by Ninie Hammon
Cotton Jackson came upon looters on Main Street in Persimmon Ridge early that Saturday morning and didn’t have any idea what he ought to do about it. Gratefully, they saved him the trouble of doing anything at all by taking one look at him, leaping into their pickup truck and hauling butt out of town, left a box of tools they’d been stealing sitting on the sidewalk in front of Peetree’s Hardware Store.
It was bound to happen sooner or later.
They’d be back tonight or tomorrow or whenever. Once they bragged to their friends about it, wouldn’t be long before all the businesses in town, in all of the towns in Nowhere County, would be stripped bare of whatever was on the walls there — because that’s all that was left. Everything else was … gone. Absurdly, ridiculously, impossibly gone. Vacant buildings, homes, the courthouse. Like they’d all been emptied out of everything so they could be repainted and the painters didn’t want to chance a drip on the owner’s belongings. Except the furniture wasn’t sitting outside, waiting to be moved back in. It was … gone.
When Lester Peetree had closed his little hardware store in Twig years ago and opened a bigger one in the Ridge, his son Willie had lined the walls of it with tools so customers could wander among them and pick out just the hammer or screwdriver or drill bit they needed. The tools were still there — or had been until looters came to steal them — but nothing else was left in the store.
Nothing was left in the parking lot out back, either. No cargo van with Peetree’s Hardware Store stenciled on the side. Cotton hadn’t seen a single vehicle of any kind — car, pickup truck, motorcycle, jeep, four-wheeler, tractor … golf cart or Sherman tank — anywhere in the county. The parking lots, driveways, garages and carports were as empty as the buildings.
And some of the buildings weren’t just empty. Some of them had become dilapidated husks overnight, with sagging roofs, peeling paint, rotted boards. Every day there were more and more of those. Stores and homes all over the county. Cotton didn’t know which frightened him the most, made him more nauseous — empty houses where the folks living there might have stepped out on the porch to watch the sunset or catch fireflies with the kids, or falling-down shells, shacks that looked a hundred years old.
A hundred years ago would be 1895. Did that mean something? Cotton had no idea. He wondered, though …
Like he wondered about everything else in his life, had been wondering ever since the world as he knew it was shattered, the day everything he believed about reality and the whole nature of the universe crumbled at his feet. The day the world went mad.
Normal, garden-variety day. He’d stayed overnight in Lexington, slept on the lumpy cot in the employees’ breakroom at Polanski’s Sewing Machine factory, where he was the production foreman, because he had stayed late to repair a broken piece of machinery and would have to be at work early the next morning.
Oh, how he wished he hadn’t stayed, wished he’d gone home.
Right, stack that wish up on top of the pile of them that was topping out now at about the same height as the World Trade Center in New York.
Wished he’d gone home.
Wished he’d been there when whatever happened happened.
Wished he could have stopped it, or fixed it or … or been there with Thelma at the end.
Wished he could peck his sweet wife on the cheek just one more time and pinch her butt and have her jump like she wasn’t expecting it.
Wished he could figure out what catastrophic event had occurred in Nower County, Kentucky on June 3, 1995.
Wished he could find all the people who were missing.
Wished he could convince somebody — anybody! — that it mattered.
At age sixty-four, Cotton Jackson was a man comfortable in his own skin. He knew who he was, what he was about, and spent his days being grateful for all the good in his life. An eternal optimist. Thelma’d said he reminded her of that grinning sun on the box of kiddie cereal he always bought. He maintained that he was a simple life form — an amoeba in a world of multicelled fungi or bacteria or viruses or whatever was the next rung up on the evolutionary ladder.
Born in Nower County, married his high school sweetheart. Yeah, she was six feet two inches tall and he was five feet eleven inches and there were men that would have bothered but Cotton Jackson wasn’t one of them.
They’d had Billy and somehow — he looked back on it now and wondered how in the world they’d managed to pull it off — both made it out of college with teaching degrees. In the fifties! And black! Yeah, it was a miracle, a minor one, but life had all kinds of simple miracles if you’d just look around and notice them.
They’d gotten teaching jobs in their hometown, a tiny school district in Eastern Kentucky, one of only a handful of black people for a hundred miles in every direction. Of course, they only got the jobs because they were “local” and because the district didn’t have a single white applicant. Nower County, Kentucky wasn’t exactly a tour bus destination.
He taught math. She taught history. Life was good. Then Billy went off to Vietnam. Only eighteen years old! After two white soldiers in dress uniforms showed up on their porch one cold morning in January, there followed a decade of Cotton’s life that was so dark he had trouble seeing into it in his memories.
But he had Thelma and together they made it through.
When the high school closed, Cotton couldn’t find another teaching job so he took a job at a sewing machine factory and worked his way up to foreman. He liked the job. It was challenging, made him feel like he was earning his way in the world when the majority of the people in Nower County had rolled over on their backs, stuck their feet up in the air and surrendered. Took the government checks, did everything they could think of to beat the system and sank down into a place Cotton couldn’t locate in his mind.
Thelma didn’t get another teaching job, but they were fine on one paycheck. She indulged her hobby and her passion, genealogy and historical research, got so excited when she found the records on somebody’s great-great-great grandfather you’d think she’d won the lottery. Met with her Bible study once a week, her sewing circle once a week, could quote Scripture like she’d been to seminary and made a mountain of quilts to donate to orphanages.
Cotton was a year away from retirement, fully vested in his pension and Social Security, and they’d do fine. He hadn’t yet decided if he wanted to quit working, though. He enjoyed what he did and he was good at it — still, to kick back and go fishing every day had a certain appeal. In fact, he and Thelma had planned to spend Sunday afternoon looking at some brochures for “retirement homes” in Florida, just blue-sky dreaming.
But by Sunday afternoon, Thelma was gone. And the world — in all its particulars — reality that was the foundation of Cotton’s existence had vanished in a puff of smoke.
Cotton pulled his car over to the curb and looked at the cardboard box the looters had left behind. And somehow, it seemed to symbolize the insanity of it all. A box full of wrenches and screwdrivers, hammers and bolt-cutters sitting all by itself on an empty sidewalk, in front of an empty store, in an empty county …
What should he do with the box? Go put it back in the store so the looters could come back later and get what they’d left behind? What was the point in that? Useless effort; why bother?
Yet he found he couldn’t just drive away down the empty street past the empty stores and the dilapidated heaps, and leave the box sitting there. So, he got out, picked up the box and carried it back into the store. Lester’d outlined the tools on the store’s walls in black Magic Marker, so it was easy for Cotton to see where the tools had been hanging. He put them back, one after the other until the box was empty, was tempted to sweep up the mess from the back door window the looters broke to get in. He didn’t do that, though, just left the front door of the store standing wide open so the looters wouldn’t have to go in through the back. Wouldn’t want somebody to cut a finger on the broken glass.
Then he got into his car and drove south
out of Persimmon Ridge with no particular destination in mind, just headed out toward the Middle of Nowhere.
Chapter Five
Stuart stepped up on the porch of the house at the base of Little Bear Mountain and knocked, listened for the patter of little feet. Merrie had decided when she was two years old that it was her job in life to go to the door to greet whoever it was who’d come to visit. Of course, she wasn’t big enough to open the door, so she just stood in front of it, not unlike a puppy that needed to be let out to pee, and waited for someone bigger to do the honors.
There was no sound from inside.
He knocked again.
Then his heart kicked into a gallop and he knocked a third time, hard.
Still silence.
She wasn’t home, that’s all. Charlie and Merrie had gone somewhere. To the grocery store. Or the park. Did Nower County have a park? Of course she wasn’t home — duh — the rental car wasn’t in the driveway.
The rental she’d failed to return.
The one that was supposed to be back to the agency two weeks ago.
He opened the screen and knocked on the door itself.
Silence.
He turned and walked down the front steps and went around the house to the backyard. He opened the gate and noticed as he stepped into the yard that the door on the kiln sitting beside the garage had been taken off the hinges and now leaned against the side of it.
Stepping up onto the back porch, he knocked on the door, but really didn’t expect anybody to come anymore. They weren’t home but they’d be back and he’d just have to wait for them.
He reached down and tried the knob. The door wasn’t locked. Charlie’d told him about that, how nobody in small towns locked their doors, but city-boy born and bred that he was, that seemed incomprehensible.
Opening the door a few inches, he called out.
“Charlie, are you home? Merrie?” And when he said the child’s name, a lump formed in his throat and he had to swallow hard not to allow a sob to escape. He had concentrated on Charlie, only Charlie.
Charlie was missing and he had to find her.
It was Charlie who’d failed to return the rental and missed the calls to her publisher. Charlie.
But Merrie was with Charlie. Whatever had happened to Charlie had happened to precious little Merrie, too, and the thought of harm coming to that child filled him with a fear and dread he had not known existed in the world.
Merrie was Daddy’s little girl. Charlie said he spoiled her, let her have her way, always gave in to what Charlie called her “drama queen” fake hysterics and he was aiding and abetting her tantrums.
To which he responded, silently: “Busted!”
He knew Charlie was right, of course. Made perfect sense. He’d trained dogs — okay, children were different in most respects but some fundamental principles applied. In both species, homo sapiens and canines, you did not reward unwanted behavior.
But Charlie being right, and Stuart knowing she was right, didn’t change the fact that that little girl could look at him with those impossibly blue eyes and he would melt in a puddle and give her anything she wanted. He had promised Charlie dozens of times that he would be better about that, because he understood the tantrums that were cute at three would be nightmares at sixteen, but somehow he had not yet managed to get his behavior to line up with what it was proper to do.
He so desperately wanted to hear that chirpy little voice. He envisioned her opening her arms and squealing, “Daaa-deee!” and running to throw herself into his embrace, and the image was so powerful it took his breath away.
He opened the door the rest of the way and stepped into the kitchen, took only one step and stopped. Standing just inside the door of the empty kitchen instantly felt … intrusive somehow. Like he was … trespassing somewhere that he was not welcome. It also felt spooky in a way Stuart couldn’t understand or explain. Creepy. How could a sunlit kitchen in a snug little house nestled up against a beautiful mountain feel … sinister? Absurd as it was, he sensed something threatening about it that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up and his heart take up the rhythm of a timpani drum.
It was crazy! But then, so was the guy who blew a hole in the road and then vanished without so much as the sparkle of a soap bubble.
He hadn’t let himself think about that, hadn’t let his mind go there because he didn’t know what to do with it. Where did you put a thing like that? Either he’d imagined it — which he hadn’t, there was, after all, a hole in the road to testify to what had happened — or he had been witness to something impossible. Both called his sanity into serious question.
And now he was standing here in a homey kitchen more afraid than he’d been as a little kid in a haunted house. Afraid of what?
The thing that didn’t want him here.
The thought dropped into his mind out of nowhere, with the horrible ring of truth.
Something didn’t want Stuart here. He was intruding into the realm of some powerful, malevolent force and that was a very dangerous thing to do.
“Nuts. That’s nuts.” He said the words out loud, in an effort to populate his out-of-control imagination with the normal and the ordinary. It didn’t work. In fact — now he really did go to the end of the diving board and leap into the deep water — he could have sworn the words rode a puff of white out his mouth. Like on a winter morning.
How had it gotten cold in here?
Done! He’d have said that out loud, too, just like he had when he was standing in front of the hole the vanishing man had blown in the road. But he feared to speak, feared he’d see another puff of white.
Then he couldn’t help calling, “Merrie! It’s Daddy. Daddy’s home.”
And the words trailed out small clouds of white vapor and were greeted by silence. A loud silence that didn’t sound hollow but should have because the kitchen was empty. Not just empty of people. There was a vacant space in front of the kitchen window where there should have been a table and chairs. He took a few more tentative steps into the room, far enough to see into the dining room, which had no table and chairs, either.
He resolutely crossed the kitchen, looking around in it for … for what? For anything that would indicate Charlie had been here. The countertops were bare — no toaster or coffee pot or electric can opener. He reached out to open a cabinet, but drew his hand back, irrationally afraid that if he opened the door there’d be nothing inside and that would mean …
A June calendar hung on the wall with a notation in Charlie’s handwriting for a graveside service. Beside the calendar was an oversized kitchen blackboard with the title “Not in Kansas Anymore, TO-DO” and there was a lone to-do item written in the upper left corner: “get bird seed.” Those words were not in Charlie’s handwriting.
He crossed the dining room into the living room and froze. There were pictures on the walls — two little girls at various ages, Charlie and her older sister, Mallory. He just glanced at the photos, refused to allow his eyes to linger because the sight of Charlie as a gap-toothed first-grader hit him harder than any tackle ever had. There was a mirror beside a not-very-good oil painting of a vase and flowers. Nothing else. No furniture!
Charlie and Merrie couldn’t have been living here!
Clearly, she had emptied the house out to prepare it for sale and she and Merrie were … yeah, where? He wandered the rest of the house, his sense of unease growing with every breath, a desperate need to bolt out of the place without looking back held in check only with an enormous force of will.
All the floors were hardwood except in one bedroom. Thick carpet on the floor there showed the indentations of the bed, nightstands and a dresser. Deep indentations. He knelt and touched where one leg of a bed had been sitting. The carpet fibers were firmly crushed, packed tight, almost like the bed had been there only moments before. He picked at the dent with his fingers, and the fibers immediately began to let go, to straighten, to fill in the dent.
The absurdity
struck him — who did he think he was, Tonto? Three horses, Kimosabe, one with two riders, go north toward fort.
He stood abruptly and strode back into the kitchen, forcing himself to move slowly and purposefully and not to give in to an absurd desire to go running out the door. The cold hit him like a fist. And the stuffiness was growing with every heartbeat, the sense that there was not enough air in the house. Or maybe that the room was — too full, somehow. Like it had too much in it, which made no sense at all since it was bare-bones empty.
He’d assumed in the beginning he would just wait here until Charlie got home from wherever she’d gone. Now … well, she would come back here eventually, even though she and Merrie were obviously staying somewhere else. He’d just have to leave her a note. He wanted her to know he’d been here, that he was trying to find her. Picking up a piece of chalk from the blackboard tray, he considered what to say, then just scribbled, like blurting out a word, the thought that was burning a brand in his mind.
“Where are you?”
He dropped the chalk back into the tray and stood looking at the words. What else? She needed to know that he would return, and keep coming back until—
Words appeared on the blackboard beneath what he had written. Just appeared; not there, then there. Charlie’s handwriting.
I’m trapped. It won’t let me go.
Stuart made some kind of sound, a mixture of a grunt, a sob, a cry and a scream, all of those and none of them. It was a distinctly man sound, like the sound the sidekick, never the hero, in childhood cowboy movies always made right before he looked down and saw the arrow in his chest.
He stared at the words, unable to process either the content of the message or its existence. Finally, he reached out slowly, his hands trembling, to touch them, but before his fingertips reached the blackboard, all the words began to vanish, his and the ones below. As if they were being erased. He stared in gap-jawed horror. In seconds, they were gone.
The words were as “not there” as the dude who’d blown a hole in the road right in the middle of the county line.