Nowhere USA: The Complete Series: A Psychological Thriller series (Nowhere, USA)

by Ninie Hammon

  “How’d you meet this guy?” Stuart asked as they picked their way through the weedy expanse of creek bank that bore no resemblance at all anymore to the well-kept lawn it had been only a couple of days ago. Jolene was struck anew by the impossibility of it all. How could a being … any being … How did the Jabberwock control time …

  She let it go.

  “I met him when we were on a shoot in Nashville. In the ghost-hunting world, word gets around. I’d heard about him and wanted to check him out. He’s a cobbler so I broke a buckle on a pair of sandals as an excuse to go to his shop.”

  She winced but not from the pain in her shoulder. “I’d have been up the creek if he’d been a great ghost hunter but a lousy cobbler because those shoes were expensive — Louboutin red sole ankle-wrap—” She stopped, could see that Stuart wasn’t tracking. “Well, your wife would definitely recognize the brand!”

  She wanted to yank the words back out of the air as soon as they left her lips. They hit Stuart like a blow to the belly and Jolene hurried on to cover her gaffe.

  “But he was excellent at both — fixed my shoes and found my ghost. Well, my sound man’s ghost.”

  Jolene often arranged for locals to work on her tech crew so she didn’t have to haul an army along with her to shoots all over the country. The man running sound was a Nashville native, a blond Asian — ah, the surprises of random genetic hookups. He had shown up late for an afternoon shoot because he’d been attending his grandmother’s funeral. As the crew sat around eating pizza on their dinner break, the young man told his grandmother’s story. The woman’d had more than a few missing nuts and bolts and the family knew she was a hoarder, but they’d been unprepared for a house stacked so full of junk it was only possible to walk through it down aisles between ceiling-high stacks of old newspapers, magazines and who knew what else.

  “His grandmother’d had a ring — a family treasure that her grandmother had sewn into the hem of her dress when the family’d fled from the approaching Japanese Army during the Sino-Japanese War a hundred years ago. The family tore the house apart — found a little tin box under a loose floorboard and the contents rattled so they were sure they’d hit pay dirt. Not. The box was filled with his grandmother’s old fingernail and toenail clippings.”

  “She kept—?”

  Jolene nodded.

  “I’d only just met Moses, but he’d seemed legit — by my definition, meaning he wasn’t a con. Crazy, maybe, but he genuinely believed he could talk to the dead. So I asked if he’d try to have a chat with the old hoarder.”

  “And did he?”

  Jolene nodded.

  “He said she was a charming nutcase, totally dithered, had rambled on about everything and nothing until she happened to mention that she was concerned about someone in the family breaking a tooth. Seems she had stuffed the ring down into three pounds of ground meat and froze it in the freezer.”

  Stuart was awed. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  “As a heart attack. Now, how do you explain away something like that? How could he possibly have known unless …? He’s the only person I ever met I believed really could communicate with ghosts.”

  Cotton and Moses had reached the house and Stuart nodded at them.

  “Let’s hope these dead people are the chatty sort.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  What the …?

  Duncan Norman suddenly threw away the pistol he’d had trained on Malachi, pitched it with all his strength into the parking lot and then turned and ran away toward the woods.

  Malachi was so surprised, he froze, then slowly collapsed back onto the side of the car and allowed relief to flood over him in a warm tide.

  He’d been mistaken about Duncan Norman. Malachi really hadn’t believed he’d be able to convince the man he hadn’t killed Hayley. He’d thought Duncan was clinging to his sanity by his fingernails and wouldn’t be able to focus on the evidence, the bloody handprint that could not possibly have been Malachi’s.

  Malachi had been wrong about that.

  It took him a few moments to gather himself, come down off the adrenaline high that he recognized so well from combat. When your life was in danger, when you’d selected fight from the fight-or-flight menu offered by your pituitary, the gland dumped adrenaline into your bloodstream. It sharpened your senses — you could see clearer, hear better. It also gave you tunnel vision, so you could focus on whatever was in front of you with more intensity. And the legendary extra strength that gave mothers the power to lift a car off their crushed child — that had saved Malachi’s bacon more than once.

  He’d have used it to cover the ground between him and Duncan in one leap, had already tensed for the move when Duncan …

  Threw the gun away.

  The man had finally come to his senses. Malachi shook his head. Having no children of his own, he couldn’t relate to the kind of agony it must be to lose one. The agony Charlie had felt when she thought Merrie was locked in an airless kiln. The kind Sam felt right now with Rusty lying unconscious on a bed in the clinic.

  And the agony that had driven a Pentecostal minister to get a gun — where had he come by a gun? — and plan to commit murder.

  Malachi gave him a little while, then crossed the parking lot and walked into the trees where Duncan had run. The stretch of woods wasn’t very wide. On the other side was the spectacular view you could see from the overlook, except the trees blocked it here unless you were standing just out beyond them on the rock ledge. The overlook area had been built on the perfect spot on the mountainside. Below it was a sheer cliff, as smooth and featureless as if it’d been cut with a butter knife, a drop of two hundred feet to the rocks in the Rolling Fork River. On both sides of the overlook cliff face, the mountainside was rugged, lumpy and bumpy with jutting rocks, scraggly bushes poking through cracks, kudzu vines reaching out tendril fingers, clawing for purchase, and piles of boulders at the base.

  He spotted Duncan as soon as he entered the woods, standing with his back to Malachi, staring out over Dragonroot Hollow.

  “This was Hayley’s favorite place in the world,” he said when he heard Malachi approaching. “She’d beg me to bring her here when she was a little girl, and came here on her own when she got her driver’s license.”

  He kept talking as Malachi came closer.

  “I didn’t know that until I read … I wouldn’t have intruded on my daughter’s privacy except … I found her diary hidden in her room, and I read it. She wrote there about coming here, about how peaceful she felt when she looked out over all that God had created.”

  Duncan glanced over his shoulder but didn’t turn, just kept talking softly. Malachi stepped closer to hear him, pushing a low-hanging tree limb out of the way.

  “That’s why I thought you …” Duncan took a breath and Malachi could tell he was fighting to keep his voice level. “In her diary, she wrote about what … had happened to her. That she had been … raped.”

  Hayley Norman hadn’t been raped. Obviously, she’d had a longstanding affair with Howie, with Sugar Bear. From what Toby’d said he overheard his father yell at her on the phone that afternoon — “I said not to call me here!” — her calls must have been a frequent occurrence.

  Malachi supposed the girl couldn’t face reality, so she’d just made something up.

  He came to stand beside Duncan, looked out over the vista. Duncan turned to him. “She described in her diary the man who … the man who attacked her. And the description matched … I thought it was you.”

  He swallowed, his mouth working to keep from crying.

  “I’m … sorry, Malachi.”

  He reached out his hand to shake and Malachi took it.

  “It’s okay, I—” Malachi began.

  Duncan’s face suddenly changed. Shamed contrition morphed in a split second into blinding hatred. Triumph blazed in his eyes. His handshake became an iron grip.

  Malachi understood then, but it was too late.

&nbs
p; With a mighty lunge, Duncan Norman flung himself off the edge of the cliff.

  And dragged Malachi Tackett over the edge with him.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Moses didn’t like this. Oh, no he did not, no, no, no he did not, not. Wanted no part of this, wanted to flee, hide, get as far away as he could. So he turned around in his tracks and took off running.

  Except he didn’t.

  Felt his legs pumping beneath him like he was a young man again — not a skeleton whose knees sounded like popcorn when he knelt down — running fast and free.

  But he kept walking.

  He was beside the big man whose name was Stuart … something, Moses couldn’t remember, never had been good with names even before everything started to go. He looked familiar somehow, like Moses ought to recognize him. An actor. An athlete.

  A butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker.

  Maybe his face was on some product — breakfast cereal or jockey shorts.

  With every step, the light dimmed. Maybe it really did dim, but Moses didn’t think so. The light dimmed only in his own consciousness. With every step, he got closer and closer to the cold and dark and—

  No, not cold — hot, fiery hot. Rage.

  No, cold, frigid and frozen. The heat was behind the cold, hiding there so you didn’t even know it was there until it leapt out at you.

  Crazy, that was crazy. Nothing was going to leap out at him. Couldn’t let his imagination run away with him. Couldn’t get dragged out onto the pier in the storm, with the angry waves battering it. The pier was breaking apart, had been for a long time. The boards, the planking, the railing, coming undone. If he were standing on it when … he would wash out to sea with all the shattered pieces.

  The house was a shack full of shadows, and more than shadows, dark presences. Oh, this was bad, very bad. The darkness was everywhere around but it was formless and with no shape maybe it was harmless.

  Not harmless, definitely not harmless.

  It was so cold here, so cold.

  Hot, back behind it, all the fires of hell raged.

  She was sitting on the floor of the shack. He spotted her the moment he stepped inside. He could barely make out the shapes of furniture around her and she was sitting on a chair or a couch maybe. No, a bed. Where she was, she was on a bed, or thought she was.

  She was crying. Heartbroken.

  So cold. So hot. Shadows getting darker and darker and darker.

  Moses had never encountered anything like this, not ever before. And he wondered if the older you got, the more you could see. That it had been like this all along, with shapes and presences, and emotions and shadows all around, but he just couldn’t see them before. And now he could.

  No. Nothing had ever been like this.

  It was pulsing. A big, black, hateful thing of absolute darkness was throbbing like a heartbeat behind the cold and light. It was angry. Just a tiny whiff of the acrid smell of rage wafted off it, like smelling a single rose in a vase, behind a closed door in a house, when you walked by outside on the sidewalk.

  But it burned his nose, just the little whiff.

  Never had he dreamed there could be such anger in one place, in one being.

  It wasn’t the girl. She was heartbroken, not angry. And she was on the outside, beyond where the shadows lay with their evil raging. She was in the dim light of the nether world.

  A pretty girl with blonde hair that hung down around her face. She was pregnant. Oh, my indeed. Her whole belly sat like a medicine ball in her lap and she had her hands clasped around it, holding it, rocking back and forth and singing through her tears.

  “Puff the Magic Dragon lived by the sea …”

  She was singing to the baby.

  She became aware of him then and looked up.

  This girl was a see-through. A translucent being with form and shape and color, but not substantial. You could see the dirty floor of the filthy shack through her. But between her and the floor was the insubstantial see-through reality of the bed where she sat.

  “She’s dead,” the girl said to him. Her lips moved but the words didn’t come at him through his ears but directly into his head. That part had been disconcerting, the first time that happened. He didn’t realize until then how much voice mattered to speech. A man’s voice, a woman’s soft voice, the high giggle of a little child. When you only heard words in your head there was no voice. Some of the inflections of speech were there, but muted. No, not muted. They were flattened out, like a wrinkled shirt that had been poorly ironed.

  “Who’s dead?” he asked. He didn’t even bother to speak the words out loud because she couldn’t hear his voice any more than he could hear hers.

  “My baby. It’s a girl. I know it is. Robbie’s mama says if you carry a baby high like I am, it’s always a girl. Low babies is boys. It’s a girl.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Marilee. Marilee Winona Potter. Marilee just ‘cause it’s such a pretty name, and Winona for my Aunt Winona. Robbie said he wanted a boy and I told him I did, too, but I really didn’t. I wanted a girl.” She stopped, seemed to realize where she was or what was happening.

  “She’s not moving anymore. She’s dead in there. I can feel it. A dead cold lump in my belly.”

  “It’s cold where you are?”

  She didn’t answer that question either.

  “When Selma first felt the queerness of it, me and Amelia went running into her room because she was moaning and carrying on. It was in there, taking her. And when we come in, it took us, too.”

  “What took you?”

  “The Jabberwock. But wasn’t no mirror, no mirage. It was just there. Dark and cold and I wanted to run away. It’s hard to run when you’re pregnant but I woulda … only I froze up and I couldn’t, didn’t go to the Dollar Store parking lot.” She patted her belly. “Least she didn’t have to stop breathing. I did. We did. Just stopped. Wasn’t like we was choking or nothing, just we didn’t need to breathe no more so we didn’t. Little Marilee never did get to breathe, though. She died ‘thout ever drawing a single breath of air.”

  She started to cry again and Moses moved closer to her. But not too close, though. He could feel a pull, a force, a power like one of those retractor beams in a science fiction movie that emanated from the darkness behind the ephemeral light where the girl was and he feared that if he stepped too close, it would take him, too, as it had taken Becky Sue.

  The closer he got to her, the more he saw images around her, from her. Like she was too translucent to keep the world of her experiences inside, the barrier of who she was had become so thin her essence filtered out into the space around her.

  Moses looked at the scenes.

  Playing in the mud of a creek. Giggling. A freckle-faced boy picks up something brown and wiggling, a salamander, and tries to put it in her hair …

  The backseat of a car. The windows fogged. He touches her and she gasps, never knew anything felt like …

  A mirror, a mirage across a road. People standing, staring at it.

  “Go ahead, cross it!” one teenage boy taunts another.

  “I ain’t ending up in the Middle of Nowhere puking my guts up.”

  A kitchen table. Three women, one older with stringy gray hair, one a pimply-faced teenager. “Where are they?” the teenager cries out. “Where’s Aaron? Is he still up in Lexington? Why don’t he come home?”

  “Can’t,” the old woman says. “Makes sense, don’t you think? If can’t nobody leave, can’t nobody come in neither.”

  A crowd of people in a room with a stage, an auditorium. The rumble of voices, a man in a uniform speaks.

  “I don’t have to tell anybody in this room that something is happening here to all of us that has changed everything in our lives. We’ve all been dealing with it individually, in our own ways, but I believe it’s time for us to figure out how we, all of us, as nowhere people need to respond as a group, doing together what none of us can do individually.
>
  A woman named Charlie speaks. Someone says her mother used to make pottery.

  “As we stay here, we vanish. It’s happening right now. The Jabberwock consumes us, we cease to exist. You can’t just sit back and make do with a life that ends at the county line. You better get up off your backside and start trying to figure out how to fight something that’s going to eat you while you sit there.”

  The night sky, black velvet with stars. But the stars don’t blink. They’re all the same size, not some smaller and some bigger — uniform as lights on a Christmas tree. How can stars not blink?

  A pretty teenager, a black girl in a smock that has smiley faces on it. She’s behind a counter. “It was rabid, almost tore poor E.J.’s leg off. And he can’t get the shots. The Jabberwock …”

  Moses realized too late that he’d gotten too close to the pregnant girl on the floor. The magnetic pull of the darkness beyond her had grabbed hold and was pulling him relentlessly forward.

  Oh, God, no.

  What was there in the darkness, that was the darkness? It was the single most awful thing Moses had ever encountered, more full of hate and anger and vengeance, all blackness and boiling loathing. It was stronger than any evil Moses had ever encountered in the spirit world — the hate and anger and pain of many who had become one. It drew him relentlessly forward. It wanted him, it would have him. Not to take him cold and breathless to a translucent reality peopled with shadows. It would take him into the great maw of evil incarnate and it would devour his soul.

  He whimpered. Wanted to plead, beg for his life, but he couldn’t speak. And there was no pity there to seek. The being was … more than one, but all one. Behind the many were the one, but it was part of them, too, fueled them, drew strength from them. Sucked energy from the souls it devoured and grew. Bigger and bigger.