by Ninie Hammon
He did need to sit down, though, so he opted to ease his old bones down on an upturned can that’d been left beside the Dollar Store when somebody cleaned out their truck. It’d likely held drywall mud. He reached down and scratched Dog under the chin and the old dog would have sat there between his knees getting his chin scratched until the Second Coming if Pete’d keep scratchin’. He told the dog to sit. It didn’t. It lay down at his feet, though, which was just as good and he couldn’t rightly expect the dog to obey commands when he hadn’t never bothered to train him. But why should an old dog train another old dog to do new tricks? Seemed like a waste of time all around.
“You want to tell me now what’s going on here?” he asked the dog, who looked up hopefully when he spoke, but didn’t bother to get to its feet when it didn’t appear a chin scratching was forthcoming. “‘Cause I sure as Jackson don’t know.”
Sitting still like this, thinking, the events of the morning got even more bizarre in his head, and instead of puzzling out what might have happened, he found himself getting all tied in knots inside over the impossibility of any reasonable explanation.
He hadn’t opted to go hauling butt out to the county line with the rest of them for a couple reasons. Oh, there was enough room in the van, but he couldn’t have took Dog along. He’d only taken the dog riding in a vehicle once and he got car sick. He couldn’t leave him tied up at the Dollar General Store, either, because he suspected the dog only submitted to the collar and lead to be polite, that the animal could escape either or both at will.
Mostly, he’d stayed because he had that uneasy feeling that whatever was happening here, it wasn’t over. Best guess was, it was just startin’. And if that was the case, somebody else was likely to show up in that bus shelter out of nowhere and Pete had hung back here because it wouldn’t be a good idea for somebody to show up without nobody around to see to them.
Oh, he couldn’t minister to them like Sam could, and he wouldn’t try — because he had neither the skill nor the inclination. He was grateful he couldn’t smell the stink. Still, the wrenching sounds had forced him to clamp an iron grip on his own diaphragm so it wouldn’t involuntarily join in the fun and games.
But he could be here, could use the water hose if he needed, could maybe make whoever it was understand that they wasn’t crazy.
Chapter Eighteen
Nobody said anything. Not a word. As E.J. piloted the van down the winding mountain roads, it was as silent as a tomb inside. And after a little while, the silence was so solid it would have taken tremendous effort to break it. You’d have to hack into it with an ice pick and Sam didn’t have the energy. Apparently, nobody else did either.
Charlie sat up front, riding shotgun with Merrie in her lap.
Sam sat in the seat behind them with Abby curled up against her, crying softly. She had never stopped crying. Just like Liam’s nose had never quite quit bleeding. He was sitting on the other side of Abby and he kept swiping at the slow dribble down his lip with his shirt sleeve.
Chai and his mother and Fish sat behind them. Fish was humming some song with a haunting melody, not loud enough to be obnoxious and his voice was a deep melodious baritone so it wasn’t unpleasant. But the melody eluded Sam and trying to place what the song was had begun to get on her nerves. Like there was so much going on in her mind and her emotions, just that one little extra thing—
“Put a sock in it,” Viola told Fish and he stopped singing, quietly whispering the words to the Jabberwock poem instead. Its nonsense syllables became white noise that was somehow soothing.
“… brillig … gyre and gimble … vorpal sword went snicker-snack …”
Maybe the others were taking this time of communal solitude to order their thoughts, to examine sequentially what had happened in the past two hours, to begin formulating explanations or at the very least eliminating possibilities as they tried to puzzle it all out.
Not Sam. She just sat there, holding Abby against her like a lost child. Trying very hard not to think anything at all.
She’d spent a fairly pleasant minute or two floating on a barge down Denial River, imagining that she was going to wake up in her bed to the sound of Rusty banging around in the kitchen, ostensibly because he was going to fix his own breakfast but in reality trying to wake her up so she’d get up and do it for him. Saturday mornings were off days for them both. They always slept in as late as they could — her twelve-year-old had definitely inherited his mother’s adoration of the human state of slumber. Theirs was a comfortable mother-son relationship where she didn’t descend to the level of being his pal. He had plenty of friends and only one mother. But she always hung a little low on the branch of authority and he was such a good kid he’d never taken advantage of it. They were close, tight. If the lack of a father figure had affected him detrimentally, she couldn’t see it.
But denial was hard to maintain with Abby sobbing beside her and the weight of silence from the others heavy in the air.
Of course, this couldn’t possibly be happening. But it was. Her coal miner father had raised all his children to be realists. It was what it was. Worse than useless, it was counterproductive to try to force reality into the shape of your own presuppositions about the way the world operated.
She coughed to cover up a bleat of inappropriate laughter. Maybe if she’d been one of them, one of the people who had suffered varying degrees of physical trauma, it would be easier to accept the unacceptable. But being merely a bystander to the carnage, no matter how closely she had observed impossible events occur, she still got stung every now and then with an urge to laugh at the absurdity of it.
People don’t just appear out of nowhere.
Right. And you know that how?
Because it’s never happened before.
And that’s a valid argument — it’s not happening now because it’s never happened before?
What did that do to your interpretation of reality, your view of how the world operated and the functioning of the universe?
She realized that she was doing what she’d said she absolutely wasn’t going to do — try to puzzle it out. But the human mind was like a dog with a bone when it came to conundrums. Somewhere in human hardwiring there existed the need to know — a compulsion to know — to understand, to figure out.
Where was Charlie’s car?
Where was Liam’s cruiser and Viola’s truck?
Those were physical objects that objectively existed … somewhere. What was it her grandmother responded when she couldn’t find what she was looking for: everything has to be somewhere. Simplistic as that sounded, it was a ground zero statement of the nature of the universe. Everything had to be somewhere. So where were their cars? Where was Abby’s beat-up old truck? And the onesies she’d bought in the Dollar General Store. She’s mumbled that they’d been on the front seat beside her. What happened to them? And the diapers she’d gotten at her sister’s. And Charlie’s purse? Did Malachi show up with his rifle because he’d had it in his hand when he hit the Jabberwock?
And was it just people who got channeled, transported, whatever-ed? If Viola’d taken her cat for a joyride, or Charlie’d brought along her pet monkey? Would those have remained with the missing vehicles? Or would they have shown up in the bus shelter in the Middle of Nowhere?
The Middle of Nowhere.
A chill went down Sam’s spine. You get used to a word or a name, and no matter how silly it is in the beginning, if you use it often enough, eventually it sounds normal. You forget that the words themselves have meaning. What if … What if the reason the people had appeared in that particular spot — among all the ba-jillions of places they could have appeared — was because the spot was “the middle of nowhere.” Literally, the middle of nowhere?
E.J. eased the van over onto the side of the road about fifty yards before the Welcome to Nowhere sign. Everyone sat where they were for a moment longer than was normal, perhaps a group reluctance to see what they were about to see and to
know what they were about to know.
“Get the lead out,” Viola said to Fish and Sam heard her slap him — on the shoulder or back … maybe on the butt. “I want you to show me this here mirror of yours.”
Chapter Nineteen
Hayley Norman got into the car, reached up and adjusted the rearview mirror, then felt around on the bottom of the seat for the handle, pulled it and let the seat slide forward.
She shouldn’t have done that!
She shouldn’t have moved them.
But she couldn’t drive the car if she couldn’t reach the accelerator and the brake. She’d just have to remember to put them back the way they were. Hayley had made a list of all the things like that she had to remember but she hadn’t thought to put the thing about the mirror and the seat position on the list.
It was a good, simple plan, but it hinged on using her mother’s car for the day without her mother knowing she’d done it. Her mother would be at the nursing home with her grandmother in Carlisle from the time Daddy dropped her off on his way to work at the church until he picked her up after work. That was more than nine hours. Hayley had plenty of time to get to Lexington and then … they said it didn’t take long, just a few minutes. Then she had to stay there for a while. But she had plenty of time. She just had to make sure her mother didn’t know she’d driven the car. And she had that all figured out. Everything was on the list.
First — drive at least ten miles under the speed limit. No more than ten miles because she’d seen on television cop shows that it was suspicious if somebody was driving too slow and she couldn’t get pulled over. Absolutely could not get pulled over.
Second. Watch out for other drivers because they’re all idiots and she absolutely could not get into a fender bender. She would park a long way from the building. The hospital complex had a gigantic parking lot and she’d park way on the back row where there weren’t any cars so she wouldn’t get a ding on her door or scratch the paint somehow.
She would get back in plenty of time so the engine wouldn’t be hot.
She would put only as much gas in the tank as she used — at that gas station in Lexington where nobody would know her. She couldn’t do anything about the mileage, but she was certain her mother had no idea what the mileage was.
They’d told her that after the procedure she needed to have somebody there to drive her home and she had assured them, oh yes, she had somebody. Her boyfriend would be there. Right. Boyfriend. He’d be there. Riiiiiiiight. But she’d had to tell them that or they wouldn’t give her the appointment. Well, she’d just tell them something had come up and he couldn’t come get her, convince them that she was fine, not woozy or groggy or anything so she could drive herself. She even had an extreme plan. If they wouldn’t let her just walk out, she’d pretend to go to that bathroom on the second floor in the Women’s Pavilion that had a door leading into it from two different hallways. She’d go in one, out the other and book it to her car. What were they going to do? Call the police? It wasn’t against the law to get up and walk out of a hospital on your own after an outpatient procedure.
Procedure.
That’s what it was. Hayley never used the A-word. Not since Sugar Bear had told her she had to get one, said the word in a cold, unemotional way like she’d only be getting her toenails clipped.
It was just a procedure.
She adjusted the side mirror and caught sight of her face and almost didn’t recognize the girl with the haunted look in her eyes, the fear written on her face. Once she got through with today, Hayley Norman would not be afraid anymore. She’d just move on, go forward from here a better and wiser human being.
She patted her purse, made sure for the umpteenth billionth time that everything was there — the envelop with the money in it and her identification. The hospital required a picture ID. She hadn’t had a driver’s license for very long so the picture was recent.
And the money.
She let out a shaky breath. Didn’t want to acknowledge that she was glad this was about to be over. It had stopped being exciting and fun to sneak around. He was no longer sexy and interesting. The older man image … it shifted in her mind. The definition was no longer “mature and confident, a man, not some teenage boy with acne.” Now, older man meant he was old. He was her father’s age and now he seemed like it. Particularly after she told him. His features had sagged, just sagged, and he had looked ancient.
She pulled the car out of the driveway and turned left on Hanover Street. Took the long way around to Lexington Road, then headed out. It wouldn’t be long now. By this time tomorrow, this would all be just a bad—
The world suddenly turned black, shiny, sparkling black and Hayley’s head filled with buzzing static.
Eight adults and one little girl walked slowly down the roadside, watching the reflection of their approach in a mirage-like shimmer in the middle of the road.
Charlie was out front, holding Merrie’s hand. She’d have made the child stay in the van but she was in no emotional shape to endure a tantrum. Yeah, okay, the little girl was spoiled.
“I see me,” Merrie cried and if Charlie hadn’t been holding tight to her hand she’d have raced ahead to the mirror.
“Well I’ll be …” Viola didn’t finish. Didn’t need to. They were all staring gap-jawed at the apparition before them.
It wasn’t really the mirror Fish had described, or the one Charlie had conjured up in her head based on his description. She thought he was claiming there was a literal mirror in the middle of the road, but that you couldn’t see what was holding it there or the edges of it. That’s not what she saw now.
It looked like a mirage, shimmering like it was undulating with heat waves in the desert. But it was clearer than a mirage. As they approached, their images were as defined as if they’d been looking into a clear pool. There was nothing “holding it” because it was a mirage, which didn’t need duct tape to affix it. And you couldn’t see the edges of it because there were no edges. It stretched across the road over the shoulder and down the embankment on the right into a puddle beside the road where a stand of cattails had grown up six feet tall.
The mirage crossed the road into the other lane, too, off the roadside there and into the trees that came down to a fence.
“Look in the background,” Sam said. Charlie did, studied it for a moment and then she got it.
E.J. saw what she was referring to and leaned/fell backward onto the hood of the van.
The mirage reflected them clearly, but it reflected nothing behind them. The background was just a mirrored image of blue sky, with a thin veneer of white clouds.
E.J. turned, went back to the van, started the engine and pulled it up ten feet or so, stopped and got back out. It didn’t matter. The van should have been parked in front of its mirror image, but it wasn’t. Nothing was reflected in the mirage except the people standing in front of it.
Liam reached down and picked up a rock and tossed it at the mirage. It landed on the highway a few feet beyond the mirage and bounced.
“Looks like it’s definitely just us,” Fish said, “just people.” He pointed up into the sky.
A flock of hundreds of starlings, a whirling kaleidoscopic of ever-changing patterns, was flying in an impossible wingtip-to-wingtip formation above them. The flock turned 180 degrees on a dime and executed a figure-eight movement that brought them swooping low over the nearby trees … and right into Beaufort County. The group stood silent for perhaps a minute, trying to absorb the implications as they watched the birds cavort back and forth across the invisible boundary,
“I don’t understand any of this,” cried Abby, hysteria close to the surface. “What is this thing? And where’s my truck? I gotta go get my baby.”
“I don’t know what this is, ma’am,” Liam said, trying to claim the role of responsibility a deputy sheriff should have had in the situation, “but I’m sure we’ll figure it out—”
“Horse hockey,” snapped Viola Tackett. �
�You figure something out when it ain’t working like it’s supposed to. You figure out what’s wrong so’s you can fix it. This here ain’t something that ain’t working right. This here is … it’s a whole new something.”
Abby straightened her back and turned on Charlie.
“What’d you do?”
Charlie was too surprised to speak.
“It was you done it. Had to be. You come from away-from-here, and soon’s you showed up everything started goin’ wrong. You messed up something,” Abby said and gestured at the mirage. “Or brought somethin’ with you.”
Ahhhh, yes. Away-From-Here. The all-encompassing description of every place that wasn’t Nowhere County. Any person from there was instantly suspect. If you couldn’t trace your lineage back three, four generations, you absolutely were not to be trusted. Most of that kind of insular tribalism had faded away, but it was the historical canvas on which all their lives had been painted. And among the people who lived deep “back in the hollers,” you didn’t have to scratch very deep to find it.
“I was born here,” Charlie said, and managed not to sound defensive. “Charlene Ryan. My mother was Sylvia Ryan — she taught ceramics classes.” She paused for a beat before pressing resolutely on. “I’m a nowhere person same as you.”
Everyone standing there had been born in Nowhere County.
Abby blew by her response, misunderstanding spreading across her face.