If the mountain don’t kill me
I’ll live till I die
As he sang, he looked across the valley, as I had done, and I wondered how many leaf changes there were in a Dragaman’s life. Some say the Dragamen remember when there were no leaves, and no mountains either.
Gonna build a log cabin
In Cove Mountain so deep
So I can see Allie
Has ne’er cause to weep
Way up on Cove Mountain
Where hawks sail so high
I’ll think of little Allie
Till my day to die
He sang and sang, and as I always was a fool for a song, I rightly lost track of the time. The air turned chill as the sun got lower, and just as it grazed the next ridgetop, the Dragaman turned his head and looked right into my eyes:
I spy a pretty wizard
Who’s up on yon hill
If she ain’t done flown off
She’s watching me still
This gave me a start, and I flushed, embarrassed. The older magic-makers get, the better they are at spotting other magic-makers, and, of course, a Dragaman is older than just about anybody short of a rock. So I might have expected discovery if I sat still long enough. I squared my shoulders, pushed through the laurel, and walked down the hill toward the Dragaman, who continued to sing:
She’s vain in her knowledge
And proud of her sense
It’ll all be forgotten
A hundred years hence
The words were harsh, but the Dragaman didn’t look angry. His eyes twinkled. Since they were the size of twin pie pans, that was a lot of twinkle.
“Well met, Grandfather,” I said, because that’s how one politely addresses the oldest beings, whether related or not.
“Don’t you ‘Grandfather’ me, Miss Cute-as-a-Bug,” said the Dragaman. “Your airs are wasted on someone as wicked as me.” He patted the mountainside, nearly knocking me off my feet again. “Come warm yourself, little one. You can’t sit in my lap, now,” he added, winking, “because I’m spoken for.”
“I wouldn’t have sat in it anyhow,” I snapped, settling myself onto the grass beside him, but my, he did put out the warmth. It was like getting neighborly with a steamboat boiler. “You ain’t even introduced yourself proper,” I said.
“That’s true, Miss Nose-out-of-Joint,” said the Dragaman, but he seemed in no hurry to rectify matters. Dragamen seldom hurry. He took a long draw on his pipe, then sighed and let the smoke roll out of his great nostrils to be lost in the evening sky. The sun had dropped out of sight as it always does in the mountains, all of an instant, and the glow of the pipe’s kettle-sized bowl was now our chief source of light. “My name,” he finally said, “is Pike. Cauter Pike. And when I say ‘my name,’ I mean only what I’ve gone by the past century or two, in the language that you know.”
“My name is Pearleen Sunday, and it’s the only name I’ve ever had.”
“You’ll earn others, in time,” Cauter Pike said. “You’re just a slip of a thing yet.”
I couldn’t disagree. In the complicated ways of wizards, I was physically about nineteen, but the cold drugstore-calendar mathematics of subtracting birth year from present year yielded a number that was pushing sixty, while in my own mind I was sometimes twelve and sometimes older than Methuselah, depending on my mood. A wizard’s adolescence lasts a long time, which is one reason I don’t recommend the life to anyone who has a choice in the matter. I had none, myself.
“So tell me, Pearleen Sunday,” said Cauter Pike, “why the mustache?”
“It’s not real,” I said, quickly. “It’s a hex, a glamour. Just like the short hair, the shoulders, the stubble on my chin.” I rubbed my face, felt only smoothness but heard the skritch-skritch that meant the spell still worked. Appearing as a man was one of my handiest skills. “A man traveling alone gets into fewer scrapes than a woman, in these troubled times,” I said. Those troubled times had lasted my entire life to date and likely would continue a lot longer, but you can’t explain to a Dragaman how tough things can be for womankind. I also didn’t mention, because I was ashamed to admit it, that hex or no hex, the mustache tickled my lip something awful.
“Seems a shame to cover up all that pretty,” said Cauter Pike, “but you know best, I’m sure. Of course, I can see right through any hex.” He dragged on his pipe, and in the light from the flaring bowl, his expression suggested that he saw through not just the hex but everything else I had on. I tugged my jacket closed and folded my arms together, and the Dragaman laughed, in deep volleys that echoed among the hills like cannon fire.
“So what brings you to my mountains, Miss Priss-and-Proper?”
“If they’re your mountains,” I replied, nettled, “then you ought to know.” But I went on to tell him that as a student of the art, I traveled the country, teaching myself the magics that were done in different ways in different places by different people. “Around these parts, for example, I’m learning my way through Hohman’s book, The Long Lost Friend. It’s from the Pennsylvania Dutch, and it’s hex-magic and Jesus-magic mixed together. Do you know it?”
“Never did much book reading myself,” said Cauter Pike. “They might be of some use if the dang things weren’t made of paper.” He poked a tree trunk with a slablike index finger, held it there a few seconds, and left a seared and smoking patch in the wood.
“I understand completely,” I told him, wondering how I’d get through even a week without reading, much less a Dragaman’s lifetime. “Mr. Pike, I heard something at the store in Catawba this afternoon that troubles my mind. Do you know anything about—”
Before I could finish the sentence, Cauter Pike had snuffed out his pipe and sprung into a crouch, his bulk silhouetted against the dark blue sky. He cocked his head and peered downslope.
I looked, too, and saw a distant swinging light. A lantern. Three lanterns. Men’s voices, coming this way.
Cauter Pike sniffed once, twice, for all the world like a frighted deer. Then he whispered:
“I got to go, Pretty-My-Pearl, but come up to Buzzard’s Rock one evening. We’ll have you to supper.”
He turned and, without another word, disappeared.
Now for a Dragaman to move from his man-shape into his flying-shape takes only about as long as buttering a biscuit, but Cauter Pike had not stayed put even that long. He had done something else.
Like some other creatures in the hills, and all the oldest ones, the Dragamen are sidewinders. They can turn themselves sideways to the world and slip out of sight—unless you know what to look for, and look quick.
What I looked for and saw was the Dragaman’s shadow, just a thin strip crawling along the ground like a blacksnake, and out of sight in an instant, as if it had poured through a crack in the earth.
I thought about hiding myself in a similar way, but curiosity got the upper hand, so I walked down the hill in my own man-shape as the men in the hunting party crashed through the laurel, rifles in their hands. At sight of me, they shouted.
“Who’s there?”
“Are you alone?”
“Your hands, mister! Show us your hands!”
I raised my hands, tried to blink away the brightness; someone was holding a lantern in my face. Another someone searched me for weapons, and none too gently, either. But the glamour held, and he felt nothing he wouldn’t expect to feel on a man’s rough body.
“Where’s your badge, son?” asked the man with the lantern.
“No badge, sir,” I said. “I’m no Revenuer. I’m a stranger in these parts, and mean no harm.” What I heard when I spoke was my own Pearl-voice, which still sounded childish in my ears but for the little rasp I had picked up in my travels, like I might need to clear my throat directly. What the men heard was a man-voice that matched the man-image and man-clothes that I presented in their minds. “Y’all hunting possums? I didn’t hear your hounds.”
The lantern was lower now, and by it I saw the bald head an
d heavy jowls of the old man who held it. I knew his face, and if I had presented myself true, he might have remembered mine, too, from the Catawba Grocery that day at noon. He had held forth loudly to the clerk, while I had eased about the shelves filling my basket, and listening.
“Law, nothing,” the old man had said. “Don’t talk to me about obeying the law!” He hacked at an apple with a pocketknife, not peeling it like a patient man but chipping away at the skin. On each outstroke he flipped a little red dot onto the floor. “Ain’t no law says we got to let them take our children.”
“Calm yourself, Ash Harrell,” said the clerk, watching the pile of red shavings like he wouldn’t appreciate having to sweep them up. “She’ll come back. She’ll be fine, you’ll see, just like the others.”
“Cut up like hogs, you mean,” said the old man called Ash Harrell. “She’d be better off—” But instead of saying the next word, he slung the flayed apple into the sandbox beneath the stove and stomped out of the store, slamming the screen door and knocking sideways the Colonial Bread sign.
“May I help you, Miss?” asked the clerk, looking relieved to speak to anyone who was not Ash Harrell. But when I asked what all the fuss had been about, he only shook his head, and said, “You’re best shut of it, Miss, believe me.”
Those things I had mused about, on that warm, flat rock up the mountain: who had run away from Ash Harrell, and who had been cut like hogs, and why the law was to blame.
Now here was Ash Harrell in front of me, looking no better tempered than before, and a good sight more scary.
“Ain’t hunting possums,” said the old man, nearly spitting his contempt. Lighted from below, his deeply shadowed expression was murderous. “You pass anyone, Mister? Up the mountain?”
“No, sir,” I said. A lie is the easiest magic there is. Just saying something can make it so, if you say it right. The old man looked unconvinced, but instead of replying, he reached a mottled hand into a pocket of his overalls.
“Mr. Ash,” said one of the others. “Mr. Ash, we got to go.” The four other men in the group were younger. The old man was stern as a deacon, but the boys were definitely spooked. They looked as if every swaying tree limb was about to dump a Behinder on their heads, or every wind-ripple in the tall grass was the wake left by a Flat with sharp teeth. If they’d ever been taught to keep their guns pointed at the ground, they’d forgot it now. I didn’t like the way those twin barrels waved around, like hard black eyes seeking a face to look into.
The old man had produced a cracked and crimpled photograph. He handed it to me, fingers trembling and slow as if he didn’t want to give it up. He aimed the lantern so the redheaded girl’s pretty face was bright in my palm.
“Come on, Mr. Ash.”
“Shut up,” Mr. Ash said, absently and without malice, as you would address a barking dog. “You seen this girl? You seen my daughter?”
“No, sir.”
“She hides it in this picture, but there’s a little gap in her front teeth, and she laughs deep like a man. You sure you ain’t seen her? Maybe in the next county?” He paused. “Or in Roanoke, with all the … the working girls?”
“No, sir, I’m sorry. How long has she been gone?”
“Three months this Friday,” he said. He snatched back the photograph and shoved it into his pocket without looking at it, as if it were a cash receipt.
“Mr. Ash, we’re gonna miss ’em.”
“No, we ain’t,” the old man said. “They got to drive around the spur and up the grade, while we cut across. We’ll beat ’em by ten minutes, easy.”
“If someone doesn’t warn ’em first,” said a new, rough voice, nearly in my ear. Its owner kneed me in the back, and I staggered.
After a moment’s thought, the old man gestured with his rifle. “Good thinking, Silas. You better come with us, Mister.”
“Why?” I asked. Silas seized my arm, as if to dig his fingers into my very bones. “Ow!” I said, less from the pain than from the anger that gouted from him. The Sight is the least developed of my gifts, but I can’t help thought-reading when someone takes serious hold of me. Out loud, I asked the question his touch was already answering: “What do y’all think you’re doing?”
“Hunting monsters,” the old man said.
As we scrambled in a straggly line toward the two-lane on the other side of the mountain, the old man in the lead was silent, but I harkened at the others whispering among themselves.
“Who they got this time?”
“I hear they got Polly, and Bert, the youngest Lunsford boy, and the Mainer twins.”
“I say that you’re a fool. Polly was on the porch swing when I went by there. It’s Lula, Polly’s sister, what got carried off.”
“Carried off by what?” I asked.
“The sheriff, of course. And his deputies, damn their eyes.”
“But why? Are they the monsters Mr. Ash meant?”
“Shut up,” said Silas, cuffing my ear. “You ask more questions than a girl.”
“All I know is, they won’t take no more of our neighbor younguns to the operating room, not if I got a say in it.”
“Hush, all of you,” said the old man. We were headed down again. His lanternlight picked up the cat’s-eyes of the reflectors along the curve of the two-lane below. We all fell silent, but between what I had heard and what I had felt through Silas’s grip on my arm, I had plenty of information to chew on, none of it pleasant.
For months, all over the county, young boys and girls from the families on the slopes and in the hollers had turned up missing, by day and by night, one or two or a half dozen at a time, hoes or fishing poles or berry baskets left where they dropped. Boys and girls of courting age were warned to stick close or stay in groups, but they paid about as much attention as courting boys and girls in all places and times, so the disappearances continued. Then the first ones came home. Weeks after the parents had gone from panic to grief, they would hear the dogs barking and come out on the porch to see, wonder of wonders, Vassar or Hazel walking up the lane, dazed and dreamy-like, in the clothes they went off in, always with the same story to tell: They had been snatched off the mountain by Sheriff Stiles or his deputies. The lawmen said they had a court order. They were driven alone or in carloads or truckloads to the state hospital—usually Staunton, sometimes Lynchburg, though a few had been taken as far as Marion, Petersburg, Williamsburg. There they were poked and prodded but treated right well, fed real good and given haircuts, so they said, and by the way, the girls all added, the doctor said my appendix had to come out, so that’s what this scar is, see? The doctor said soon it’ll be only a pale line across my belly, how about that? The boys had scars, too, ones less visible and more embarrassing, but soon enough they realized the equipment still worked just fine, and so some were inclined to shrug off their brief adventure, no stranger than some other things that you heard tell of in the hills, like red-eyed dogs that cross your path at night and crows that speak in the voices of men and farmers who drop from sight in the middle of a field into the Gone Forever. But the more young men and women got rounded up for the hospital, the madder the mountain folks got, and the better able to figure that appendicitis was not what the operations were meant to prevent. Then Ash Harrell’s daughter had not come back at all, so now Ash Harrell and his neighbors would make some law of their own.
“Here they come,” the old man said.
Across the cut, a pair of headlights swept around the last curve before ours. At nighttime in the deep mountains, oncoming cars give plenty of warning if you keep watching the next curve across the way. It sounded like a truck, and its brakes squealed as it hugged the curve. Someone was in a hurry to get down the mountain, now that it was dark.
Silas kept hold of my arm. His thoughts were all confused now, mostly from fear I judged, but his interest in the Harrell girl was not brotherly, and his favorite pie was peach.
Just below, the old man knelt on an outcrop and raised his rifle, while the thre
e others kept going, slid down the rocks onto the gravel shoulder and walked into the middle of the road, swinging their lanterns back and forth like the Brown Mountain spook lights.
The engine got louder.
Just as the sheriff’s truck rounded the curve, I dropped the hex that hid my true self. Within Silas’s grip, my upper arm changed from a young man’s to a young woman’s. He looked at me—now a foot shorter and a girl besides—then let go and jumped back with a gasp.
I turned and ran—not down into the road, but along the hillside in the same direction as the truck, which now blared its horn and veered around the men trying and failing to flag it down.
As I ran along the trackless hillside, I said to myself one of Mr. Hohman’s charms for surefootedness:
He is my head
I am his limb
Therefore walketh Jesus with me
Jesus-magic had never been my long suit, but what could it hurt?
Below and just behind me, the truck roared onto the far shoulder and nearly skeeted off the edge of the cliff, but the driver fought it back onto the asphalt past the highwaymen and sped up again, into the right-hand lane and catching up to me. Just as rifles fired behind me and the right rear tire blew, the truck passed directly below, and I took a deep breath and ran off the ledge, Wham! onto the roof.
“Hold!” I cried, and just in case that spell didn’t take, I seized the luggage rail tight in both hands as the truck squealed into the next curve, rear tire flapping. My body swung sideways, and my feet kicked air off the edge of the roof, but I held on, and before us now was a long, straight downslope. The driver had done a fine job so far to avoid a wreck, but now what? That tire was plumb gone, and the truck began to fishtail. The brakes smelled like a miner’s lamp. Did I know any arts that could stop an out-of-control truck? All I could think of was one to stop mad dogs, but as the truck began to speed up—toward a bad curve below, and a void beyond—I decided that would have to do. Without letting go of the rail, I pointed both index fingers at a spot halfway down the grade and yelled:
Dragon Book, The Page 53