by Ben Farthing
“That’s my parents’ rental property.”
“Have you checked there?”
“I’ll head there now.” The hill sloped steeper. A single-wide trailer beneath a pine tree. Brown pine needles layered the sagging roof. A rusty Ford truck beside it, one flat tire.
Cessy stopped to examine the scene. If it’d been abandoned long, all four tires would be flat. Again, it looked like people had still been living here until recently. She walked up to the trailer, peered into a window. Trash on the floor. Dishes in the sink. TV atop a bookshelf.
“This is getting dangerous. I’m heading out there and calling the state troopers.”
Cessy jumped at Landis voice. “That’s probably a good idea.”
Cessy went to the truck. She found keys behind the sun visor. The starter screeched, and then the engine turned over. She considered borrowing the truck, but there wasn’t a spare tire, and driving on a rim through town was a quick way to draw attention to herself.
But the truck had started. Proof that Rag Hill hadn’t been abandoned for long. She looked up and down the hill. The road fifty feet through the trees. RVs, tents, and shacks blended into the forest. Their man-made straight edges sagged under nature’s uneven weight.
Last she’d heard, several families still lived up here. Too poor to afford even the cheapest apartments in town. Or too committed to their family’s land. Or too in need of privacy. She was sure stills and meth labs hid up here.
“Hello?” she called.
“Can you hear me?” came Landis’ voice.
“Be quiet a second.”
Cessy repeated her call.
Birdsong answered. Wind through the leaves.
“Everyone left Rag Hill,” she said to herself.
“Jackson said something about that,” said Landis. “Hold on.”
Cessy continued down through the woods.
“Here it is. I swear, this young man typed out ‘worm’ every other word. ‘Worm, vermin on Rag Hill can’t worm be the last. I worm stopped selling but worm they’re still coming after worm me. I found a crack in my foundation worm, Olivia says it’s old, worm but-”
The call cut off.
Cessy adjusted the shotgun to look at the phone screen. Call dropped.
She hit redial.
The text ‘No service’ blinked on the screen.
In the upper left corner, the lack of bars confirmed the text. Maybe she’d walked into a dead zone, although she’d had service the rest of the time in town.
She reached the bottom of the hill. Through the trees, on a squat mountain on the east side of the valley stood the cell phone tower that’d been built ten years back. Never had a problem with service since.
Cessy held up her phone. Waved it toward the tower.
No service.
Black Gold Peak in front of her, Maul Rock behind her, the Church of the Morningstar to her left, and which angel was called Son of the Morning?
The mountains contained Hamlin like the earth itself reached up with cupped hands. And now Cessy was cut off inside.
27
An hour later, Cessy reached the back yards of Rooster Estates. She’d walked through woods, orienting herself with glimpses of Black Gold Peak through the forest canopy.
Her sneakers were wet from crossing a creek that fed into the Mud River.
Cell phone signal remained dead.
The sun lulled toward the mountaintops west of town.
Lights in back windows said that Rooster Estates wasn’t as abandoned as Rag Hill, but were there fewer than there should be? Or had people just not made it home from work yet? Were there any nine-to-five jobs left in Hamlin? What about people who commuted out of town? With Mud River Road closed, what did they do?
She tried to think of how many people she’d seen at all since she’d returned. A few passing cars. Her parents, Gordon, Sheriff Miller, the dispatcher. There’d been a dozen or so people inside Tapjacks Diner.
Over two thousand people lived in Hamlin. But it felt empty.
She walked between two houses, to the road behind her parents’. She kept the shotgun in the crook of her arm. No point trying to hide it.
A car passed. Headlights blinded Cessy from seeing the driver.
Mom’s car was still in their driveway. Dad’s truck was gone. Cessy’s 4Runner was still parked out front.
She walked up, opened the driver’s side door.
She stopped to take in the house where she’d spent her teenage years. Yellow siding, blue shutters.
It would be so nice to go inside, sit down with her parents for dinner. Listen to them laugh about their neighbors, complain about being bored of retirement. See their eyes light up as Kate babbled about her plans for life.
Cessy got into her truck, shut the door, started the engine. As she drove away, the front door of the house opened. She didn’t slow down.
Evening cast a dull yellow tone over Hamlin.
Cessy drove down Main Street.
Street lamps blinked on. Empty storefronts with signs that read “For Sale or Lease – Cheap.” The sidewalks were well tended, but with amateur repairs. Patched cracks rather than replaced segments. Strips of grass were the same--trimmed evenly, but dying in patches.
Ahead, the bar that’d been Hamlin’s only place to get a meal after 9 p.m., or a drink at any time. The Evening Whistle was a low building, flat roofed, and--for the first time in Cessy’s life--closed. Plywood covered the windows. Around the side, scorch marks on the bricks. A kitchen fire, maybe.
Main Street felt as empty as the rest of Hamlin today. Normally, even with the empty stores, old folks would be walking around, or bored teenagers would be gathered in someone’s dad’s truck on a corner. It helped that there was usually a snowcone cart set up. None of that tonight.
One business was open, a glow in the darkening evening. Tapjacks Diner.
The building was annoyingly quaint. Mostly windows, polished metal walls, a neon sign on top. Trucks packed the meager parking lot, and lined the street in front.
Cessy slowed as she passed. The scent of fried cooking oil penetrated the car. Inside Tapjacks, people filled every booth and counter seat. Two waitresses in yellow dresses hurried about. Dad stood next to a booth, laughing with Gordon Wilder.
Small towns did have that going for them. As long as you weren’t one of the ostracized, you could go to the local bar or restaurant and see the same people each week. But Cessy had ostracized herself before her brain had even fully developed.
How would the Hamlin citizens in there react when they found out their sheriff was gone? She almost felt sorry for those who saw Sheriff Miller as an anchor of authority in a scary world.
How many of them had seen Kate? How many knew something about her disappearance?
She could march into Tapjacks and demand answers. But Mom and Dad swore ignorance, and a willfully ignorant crowd could be dangerous.
Better to stick to the current plan. Check the Seventh Street house for any clues to Kate’s location, then get back up Black Gold Peak to talk to Valerie. Avoid any sinkholes, swarms of perforations, or hungry rock formations.
Cessy left the glow of the diner behind to drive deeper into the darkening town.
28
After a career of accounting, Dad decided he loved nothing more than repairing houses. The Seventh Street house took the most work. Complete gutting inside, and replacing the siding outside. So really, the only original parts of the house were the foundation and the guts inside the walls.
Cessy parked on the road in front.
The neighbors’ porch lights were on, offering pale illumination to the white rancher. The front windows were like curtains of black.
This was their third renovated house, and Dad had finally considered himself a competent craftsman. They went over budget on repairs--a fact Dad lamented over Christmas dinner two years ago--and so he overpriced the rent and rarely kept it occupied--a fact Mom lamented over Christmas dinner last year.
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br /> The empty gravel driveway and dark windows suggested it was still vacant.
Cessy left the shotgun in the car, but took the pistol and Sheriff Miller’s flashlight. It was heavier than hers. A better cudgel, should she need it.
She tried the front door. Locked.
She made sure no neighbors were watching--no one in sight--then walked around back. The small, fenced-in yard was surrounded by five other back yards. No privacy in a small town.
The neighbors directly behind were the only ones with lights on. The shifting glow of a TV emanated from the back windows. They were distracted.
At the back door, Cessy jiggled the handle. Locked.
She knew Dad, though. A potted fern sat on the otherwise empty patio. Underneath the terracotta pot, an indention for a key.
But no key.
Hope sparked in Cessy. Kate had been here.
Cessy could almost smell Kate’s off-brand cucumber melon lotion.
Cessy used the butt of the flashlight to break the backdoor’s window. Glass fell to the brick pavers outside and the linoleum inside.
She reached in, opened the door, slipped inside, then watched outside to see if any neighbors had noticed the sound.
The shifting lights of the TV continued strong. The dark yards remained dark. Hamlin remained eerily empty.
Satisfied, Cessy turned around.
The fridge hummed. A smell of fried bacon lingered in the air, and Cessy’s stomach growled to remind her she hadn’t eaten since this morning.
She switched on the flashlight, kept it aimed low.
The kitchen was clean and empty. Fridge, stove, and empty countertops stood ready for a tenant.
She used the sink to splash water over the wound on her stomach. No soap, no antiseptic, so she’d probably end up needing antibiotics.
Cessy opened cabinets until she found one that wasn’t empty. A pan, utensils, and stack of canned food. Inside the fridge, Cessy found butcher wrapped meat, including bacon.
Kate had never been a big meat eater. She claimed it was because of the cost, but Cessy could tell she had moral qualms about killing animals. Kate wouldn’t have bought that meat.
Someone else was here.
Cessy moved to the living room. Clean, thick carpet. Three beige walls and one red accent wall.
A beetle crawled across the carpet.
Cessy inhaled, drew the pistol.
The beetle clicked its wings and buzzed into the air.
Cessy exhaled. Jumping at shadows.
The humor died as she actually remembered the moving hole, how it swam through her skin, up her cheek, over her eye.
The deep repulsion towards that violation was only half of her lingering unease. She’d seen something in the corner of her parents’ basement. The same cinderblock foundation and wood studs as before, but moving somehow, like a sewer pipe flowing through, and the solidity of the wall wavering while it was shouldered aside.
As she explored the rental house, she couldn’t get that image out of her head. Even “image” was the wrong word for it. It was an idea overlaid upon an image. If she were seeing it now in this narrow hallway, master bedroom door at the end, she would see the white trim shudder as if an airliner buzzed the house, except the fuselage was moving through the walls in the same way it moved through the air, distorting space but leaving it untouched.
The doorknob of the master bedroom turned.
Cessy clicked off the flashlight.
In the dark, the hallway’s airflow shifted. The door had opened.
Cessy’s heart raced.
She caught herself. Who was she hiding from?
She smelled cucumber melon lotion. “Kate?”
Cessy turned the flashlight back on.
A frail young man stood in the bedroom doorway. He winced at the light. He wore jeans and a sleeveless undershirt. Bruises on his wrists, a split lip, a black eye.
But sallow as it had become, Cessy could never forget that face, and even now, the older anger came back as she flung his name at him like flicking dogshit off her boots. “Jackson.”
29
Cessy pointed the revolver at the fresh carpet, but kept it ready to raise.
The young man at the end of the hallway limped forward. He squinted at her flashlight. Sunken cheeks said he’d been malnourished longer than he’d been hiding here. “Who’s that? Let me see your face.”
Cessy pictured Kate’s cheeks, puffy from crying after Jackson had told her she was too ugly for anyone but him to ever love her. And her withdrawn posture, months later, when he’d convinced her of it.
It’d been over five years, and people changed, but a big sister’s ire didn’t.
“What’d you do with my sister? Is she here?” Cessy’s head spun. Jackson was alive. Mom and Dad had said he’d run off. Sheriff Miller joined their lie. Gordon confessed the truth. Then Mom and Dad confessed they were trying to keep his meth dealing a secret. Cessy had drawn her gun before she got a clearer explanation for their lie.
Except, had they been lying? Here was Jackson, standing in front of her.
“Cessy?” Jackson squinted into her flashlight. He raised his empty hands. Bruises around his wrists were an irritated crimson.
“I saw your grave.” Cessy tried to reorient the conflicting accounts. “Your father said you died in a sinkhole.”
Jackson coughed, a raspy, splitting sound. “He thinks I did.”
“And my parents?”
“Everyone thinks I’m dead.”
Mom and Dad had still meant to deceive her. They were still covering something. “Where’s Kate?”
“Let me see it’s really you.”
Cessy lowered the flashlight from his face. The hollow valleys of Jackson’s sunken eyes and cheeks filled with shadow. “You still look like her.”
“Where is she?”
“She gave up on you. Went herself.”
“Went where? Kate was here?” Cessy knew she’d smelled her lotion.
Jackson fell against the wall. His cheek pressed against sheetrock. “Worm.”
“Forget your worm.” Cessy met him halfway down the hallway, propped him up. He was sickeningly light. “Tell me about Kate. Where is she? Is she okay?”
He blinked, looked her in the eyes. “Cessy? What are you doing here?”
She shook him. “Where’s my sister?”
“Did you ride with Kate? Have you been here this whole time?” His eyes narrowed. “Was that you under my house?”
Cessy had seen meth addicts before. And she’d seen plenty of addicts who were half-assing getting clean. Jackson was caught in physical withdrawal crossed with a failing desperation to be free. “Let’s go sit down.” She guided him towards the master bedroom.
He complied.
In the bedroom, a radio buzzed static. A sleeping bag lay in one corner. In arms’ reach, a handgun sat on a cardboard ammo box. A sheet was taped over the window. Marble notebooks in a stack.
Jackson looked around like he was seeing it for the first time. “Not in here.”
He went back to the kitchen. Cessy followed.
He opened the door to the basement. “Down here.”
Cessy watched the frail man descend the stairs. Carpeted stairs, drywall, a finished basement. She took a breath and followed. “You need to start talking.”
Downstairs, an oversized windowless room, waiting for a tenant to turn it into a home theater or pool hall.
Jackson sat down in the middle of the floor, cross legged, facing the stairs. “We’ll have more time if we talk down here. Can’t be for too long, though. I can’t risk losing this hideout. Then where would Kate find me?”
“Kate’s alive?” Cessy immediately regretted asking. She wasn’t ready to hear it if she wasn’t. Wasn’t ready to begin a lifetime of guilt over not checking in earlier. Over not having a strong enough relationship with her baby sister for Kate to have called her when there was trouble.
“Last I saw her, she was alive.”
“When was that? Where?”
Jackson winced. He looked at the blank white walls. “Here.”
“She met you here?”
“Ask me something else. Come back to that.”
“Answer the damn question.”
He sighed. Sharp awareness had returned to his gaze. “This is the best way. Trust me.”
“Trust? It took my baby sister years to recover from you.”
“And then I bought my house by selling the drugs that killed at least four of my neighbors. I get it. I’m vermin.”
“Don’t come to me for forgiveness. When did Kate meet you here?”
Jackson flinched. “You gotta dance around. Hit the topics real soft, then come back to them.”
“Why?”
“I don’t want to get noticed, that’s why.”
“By who? Lockler? The Maple Table?” Cessy wanted to brush off his absurd reasoning, but she’d done that to Valerie last night, and missed the chance to learn valuable information.
Jackson scratched at his belly under his shirt. “You’ve heard about them?”
“I’ve heard them. Who are they?”
“Dangerous people with black magic, or voodoo, or alien technology. I don’t know what, but they’re convincing.”
Cessy reached for her phone, her impulse when she was taking notes from a witness. But Jackson’s babbling was nonsense. “You’ve met them? Are they from Hamlin?”
“I think it’s like a Waco cult crossed with car salesmen.”
Cessy started recording. If Hamlin had become the next Jonestown, she needed evidence. “Did they work for your father?”
“Don’t know. Never seen them.”
“Did Kate find them?”
Jackson tapped his finger on the carpet. He’d been counting. “Different topic. She was afraid if you came, they’d label you vermin right away. Folks around here remember Angry Cessy, and poor Marissa. But Kate made everyone smile, so she’d have more leeway to poke around.”
“I didn’t ask-”
“You probably would have. You’re like her mean guardian angel. Now we can circle back. She met me here about ten days ago.”