“Yes. Like the salt,” she said. “And the chamomile and St. John’s wort.”
And then Ghost sat up again and pointed at Winnie-the-Pooh, where Deliverance had set the book down on the table beside the bed.
“How about we read ‘In Which Pooh Goes Visiting and Gets into a Tight Place’?” he asked. “There ain’t too much rain in that one, is there?”
“Maybe you best get some sleep. It’s almost midnight.”
He shook his head no. “I ain’t sleepy.”
“I didn’t ask if you were, now did I? And don’t say ‘ain’t.’” She scowled at him, but picked the book back up off the table anyway. “It’s bad grammar. I ain’t having people thinking my grandbaby’s no better educated than some ignorant hillbilly.”
“But you say ain’t all the time, Dee. You just said it.”
“When did I say it?”
“Just now.”
“Well, I’m old,” she said. “It’s too late for me,” and she opened the book to Chapter Two and began to read, but Deliverance listened, too, to the wind blowing wild through the trees, the rain on the roof, the thunder rolling like angel voices across the valley.
“‘Well, Edward Bear, known to all his friends as Winnie-the-Pooh, or Pooh for short, was walking through the forest one day,’” she read, and far away, off towards the creek and the place where the sandstone bluffs got steep on their way up to the bald crest of Lazarus Mountain, there was another sound. The one she’d been waiting for all night long, the reason she’d drawn hex signs on all the doors with a piece of chalk. She didn’t have to ask him to know Ghost had heard it, too, the wary flicker in his pale eyes all she needed to tell her that he had, and so she kept reading about Pooh gone to see Rabbit, and tried to remember if the shotgun on the big table across the room was loaded.
Sixty years since the first time Deliverance saw the pile of stones by Lame Rabbit Creek; 1913 and she was barely eight years old, the same year her mother married a tall, red-bearded blacksmith from Tennessee who made horseshoes and axe heads and lightning rods. Deliverance would go down to the gurgling, snake-winding creek with her mother and together they would pick watercress and dandelion greens and look for sassafras trees growing along the banks. Sometimes they would sit very still and quiet in the bright patches where the sun found its way through the sheltering oak and sycamore branches overhead, dangle their bare feet in the cold water, and wait for deer or raccoons to come down to the creek for a drink. Sometimes they saw otters or mink, and once, a bobcat that sat and stared back at them warily from a tangled hawthorn thicket.
Her mother showed her fossil sea shells embedded in the mossy rock walls of the creek, proof of Noah’s flood, taught her the difference between the harmless water snakes and cottonmouth moccasins. And “This here creek runs all the way down to the sea,” she would say, as if maybe Deliverance had forgotten since the last time. “All the way to the Pee Dee River and the South Carolina marshes and finally out to the wide Atlantic Ocean.”
But on the late September day they found the stones it wasn’t sunny, and her mother hadn’t said much of anything, one of her silent, melancholy moods, and Deliverance kept running on ahead alone, threading her way expertly through the ferns and pricking creeper vines. The two of them strayed farther up the creek than they’d ever gone before, wandering past a wide, beaver-dammed pool and then the creek bed made a sharp bend and disappeared into a dense wall of tall, dead trees. Twisted, rotting trunks stripped of bark, stark branches naked except for the clustered, infesting growths of mistletoe and green-brown fungi. The trees seemed to have grown too close together, to lean towards one another, intertwining and blotting out the cloudy sky.
“Livvy, stop!” her mother shouted, but she’d already gone past the first of the dead trees, stood among them looking back out at her mother.
“Come on back now, baby,” her mother said, whispered urgently, and she motioned to the girl. “We shouldn’t be here. This is…” and she hesitated, looking up at the ugly, ancient trees, the birch and hickory corpses standing guard like a column of wooden soldiers. “This is a bad place,” she said, sounding frightened, and Deliverance couldn’t remember her mother ever having been afraid of the woods before. Cautious, because there were things that could hurt them if they weren’t careful where they put their feet or what they touched, but never frightened.
“No, I want to see,” she said, and turned and ran deeper into the stand of dead trees.
Later, Deliverance clearly remembered the sound of her mother calling after her, the crunchy rustle of her mother’s feet running through fallen leaves, but she could never recall exactly why she’d disobeyed, why she’d turned and run away laughing. Even then, some small part of her understood what her mother was saying, could feel the sick and spiteful energy rising from the trees like heat from a crackling fire. Sometimes, she would think there had been a voice, another child’s sweet, inviting voice, calling her to come and play. And other times, it would seem as though there might have been an unseen hand pushing or pulling at her, driving or dragging her on as the trunks of the trees closed in tight around her.
“Deliverance!” her mother cried out, sounding at least a hundred miles away.
Towards the end, there was hardly enough room left to squeeze between the trees, and she couldn’t help but touch their raw bones, that malevolent wood slick with the things that lived off decay. Her arms and hands and face, her dress, smeared with the corrupt and stinking juices that leaked from everything she touched. Then it was over and she stood alone in a small clearing on the bank of Lame Rabbit Creek, and the pile of stones was waiting for her there. The stand of dead trees entirely surrounded the clearing, encircling it in a protective shroud. The creek wound down the middle, dividing it neatly in half.
The cairn was nearly as tall as Deliverance, each and every charcoal-grey stone so smooth, so evenly shaped, round and flat as a pan of cornbread, dark as the cloud-bruised sky overhead. There were glinting, crystal flecks of mica and quartz in them, and no moss or lichens growing anywhere on the stones, as though someone came here every day and scrubbed them clean.
She held her hand out just a few inches above the topmost stone and saw that there was something carved there, circles held within circles, wheels within wheels like what the prophet Ezekiel saw come down to him from Heaven. And a voice that wasn’t a voice murmured words she didn’t hear, but felt through the tips of her outstretched fingers; the kindest, most beautiful voice she’d ever imagined and somehow it knew her name.
“No!” her mother shouted. “Don’t you touch it!”
Deliverance looked back at her, but all she could see was a pale, terrified face, her mother’s face framed by a gap in the trees much too narrow for an adult to ever squeeze through.
“Come back to me, Livvy. Come back exactly the way you got in there and don’t touch anything.”
“It won’t hurt me, Mama. It already promised it won’t hurt me. It’s just lonesome,” but her mother was shaking her head, straining desperately to reach her through the narrow gap in the dead trees.
“Don’t be afraid,” Deliverance said, and turned back to the cairn again, the honey and summer sunlight voice seeping up from it, and in the last second before she touched the intricately carved surface of the stone, she might have seen something rising from the rippling creek. Something vast and glistening, with a crown of eyes that blazed like the coals in her stepfather’s furnace, eyes like red-hot iron. And then her hand hurt, and there was only the sound of her mother screaming before there was nothing at all.
Somewhere in the short space between Pooh getting wedged in Rabbit’s front door and Christopher Robin reading the bear a Sustaining Book, Ghost drifted away, sleep not nearly as far off as he’d thought, the rhythm of the rain and his grandmother’s voice to lull him reluctantly down. But he only fought a little, blinked himself awake once or twice to the storybook rise and fall of Deliverance’s words that sent him right back to the soft,
indefinite places dividing wakefulness from dreams. Not far to fall, to settle slow, like a yellow-gold leaf to the sandy, pebble-littered bottom of a stream.
“No, the Indians,” she said, offering up the answer to a question he didn’t remember asking, his grandmother but in this dream her hair wasn’t grey and the splotches on the backs of her hands were gone; her skin as smooth as his mother’s was before she got sick and died, the mother he remembers mostly when he’s asleep, and sometimes he thinks she’s only a dream, the kind that were never true and never will be, and his real mother is Deliverance, after all.
“The Cherokee people who lived here before us,” his grandmother said. “They put the stones there.”
Ghost was sitting on a chair in a small room that smelled too much like dying, the brittle winter scent like peppermint tea and stinging red centipedes, that smell, and men and women sat or stood around a bed. Only candlelight, and he thought the child lying on the bed might be where the death smell was coming from, the girl with raven hair and wildflowers strewn about on her pillow. One of the women leaned down and wiped the sweat from her forehead with a damp cloth, and one of the men began praying quietly to himself. Log cabin walls, one small window with a pane of cloudy thick glass and outside the night so full of stars that Ghost thought the sky must have exploded.
“She’s so hot,” one of the women said, the one who’d wiped the little girl’s forehead. “I swear, I think she’s gonna burn up alive.”
Another woman was sitting on the edge of the bed holding a small, cobalt-blue jar, an ointment or salve that she was rubbing into the skin of the little girl’s right hand. The hand was swollen and purple and looked snake bit. He’d seen a beagle that was snake bit once, and that was the way its paw looked.
“But there were other things here before the Indians,” his grandmother said, the young woman standing beside him. She pointed to the dying girl on the bed. “I opened my eyes that night, and there was this white-haired boy child watching me from that very chair you’re sitting in. I thought he was an angel. I thought he was the Angel of Death come to take me away with him.”
“I didn’t know,” he whispered, afraid the girl would open her eyes and look at him and see an angel instead of a boy named Ghost. “I didn’t know what was under the rocks.”
“Nobody’s blaming you,” his grandmother said. “This ain’t your fault. This ain’t nobody’s fault.”
And then Ghost looked at the window again and saw what was looking in, watching them, and he started to scream, opened his mouth wide so the sound rushing up from his belly wouldn’t tear him apart trying to find its way out. But the sickroom had already dissolved, like sugar in scalding coffee, melting so only the taste remains, and he was wet and sailing through the storm-lashed night on the back of a great black bird.
“Don’t you fall,” the bird cawed, a crow or an eagle or maybe even an owl, all of those or nothing he’d ever seen before, and Ghost dug his fingers deeply into its feathered shoulders. Its wings rose and fell, rose and fell, and Ghost looked down at the world so small and wet below them.
“You be careful back there,” the bird said. “I should think poor old Rabbit is about flooded out by this time.”
Lightning and thunder and below them Lazarus Mountain and Big Henry Mountain and all the others flinched and cringed at the terrible commotion from above. Ghost knew they would hide from the violent sky, if there were anywhere for them to go, any sanctuary for a mountain, and then he saw the things marching single file up the narrow dirt road that led to his grandmother’s house. Dancing things with torches, and some of them had long, sharp sticks that they jabbed at the sky and each other.
Deliverance put her thin arms around his waist, and he wanted to ask her how she got way up here on the bird with him when she wasn’t there just a second ago, why she had to get old again, wanted to ask a lot of questions, but she said, “Hold on, Ghost child. Hold on tight as you can.” So that was what he did. And the great bird folded its wings and swept lower so that Ghost could see the faces of the loping, trotting, prancing things, their dog-snarls and vicious, blazing eyes.
“The rocks didn’t hurt me,” he said to his grandmother. “They didn’t burn me when I touched them.”
“You got magic about you,” she said. “A fierce magic and sometimes it keeps you safe.”
One of the dancing things stopped dancing, stood in the mud and the muddy water rushing about its splayed hind feet, and it pointed a crooked finger up at the bird and Ghost and the old woman flying above it through the rain.
“You gotta go back now, Ghost,” his grandmother said. “You gotta wake up,” but he didn’t want to. Thought if he could dream all this maybe he could also dream himself back into the clearing, back to the day before when he went walking in the woods alone, splashed up Lame Rabbit Creek and found those strange, dead trees and the pile of stones in the clearing. Back to the moment before he lifted the top stone off and heard the whistling deep beneath his feet, the whispering, eager voices that wanted in his head but couldn’t find their way. And then he wouldn’t have to do or see any of this, and the storm wouldn’t come looking for them, or the long-legged, dancing things, and he’d never even have this dream.
“Sorry, but it don’t work that way,” his grandmother said, sounding like she wished it did, sounding tired and afraid and old, and then the wind turned her into dust and fallen leaves and she blew away.
“Wake up, Ghost,” the bird screeched, spreading its dark wings almost as wide as the stormy Appalachian night. “Wake up right this minute or you’ll fall, and that’s what they’ve wanted all along,” and then one of the things crouched in the muddy road below them hurled its sharpened stick, a bewitched and tainted spear to shatter the sky itself and Ghost tumbled through the mad cacophony of thunder and gunpowder, time and breaking glass.
Deliverance sat in the dark in her rocking chair a few feet from the front door of the little house. Oak rocker that was her mother’s before her, and the big shotgun that was her husband’s across her lap. The Winchester 12-gauge he used for hunting squirrels and possums, fat tom turkeys and coons, but she figured it’d work just fine on whatever had been scratching at the door for the last hour or so. Outside, the wind was a bold and fleshless demon, battering the world with cold, invisible fists. Perdition come crawling out from under a rock, spilled from the prison that had held it since the continent seethed with buffalo, and white men were only a distant nightmare for shamans to keep to themselves.
“Don’t you think I don’t know you,” she said, talking to the other side of the door, talking to keep herself alert, just to keep herself company. But the storm made it hard to hear herself, so Deliverance raised her voice. “I know you! I know what you are!” she shouted. “I know who you are and what you’ve come here after!”
And she couldn’t be sure if what she heard next was laughter, mocking laughter for a presumptuous old woman who thought she could slay dragons with birdshot, or if it was just a fancy new trick of the wind. One or the other and it really didn’t matter which; something to make her blink first, to get the best of her and then it would all be over in a heartbeat. She concentrated on the words and symbols drawn on the door instead, Bible verses and darker phrases, chalk and the paste she’d made from arrowroot and angelica and chicken blood.
“Oh, I know you. Yes, sir. I remember you. I got this scar right here on my hand so I won’t never forget.”
She held up her right hand, held it palm out and never mind the thick pine door or the charms scrawled there, she knew that the thing on the other side wouldn’t have any trouble at all seeing the crooked pink-white scar cutting her life line in half, dividing soul line and heart line. That scar she’d carried with her sixty long years and it still looked so fresh, so raw, she might have gotten it a few months ago; might only have grabbed the handle of a hot skillet or burned herself trying to light the water heater.
The taunting, snickering sound again, then, but much l
ouder than before. It’s laughing at me, she though. You ain’t fooling nobody but yourself, old woman. Deliverance put her hand back down and swallowed, a rasping, sore-throat swallow because the spit in her mouth had dried up; she took a deep breath and slipped her index finger around the trigger of the shotgun.
You ain’t fooling nobody at all.
There was a flash of lightning, the stormy, mountain night stripped straight down to broad daylight, and for the stingiest part of a second she could see it standing out there in the wind, glaring in at her through one of the windows. Brief glimpse of shaggy, stooped shoulders and spindle arms, a horsey-long face and black wolf-lips curled into a sneer or a hateful grin, snaggled teeth, and then Deliverance shut her eyes. Squeezed them shut tight and counted, one, two, three, four, waiting for the thunder and when she opened them again the night had washed mercifully back over the hollow, and there was nothing out there but the rain pelting hard against the windowpanes.
You didn’t see anything out there but what you were afraid you’d see. You didn’t see anything at all.
But then came the immediate and scraping sound of claws on the door to contradict her, and the knob began to turn, teasing, slow game of clockwise and counterclockwise motion, and she raised the shotgun, set the brass butt plate against her shoulder and aimed the barrel at the door.
“Come on ahead then, you old bastard. But you ain’t getting him, not this night or the next,” she said, trying hard not to sound afraid, trying to sound like she believed a single word of it herself. Just a little more pressure on the trigger and the Winchester would tear the night to smoky shreds.
“No, Dee,” Ghost said. “That’s not the way it ends,” speaking very softly, calm and velvet-edged words from his lips held close to her left ear. A warm pool of light from the oil lantern he carried, and she hadn’t even heard him get out of bed, the storm raging too loud, all her attention focused on the door.
Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) Page 30