by Ninie Hammon
He looked like he’d aged ten years … and smelled like he’d spent the whole decade in the clothes he was currently wearing. He might even have been aware he had a … hygiene problem, because he mentioned that he’d washed all his clothes and hung them on the line so he’d have something clean to wear. Unfortunately for Charlie’s olfactory nerves, the clothing was still too wet to change into.
He vacillated between being tense and jittery, his eyes darting from side to side, paranoid that something — likely the Jabberwock, but they hadn’t yet gotten too deep into that part of the story — would come for him. Other times, he broke out sobbing for what appeared to be no reason, at least nothing Charlie could tie to the subjects they we’re talking about. His emotions didn’t fit the circumstances, and his answers to her questions about the Jabberwock were evasive. Clearly, he didn’t want to talk about it, but he’d been awake and aware enough this morning to try to order his life, clean up his act, and that intention appeared to be clearing his thinking.
Charlie had done a lot of the talking — to give him time to grab hold of himself after his crying jag. She’d told him about the conversation she, Sam and Malachi had had with Thelma Jackson. How Thelma had told them the Witch of Gideon’s daughter said her mother had called the “thing” that had made the town disappear “the Jabberwock.”
“She said that was its name,” Charlie said. “That it told her that was its name.”
Fish had dropped his gaze into his lap when she said the word and wouldn’t look at her.
“So how did you know its name on J-Day?”
Fish wouldn’t raise his eyes.
“We all thought you just pulled the verse from the poem out of your cluttered literary mind. But that’s not it, is it, Fish?”
He shook his head slowly.
Suddenly, Charlie felt a flash of anger at the dirty old man seated beside her. She didn’t have time to play word games here. People were dying.
“Come on, spill it.” Her voice had an edge to it now. “You have to tell me whatever you know about the Jabberwock. What do you mean ‘you didn’t know it could kill people?’ What are you talking about?” As an afterthought, she tossed in: “Tell me what you know or you’ll have more innocent blood on your hands.”
That did the trick, built a fire under the man. He looked up, grabbed her gaze with his bloodshot eyes and said, “I was in Fearsome Hollow. I … encountered the thing. But I thought at the time it was a fantasy, a hallucination.” He averted his eyes momentarily. “That I had fried my mind with too many hallucinogenic drugs so I’d conjured it up in my head.”
He stopped.
“I clung to that explanation … that self-delusion for years. Because to believe the thing was real was to … I couldn’t believe what I had seen was reality. If I had, I … would have lost my mind.”
“So, instead, you tried to erase what you’d seen by soaking it in booze.”
“I went back to my house, drove my car, actually got in my car and drove away like the world was a normal place and not a country peopled with monsters with sharp teeth. I went into my kitchen, dug out a bottle of whiskey I’d gotten at the Kentucky Education Association Christmas party in Louisville the year before, and … I think I drank the whole bottle that night.” He paused. “I don’t believe I have drawn a completely sober breath since that day.”
“What did you see in Fearsome Hollow?”
He drew a breath and his voice was soft. “I saw it, the Jabberwock. Only the Jabberwock is not it. The Jabberwock is them. It’s plural. Though perhaps that’s not entirely accurate. They function as one entity, so it’s a matter of grammatical dispute.”
They.
Duh. Of course. When she and Malachi and the Tungates went to Fearsome Hollow looking for Abner that day, there had been more than one thing swirling around the car in the mist. When she and Sam and Malachi were first-graders lost in the mist, they heard voice-s, more than one.
“What did it … they … the Jabberwock do?”
“It killed Jamie Forrester. Or not. Maybe not.”
“Who is Jamie Forrester?”
“A young man I picked up hitchhiking on Interstate 75. He said he was bumming his way across the country and when he saw the sign that said, ‘Kingdom Come Parkway,’ he had to see where that led.”
A smile tried to flitter across Fish’s lips but couldn’t make it.
“He was a positively delightful young man — an aspiring Shakespearean actor who loved Keats and Shelley and Burns. A kindred spirit. A soulmate. The boy was terribly disappointed when I told him that the Kingdom Come Parkway was a road from nowhere, to nowhere, through nowhere. So I offered to take him to the closest thing we had to Kingdom Come — a genuine ghost town. I shared with him my cache of goodies.” He lifted an eyebrow. “Mild-mannered English teacher by day, psyched out druggie by night.”
“So the two of you—?”
“I took him to Gideon. He dropped acid. But before I had a chance to join him in psychedelic lunacy, the real monsters showed up.”
Chapter Twenty
Driving long distances were the worst. Hard to distract yourself when you were in a car alone. The radio didn’t work and even when it did, Moses could never find anything but country music stations, and crying-in-your-beer songs about trains, dead dogs and unfaithful lovers set Moses’s teeth on edge.
Only four and a half, maybe five hours. Two hundred seventy-five miles. That’s what he’d figured out pouring over the road atlas, his nose so close to the print on the page he could smell where one of those little barbecue packets burst in his glove box and sprayed the contents as thoroughly as a skunk.
The miles sped past outside his window. The memories came. The groove was deep.
Ghosts lied. Of course they did. People lied and ghosts were people. Dead people but people all the same. It was Moses’s theory that dying made good people better and bad people worse. It didn’t hold true every time, but was accurate more often than not.
And when a person died angry, or afraid, or jealous, or in a murderous rage … well, strong emotions like that lingered. Ghosts were no more likely to be benign creatures, devoid of malicious intent, than people were. Moses had run into all kinds since the day more than five decades ago when he briefly visited the land of the dead, when he died, drowned. Then a fireman beat on his back, knocked the water out of his lungs, pounded on his chest until he cracked a rib, but somehow got Moses breathing again. Maybe Moses had left that other world too fast, left the door open a crack and others came through it after him.
He never knew the reason, could only speculate, but after that day, the dead were almost as much a part of his life as the living. They showed up when it suited them, stayed as long as they wanted, and then vanished — literally popped out of existence like a soap bubble — for no reason Moses could understand. Sometimes right in the middle of a sentence.
In the beginning … well, how many people could see ghosts? Of course, it was entertaining, he made dumb mistakes, told people, got laughed at, had bad encounters. The novelty wore off pretty quickly. Still they were there. Day in, day out. And their presence slowly eroded his soul. Bit by bit, pieces of who he was … came loose. He envisioned it like the pilings of a pier in a storm, the fury of the waves beating against it until it begins to fragment, can’t withstand the constant onslaught. It breaks apart, and boards, planking, railing … it all washes out to sea. The dead people and their horror stories, their unspent emotions, their often evil intent — it chewed away at the man who was Moses Weiss and he had no defense against it.
Nobody but Flossie ever knew the whole extent of it. And after a while, she had to put up a barrier or she’d have gone mad, too. She had to keep him always at arm’s length, citing her growing list of mantras like a litany to the Virgin Mary … Say two Hail Marys and two Our Father’s …
Brick by brick, she built a wall between them that protected her, that she could hide behind. And he was forever on the other side.<
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They never made love again after the first year of their marriage. And Moses had remained faithful even then. He didn’t blame her, he understood, she should have abandoned him, and in her own way she did, just left her body behind when she bailed out.
Occasionally, his encounters with the dead were somehow beneficial, to them or to the people they’d left behind. It had been that way with Jolene Rutherford and he was sure that was why she’d called him. but it didn’t work out that way very often. In fact, the older he got … maybe he just wasn’t as resilient as he’d once been. But now, it seemed that every encounter hit a nerve, like cold water on a sensitive tooth. And he was worn out, worn down by it. So very, very tired of formless visages only he could see, dragging him into their dramas and diminishing him by the contact.
He felt … thin.
He suspected that it wouldn’t last much longer — that he wouldn’t last much longer. And maybe that’s one reason he had been willing to drop his life and go running off into the mountains of eastern Kentucky to help an old friend — okay, an old acquaintance, because that’s really all she was. Maybe that’s why he hadn’t just called her, asked what her problem was — perhaps he could have helped her with “wise counsel” over the phone.
Of course, that was horse hockey. He’d never helped anybody over the phone, and as soon as he’d heard the desperation in her voice, he’d felt a sense of inevitability settle over him. It would be what it would be. This was a thing he had to do. The next thing. Just do the next thing, that was all anybody could do. And maybe it would be the last thing. Everybody had a last thing and maybe this was his. Maybe this was the last such encounter, mission of his life, one he would perform with his last breath.
And that was just fine with Moses Habakuk Weiss. He was bone weary and the prospect of “going out with a bang” had a certain appeal. He’d take that and a twenty and give you back nineteen dollars, ninety-five cents in change.
Chapter Twenty-One
Holmes Fischer and Jamie Forrester sit side by side on the top step of the porch of an abandoned building as the sun sinks down behind Buzzard Knob and its shadow stretches out to claim Fearsome Hollow.
As Jamie rolls two fat joints from the baggie full of weed Fish carries in his glove box, Fish answers Jamie’s question about the huge tree in the middle of the street. Fish tells him it’s called the Carthage Oak, but he doesn’t know where the name came from.
They inhale deeply, enjoying the feel of smoke filling their lungs and the world around them slowly filling with cotton-soft “mellow.”
The game of dueling soliloquies begins halfway through the joint.
“But soft, what light through yonder window breaks,” Jamie intones, staring glassy-eyed into the trees on the mountains rising up around the town. The boy’s words ring true, real, not like some fool making fun of the beauty of the language.
“It is the East, and Juliet is the sun,” Fish says, and Jamie looks at him and grins in delight, then finishes the line.
“Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon who is already sick and pale with grief.”
They move from Romeo and Juliet to Othello.
“I loved Ophelia,” Fish begins.
“Forty thousand brothers could not with all their quantity of love make up my sum,” Jamie continues.
As the game continues, they finish the joints and Fish pulls out his cache of wonder pills. He had first taken psychedelic drugs when he was in college in the 60’s, carried his desire for them and his supply of them into two previous teaching positions before he settled in sleepy Nower County, Kentucky.
Jamie pretends that he is an old hand at dropping acid, but Fish can see it’s all a bluff, that the boy is about to take his first trip on the Good Ship Lollipop.
Jamie places a pill on his tongue and dry-swallows, then moves on from Othello to Hamlet. Not the cerebral to-be-or-not-to-be Hamlet, but the man in emotional torment.
“O that this too, too solid flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew …”
“Or that the Everlasting had not fixed his canon against self-slaughter,” Fish continues, unaware at the time that the words would come back to haunt him, to stay his hand when he, like Hamlet, comes to see “how weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!”
Fish wants to be sure the boy’s ride is a smooth one, so he waits. As soon as he sees the boy’s eyes slip out of focus, can tell that what Jamie is looking at does not exist in the natural world around him, Fish prepares to join him. That’s when it occurs to Fish that the most right and proper images for their journey come more from Lewis Carroll than Shakespeare.
He stands and calls out in a loud voice the opening line from “Jabberwocky,” the nonsense poem from Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass fantasy.
“T’was brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe. All mimsy were the borogoves and the more raths outgrabe.”
As soon as the words leave his mouth, he feels a chill, as if a breeze off a glacier has lifted the hair off the back of his neck.
He waits for the boy to join in, but it is clear from the vacant look on his face that Jamie Forrester has left the building.
“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!” Fish continues for him. “The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!”
The air thrums violently in Fish’s ears. Pressure like dropping in an elevator. The sensation is so violent that he loses his place, forgets the next few lines. His tongue stumbles over the words and he takes up at the next line he remembers.
“… the Jabberwock, with eyes of flame came whiffling through the tulgey wood and burbled as it came.”
He is suddenly struck with the sense that some terror, some unnamable horror is lurking out in the shadows just beyond the edges of his vision. And he is only high. Has indulged in nothing more potent than a little weed. Still the sensation is so intense, so visceral, he sucks in a gasp and looks around.
Nothing.
Burping out a self-conscious laugh, Fish lifts his hand to drop the pill on his tongue and proclaims in a firm voice:
“One, two! One, two! And through and through, the vorpal blade went snicker-snack. He left it dead, and with its head, he went galumphing back.”
Piercing, wailing shrieks from voices all around him suddenly rip into his ears, the ferocious wave of sound literally dropping him to his knees. How — the acid pill falls out of his suddenly limp fingers to the wooden porch and he watches it roll away — he didn’t take it. How—?
Then he lifts his eyes and monsters with eyes of flame come rushing at him out of the surrounding trees.
Inhuman faces distorted by unhinged jaws with impossibly large curved teeth as sharp as razors.
Snarling, snapping teeth. Distorted bodies, deformed … flesh dangling off skeletons in great tatters.
Herky-jerky movements, bloated bellies, surging forward on limbs with bones as thin and fragile as a baby bird’s wings.
One.
Five.
A dozen of them.
No, more than that.
Each unique, different in its horror from the next. All in a fury beyond the capacity of human anger.
But they are human.
Were human.
Voices shrieking with such an agony of pain and despair and rage that Fish reaches up to feel blood dripping from his ears.
He staggers to his feet to run. Where? There is no escape from monsters from Hell. And they are all around him.
Jamie stands oblivious to the horror, a lopsided grin on his face.
The first of the monsters leaps up onto the porch, reaches out a witch’s hand that ends in claws. The creature rakes them across Jamie’s face, opening up gashes to the bone, the white of forehead and cheekbones visible before the gush of blood.
Jamie shrieks.
Fish is too stoned to move effectively, can’t coordinate his limbs, staggers as a creature leaps toward him. It’s smaller than the one that rippe
d Jamie’s face off, but when it strikes Fish in the chest, it knocks him off balance. He reaches out, arms flailing and strikes Jamie in the back of the head. The young man staggers forward and falls head-first down the steps.
The creature is in Fish’s face, gaping maw open to rip out his jugular.
Fish was breathing in great heaving gasps. Charlie was grateful that his words exploded out of his throat in a strangled whisper Merrie could not hear, tucked away on the other side of the room inside her hymnal castle, singing happily some nonsense song about a witch, a dragon and a doughnut.
She was looking at Merrie when Fish spoke in a normal voice again, not a whisper, though the voice was hoarse.
“It was real.” All emotion was seined out of the words. “What I saw was not a drug-induced hallucination. It — they screamed pieces of the poem. ‘Jabberwock. Jabberwock. Jabberwock,’ the words came from all of them in different voices. The thing, the one, the smaller one that … I could smell its breath like a rotted corpse.”
Fish reached up with trembling fingers and began to unbutton his shirt, when he was halfway down, he pulled it open, like Superman displaying the S of his Superman suit on his chest.
Fish wasn’t wearing a Superman suit. What he revealed was a bony chest, thin and hairless, with four thick white scars that started low on his right side and swept across his chest and onto his shoulder.”
Charlie couldn’t help gasping.
Fish slumped back against the wall then, buttoning his shirt.
“I don’t know why I didn’t die. I thought I had, thought I was dead and had gone to hell. Then I opened my eyes and I was lying on the porch of that building on my back in a puddle of blood, my chest ripped open. And when I got to my knees, I saw Jamie lying in the street below.”