The Witch of Gideon (Nowhere, USA Book 5) Read online

  It would have surprised no one if an infection had developed in the gory wound where the rabid Great Pyrenees had taken a hunk out of E.J.’s calf.

  “Until I can get that infection under control … he’s just getting weaker and weaker.”

  Of course, it wasn’t the injury or the infection that was most concerning. Neither was likely to kill him … but the rabies growing in E.J. daily eventually would.

  If they didn’t figure this thing out soon, E.J. would die a grizzly death. Bottom line, nobody in the county would survive if somebody didn’t do something.

  Apparently, the three of them were the only somebodies who were trying.

  Well, not the only ones. There was Thelma Jackson, too, who had called the night before, telling Sam she had information she thought might be useful in their efforts to understand the Jabberwock.

  As if summoned by his thoughts, Thelma appeared at the door.

  “Hello, Mrs. Jackson,” he said, rising. She was tall, about Malachi’s height, six feet two inches, which made her slightly taller than Sam. Malachi’d always thought there was something regal about Thelma Jackson, with her wide forehead, high cheekbones and ebony skin, like she was an Ethiopian princess. She must have been a knockout when she was young because even at — must have been mid-sixties — she was still beautiful, with wide eyes and a full-lipped mouth, the kind men went all stupid over. Her hair was more salt than pepper, as glossy and shiny as he remembered it, falling in curls around her face. Her smile came easily. Soft-spoken and a good listener, she wasn’t as irresistibly likable as her husband, Cotton, who’d taught math. That man could make an enemy into an ally between one bus stop and the next. But you could tell she was a true, loyal friend. The kind who’d come to get you when your car stalled in the rain at two in the morning.

  “Thelma,” she corrected.

  “Good luck with that.” Sam smiled. “I’ve been trying to call her by her first name for a decade and I still revert to ‘she’s my teacher and I can’t call her Thelma!’ mode eventually.”

  “It’s nice to see you again … Thelma,” Charlie said, then looked at Sam. “It is hard, isn’t it?”

  “If you don’t call me Thelma I’m going to feel even older than I do right now — with the three of you grown up, pimples all gone.”

  They’d all been zit-faced for a time when they were in high school, but Malachi remembered Sam’d had a brush with real acne — the ghastly kind with big bumps and yellow pimples. He’d forgotten about that. Gratefully, it had left no scars, and her skin was creamy smooth now.

  “Don’t remind me!” Sam blushed bright red and looked away.

  Malachi thought for the first time how awful it must have been for a beautiful girl to suddenly look like her face was made of ground beef. He hoped that hadn’t been the reason she and her steady boyfriend, Jimbo Mattingly, had seesawed in and out of a relationship their senior year. Surely not. Malachi had barely known Jimbo, but he didn’t believe a guy who’d sacrifice his life to save a child from a burning car would be that shallow.

  “Have a seat,” Charlie told Thelma.

  “You look … tired,” Sam said. “Is everything okay?”

  Of course, it was Sam who noticed how drawn Thelma looked. Sam was all about other people. She’d always been like that.

  “You mean, other than the fact we’re all trapped here and are gradually going to be … absorbed?”

  “Well, there is that,” Malachi said, deadpan, and got a smile out of her.

  “No, everything’s definitely not okay, as a matter of fact.” She sat down heavily in the seat offered. Charlie held up her own coffee cup and nodded to the coffee pot. Thelma shook her head. “But the rest of it is …”

  “Too weird to talk about?” Malachi asked, and she looked surprised, then relieved.

  “We have a rule — a little like the umbrella of mercy.” He didn’t know if Thelma knew what that was but he didn’t bother to explain. “The rule is that nothing is off the table on the weirdness scale here. Nothing in life is normal anymore, and the only hope we have of figuring this thing out is if we pool what we know. All of what we know. No self-editing.”

  “When Charlie spoke up at the meeting … I finally had somebody to tell,” Thelma said. “I started thinking about this on J-Day, but … you know, we all thought it’d blow back out of here and then it wouldn’t matter. And when it didn’t go away, I knew there had to be a connection. I mean, a word like ‘Jabberwock’? — how could that possibly be a coincidence?”

  Malachi exchanged a startled look with Charlie and Sam.

  “You’ve heard about the ‘Jabberwock’ before?” he asked. “Fish just pulled the word out of his head that day. It was random. How could—?”

  “Might not be as random as you think,” Thelma said. “Maybe Fish heard the name somewhere before. Maybe he wasn’t making it up but repeating it.”

  Sam sat back in her chair. “Goody. Another can of worms.”

  “I suppose we need to have a talk with Fish, too,” Charlie said.

  “I guess we ought to do that before we go to Charlie’s house and try to become pen pals — no, with a blackboard, I suppose it’s “chalk pals” — with the Jabberwock,” Sam said.

  “You’re communicating with it?” Thelma was thunderstruck.

  “It’s only one-way communication so far,” Malachi said. “It wants to play with Charlie.” Malachi held up his hand before Thelma could launch questions. “We’ll tell you the whole story, but let’s take this one thing at a time. What was it you wanted to talk to us about?”

  Thelma took a deep breath.

  “I came here to tell you what I know, what I’ve found out over the years. It’ll sound crazy, but …” Her voice trailed off.

  “Start small, with the history,” Charlie encouraged her. “Then you can kind of ease into the Twilight Zone stuff.”

  Thelma nodded.

  “The Jabberwock isn’t anything new. It’s been here for years, for centuries. Maybe all the people, the souls it absorbs … I think it feeds on the energy. And it grows.”

  Her words knocked the wind out of Malachi. If that was starting small … He could tell the others were as startled as he was.

  “How about we back up a little.” His voice sounded breathless. “How is it you know … whatever it is you know.”

  “I’ve been tracing ancestries since I was old enough to realize that my grandmother was my mother’s mother and that she had a mother, too. Like beads on a string. I was fascinated. After I retired, genealogy became a hobby. I was particularly interested in places and people who … didn’t matter.”

  She let that lie there in the air between them, then went on.

  “That’s what got me interested in Gideon. It was just a coal camp, miners they hauled in from West Virginia and Pennsylvania — throwaway people. Nobody cared about them when they were alive and nobody noticed when they vanished.”

  “Then you believe Gideon actually vanished?” Sam asked. “Are you certain?”

  “Absolutely,” Thelma said. “I’m sure of it.”

  Chapter Four

  “Thelma was sure Gideon vanished,” Cotton Jackson told Jolene Rutherford and Stuart McClintock. “She was absolutely certain.”

  His words trailed a randomly firing synapse into the room where the three sat at Cotton’s kitchen table bleary-eyed from lack of sleep.

  Jolene and Stuart didn’t appear impressed by that revelation, but maybe they were just too tired to show it. Coffee. And maybe some kind of pills — NoDoz or something like that. When Cotton went into Carlisle, he would stop by a grocery store and see what he could find. He didn’t like the thought of getting hyped up on some drug, but they needed something to keep them awake — sleep deprivation did strange things to a person.

  He picked up his cup and took another sip — the coffee was so strong you could stand a spoon in it.

  “In the short term, a lack of adequate sleep can affect judgment, mood, ability
to learn and retain information, and increases the risk of serious accidents and injury,” Stuart said. “That last part’s the kicker. It’s how I won a case.”

  Cotton stared at him.

  “How did you know I was thinking about …?”

  “I could say that I just guessed. A man who hasn’t gotten a decent amount of sleep since the Eisenhower Administration is staring into a cup of road tar — safe money’s on he’s thinking about sleep deprivation.”

  Stuart got up and went to the counter where the coffee pot was still gurgling its contents down into the carafe below. He picked up the unwashed cup he’d been using for the past two days, looked in it, apparently decided it didn’t need washing, then poured himself a cup.

  “But that’s not it. I didn’t guess.”

  Cotton felt the tiny hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.

  “You gonna make me guess how you knew?”

  “Ahhhh, snappy and short-tempered,” Stuart said, while he looked around on the counter, probably searching for the sugar he’d forgotten Cotton didn’t have. “Classic symptoms.” He either remembered there was no sugar or gave up on it, brought the black coffee to the table and sat back down.

  His face was haggard, with dark circles under bloodshot eyes. The stubble of unshaved beard and a crumpled shirt added to the effect. Cotton was sure he looked equally exhausted. But he would have to get his act together, shower and get cleaned up, before he went into Carlisle. He couldn’t show up at the nursing home looking like he was homeless.

  “It’s like … everything’s been dialed up,” Stuart said. “Like my brain’s an antenna and it’s picking up things it never picked up before.” He took a long drink of the coffee and grimaced. “Or I’m losing my mind. One or the other.”

  “I’m glad one of us is dialed up,” Jolene said. She sat opposite Cotton at the table in a glorious state of bedhead. “Because my mind feels like it needs an oil change. Like it’s clogged and if you drained out what’s in there now it’d be so thick you could trot a mouse across it.”

  Cotton’s head snapped up. He looked at her, started to tell her that he’d thought the same … no, he was too tired to go there. All he said was, “I think you’re picking up more than you know.”

  “I had a few glorious moments of clarity this morning,” she said, sipping the cup of coffee she’d poured earlier that was likely cold by now. “I woke up, which would seem to indicate that I had actually been asleep, so there’s that. And for a few seconds none of this was real. People vanishing, bleeding ceilings, nightmare monsters. None of it. I was waking up in my bed, hoping I wouldn’t get stuck in rush hour traffic or I’d be late …” She stopped. “And when the bubble of that glorious few moments of forgetfulness burst, reality landed on my chest with both feet. In combat boots.”

  She looked at them, almost pleading.

  “This can’t be real. I mean, come on! It can’t. I want it to be over. I want normal back.”

  “My mama always said—” Cotton said.

  “Normal’s just a setting on the dryer,” Stuart finished for him. When Cotton shot him a look that asked did you just read my—? Stuart shook his head and said, “My mother told me the same thing.”

  Stuart looked at Jolene over the rim of his coffee cup. “I’d settle for dryer-setting reality right now, too.” Into the beat of silence that followed his words, his voice turned ragged. “But I want my wife and my little girl! I want Charlie and Merrie back!”

  Then the three of them sat without speaking, each a prisoner of his own pain.

  Cotton recovered first, pushed back from the table and stood.

  “My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to have a long conversation with the Witch of Gideon.”

  “Run that all by me again,” Stuart said. “I know you told me who … I’m not tracking very well.”

  “The Witch of Gideon is—”

  “A melding of fact, fiction and folklore,” Jolene interjected.

  “As the story goes, the day before Gideon vanished, a little girl ran away from home and spent the night in the woods, and when she came home, the whole town was gone. So she just stayed there, in the ghost town.”

  “How did she survive?”

  “Beats me, but apparently she did.”

  “Stories abound about ‘witch sightings,’” Jolene said. “I mostly wrote them off because it didn’t seem possible. Gideon vanished, went poof … did something before the turn of the century, and if there was a witch wandering around in the woods when I was a kid in the 1980s, she’d have been collecting Social Security.”

  “I found bits and pieces of information about that in Thelma’s old files — her genealogical research — in the storage building yesterday,” Cotton said, and turned toward a stack of boxes he’d set on the floor beside the back door.

  Stuart waved him off.

  “You don’t have to show me. Give me the CliffsNotes.”

  “About fifteen years ago, Thelma went to Carlisle to talk to the witch’s daughter, who was transferred to a nursing home there after they closed the one in Nower County. Which means that for a time there were actually two Witches of Gideon in the woods of Fearsome Hollow.”

  “Ahhhh, the Dread Pirate Roberts,” Jolene put in and actually got a smile from the other two.

  “Thelma did the math,” Cotton said. “The little girl — her name was Lily Topple, by the way — was ten years old when Gideon vanished in 1895. She had a daughter, Rose, when she was twenty; that’d have been in 1905. The girl lived with her mother for a while, then I think some family raised her. I’m not sure — most of the records about Rose weren’t in the shed, they were here in the house.” He gestured at the emptiness. “But I remember Thelma saying at the time that Rose was seventy-five.”

  “Fifteen years ago, that’d make her ninety now. You really think she’ll be able to tell you anything?”

  “We’ll see. I called yesterday and they said she could have visitors. That’s what I meant earlier — after Thelma talked to Rose, she was convinced Gideon really did vanish overnight.”

  “And you want to find out from Rose Topple … what?” Jolene asked.

  “Anything she can tell me about her mother, Lily — who was there, an eyewitness, when a place disappeared just like Nower County. There’s not much information at all about her in Thelma’s stored records. Maybe Rose knows something about what happened then that’ll help us now. Help us … I don’t know, figure out what the thing is, I guess, come up with a way to get rid of it.”

  “Our best chance of getting rid of it is in the equipment that we” — Jolene glanced at Stuart and he nodded assent — “are going back to Reece Tibbits’s house to get.”

  “If it’s still there,” Cotton cautioned.

  “Why wouldn’t it be? What would a guy with a mouthful of bugs do with it? And when I show the readings from that equipment on my show, there’ll be a whole lot more people in Nowhere County trying to figure this out than just the three of us.”

  Chapter Five

  It wasn’t until Grace Tibbits saw her breath frost in front of her that she allowed herself to believe that it really was freezing in her house and not just her imagination.

  Of course, she could be imagining that her breath was frosting every time she breathed out as easily as she could imagine …

  Oh, stop it.

  It was cold in here.

  She might be a confused, disoriented, dying of end-stage CKD, chronic kidney disease, but she wasn’t completely crazy. Not yet, anyway, though she was surely on a fast track to getting there. It was cold in here. The temperature had been dropping for the past hour and a half.

  Ever since she’d stopped calling out to Audrey and Mary Jo. If they’d heard her, they would have come. So obviously they couldn’t hear her. And thinking about the why to that was worse than them not coming.

  Fine. She’d do this by herself.

  Most tough things she’d ever done in her life she’d been a
lone when she’d done them. The going out of it, well, everybody died alone when you got right down to it. They might have had friends and family gathered around their beds, but in the actual moment of dying they were all by their lonesomes. Stepping out of life into … that was about as profoundly alone as it was possible to get.

  And then you were in the presence of God, which meant you wouldn’t ever be alone again for all eternity. But the moment in between, yeah, that was alone on steroids.

  No different now. She was here by herself in a house getting colder and colder. Alone.

  Had Reece been alone, too, at the end?

  Grace had convinced her oldest daughter, Audrey, to take her out to Reece’s house yesterday. Since Liam had got shot at the county meeting on Saturday, somebody needed to let Reece know his phone was on the blink, that everybody who’d tried to call had just gotten a busy signal.

  She still wondered if Audrey was really so gullible that she believed that was the real reason Grace wanted to go to his house.

  Probably was, come to think of it, because if she’d suspected what she was going to find when she got there she would have refused to go altogether or would at least have been prepared for what she was about to see.

  They had driven down the gravel driveway toward Reece’s house and Audrey had kept up a constant babble of noise, senseless talk, wondering if this was the year the cicadas would come out of the ground because if it was she was going to have to go get herself some earplugs because wasn’t any way in the world to go to sleep with that buzzing in her ears.

  Cicadas didn’t buzz at night. Audrey knew that. And there was nowhere for her to go to get earplugs either, but Audrey wasn’t paying any more attention to what she was saying than Grace was paying to listening.

  Grace glanced at the girl behind the wheel only once, saw the pinched look on her face, how she gripped the wheel in white knuckles and felt a wave of sympathy wash over her, wanted to take her little girl Audrey into her arms and tell her the mean old wasps wouldn’t sting her anymore, that Reece had knocked down the wasp nest — got stung half a dozen times doing it — and had poured gasoline on it and set it on fire.