Out of the Darkness

by Karen C. Webb

  "I'm just husky, you turd," Billy Ray grunted.

  But, follow he did, his legs aching and his shirt soaked with sweat as they followed the old road, up and over the hill, across dead, brown leaves, their feet tangling in vines and underbrush.

  And, as they came down the hill on the other side, there it was, an old ramshackle house, with a rusted tin roof and an old barn a hundred yards away. Part of the roof had fallen in on the barn, and vines tangled their way up its side. They could even see a tree, growing up from inside the barn, pushing its way through what was left of the rusty tin roof.

  The boys made their way to the old house, out of breath. The place was old and creepy, like an old hillbilly haunted house, Ricky thought.

  "Wait," Ricky said as Randy put his hand on the old glass doorknob.

  "Wait for what?"

  "You gotta knock. What if somebody lives here."

  Randy guffawed. "Ain't nobody living here, you dumbass. Look at this place."

  He turned the knob, but the door wouldn't budge. He had to ram his shoulder against it, finally forcing it open.

  The other two boys crowded against him, trying to see over his shoulder.

  Randy stepped inside, followed by Ricky and Billy Ray.

  There was furniture inside, but old, dusty furniture, furniture that hadn't seen any use for a long, long time.

  Ricky jumped when something scurried across the floor.

  Randy laughed. "Mice," he said.

  Ricky saw it too. Part of the stuffing was ripped out of the old sofa, where many families of mice had made their home there.

  They made their way into the kitchen, which looked out over the old barn.

  "Look how much stuff is here," Randy said. "Somebody must have left here in a hurry."

  There were some old dishes in the cupboards and even some very old cans of food in a pantry.

  "Hey, Billy Ray," Randy said. "I dare you to eat one of them cans of food."

  "No way," Billy Ray said. "I ain't puking my guts up, all the way back down this mountain." He dropped into an old, dusty wooden chair, in front of an ugly Formica-topped kitchen table.

  "Come on Billy Ray," Ricky said, dropping his hand to Billy Ray's shoulder. "No rest yet. Not until we explore all of this old house, and find out what happened to that girl."

  "I haven't seen any sign of where any girl lived here," Billy Ray grumbled as he pushed himself up from the old table.

  There was a short hallway off the kitchen, with a bathroom and three bedrooms opening off it. The wooden floor was covered in dust, but even still, the boys could see a black stain across the boards. The bathroom was cruddy with age and mold. The once-white sink and bathtub were covered in a green-black dirt, and the toilet...well, the years hadn't been kind. "Ugh," Randy said as he shut the door quickly and they all moved on.

  The first bedroom had two beds, but there was so little else in the room, it was hard to tell if it had belonged to a boy or a girl. Randy pried open the closet door, then jumped back as an animal flew out at him, then hopped out the broken window.

  The other two boys doubled over with laughter.

  "Racoon," Ricky said, when he could speak again.

  "Yeah," Randy said, his face turning red. "I know."

  There was nothing in the closet and the boys moved on to the next room. It was bare also, just an old four-poster bed in the middle with the stuffing ripped out of the mattress.

  Randy stood back this time as he yanked open the closet door, but again, there was nothing there, not even a racoon.

  "Come on," Billy Ray grumbled. "We ain't gonna find nothing in this old place. This whole thing was a waste of time."

  Ricky was beginning to agree with him. They had missed out on the whole day of fishing and swimming, they were sweaty and tired. And now, it seems like it had been for nothing.

  "One more room," Randy said, gritting his teeth. He really hoped to find something himself. Otherwise, he was going to look like a fool. It had been his old story after all, a story he had believed when he was younger, as he'd listened to the old men who hung out in the general store. He only wished they would have said what actually happened to the girl. But, he suspected they'd realized he was listening, and it seemed to him, they had clammed up about it.

  He tried to open the remaining door, but it was stuck. He shoved against it, but nothing happened. Billy Ray finally threw his considerable weight against it, and together, they forced it open.

  This room was sparse as well, nothing but a big double bed against one wall, with a very old cedar chest at the foot of it.

  Randy sighed, totally deflated. This had to be her parent's bedroom, which means they hadn't found it. They hadn't found whatever secrets she'd been hiding.

  He went to the closet anyway, not caring now if an animal jumped out at him. He yanked the door open angrily. He wasn't even surprised when the closet was empty; he had expected it this time.

  He turned around and watched as Ricky pried open the lid on the old cedar chest.

  There were blankets and pillows inside, old and half-rotted. And right on top of the blankets, a pile of papers, wrapped in an old rubber band. And underneath that, several notebooks, the cheap kind, one subject notebooks with only a hundred sheets of paper in them.

  Ricky lifted them out, removing the rubber band from the loose pieces first. "Jackpot," he whispered.

  He sat down on the floor, crossing his legs. Randy and Billy Ray joined him, sitting in a circle around him, just as they had around their campfire.

  "These look like songs," Ricky said. The papers were old and yellowed with age, and they curled up at the edges where the rubber band had held them for a long time. He separated the bundle and passed a few sheets to each boy.

  "They are songs," Billy Ray said in amazement. "But they look like they were done by a small child."

  They read through the lyrics, passing them back and forth.

  "Well, this doesn't tell us anything," Ricky said.

  Randy was feeling the defeat settling over him again. He felt sure the notebooks were filled with more of the same childish song lyrics.

  He picked up the first one, which had a dark blue cover and a large number one, written in pen on the front. He opened the cover, and there was a neat, cursive penmanship, the curly kind, that only a girl can do.

  He thought it must be a journal, a girl's journal. Her journal, he thought. Cold chills ran down his spine and he felt the hairs prickle on the back of his neck. He began to read it aloud.

  It began with a date, some forty years ago.

  CHAPTER 1

  June, 2014

  I was in the middle of enjoying my fifteenth summer in my little corner of this beautiful, round blueberry we call earth. I was dreaming of escape, and even making plans for it, when life threw me a curveball. I had always been a dreamer; Mama even called me a romantic, but never in a million years could I have dreamed up such as befell me this summer.

  Our town of Jericho Falls, if you want to call it a town, sits up in the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains, in Caldwell County, North Carolina. We live—that is, my family and I—live on a farm about fifty miles from any real town. "Fifty miles from nowhere, and one step closer to Hell," Mama always said.

  Jericho Falls is more of what you’d call a community, a small, unincorporated village of maybe ten houses in all, grouped around a small white church with a general store just down the dirt road. It all sits along the banks of Jericho Creek, a pretty little creek with cold, clear water running down out of the mountains and filled with rainbow trout. The falls themselves, not that much of a waterfall really, sits up past the town, about a mile or so. It’s a drop of about six feet, but only about half of it is a straight drop. The remainder bounces down across huge boulders. Sure does make a pretty sound though, falling down across those rocks. A tall ridge runs along back of us; you can stand in this valley and see that it’s a gorge really, cut through these hills over millions of years by this sw
ift-running mountain water.

  Our farm, it sits further back up the gorge, maybe two miles up from Jericho Falls. Feels like a hundred miles if you’re walking it, though. There’s just our small, weathered house with a rusted tin roof, a falling down barn and about twenty acres of land. The barn was built into the side of a hill, and it actually leans a little, as if it would fall over any day now. Daddy’s grandpa built this house and barn, musta been a hundred years ago, and it looks it too. Maybe if it had ever had even one coat of paint, instead of that old, weathered wood siding, then maybe it wouldn’t look so old and tired.

  My daddy is a horse trader and sometimes a moonshiner—'shiners—we call 'em here. When he quits drinking it long enough to sell it, that is. Sometimes him and a few of his horse trading buddies will sit out there, on the edge of the woods, and drink 'til late into the night. ‘Shiners Convention,’ Daddy calls it.

  Mama named me Lauren, on account of her and Daddy went down to Lenoir one time back when they first met. They went to see one a them drive-in movies—Key Largo—it was called. It was an old movie, even way back then, but Mama said the drive-in showed classics every Thursday night. Anyway, Key Largo had Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in it, and Mama said Ms. Bacall was the most beautiful, classiest lady she’d ever seen, and if she ever had a daughter she was gonna name her Lauren.

  Mama is slim like me, but she looks older than her years. Too many years of child bearing and hard work around this farm has took its toll on her. Her hands look rough and weathered, and the blue veins stick up on 'em like the hands of a grandma, even though she's only thirty-eight.

  But, what she's lost in looks, she's more than made up for in love. When she hugs me or lays her hand on top of my head, the way she does, I feel all warm and cozy and happy. She's tough as nails, but she has a heart the size of Caldwell County.

  Ain’t none of us Martins ever been to school. What, you say? How is that possible in this day and age? This ain’t a hundred years ago nor even fifty years ago, when Grandpa thought it was more important that Daddy be helping on the farm instead a sitting on his butt in a classroom all day. Well, there’s twenty-two miles of winding dirt road before we even hit the pavement to meet up with a school bus. And them dirt roads, I always hold my breath, whenever we do get to town. There’s a hill on one side, because of the gorge, see, and the other side, well, Jericho Creek sits off down in there, far below the road. The bank has gave way in spots. In the curves, you have to stay near the hill side of it, or else you’re in danger of the bank falling out from under your vehicle, dropping you off down that cliff. There’s even an old, rusted car down in there, lodged up against the trees, where somebody in the past fell off, then just left it there. I’ve had nightmares, ever since I was little, about falling off that dirt road.

  I dreamed of going to school when I was younger, even if I had to brave that dirt road. I even begged Mama, years ago.

  "Folks in the hills, we take care of our own," is what Mama always told me when I asked her about it. But I heard Mama talking to Daddy one time, when I was small, she said if the county people ever found out we’d never been in school, we’d all be in a heap a trouble. Well, she’s home-schooled us pretty good, me and my two brothers and my little sister Megan.

  Well, it was two brothers, 'til some cantankerous ole mule Daddy traded for went and kicked my little brother, Tommy. Kicked him right in his chest; stopped his heart, old Doc Roberts down in Jericho Falls told Daddy. I can still see Daddy, carrying Tommy’s lifeless body in his arms, with tears running down his face. Only time I ever seen my Daddy cry, at least, up until this crazy summer got over. Daddy had Tommy buried on the farm here, in our family plot, right alongside Grandma and Grandpa Martin.

  Oh, you shoulda seen Tommy, that boy had somethin’ special. ‘A true gift from God,’ Mama always said. By the time he was seven years old, he was doing high school math, algebra and stuff that I struggle with now. And he was reading history books, boring books about the Civil War and the Roman Empire and he could quote you any passage from any book he ever read and even what page number it was on.

  Daddy traded somebody for an old guitar one time and Tommy sat down with it, and within a few weeks, he’d taught hisself to play that guitar and, after a few more weeks, he was writing songs to go with his tunes. Mama has all them songs stored away now in her cedar chest. But I’ve seen her take 'em out occasionally, folded sheets of notebook paper held together with a rubber band. She cries as she reads them, but if she sees me watching, she pretends she’s not. She always did need to be the strong one, strongest one of this whole family. Oh, maybe not physically, although I might lay odds on her there too, but mentally, she was always the strong one. She was the glue that held us all together. Without her, we might of all been torn apart like the fluff of a dandelion, and drifted away on the summer breeze.

  My older brother, now—Will, his name is—he’s the complete opposite of Tommy. ‘Steadfast,’ Mama calls him. He loves nothing more than helping Daddy on this two-bit farm and working with them half-broke horses and mules. Him and Mama have a special bond, a bond made even stronger after the loss of Tommy. My whole life, as long as I can remember, Will would always come into the kitchen and wrap his arms around Mama's waist, squeezing her tight in a big hug. Every day, without fail, I've seen him do that. Only now, he's head and shoulders taller than her and he has to lean down some to hug her. But still, he never misses a day, he never goes out the door without his morning hug. Will is perfectly content right here with his family, in this tiny community in the middle of nowhere.

  Not me, though, I got plans, plans and dreams. I dream of traveling the world, exploring all the places I’m always reading about. All of us Martin’s reads a lot, on account of we ain’t never had no TV, out here in the hills. After supper every day, each of us is likely to wander off to our bedrooms, picking up on whatever exciting adventure we was in the middle of. You could usually find me on a summer’s afternoon, once the chores were done, laying back in the soft green grass of Daddy’s pasture, sometimes surrounded by the sweet scent of wildflowers, reading books of faraway places and adventures. Usually don’t take long though, if I’m still enough, 'til one of Daddy’s trade horses will be sniffing around me, blowing air on my head while it tries to figure out what I’m doing laying down in the middle of its lunch table. Sometimes they’ll graze all around me; I listen to the sounds of the grass ripping in their teeth while I read.

  But not today. Today, my little sister Meg is down with a fever, and since Daddy and Will are both working down at the sawmill—filling in for the summer, while a couple guys are gone—then I guess it’s on me to go for help.

  “Go fetch Mrs. Parker,” Mama yells out the door at me.

  I come running from the garden where I’d been pulling weeds. Must be serious if she wants me to fetch that old witch, I thought. She’s not a witch, really, even though she kinda looks like one. People like her, I’ve heard 'em called Mountain Sorcerers, but that ain’t true neither. They’re healers, is what they are. Mrs. Parker is a faith healer. Supposedly she says a passage from the Bible while she holds the hand of the afflicted. But I read the Bible, cover to cover, on account a how we ain’t got no TV, and I never did find no passage that said, ‘read me and thou shalt be healed.’

  But I seen it, though. I seen it with my own two eyes. We was in church one Sunday and Mrs. Parker was there, sitting in the pew just behind us. Jane Crockett brought her boy, Petey, over to Mrs. Parker and showed her his hands. That boy had warts all over both hands, big, nasty ugly warts, that made me want to throw up, they was so ugly. Well, Mrs. Parker took those warty hands in hers, closed her eyes and commenced to whispering. I could see her lips moving, but for the life of me I couldn’t make out a word she said. Then Mama elbowed me in the ribs and I had to turn around and sit down.

  Well, I didn’t see Petey again for about a month, on account a how we ain’t the most regular churchgoers and all. But, when I saw h
im again, his hands was as clean and wart free as yours or mine. Mrs. Parker talked them warts off, that’s what Mama said.

  These mountains have lots of secrets—secrets they been holding for a thousand years. Secrets people outside of these hills don’t usually get to know, and some that us in the hills don’t know either, as I was about to find out.

  So today, I'm fixin' to go and fetch Mrs. Parker back for Meg. Ordinarily, I could jump bareback on one of Daddy’s trade horses, but he’d sold the last one a few days ago. So I gotta hotfoot it near two miles, mostly uphill. I think they call it hotfooting around these parts 'cause in the summertime, most of us go barefoot. Most of us kids, anyhow. And that dirt road is doggone hot on the feet, unless they’re tough as a ten-penny nail, like mine are.

  But Megan, we gotta take care of her. She’s my baby sister, the baby of the family. With her blond curls and big blue eyes, I always thought she looked like a baby doll. I used to dress her up when she was smaller, pretending that she was one of my dolls. If Mama was heartbroken over losing Tommy, losing Meg would just kill her, I’m sure of it.

  My mind began to wander, as I strolled along the dirt road. I didn’t notice the bright Mountain Laurel bushes as I walked, nor the bees that flitted from one bright pink blossom of it to the next. I didn’t see the rich green of the Kudzu vines, snaking up the trees like it planned to choke the very life from them. I didn’t hear the sound of Jericho Creek neither, as it trickled across stones and splashed its way down this mountain. No, I missed the world around me, 'cause I was busy with one of my daydreams. I pondered on what it would be like to live in one a them big, two-story houses in a housing development, like I’d read about. To come home every day from my nice office, driving a shiny new car, and pulling it into a driveway made of concrete, instead of sand and mud. I saw myself clearly, in this fantasy of mine, opening the door to that big house, setting my briefcase down on a white tile floor, and kissing my handsome husband. Then making dinner for the two of us, in a kitchen that was all warm wood and granite countertops, with a big island in the middle, where my Prince Charming would sit down on a stool and talk to me while I chopped vegetables. Then I would pop a roast into an oven that was built into the wall, with a second oven just above it. I never did figure out what that second oven was there for. But I had read about it, and even seen pictures in magazines, so it was there in my dream, just the same. I also had all kinda gizmos and gadgets in this fantasy of mine, computers and laptops, cellular telephones and epads or ipads, whatever they’re called. It would take me years just to figure out how to work all this stuff, if my dreams ever did come true that is.