Dig

by Dan Dillard

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The end of Sheila and…

  The breeze picked up and it rattled the leaves in the scrub oak trees along Howe Street as Sheila went inside with her mail. Her hair was green for Saturday because it was the color which had grabbed her that morning. There was an arsenal of temporary hair color in her bathroom and Mrs. Sheila Pendleton was anything but shy. She tossed the mail on the kitchen table—all junk—and opened her refrigerator. Inside, she found a tub of El Jefe’s Guacamole and a pitcher of lemonade. In the cabinet next to the fridge, she found a large glass which she filled with ice, lemonade and vodka. She stirred the concoction with a straw. A half-empty bag of tortilla chips completed her early lunch and she carried the lot out to her back porch to sit in the sun, munch and read one of her magazines with a buzz.

  The swing was already going when she got outside. Back and forth. Back and forth. No fiddle music, just the one swing. The squeak of the old metal joints and the scrape of the rusty chain links comforted her. She smiled and took a swig from her drink.

  There’s my man.

  “Afternoon, Jacques,” she said. There was a burst of wind and then the swing stopped. Not slowed to a stop, but stopped dead as if the someone who was moving it just put their feet down and stood up. The world went silent. Sheila sat up straight in her chair and stared out at the swingset. She was hoping to see something, anything…a glimpse of her ghostly friend. There was a single crunching sound in the yard, like a snapping twig and then more silence.

  “What’s the matter, Jacques? Scared? You been talkin’ to one or more of my dead husbands?” she said. There was a small waver of fear in her voice.

  Sheila looked nervously toward the swingset and then laughed.

  “Silly old woman. What are you scared of?”

  Sheila tried for a smile, but the air smelled foul and instead she got a frown with a wrinkled nose. She dipped a near-stale chip into the guacamole and sniffed it. Fresh like cilantro and lime. She crunched down on it and felt something hot pass her face. It was like a breeze, only the trees all around her were still.

  “Is that you, Death? You old fart, are you finally come for me? Well, bring it you sorry shit. Sheila’s got something for you.”

  It was an awful thought. Not one she would normally think. Sheila was upbeat, loud, funny. Never morbid, not even on her loneliest of days.

  “They is coming,” a voice said, deep and breezy.

  She heard it. There was nothing foreboding or mystical about it aside from the fact it didn’t seem to have an owner. It was just a matter of fact statement that appeared out of the still air.

  She gave a quick glance around but saw nothing. No one. It was only Sheila on her back porch with a snack and a cool drink on a hot summer’s midday. Nope, Sheila was alone. Possibly as a defense mechanism, her inner smartass unleashed.

  You’re hearing things, Sheila. Everyone thinks you’re crazy, why not leap over the edge and prove them right. You’re talking to the air. You’re already answering those voices in your head. Start dancing as well. Maybe you should just do a flipping striptease here on your back porch and remove any and all doubt. Drink your lemonade, girl. Then go and get another.

  But she’d heard the words plain as day. As plain as her green-tinged hair. She heard words on the breeze.

  They is coming.

  Maybe it was a combination of other sounds. Some strange coincidence where the sound of the breeze and a bird’s song plus a passing car and a slamming door aligned in just such a way that English words were formed.

  Sheila dismissed the thought and the other one. The other thought being someone unseen had spoken to her. She’d grown used to Big Jacques and his fiddle playing—though she never knew where the name Big Jacques came from. It just formed in her head one day while she listened to him and while she watched the swing moving back and forth like a pendulum. Big Jacques had never spoken to her. And she’d never heard voices in her head aside from her conscience. Sheila Pendleton had mostly ignored her conscience and done as she pleased.

  “Hello?” she said.

  There was no hesitation, in fact the words almost interrupted her own. “They is coming,” it said. More plain that time. Not ethereal or whispered, not reverberating in some haunted hallway. Not a combination of the sounds of nature. It was a human voice. Three words. A statement.

  “Who’s there?” Sheila said.

  She worried, certain one of her neighbors was watching her from their window. Certain they were calling their friends and family and telling them, “Hey, the old bitch finally cracked in half. She’s outside talking to a squirrel.” Or something just like that.

  Sheila felt the warmth across her body again, like a clothesline-dried sheet gently flapped against her. The bag of chips slid to the opposite edge of the wrought iron table, yet the air was still. For the first time since her fiddle-playing swinger had come years ago, Sheila felt uncomfortable.

  “What do you want?” she said. Her voice trembled and she longed for the swing to move, for the fiddle music to start. Those things brought her peace. This was antagonizing.

  “They is comin, ma’am,” the voice said again. This time, it was clearly a woman’s voice. “That Loretta woman broke through. She found the place Mr. Albert started looking for so long ago.”

  The polite tone eased Sheila’s anxiety from eleven back to six or maybe a seven on the scared shitless dial.

  “Who are you?” Sheila said with some authority.

  If you’re going to haunt me or kill me, do it good.

  “Mrs. Pendleton, ma’am, my name is Odette.”

  Something formed on the other side of the table. It twisted in and out of shape, swirling the natural colors of the real world around it like a glass of clear water made to look like a woman. The apparition didn’t shine, but bent the light.

  Sheila shuddered and pushed her chair back. The ghost moved slowly away, as if in apology for the start. As it steadied, Sheila also steadied. She put one hand to her chest and adjusted her glasses with the other, squinting and widening her eyes in attempt to focus them better.

  “Odette, are you the one who swings on my swingset?”

  There was a moment where Sheila thought she saw the clear woman look down at her feet. It was aw shucks body language, just without the body.

  “Yes ma’am. I hope you don’t mind,” Odette said.

  “No. No you’re welcome here as long as you don’t mean any harm.”

  “I don’t wish no harm on anyone.”

  Sheila stood up and walked nearer to the spirit. Odette moved away from her touch. “I’m sorry,” Sheila said.

  “No need to be,” Odette said. “I guess I don’t know what to expect any more than you do. I ain’t never touched the living. Not since I been dead, no how.”

  Not since I’ve been dead, it says. Odette says. She has a name. This is…fabulous. This is just fantastic.

  “How long have you been here?” Sheila asked.

  “Ma’am, I was born in eighteen hundred and eleven. Died in eighteen twenty seven.”

  Wonderful.

  “My God,” Sheila said. “And the fiddling? Is that you, too?”

  A giggle, like a little girl’s. She was a little girl. A sixteen year old girl, dead for over a century, standing and having a conversation with Sheila on her back porch.

  I must be losing my mind. There’s no other explanation…unless there’s something in this vodka.

  She peered down into the glass of lemonade.

  “No ma’am. That’s my daddy, well, the only daddy I remember. Big Jacques, you call him. That’s what everybody called him back when. I suppose it’s all right folks still do so.”

  “Is he here?”

  Odette’s spirit moved to the edge of the porch, looking away toward the north. “No ma’am. He left. Went back to Mr. Albert’s land. Back to try and stop that Loretta woman before she go and make things worse.”

  “You mentioned her. Loretta Gates? Is that wh
o you mean?”

  The spirit didn’t look back at her, but continued staring in the direction of the Gates place. “Mm hmm.”

  Sheila moved next to Odette, matching the apparition’s gaze. “What is it she’s doing?”

  “Digging. She done her best to dig a hole straight on down into hell, ma’am. ”

  “Hole to…” Sheila laughed. “That’s a load of shit if I ever heard one.” She laughed, but her stomach felt sick. Hell described the foul odor she’d been smelling. It described the way people had been acting. It explained some of her own terrible thoughts. If some woman, especially the town crazy Loretta Gates, was digging a hole. Hell could be its only destination.

  “I wish it was silly, Mrs. Pendleton. I wish it was just that. Albert, her grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather started digging back when I was alive on that dead land. Walking on that place made my heart as dark as it ever felt. Standing on that spot was darker even than when he killed me. Ain’t no God there. Ain’t no nothing there.”

  Killed me. She was murdered. This poor girl.

  “Holy shit,” Sheila said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “There’s no need for sorry. I’m free of him, of that place. I’ve had a long time to study on it. It wasn’t Mr. Albert’s fault. Not entirely. It was that land. It was that hole.”

  Digging a hole down to hell. That’s…wait a minute!

  “But we’re at sea level. This is the beach. You can’t dig more than a few feet before you hit water.”

  “Yes’m, I know. But those demons thought of everything. I think they was prepared for this day long ago and they’ve just been waiting for someone to come along what was weak in his faith. They made them a chimney that goes down to the belly of the evil place and waited for Mr. Albert to come along and start digging. Don’t you smell the brimstone belching up from down there? Don’t you get that uneasy feeling?”

  Sheila had. She’d had those feelings for a long time and recently she had noticed they were getting worse. Sheila had run into Loretta Gates on occasion, but only once had they spoken. It was at the Ace Hardware next to the Sandpiper Restaurant out near the highway. Sheila was buying a quart of turquoise paint for her bathroom and Loretta was in line with a buggy full of tools. Tools of the digging variety.

  “What kind of weekend do you have planned?” Sheila had asked her, trying to make friendly conversation.

  Loretta had looked her up and down and with a sneer on her lips, said, “It takes a vagina and a big pair of brass ovaries to finish a job like I got. Women are the closers in this world, lady. Don’t you ever forget that. We finish shit—get it done. Men tend to start projects. They put things in motion but are too easily distracted by little things. Women clean ‘em up. We put the final stamp on ‘em.”

  Goddamn. Odette is right. She is on the ever-loving nose.

  She put a hand out to where Odette’s shoulder would’ve been. It felt warm and humid, but not solid. Odette fluttered but didn’t shy away.

  “What’s down there? I mean if she breaks through, what is down there?”

  “She did break through, ma’am. That’s what I’m telling you. She broke through and they is coming.”

  “Who, dear? Who is coming?” Sheila asked.

  “Fear. Pain. Despair. Death. Destruction. Hatred. Evil. All of them. They all coming. Some of them already here. Some of them been here for a long while already.”

  Sheila thought about Shrimp and Thomas. She thought about that girl, Robyn’s friend’s sister—the Clemmons girl who was hit by the drunk driver back in the eighties. She thought about a news story from the seventies where a teenage boy had poured gasoline on his next door neighbor’s dog and then lit the animal on fire. She thought about Sue and that bastard Travis and his raping truck. She thought about the sirens she’d heard that morning and wondered. She didn’t know yet if those sirens were due to Jeanne Kepler all but decapitating Top with a shotgun blast, but she wondered. Sheila though of all the things she’d seen in that town over the course of her life. Had it been getting worse? It was like any other small town, wasn’t it?

  “What can we do?” Sheila asked.

  “Run, Mrs. Pendleton. I was you, I would run as far and as fast as I could go. Tell your daughter and her daughter to do the same. Tell them, ma’am. Don’t you wait.”

  “They’ll think I’m crazy,” Sheila said.

  “You ain’t crazy, ma’am.”

  “But they’ll think…”

  “Better they think you’re crazy than all of you dead,” Odette interrupted.

  The words chilled her, and quickened her. Her inner smartass quieted, scurried away somewhere inside her head and closed the door.

  She would start with Kelly. Kelly was on shift at the motel, only a couple of blocks away. Kelly would know how to get hold of Robyn. Sheila would fake a stroke if she had to. She could demand they take her to New Hanover Hospital in Wilmington. That might be far enough. Maybe she could then convince them to head up the coast toward the Outer Banks or even Virginia Beach.

  “Thank you, Odette,” Sheila said. “I’m glad we met.”

  “Yes ma’am. You hurry along now. I’ll keep watch from here. My daddy—Big Jacques—will do what he can.”

  Sheila did hurry. She rushed in the house and grabbed her purse just in case there wouldn’t be time to come back home. Kelly had a car. They could go wherever Robyn was and pick her up or maybe she could meet them.

  Oh, Squirt. Momma’s coming. No. Kelly is closer. Kelly. Robyn. Dear God.

  Her old mind scattered like a handful of dropped BBs. She tried to organize her thoughts but failed miserably. Sheila closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Her heart pounded, but she found her strength.

  Calm down. Walk. Get to the motel. Find Kelly. Explain. Robyn next, but Kelly first. Kelly. Motel. Calm. Hurry.

  Sheila closed her front door and stepped down onto the stoop. She breathed deep again, noticing the odor.

  Brimstone. Hell. Evil. Despair. Destruction. Death. Hatred.

  The words punctuated each one of her footsteps like a chant as she came to the corner of the sidewalk. She stepped into the road without looking. The yellow stench filled her lungs and made her cough but she continued on.

  Have to find Kelly so I can…what? Warn her. Help her. Choke her. Stab her. Kill her. That’s it. I want to…

  “No. Goddamnit! No,” she said. Sheila was in the center of Bay Street shaking her fist and cursing as if she was in a heated argument. Wandering tourists gave her off hand glances. She was an oddity. Local color. People probably went home and told their neighbors about the crazy woman in Smithville with the hair and the loud mouth.

  That’s right, folks. Step right up and see the nut case. Get all your eyeballs full of me. Then fucking choke on something. You heard right. Choke!

  She walked again, panting, taking in lungfuls of the poison like it was sweet cigarette smoke or primo weed. Each step became labored. Each breath became labored. Even still, she walked up to the motel, past the lobby, past the restaurant, past the porch swing on its metal frame, past the row of signs which said CAUTION, past the sea grass and the drop off that led down to the edge of the Intracoastal Waterway. She climbed down the slight embankment and into the muck and oyster shells lining the water’s edge. The shells carved at her sandals and her bare ankles. Tears streamed from her eyes and blood streamed from her legs as she stepped into the blue-gray water. It was warm, like a bathtub. She didn’t want to do what she was about to do. Sheila Pendleton just couldn’t help herself.