by Ninie Hammon
Except it wasn’t, of course.
Not in Fearsome Hollow, it wasn’t. He didn’t like looking at that part of the project. Roads and creeks and “You are Here’s” were there, just like in every other part of the county. But the notes he’d used to place them had been erased and redone, and erased again so often the paper was worn thin and fragile. Because the mist … obscured things. No, it was more than that. Much as he was loath to admit it, Pete Rutherford would swear that things in Fearsome Hollow moved around. You couldn’t make an accurate map of a place where sometimes a road was here, and other times …
Roscoe was wearing a chambray shirt while Harry had on a University of Kentucky tee shirt. She was able to tell them apart now, though, after listening to Harry’s story, watching his face as he told it, and she would never again mistake him for Roscoe.
Charlie had remembered Abner Riley from the nightmare of J-Day — he was unforgettable, with his tortured “harelip” speech and the jagged scar on his lip. She’d had to concentrate to keep from looking at it, made herself look into his eyes and she found there a kindness and … peace she hadn’t seen in many people in her life.
She had never seen him again after that day, had no idea he lived in Fearsome Hollow. In truth, she had trouble believing anybody actually lived here. The stories about haints and all manner of other strange happenings … you could blow them off, sitting in the bright sunshine around a barbecue grill behind her mother’s house beneath Little Bear Mountain. But living in Fearsome Hollow, in the midnight dark, with a keening wind … well, it was a hardy soul who could go with that and not worry about all the things that inevitably go bump in the night.
Gabe Stump Road ran alongside a nameless little stream that fed into Troublesome Creek, which formed the waterfall in Gideon. In lots of places in the mountains, this being one of them, there was only room enough between the inclines for the road and the stream bed, and sometimes the old railroad tracks that hadn’t been used since miners dug coal out of the mountains with picks and shipped in on huge coal cars north to Andrew Carnegie’s steel mills in Pennsylvania. The road and stream were nothing like the highway and the Rolling Fork River, but still they reminded Charlie uncomfortably of the night Abby had hauled her out to the county line and demanded she get rid of the Jabberwock so Abby could go to Lexington to—
“The mist.” Just those two words. Harry spoke them from the back seat and Charlie turned to look where he pointed. High above them, blotting out the steep walls of the surrounding mountains was a puddle of white like cream on top of a bucket of milk. The mist was intimidating and foreboding even way up there.
“We’re like to get a closer look at it than this before we leave Fearsome Hollow,” Roscoe said.
Chapter Eighteen
E.J. noticed a pile of something that looked like feathers against the wall of the barn. It registered in the higher centers of his brain what it actually was a couple of seconds too late. Not just feathers. There were feet, webbed feet. A goose. The remains of a goose. A dead goose.
“What about the chicken?” Judd had asked when he called.
“What chicken?”
“The chicken Buster killed this morning.”
The veterinarian seemed to think the thoughts slowly, rationally, absorbing the full meaning of each one. That’s what it felt like, but in reality E.J. had thought through the whole process between one eye blink and the next and had reached the horrifying conclusion before he blinked again.
Buster had refused to drink from his dog dish.
Buster had been eating rocks and clods of dirt.
Buster had refused to look at Judd.
Buster had been walking funny, limping.
Buster had killed a chicken. And a goose.
… and Buster had missed his last rabies booster.
A big white dog came around the side of the barn then. It was shaking its head, yanking it to the right rhythmically, like it had something stuck on its snout and was trying to shake it off.
Yep, Buster was rabid alright.
The thought was dispassionate, clinical. A diagnosis based on the available data. The full realization of what that meant at that particular moment parked at the curb of time took another heartbeat to register.
Buster was huge, easily as big as a mountain lion. And right now, way more vicious than one.
E.J. froze, which turned out to be the right response, though he hadn’t done it as an act of volition. He had been so shocked that his muscles were not responding to the signals he was sending to them to run.
Buster stood where he was, shaking his head. If he charged, he would kill E.J. instantly. Instantly, if the veterinarian were lucky. Because the attack would not be an instinctual animal response to food on the hoof, Buster might not go for the throat, the kill shot, right away. He would likely maul E.J. first, then kill him.
The eye was drawn to movement, and E.J. hadn’t moved. It was possible Buster had not seen him. Yeah, right. Standing out in the middle of an empty barnyard, E.J. stuck out like a cherry red Mustang at a car show. But rabies did all manner of horrifying things to the brain. A not-exhaustive list included blindness. Though sight didn’t provide a dog much information about the world, maybe Buster’s vision had been impaired. It was equally possible that his primary senses, smell and hearing, weren’t firing on all cylinders, either, but best not count on being dealt a royal flush. A dog’s sense of smell was staggeringly superior to a human’s, 10,000 to 100,000 times stronger. If it were sight instead of smell, what a human could see at one foot, a dog could see twenty miles away. A dog could hear a human heartbeat behind a closed door, and the heart that was currently jackhammering a hole in E.J.’s chest probably sounded like one, too.
He was standing downwind of the dog and the animal was not yet aware of him. He had a couple of seconds.
Without moving his head, E.J.’s eyes frantically raked the barnyard. Nothing that could be used as a weapon was in sight. No obvious place to escape that he could outrun the dog to. On the ground beside his foot was a rock about the size of his fist. He would not likely hold off a rabid 170-pound Great Pyrenees with a rock.
What he did next he did from pure instinct, though surely it had gone through some process of analysis, and a forming of intent that had merely been too fast for E.J. to follow. Bending at the knee, never taking his eyes off the dog that was still wagging its head from side to side, he knelt and picked up the rock.
Not anybody’s definition of a jock in high school, E.J. had been too skinny and scrawny to play football and not tall enough for basketball. But he had played baseball. Left field. And, in the verbiage of major league baseball announcers, “he had an arm on him.” When he drew back to throw, the motion caught the attention of the dog. It looked up, saw him.
E.J. threw the rock with all the force that his natural ability, spiked by the adrenaline rush of abject terror, could bring to bear. When it hit the tin shed about fifteen feet to the dog’s right, it sounded like the retort of a Howitzer.
Bam!
The dog’s massive head jerked in that direction and it leapt, primed to attack whatever had made the sound. At the same time, E.J. took off running for the barn. The dog would see him, see the movement. But it would be too absorbed in the sound it had heard to care. Or not. Either way, E.J. had a two-second head start on the dog and he never looked back.
Running faster than he’d ever have believed possible, E.J. tore out across an impossibly wide twenty-foot stretch of bare dirt toward the side door of the barn, slammed into it, grabbed the handle and yanked.
The door was latched on the inside.
When Buster stuck his snout through the hole in the side of the barn, Judd got his first look at the dog’s eyes. Gone was the gentle intelligence.
He had commented to Mildred dozens of times that looking into Buster’s brown eyes was like looking at marbles that didn’t even have no black spot in the middle. She had finally dragged him and the dog over to the wind
ow and made him look at Buster’s eyes in the bright sunlight, and sure enough, there was a black spot in the middle of what looked like — in bright sunlight at least — liquid caramel.
After that, Judd had always thought of the dog’s eyes like that — even at night when all he could see were dark spots on white fur, he imagined he could see them caramel eyes with the sun twinkling in them.
Them eyes — well, he used the rest of his body, too — could make the dog look silly. He’d plop that big head on the floor on his front paws, while his huge back end was standing up and tail wagging and you could flat out see the amusement in his eyes.
He could look like he cared, like he was grieving right alongside Judd. After Millie passed, Judd would find himself wandering from one room of the house to another, not looking for anything, just wandering around and Buster was right there, one step behind him.
And there was times, in them first few weeks, that Judd would go down on one knee in front of the dog, wrap his arms around the animal’s neck and sob into that mane of white fur. Buster would snuggle closer to him when he done that. Sometimes, he’d even put out his paw and … wasn’t any other way to describe it, he’d pat Judd on the shoulder.
And Judd would swear, bring him a stack of Bibles and he’d put his hand on them and challenge God to strike him dead with a lightning bolt if he was lying — he’d swear Buster cried, too. He seen tears in them eyes, running down the fur on his snout and wasn’t no other explanation for that except he was crying.
There was love in them eyes, intelligence, fun and—
All that was gone now. What Judd seen in the eyes of the dog that’d got most of his whole head through the opening was madness. Pure madness. Judd would never have thought such a thing was possible, had secretly dreaded the fact that the dog was not going to live as long as he was, that one of these days he was gonna have to take him in to E.J. and sit patting his head as he went to sleep. He had thought about it — wouldn’t let himself go there often, but he’d thought about it and he was sure that he absolutely would not be able to stand it.
As he looked into the mad eyes of the crazed beast trying to dig into the barn to kill him, Judd knew that Buster wasn’t in there anymore. Rabies had already killed Buster, and Judd would be glad to put an end to the suffering of his body if he could. He would put a bullet into the brain of that beast and be grateful the good Lord had give it to him to do.
But he couldn’t put a bullet in the dog’s brain now because he didn’t have a rifle. Didn’t have a weapon of any kind. Had grabbed at an old broom handle on the floor and beat on his snout to get him to back out of the hole. That’d drove him away for a moment, then he lunged again and the weight of him popped loose another one of the boards.
He could keep the dog out beyond the barn door with the latch — and all Judd’s weight held against it. He couldn’t whack at the dog with a broom handle and keep him from digging through the hole in the barn wall.
Looking around frantically, for anything to hit him with, anything to stick in the hole—
The whiskey barrel.
He’d got it at Maker’s Mark Distillery in Marion County years ago, a big old white oak barrel. Before he cut it apart to make planters for Millie to put flowers in on both sides of the front walk, he’d leached the liquor out of it. Whiskey barrels only got used to make whiskey once. The making of whiskey required a brand new white oak barrel that was charred on the inside — he’d seen that part once when he was at a cooperage getting used staves for firewood and them barrels rolled down an assembly line and past this thing that squirted flames out into them, looked like a dragon.
After whiskey aged in the barrels for seven years, they couldn’t be re-used, so the distillery sold them, knowing full well that you could go home, put water in them, seal them up and put them out in the hot sun and leach out a couple of quarts of whiskey that’d soaked into the wood. Same whiskey the distillery sold in bottles you could get without paying for the whiskey or the government tax.
He never had got around to cutting the barrel in two before Millie got sick, so he’d just stuck the barrel in the barn.
Judd leapt to his feet, grabbed the barrel and wrestled it onto its side as Buster lunged at the hole again and broke a board clean off. He rolled the barrel up to the wall beside the hole and set it upright in front of the broken boards. The next time Buster lunged he ran into the oak of the barrel, musta hurt but he never cried out. Wasn’t no way he was gonna break through that and heavy as it was, he wouldn’t be moving it neither.
Then Buster was gone. Didn’t even try again, stopped lunging and … yeah, and what?
Where did he go?
Judd leaned on the top of the barrel, and took two ragged deep breaths.
Bam!
Sounded like a rifle shot — but it wasn’t a sharp enough crack for that. Seconds later, something slammed into the barn door and a voice cried out, “Judd!”
It was E.J.! Out there with Buster.
If Judd opened the door, the dog would get into the barn and kill them both.
Chapter Nineteen
Charlie couldn’t help scanning the hillsides for the blotch of white that could settle down off the mountain on them like a blanket. Up among the trees, it just looked like ordinary creek mist, tattered and frayed, like it’d dissipate if you puffed a breeze at it.
The sky was blue and the sun was shining when Harry instructed them to pull over at the next house. He’d said Abner lived at 2433 Fog Bottom Lane, but there’d been no road sign to identify it when they’d turned off Gabe Stump Road, and there was no mailbox either and no house number on the house.
The front door of the house was standing open. But that was the only thing that fit the description Harry Tungate had given.
Harry and Roscoe got out of the car slowly and stood beside it gawking at the house, identical looks of confusion and fear stamped on their features.
“What … what’s happened here?”
“I thought you said Abner kept his place so neat …”
“This ain’t about Abner,” Roscoe said, looking at Harry. “This here’s something else entirely. This here’s …” He didn’t finish, just gestured at the house and yard before them.
Abner Riley’s house was nothing like the pristine little brick home Harry had seen only a few hours ago. It was a dilapidated old brick house that appeared to be still standing only because the brick walls hadn’t caved in.
The roof had. It was sunken in a heap in the middle, had moss and greenery growing on the ancient roof tiles. The white paint was … well, if there’d been white paint, it was nowhere in evidence on the shutters or the trim. The wood was gray with age. The picket fence was only standing where it was attached to the gate. It was a tangled gnarl of ancient gray pickets lying in the mass of weeds that surrounded the house. There was no yard. Though the gate was gone, the sidewalk still stretched from the gate posts to the porch, through years’ and years’ worth of briars and brambles that narrowed the walkway so that you’d have to edge sideways to get through. The front door was hanging by one hinge. You could see in through it, in the light of the hole the roof collapse had created, where sunshine illuminated a shamble of interior overgrown by weeds and vines.
The house looked seventy-five, maybe a hundred years old. Maybe older.
“How could this” — Harry waved his hand around in a gesture that encompassed it all — “have happened since this morning?” His voice was breathy.
“Don’t see no point in looking for Abner here,” Roscoe said, but Harry started down the sidewalk anyway. “Don’t you go in there or the roof’s gonna fall in on you.” Roscoe ignored him.
Charlie fell in behind Roscoe, with no intent but to get a better look at the building, certainly not to search the interior. When Roscoe stopped abruptly in front of her, she almost ran into him.
“Feel that?” His voice was tight with fear. “Feel the cold?”
And she did. A breeze was issuing o
ut the hanging-by-a-hinge door, cool. Unnaturally cool.
That was singularly odd for a couple of reasons, the most important of which was that the wind wasn’t blowing. The leaves on the tangle of vegetation were still.
Malachi came up behind her on the sidewalk.
“That’s what you were talking about?” Malachi indicated the door and the chill.
“Yeah, but it was colder then. A crap-ton colder than it is now.”
With his words, the temperature of the breeze seemed to drop.
“Let’s get out of here.” Harry turned and pushed Charlie along in front of him toward the car. She felt the wind then, behind her. Cold on her neck.
“Go on, now. Get in the car,” Harry told her, looking back over his shoulder.
Malachi took Charlie’s arm and pulled her along beside him, not dragging her but the next thing to it. He only let go of her to push her into the driver’s seat, then hurried around the car to the passenger side. Harry and Roscoe dived one after the other into the backseat.
“Go on!” they urged in unison.
The wind was frigid now. Like the breath off a glacier.
Charlie slammed the door and looked at the house, saw that the cold was not a wind that touched the leaves of the vines, brambles and weeds. They remained still, but the cold breeze had been blowing strong enough to lift Charlie’s hair off her neck before she got into the car.
“Don’t turn around, just go on straight,” Roscoe instructed her, “make for Frogtown Road.”
Charlie pulled back onto the road that ran in front of Abner’s house, fear shoving her foot so hard on the accelerator that gravel flew out behind the back tires.
And she imagined she could see her breath frosting in front of her as she drove.
What Reece had the hardest time figuring out was what to put it in. And in the end, he decided not to put it in anything.