by Ninie Hammon
The tub was actually too big to be comfortable for a person her size. It was too long. If she leaned back against the back of the tub, her feet didn’t reach the other end and she slid down into the water. But she’d figured a way around that when she was a kid, and she’d had to shoo away the bats and blow dust off memories to recall. Then she looked in the corner behind the tub and it was still there! After all these years, it was still there. As a small child, she’d used a little three-step plastic stool to reach the sink. When she got older, she’d set the feet of the plastic stool against the front end of the tub — then she could stretch out in the tub, lean against the back, put her feet on the stool and not drown.
She leaned back now, the rumble of water raising mountains of bubbles. The air smelled sweetly of lavender, or maybe violets. She wasn’t up on her flower aromas like perhaps she should have been. It probably said on the bottle, but she was too relaxed to lift up and look at the bottle. As she lay in the warm water, the tension began to ease out of her muscles and the result was a rubbery sense that if she tried to stand, her knees probably wouldn’t hold her upright.
Once the tub was full, she turned the water off and could hear the phone ringing again. Or still. If somebody was that determined to talk to her, it must be important. She began to consider getting out of the water when the ringing cut off abruptly. She settled back against the back of the tub. If it was all that important, they’d call back.
The main reason her mother’d had a shower installed in Charlie’s bathroom was the issue of hair washing in the big clawfoot tub. You could get your hair wet, soap it up and get it clean, but the only way to rinse it was in the water you were sitting in. Well, if you were desperate for clean water, you could stick your head under the cold water spigot and get a brain freeze or under the hot water spigot and blister your scalp. One or the other. Pick.
Tonight, she’d be satisfied with clean hair, even if she wasn’t able to get all the bubble bath out of it. And she’d best get to washing it soon, while she still could. Every speck of her remaining strength had melted into a puddle in the hot water and her exhaustion was palpable. She might have trouble getting out of the tub and making it to her bedroom.
Besides, the water was getting cold.
She rinsed her hair one more time, sinking down into the water and came back up spewing, then stood and grabbed the bath blanket off the rack beside the tub. It was not as soft as her own bath towels but she knew why. She could smell sunshine in the fabric, knew it’d been dried on the line in the backyard instead of in a dryer.
She dried off, and slipped into the pajamas and robe she’d grabbed out of her suitcase — which she had never unpacked.
Wiping the steam on the mirror off with the edge of the towel, she looked at her own reflection and quickly realized that wasn’t a good idea. The words “death on a cracker” came to mind. What showed on her face was testimony to the reality of all she’d seen and experienced today and she really didn’t want to be reminded.
Rigorously drying her hair with the towel — her hairstylist had warned against that. “You damage your hair when you rub your head with a towel like you’re trying to buff a shine on a cherry red Mustang. Blot it dry.”
Blot it. Not tonight. Charlie couldn’t sleep with wet hair, had never been able to stand that. She opened the bottom cabinet beneath the sink, felt around and found the “mini blow dryer.”
She leaned against the high side of the clawfoot tub, leaned her head over and began to dry the underside of her hair, shaking her head and running her fingers through the wet strands. Then she stood, shook her head and felt of her hair. Still damp. But good enough.
Stepping out into the hallway, she instantly regretted not getting her house shoes out of her suitcase along with her pajamas and robe. The hardwood floor felt cold on—
The telephone receiver in the hall was dangling down from the phone by its cord, hanging there about an inch from the floor. Swaying back and forth.
Sam was so surprised she didn’t know how to reply. Did Malachi … could he actually believe the Jabberwock was anything other than a passing event, a mystery that’d probably never be solved? A conundrum.
“No! Of course, I don’t think it’ll be here long.” She actually stammered out the words. “Why on earth would it—?”
“Have appeared in the first place? That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.”
“That nobody can answer. So why would you think that—?”
“I think it’s permanent.”
The words so totally knocked the air out of her lungs she had trouble formulating a sound and getting it out past her lips.
“Permanent?”
“Un huh. I don’t think it’s going away.”
“Why? It makes a whole lot more sense that some freak meteorological thing caused by that wacko, Looney Tune storm yesterday somehow caused … oh, I don’t know. I bet scientists are going to spend the next decade trying to figure it out. If they believe any of us when we tell them about it. And those kinds of things, storm things, they pass. Tornados don’t hang around day after day for a week. Much less … forever. Why would you—”
“I don’t think the Jabberwock has anything to do with yesterday’s storm.”
Now, there was a conversation stopper. Sam sputtered some sound, it wasn’t a ladylike one whatever it was, some aborted expletive.
“Why on earth not? What other explanation could there possibly be?”
“Does not believing the storm explanation require that I come up with an alternative?”
“Well, no, but … so you don’t have any idea what did cause it, you just know what didn’t — the storm?”
“Something like that.”
“I don’t understand …”
“Neither do I. Look, I don’t claim to know anything the rest of you don’t know. It was just, me and Pete talked about it and …”
“And …?”
“And doesn’t it bother you that nobody” — he made an all-inclusive gesture — “out there has noticed? People had places they were supposed to be.”
He ticked them off, rapid-fire: “Abner was supposed to be at work. Timmy Bessinger had a dentist appointment. Liam radioed the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Department to intercept the speeder and the speeder showed up but Liam didn’t. Grace was supposed to have dialysis, Pete had a chemotherapy appointment. Roberta was a no-show at her own birthday party and you know how big her family is. Abby was supposed to pick up her baby!”
He ran out of steam then and continued slowly. “Those are just the ones we know about. None of those people showed up where they were supposed to be … and nobody came looking for them. Why not?”
Of course Sam had thought about that, wondered about it. They all had. But they’d been too busy and — admit it — too thunderstruck by it all, or maybe still too affected by what the Jabberwock had done to each of them individually to do much conjecturing.
Sam made a tire-sliding turn onto Barber’s Mill Road where Charlie’s mother’s house sat at the base of Little Bear Mountain, and she had to focus all her attention on the road. And into that focused attention dropped an understanding her conscious mind was studiously ignoring. In truth, she though Malachi might be right. From the very beginning, she’d sensed something about the phenomenon … a power. Reality was, Sam Sheridan didn’t think the Jabberwock would go poof with a sparkle like a soap bubble and be gone. There was more to it than that. It would not be that easily beaten.
“When we get there,” Malachi said, “I want you to wait in the car until—”
“I’m not waiting in the car. Charlie—”
“If Abby’s here, she’s got a gun.”
“She wouldn’t shoot me. I’m the one who—”
“She would shoot anybody. You don’t really get this, Sam, and you need to. That woman is insane. She has reached the ragged edge of desperation and there’s no turning back, nothing she won’t do, nobody she won’t kill. No boundarie
s of any kind.”
“What makes you think she’ll listen to you rather than—”
“Listen? You think I’m going in there to reason with Abby?” He shook his head and focused his gaze back out the windshield. “I’m going in there to take her out.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Now that was exceedingly weird!
Charlie stood in the hallway, her bare feet on the cold hardwood, and stared at the receiver of the phone, swinging slowly back and forth. And for a moment a wave of fear washed over her, but then it retreated back out to sea.
She could have sworn she’d hung the receiver up when she’d almost called the rental car agency. But apparently she—
It was still swaying.
She’d been in the tub at least a half hour. Longer than that. Long enough for the water to get cold. Then dried her hair. So why was the receiver still moving if she’d dropped it before she even started running the bathwater?
And the phone had rung!
How could it have rung if it had been off the hook?
The wave of fear washed back up onto the shore.
It had rung! It had rung … hadn’t it?
She thought it had, but even at the time she hadn’t been sure and now she had no idea if she’d imagined it or …
Well, she had to have imagined it. Because off-the-hook phones didn’t—
Why was it still swaying, the receiver turning like that guy who hung himself in Mr. Fischer’s English class? Loopy. She was getting loopy. The guy didn’t hang himself in Mr. Fischer’s class. He’d hanged himself in the book Mr. Fischer’d made them read. She couldn’t remember anymore the name of it, but she clearly remembered that one image from it: a dead man, hanging at the end of a rope, his body slowly spinning, facing the different points on a compass — north, then east, then south, then west. She’d always wondered what’d kept him spinning.
But the rope hadn’t been an elastic extension phone line. And you could probably dangle the receiver on the end of one of those for three days and it’d keep twisting.
The phone had rung.
Maybe.
This was nuts. She cinched the robe ties tight around her waist, marched down the hall, picked up the receiver where it dangled and put it to her ear. The line was dead. She pecked on the “thingy” — she’d never known what that disconnection bar was called — a time or two. Still no dial tone. It sounded dead, just like the phones sounded when they’d tried today to call out of the county.
No, actually those phones had sounded unconnected or disconnected. This one had that hollow sound like the phone in the kitchen was off the hook, too.
That thought grabbed hold of her guts and yanked them as tight inside her belly as the rope tie on her robe on the outside. Her thundering heart became a herd of stampeding buffalo. She—
Stop it! Just stop it.
She was tired, exhausted, had earned more than a few fried synapses.
Replacing the receiver in its cradle, she wiped her hand off on her robe and headed toward the front of the house to peek in on Merrie before she collapsed in glorious catatonia in the back bedroom. It had a feather bed. The anticipation was delicious.
She felt something sticky on the doorknob of Merrie’s bedroom door and wiped her hand again on her robe, pushing the door into the darkness of the room, lit now only by the saber of light from the hallway. She crossed to Merrie’s bed and stood for a moment, looking at the lump of a kid under the blanket. Sometimes she was … what was it the Brits said? Gobsmacked. Yes, gobsmacked by how much she adored that child. She smiled, and as she turned back toward the lighted hallway, she glanced down at the front of her robe.
The smile drained off her face.
There was something smeared across her robe. Something black. But she knew that in good light the smear wouldn’t be black. She knew exactly what color it would be. Red. Blood red.
She pivoted back toward the bed, moving like she was encased in that clear stuff they found prehistoric bugs in — amber. She watched her hand glide through the air to the top edge of the blanket, saw her fingers grasp it and pull it down.
All the oxygen was instantly sucked out of the room.
Merrie wasn’t under the blanket on the top of the bed. The lump wasn’t a little girl. It was a pillow and a doll. A bloody doll.
A voice spoke out of the shadows, a nightmare voice full of pebbles.
“She ain’t there.”
Charlie whirled toward the sound, unable to breathe or think.
Then she watched in horrified amazement as the shape stepped … shambled out into the light. The figure was dressed in filthy, torn rags of clothing, a suit of scrubs from the Dollar General Store, but ripped, muddy and bloody. Her hair was a tangle with leaves and twigs. Looked like she’d been dragged through a mile of briars and brambles.
Her face was skeletal, and much as Charlie tried, she could not picture what Abby Clayton had looked like when she first saw her, fuzzy blonde hair, face still raw from very recent adolescent acne. But beautiful. Beautiful with hope and love and joy and excitement. That girl was a person life had smiled on.
This creature was none of those things. She was bleeding or had bled out of every orifice of her body. Small streams of blood, not gushing, but surely the accumulated blood loss …
Bloody tears streamed down her filthy cheeks. Her ears were bleeding, as was her nose, and the crotch of the scrub pants was a wet, black stain.
She’d suffered some kind of stroke or brain bleed or something because the left side of her face wasn’t lined up properly with the other side. She was clearly missing teeth, but maybe she had been before, too, and Charlie just hadn’t noticed. Her voice was the sound of chains dragged across a metal floor. Cold and ragged and fearful in every way. The strip of light that sliced into the room from the hallway lit the fire of rage on her face. Sparkled in her eyes.
The left side of her body didn’t appear to be affected by the stroke or whatever’d happened in her brain. She held the rifle firmly, finger on the trigger.
It took several gasps before Charlie had enough air to speak.
“Where’s Merrie? What have you done with my baby?”
“Ain’t ‘bout where she is. It’s ‘bout where she ain’t and she ain’t where she’s supposed to be.” Abby took another shuffling step farther into the light. “Just like I ain’t where I’m supposed to be — up Lexington with my boy.”
“What have you done with—?”
“Shut up!”
The words rode a spray of blood out the creature’s mouth.
“Ain’t for you to be talkin’. You listen. You brung that monster down on us. Ain’t no use denying it. I heard them whispering, the voices, saying the Jabberwock come to Nowhere County to play kiddie games with you and them others and have fun.”
“What on earth are you talking—?”
“I said for you to shut your filthy witch’s mouth!
Abby advanced another step.
“But you got yourself a sword, one of them ‘vorpal blades’ and you gonna use it on him. You gonna go looking for him in the woods behind that mirror thing where he hides. You gonna find him and kill him. Cut off his head — snicker snack — hold it up for everybody to see. Then everything’ll go back to the way it’s supposed to be and I can go get to my baby.”
“Where is my little girl?”
Charlie was glad to hear there was neither fear nor pleading in her voice. It was made of pure, cold steel and the power of it unsettled Abby just a bit.
“Don’t matter where she’s at.”
“Tell me what you did with my daughter.” Charlie advanced a step, with no firm plan of what she was going to do, though she was aware that her fingers had formed unconsciously into claws.
“Wouldn’t do that, I’s you. I done planned for that part, you jumping me to get the gun and me too weak to fight back. That’s why I done what I done, so you couldn’t stop me by takin’ my gun, so you’d have to do what I say.
You don’t and your little girl’s gonna die.”
Charlie started to take another step.
“I hid the key. Somewhere you’ll never find it. Even if you get my gun, even if you kill me, without that key, you can’t get that door open in time and yore little girl’s gonna suffocate.”
Charlie was so staggered by the words her mind cartwheeled, fired random thoughts with no meaningful connections.
“I put her in the kiln.”
Charlie screamed, shrieked, wailed … without making a sound because sound required air and she couldn’t breathe.
“Locked her up tight in there and hid the key. You best do what I tell you real quick, or she’s gonna die in there.”
Charlie’s mind was processing as fast as she could. Merrie was … in the kiln. Locked inside it.
“No, you couldn’t—”
“Could and did. My mama come here lotsa times when I’s a kid, watchin’ your mama make them pots and ashtrays and such. A cup that wouldn’t sit flat on the table was all Mama made, but she told me all about your mama’s art stuff. About the kiln and how it had to be airtight. How it was locked up, but your mama kept the key on a nail behind the door so she could get to it when she needed it. It was right there, when I felt around for it. Just like she said.”
“You put my baby in the kiln and closed the door?” The magnitude of the horror was staggering.
“Didn’t just close it. Locked it. She never made a peep. I come in the window, carried her out the back door and she never even wiggled.”
It was incredible that the woman before her was even able to stand. How had Abby carried Merrie — that child was a little chunk — and …? But how had Abby gotten here?
She’d climbed the mountain!
“Put her down real careful like on a piece of brand new carpet that was a layin’ on top of a stack of carpet rolls on the floor.”
Carpet. Her mother had carpeted her bedroom a couple of years ago, said the hardwood was too cold on her feet. Had she stored the leftover carpet in the kiln?