by Ninie Hammon
“And what it wants is …?” Pete asked.
“To play with us — me, Charlie and Sam.”
“Play with you?” Pete was incredulous. “What does that—?”
Malachi was on a roll and didn’t pause. “It captured the whole county just so it could capture the three of us.”
Pete shook his head and stood. “The three of you got a whole lot more of this figured out than I have. How about I go look in on E.J. and Merrie — I ain’t got nothing more to say that’ll help.”
As he walked out, Charlie put into words the “fly in the buttermilk” she’d found in Malachi’s reasoning.
“I’ve been thinking about this ever since we decided we were the cause of the whole thing … so why now?”
“Because we’re all here for the first time since graduation night,” Sam said.
“No, we’re not.”
“Yes, we—”
“We were here for years, all three of us. We grew up here. Sam and I played baby dolls in the shade of the elementary school. You were a football hero, got cheered all the way down the field. If it wanted us, the three of us, why didn’t it take us when we were little kids? We were all here together for years after that first-grade field trip.”
“Until you left for college,” Sam said.
“The morning after we graduated,” Charlie said. And when she spoke again, she gave voice to the memories as they surfaced in her mind. Old, stored-away memories she had to blow the dust off before she could think them. But as soon as she did, they were crystal clear in her mind. “After the night of graduation … when we went to Fearsome Hollow together.”
Malachi looked confused.
“Went to Fearsome Hollow? You and me and Sam?”
Sam looked … what? Charlie couldn’t read the look. Horrified? Yeah, but scared, too. Not the reaction Charlie would have expected.
“You’re saying the three of us …?” Malachi began.
“Just like when we were first-graders, it was your idea,” Charlie said. “Don’t you remember? You dared Sam and me to go with you to Gideon.”
“Seriously?” Malachi’s brow was furrowed with concentration.
“We went to Fearsome Hollow on graduation night … and got drunk,” Charlie said. “And the next morning — nursing the worst hangover of my life — I left for college and the three of us were never together in Nowhere County at the same time again—”
“Until J-Day,” Malachi said. “The Witch of Gideon said when we were first-graders that we shouldn’t have come … ‘making it want,’ remember?”
Charlie did. “We were playing in the woods, laughing, happy little first-graders.”
“Making it want,” Sam said, and her voice sounded haunted.
“Making it want … to play with us?” Charlie asked. “To be like us? What?”
“It wanted what we had,” Malachi said. “What we were. Carefree children.”
“But it didn’t take those children until after—” Charlie began.
“Yeah, why did it wait? There had to be something else. Something more than making it want when we were children.”
“Graduation night.” Charlie was thinking out loud. “We must have … what? We made it ‘want’ on graduation night, too? Made it want more than we did that day on the field trip?”
“I have a vague, vague memory of maybe being there,” Malachi said. “Maybe. I must have been smashed out of my gourd. Didn’t learn to drink like a man until the Marines. You’re sure we went there?”
“I’m sure,” Charlie said. “I even remember going … Sam’s car, she drove and we sang along with the radio. Don’t you remember?”
Malachi shook his head.
“There’s just the ghost of … We were in a car. I sat in the back seat. You were in front. I …” He paused, frustrated. “After that? I don’t remember … what did we do?”
Charlie concentrated, willing her mind to retrieve the foggy images.
“There was a full moon.”
“And a porch …” Malachi was trying just as hard. “Didn’t we … were we sitting on a porch?”
Charlie shook her head in frustration. “I don’t know! I don’t remember.”
No one spoke. Then Sam dropped words into the silence.
“I do.” Her voice was as pleasantly husky as it always was, but now it was … hollow, so full of unspent emotion that the words sounded like each one of them weighed a ton.
Holmes Fischer had walked to the cemetery from Persimmon Ridge and it had taken him … how long? He had no idea. But he hadn’t been in any hurry then, had just ambled along on his way to alcoholic oblivion. A bit like a pirate walking the plank … he hadn’t been in any hurry to get to the end of it.
Now, he had to get help fast! Walking all the way back to town would take too long. He had to find a phone. Looking around him, up and down the road leading to the cemetery, he couldn’t see a single house anywhere.
Then what …?
He had no choice and started walking. Urgency turned the walk into a run, or the best a man in Fish’s physical condition could approximate a run. He didn’t make it half a mile before he was gasping for breath, his head swimming, fearful he was about to vomit.
He had nothing in his stomach to throw up, only the single gulp of whiskey that … he had left the bottle in the crypt. He actually had to catch himself, will his legs to continue walking forward when every muscle in his body was crying out that he go back.
Go back and get the bottle. No, don’t get it. Go back and settle in with the bottle. Sit there in the cool dark as he had intended to do, and drink the bottle. Drink every drop. Allow the booze to transport him to that fuzzy not-reality of inebriation. That was about as far as he had been able to sink into drunkenness in the past few years with his cells so saturated with booze. But it was enough, blunted reality. It kept the memories at bay, allowed him to lie to himself successfully, tell himself that all was right with the world, that Holmes Fischer was a decent human being after all, who had chosen homelessness as a way of life and was grateful he had made a success of it.
He had hoped, prayed this morning, that the lack of all alcohol for four days had reset his internal drunk-meter. That when he did feel the hot liquid course through his veins, he would be able to push the needle farther than warm fuzzy. That he would achieve true drunkenness. True mindless inebriation. He’d gone out to the crypt this morning intending on banishing all reality, wiping his mind clean with the pure fire of bourbon whiskey.
Now he was running the other direction from that. Actually running. Alright, hobbling.
Then his feet got tangled up and he tripped. The momentum of his hobbling run carried him forward and he hit the pavement hard and rolled sideways into the ditch beside the road. His head connected with something solid and the world went blessedly dark.
Chapter Seven
Sam Sheridan remembered graduation night, all right. It was a night that changed everything about the whole rest of her life.
Sam tries to keep her eyes on the road, watch where she’s going. But that’s not easy given what else is going on in the car. All the windows are open, so the roar of the wind thrums inside the car, making pressure in Sam’s ears. But it’s a hot night and her car has no air-conditioning and besides, Malachi and Charlie definitely need the fresh air.
Above the roar of the wind is the sound of the radio, blasting full tilt, as loud as it will go. Charlie and Malachi are singing along, one country song after another. Charlie has a good voice, a little off key, tends toward sharp. Malachi’s is a deep, clear baritone, but when they try to harmonize, then they’re both off key and they can hear it, so they burst out laughing.
Suddenly, the crisp, clear sound of a piano fills the car, single notes in a haunting melody.
Charlie squeals in delight. “I loooove that song!”
“Lady.” Kenny Rogers croons the lone word. Poignant. Wistful.
“Oh, turn it up, turn it up,” Charlie cries. S
he’s in the front seat beside Sam and she fumbles with the dials and knobs, trying to make the sound louder.
“It’s up as high as it will go,” Sam tells her, yelling so she can be heard.
But Charlie keeps begging Sam to turn up the volume anyway, either doesn’t hear, doesn’t understand or doesn’t believe Sam. In Charlie’s current state of inebriation, any of the three is possible.
“I’m your knight in shining armor and I love you,” Kenny sings, and Charlie wails an inarticulate sound of pure extasy. “You have made me what I am …”
“And I am yo- o-ours,” Malachi joins in from the back seat, warbling the “yours” convincingly. He doesn’t sound like Kenny Rogers, but it’s a nice sound.
Charlie and Malachi sing along with the next few lines. Sam joins in the chorus. “And ohhhhhh, we belong together. Won’t you believe in my song?”
Together they all three sing the ending. “You’re my …” and wail/groan the final word “lady.”
Charlie falls back on the seat and literally kicks her feet in the floorboard in delight.
“That is the best song ever written!” she cries. Turning to the back seat. “Don’t you think so, Malachi? The beeeest song e-var!” Sam can see him in the rearview mirror. He takes a long pull on the whiskey bottle he’s holding, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, and bleats a slurred “E-var!” in response before handing the bottle to Charlie, who dribbles a little of the amber liquid down her chin when she turns it up to her mouth.
It’s possible the two of them will both pass out before they ever even get to Fearsome Hollow. Which might not be the bad news, though Sam isn’t sure what she will do with them if they do. Just like she isn’t sure how she came to be here in the first place, driving through the hot summer night toward Gideon, hauling her two soon-to-be-passed-out friends to the ghost town.
No, not friends.
Well, okay, friends, but the three of them have definitely scaled the societal barricades of standard high school striation of humanity to be here with each other tonight. Sam is a jock, loves sports, eats, sleeps and breathes basketball. Charlie is … Charlie. Beautiful. Aloof. Unattainable. And Malachi …
Malachi is the heartthrob quarterback every girl in the stands drools over.
Sam has been in love with him for years.
No, no … not “in love.” Not that. A crush. She’s just had a crush on him, that’s all, as has every other female human being in a five-county area. And she had been brought into his orbit, and Charlie’s, their senior year in Mr. Fischer’s English class, where the three of them became Tolkien groupies, fascinated, addicted to, enamored of, confounded by, and obsessed with The Lord of the Rings. Sam could not figure out why it was just the three of them, why every other senior, every other reader with opposable thumbs, hadn’t fallen under the trilogy’s spell.
Jimbo’d had no idea what she saw in the books.
Her boyfriend’s face flashes in front of her eyes — hair the color of sand on a beach, brown eyes, thick eyebrows, a pleasant face, not “handsome,” but definitely good-looking. A really good guy. But no, Jimbo Mattingly is not her boyfriend. Not anymore. They had broken up three weeks before graduation and this time Sam is determined the split is going to last. As soon as school is out, Jimbo will go off to summer school at the University of Kentucky in Lexington and the distance will make the break easier. He’ll accept that it’s over. And in truth, it has been over for … she can’t remember a time when she’d done anything more than coast along with Jimbo. And after … her face … she’d clung to him out of something like desperation — which was not fair to him.
She instinctively glances in the rearview mirror. Not much of her face is visible, but she can see enough, and she experiences anew the wave of self-loathing, the revulsion she feels every time she sees the gross acne spread across her skin. It had come out of nowhere last summer and overnight she felt like a leper, wanted to crawl into a hole and pull the dirt in after her.
She gets it, can quote the “causes and treatment options for adolescent acne” like a catechism. She knows it won’t be permanent. “This too shall pass.” But knowing it will eventually go away and living in the daily misery of sudden, acute ugliness are two entirely different things. Her self-esteem had taken a nose dive the day she saw the first bump, the first ugly, gross, yellow, pus-filled pimple, and she would not feel human again until it was gone, all gone.
Ugly was such an … ugly word. But it is the word that came to mind whenever Sam thought of herself. She had been pretty. Might even have teetered on the brink of beautiful. But now …
She shudders as Charlie takes up the chant and Malachi chimes in:
“Look out, world! You best run. We’re the class of ‘81! Whoot, whoot, whoo-hoo!”
She shouts and hoots along with them. Malachi takes the tassel and chain with the gold letters “1981” off his cap and tosses it into the front seat, trying to hook it around the rearview mirror post where Sam and Charlie have hung theirs. He misses and intones from the back seat his imitation of Mr. Locklear’s voice, calling out the names of the graduates so they can file across the stage, shake his hand and receive their diplomas from the stack of faux-leather binders on the table beside him.
“Ryan, Charlene Reneé … Sheridan, Martha Ann … Tackett, Abraham Malachi.”
“Idiot,” Charlie says and giggles. “Doesn’t even know the alphabet.” She and Malachi burst into a roar of laughter.
That’s how the three of them had come to be here, driving through the dark toward a ghost town high up in Fearsome Hollow. Their diplomas had gotten mixed up. Sam had gone home right after the ceremony, didn’t want to run into Jimbo in the crowd of celebrating seniors, grateful he’d been lined up two rows ahead — Mattingly, between Larson and Nobles. When she finally opened up the faux leather folder and read the words “Tackett, Abraham Malachi” in scrolled letters on the diploma inside, she got in the car and went back to the high school, hoping to swap his diploma for hers before Malachi took hers home, all the way out to the other side of Killarney.
She didn’t actually expect to find Malachi at the school. The students had scattered like roaches on the kitchen floor as soon as the ceremony was over — all of them intent on celebrations that would spawn a county full of hungover teenagers in the morning. She only hoped he’d left his car in the parking lot — as a lot of the kids had, piling in together to go off partying. Maybe he’d left her diploma on the front seat; it was worth a shot, or at least she could put his there if his car was in the lot.
What she had found in the parking lot was not just Malachi’s car, but Malachi himself. With Charlie Ryan. They were already well on their way to drunk when she pulled into the parking space next to them.
Seems Malachi hadn’t gotten Sam’s diploma, he’d gotten Charlie’s, had caught her in the parking lot to make the exchange, where Charlie discovered, to her dismay, that she couldn’t give him his diploma because she didn’t have it. She had Sam’s.
And then, well …
Malachi’s football buddies had left for a party at some cabin out in the woods somewhere and he was supposed to meet them there. Charlie was to bring the booze to the gathering of her friends, showed the whiskey to Malachi and the two of them had decided to sample Charlie’s wares before she left. One thing led to another and …
Somehow the straightening out of diplomas had devolved. Malachi had held one up and pretended to read from it … the speech Bilbo had given at his birthday gathering in the first book of Lord of the Rings.
Then they’d all taken a turn at quoting scenes from the trilogy.
Charlie had bemoaned the lack of adventure in their lives.
Malachi had said he would love to fight a battle with a Balrog like Gandalf.
Sam had said he could have her spot fighting Shelob any day.
Malachi’d said he bet there were even worse creatures than giant spiders lurking in the nooks and crannies of Nowhere County, did a spooky
bwa-ha-ha-ha Boris Karloff laugh. And somehow that had led to Malachi daring Charlie and Sam to go with him to the creepiest of Nowhere County’s crannies — the ghost town of Gideon, where the three of them would draw their swords and challenge whatever monstrosity happened to stroll by. Or something like that.
The raspy voice of Lionel Richie fills Sam’s car.
“My Love … there’s only you in my life. The only thing that’s right.”
Charlie starts squealing again, telling Sam to “turn it up, turn it up — I love that song.”
Sam pretends to turn the dial to keep Charlie from messing with it and accidentally changing the station.
The three of them sing along with “Endless Love” and by the time the song is over, Sam is pulling into the ghost town, her headlights illuminating the empty buildings and the huge tree in the center of town. She stops by the tree, and Charlie scrambles out of the front seat, almost falls to the ground and walks unsteadily to the nearest building where she sits/falls down on the porch steps.
Sam kills the lights and gets out of the car to join Charlie and now Malachi, also seated on the steps. She has always wondered how it is that this town, these houses, have remained so long, have not collapsed into piles of kindling long ago, as has been the fate of just about every other coal camp in the mountains. But Gideon … it’s like the town is somehow preserved …
There’s a full moon, the eerie light casting long, dark shadows down from the tree and between the buildings on the street.
“Look out world, you best run …” Charlie begins and Malachi joins in, reaching into a sack and withdrawing a full whiskey bottle, mumbling “last one” as he opens it and offers a drink to Charlie.
Sam looks around. Their voices echo off the buildings and ring out in the cooling night air.
“Have a drink, Sam,” Malachi says, takes her hand and pulls her down to sit beside him. “The chauffeur’s off duty. You don’t have to be the designated driver anymore.”