November Mourns

by Tom Piccirilli

  “And you chose Mags. Why?”

  Rising to his full height, Dave crossed his arms across his broad chest and seemed to fill the entire room with his power and righteousness. Through his tears, Shad had trouble seeing him. It was like staring into the sun.

  “Because she was special,” Dave told him. “She had to be taken back to the land. She’ll return again soon. They all will.”

  “All of them?” Shad asked. “How many?”

  But Dave Fox wouldn’t answer.

  “So that means you’re a wraith? Something that comes out of the gorge and plays with the little girls, then bites into them.”

  “It’s not like that. I’m a part of the current, the same as all hollow folk. I’m just different.” Then, dropping his voice, and giving Shad the killer eye. “Even from you.”

  “You knew I was going up Gospel Trail Road. Were you there when I met the Gabriels?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re the one they were waiting for.”

  “Yes.”

  “The one Jerilyn was writing to, sending letters on the creek.”

  “I can read them that way. I was in the woods, watching the snake gathering.”

  “Why?”

  “I thought I could help you,” Dave said.

  “Help me to do what? All I wanted was to find my sister’s killer!”

  Still with the questions. Trying to find your way from one end of the bitter confusion to the other. Shad hated himself for even talking. He should be fighting, running for the shotgun. Take another bullet in the back if need be, but he should be doing something.

  “Help you to finish walking the road.” Dave paused, finding the right words to use, like he was talking to an ill child. “You’re already different than when you first got back to town, Shad. You must know that. We’re all in a state of . . . incompletion. Every one of us except the dead.”

  So now it was about resurrection.

  “Why didn’t you let the Weggs kill me off? If it’s all about sacrificing our lives to the hollow?”

  “It’s not. Only favored folk, at certain times. If I’d let them kill you, it would’ve been murder, and why would I go and do a fool thing like that? You’re my friend.”

  Shad let out a little chuckle of malice. “Who’ve you got your eyes on next? Who’s the next special person?”

  “You need to stop asking questions if you don’t want the answers. Don’t be in a rush to judge. You’ve got blood on your hands now too.”

  “You think it’s the same?” Shad shouted. “Murdering teenage girls and taking out some guy coming at you with a shotgun?” Thinking about Howell Wegg’s throat made Shad even more ill. Now, when he needed it, the fire in his skull had deserted him. “I should’ve figured it out. You told me you’d met with some of those snake church folks.”

  “Yes.”

  “I mentioned your name to Lucas Gabriel. I asked him to call the sheriff’s office and get you and Increase Wintel up there. I mentioned your name. He said he had no need for Moon Run Hollow outsiders. He told me he didn’t know you.”

  “He doesn’t. Not with this face.”

  “I mean, I should’ve realized it then.”

  Dave’s expression grew more disappointed. “You’re a terrible detective, you know that, Shad Jenkins? I said that I’d run into a couple of them snake handlers now and again. I never said I’d met Lucas Gabriel. You didn’t catch me in a lie. I don’t lie.”

  Shad grimaced and let out a groan. Okay, he already knew he wasn’t cut out for this private investigator shit.

  “That day you searched Megan’s room wearing your little latex gloves. You were looking for this letter, weren’t you?”

  “Yes,” Dave said. “She didn’t send it to me but she read it aloud. I heard her.”

  It was kind of a relief knowing you weren’t the only lunatic in the room.

  “You looked high and low and didn’t check my room?”

  “It was an oversight.”

  So Dave Fox did make mistakes. He did have a weakness. He wasn’t infallible.

  “I don’t lie, Shad. Once you accept that, you’ll begin embracing the truth about yourself.”

  “You terrified Lucas Gabriel. He actually wanted you to have his daughters.”

  “And so I took one. But I didn’t frighten him. He loved me. He still does even now. The same way he loves the rattlers. I came to him crawling on my belly through the thorns, with the face of a snake.”

  “Oh Jesus.”

  “Because a serpent is as much a part of Eden and man’s nature as anything else. Through our pain and forbearance we grow closer to paradise.”

  It made Shad snarl with impotence. How many people would be alive if only he’d spent his first night in the hollow back in his own bed? He counted three, and who knew how many others were lying out in the woods?

  “How do you kill them? Hold your hand over their faces? Suffocate them? Did you press your mouth over theirs so they couldn’t breathe?”

  “You’ll understand eventually.”

  “Is that why their lips are always screwed into a smile and there wasn’t a mark on them?”

  “They smile because they’re happy. Fulfilled.”

  “You stole Jerilyn right out from beneath me.”

  “No, Shad,” Dave Fox said, and his voice was filled with as much honesty as you’d ever heard in one man before. “You let me have her.”

  “What?”

  “You helped me. Then you wrote yourself a note in the dust.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “It is. You’ve probably written yourself other messages too, thinking they were from someone else. The hollow uses your body as well, to give them whatever they want.”

  “Like hell!”

  But you couldn’t argue when you were starting to believe a little. It was no more insane than talking to your dead Mama or seeing your murdered sister’s hand wherever you went. Chatting it up with the devil dressed in the warden’s finest suit and silk tie. Finding old beer bottles with notes in them written for you. Really, even at a moment like this, you couldn’t be that much of a hypocrite.

  His mother had told him that they would take him.

  She’d said there was someone in the hills who could demonstrate his belief on his belly. Who manifested nothing but poison. One of Mama’s prophecies had finally come true. Or perhaps Shad had suspected Dave all along, because they were so much like alike. Was that the joke here? Were they simply two schizophrenics trying to find common ground?

  Dave Fox didn’t think he was human. Just another ill child with a sick brain, born or made into something that wasn’t quite right. Another damned part of the hollow like all the plague victims they’d brought up Gospel Trail and left there to become dust sifting into the river. The earth and water had gone bad. The flesh had gone wild.

  You had to keep them talking. In the morality plays this was the scene where all the revelations were made right before the clouds parted and God came down in his wicker basket on a rope and solved all your problems.

  “Why is it you’ve never shown yourself before, Dave? The real you.”

  “I have many faces. Some are unfinished.”

  “You’ve only got one, Dave. I’ve only seen you with one.”

  “The one I wear now I show only to you. Nobody else but you.”

  “You’re cracked. It’s the moon. The moon’s done it to us. It’s poisoned us. We’re all brain-damaged from it.”

  “We’re changing on the road. It’s the way the hollow needs it to be.”

  He tried to raise his voice above Dave’s but he didn’t have the strength. “That’s why there’s so many ill children being born. The dying gene pool. The diseased bodies thrown into the river and sinking into the ground. Into our food. Into the corn and the mash. We’re all monstrosities. But everything you did, you did on your own. You chose Megan.”

  “She was favored.”

  With his vision swimming, Shad be
nt and retrieved the sheet of paper and held it out before him. “She said you chose her, David. You. You think you’re a slave to the woods? To the road?”

  “To my nature,” Dave admitted. “Same as you are to your own. That’s why you lay with both the Gabriel girls. Because it’s natural to perpetuate with your own kind. You’re no less a hostage than me or anyone. You gave Jerilyn to me, Shad. She was mine and Rebi was yours.”

  “I didn’t kill Rebi.”

  “Didn’t you?”

  Being a jonah didn’t make you a murderer, but Dave was so damn sure of himself. “Ever think you’ve just gone insane?”

  Dave Fox, for the first time since Shad had known him, hesitated. His mouth worked and formed a word or two, and a subtle ripple passed over his face. “No.”

  “I’ve got to stop you,” Shad said.

  “Don’t you think I’ve already tried to end it?”

  He grabbed Shad by the throat, hauled him off the floor, and pinned him to the wall without any effort. Shad let out a cry and struggled vainly. Dave wasn’t even straining and Shad couldn’t breathe. “I don’t want it to be this way, but this is our world. You think I like doing this? The hollow won’t let me die.”

  You could never beat someone as powerful as this.

  Using all his strength, he tried to pry Dave’s fingers from his neck but couldn’t move him an inch. He was suffocating and in his terror strained even more, kicking out now, trying to scream. Nothing helped. Dave pulled Shad’s body forward and thrust him into the wall. Battering him once, twice, and again until the crossbeams splintered and Shad gave up any resistance.

  Oh Mama. Oh Megan. He’s gonna plant one on me and I’m going to the grave a grinning idiot.

  “Your eyes are closed,” Dave said. “Open them.”

  Shad did, the blood flowing from his nose and mouth, down the back of his throat. There was smashed plaster on his face, in his hair, all over the floor. Dave really had put him through the wall, then yanked him out again. This wasn’t going to be like the other times. They were going to know he’d been in a fight.

  Then, with an extraordinary amount of gentleness, Dave Fox laid Shad on the bed.

  “I told you,” he said. “You’re my friend.”

  That rasp of leather filled the room as Dave drew his .38 from the holster and held it to his own temple. “No matter what I do it never stops. I tried to kill myself for years before I understood and accepted my purpose. I’m theirs, same as you are. I get by all right bearing my sins, and you will too.”

  Look at this, look at what you have to do now. You’ve got to try to stop the guy.

  Shad reached out but there was a hideous tearing in his stomach as the opened wound ripped wider. His voice was barely a whisper. “No. Listen—”

  “Watch and learn, Shad Jenkins.”

  Dave Fox, slave to the hollow and all the back hills, derailed by corn mash moonshine and mutated plagues deep inside his chromosomes, and maybe something more, gave the same smile that had branded the lips of his victims, pulled the trigger, and blasted the top third of his head off.

  Chapter Nineteen

  ON BOGAN ROAD, THE BULLFROGS CRAWLED out of the pond and tried to make it over the wire grass. It cut them to pieces but they kept staggering and hopping forward until their bellies were sliced open. They roared and staggered on with their guts dangling loose. Some turned back but they couldn’t make it to the water.

  Pa was building coffins. One of the four Luvell shacks covered in crow shit had been torn down, and Shad’s father had carefully stacked the lumber up in the yard. He’d used the wood to complete one coffin already and was busy at work on a second. Lament sat nearby, sluggishly wagging his tail.

  Mags’s hand was on Pa’s neck. Now she was reaching up to stroke his face.

  You weren’t finished yet and might never be.

  When you learned so much all at once, it was worse than never knowing anything at all. And you had no one left to blame except for yourself.

  Glide moved about the area, working the vats of bubbling gruel, wearing heavier clothing and checking the sky. She wouldn’t remember the last time it had snowed in Moon Run, and you could tell she was a little frightened. She circled the steaming drums with a lot less wriggle today, and her cheeks were red with windburn.

  As he watched, Glide slipped over to his father and gave the old man a peck on the chin. They embraced and kissed and his pa said something that made her laugh.

  Shad thought, Well, there’s something.

  When Glide returned to the vats, Shad straggled forward. It felt like something had given way in the small of his back. His stitches were loose but the bleeding seemed to have stopped. He limped toward Glide. He had to admit, the smell of the boiling whiskey made him feel a bit better.

  “Haven’t seen you for a spell,” she said. “You hurt? Why you walking so odd? Is that blood in your hair?”

  Shad tried to form a response but could only stare.

  “What’s this look on your face? You didn’t know about me and your pa?”

  “No.”

  “What’s that?”

  He coughed and spit bloody phlegm. His throat burned badly and his voice had a rough, grating squeak to it. “I said no.”

  “You sound funny. I would’ve thought he’d have told you about that by now. He asked me to marry him.”

  Yes, you might’ve thought your father would tell you something like that. That you had a seventeen-year-old new mom. It might make for a good topic of conversation. “When did he propose?”

  “A day or two after the last time you was here.”

  Before he’d gone up Gospel Trail Road.

  “Did you agree?”

  “A ’course,” she said, like she found it odd he was even asking.

  “Why’s my father making coffins?”

  “Well, Venn’s dead. That’s who the big one is for. I’m not sure about the others. Maybe he’s going to sell them.”

  So that’s the way it was getting now, when you could just drop the fact that your own brother was dead without even a note of sorrow. “What happened to Venn?”

  “Dunno. Think his brain just rusted in place until it stopped telling his heart and lungs to work. He didn’t suffer none.”

  It made Shad think about the scene this morning again, with Jake and Becka Dudlow on the stump out back of Mrs. Rhyerson’s. “Where’s Hoober?”

  “Don’t know that either. Ain’t nobody seen him in over a month. Maybe he left the hollow.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You might be right at that.”

  Karl Jenkins crouched near M’am’s front door, hammering at the lumber. His craggy features were fixed with intent, and his deep-set eyes had glazed a bit, the melancholia sort of just rattling around in there. The terrible grace and brutal force within him was barely constrained, and Pa’s lips were scabbed from where he’d been chewing them. Or from where Glide had been gnawing on him.

  His father didn’t look up at him.

  “Hello, Pa.”

  “Hello, son.”

  “Dave Fox is dead in our house.”

  Pa didn’t appear to be surprised, and kept working with the wood.

  “You already knew that, didn’t you? Is that who you’re building this coffin for?”

  His father said, “Venn passed on a few days back. They got his body wrapped in the barn. Nobody’s seen Hoober in so long that they’re fearing he’s come to an awful end too.”

  But Shad was certain that his father already knew Dave was lying spattered across the bedroom, a few feet from Mags’s last love letter to him.

  “Who told you about Dave Fox? Was it Megan? Or did you find a note scuffed in the dirt?”

  “You’re talking foolish now, Shad. I’ll hear no more a’that.”

  “Or was it Dave himself, Pa? Did Dave come by and tell you he blew his brains out in front of me?”

  But Dave wasn’t dead. You didn’t live in the hollow, and y
ou couldn’t die in it either.

  “Shad, you’ve gone a little sick, son. That’s what happens when you head up the bad road into them woods. You need to go inside and talk with M’am. She’s gonna help you.”

  “Will she?”

  “Go on now.”

  His father dismissing him was both comforting and insulting. He wanted to shout at Pa and explain how he’d committed murder with his own hands. But Tandy Mae had been right. Once his father had made his peace with Shad going up into the hills, he’d considered his son lost to him. It was an act of will. The same way it took incredible resolve for Pa to ignore Megan’s hand pressing across his cheek.

  “I’ve still got more to say to you.”

  “I don’t wanna talk no more right now, son. Go on inside.”

  Shad realized his father was silently sobbing, the man’s shoulders quivering. It should have startled him but somehow it didn’t. “You were right, Pa. That the dead don’t rest in the hollow.”

  His father’s strong palm came up and flattened against Shad’s belly. It came away red and wet. Tears tracked his cheeks. “You’re bleeding, son. Please go on inside now, she’ll help with that too.”

  “Sure. Congratulations on the new bride.”

  You couldn’t do anything except follow the course laid out in front of you. Megan had been right. You didn’t choose, you were chosen.

  Shad stepped to M’am Luvell’s ramshackle pineboard door and tapped as the walls creaked and scraped together, tilting worse than before. His knuckles came away stained with wet moss. If the shack went over, it would crush his father.

  The dying bullfrogs continued to roar and scream.

  M’am’s voice, dangerous and without the quaint mischief, slid out through the slats like a fishing blade. “Shad Jenkins, you just—”

  He didn’t like her tone and walked in without waiting to hear her bidding. The place had lost the hallowed essence that he’d sensed before. The stink of marijuana filled the room. His skin grew clammy and he began to cough uncontrollably. After a minute he checked the window and saw the first patterns of snow emerging in the sky.

  Huddled in her chair, M’am Luvell sat wearing only a silk slip, smoking her pipe. The hex woman was sweating even as the temperature dropped. It made him giggle and shake his head. You couldn’t get away from the backass contradictions of this town.