Gather Her Round

by Alex Bledsoe

  Then Janet yelped as another barefoot woman appeared directly behind them and sauntered casually toward the other two. Like him, she wore only a loincloth, and like the other girl, her hair was twisted in dreads. She crouched at his feet on the other side.

  Mandalay made a complex hand gesture, and the antlered man responded. Then Mandalay walked forward and stood looking up at him.

  “This has served its purpose,” she said, indicating the banjo she held. “The spirits it binds need to be released to their rest.”

  The big man replied, but his voice was so deep, Janet felt it in her chest, rather than hearing actual words.

  “Of course,” Mandalay answered.

  And then the antlered man, all eight feet of him, went down on one knee. Mandalay handed him the instrument, touched his bearded cheek, then turned and walked away. The banjo looked like a toy in the man’s hands as he stood upright.

  The two girls at his feet also rose and scurried with surprising silence into the forest. The man turned and followed them. Moments after they disappeared, two coyotes howled from the direction they’d run.

  Mandalay walked back to Janet. “You can talk now.”

  “Who … what … why…?” She was still so stunned, it was difficult for the words to come out.

  “He has that affect on people sometimes,” Mandalay said. “Especially women. Makes you wish you had a boyfriend.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t say that.”

  Mandalay nodded knowingly. “You and Ginny.”

  “What? No! Why would you think that?”

  Mandalay looked surprised. “Well, the two of you—”

  Janet held up her hand. “Stop right there, okay? Ginny and I are just friends. In fact, I’m just friends with everybody. I have no boyfriend; I have no girlfriend. I have no interest. Can we go home now?”

  “I didn’t mean anything by it,” Mandalay said. “And I certainly wouldn’t judge.”

  Janet looked around at the dark woods. “I’ve never felt the way you’re supposed to. The way the songs say. I don’t think I can. There’s a word for it, but…”

  Mandalay put a hand on her arm. “There’s no need for it here. You are who and what you are, and the Tufa don’t care. It’s your music that matters to us.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously.”

  Janet took a deep breath. A weight had come off, one she didn’t realize was there until it left. “Wow.” She chuckled, took a few more deep breaths, and said, “So who was that? The big guy?”

  “If you think about it, you’ll know who he is.”

  She remembered the whispered tales around campfires, at swimming holes, and in the dark outside the barn dance. “But I thought he was … I mean, just a story.”

  “We’re all just stories, Janet. Or songs.”

  With that, Mandalay walked past her and back into the forest, although now there was a wide, clear trail. It led quickly back to their car, through a gate in the fence that was conveniently left open. She said nothing as Janet backed them back onto the highway and started the drive to Mandalay’s house.

  * * *

  At last Duncan emerged into a different clearing and collapsed onto the damp grass. Above him the sky was cloudy, and the hidden moon cast a dim, grayish glow that diffused across the whole vista. He was thoroughly spent, and rested until his pulse no longer pounded in his ears. Then he got to his feet.

  He looked around. He saw the cars and trucks. He smelled the rank odor.

  Wait a minute, he thought. I know this place. And then he realized.

  He was outside the old moonshiners’ cave, the place his people gathered and celebrated, the place where even now, he might find help. He checked his phone again, but its battery was totally drained.

  He ran to the entrance, stumbled down the tunnel, and emerged with a cry.

  “Somebody, please!” he shouted. “Kera’s stuck in my truck at the bottom of a holler. That big-ass hog ran us off the road, and she’s hurt.”

  There were a lot of people in the cave, most of them men, all gathered around Flint and Junior Damo. They fell silent and turned to look at him. Their gaze was cold and hard.

  “What’s wrong?” he said. He was so tired, he could barely stand, and had to lean against the nearest cave wall for support.

  No one spoke. They just stared.

  “Come on!” he exhorted. “Move!”

  No one did.

  “All right, then please, someone, anyone, just call 911 for me. My phone’s dead.”

  Their total silence scared him more than anything. Then Porter Procure pushed his way to the front of the group. Procure was red-eyed and red-faced, and pointed an accusing finger at him.

  “You!” he yelled, his voice charged with emotion. “You let my son die when you could’ve saved him!”

  Duncan’s legs collapsed, and he slid down the wall. He closed his eyes in defeat and disbelief. How did the man know?

  “Aw, no,” he whimpered. “No, not now…”

  Porter Procure wasn’t the only one. Everyone glared at him with the same hatred, the same knowledge. Fuck, did they all know?

  “No, it wasn’t like that,” he said, eyes still closed. “It was just—”

  “We know what you did!” Porter screamed, his face distorted with alcohol and rage. “We know! We know!”

  Tears ran down Duncan’s face. Hearing the truth spoken by someone else drove home anew what he had done, and gave it a reality that he couldn’t ignore. He wanted to curl up and die.

  But Renny still needed him. He opened his eyes and pushed himself back upright. The crowd was now all around him, blocking any possible escape. Porter Procure stood in front, Junior Damo and Flint just behind him.

  Duncan forced himself to look at his father-in-law. “Please, Mr. Procure, your daughter is hurt, we have to—”

  But Porter was drunk, and enraged, and headed a mob that loved nothing more than an object at which to fling its ire. “We know!” Porter kept repeating, and soon the whole bunch chanted it. “We know!”

  And then a song began. It was one Duncan had never heard before, but it had a kind of awful familiarity just the same, a connection with him that made each note, each lyric, as inevitable as the sunrise.

  In every man there dwells a dark and unforgiven place

  Where no amount of light could show redemption, or replace …

  Duncan felt himself grow smaller, weaker, more pitiful. This must be his own dying dirge, the song that could take his life and return his spirit to the night winds for their disposition. He couldn’t stop it, and he had no song to counterpoint it.

  He slid back down to the floor and drew his knees up to his chin. “Please,” he begged again and again. “Please, help Renny, she’s hurt.…” He looked up and made eye contact with Junior, whose face was a mask of disapproval and amusement, but whose eyes revealed the fear that his own role in what had happened might be brought to light.

  Duncan got to his feet, pushed his way over, and grabbed Junior by the shirt. “Please,” Duncan begged Junior. “Please.”

  Then Porter Procure hit him with a piece of lead pipe, crushing in one side of his skull. As his people, his tribe, descended on him, he died in a shower of blows and kicks, his dying dirge swirling around him.

  Though my reason held me steady when it came my time to act

  I stood still against the raging wild, and cannot take it back.…

  31

  In the truck, Renny was starting to go into shock. Her broken arm was numb, and she could now see her breath by the faint, fading light from the dashboard. She wasn’t sure how long Duncan had been gone, or how long she’d been hanging upside down, but her head pounded with every heartbeat, and she sensed that she didn’t have long.

  She kept her good hand over her belly. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, “I’m so sorry, my baby, I should’ve been stronger, you deserve so much more.…”

  And then came the unmistakable, disgustingly wet
sound that has always been written as “oink.”

  She went absolutely still. The odor reached her then, faint at first but growing stronger as she heard the noise of several small bodies moving through the leaves that lined the floor of the gully.

  She kept listening, until suddenly a pig’s snout and head pushed their way into the open driver’s-side door. Then she screamed.

  She began to thrash, ignoring her arm, her baby, everything. The horror of what had happened to her brother filled her and choked out everything else. “Help!” she cried. “Jesus Christ, somebody, help me!”

  The pig cocked its head and looked at her oddly, mystified by her sudden movement and noise. Another pig tried to shove the first one aside. They squealed at each other and fought for position.

  Renny tugged at the jammed seat belt with her good hand. “Help me! Help me!”

  One small pig awkwardly worked itself all the way into the truck cab. It nosed in the debris for anything edible, then looked up at Renny. Its snout, wet and wrinkled, was inches from Renny’s face.

  She punched it.

  The animal squealed and drew back, then turned and tried to get out of the cab. It struggled through a hole in the shattered windshield, shrieking as the jagged edges tore at its thick hide.

  Renny stared past it, at the herd of pigs rooting along the bottom of the ravine. They were mere shapes in the dark, emitting sound and odor, crunching anything that was remotely edible.

  Then, looming over and above its brethren, came the monster that had killed her brother.

  “Oh God,” she whispered. “Oh God, don’t eat my baby, please, no…”

  The monster came forward, slow and inexorable, toward the truck. Its smaller herd mates squealed as they were pushed aside. Renny wanted to scream, but fear paralyzed her.

  * * *

  Janet drove while Mandalay checked her phone. The night was silent, and the only sound was the road noise. Janet should have been exhausted, but instead she was wired with stress, adrenaline, and relief of a secret revealed.

  Mandalay saw that Bronwyn Chess had called while she and Janet were in the cave, where no cell signals penetrated. Bliss had called as well.

  As she was about to call Bliss back, Janet blurted, “Okay, what really did happen back there?”

  Mandalay jumped and dropped her phone onto the floorboard. “Whoa! You scared me to death.”

  “I’m sorry, but back in the woods, that man with the two girls. Was that who I think it was?”

  “The King of the Forest,” Mandalay said softly, looking straight ahead.

  Janet gripped the steering wheel with both hands. “Wow.”

  “That’s the right response.”

  “Do you see him often?”

  “No. He and the Tufa aren’t always on good terms. I see him only when it’s necessary.”

  “And this was necessary?”

  “Oh yes. That banjo had to be disposed of in a very particular way. I could’ve done it, but by asking for his help, I hope to make him more sociable to us.”

  “And now?”

  “Now we’re done. We’ve sung our song. Now the decision is up to the night winds.”

  “Was that really who whispered to me? In the cave, I mean. Was it really the night winds?”

  Mandalay was about to answer, when she suddenly said, “Stop!”

  “Hey, don’t get your knickers twisted, I just want to know—”

  “No, the car, stop the car!”

  Janet slowed and pulled to the side of the road. There was a tight curve ahead, and if anyone swung wide coming around it, they’d plow right into them, so she turned her headlights on high and set her emergency flashers. By then Mandalay was already out of the car.

  “What is it?” Janet asked as she followed.

  “There’s been a wreck here. Look.”

  In the high beams, the path Duncan and Renny’s truck had taken through the saplings was plain, as was the dark opening of the ravine below it.

  “Stay here,” Mandalay said. She carefully picked her way to the edge and looked down. Then she ran back, her phone to her ear. “Bliss? Is Jack still with you? Get out to Stack’s Pike as fast as you can. That curve just before Maggie’s Mill Road. There’s been a wreck, and there’s a bunch of those wild pigs nosing around it. Yes, I’m here with Janet Harper. We’ll wait for you.”

  Janet went to the edge and looked down. She saw the wreck, and the pigs visible in the truck’s fading headlights. She called out, “Hello, is anyone down there? Are you hurt?”

  The pigs squealed, startled, and scattered back down the ravine into the darkness. Nothing human answered.

  * * *

  An hour later, Duncan’s truck rose from the ravine, pulled up by Doyle Collins’s wrecker. Alvin Darwin’s car, its blue lights counterpointing the yellow ones on the wrecker, blocked the road at the top of the curve. Road flares did the same thing at the bottom. Neither had been needed so far; there had been no one on the road who wasn’t summoned to the wreck.

  When Jack and Bliss first arrived, they’d gone down to check for survivors. The registration identified the truck as belonging to the late Adam Procure, but no one had been inside.

  “Was it stolen?” Jack asked.

  “I don’t know,” Bliss said. “I’ll try to call his parents.” But there was no answer.

  Darwin showed up, called Doyle to bring his tow truck, and joined Jack in looking up and down the gully. Neither man saw any sign of people, only the unmistakable damage inflicted by the pigs. The slippery mud stank of pig manure.

  Eventually Doyle arrived, and he and Jack rigged the crashed vehicle so it could be pulled up to the road. Darwin went to sit in his car and stay out of the way.

  As Doyle did his job, Mandalay quietly told Bliss what had happened at the cave. When she finished, Bliss said, “I can’t believe you went there alone.”

  “I wasn’t alone.”

  “You might as well have been,” she said, glancing over to make sure Janet didn’t hear. The girl leaned against the fender of her car, her face bathed in the flickering gold from the tow truck’s light bar.

  “You’re right, she wasn’t you,” Mandalay agreed. “But she didn’t need to be. I needed her talent.”

  Bliss’s phone rang. She walked away down the road, so she could hear over the truck’s winch. When she returned, she said, “That was Adam’s mother. She said Renny’s been driving it.”

  “Did you see any sign of her?”

  “No. Not her, not Duncan Gowen.”

  “We don’t know that he was with her.”

  “Yes, we do. They showed up at Bronwyn’s house earlier tonight and got Craig to marry them. Bronwyn called and told me about it when she couldn’t reach you. This would be the fastest way home for them.” She looked up at the starry sky. “I can’t believe the night winds claimed them both.”

  “All three, you mean. You know Renny was pregnant. If she died, the baby died.”

  Bliss folded her arms and bit down the reply she wanted to snap out. Mandalay put a sympathetic hand on her arm.

  * * *

  In the gully, Jack stayed out of the way as the truck rose up the side. He had a powerful halogen flashlight, but even with its help, he couldn’t make out much. The thoroughly churned-up ground confirmed that a herd of wild pigs had been here, but he saw no human tracks except his own.

  There had been blood on the windshield, but he wasn’t sure if it was human or porcine. It would take lab work to tell if this was a mere traffic accident, or something worse. Duncan and Renny might have left the truck before the pigs arrived, and their tracks had been obliterated. But if so, where were they?

  He methodically shone his light around, studying the mud for any additional clues, and it wasn’t long before he found one: the clear, deep print of the monster.

  So once again, the Gowen boy was present when the monster appeared. If this were a horror movie, he’d think that the boy had some way of summoning it, or tha
t it was a supernatural being manifested by a guilty conscience. But no, he reminded himself, it was just a wild animal, dangerous and in need of disposal.

  The truck reached the top and dug a chunk of mud out of the edge as it was pulled free. Jack jumped aside as it sluiced down and landed with a splat where he’d been standing. When all was clear, he climbed back up to the road. He opened the truck’s door and shone his flashlight around the wrecked cab: the air bags and seat belts were mangled, and the stuffing had been chewed from the upholstery. But he saw no blood except that on the edges of the shattered safety glass.

  He turned off the flashlight and walked over to where Bliss and Mandalay stood talking.

  “Any sign?” the girl asked, once again sounding older and more in charge than any of them.

  “It’s too hard to track at this time of night, but I did find the prints of our monster. So it was here.”

  “Did it eat them?” Bliss asked, verbalizing what they all were thinking.

  “I don’t know. I only found a little blood, but it’s hard to tell at night.”

  “How long would it take?” Mandalay asked. “To eat a person, I mean.”

  Jack thought. “Depends on how many people, and how many pigs. And how hungry the pigs are.”

  “Could they have eaten them and left no traces?”

  “I’m sure there are traces. We just can’t see them. Once the sun comes up, I’ll be able to tell more.”

  * * *

  Janet leaned against her car’s fender, watching the other three deep in conversation. She’d called her parents, assured them she was with both Bliss and Mandalay, and that she’d be home soon. But she wasn’t about to leave the site of possibly her greatest story yet for the Raven’s Caw. She’d taken dozens of photos on her phone, trying to see the dramatic moments in what had, so far, been a pretty uneventful thing. Without injured victims, or bodies, it would just go into the blotter section of the Weekly Horn, if it even got mentioned.

  She paced along the edge of the highway, humming “Didn’t Leave Nobody but the Baby,” which had become her go-to song for killing time.

  Go to sleep, you little baby,

  Go to sleep, you little baby.…

  She trailed off, but in her head, she heard the next line, “Mama’s gone away and your daddy’s gonna stay.…”