by Ninie Hammon
“You wasn’t listenin’, was you Mommy. You never listen to me anymore.” And she unexpectedly burst into tears.
Charlie dropped to her knees and gathered the crying child into her arms, awash in guilt and sorrow.
“I’m sorry, baby, Mommy’s sorry. I never, ever intended to ignore you. I love you, precious. Please forgive Mommy. Please.”
The little girl pulled back out of her embrace, tears streaming down her face and a smile on her lips.
“I lube you, too, Mommy. So, can I?”
“Can you what?”
“Can I have both puppies? The one that bited me and the one wiff socks. Pleeeease.”
Charlie deftly sidestepped the question by telling the little girl she would need to see and inspect both the puppies in question before she could render a decision, then handed Merrie the bag of clean clothes she’d selected for Sam — who’d been sleeping in the clothes she was wearing — and told her to take it out to the car.
Charlie’s back was turned when Merrie opened the front door and cried, “Toby! You comed to play wiff me!”
She turned around slowly and saw Sarah Throckmorton standing with Toby beside the open door or her ancient Chevrolet parked behind Charlie’s mother Honda Legend in Sam’s driveway.
The look on Sarah’s face told Charlie something was very, very wrong.
Chapter Two
“So okay, the SPAM’s good,” Sam said grudgingly.
Malachi did a fist pump.
He really hadn’t expected to be able to entice Sam into eating anything, but two bites of SPAM, hey, that was something. On a roll, he tried to distract her so maybe she wouldn’t realize she was eating and reflex would take over.
“I’ve been sitting with our new friend and it’s clear to me he was at least half a bubble off plumb long before he hit the Jabberwock.”
The new friend was the old man who’d shown up in the bus shelter last night, clearly transported there by the Jabberwock but displaying none of the Jabberwock-ride symptoms other passengers on that train had suffered.
Well, except his brains were scrambled. And stayed scrambled. He made no sense when he talked, didn’t seem to understand or responded inappropriately to what was said to him, and had a strange, creepy vacant look in his eyes.
He was a bent old man with wispy white hair, wearing a leather apron beneath a raincoat. His gnarled fingers told Malachi he’d likely spent his life working with his hands — an assumption borne out by the business card in his wallet: “Moses Weiss, Craftsman Cobbler, shoe repairs, insoles, shoe laces.”
Beneath that: “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Lao Tzu, 4th Century A.D.
And beneath that: “Every journey seems like a thousand miles if your feet hurt.” Moses Weiss, 1945.
Malachi liked the card, would likely have liked the man in whose wallet he’d found it — along with a Tennessee driver’s license identifying him as Moses Habakuk Weiss, 73 — if the man had been lucid. They’d all assumed he would “come back to himself” in a little while, like all the other Jabberwock victims. But he didn’t. Three hours after they’d found him in the parking lot, Malachi had led him upstairs and put him to bed on the couch in E.J.s apartment. He’d followed along as obediently as a child.
And like a child … he had wet himself.
Yep, sure did.
As he’d cleaned the old man up, Malachi’d tried very hard to be grateful he’d done it standing in the doorway and not after Malachi had gotten him settled on the couch. He had put Mr. Weiss in a pair of E.J.’s old jeans. Clearly the dude’s circuits were seriously fried.
“What is he saying?”
“Everything. Nothing. I’ve been listening to him ever since he woke up this morning — at five o’clock, by the way. No, not listening. Hearing. There’s a difference. He just talks. Random. Babbles. Nonsense.”
Malachi hadn’t had a chance to tell the others about Mr. Weiss’s little accident last night. He’d fed him some breakfast this morning — supplies were low and choices were limited so Malachi’d chosen a can of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup. He heated it and set a bowl of it in front of the man. He didn’t appear to notice. But when Malachi spooned the soup into his mouth, he chewed and swallowed. Same with a glass of water — he drank.
Malachi had taken that as a good sign and decided to take him into the bathroom and just see if he’d … He had done as instructed. But Malachi was pretty sure he wouldn’t do it on his own. It felt a little like house training a puppy — Malachi would have to remember to “take him out” every couple of hours, but it sure beat cleaning up a mess.
Malachi’d brought Mr. Weiss downstairs and parked him in a chair in the waiting room. He’d been content to follow, sit where he was placed. Malachi hoped this morning’s adventures in potty training had been a harbinger of better times ahead. Life was already icky enough without having to care for an incontinent stranger.
“I’m hoping that several of us — you, me, Charlie, Pete … whoever — could get together and talk to him all at the same time, try to focus him so he’ll make sense. Find out how he got here.”
“He couldn’t possibly have been here since before J-Day … could he?”
Malachi shrugged. “I would think somebody would have noticed a dithered Away-From-Here who’s not potty trained.”
“Not potty trained?”
Malachi tried to blow it off. “A little accident. No biggie.” He quickly deflected the conversation. “And if he wasn’t trapped here like the rest of us, he’s from” — Malachi made a vague gesture that indicated everything out beyond the walls of the room — “out there. So how’d he wind up with a ticket on the Jabberwock to the Middle of Nowhere?”
They’d asked all those questions last night, of course. Had batted around one hypothesis after another until they were all exhausted. Malachi had watched Sam struggle to stay awake and focused and made an executive decision. Rest. Sleep. They’d come at it with fresh minds in the morning.
Well, it was morning. And Malachi’s fresh mind was no closer to an understanding of what was going on than his tired mind had been last night.
After he’d fed Mr. Weiss his breakfast, one of the elders of Duncan Norman’s church arrived. When Pete got back from delivering the news about Duncan to his family last night, he’d said that members of Norman’s congregation were forming up in teams to go out with lanterns and flashlights to search for the pastor’s body — on the rocks below the cliff face or in the river. Elder McEntire said they’d found nothing, so it must have washed downstream. They’d keep looking, of course, but … the Rolling Fork River wound in and out of Nower and Beaufort counties. What if the body had washed into Beaufort County … what did that mean? Would the body …? Then Malachi’d stopped himself. He just didn’t have enough space in this mind to consider the ramifications of a thing like that. Right now, he had to concentrate on the living instead of the dead.
During the pause in the conversation, Malachi could hear the old man’s voice from the waiting room. He was either hard of hearing — certainly a possibility — or just talked loud.
“You missed a spot shaving.” A pause. “Collect payment upfront. If they don’t pay — hold their wing-tips hostage until they do.” Another pause. “You have shaving cream under your ear.” A third pause, it had the cadence and rhythm of a conversation, like listening to someone talking on the phone where you only hear half of what’s being said. “Smile once in a while, it won’t break your face, and don’t break your tooth on that hamburger meat. There’s a ring in it.”
Nonsense.
The old man’s voice grew softer then, but still clear. “She’s dead. My baby girl’s dead.”
Like Malachi’s sister, Esther Ruth. Dead.
He grabbed hold of his emotions and wrenched his thought processes back away from that abyss. But not before the whole of it kicked him in the belly with a hiking boot.
Somebody had shot that poor little girl — an
d Essie was still a little girl — a small child in a woman’s body. Everyone knew Essie would never grow up, but Malachi had never considered the possibility that she’d be robbed of the opportunity to grow older.
Who would shoot an innocent like Essie? What for?
Of course, he knew what for. Payback. Revenge. His mother had done something bad to somebody — and there were dozens, hundreds of those somebodies out there — and they’d taken out their impotent rage on poor little Essie.
Impotent rage. He knew that feeling, had felt it well up from the pit of his soul at so many things his mother had done over the years. It horrified him how easy it was to identify with the monster who’d shot Essie. Viola Tackett had earned the rage and hatred of just about everybody in Nowhere County.
But Essie hadn’t. Why shoot poor simple-minded Essie?
“I’m sorry,” Sam said, her husky voice quiet, and he felt the light touch of her hand on his arm. He looked into her hazel eyes, saw the faint shadow of a dimple in her right cheek. “You loved your sister a lot, didn’t you?”
He discovered he couldn’t speak over the lump in his throat. He merely nodded. Then he found his voice. “She was a single, pure thing. Just good … only good. When you looked into her face, you saw no guile in her. She was the only … perfect thing my mother ever did.”
“She sang to her.” Sam’s face was swimming in the tears in his eyes. “When Essie was … when she was dying, your mother sang to her. It was some nonsense song, not even a song, really—”
“Ahhh-nah, gahma-gahma-gahma.” Malachi’s soft words were tear-clotted. “So-so-wissy-wheeee.”
“Yes, that’s it. Your mother sang that to Essie. Those were the last words she ever heard.”
How was it that Sam knew just the right thing, the only thing to say that would comfort Malachi right now? Sam, whose son lay too quiet on the bed, might be dying as well. Still, she’d had the heart and compassion to reach out to Malachi.
Sam Sheridan was a remarkable woman.
Charlie suddenly appeared in the doorway of Rusty’s room. Her face was pale, her eyes wide.
Merrie, who was with her, announced, “Dat old man in the waiting room …” She wrinkled up her nose. “He pooped his pants.”
Goody.
“What is it?” Sam asked Charlie, reading her distress.
“I just talked to Sarah Throckmorton.” She turned to Malachi. “I think your mother knows about Howie. Well, something about Howie. Viola showed up at Sarah’s house yesterday. She and Toby hid in the woods, so Viola didn’t see Toby there. But this morning, Sarah noticed Toby’s baseball cap was missing. She said there was only one place it could have gone. Sarah thinks Viola took it with her when she left.”
Chapter Three
Was it a tomb or a vault? Or perhaps an ossuary?
There were interesting distinctions, of course, Fish thought, occupying his mind with the distraction of figuring out the proper noun to use for the place he was going, so that perhaps he could manage to pull himself back at the last minute and not go there at all.
Not likely.
Still.
It was surprising to Fish how clear and sharp his mind had become after he stopped drowning his synapses in alcohol every day. Sharp was the proper word, of course. It was sharp, as in razor sharp — so sharp, getting near it was likely to result in a nasty cut.
Fish really should not get anywhere near his own mind, but of course, it was not a thing he could avoid.
Serrated edges, maybe, too. His thinking was so vivid, so pointed, so clear, that it felt like his every thought sliced into him whenever he allowed himself to think.
And since he had sobered up — last drink fifty-six hours and twenty-five minutes ago, if he were counting, of course, and he absolutely, one hundred percent was counting — he had not yet figured out a way to direct his outrageously clear mind away from the thoughts, images and memories he had spent more than a decade obscuring with booze.
Holmes Fischer’s clear mind knew exactly what he had done. It knew how he had done it, and was likely to offer up for his viewing enjoyment images from those times just to prove that he did remember.
He crossed the street in front of the Methodist church, where he had spent the night, not sleeping but spent the night, and headed north on Main Street.
At every step, he tried to stop himself from taking the next one, but he moved recently onward, propelled by a need that was far stronger than his pitiful ability to hold it in check. The walk to the cemetery was quite a hike on foot, but it was a beautiful spring morning. Exactly the same as every other morning had been for more than two weeks now. Cloudless blue sky, warm but not hot. Just perfect. Too perfect. He couldn’t be the only person in Nowhere County who was yearning now for bad weather. How about a thunderstorm? Or not even that much variation — overcast would be nice. Or not even that. Just cloudy. Clouds. Okay, one cloud. One measly cloud in the sky. How he longed to see that. But the Jabberwock controlled the weather now … and the time … and access and egress into and out of the county. The rest of the mere mortals here had no say in the matter.
Don’t do it.
He pleaded with himself, begged himself, would have gotten down on his knees in front of himself, though that was, of course, physiologically impossible, but he’d have done it if it would have dissuaded him.
Please, don’t do it.
But, of course, he was going to do it. Every step he took confirmed it. All the arguing to the contrary, Fish was going to do what he shouldn’t, couldn’t, mustn’t do. If he did. If he took even one sip …
He had not been sober in such a long time, he hadn’t realized how too-clear and too-crisp reality unmuted by booze was, hadn’t remembered what it was like to have ordered thoughts, purpose and direction unhindered by the obsession, the constant need to find that next drink.
The moment he had opened his eyes this morning, he knew he was lost.
He had only dozed, of course. Even though he was exhausted — must have walked … what? Ten miles, maybe fifteen — never leaving the church basement, of course. Around and around and around he had paced after his conversation with Charlie McClintock. After he had ripped the scab off his most grievous wound, after he had allowed the pus and putrefaction to flow out of it into the world, he had felt utterly empty, and strangely at peace.
For a little while.
For ten minutes after she left. And then the awful memories had raced down the field after him. He ran, as hard as he could. Not literally, but in his mind, as his body circumlocuted the basement for hour after hour. But in the end they had tackled him, brought him down, held him crushed beneath them by the sheer weight of their bulk.
And he had confronted yet again — sober this time — his encounter with the Jabberwock. The death of Jamie Forrester. And Martha Whittiker. And Dylan Shaw.
He was, after all, quite the murderer. Serial killer. Yeah, that’s what Holmes Fischer was. A serial killer.
Sometime before dawn, he’d realized he couldn’t do it. It was not the surrender of a wrestler, who has struggled and fought and given all his strength to the effort to defeat his opponent. It was a simple concession. An acknowledgement of the nature of the universe.
Holmes Fischer was a drunk. Right now, he was what the alcoholics called a dry drunk. A sober drunk. But he was a drunk nonetheless. He simply could not remain sober. Could not remain sober and remain sane, that is. He either had to blunt, obscure, blur the images that ate up his soul … or he had to kill himself.
Long before the sun rose up above the horizon somewhere out there on the flat, he came to accept that it was suicide or booze. One or the other. Those were the only choices his life afforded him.
And, of course, Holmes Fischer made the choice of a coward. Of course. Why, he would expect no less of himself. He was a sniveling weakling who caused the deaths of innocents, but who didn’t have the guts, the cajones, to take his own life.
Morning light had not yet b
egun to filter through the trees at the top of the mountains when he set out for the Mason family crypt. Or vault. Or tomb.
One of those words.
It was one of the many places the county’s token homeless person had laid his head in the past ten years, as he wandered the highways and byways of the county in a state of near falling-down inebriation all the time. And it was the only place where he’d left a stash. Not much of one. A single bottle of whiskey, but it was mostly full.
He had poured all the booze in his possession down the sink Sunday night, when he staggered back to the church basement after Viola Tackett had hanged an innocent teenager for the crime she knew Fish had committed. He had dumped it all, had gotten rid of every drop. Then he had suffered the ravages of the DTs, lived through it unassisted — which was something of a physical accomplishment, or so he had read. Unmedicated DTs killed a lot of people.
But it hadn’t killed Fish. He had survived. He had slowly become again the human being he had been pre-booze. Well, a reasonable facsimile. He had lived in that reality. Had even shared the horror of that reality with Charlie McClintock. But after he did that … he found he just flat out couldn’t live the rest of his life with the clarity of what he had done, like a bright light shining onto a dark stage where he writhed in its white-hot glare, naked and alone, sobriety laid his soul bare.
And he made a decision to leave sobriety behind, and crawl back into the bottle where he had lived in something like comfortable oblivion for all the years after the monster ripped off Jamie Forrester’s face and sliced open Fish’s chest. He hadn’t just given in to a compulsion. He had made a rational decision, at least he had done that much. He had decided to live what was hopefully a blessedly short time on this earth in a drunken haze.
So he’d set out for his stash.
He had made a little “nest” in the alcove behind the stone structure that held the Mason family’s … what had John called it? His jewels.
It was a mighty stone building that dominated the otherwise ordinary cemetery where the dead of Persimmon Ridge had been interred since the Nower family crossed the Cumberland Gap, whenever that was. Set off to the side in the back beneath the spreading limbs of a huge cherry tree, Jonathan Mason had built a stone structure fit for a king, into which he put the bodies of his wife and two little girls.