“Wait, are we running away to hide in the mountains?”
The road was long and winding with no direction but forward. Nothing but endless trees all around us. Damon sat back and relaxed, sending me a lazy smile. “Not yet, honey baby,” he said. “That’s a last resort. Things are still getting better.”
“Did you sleep last night?”
He reached over to stroke my hair and rub my shoulders and neck. “I never could sleep.”
Mama used to have trouble sleeping, too. “What are we looking for again? I can’t remember.” I wanted to see if his story had changed.
“The cave. Where they came from.”
“The vampires?”
“Once we find them,” he continued, “we won’t have to wonder anymore. We’ll know who we are. What we are. We might even live with them.”
Now I really was worried. I hadn’t truly realized what he was after. I’d been living on the periphery of his obsession. “You want to live with vampires?”
“Don’t you?” he said with a baffled laugh.
I guess I wasn’t completely over my disappointment, because my belligerent side began to rise to the surface. “We already were. Chester and Bella and Verna Jarvis. Remember? They’re all vampires.”
“They were bitten by a vampire,” he said, frowning at me. “These are the real thing. There’s a secret, hidden village where they all live.”
“I thought they lived in caves.”
“The cave leads to the portal.”
Now I frowned at him. “They must have been dangerous if Gram and everybody wanted to leave.”
“I don’t know,” he said seriously. “We’ll see.”
“They’re probably not there anymore.”
“They’re here,” he said, training his eyes forward, “I can feel them. I’m a compass needle homing in. I’m a coonhound, I can smell ‘em. I’m god.”
Immediately, he squeezed my knee and laughed apologetically. “Sorry, that just shot right out of my mouth. That was the crazy guy. I’m hearing voices again.”
I patted his thigh. “It’s okay. Do we have enough gas?”
He relaxed his shoulders and smiled at me. “Yep. Filled up. We’re good. We’re perfect.”
That was good because I didn’t like the look of this never-ending road. We were all alone miles from anywhere, probably just a few turns away from being lost. For the first time in my life, I wished for a cell phone, though it probably wouldn’t have worked out here.
“I know exactly where we are,” Damon said.
I looked at him and decided he could read my mind, sometimes. He was, without a doubt, my soul mate.
Suddenly, the road looked beautiful, magical and mysterious. I held my new husband’s hand, leaned my shoulder against his, and watched the scenery.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt truly free and alone, without Mama riding on my back. But she couldn’t find me here. No matter how hard she looked, she would never find me way out here. I’d escaped her, for awhile.
“I hope it’s a nice little town,” I said, thinking aloud, “with friendly people and pretty farmhouses and steeples and shops. I hope they only left because they wanted to see more of the world.”
Damon squeezed my hand. “It will be. I have a cabin out here, overlooking a valley. Our cabin. The hidden village sits in the valley, where our people live. We’ll never be strange again.” He lifted my hand and gave my knuckles a soft kiss. “We’ll never be alone again.”
“That sounds nice,” I said, deciding to go along with him. I couldn’t do much else.
We topped a hill and came to the end of the road. We could go right or left. Both ways looked the same, endless forest and mountains.
Damon mumbled to himself the directions he’d learned from the map, and decided to turn left. We were off again, moving down a road that looked exactly like the one we’d left behind.
This was how people got lost.
We drove for a long time and I couldn’t pick up anything but static on the radio. I didn’t want to listen to the Bee Gees. We were way too far from civilization. So I gave up and sat back, trying to be patient by bobbing in my seat.
“You need to drink,” Damon said, nodding at my nervousness.
I stopped moving to look at him. “Why aren’t you bouncing?” My pulse suddenly slowed. “Did you… while I was asleep?”
Damon frowned hard at me, as if I’d accused him of kicking a puppy.
I checked myself over for a fresh wound, but couldn’t find one that looked recent. “Well, did you?”
He turned his head back to the road, his eyes still wild and uncertain. He couldn’t remember.
I didn’t want to turn this trip into a drag. I just wanted to relax. So I turned in my seat and stared at the passing scenery.
“Look,” Damon finally said. “Up ahead.”
We were getting close to somewhere. Alongside the road, mobile homes began to appear here and there. People. Civilization.
I sat up straight, anxiously scanning for signs of a town. Finally, after driving a few more miles on, I saw a steeple up ahead.
My happy moment quickly vanished, though. We had found Pine Hollow, but we were decades too late. The town was gone. All that remained was a severely dilapidated church and overgrown cemetery.
Damon drove on a ways just to be sure, but soon turned back. We’d already found what we were looking for.
To my mind, that was that, and I was ready to head back home. But Damon wasn’t so easily deterred.
We stopped at the church and got out to see what we could find. Damon kept an alert expression as he climbed out of the car and began to explore.
I found the old photo of Gram and her friends as kids from Damon’s bag in the backseat and then walked up to see if this church might be the same building where they’d stood so long ago. I couldn’t be sure. The buildings were similar. Small, narrow, with one door in front, no windows. I tried to imagine this old gray church standing tall, painted white. There was a narrow porch in the photo, but none on this building. Though, the church was so rundown it might have had a porch once. The door was a couple of feet off the ground with no steps up. I couldn’t see the steeple in the picture for comparison.
I gave up and went to find Damon. He was slogging through waist-high weeds to look at headstones.
“What are you looking for?” I called as I carefully maneuvered forward, trying not to step on any fallen stones.
He pointed to a stone and smiled. “1781.”
“Yeah. Interesting,” I said, deciding to stop and wait.
“Oh, never mind,” he said, kneeling down for a better look. “Died 1848.”
“What are you looking for?” I asked again.
He stood and rested his hands on his hips, frowning around at the neglected boneyard. “Names.” He shook his head and started back. “This isn’t Pine Hollow. We took a wrong turn somewhere.”
I wanted to find a phone and call Chester, to get directions or at least find out if the town still existed. I wanted to get something done so we could go home.
“I was born in 1781,” Damon said as he joined me at the entrance and turned back to look over the landscape.
“Cool,” I said and looked around. “Well, we might as well go.”
But Damon set off to inspect the crumbling old church. I wandered back toward the car then nearly jumped a mile high when a voice yelled in my ear:
THEY’RE DEAD. THEY’RE ALL DEAD. EVERYONE IS DEAD!
I quickly looked around to see if anyone was around, maybe yelling at us. We were alone. My hands started tingling and I closed my eyes. I really was hearing voices. No, this will not happen, I told myself. I will not let this happen.
I’d decided I had another ten years before insanity started dragging me down, and I wanted my ten years. I needed them, to take care of Damon and Mama. I needed them because I was terrified of being as doomed as they were.
I opened my eyes and Damon was s
tanding there, staring at me.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said as lightly as I could. “Are you done?”
He nodded, but continued to eye me suspiciously. “You heard the voice again.”
“Oh no, I was just thinking.” I didn’t want to admit what terrified me to the marrow of my bones. I wanted to block it all out and pretend it wasn’t happening.
Damon gave my arm a reassuring pat. “You’re fine. Let’s get out of here.”
Once in the car, though, Damon sat wringing the steering wheel.
“What do we do now?” I asked.
“We need to hurry.” He looked around with glazed eyes. The fear in his eyes broke my heart. I rubbed his back and tried to reason with him, hoping that would calm him.
“I think they moved away because the town died. We know by 1959 they were all in Knoxville. Nothing was left here so they moved away looking for work.”
He shook his head at me, not really listening. “Somebody lives around here,” he said. “Somebody who knows.”
Our journey might never end, I realized. I should have kept my mouth shut.
***
We found an old, gray farmhouse set on a hill off the road. I didn’t like the look of it, frankly. Generations of forgotten debris cluttered the patchy yard, pushing up against the house. Whoever lived here had called this home for quite some time. And probably weren’t used to strangers pulling up.
Hounds came to harass us, woofing and howling a chorus, then a heavyset man wearing a tight red t-shirt and baggy jeans stepped out the screen door. His hair was black, he had a full black beard, and he squinted at us, making no move to leave the porch.
Damon honked the horn and the man slowly took the steps and came toward us. He yelled and kicked dirt at his dogs to get them off us.
Damon rolled down his window. The man wasn’t much older than me, I saw when he came close.
“Y’all lost?” he asked. “Or selling something?”
“The first one,” Damon said. He thumbed in my direction. “We’re trying to find her granny’s old house. It’s up here somewheres.”
“Cool car.” The man leaned over to see me then rested against the door. “What’s the name?”
“Elizabeth Sullivan.”
I almost corrected him, then remembered my grandmother had once been a Sullivan. It still bugged me how little I’d known about my gram. I hadn’t even known her maiden name until Aunt Cynthia had told me.
“There used to be Sullivans around here, but not none now that I know of right off,” the man said. “You never been up here?” he asked me.
I shook my head.
“The house looks a lot like yours,” Damon said. “But with a big weeping willow out front.”
I gave Damon’s arm a slap, wondering how he knew that. I didn’t even know that. But he ignored me.
The man nodded and pointed to the distance. “You go on up the road a couple miles and you’ll hit Pikewood. Might be there you’re looking for instead. But I’m the wrong person to be asking.” He turned and yelled at the house. “Hey! Get Pawpaw out here.” He turned back to us. “He’s lived here his whole life.”
I couldn’t see who he was yelling to, but in a minute, an old man stepped outside, closely followed by several kids of varying ages running out to see who was visiting.
Pawpaw was an older version of the young man in red. He was also heavyset but with white hair and a thick white beard. He wore traditional overalls with brown boots and kept his hands in his loose pockets. My heart rate sped up when I noticed the outline of a handgun in one of those pockets. I hoped the gun was for precaution only.
While Damon talked to the grown-ups, I sat and smiled at the kids who were flattening their noses and lips up against my window and making funny faces.
A woman opened the screen door enough to yell at the kids and they ran away. So I turned to hear the conversation.
“Now I knew a ‘lizabeth Sullivan, but she passed back in the fifties,” Pawpaw said, picking his teeth with a wet toothpick.
“Around when? Fifty-nine?”
The old man looked up, thinking. “Mighta been around then. That was a long ol’ time ago, son. She was an old lady gave piano lessons and substituted at the school sometimes.”
Damon sat back, annoyed, but kept his wrist dangling over the steering wheel, showing no interest in leaving. I leaned across him. “We’re looking for a town called Pine Hollow.”
They both frowned and shook their heads. “You ain’t got a map?” Pawpaw asked.
“It’s not on the map,” Damon said. He tapped my knee. “Get the pictures.”
I reached for his bag in the backseat and handed him the envelope of pictures. He found the black and white one when Gram and her friends were kids and handed it to Pawpaw.
“What about Elliot Jenkins and Chester Brewer?” Damon asked. “Verna Jarvis? Have you ever heard of them?”
“Don’t ring a bell.” Pawpaw tapped the photo vigorously. “But this here takes me back to a time. I remember each and every one like my own brothers and sisters. We was in school together and there weren’t many of us out here then, so those you knew you knew right well. This here was our school. Gone now.” He looked to the back of the picture. “Pine Hollow. Now I know what you mean. That was the name of the old road they all lived on. But it’s nothing out there now. A bit of rubble after the fire.”
Damon’s knee began to bob in excitement.
But Pawpaw had the opposite reaction. He turned solemn, moisture coming to his eyes as he stared down at the picture. He looked up at us, Damon, then me, and handed back the photo.
“You’re ‘bout fifty years too late, kids. Sorry to say. They was all lost, all eleven of ‘em, when fire swept through the night of the big storm. 1958. That’s when it was. Nine adults and two baby kids.” He pointed over his shoulder with his thumb. “I remember seeing the flames from right there on that porch in the middle of the night. We all went out, tried to help, but it weren’t nothing doing.”
“Their houses burned down?” I asked, trying to keep up. It sounded like he was saying my grandmother and Chester and Bella and Mrs. Jarvis and the rest had died that night. Fifty-five years ago. Suddenly, the voice shouting in my head that everyone was dead, seem to take on a vital significance.
Pawpaw nodded and pointed to the distance. “They all lived down in the hollow over yonder. One fire set the other and so on. Awful lightning that night.”
Damon handed back the photo. “What were their names? Maybe we’ve got the wrong people.”
Pawpaw started naming off the kids in the photo, people I’d known my whole life. When he got to my grammy, he called her Ellen Stevens. Chester was Charles Bowers and Bella was his wife, Mirabelle Morris. Verna Jarvis was Vivian Davis, Corky was Jerry Tomasson, and finally Damon’s grandfather, Elliot Jenkins, was David Jennings.
“’Course,” Pawpaw said, “by the time of the fires they was all grown and mostly married up. All got took. Worst was the babies. Jerry and his wife had a baby boy, and Ellie and Harry had a baby girl. Brought the town down, losing so many all at once. Was like the war all over again, some said. Tore me up, to be sure, for they was all good friends of mine. We all played down at the creek as kids. Best times, those were.” He backed up as if tired of this conversation, and the trip through his past we’d caused him. “Wish I could be more help.”
“Good luck,” the younger man said and they walked away, leaving us there, stunned.
Or, at least I was stunned. Damon was rejuvenated. “Believe me now?” he said as he backed out.
“Believe what? I’m not sure what just happened.”
Damon backed out to the main road, slowed just enough to put the car in drive, and then sped off again. “They had to hide who they were. What they were. They burned their houses down, moved to Knoxville, and changed their names. Somebody must have found out and they were forced to leave.” He looked at me and laughed as if
we shared a private joke. “David Jennings.”
“You must have been named after him.”
Damon nodded, slowing as we came up to a side road. “Almost makes me wish I hadn’t changed my name. Not quite though. I never liked being called Davy. But the Jennings name? I thought I’d made it up. I must have heard Granddad talking about it or something when I was little and it stuck in my head.”
“I guess,” I said, distracted when Damon turned off on an isolated road. “What are you doing?”
“It was probably down here.”
“What was?”
“Where they lived.”
“What’s the point? The houses are gone.”
“I need to see.”
Fine. I sat back and waited, staring out at the trees trying to digest all the new information. If Pawpaw was right, and the people in the picture had been born with different names, then I wasn’t even who I thought I was. Grampa Harvey had been Harold Bosch. I didn’t want to believe it, but the coincidence was startling, and upsetting. They’d all chosen names close to their own real names. Bosch had become Baushke, Bowers had become Brewer, Davis to Jarvis, Jennings to Jenkins. Probably to make it easier to remember. Even their first names were similar. It seemed like too much of a coincidence to ignore. Damon had inadvertently reclaimed his family name, but my family name was lost forever. Not that I could really complain. Until recently, I hadn’t even cared about the family history.
Still, I was upset about it. The old folks had been lying about everything, even more than I’d thought. And Damon was right. There was a mystery going on. Something bad had happened. And I was beginning to put the pieces together.
They’d been criminals, murderers, possibly even identity thieves.
They’d killed a man, cut off his hand and then morbidly put it in a box. They’d burned down their houses and moved away, changed their names and started over. A life based on lies. Only three remained, and I felt they owed me an explanation. I spent my days with two of them. I entrusted my mother to Mrs. Jarvis, or Davis, or whoever, while I was gone during those days. Chester was lying to the IRS, paying taxes under a false name.
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