by Ninie Hammon
“I have a car … Mom’s car. The car the Jabberwock ate was a rental. I’ll come back in the morning if …”
Again the words died, but they were unnecessary. If the world righted itself, the three of them might not see each other at all tomorrow … or ever again, for that matter. They’d just pick up where they’d left off and go on with their lives.
If it didn’t … they’d all three be back.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Abby lay in the darkness, curled in a ball, in pain everywhere but nowhere in particular. It hadn’t worked, the last attempt to leave, to get past the county line. Buddy and Mary Jo Cawdrey had brung her out. They lived up in the holler behind her granny’s house and they was good folks and they’d been glad to give her a ride. Didn’t neither one of them get there by way of the Jabberwock, so they wasn’t sick, and Abby said she’s just going out to the line to meet Ralph, her older brother, who was gonna pick her up there.
It hadn’t been a very convincing lie but they never asked how come he was fetching her way out there, and it didn’t matter if she’d talked them into it or no. If they hadn’t took her, somebody else would have. She’d a walked if she’d had to. She’d a crawled.
The Cawdreys was smoking weed — offered her some, but she said no, that she was nursing. Or should have been.
While Buddy and Mary Jo giggled in the front seat of their little Chevy Chevette, Abby sat in the backseat readin’ what she’d wrote up in that little notepad she always carried in her hip pocket. Her promises to God. Wasn’t strictly true that she was readin’ it, not with her eyes, anyway. Her pants had got wet, had blood and vomit on them, and she’d changed into Dollar Store hospital scrubs hours ago. But when she’d tried to pull that notebook outa her wet jeans, it’d come apart in her hand. Didn’t matter. She didn’t need them pieces of paper. She could read it with her memory and with her heart. She had ever word memorized.
They all started the same way: “God, if you’ll let my baby live, I’ll …” And the biggest one of all, the most important one was she’d swore she’d take good care of Cody, that she wouldn’t never let no harm come to him. Now he was lyin’ in a bassinet in a hospital up Lexington, crying, hungry, and she wasn’t there to do for him like she’d swore she would be.
She was here, behind the bus shelter, lying in the dark, hurting everywhere, but she was glad of it. She understood that she’d had to go back through that third time so the Jabberwock could talk to her, whisper in her ear.
Hadn’t nobody seen her yet, lying all scrunched up in the shadows. They’d set up lights so bright they blinded you so you couldn’t see what was in the dark. She lay there listening to that Ryan woman, that witch, talk about her little girl.
The other reason hadn’t nobody noticed her all curled up there was because she was quiet, she wasn’t moanin’ or screamin’ or cryin’ or puking and the like. And she knew why that was, too, why she wasn’t sick. She understood everything because the Jabberwock had explained it all to her.
Somewhere in her registered a needle point of pain in the center of her skull that if she’d let herself notice it, it would have hurt so bad she’d a died right there from the hurt of it. Some other part registered that her joints hurt, her elbows and hips and knees. Ached like that time she’d sprained her ankle and it’d swole up big as a cantaloupe. Every one of her joints felt like that now, but she didn’t let herself know those things, because she’d been given a gift and if she let herself know about how her body was hurting, she couldn’t do what she had to do.
She was curled up in a fetal position because that’s the way her arms and legs was bent when she come back and she didn’t have the strength yet to uncurl herself.
Her face felt funny, numb kind of, and she couldn’t see good out her left eye. Her nose was bleedin’. Her left ear was bleeding, too. Dripping off her face and down her neck to stain the Mickey Mouse scrubs she’d changed into after she puked on what she’d been wearing. Them scrubs was wet between her legs, too. She was bleeding … there, where Cody’d come out. She’d quit bleeding there while he was still in the intensive care unit and hadn’t got her period since. They said it was ‘cause she was nursing … well, pumping. The bleedin’ there now didn’t have nothing to do with her period, though. But it wasn’t no thang.
Didn’t nothin’ matter except what the Jabberwock itself had said, a monster with eyes of flames, terrible-er than any nightmare. She liked to a died just being up close, it stinkin’ like a rotting corpse, so close she could hear it whispering to itself, all them screechy voices that tore up her insides and made her ears bleed with the sound of silent screaming.
Mostly, it talked in that monster language Fish’d used in the backseat of the van — slighy toves that gyred and gimbled in the wabe — like that. ‘Bout horror creatures — a Jubjub bird and a mome rath.
That’s why Fish knew its name, because Fish was one of them, a bandersnatch, maybe. He’d knowed what was going on all along, but didn’t matter now because she’d heard the Jabberwock say the witch from out there on the flat was why it was here. Said it’d been waiting for her, wanting her to come and play, her and the others.
And it’d stay here ‘til she paid some attention to it. Like a dog waiting for a treat. A day, a week, a month.
But Abby’s Cody wasn’t gonna wait no week for his mommy to come get him!
Then Abby’d membered what Fish had said, about cutting the Jabberwock’s head off with that sword. That vorpal sword.
That woman bein’ a witch and all, you know she had a sword. All them magical creatures had swords and staffs and capes and the like. And soon’s Abby figured that part out, she knew what to do. Abby would make that witch woman kill the Jabberwock with that sword. She would hurt that woman and that little girl of hers if she refused. She’d kill that child, if she had to. That mother didn’t deserve no child when she was keeping Abby from hers.
Abby purposed in her heart to make the witch slay the monster with flaming eyes — or die in the tryin’ of it.
“Look over here,” someone said, and she knew they’d seen her. Maybe they’d help her up, help her uncurl her arms and legs. She didn’t care if they had to break her arms to get them free, she had to stand up. She had to walk. She had to hurry. She had a long way to go and her baby boy was hungry.
Chapter Twenty-Six
When Sam pulled back into the Dollar General Store parking lot after she took Charlie home, she saw Malachi deep in conversation with Thelma Jackson and some man she couldn’t place. He was one of the Tungate boys from Solomon Hollow, she thought, had been one of the few folks who’d shown up out of curiosity, then stayed on to help out. Then Malachi turned and went into E.J.’s office.
Thelma hit her with the news as she was getting out of her car.
“Abby came back through.”
And she was dead, that’s what Sam thought. She’d got so sick she … she’d bled to death … internal bleeding or …
“Where is she?”
“We don’t know,” said the Tungate who ran the butcher shop in Foodtown … Roscoe. “She was here and then she wasn’t.”
“You mean she came back through the Jabberwock and then got up and walked away?” Sam was incredulous.
“I don’t know about the walking part,” Roscoe said. “Shape she was in, I’d have been stunned to see her stand up. But she musta because she ain’t here.”
“Tell me what—”
“About an hour ago, I seen her laying on the ground behind the bus shelter, all doubled up in a ball, looked like a pill bug. I don’t know how long she’d been a laying there, just a little thing curled up in the shadow not making a sound. Malachi was busy helping Liam load that Bennett fella into a car. That man weighs three hundred if he weighs an ounce, so Liam went along with his wife to help her get him up the front porch steps. I went to see could I help Abby but she didn’t want no help, just held up her hand, wanted me to pull her up.”
Roscoe took a breath.
“Course she was a mess, maybe had a stroke or something. Her mouth was kind of droopy on the left side and her eyelid was hanging down like. But wasn’t like she was paralyzed or nothing. She could move. Slow. But most everybody here’s been slow at first, comin’ back from it.”
Thelma tired of the snail’s-pace progress of the story.
“She stood up, said she needed to go home and would we find somebody to take her. But there was nobody here who’d have been willing take that girl home and just leave her there all by herself in the shape she was in.”
“She was bleeding bad,” Roscoe put in. “Not bad like she was gonna bleed to death or nothin’. Just bad because it was comin’ outa … lotsa places. Her nose and her ears. Even her eyes. And … other places. She needed a doctor, or you — somebody to see to her.”
Malachi came out of E.J.’s office and strode with purpose toward them. Something about his body language spelled trouble.
“She’s not there,” he said.
“She wanted to go into E.J.’s office to go to the bathroom,” Thelma said, “so she went in and she never came back out.”
“Then where is she?” Sam said, sensing there was more that Malachi wasn’t saying. “What is it — tell me.”
“I left my rifle, the one I was squirrel hunting with, behind the door in E.J.’s waiting room. She saw me put it there when we were loading up the van. Now, it’s gone.”
“What are you talking about?” Sam was totally flummoxed. ‘You’re saying this bleeding stroke victim went in there and stole your gun and … what? What for?”
Thelma spoke then. Her voice was soft, not trying to be quiet but because she didn’t have enough air to speak any louder.
“She was babbling about ‘the witch from out there on the flat.’ Most of what she said made absolutely no sense — about a monster with flaming eyes that smelled like dead bodies all mixed up with words and phrases from the Jabberwock poem.”
“Don’t know how she could have knowed them kind of words,” Roscoe interrupted.
Malachi silenced him. “Fish was quoting the poem in the van. Go on, Thelma.”
“She said the Jabberwock was the witch’s fault because it had come to play with her and the others and it would stay until it got what it wanted. And, of course a witch would have a sword, a vorpal sword — crazy nonsense like that.”
“Brain damage,” Sam whispered.
“She said she was going to force the witch to use the sword to cut off the Jabberwock’s head, kill it so she could go see her boy.”
Thelma’s voice was soft but the words were as powerful as a shout. “She said she was going to kill the witch if she refused.”
Sam’s hand flew to her mouth.
“Charlie!”
They turned in unison to look at Little Bear Mountain. Charlie’s mother’s house was on the other side.
“She couldn’t possibly climb …” Sam began but couldn’t finish. Took a breath and tried again. “It’s two miles if it’s a foot, up the side of a mountain, through the bushes, over limbs and dead trees and then back down the other side. In the dark — without a flashlight.”
“She’s got a flashlight,” Fish said. Fish had been in the background of everything that had been going on all day, couldn’t “get a ride home” because he didn’t have one. He had disappeared into the back of the Dollar General Store late in the afternoon and when Sam went to the back to get more paper towels, she smelled something like cherries. Cough syrup. Fish was curled up in a corner with a bottle, had gotten his alcohol where he could.
“I made myself a place on the floor in the back of the store and she came in the back door. So she must have gone out E.J.’s back door and come around. I asked if I could help …”
He shook his head.
“I shouldn’t have done that because I scared her, jumping out at her like I did. She cried out something, sounded like ‘Bandersnatch!’ and raised the rifle, pointed it right at me. I backed off, said I just wanted to help, that’s all. She said she didn’t need my help, then she dug around until she found a flashlight, one of the big ones with the two C batteries. She took it and the gun and went back out the way she came in.”
“We need to call Charlie, warn her,” Sam said. “Tell her to lock her doors and stay inside, not open a door for anybody.”
“Thelma, you do that,” Malachi said. He looked at Sam. “Can I borrow …?”
“No, I’m driving.” Sam slid back behind the wheel and Malachi got in beside her.
“Keep trying until she answers,” he called out to Thelma as Sam pulled out of the parking lot. “Keep calling. Tell her to run, to hide.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Charlie stood in the darkness just inside the door after Sam dropped her off, just stood there. Then realized Sam wouldn’t leave until she saw a light, so she flipped the switch. Still she stood, listening to the crunch of tires as Sam pulled out of the driveway and drove away, almost not feeling the weight of Merrie, dead to the world in her arms.
She waited for a few seconds, long enough for Sam to get far enough away from the house that she couldn’t see, then she reached over and flipped the lights back off so she could stand there in the dark, listening to the sound of silence roaring in her ears.
She and Sam had said almost nothing to each other during the ride to Charlie’s mother’s house. Both just stared out the windshield, their own thoughts imprisoning them in their own worlds, which right now were two fenced-in yards next door to each other. Each contained their own stuff that they weren’t ready yet to share, and each too full of their own stuff to have room for anybody else’s.
This was crazy. It couldn’t be happening. It didn’t happen. This was all an illusion or a hallucination or a dream she was going to wake up from, feeling Merrie’s wet kisses on her cheek and probably cry from relief that the nightmare was over.
Twilight Zone stuff like this didn’t happen to normal people. No, not normal people. Her mother’d always pointed out that “normal is just a setting on a dryer.” Ordinary, then. Ordinary people did not fly out into nowhere and get transported—
The word “transported” brought a burp of sound, maybe stifled laughter, some sound that bespoke the absurdity of it all.
She was Charlene Renee Ryan McClintock, thirty-two years old, with a birthmark shaped like a smiley face on her tush, a cesarean section scar on her belly where doctors had intervened after nineteen hours of unproductive labor and saved her little girl’s life. She had a dentist appointment next week to replace the filling that’d come out when she bit into a piece of chocolate pie — a piece of pie, for crying out loud — and if she didn’t return The Lion King to Blockbuster by five o’clock on Monday, she’d be charged a late fee, which she knew was how they made their money — late fees. And she hadn’t even watched it yet. It had sounded like something Merrie would love, an animated musical about a lion—
Her mind was ping-ponging. Frantically racing from one inane thought to another so she wouldn’t have to think about—
She let out what sounded like one of Merrie-the-Drama-Queen’s theatrical sighs. And when she drew the breath back in, there was just a whiff of … vomit.
And the whole thing slammed down around her with the clanging of the cell door in the execution chamber of a prison.
She started across the dark room toward the hallway that led to the bedroom that’d been hers when she was a little girl. That was where Merrie was sleeping. It wasn’t the smell of vomit. She was imagining that part even if the rest of it was real. She’d stripped Merrie down to her birthday suit and dressed her in new clothes at the Dollar Store — underwear, socks, shoes, everything — even though she had only been in the presence of the yuk, not dealing directly with it like the rest of them had. And she’d thrown away what the little girl’d had on, a pair of jeans and a Whitney Houston tee shirt, stained with the blood from her head wound. Charlie had loved the cute outfit — but not enough to wash it. Charl
ie was on her third, maybe her fourth set of scrubs, having tossed her own clothing, including — especially — her shoes, when they’d gotten too gross. In the spill of light from Sam’s headlights when Charlie’d crossed in front of the car, she’d noticed that the scrub shirt had a pattern of some kind — little balloons or flowers or maybe smiley faces. She hadn’t noticed it when she’d grabbed a random shirt off a hanger on a rack between the posts with M’s on them. A popcorn synapse fired. She wouldn’t let Sam pay for all the stuff they’d used today — likely every set of hospital scrubs, which would fit anybody, in the building and an uncountable number of towels and washcloths. The real hero of today’s catastrophe would be whoever volunteered to wash all the dirty stuff … if anybody did. Probably best to take it out into the parking lot and burn it. Lunch and dinner, too, what little their unsettled stomachs would tolerate — peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, Vienna sausage, chips and, of course, Ding Dongs, HoHo’s, Moon Pies and soft drinks. And paper goods — paper towels and paper cups and bottled water and … the list was huge. Everybody’d just taken what they needed. That was going to be quite a bill … but that was a thought for another day.
“Ouch!” she cried, hopping around on one foot after she banged her shin painfully on the coffee table.
There was a full moon but the curtains were drawn so she might as well have been in an oil drum, and she wasn’t familiar enough with the current placement of the current furniture in her mother’s house to negotiate a trip across the living room in the dark. She should have left the light on.
Making it to the hallway without further mishap, she felt along the wall for the light switch and turned it on, went all the way to the end, carrying Merrie into the bedroom on the front of the house she’d inherited years ago from her older sister, Mallory. Who’d married that idiot who fancied himself a boat captain and they’d taken Mama out—