by Ninie Hammon
Malachi picked up the envelope and sat down. As she pulled out of the parking space, he opened it and idly fingered through the contents. Copies of birth and death certificates, of “chits” for merchandise sold at the store in Boonesborough before the Revolutionary War, family tree charts, the list of names from the Bible Thelma found in Shakertown, copies of ledger entries, letters like the one where someone had set down the memories of the trapper Jeb Pollock, who went looking for a crying child in the woods and found “a beastie twenty feet tall, teeth sharp as knives,” or Aloushous Hardy, the minister who claimed the devil “his own self came to carry me away to hell. Its teeth were daggers and its eyes were full of lost souls.”
When she turned on Pebble Bottom Road and headed toward Byrne Lane and Zebulon Pike, she glanced at Malachi’s face and realized he wasn’t really looking at any of the pages on his lap.
His mind was somewhere else entirely. She couldn’t fit it into her head what it must be like to find out you have a son … and, oh, by the way, the boy might die before you ever have a chance to have a conversation with him.
Sam sat silent in the back seat. Charlie didn’t speak either. All of them were as imprisoned by their own thoughts as the county was by the sinister mirage on the county line.
Merrie.
Stuart!
Stuart had been here. No, was still here, at least in some “here” that approximated Nowhere County somewhere in the universe. He’d come looking for her. And she would bask in the warmth of that, not let the cold of other realities chill her. If she ever saw him again … when she saw him again, there would be time and space for all the rest of it. Not now. Right now, Charlie concentrated on the truth as she knew it to be. Sometime this morning, Stuart had written a message to Merrie on the chalkboard in the waiting room of the clinic. He was here right now, searching for her.
And if Moses Weiss was to be believed, he would be in Fearsome Hollow today, too. High noon. Fighting the Jabberwock to free his wife and little girl.
She tried to allow that reality, like the heat from a single red coal in a fireplace, to warm her and keep at bay the terror. And the agony of leaving Merrie.
She suddenly realized there were tears running down her cheeks. She reached up and wiped them away. Malachi hadn’t noticed. His head was bent to the papers in his lap but there was a thousand-yard stare in his eyes. It didn’t surprise her that when she glanced in the rearview mirror, she saw that Sam’s cheeks were wet, too. When she rounded the final curve into Fearsome Hollow, she looked fearfully up into the trees. The last time she had been here, when she and Malachi had come with the Tungate brothers to look for Abner, she’d spotted puffs of white, like mini clouds, clustered in the trees on the mountainsides around them.
Now the Tungates were as “gone” as Abner, as gone as an uncounted number of other Nowhere People.
The bright blue sky shone above the mountaintops. There was no mist clinging to the trees today. It was here, though, somewhere. Waiting for them.
Pulling to a stop on the right side of the huge Carthage Oak, she killed the engine and the three of them sat still and silent.
Then Malachi opened his door, and they all wordlessly got out of the car and stood together in front of the tree, in the shade of its massive canopy of leaves. On the other side was a huge hole that’d been filled by rocks, but on the front side the tree’s gnarled roots spread out into the street.
They looked around them at the empty buildings that should have collapsed half a century ago but hadn’t. It was quiet. Preternaturally quiet. No birds sang in the trees, no cicadas buzzed in the bushes. It was utterly still.
She found herself instinctively moving closer to the others. Malachi had taken Sam’s arm, stood beside her, his head on a swivel, looking all around them. But there was nothing to see.
Or hear. Except there was.
She could hear the silence. It wasn’t hollow-sounding, empty — the quiet of one of the gigantic cathedrals in Europe, where the walls and ceiling contained the quiet and the silence echoed in the hollow void, big and vacant.
This silence didn’t feel empty. It was full, swollen silence. Silence stretched so tight over sound that it was bulging out on all the sides, about to explode.
The bulging silence … if you put your ear up to it, you could hear the sounds on the other side. Voices. Whispering. The whispers were as dry and fragile and brittle as chaff blowing across a threshing room floor. As sand blowing across ancient stone.
Whispers. And … crying.
Sam put her hands over her ears and the three exchanged terrified looks. They hadn’t been here even a minute, and already …
“We’re here,” Malachi called out, looking around. “We came. To play with you.”
“Kiddie games,” Sam called, her husky voice an octave deeper than usual. Charlie could hear the tremor in it. “What games do you want to play — hide and seek?”
As soon as the words left her mouth, there was a sound like static — the one they’d heard inside the Jabberwock. And there were sparks in the air, a shower of sparks like from a welding torch. Sam’s whole body was suddenly outlined in the glittering light, Fourth of July sparklers, and her face instantly went blank, expressionless. Except for her eyes. Her eyes were seeing “something” and clearly it wasn’t a reality Charlie could see.
“Sam …?” Charlie said.
Sam stood rigid for a moment, her eyes moving frantically, and then she clamped both hands over her mouth and cried out through them in a terror-filled voice. “Indians! The Indians are coming.”
Cotton Jackson pulled Stuart’s rented Lexus up on the left side, as close as he could get to the behemoth trunk of the massive Carthage Oak in Gideon. The gnarled old tree stretched up more than a hundred feet into the sky, with a circumference Cotton would guess was at least twenty feet. When they had last come to Fearsome Hollow, they’d been in Jolene’s van and she’d backed up next to the tree, facing the street … and a good thing, too, because Cotton had been driving when they left. He’d been so frantic to get away from the storm, the shadows, the shrieking and the gunfire that he’d have plowed smack into anything in his path.
This time he parked so it’d be easy to load up the trunk of the Lexus. If they found anything to load, that is.
Jolene got out of the car and came to stand beside him, looking up at the mammoth tree. She’d refused to wear the sling he’d made for her, just got him to put on a tight bandage, pointing out “I might need this arm.”
She might indeed.
Going around to the car trunk, he retrieved from it the second of the two picks he’d purchased at Home Depot, along with the tire iron and accompanying mallet. He rejoined Jolene, who had gone around to the back side of the tree and was now on her knees in front of the sealed opening of the huge hole, the hole Rose Topple had told him was so large children had once played inside it. The bottom of the opening was a couple of feet off the ground, where roots the size of fire hoses snaked out away from the trunk. The top of the opening was about five feet from the bottom, stretching out in an oval maybe ten feet wide. You could easily have fit a chest freezer through that opening. Depending on the depth of the hole, the contents of two duffle bags of bones certainly wouldn’t fill it.
If the bones were still where the Jabberwock had instructed Lily Topple to put them a century ago.
The little girl had jammed the opening full of creek rocks after she placed the bones inside, filled it completely, top to bottom. Cotton had always assumed — as he was sure everyone else did — that the entire hole was full of rocks, that they’d been used to seal the hole for some purpose related to the health of the tree. He didn’t lay claim to vast knowledge about trees, but his neighbor’d had a big tree with a hole in it and an arborist had instructed him to fill the hole — to keep critters from burrowing farther into the tree, causing more damage. Not with concrete, though. Once it set up, it wouldn’t “give” as the tree moved in growth. The recommenced fill w
as spray insulation foam. But most people just filled holes in their trees, if they filled them at all, with rocks.
Cotton was sure nobody’d ever given any thought to what had been jammed into the hole in the big tree in a ghost town. If you dug back through property tax records, he would bet the land all around Gideon, and the buildings, still belonged to the Monroe Addington Coal Company. And the struggling coal company had had bigger fish to fry in the past century than curiosity about rocks in a tree.
Cotton put on the pair of gloves he’d purchased, and handed another pair to Jolene. As she put them on, Cotton looked around, straining to see … what?
“You feel it, too, huh?” Jolene said. His eyes snapped back to her. She reached up and felt her short-cropped brown hair. “Is my hair …?” It was standing out in a halo around her head.
“When I was in grade school a little boy rubbed a balloon back and forth on the top of my head, but the static electricity wasn’t this strong.”
If it was, indeed, something as benign as static electricity.
Cotton had felt it the instant he stepped out of the car. A kind of tingling, buzzing sensation, but he had been studiously ignoring it, hoping he was imagining it.
“Do you hear …?” Jolene started. “I don’t know what it is, but it sounds like—”
“Static,” he finished for her.
“Yeah, like when you can’t find a station — what’s that?”
“What?”
“That … I don’t know what—”
She pointed to something like a spark in the air on the other side of the tree. One spark, then another. Then the air in front of the tree was filled with sparks, like somebody was welding a piece of metal there. Showers of sparks rained down out of … nothing at all.
“The static’s not just … static,” she said. “There are voices—”
“Whispers.”
“Can you hear what they’re saying?”
He shook his head and they both looked around fearfully. Waited.
Nothing else happened. Oh, maybe the static got a little louder, the showering sparks thicker, but no other weird phenomena showed itself. And in the world in which Cotton Jackson now lived, only “mild” impossibility was a win.
“We need to get busy.” He bent and jabbed the pointed end of the pick between two of the big rocks and began to try to pry them apart. Jolene helped out with the tire iron. It took considerable muscle to pry the rock free from the space it had occupied for a century undisturbed, and Cotton was beginning to think it would take days to finally dig them all out. But the first one was the hardest, jammed in tight by the pressure of the others around it. Once it was free, the other rocks were easier.
He pried out rock after rock, and Jolene piled them up in a stack. He lost track of time, just jammed the pick between rocks, wiggled and pried them loose, used the crowbar, then back to the pick, pulled small rocks free, then bigger ones …
Suddenly, he pulled a rock free and there was no other rock behind it. Just … black emptiness.
“Guess this means the entire hole isn’t filled with rocks.” He felt his arms pebble with gooseflesh.
He kept digging and prying while Jolene went back to the car trunk and got the flashlight. He tossed a big rock aside and leaned back on his haunches. Jolene handed him the flashlight wordlessly. He flipped the switch and he and Jolene leaned forward together to peer through the opening — into a darkness illuminated for the first time in more than a century.
Sweeping the beam back and forth, he saw nothing but the back side of the hole in the tree, nothing—
There! Bones. A pile of bones. A big pile of bones.
Jolene managed not to cry out but her hand went to her mouth.
The two sat still, breathless, then Cotton put the flashlight on the ground and went back to work.
His attention and focus narrowed to widening the hole, concentrating on the next rock, and the next, handing them out to Jolene and digging out the next one. And the next. He no longer needed the pick to pry them apart, could wiggle each free with his bare hands. He hadn’t removed all the rocks, but had opened up a large hole in the stone wall of them, when he had to stand. His knees were killing him, and they protested with loud pops and snaps when he extended them.
Jolene remained on her knees.
“Hand me a sack,” she said. “We don’t have to move all these rocks. This hole’s big enough for me to crawl through. Just hold the flashlight.”
The wall of rocks was several feet thick. But beyond them was, indeed, a chamber. A burial chamber, full of bones.
“Are you sure you want to … to crawl in there?”
“I’m sure I absolutely, one hundred percent do not want to crawl in there. But it’ll be quicker that way.” She looked at the cascading sparks in front of the tree and he followed her gaze. The waterfall of sparks was huge now. “I think we are in a hurry. A really big hurry.”
Chapter Twenty
Sam blinked. Gideon and the tree, Malachi, Charlie and the car … everything vanished. No, just blinked out for a moment with a sparkling light so bright it blinded her, before an entirely different reality blinked back on. It was a little like changing the channel on the television. She had been expecting any second that the Jabberwock with claws and razor teeth would appear and rip the three of them to pieces, had been so afraid, terrified!
Not anymore. She wasn’t frightened now, she was angry. She was sitting on a rock, could feel the cold on her butt, and she was looking out on a sunshiny day through somebody else’s eyes.
It’s not fair.
Grace Biddle sits with her back to the other children and she’s glad they can’t see her face because she is crying and she doesn’t want to give Hope the satisfaction of seeing her cry.
Mrs. Campbell told her she had to sit by herself until she was willing to apologize to her sister for taking her doll away. Well, that’s going to be a long time because Grace isn’t sorry. How can she be sorry for taking the doll away when it was her turn? Hope had the doll all morning and it was Grace’s turn and when she said she wanted it, Hope started to cry.
Hope always cries.
Six years old and she still tunes up every time something doesn’t go her way.
Maybe Grace should do that. She’s always been the strong one of the twins, the one who knew what the two of them ought to do, who planned. Hope acts like a baby. Hope doesn’t want to get mud on her skirt. Hope wants to go in the house at night as soon as it gets dark because she’s scared. Pooo!
Mostly, Hope is terrified of Indians. She and Hope had both sneaked out of the house into the shadows beyond the big campfire the elders built that night and listened to the travelers from Boonesborough talking about how the raiding party of Cherokee Indians had attacked their settlement. Whooping and hollering, tried to kill everybody there. The men fought back, shot two of the Indians and all the others ran off.
After that, Hope was afraid of her own shadow. They sleep together on the corn husk mattress and after Hope heard about the Indian attack she cuddled right up next to Grace in the bed every night. It’s too hot for cuddling, but Hope is so scared all the time that she has to be right up next to Grace or she can’t go to sleep.
Grace hears laughter and turns to see Lydia Mullins splash water on Ruth Ann Whitt. Lydia is watching her eight-month-old brother, who’s sitting in about an inch of water, clapping his hands and giggling at the girls playing.
Most of the girls are here at the creek helping their mothers do the washing. Most of the boys are out playing hide and seek. They don’t have to work nearly as hard as the girls. But now that the wash is done, the women are sitting on the rocks talking before they haul their baskets back home.
Grace wishes she had a baby brother to look after. She asked Ma for one and Ma gave Pa a look and smiled but she didn’t say yes or no. Hope even chimed in, pleading with their parents for a baby.
And then they’d told the girls to pray about it, to ask God for
a baby brother and after that, whenever they got down on their knees beside the bed at night, they begged God for a baby brother but God hadn’t given them one.
Ma’d said she didn’t want two of them this time, so alike she’d had to tie a red ribbon on Hope’s toe when she was a baby so she could tell them apart. Just one baby, she’d said, so the girls would have to share him.
Grace doesn’t like that part because Hope is so selfish she probably won’t even give Grace a turn holding the baby. Just like she wouldn’t let Grace have the doll. Sarah and Priscilla’s father had carved dolls out of wood, was going to make each of the little girls her own doll. That was before he cut his hand. Now he was in bed with a fever and the bandage on his hand smelled bad, and Ma said it would be a long time before he’d be able to carve again. Hope had gotten her doll but Grace hadn’t. So Ma had said they had to share the one doll Hope got but Hope wouldn’t. She kept it all the time and cried when Grace wanted to play with it. Grace asked nice this morning, but Hope said no, so Grace had taken the doll away — it was her turn — and Hope had started crying. David and Silas’s mother had been standing there, holding their little sister, Leah. Mrs. Campbell listened to Hope and took Hope’s word for what had happened — and had made Grace go off by herself to “pray for God to forgive her sin and soften her heart.”
But she isn’t praying. She’s too mad to talk to God, who will be mad at her because she is mad at Hope. If Hope would just—
“Grace, are you ready to tell your sister you’re sorry and ask for her forgive—”
Mrs. Campbell’s words are cut off by the sound of shouting. Men’s voices.
The women drop their baskets. Some of them scream. At first, Grace doesn’t know what’s going on, why everybody is so upset and then Hope drops the doll on the rocks and leaps to her feet, her eyes huge. Grace knows then. She covers her mouth, utters a bleat of wordless horror and cries out through her fingers, “The Indians are coming.”