“Henry, what’d I tell you about pesterin’ our customers?”
Diane leaned over the counter, one finger held out in a scolding manner like a school teacher, and Henry recoiled as if he’d been shot. Chin down, he offered Felix a brief wink before turning around to face her.
“I’s just makin’ po-lite conversation, Diane. I ain’t done nothin’ to bother this nice man. Ain’t that right, bubba?”
Felix straightened up in his seat and flashed the waitress a smile. “He ain’t done nothin’, ma’am.”
His sarcastic slip into their accent went unnoticed. Diane’s scolding expression softened a little, but not enough to put the old drunk at ease. She stared at them a second more before turning back to the register, prompting Henry to turn back around. Felix, however, still had a perfect view of the waitress, and he could see she was watching from the corner of her eye. The way she tucked her hair behind her ear was another tell that set off an alarm in his mind. What the hell is going on here?
Felix leaned forward and looked up at Henry. “After my meal. Around the corner.”
Henry said nothing, only nodded in agreement as he retreated to exit the diner. As soon as he was out of the building, Diane brought over a tray of food and set it down on the table. Felix offered her a smile and thanked her.
“No problem, hon. Say, don’t you mind that old drunk. He ain’t done nothin’ but heckle everybody—especially tourists like yourself.”
“He wasn’t bothering me,” Felix said. “But I appreciate your concern.”
Diane smiled. She was missing a few of her lower teeth. “You just let me know if there’s anything else I can do for ya, hon.”
Felix thanked her again and waited for her to return to the counter before digging into his food. Even then he couldn’t get the old man’s worried face out of his head or those words out of his mind. Tell ya what you need to know so’s you can tell everyone else. He’d promised Larry an interview one way or another, but from the sound of things, something bigger had just fallen into his lap.
***
“Over here, boy.”
Felix almost missed him. Henry leaned against a dusty wall of the adjacent building. Shadows clung to him like a cloak in the failing daylight, and Felix nearly jumped out of his shoes when the old man beckoned to him.
“Swig?” Henry held out a small bottle, sloshing the pale amber liquid within. “Ya might need it before I’m done tellin’ what I got to tell ya.”
“No thanks,” Felix said, although he was certainly tempted by the offer. His mouth watered a little. “I quit a long time ago.”
“Suit yerself,” Henry said, tipping back the bottle. He finished it off in four hard gulps. “I heard fallin’ off the wagon is too goddamn easy, so I never bothered climbin’ on it.”
Felix stepped back and pressed himself against the opposite wall. He watched the old man, wondering if his warning to “git” out of town earlier was just the ramblings of a liquor-soaked mind, but the urgency in Henry’s voice—combined with the way that waitress had been watching them—tickled the right nerves in the back of his head. He was a journalist, after all. Or used to be. These days he wondered about that.
A breeze picked up around them, filling his nose with that foul pig smell. He grimaced.
Henry scratched his beard and sniffed the air. “You git used to it, that stink. Wasn’t always like that, though. Dalton used to be a great town, but it ain’t been the same since they shut down the mine.”
Felix nodded. “You could say that about any coal mining town. What makes this shit hole any different?”
The old drunk crouched against the wall, sighing as his knees popped. He lowered his head, chin to chest, and spoke barely above a whisper. “They found somethin’ down in that mine. You won’t find nothin’ about that in no newspaper, no sir. They’ll tell ya the coal vein dried up, but that ain’t the truth. I should know, bubba. I was down there when they found it.”
“What do you mean?” Felix stepped forward and knelt beside him. “What did you find down there?”
Henry looked up at him and wiped tears from his eyes. Booze or not, Felix knew that desperate look. He’d seen it in the mirror before, in the days following his discovery of Helen’s lies. What the old man said next sent a chill racing all the way up his spine.
“Pure evil,” Henry sobbed. That icy feeling sank its teeth into the back of Felix’s neck and wouldn’t let go. “We found the devil down in that hole, and damned if we didn’t bring him right back up the shaft with us.” He wiped his nose on his sleeve. “Three of us broke into that room down at the bottom of the mine—me and Tommy Wilkins and Jarvis Hennigan, all of us were there, saw the room all laid out like an altar with that little stone figure in the middle.”
“Stone figure?”
“Yessir,” Henry snorted, “in the shape of a baby, with two nuggets of coal for eyes and smellin’ like Satan’s asshole. We’d never seen nothin’ like it. Maggie’s daddy Zachary Dalton even come down to the mine that day to see what we’d found, and he took it home for his daughter and . . . and . . . ”
Henry’s blubbering got in the way of his words, devolving into a series of hard, drawn out sobs. Felix stared at the crying man, allowing his words to sink in while the silence of the town crept between them like a looming shadow. A light breeze swept down the alleyway, lifting the scent of liquor to new heights above that ever-present pig stench, and his mouth watered some more. He’s drunk, Felix thought. I’m wasting my time with the town drunk.
He knew what the drink could do to a man, and the longer he sat watching Henry cry, the more he saw a reflection of himself. How long had he been sober now? Five years? Six? Time didn’t matter anymore in that respect; he was dry and planned on staying that way. He swallowed back the saliva accumulating in his mouth and climbed to his feet.
“Mister, I appreciate you taking the time to talk with me, but I’m a journalist, not a novelist. I think maybe you’ve had too much of the old rotgut—”
Henry lashed out, gripping Felix’s ankle. “Now you lissen ‘ere, city boy. Mayhap I like to drink, but I know’d what I saw that day. That thing we found swallered this town, sucked the life right out of it.” He met Felix’s annoyed gaze and frowned. “It used Miss Maggie, used her like a puppet. It took our kids just like it took her soul. Replaced ‘em with those infernal dolls. There ain’t been no kids in this town since they dug up that demon in the mine. It’s been leechin’ from us ever since. Ain’t you wondered why everyone’s so old here, boy?”
“This is insane. You’re drunk, old man. If you know what’s best for you, find an AA meeting and stick with it.”
Felix kicked away Henry’s hand and started for his car. Henry rose to his feet and struggled to keep his balance. He braced one hand against the wall to steady himself.
“If ya don’t believe me, boy, you get in that fancy car of yers and drive out to First Baptist on Maple. Take a peek inside and then tell me if I’m just a poor-ass drunkard.” Henry’s warning broke up into a fit of laughter. “You go right ahead, young’un. You’ll see, and then you can go drive back to the city and write with yer fancy words. Write about how old drunk Henry Watson was right. Go on, city boy. You go on and git!”
Felix picked up his pace, exiting the alley as fast as he could. The old man was obviously crazy, his voice cracking as it switched between laughs and cries. A stone idol down in the mine? Some buried evil that had enveloped the town and taken the children? Felix scoffed. If it weren’t for the old man’s ignorant speech, Felix might have figured Henry had just read too many books.
Except the old bastard probably can’t read. Not well, anyway.
He unlocked the rental car, climbed in, and started the engine. He was on the verge of doing a U-turn in the street and hauling ass back to the Dalton R&R when movement caught his eye. He looked over to his right, toward the large picture window of the diner. Sitting at the nearest booth were those same three dolls as before, their fa
ces pressed against the glass, dark eyes staring with a kind of cold anxiety.
“That’s not right,” he whispered, remembering how they were just an hour before when he’d first walked in. He saw them clearly in his head, sitting with their elbows on the table in secret, conspiring poses. They could have been young children whispering to one another if not for their pale skin and dark eyes.
And yet there they were with their heads turned, staring in accusation while he sat in the car, trembling.
“The old man’s crazy,” he said aloud, listening for some reassurance in his voice, but the light tremble of his words suggested otherwise. He had seen actual children since his arrival, hadn’t he? What about the old man and the little boy coming out of the drugstore? What about the children sitting with their families at the diner earlier that afternoon? They were kids, weren’t they?
Of course they were, he thought, remembering the way they had moved on their own, staring at him with—
A cold hand curled its fingers around his gut and squeezed as Henry Watson’s voice echoed in his skull: Two nuggets of coal for eyes.
“What are you doing, Felix?” Helen’s words were out of his mouth before he could stop them. Even in his own voice, he could hear her tired disdain and frustration, and if he concentrated hard enough, he could see her standing in the doorway of their bedroom, the drying tears on her cheeks preserved forever in memory.
“What I have to,” he whispered, snapping himself from that reverie.
Felix Proust sucked in his breath and put the car in gear, cursing his promise to Larry. He drove two blocks, flipped on his turn signal, and turned onto Maple Street.
***
First Baptist sat at the top of a small hill removed from the rest of the town. The small building stood like an aging sentinel, its days of jubilation and brimstone long silenced by an apparent catastrophe the magnitude of which Felix could only imagine. And imagine he did, his mind working overtime with the old drunk’s taunts and warnings. He had to hand it to the guy: Henry sure knew how to pique a man’s curiosity.
The church’s windows were boarded up with thin, rotting sheets of plywood that bore scars of the elements. Even the steeple leaned to one side as though drooping in defeat. The late afternoon sun sank behind the mountains, casting the hillside in a thick shadow, and a stiff breeze rustled the tall grass along the sidewalk.
Felix held out his cell phone, illuminating the concrete steps as he walked toward the church’s double-doors. He stopped when he saw the entrance barred with a series of two-by-fours, each corner nailed to the door frame. Written across the center board was a single word in what might have been a child’s scrawl: HERETICS.
“That’s inviting,” he muttered, almost chuckling to himself. The nagging question of Why kept nipping at the back of his mind. Why would someone do this? Why board up the only church in town? Why had the people of Dalton lost their faith?
Helen’s voice piped up in his head: Plenty of reasons, but so far all you’ve got to go on are the words of a drunk. Ironic, isn’t it?
“Fuck off, Helen.” Felix sniffed to clear his nose, but when he did he caught a whiff of something foul in the air. This wasn’t just the smell of pig shit—he was getting used to that, believe it or not—but something far more rank. Something vile. And whatever it was, it wafted from beyond those doors.
Heretics, he thought. What would a town of religious zealots do to heretics?
His imagination ran rampant with possibilities, leading him back to college days spent learning about the Spanish Inquisition, but he forced those thoughts from his mind. Keep your focus, he told himself. You owe Larry one. But he didn’t just owe Larry one; he owed Larry several. The AA meetings gave him a lot of perspective, and his debt of gratitude to Larry Malone was just one of many things which Felix now saw with perfect clarity. This was more than just an assignment; this was a debt to be paid.
So put your big boy pants on, he heard Larry say, and go get that story.
Felix sniffed the air again, ignoring the reeking miasma surrounding First Baptist. He approached the door and pulled at one of the boards with hope that it was rotted through, but he had no such luck. The two-by-four resisted his force, seeming to mock him with its childish scrawl.
He held out his cell phone, illuminating his way through the tall grass around the side of the building. The windows were also nailed shut, but at the far end he spied an opening. One of the slats had rotted through, hanging limp like a dead limb. Felix reached out, pressing his fingers into the wood, and frowned when they sank into the pulp. He wondered how long the church had been closed.
Felix reached through the opening, braced his elbow against the window pane and his hand against the board, and gave a single, forceful push. The rotted beam gave little resistance, easing its way free of the nails holding it in place before snapping in two. The pulpy remains collapsed inward.
The stench from within hit him like a sucker punch, twisting his churning guts inside out until he was ready to vomit, but all that came was a single dry heave. He spat, wiped his mouth, and clutched his tie against his nose to hold back the stink. Shaking, Felix lifted up his cell phone and peered inside.
A number of emotions went through his mind in the span of seconds which followed, each more unsettling than the last, seemingly emptying his soul with each lingering moment until there was nothing left but the hollowed husk of a frightened man.
His eyes were playing tricks on him. Surely those shapes piled up on the floor weren’t what he thought they were. No, they couldn’t be. They shouldn’t be. Perhaps it was the poor lighting. Yes, that had to be the cause of his confusion—the dim glow of his cell phone combined with the moonlight filtering through the cracks of the boarded windows were making those shapes on the floor look like the remains of children.
An oppressive heat rose up in his chest, and he realized he’d been holding his breath. He exhaled, unable to look away from the pile of things that were most certainly not children but also unable to reconcile what that monstrous amalgamation of shapes might otherwise be. He panned the light over a mound that reached as high as the ceiling, refusing to believe those bones belonged to children, some of them merely infants, little bundles of putrescent joy that were branded as heretics by Miss Maggie’s coal-eyed stone idol.
It used Miss Maggie, used her like a puppet. It took our kids just like it took her soul.
Felix finally recoiled from the window, and this time his dinner shot up from his stomach. He doubled over, retching until there was nothing in his guts left to give, and he teetered backward away from the defiled tomb that was Dalton’s First Baptist.
He staggered back to his car in a daze, feeling as though all he’d seen in that one-room church had somehow sucked away his last ounce of energy. His stomach ached, but his heart hurt worse. He felt as though someone had punched a hole through his chest and ripped that vital muscle right out of him. How could anyone do that to all those children?
His hands were shaking so badly that he had a hard time putting the key in the ignition.
“Get a grip on yourself,” he said, staring into the rearview. He slicked his hair back and wiped his mouth. “You made it through the DTs, you can make it through this.”
He steadied his hand and started the car. Act casual, he thought. Just get back to the motel, get your things, and get the hell out of here.
But as he turned off Maple and back onto Main, Felix found that he had a hard time driving the speed limit.
***
“Larry, goddammit.” Felix pressed the phone to his ear and slammed the door to his room. Larry’s voicemail message played back in his ear. The beep chimed, signaling his time to speak, but he found his words were blocked by the lump in his throat. He hung up, chewing his lower lip while frantically searching the stale motel room. His suitcase sat open on the bed, and some of his clothes lay in a pile beside it.
Those familiar fingers curled around his gut once again. He star
ed at the pile of clothing while his fingers fumbled with the phone. He dialed Larry again. Three rings. Four. Pick up, Larry. Don’t do this to me now.
Heart pounding, Felix walked to the edge of the bed with the phone to his ear and began shoving his clothes back into his suitcase. He tore off his tie and tossed it into the suitcase as well, zipping everything up with his free hand while the call went to voicemail.
Beep.
“Larry,” Felix began, cradling the phone against his ear with his shoulder. He struggled to wrap the zipper all the way around the suitcase. “This is going to sound really batshit, but I’m pulling the plug on this article. I’m checking out and getting back on the highway to Charleston, and I’m going to call the cops when I do. Something’s really wrong here, man. There’s a church in town full of—”
Three short, quick knocks rapped at the door. Felix paused as the blood in his veins went ice cold. He lowered his voice.
“Look, I’m sorry, I know you trusted me on this but I need you to understand I am not okay here. Something is wrong with this place, and if I don’t leave, I’m afraid something is going to happen to me. Call me back when you get this.”
He ended the call and set the phone on the nightstand, watching the door rattle as the knocks continued, growing heavier with each beat.
“Mr. Proust?”
Felix closed his eyes as the adrenaline left him feeling lightheaded. He shook his head, embarrassed by his skittishness, and cleared his throat.
“Yeah, Jerry?”
“Everything okay in there?”
He walked over and opened the door. The short old man peered up at him from behind a pair of thick glasses, his lower lip tucked inward. The expression gave his whole face a concave look.
“I saw ya run by the office in a hurry and the way you slammed the door plum shook the whole building.”
Felix made himself smile. “Sorry, Jerry. I’m just in a hurry. I’ll be checking out tonight.”
“Is that so? Huh. Ain’t that a shame. Yes sir, that’s a damn shame.”
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