Black Valley

by Jim Brown

  “A bad one, a very bad one,” she whispered. She fetched a roll of paper towels from the pantry. “A very bad one,” she repeated. Hadn’t been like this since . . ?

  “The fire in sixty-eight,” she muttered, her words as soft and fragile as a butterfly’s wing.

  The Black Valley Elementary School had gone up in a bright flash of red and yellow. Seventy-two kids died. The cause was never determined.

  “All the same, it’s a God-blessed miracle that more didn’t die,” her father had said, hugging her tightly.

  Gena was only in the third grade at the time, but she knew it wasn’t a miracle; it was the blood.

  It had come that day, as it did now, gushing from her nose without warning, without stopping . . . and . . .

  And what?

  And she had known. When the blood came, so, too did the feeling. She ran out of the class, rushed to the bathroom. When she was alone in the hall, the sensation grew stronger. She stood still, listening to the blood, her face drained white, as her dress and hands turned scarlet.

  Then, with bloody fingers, she pulled the fire alarm.

  In the aftermath no one realized that the alarm had sounded a good three minutes before the fire began. But once it was ignited, the blaze was so fast that three minutes was of little help. Not all of the classes made it out.

  But hers did.

  How many more would have died if not for . . .

  “The blood.”

  She never told a soul. Who would believe it? Born and raised in the shadow of Hawkins Hill, she was already considered a little weird, even at that age. Sometimes even she didn’t believe it. Perhaps it was a dream, a childish fantasy, wishful thinking – rearranging her memories to put herself in the heroine’s role, a way of dealing with the trauma. But deep down she knew the truth.

  So long ago, so very long.

  The blood was just a dream – a faraway nightmare – nothing more . . . until now.

  The sky roared; the rain fell harder.

  Something bad was happening.

  “What?” she asked.

  This time, the blood was silent.

  Whitey Dobbs woke. He had passed out, exhaustion and fear casting him into a pit of mental darkness every bit as black as the grave.

  How long had it been? How much air was left?

  He grabbed the now silent radio and jacked the volume; nothing happened. The batteries had died.

  “And so will I.”

  Suck air.

  He could feel wetness; was the coffin still leaking? No, this was too warm to be rain. Putting a hand on his crotch, he realized he had peed in his pants. It didn’t matter. A lot of things didn’t matter when you were going to die. His heart shut like a fist around a wrench of rage and terror.

  He began to pound the coffin lid, screaming with each blow.

  The knife?

  Click.

  Flip.

  He stabbed the top of the coffin, the blade sinking deep into the wood. Almost too deep; adrenalized muscles pulled it free. He stabbed again and again and again. Each time the knife bit into the lid, slashing the lacy canopy, gouging at the rigid ceiling. The blade sank deep, deep.

  Then it was stuck. He pulled with both hands.

  Snap.

  The handle pulled free, the blade still buried in the wood - broken.

  “No, no, no,” Dobbs screamed, pounding the lid, striking with bare hands. All his might behind each blow, flesh to wood, flesh to wood.

  Something warm cascaded down his arm. Blood. He was beating his hands into a bloody pulp, but the lid held firm.

  “I could kill them all, I could kill them all!” Warm blood splattered his face as he battered the coffin lid, each blow sending a sword of pain down the length of his arm. He didn’t care. Pain meant he was still alive.

  If he could have seen in the dark, he would not have recognized his own reflection. His eyes saucer wide, patterned in red veins, his hands bloodied and mauled, rivulets of red racing down both arms, scarlet droplets covering his face, his teeth, his death-white hair.

  The pain was eternal. His arms stopped moving, no longer strong enough to respond to his mental demands.

  Silence.

  A quiet a thousand times louder than the greatest sound the world had ever heard. The sound of nothing, of the end, of death.

  Then . . .

  3

  Eight twenty-three P.M.

  She wasn’t there. Her shift had ended more than twenty minutes ago, but so far Judy Pinbrow had failed to show. Was she angry? Had the weekend before last really been Dean’s only chance, his only real chance? And now that he had blown it, was she lost forever? Was he doomed to a life of incompleteness? He could not imagine a future without her.

  Where was she?

  The fry machine issued a brain-numbing, elongated note. He drained the basket and dumped the fries with Pavlovian indifference. A baby cried. A mother shushed it with a pacifier. A man with long brown hair, beard, and mustache sat in a back booth, pumping a straw up and down through the plastic lid of his large soda, producing a disconcerting squeal.

  And still – she wasn’t there.

  The door opened. Dean looked up expectantly.

  In walked John Evans, Mason Evans, Clyde Watkins and Nathan Perkins. The gang. They had been together since elementary school. Dean knew each of them, their moods, their likes and dislikes, as well as he knew his own. And that experience told him something was wrong.

  Nathan’s face was sallow, Mason and Clyde appeared positively delighted with themselves, while John had a sphinxlike expression.

  They shook off the rain, then took a table not far from the counter – their usual. Clyde bought a round of Cokes, including one for Dean.

  “Okay if I take my break, Mr. Dwyer?” Dean asked his manager.

  “Sure, sure. Business is as dead as a graveyard.”

  A look passed between Clyde and Mason. They bowed their heads and snickered.

  Dean slid a plastic chair up to the table, then turned to John. “Larry Pepperdine came in earlier. He asked if I knew how it went?”

  John nodded, a slight movement like a mailbox in a stiff breeze.

  “He seemed surprised that I didn’t know what he was talking about,” Dean continued.

  “Uh-huh.”

  Clyde and Mason passed out the drinks, their faces flagged with smiles. Nathan tried to mirror their enthusiasm but failed miserably, looking instead like someone enduring a hidden pain.

  “Okay, what the hell is going on?” Dean asked.

  Clyde and Mason chortled. Nathan made a small bleating sound.

  “Tell me right now or – ”

  “Or what?” Mason challenged. “What? You going to make me?”

  “Hey – hey easy guys,” Nathan interjected. “Come on, keep your voices down. Stay cool. No fighting in the group. We’re a team – Flash Five, remember?”

  Flash Five. Dean smiled.

  Ask any member of the group what it meant, and you would get a different answer. Clyde, the best looking, said it was because they were so photogenic. (They weren’t.) Mason, the car nut, said it was because they drove fast and lived faster. (They didn’t.) While Nathan, the meekest, said it was because they had rescued a group of cheerleaders from one of the mysterious flash fires that tended to plague Black Valley. (They wished!)

  Whether the others chose to remember it or not, Dean knew the truth. And the name never failed to make him smile.

  “Nathan’s right,” Clyde said. He held up his hand and spread his fingers. “Flash Five, stay alive. Flash Four, group no more.”

  Dean relaxed. “You’re starting to sound like Whitey Dobbs.”

  Clyde’s smile slackened. Nathan shifted nervously in his seat. John Evans stared at nothing, then said, “Funny you should
mention Dobbs.”

  Whitey Dobbs?

  Ninety-nine Einstein.

  “We buried him on top of the hill tonight,” John said evenly.

  Mr. Dwyer lowered a basket of raw potatoes into a vat of hot oil; it hissed like a thousand coiled snakes.

  Gena Blackmoore was dying, a fact as cold and hard as the floor she was lying on, as sure as the falling rain. The blood wouldn’t stop. She had tried to call for help, but the phones were out. The storm. Perhaps the neighbors? She had made it to the front door before collapsing in the archway. Rain splashed in through the screen. She could see the sky, see veins of lightning throb across black, muscular clouds.

  The storm and the blood and the bad thing. All connected. Somehow.

  Bleeding to death in my own home – goodness, won’t Joel be shocked? Her husband was working the night shift and wouldn’t be home until midnight. How large will the puddle of blood be by then? she wondered.

  Her thoughts were becoming more disjointed, broken.

  “Mommy?” The small, sweet voice focused her consciousness. She tried to turn her head but couldn’t.

  “Piper?” She said, not sure if she had actually spoken or only imagined she did. Piper. Her four-year-old daughter was supposed to be in bed, sleeping the sleep of the innocent.

  “Mommy, what’s wrong?”

  Piper.

  Gena’s face flashed white from a spike of lighting and the heavens roared like a wounded beast. Something touched the back of her head, tiny fingers caressing her hair.

  “Mommy hurt.”

  “Piper. No, honey, go back to bed.” She gagged, choking on her own blood.

  “Mommy, get up.”

  “It’s all right, honey, go back to sleep. Mommy is just resting.”

  “I’m scared.”

  “Just a storm . . .” she struggled, the words clotting in her throat. “Don’t be afraid.”

  “Not scared of the thorm,” said the child, stepping between her fallen mother and the open door. Lightning flashed. Gena saw her daughter in strobing silhouettes.

  “Scared of the bad thing,” Piper said, turning to face her mother. A small trickle of blood was running from her nose.

  “Piper?”

  The skies erupted.

  The mother of all lightning – a prolonged, sustained flash that was brighter than the sun but void of warmth. And in the doorway? Behind her child. A man. A man?

  Joel? No, not her husband. Long hair, a beard. She opened her mouth to speak, to ask for help. Blood bubbled in her throat, cutting off the words, the air. Then darkness. The flash was gone.

  “Mommy? Mommy, the bad thing?” She could hear her daughter cry, so small, so fragile next to drumming thunder.

  “Mommy . . .Mommy . . .Mommy . . .”

  Lightning – blinding, impossibly harsh – shredded the night. Mason Evans hit the brakes. The Chevy slid on the rain-sheathed road, turning sideways. The lightning held. Dean could see an open field: fence posts garnished in barbed wire, cattle with their heads up and their eyes wide in fear – a tableau painted in electric white.

  The lightning held.

  Impossible, Dean thought, his mental clock marking the time. A bolt of eternal light?

  He could see the gray, drumming rain; tall, thick weeds undulating in the wind; a crow in hurried flight.

  And still the lightning held.

  Thunder exploded, shaking the car, shaking the road, shaking the world.

  Darkness rushed back like the ocean into a fresh concave.

  “What the hell was that?” Mason asked.

  Dean felt his heart beating in the back of his throat. More than half a minute. The lightning bolt filled the sky for more than half a minute. Not possible. Not possible.

  Mason shook his head, blinking like a child pulled from slumber. “Jesus! Did you guys see that?”

  “The blind could see that,” John answered from the backseat. “Unless you want Nathan and Clyde to plow into us with the mortuary truck, I suggest we get going.”

  Mason Evans gunned the engine and straightened the car. “What the hell was that? How can lightning last that long?”

  How? Science. Everything could be explained with science. There were no secrets in the universe, Dean thought, only equations not yet solved.

  “It can’t,” he answered. “It must have been a series of continual flashes spaced so close together that it gave the impression of one contiguous burst.”

  Mason sped up, still watching the sky, flinching with each new flash.

  Dean had done something he had never done before: he left work early. His manager had been understanding, but Dean was still troubled about abandoning his post. Or was it missing a chance to see Judy that really bothered him? The memory of Judy’s smile played in the back of his mind like a continual song. Her capricious, winter-blue eyes, her delicate cheeks and pert nose, all framed in a cloud of sun-blond hair.

  Dean pushed the thought of Judy Pinbrow out of his mind, focusing instead on their conversation, on what John had told him about Whitey Dobbs’s initiation ceremony.

  “A tape? That’s what you owe Larry for? He made a tape?” Dean asked. The stars and moon had vanished. Lightning revealed massive, roiling clouds. The air was restless and rich with the scent of ozone.

  “Yeah, then I gutted the insides of an old radio and installed the tape player. Pretty slick, huh?” Mason said, his timidity quickly evaporating. He drove with fresh abandon, taking curves with quick, tight jerks of the wheel. Twin beams splashed across the blacktop and vanished into the night.

  “Sick is what it is.”

  Mason ignored the jab, reveling in his own creativity and craftsmanship. “You should hear it. Larry did a whole hour-long radio show – songs, commercials, the whole shebang.”

  “Including the news,” Dean finished. Mason grinned. In the glow of the dashboard light his teeth seemed phosphorescent, jagged by shadows. Big John Evans sat in the backseat, arms stretched out, silent and stoic.

  “And this news story,” Mason continued, “says there’s been an automobile accident and that John, Clyde, Nathan, and me are dead. We’re so dead, man.”

  Mason cheered, releasing the wheel and slapping his meaty hands together in a single note of applause. “That son of a bitch is buried alive, and he thinks the only ones who know where he is are dead. Whoo-ha! Brilliant, ain’t it?”

  Dean Truman felt a thorny stroke of apprehension, as if something with a barbed tongue were licking his spine.

  The road began to rise, crawling up the side of Hawkins Hill.

  Anger, like lava under pressure, pushed against his self-restraint. He closed his eyes and tried to pinch off his emotions. When he spoke, it was with measured restraint. “Why? Just tell me why, John? I thought it was weird that you guys were hanging around with a creep like Dobbs. But Jesus, he’s dangerous. Seriously. He is not someone you want to be screwing around with.”

  “And this.” Dean held out his hand. “All you’ve done is piss him off.”

  Drops of rain, silver in the wash of the headlights, slammed into the windshield. Dean shook his head. “Why would you do something so . . . stupid . . . so vicious?”

  “Because we couldn’t kill him,” John whispered from the backseat.

  Lightning bathed the sky, revealing John’s face. He was serious.

  Dean shuddered from a sudden chill. Something terrible had happened.

  “I don’t understand you, John, and I don’t understand any of this. Nobody deserves this kind of treatment.”

  “Tell that to Judy,” John’s words were a whisper, but Dean heard the name as a shout.

  “Judy?”

  “Tell him, man,” Mason urged.

  Judy.

  Dean felt the dimming fog of distress growing around his peripheral vision. A st
range, unearthly sense of foreboding throbbed with each beat of his heart. He wanted to stop John Evans from saying what he was about to say.

  “That bastard raped her. Whitey Dobbs raped my sister. He raped Judy.”

  Judy.

  Dean Truman’s vision narrowed, the world consumed by shifting gray static. He bit his lip until he drew blood, the salty copper taste lost in the general disarray of his senses.

  The rain fell harder and faster.

  In the darkness John Evans told the story. He had first noticed something was wrong the Sunday before last, when Judy’s ever flowing smile seemed to suddenly dry up. He thought she was melancholy about the end of school. She liked school. Maybe she was a little sad that Dean was going off to college. But then on Monday she didn’t go to class, same thing on Tuesday. Until that point Judy Pinbrow had maintained a perfect attendance record.

  Even though she was his stepsister, John had always been close to Judy. Opposites in body and mind, but identical in their devotion. She was usually the one who pulled him from the pit of depression, made him talk about what was troubling him, and more times than not, made the world a place worth living in. But now it was John’s turn.

  He confronted her. She feigned sickness, then distraction, but her efforts to smile were feeble. The truth came with tears.

  “It happened two Saturdays ago,” John said. “After she left you at the restaurant. She was parked behind the flower shop next door. And that’s where Dobbs was waiting.”

  Dean closed his eyes. His mouth was dry, his throat scoured. He listened even though he didn’t want to hear.

  John explained how Dobbs had grabbed Judy from behind, his hand over her mouth, clotting her screams. How she had heard a small, chilling sound, barely audible over the drumming of her heart.

  Click.

  Followed by the touch of something cold and biting, dimpling her neck. Whitey said the knife had a name: Switch. It was his best friend, and unless she did just what he said, he was going to let Switch see what the inside of a pretty little girl looked like. He then dragged her behind the store to the trash bin; there, on top of empty boxes and dead flowers, he took her.