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

  Though the woman behind the wheel clearly wasn’t that same little girl, she wore the same look of fear on her face, a kind of permeating fear that only went up and down in intensity but never went away entirely.

  Mary Jo had the same look.

  Surely, they hadn’t always looked like that. They only started when they found out their mother was going on dialysis. Or had Grace only noticed the look after she told them?

  If it had, indeed, always been there, Grace was terribly, terribly sorry about that. She was their mother and if they lived in a state of constant fear, that had to be her fault somehow, didn’t it? Had she just been such a strong woman, too strong after Low-Life bailed — “he died at sea,” she had told the kids and they either believed it or pretended they did because they never asked about him.

  She’d taken over the farm, worked it herself, only hired out the physical things she wasn’t strong enough to do. She had gotten a job in town at the savings and loan and there were years of being so busy she met herself coming and going. Kids to school, her to work, pick the kids up, do the chores, fix dinner, “family time — riiiight,” fall into bed to get some sleep to get up in the morning and do it all over again.

  But she’d managed.

  You’d think watching your mother do a thing like that would be inspiring, not intimidating. That it would make you a person of discipline and strong character. It hadn’t, not with any of the four of them. Well, maybe with Oliver, the youngest, the one who went his own way. He’d always been such an independent “wild hare” she didn’t know him well enough to say.

  Suddenly, Audrey started screaming!

  Grace was so startled she felt her own heart stop. Just stop. It hadn’t been beating regularly since the toxins began to build in her system, but it had never before just stopped.

  Then it commenced to flutter in irregular beats that she knew wasn’t pumping no blood.

  Grace began to get dizzy and a black frame formed around her vision and began to close in on her.

  So she coughed. She’d read somewhere that if you were having a heart attack you should cough all the way to the hospital because the act of coughing squeezed the heart in a similar fashion to CPR. She coughed again, harder — as Audrey continued to scream. Again and again she coughed, every couple of seconds, regular-like, and finally felt her heart settle into a rhythm. About the speed of a hummingbird’s heart, but that was better than useless fluttering.

  Only when she’d gotten her heart beating like it should did Grace follow Audrey’s gaze. She felt like screaming then, too, but she had neither the breath to scream nor the strength to do it. She heard herself make sounds, though, little sounds, whining, mewling sounds that passed for screams from the mouth of a mother who was staring at what surely was the grave of a son she didn’t know had died.

  Reece’s house — where he lived with a wife and two daughters until a couple of days ago when he’d tried to blow a hole in the Jabberwock — was gone. Not gone as in vanished. Gone as in not what it had been before. It was ancient, looked like it was a century old. A shack. A derelict house that’d been left to rot by the owners.

  The tree with a tire swing in the front had died and fallen onto the house, crushing the roof on the west end. There was no yard, no fence, no furniture, nothing to indicate anybody had lived in the house, had even been inside the house, in half a century.

  Audrey just kept screaming, shaking her head and screaming. She’d run the car off the driveway into a bush when she saw the house and now she sat there in the driver’s seat shrieking. Grace reached over and turned off the key, got out of the car and approached the house but didn’t go inside. Couldn’t bring herself to go inside. Because Reece wasn’t there, of course, and because there was something so profoundly frightening about the place she couldn’t have been dragged inside by a team of Clydesdales and the Budweiser beer wagon.

  And the house had been cold. It was a warm summer day. The same temperature it’d been every day since J-Day. But the closer she got to the house, the colder it got. She didn’t remember what happened after that. If Audrey got out of the car and got her and put her back inside, or if she had run there in terror from the cold. Her last clear memory was Audrey driving like a madwoman down the lane away from Reece’s house, her eyes wild, trailing a strange keening scream behind her like the tail on a kite.

  Cold.

  That’s what everybody said about the houses — and there were more of them every day — that had aged a century overnight. Some of them had withstood the “aging process” better than others. Some were almost unrecognizable piles of rubble. But they all had one thing in common. Cold.

  So when Grace began to feel the temperature drop in her own home … well, duh.

  As soon as Audrey helped her into her favorite chair in the living room where she could look out at the mountains through the front window, she’d begun to feel chilled. She’d dozed off then. She was always so tired, so incredibly tired, that she would fall asleep in the middle of dinner, or while she was talking. When she woke up, she’d called out to Mary Jo to bring her a blanket. Since it was clearly afternoon by now, Mary Jo had taken Audrey’s place “babysitting” Mama. That’s what Grace called it, though she knew in truth that she actually did need the girls’ help, that her progressive weakness had robbed her of the last dignity — doing for herself. They took turns looking after her.

  But Mary Jo hadn’t answered.

  She’d called Audrey then, louder. Well, loud for a woman who was doing well to whisper.

  The house around her was silent.

  And cold.

  She’d called and called. They had never come and the temperature continued to drop. The view out the front window was of the mountain’s shadow, hurrying across the hollow toward the house, carrying buckets of darkness to splash under the trees and the bushes, and the light would gradually fade, the sky would go from dark blue to black. The stars would come out. The wrong stars, but Grace supposed wrong stars were better than no stars at all.

  She knew then.

  The cold had come. Whatever that was. It was her time. And she should be grateful it was finally going to be over. Whatever it was — oh, call it by its right name, the Jabberwock! — had taken her children and grandchildren, and Grace really didn’t want to hang around without them.

  It just wasn’t right, though. It wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. She was supposed to go first, to lie in bed with them gathered around and step out of her sick, polluted, poisoned body when it was time and into the arms of God.

  But she was still here and the others were gone.

  Now it was her time.

  She got quiet, listened.

  She could hear it coming.

  Chapter Six

  Cotton never could figure out why nursing homes had such foof-y names. Pleasant Acres. Bubbling Brook. Rosebud Farm. This one was Aspen Grove and as far as Cotton knew, there wasn’t an aspen tree for five hundred miles in every direction. Of course, there were no Persimmon trees in Persimmon Ridge either.

  Maybe the foof-names were because nursing homes were such inherently depressing places somebody’d decided that a pretty name would alleviate the drear. Putting lipstick on the pig didn’t work. He wasn’t a man who frequented nursing homes, shied away from them the way most people did. Who wanted to go to a warehouse for old people? At the very best, a nursing home was clean, bright and cheery with mostly well-groomed elderly people sitting in wheelchairs, staring blankly at nothing in front of them.

  He’d gone with Thelma once to visit her aunt in a facility like that in Lexington. It was called The Memory Center. After the director’d waxed eloquent about all the activities they had for residents, Cotton thought they ought to change the name to Boot Camp. In the mornings, “attendants” carrying colorful signs showing the upcoming special events, greeted the residents with coffee … to prepare them for aerobics, meditation, yoga, bowling, golf, spike the balloon volleyball, bingo, trivia — all p
resented with the forced cheeriness of the program director on a cruise ship.

  But when her aunt’s money ran out, she was moved to a Medicare facility in Richmond which was on the other end of the spectrum — dark, dreary and smelled a particular kind of bad that was endemic to such institutions. An aroma composed of, but not limited to, stale perspiration, a whiff of rancid ointment with a sulfate base, thin fumes of sour urine and the smell of illness, of being long abed and bathed only with a basin and sponge.

  Aspen Grove was the second kind of nursing home. He knew as soon as he pulled into the parking lot that he was not likely to have a pleasant experience here. But he didn’t know which was chicken and which was egg — did places like this attract sour, lazy, mean-spirited employees or did the presence of such people make the places what they were?

  It was a one-story brick building with wings spreading out from a central hub like the spokes on a wheel. The neighborhood had probably been nice once, but now was seedy and unkempt. Unlike valued, well-tended homes that reject decay, the houses on the streets leading to the nursing home had slipped easily and gratefully into collapse, in the same way the old people warehoused in Aspen Grove would greet the prospect of painless death in their sleep.

  The paint on the trim was chipped, weeds grew up through cracks in the walkways leading from the parking lot that didn’t look like it had been freshly paved since Neil Armstrong took one small step for man and one giant leap for humanity.

  The place was air-conditioned, felt like it was turned up to the max … which wasn’t logical since old people always seemed to feel cold. The frigid air felt like passive aggression.

  The reception desk was empty when he arrived. He had to ding the bell several times before a woman emerged from a nearby office, moving with the kind of lumbering hostility of an elephant prodded against its will to stand on a ball.

  “Help you?” Her name tag identified her as Hillary Clinton and Cotton wondered if it was the good news or the bad news to have the same name as the First Lady.

  “My name is Cotton Jackson. I called late yesterday afternoon and asked if I could visit with Rose Topple.”

  She looked surprised, glanced down at a ledger in front of her on the countertop and traced down it with her eye.

  “Yes, I see here that you did. You’re a first.”

  “First what?”

  “First visitor Rosie’s ever had. Well, I don’t know about before I got here, but nobody’s ever come to see her while I’ve been working here and that’s more than a decade.”

  “She doesn’t have any family.”

  “Oh, it’s not surprising for a resident to have no visitors — even the ones who do have families. They stick them here so they can forget about them. But Rosie’s kinda different. To hear her tell it, she knew every man, woman and child in Nower County, but then you can’t believe a word she says.” She looked at him keenly. “You do know that, don’t you? That Rosie’s got dementia.”

  “Yes,” he lied. “I knew that.” In truth, he knew no such thing. When his wife had come to visit her fifteen years ago Thelma’d described Rose as “lucid.” She’d said the woman had told such wild stories, it was possible much of what she said wasn’t true, but she seemed to know where she was, who she was, who Thelma was … and most importantly why Thelma’d come.

  “You want me to tell you all ‘bout my mama,” Rose had said, and then she had laughed out loud — Thelma said she had “cackled.” “Ever’body wants to know ‘bout the Witch of Gideon.”

  Chapter Seven

  The room got darker and darker. But Grace wasn’t sure anymore that the darkness was outside her eyes. Maybe it was inside.

  A sound she had been ignoring, pretending not to hear, had been growing louder and louder. It was the static sound she had heard when she and Reece had driven across the Beaufort County line and slammed into the mirage fence put up by the Jabberwock.

  There were halos around the edges of her vision now, the kind you saw around lights when you drove in the rain at night. Except the halos weren’t bright white light. They were black light. Light, but black. Impossible, but there wasn’t anything about what was happening to her and to everybody else in the county that wasn’t impossible. The light was sparkly, like someone had thrown into the air a handful of black glitter.

  And it was cold. So very, very cold. Her teeth would have been chattering except she had her jaw clenched so tight in terror the muscles couldn’t budge it.

  This was it. This was what had happened to Reece. To Cissy and the girls. Oh, those sweet children, how utterly terrified they must have been. This was what had happened to Abner Riley and Harry Tungate, and to all the other people out there in the county who had vanished. Nowhere County had vanished, too, and nobody out there in the wide world missed it. It could have fallen off the edge of the planet and it wouldn’t even have made the ten o’clock news.

  A tiny thought squiggled out of a school of thought fish below the surface and fired up into the light.

  Was that it? Was that why this was happening? Was it because nobody cared about Nower County — including, no, especially the people who lived here? Was it possible that when the world stopped caring about a place, stopped noticing it, the place somehow … came unhooked from the world?

  Was that what caused the Jabberwock?

  She heard laughter, only it wasn’t real laughter. Not human laughter. It was a sound like a creature that didn’t normally produce human sound was trying to laugh. Like they’d learned how by watching real people laugh at real things. It was a mimic. A parody. A mirror image of laughter. Tinny and fake and utterly repulsive.

  But it was definitely somebody’s … no, something’s attempt to laugh.

  At what? There wasn’t anything funny.

  Oh, but it is humorous.

  The words weren’t spoken, but she could hear them. In her head. As the world around her got colder and more dim, more filled with black light and glitter. She didn’t hear the words above the ever-increasing roar of the static, but through it.

  Like whatever created the static spoke and laughed, too. Or tried to imitate speech and laughter.

  No, that wasn’t it. No, the laughter and the words were made out of the static. The static was the natural sound, the ambient noise, and some … thing had twisted and contorted the static into sounds that approximated speech and laughter.

  Approximated.

  Such an ugly, hoary sound that Grace shuddered.

  You don’t think it’s funny?

  The words were a growl of ugly sound Grace suspected she wouldn’t have been able to understand if they’d been spoken out loud instead of in her head.

  “No.” She said the word out loud and was instantly sorry she had done it. Sorry she had engaged. She didn’t want to participate in any way with what was happening to her.

  Let the Jabberwock kill her and eat her or dissolve her or whatever it was the thing did to people to make them vanish. Just do it. She believed a person ought to die with as much dignity as the situation allowed. The same held true for vanishing.

  Chapter Eight

  The Breakfast Club sat in rapt attention as Thelma Jackson told them about digging through records in libraries all over five states — Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee and Ohio — looking for information about all things Nower County, and specifically about Gideon and the people who’d lived there.

  “There’d never have been a town there if it hadn’t been for the coal company. Not a whole lot of people were itching to set up housekeeping in Fearsome Hollow.”

  “Even before Gideon, there were superstitions?” Charlie asked.

  “As far back as I could find records there were mentions of the ‘haints of Fearsome Hollow.’ I couldn’t trace where it all started, but more than just a couple of people claimed to have had encounters with them.”

  “What kind of encounters?”

  “Not sit-down-and-have-a-cup-of-tea encounters. They were always
described as terrifying. The haints were in the mist, or maybe the haints were the mist — some people said that. And it wasn’t like you could build a house somewhere in the hollow and avoid the mist, since it moved around.”

  Malachi exchanged a look with Charlie. “We had a front-row seat at the traveling-mist show,” he said. “We’ll tell you all about it—”

  “And about the rest of what we’ve figured out—” Sam put in.

  “But first, we want to hear what you came here to say,” Malachi said. “The people you talked to who reported haint sightings — what did they think they were?”

  “Spirits of the dead. That’s what a haint is, a ghost. These were particularly nasty ghosts.”

  “What’d they do?” Charlie asked.

  “I only found a couple of incidents where anybody actually described what they saw. There were lots of references to hearing them, though, that they made a sound like crying children, like there was some kid hurt in the woods.”

  “Which would lead people out to investigate, thinking there was a lost child,” Sam said and Thelma nodded.

  “The descriptions I did find were remarkably similar, and they were from different parts of the hollow and separated by more than sixty years. The first one was a man named Jeb Pollock, who had built a little shack at the base of Hazard Bluff downstream from the waterfall. He was a trapper, took pelts down Troublesome Creek in the spring to the Rolling Fork, into the Licking River and the Ohio to Cincinnati.”

  Thelma had brought along a fat manila envelope and she opened it then and dumped the contents on the breakroom table. She searched through the pile of papers until she found the one she wanted, then she read from it. “I heared a little ‘un, cryin’ and went to see to it.”