by Ninie Hammon
Stupidly looking around — like maybe the words had dropped on the floor! — took up the few seconds required for Stuart to process that what he had just written and the other words that appeared after it — Charlie’s response? — had just vanished.
Then he was moving across the kitchen in great leaping strides, out the back door, and found himself sitting behind the wheel of the rented Lexus, breathing like he’d just returned a kickoff the full length of the field.
He started the engine, threw the car into reverse and pulled out of the driveway, turned and tore down Barber’s Mill Road in the opposite direction from which he’d come … oh, not toward anything.
Just away. Away.
Chapter Six
Charlie McClintock started to reach for the cup of coffee Sam Sheridan had poured for her, then thought better of it. Her hands were still shaking like a jackhammer and she hadn’t been able to take a few minutes sitting in her car outside the clinic to calm herself. Deputy Sheriff Liam Montgomery had come out the front door as soon as she pulled up.
“Don’t suppose you’ve seen Reece Tibbits, have you?” he’d asked before he got into his cruiser, and she’d merely shaken her head, hadn’t trusted her voice not to tremble. Gratefully, Merrie’s cheerful babbling covered for her with Liam and with Raylynn when Charlie dropped the child off to assume her duties as the assistant-receptionist-in-charge-of-playing-with-the-puppies.
Neither Sam nor Malachi Tackett had picked up on how shaky Charlie was when she sat down at the breakroom table, but they would if she spilled her coffee all over it! And then they’d ask what was wrong and Charlie did not want to talk about it. Couldn’t talk about it, not until she got her own arms around what had happened in her mother’s kitchen this morning.
“So does this make us the Breakfast Club?” Sam asked.
Charlie and Malachi immediately got the reference to the movie and Malachi said, “Well, it is Saturday. And it feels like detention. None of us is here because we want to be.”
They’d hastily arranged this morning’s powwow because there were things they needed to talk about and they’d all been too fried last night, too traumatized by what Charlie and Malachi had encountered in Fearsome Hollow and by what’d happened to E.J. — mauled by a rabid dog!
Sam looked exhausted. She had spent the night looking after E.J. One of the things on the unwritten agenda for this morning was setting up a schedule for caring for E.J. Shifts. It would be no trouble to find volunteers to fill the slots and Sam couldn’t do it all by herself.
“I am glad to assume the role of the bad boy,” Malachi said. “I do not qualify for the nerd position and—”
“You’re the jock!” Sam said. “Every girl in school sat in the stands drooling when you threw some Hail Mary pass right into Billy Joe Richland’s hands.”
Malachi looked both surprised and embarrassed. “Billy Joe was the one catching the ball. That’s the hard part. And then he had to manage not to get tackled. I just mailed the package and stood there while he delivered it.”
“I want to be Molly Ringwald,” Charlie said in a voice that was almost normal, barely any tremor in it at all. She was gradually getting her mojo back.
“Well, duh,” Sam said. “There wasn’t a girl jock and I’m not the girl with hair in her face … what was her name?”
“Actually, we’re all the nerd,” Malachi said. “At least we were our senior year. In English class at least.”
“I still don’t understand why the whole class wasn’t as captured by The Lord of the Rings as we were,” Sam said.
“As Mama has so often pointed out to me, ‘ugly’s on your face, but stupid goes all the way to the bone,’” Malachi said. “I don’t think the rest of the class wanted to believe in magic.”
“Well, they believe in it now, whether they want to or not,” Sam said.
“Is that it — magic?” Charlie asked. “Do you think that’s what’s going on here?”
Was what Charlie had seen in her mother’s kitchen this morning magic?
Charlie sits on the kitchen floor, not because she decided to sit but because her legs folded up and dumped her there.
She stares at the blackboard on the wall and screams “Nooooo!” at the top of her lungs. Except she doesn’t. She screams it in her head because the wind has been so totally knocked out of her she doesn’t have the breath to scream.
She shakes her head, squeezes her eyes tight shut and then peeks out at the world through a forest of eyelashes. Reality refuses to budge.
So she opens her eyes wide and stares in gap-jawed amazement at the words in the center of the blackboard.
Not the words her mother had written, words Charlie could not, would not erase. Not “get bird seed” in her mother’s precise cursive in the top left corner.
Other words, big and bold — three of them.
Where are you?
She recognizes the handwriting. It’s Stuart’s.
She grinds her teeth together. Stuart wants to know where she is? Riiiiiight. Like he cares where she is!
Leaping to her feet, she rushes to the blackboard, picks up the piece of chalk and writes beneath the three words.
“I’m trapped. It won’t let me go!”
She stares at what she wrote, wondering why her mind had burped out those particular words. She starts to write more, describe that she’s right here where Stuart had left her when he sneaked off to Hawaii with … somebody … instead of going to a business meeting in Seattle. She looks at the chalkboard through a blur of tears.
Grabbing the eraser out of the tray, she applies it with force to the blackboard. Careful not to erase “get bird seed,” she wipes out everything else, wipes over and over until every speck of chalk is gone.
No, there was nothing magical about the words on the blackboard in Charlie’s mother’s kitchen. Charlie had written them herself — that was the only possible explanation. She had gone home last night so distraught she didn’t even remember doing it. The words were nothing more than her own pathetic effort to make it seem like Stuart gave a rip what happened to her and Merrie. The man had made it abundantly clear that he did not!
“I guess that’s what we’re here to talk about,” Sam said. “What it is — the Jabberwock.”
“And what to do about it,” Charlie said. “That’s the point.”
“But those are sequential questions,” Malachi said. “You can’t link the progression to the second without figuring out the first.”
Malachi continued to surprise Charlie. That wasn’t what you expected to hear from a man who’d grown up without a telephone, falling asleep every night with the heady aroma of the privy outside in his nostrils.
He had always been a conundrum, even when she wouldn’t have known the definition of that word. He’d come back to Nowhere County from … Rwanda, she thought … broken, shattered by horrors they couldn’t imagine, but there was strength in his determination to hang on. She glanced at Sam and saw a brief look of admiration wash across her face, gone almost before it formed.
“Our mission, should we choose to accept it, is …” Sam ran out of steam. “Is what?”
“To save E.J.’s life,” Malachi said softly. And then it was quiet.
“If he doesn’t get a rabies vaccination before he starts to develop symptoms …” Sam said.
“We have — worst case scenario, one week to figure this out or E.J. dies of rabies,” Malachi said.
“And even aside from that, he’s not doing very well,” Sam said.
“What do you mean?” Charlie asked.
“He’s running a low-grade fever. And I don’t know why. Or what to do about it, except tell him to take two aspirins and call me in the morning. He needs to be in a hospital — a human one — and he needs a doctor. Several doctors.”
“Several?” Charlie repeated.
“A vascular surgeon, for starters. I’m concerned about blood flow down the injured leg — it was so … damaged. “
&
nbsp; “Whether it’s rabies or merely complications of being mauled by a dog, it all loops back to the same thing,” Malachi said.
“The Jabberwock.” They said the word almost in unison, and it creeped Charlie out.
“As far as I can tell, nobody else is thinking long term. Everybody just assumes it will go away as mysteriously as it arrived and they’re focused on surviving until it does.”
“And it could,” Sam said.
“It won’t,” Malachi said, and Charlie didn’t like the finality in his voice.
“You keep saying things like that, as if you know something the rest of us don’t. You want to share it?” Sam asked.
Malachi was silent, looking at his hands. Then he lifted his eyes and looked from one to the other of them.
“We need to get our heads out of the sand. This thing isn’t a naturally occurring phenomenon, some atmospheric anomaly brought on by the storm the night before. Whatever it is, it’s … outside nature.”
“Are you saying it’s … supernatural?”
“You can tag it with that term if you need a hook to hang it on. All I know is that it has a will and it has superimposed itself on nature, has taken over control of aspects of the natural functioning of the universe. In more ways than just a mirage and Star Trek transporter.”
“Abner’s house,” Charlie said simply.
“And the mist. A shame you missed that little joyride,” Malachi told Sam. “Besides being a barrel of fun, our little adventure gave us some vital information.”
“And that is …?”
“We may not know what the Jabberwock is, but now we do know where it is. It’s in the mist in Fearsome Hollow.”
Chapter Seven
Cotton Jackson slowed as he approached four-way stop at the intersection of Route 17 with County Road 278, where the Dollar General Store and a bus shelter were on his left beneath a sign that said the Middle of Nowhere. He didn’t intend to stop. Nobody stopped there; slowed down maybe, but didn’t stop. You weren’t likely to get t-boned because you could see down the cross road for half a mile in both directions.
What Cotton saw barreling down County Road 278 was a red car, maybe a Lexus. He stopped then, sat there. The speed that vehicle was traveling, there was no way for it to stop at the sign, even though it was clear Cotton was waiting to cross the intersection.
Cotton was certain the car would blow through the sign and keep going. But it didn’t. It appeared that as soon as the driver noticed Cotton, he began to try to stop — a process that didn’t succeed in halting the car until it was well past the sign and thirty feet down the road beyond it.
The backup lights turned on, but the car didn’t back up the way it’d come. The back end swung around, pointing the car toward where Cotton was stopped at the sign. Then the car — it was, indeed, a Lexus — slowly approached until the driver’s window was next to his.
The man driving it was a black man, but at that moment he looked ghostly pale, and only another black man would notice the difference. The window powered down. Cotton’s was already down. The man started to speak and couldn’t seem to form words. He looked really familiar, but Cotton couldn’t place him.
“You’re the first person I’ve seen since I got here. There’s not another car on the road, no people. It’s like … like everybody in the whole county vanished.”
“They did.”
Cotton watched reactions wash across the man’s face. Shock. Disbelief. Horror. And then a kind of relief. When he spoke again, there was more life in his words.
“Where’d they go?”
“I got no idea.”
The man took a second to absorb that, then said, “My name’s Stuart McClintock and—”
That’s where Cotton had seen the guy’s face! Of course. Cotton Jackson was a diehard Pittsburgh Steelers fan! He could quote every one of Stuart McClintock’s stats: grew up on the streets of Detroit, recruited from some inner-city high school by every Division One college football program east of the Mississippi River. Legendary running back for the University of Michigan. Heisman Trophy winner his senior year. First-round draft pick by the Pittsburg Steelers. McClintock had had a bright future before a career-ending knee injury during his third season sent him out to “get on with his life’s work,” as Coach Chuck Noll put it, instead of to the Super Bowl. Cotton thought he’d heard McClintock went to law school.
“—you don’t know me, but—”
“Oh, I know you, alright. I bleed black and gold!”
The man offered the scraps of a smile before he continued. “Look, I’d like to talk, to ask … I was wondering if—”
Cotton was sure he didn’t usually have so much trouble putting words together. But then, discovering that everything you thought you knew about the functioning of the universe didn’t mean diddly squat would rattle anybody.
“Can we go somewhere? I’d like to buy you a cup of coffee—”
“There’s nowhere to go for coffee. Nobody here to serve it.”
Even that small statement rocked McClintock and Cotton realized he wasn’t displaying a whole lot of sympathy and empathy for this stranger — famous football player that he was — who was just finding out what had knocked Cotton on his keister almost two weeks ago.
“Why don’t you follow me to my house. I live on Chimney Rock Pike in Bugtussle Hollow. It’s not far. Not a whole lot there, but I did get a table and a couple of chairs to go with my camping gear out of the U-Store-It. And a coffee pot. I’ll make you a cup. Of course, by the time I’m finished talking, you’re going to need something a whole lot more potent than coffee. A stiff drink. Strong enough to dissolve the swizzle stick.”
An hour and two full pots of coffee later, Cotton sat back and surveyed the young man seated across the table from him. Stuart McClintock had told Cotton an outrageous, impossible story, one Cotton was certain the man would never have breathed a word about to anybody else on the planet. Knew the breakers would fire in McClintock’s head at how “crazy” he sounded and he’d tell himself it hadn’t really happened, loud enough and long enough to mostly convince himself that it hadn’t. Mostly.
But there’d been no disbelief on Cotton’s face when he began his halting account, and as Cotton merely nodded, he spoke more and more freely. The explosion. The vanishing man. The cold. The appearing/disappearing words.
“Her mother’s house was bone empty — not a stick of furniture in it — so how could she have been living there?” Then he’d looked around but hadn’t yet asked Cotton why he had so little furniture. But he had wanted to know if Cotton would mind if he opened a window, though, that the room was “stuffy” — so he felt that part, too.
Well, now it was Cotton’s turn.
Chapter Eight
Malachi was right, of course. Whatever the Jabberwock was, it “lived” in Fearsome Hollow. Charlie remembered the mist and almost shuddered. The Jabberwock was hidden in that mist. Or maybe the Jabberwock was the mist.
“This isn’t just about Abner’s house, and all the other houses that have aged a hundred years overnight,” Sam said. “It’s about Abner. Where is he?”
“We could look under every rock in Nowhere County and not find him,” Malachi said. “He’s not here anymore.”
“Then where is he?” Sam’s voice was close to a strangled sob.
“The witch warned us,” Charlie said. “When she gave us the rocks, she said that when she got back to Gideon after spending the night in the woods, her family’s house was bare — all the houses were — no furniture, no food, no possessions, nothing in them, but—”
“—her family was still there, still in Gideon … somewhere,” Sam finished for her.
“For a while,” Malachi said. “Her father left the rocks for her for three days. Maybe from inside Gideon looking out there was a mirage around it, like out there on the county line. Remember when Liam tossed those rocks on J-Day, how they bounced right through it to the other side? I bet that’s what the witch’s fath
er was doing — throwing rocks through a mirage.”
“For three days, but after that it ‘took them’ — whatever ‘took them’ means,” Sam said.
Charlie knew what it meant. So did Sam, whose voice was huskier than usual when she answered her own question. “It means ‘vanished.’ Like Abner.”
Charlie had a sudden, crazy thought. She knew it had grown out of what had happened in her kitchen this morning — what she thought had happened — but she voiced it anyway. “You don’t suppose that … there are people in Nowhere County right now who came looking for somebody and found … nothing but empty houses — all the people vanished?”
“We have bigger fish to fry than wasting time wondering what people outside the Jabberwock are doing,” Malachi said. “If the Jabberwock ‘took’ the people in Gideon, and Abner, then by logical progression it will—”
“Take all of us eventually just like it took them,” Sam completed his thought.
“Only there are a whole lot more of us,” Charlie said. “Nowhere County’s way bigger than Gideon.”
“You think it took the sky then, too?” Sam said.
“The sky?”
“Well, the stars anyway.”
“You’ve been talking to Pete," Malachi said and Sam nodded. "The stars in the night sky. They're … wrong. And the uniformity. Weather, temperature. It's artificial."
Charlie knew without asking what he was talking about, had wondered about it herself — no clouds, and every morning it was sixty-five degrees when she got up and eighty at noon. Every day. But she had blown it off. Malachi didn’t miss much.
“And time,” Sam said.
“You think so, too, huh?” Malachi noticed Charlie’s confusion, that she wasn’t privy to the understanding that had passed between him and Sam. “It’s not something definitive, something you can quantify. It’s not like looking at a sky without constellations and the stars don’t twinkle, or temperature as predictable as a thermostat. But time is passing … too fast. And it’s getting faster every day.”