June 30, 1864—Marietta, Georgia
The regiment finds itself this morning separated from the greater mass of our troops on the outskirts of Marietta, stopped to rest a few days beside a now abandoned and desolate, though no doubt once grand plantation. Having been greeted with much jubilation and singing by freed Negroes everywhere along our march, we are surprised to discern a general malaise of some sort afflicting the few dozen Negroes that have been left alone beside the ruined manse. I happened upon the doctor as he was taking his leave from the former slave quarters, who described the malaise they suffered only as “a fever of unknown origin.”
I approached one man, himself apparently healthy, but left to care for his sick family, and he was quite rude when I attempted to offer him what assistance I could. He spoke words in a language I did not understand, and waved his arms toward me as if to ward off an evil eye, before he bid me to “leave, go leave, while can.” Strange, indeed.
July 1, 1864
We have learnt this evening that the plantation is not abandoned, but left in the care of a visiting gentleman, who was away on business. I saw the elegant gentleman, dressed in European fashion and speaking thickly accented English, exit the plantation after night had fallen to walk slowly down the grand portico and tell Hopkins that he invited his commander to dine with him.
The Colonel, now looking every inch his sixty-three years, required assistance from burly William Chatham and young Oliver McNeil to mount the grand stairs of the portico and enter the house. I worry so about young Oliver, now a tall, strong lad of fourteen, who has never gotten over the loss of his brother. Since that day, he has fought as fiercely as any man and has sworn blood vengeance against all who wear the gray. For myself, I simply desire for the war to end, and for peace to again grace our land.
I have been much troubled by my conversation yesterday with the former slave, and attempted today to find him. I knocked on the door to their quarters but received no response. They seem greatly in need of sleep during the hot daytime hours, perhaps a habit left over from years of hard toil. I have seen one or two of them late in the evening, but thus far, they do not approach us.
July 3, 1864
The Colonel is disappeared, along with Chatham and young Oliver, and we are frantic. A search of the house and all quarters has been conducted, however no sign of the three or of the European gentleman has been discovered. Stranger still, it appears that all of the former slaves who were here so recently are also vanished. Might we have imagined them?
Captain Hopkins has ordered a vigorous search of the surrounding countryside, but as yet we have found nothing. A rumor persists that a great quantity of blood was discovered inside the plantation manor. Pray God that it is not so.
July 5, 1864
On this, our second day of searching, we visited the small village situated a few miles south of the plantation in the hope of gleaning information. We found all the village abandoned, with evidence of a recent wave of great violence everywhere. Blood pooled in every hearth and stained every mattress. Large splotches of the rusty liquid were discovered throughout the dusty main road leading in and out of the village, conjuring in my own mind painful memories of Sharpsburg.
After an exhaustive search, the Captain assembled us out on the village green, where all were struck suddenly by the quietude. Not a bird sang nor cicada chirped, nor was there evidence of any natural beast, wild or domestic, seen or heard in that now accursed village. I tell you we did not tarry long in that place, and rumors and gossip abounded that the former slaves perhaps took blood vengeance on those in the village who might have facilitated their former hardships.
This evening, it is to be announced that Captain Hopkins will take temporary command of our unit. We have lingered for as long as we dare, and after continuous and diligent searching for those missing, our orders are clear: we are to leave this haunted place and continue south toward Atlanta.
* * *
Dugan was drowning. Having gasped involuntarily when he felt the clutch at his ankle, he was still filling his lungs with air when he was pulled under and the air turned to water.
* * *
July 28, 1864—The Road to Atlanta
How shall I tell you of the strange occurrences that have befallen our regiment during the movement south? Having left Marietta earlier this month, we began the slow journey to rejoin the main force of our troops. Three nights into our march, another three men disappeared amidst screams and howls the like of which I have never before heard, and hope never to hear again.
It was Sergeant Baker, Lieutenant Graham, and Private Wilson who all disappeared that evening, as they stood the night watch. Captain Hopkins, the poor man now looking twenty years more than his age, again rallied us out of our billets to organize a search, again to no avail.
* * *
Something was on top of him. It was heavy and solid and held him under, but after a few moments, he began to feel a not unpleasant kind of lightheadedness, and saw before him a shimmering white light. He heard his mother’s voice tell him that everything would be all right if he would just let go and take another deep breath. He was just about to do it…
…when he realized suddenly it was not his mother’s voice but something else, and he remembered that he was drowning and he was freezing and he clutched again at the dead weight that clung relentlessly to him and flung it aside finally in the direction of the flowing river.
He managed to get his head just above the level of the water. A few seconds later, his feet found solid ground. He used what strength he had left to scrape and crawl against the onrushing water, getting himself onto the opposite shoreline that had been his destination all along.
Throwing himself down onto the wet asphalt, he retched and coughed until there was nothing left inside of him and then collapsed prostrate in the middle of the road. Some time later, he was able to raise his head, and he saw that the white light had returned.
* * *
July 30, 1864—The Road to Atlanta
Baker, Graham, Wilson. The next evening it was Smith and Olson and Philip Chatham. The howls and screams of anguish of which I have written, and prayed never to hear again, I hear each evening now. Captain Hopkins has doubled the overnight guard. There have been strange and unholy rumors, which for fear of being called mad I will not at this point share, however I say to you that should I or any man among us ever again sleep, it will be with one eye open.
* * *
Dugan looked into the shimmering white light and this time decided to follow it. He tried to move his arms, to gain some purchase on the wet road and bring himself to an upright position, but he found his arms weren’t there anymore.
“Hey kid. You all right, kid?”
He felt a hand begin rubbing his back. It felt good. He put his head back down again.
“It’s gonna be all right kid. You all right?”
Dugan let it go on for a few more minutes before attempting again to raise his head toward the white light.
“You gonna be all right kid,” the angel repeated.
“Where’d my arms go?” Dugan asked, thinking that perhaps they’d already been replaced with wings. He heard a deep bass chuckle and a moment later felt himself rolled over onto his back.
The hand began rubbing Dugan’s arms vigorously through the thick slicker, getting blood flowing again into the two limbs that had fallen asleep beneath his chest.
“You gonna be all right kid.”
Dugan began sitting up, and was again seized with dizziness and nausea. He retched violently for a few minutes more while the strong hand continued rubbing his back and telling him everything was going to be okay. When he felt ready, Dugan turned around to look into the white lights, confirming what his now fully conscious mind already knew: they were the headlights of an automobile.
He looked up at the figure by his side and recognized Mr. Gregory, the man who did the early morning deliveries of fresh milk from the dairy farm. The two passed eac
h other every morning and waved.
“You ‘bout ready to stand up?”
Dugan waited a moment before nodding his head. Mr. Gregory put both of his big hands underneath Dugan’s armpits and lifted him to a standing position. A brief wave of nausea again surged through him, but he bent over and put his head down and it passed after a moment. The two of them stood upright and stared down into the gushing river.
“Ain’t never seen that before, mm mm, nuttin’ like it, not in twenty-one years,” Gregory said. Dugan could only nod and a moment later was overcome with an uncontrollable bout of shivers.
Gregory must have noticed because the next thing Dugan heard was, “Let’s get you in the car.” He began to move Dugan toward the passenger side of the small truck, but Dugan pulled away from his strong grip.
“G-g-g-otta get my b-b-b-ike,” he said, and felt Gregory grip him tighter.
“Don’ you worry ‘bout that, I’ll find it. You come wit’ me.”
Gregory steered Dugan into the truck, reaching over to turn on a blast of heat before going to the back of the vehicle for an old blanket. He placed it over Dugan, who clutched it tightly, his teeth chattering. Dugan’s eyes were closed a few minutes later when he heard the rear door opening and something being lifted up into the back of the truck. A minute or so after that, Dugan opened his eyes and looked at Gregory.
“T-t-t-ime is it?”
Gregory looked down at his watch. “Six fifteen, and don’ you dare start talkin ‘bout dem newspapers boy. People gonna understan’, day like this, damn! And if they don’?”
He waited a moment for Dugan to look up, and when he did, Dugan saw Gregory smiling down at him.
“And if they don’…fuck ‘em.”
Dugan smiled and then couldn’t help but laugh along with Gregory’s deep bass chuckle. He managed to catch about twenty minutes sleep. Gregory had to take the long way around, back onto the highway, and then through the back roads of Dutton, before returning him and his bike—sodden, but alive—home to Applewood.
5
The boys come clean
What the hell happened to you?” Jimmy asked as Dugan approached the bus stop.
Cuts and lacerations covered both his cheeks in tic-tac-toe patterns. His skin was a mottled purple. A longer scratch ran down the left side of his chin. Both his eyes had been blackened in the struggle with whatever had been in the water. Dugan had even worried for a moment that his right ear had been half torn away from his head. Only after he washed out the rest of his cuts, and held back his tears after dousing them with alcohol, did he dare hold a shaving glass up to the mirror and investigate what was going on behind his ear. Relieved to see it was only a deep cut, Dugan silently thanked Mr. Gregory again, this time for being kind enough not to mention anything about his grisly appearance.
“You should see the other guy.” Dugan pasted a grin on his face but winced from the effort. Motioning his friends closer, he huddled them up. “We gotta skip.” It wasn’t a request.
Jimmy looked at Dugan through the pouring rain, and nodded. A moment or two later, Moon and Mike signaled they were in too. Only Larry shook his head.
“Negative. Uh-uh, not today. Can’t do it. Big math test.”
Dugan would not be dissuaded. “Come on! It’s the last day before April vacation! Whose gonna notice?” When he got no response, he added, “Larry, look at me. I’m tellin’ ya, we need to talk. All of us.”
Larry shook his head again and tried to explain. Dugan was in no mood to listen. “We’re not leavin’ without ya.”
The debate was getting a little loud. When a couple of the other kids started looking in their direction, Dugan motioned his friends further off to the side.
“Jimmy’s been right all along,” Dugan began, “there is somethin’ goin’ on around here, I think, somethin’ dangerous.”
“What happened?” Mike’s face, beneath his rust colored hair, was even whiter than usual.
“That’s what I wanna tell you about, that and…some other things.”
“You talk to Harris yet?” Jimmy asked for the millionth time. Dugan nodded.
“Whaddya say Larry, you in?” Dugan asked again.
Larry shook his head and this time, turned his back on them all, and began walking up to the stop. Moon stepped in front of him.
“We ain’t lettin’ you on that bus,” Moon said.
Dugan looked at the massive frame blocking Larry’s progress and couldn’t help but laugh. If Moon said you weren’t getting on the bus, then you weren’t getting on the bus. That gave Dugan an idea. “Let’s take his ticket.”
Before Larry could react, Jimmy grabbed one arm and Moon took the other and before he knew it, Dugan reached into the back pocket of Larry’s Levis and withdrew his wallet. He removed the bright blue ticket and ripped it up, tossing the confetti into the air before putting his friend’s wallet into his own back pocket. He looked up and saw that Larry was seriously pissed now, and Dugan couldn’t blame him. Marden hated kids who used temporary passes even more than kids who had no ticket at all. He liked to single them out for special abuse.
“You guys all suck, you know that?” Larry said.
They nodded as one to confirm for him that they did. But even then, it was only after Marden was more than a half hour late for the first time in memory, and all the other kids had left the bus stop to go and ask a parent for a ride or begin the long walk to school, that Larry finally relented.
* * *
They went to Moon’s basement and removed their sodden raincoats, then sat on the worn couches listening to Dugan tell them everything he knew. He told them that Harris had admitted to being at the cemetery the night of the vandalism, and mentioned Harris’ strange belief that the Colonel had taken his brother. He told them about Harris seeing his brother and friends outside his bedroom window at night, and of his own observations about the missing neighborhood dogs, and newspapers piling up on his customers’ doorsteps.
He said that a week had passed since the Wilsons had taken in their paper, and it was five days for Mr. Harper. When he told them that Mrs. Skinner was working on three days, he saw Larry flinch.
Dugan went on to tell them why he hadn’t delivered to any of them this morning, and of his suspicion that wherever those people were, they didn’t read newspapers anymore. Then he told them about the Daniels diary and how he had mysteriously come to be in possession of it. He told them he was at a point in the story where, as now, the good people of Grantham were beginning to disappear. He finished by telling them of the events in the river only that morning.
After waiting long enough for his friends to absorb the things he had told them, Dugan turned to Larry. “Tell us about Mrs. Skin,” he said, invoking the nickname Jimmy came up with after Dugan told of her answering the door in just a towel.
Larry looked down. He began to protest, but before he could, Dugan repeated, “Tell us about Mrs. Skin.” After a moment, Larry did.
“It was a few days ago. I went over for my usual four-thirty appointment. I knocked and knocked and when she finally comes to the door she’s…naked. I mean she only opened it a crack, but I could still see everything.”
He stopped and seemed to brace himself before going on.
“So it seems like she’s real tired or somethin’, and she tells me to come back later on and…well, we’d been workin’ on somethin’ new, and…I mean…did I mention that she was naked?”
He looked up and raised his eyebrows as if to say “can you blame me?” which got a nervous chuckle of understanding from all of his friends.
“So anyway I go back there later on, and by then it’s dark, and I knock again and this time she comes right away. Now she’s got a sheet kinda wrapped around her, like a toga or somethin’, and then we go into the house and like always we sit down together on the bench.”
The next part looked hard for Larry, so Dugan prodded him by saying, “It’s all right, Larry. Go on.” But before Larry spoke, Dugan looked
over to Jimmy and waited to catch his eye before saying, “Before this day is out we’re all gonna share our stories.”
Jimmy looked away quickly and then Larry went on.
“So we’re sittin’ on the bench and I start playin’, Chopin, when all of a sudden I feel her hand on my knee and then it starts… movin’ up. I let that go on for awhile, until finally I stop playin’ and look up and see she’s got her eyes closed and she’s got this… look on her face, and then I see…just how bad she really looks, you know, like close up? Then she lowers the sheet all the way down and starts…feelin’ herself, but by then I’d already seen the marks… and…the bruises…and all this time she’s still fiddlin’ away on me, but by then…it wasn’t gonna happen.”
Silence.
“So I get up in a big hurry and tell her I gotta go. I start to run away and then I hear…her start laughin’.” He slumped back on the couch and looked down, spent. It was a while after that when Mike began to speak.
“We had a body disappear last week.”
They all turned their heads to look at him.
“Jim Wright’s grandfather, you guys know him? Cancer, supposedly. When he found out he was gone, my father, well, first he talked the family into a closed casket, you know, thinkin’ that maybe it would buy some time for him to find it. The family bought it.”
It was another moment before he went on. “He kept hoping it would turn up somehow, but then the day of the funeral came and my father let ‘em bury the empty casket.” His voice trailed off. “I’d never seen him like that before. I’d never seen him cry. He cried that day like it was the worst thing he ever done.”
Dugan felt a burst of empathy for Mike, and for his father, the kindest man he knew. It probably had been the worst thing he’d ever done, Dugan thought. He turned to Jimmy.
Jimmy was the one who seemed to know about all this before anyone else. Jimmy had been the one who had told them all those months before to keep their eyes open. Dugan couldn’t wait to hear what he had to say, and he knew that Jimmy felt all of their eyes upon him. Dugan would have made a bet that a two-word answer from Jimmy would not have sufficed. He would have had to make good on the bet.
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