The Witch of Gideon (Nowhere, USA Book 5) Page 4

  Thelma looked up. “What he found instead of a child was”— she looked down again at the paper — “a beastie twenty feet tall, teeth sharp as knives, eyes like the devil, come running at me out of the mist in the trees.”

  “I’d heard the crying-little-kid part but not the knife-teeth part,” Sam said.

  “The second description was from a circuit-riding preacher named Aloushous Hardy on his way from Frogtown to Killarney who camped for the night on Buzzard Knob. He said ‘The Devil his own self came to carry me away to hell. Its teeth were daggers and its eyes were full of lost souls.’”

  “Correct me if you don’t agree” — Malachi looked from one to the other — “but it seems like a no-brainer to me that the haints have something to do with the Jabberwock. They’re both phenomena outside the range of … normal. Maybe the haints are the Jabberwock.”

  “But if the haints have always been in Fearsome Hollow,” Sam said, “why’d they suddenly decide to get nasty and gobble up a town — and a hundred years later, the whole county?”

  “I don’t know why anybody would ever have set foot in Fearsome Hollow in the first place,” Charlie said and actually shuddered. “The place is off the charts on the creepy scale and sounds like it always has been.”

  “Well, you have to admit that with that waterfall it’s one of the most beautiful places in Nower County,” Thelma said. “The coal company wouldn’t have cared about how scenic the waterfall was, of course — they were just looking for a piece of flat land — but I’m sure that’s why the Quakers built a settlement there.”

  Malachi sat up straighter in the chair and leaned toward her. He’d heard variations of the other stories she’d told — and stories about sightings of the haints that she hadn’t mentioned — but he did not know there’d ever been another town in Fearsome Hollow besides Gideon.

  “There was a Quaker settlement?”

  “Yes. It was called Carthage.”

  “Carthage … as in the Carthage Oak.” Everyone knew the huge tree in the center of Gideon was called “the Carthage Oak,” but until now Malachi didn’t know where the name had come from. "Did the Quakers plant it?"

  “Oh, I doubt it. There's a bur oak at Airdrie Stud Farm in Woodford County that's smaller – less than hundred feet tall -- and arborists think it's almost five hundred years old. But there were mature fruit trees in the woods around Gideon that maybe the Quakers did plant. I don’t know much about Carthage. I’ll tell you what I do know, but first let’s talk about Gideon.”

  Then Thelma described the coal camp built by Monroe Addington Coal, the company called simply MAC, which operated dozens of mines all over the coal fields.

  “Gideon was like every other coal camp. The company slapped together some pathetic shacks and brought in miners from other coal fields in eastern Kentucky, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. And immigrants, too. The coal companies always tried to mix it up — some locals, some Irish, some Italian, some from Eastern Europe. Different languages and cultures made it less likely they would bond to their neighbors and present a united front against the companies.

  “The Gideon miners who worked in the MAC #7 mine were the usual hodgepodge — West Virginians, mostly, from the Flat Top, Pocahontas, Kanawha and Greenbriar coal fields, with a handful of Irish from County Tipperary who’d dug anthracite in the Ballingarry Coal Mines. Conditions there were horrific — high up in the Slievardagh hills, the melting snow regularly flooded the mines and drowned all the miners inside. So they packed up their families, left everything they knew behind, crossed an ocean — only to land in mines here just as bad as what they left behind.”

  “Even little kids worked in the mines, didn’t they?” Sam asked.

  “Oh my, yes. Children as young as six or seven worked alongside their parents. The smaller the better because they could get into cracks and crevices grownups couldn’t, particularly mining low coal.”

  Malachi thought of his brief stint working in a mine, which wasn’t the Hollywood version of a hole dug deep into the ground. The coal seam in eastern Kentucky wasn’t in the ground beneath your feet — it was under the mountain you were standing next to. Coal mine shafts were dug straight into the base of the mountains, but since the seam was only fifty-two inches thick, the mine shafts were dug only fifty-two inches tall. At over six feet tall, Malachi had worked on his hands and knees. There weren’t a whole lot of miners who could work standing up in a shaft where the roof was less than five feet off the floor. But children …

  “There was no such thing as safety regulations, working conditions were … constant roof-falls, dangerous equipment, poison gas, explosions, breathing thick coal dust twelve hours a day. But miners were expendable, disposable, just throwaway people.”

  “Is that why nobody seemed to care when they all vanished?” Charlie asked.

  “The person I talked to about that part said that when the miners didn’t show up to board the wagons that transported them to the mine that day, the foreman did go looking for them.”

  “I’d think so. That’s a good-sized hunk of missing employees — they’d have shut down a whole shift,” Malachi said.

  “That’s what I’ve always wondered about,” Sam said. “Why didn’t their disappearance raise a hue and cry? Not because anybody really gave a rip whether they lived or died but because they were indebted to the company store and you’d think the coal company would’ve wanted to settle up.”

  “What I pieced together from a couple of different sources is just an ‘educated’ guess. I believe the foreman was playing CYA and put out the story that the miners had packed up and left in the middle of the night, ran off on their debts and their jobs.”

  “But—” Sam began but Thelma held up her hand.

  “I know, that story would never have held up for long. Where could they go? They had no money at all, no currency. How would they survive? All I can figure is that the Bent Stick disaster took everybody’s eye off the ball.”

  “Bent Stick,” Charlie said. “I didn’t realize … the dates … yeah.”

  “When Bent Stick blew — all those miners, a hundred-fifty killed, more than two dozen of them children. The big city newspapers on the East Coast were all over it. Unions began to rear their ugly heads. Miners started demanding regulations and inspectors. MAC’s response was just to cut bait. They shut down all their mines in this part of the state and that threw so many miners out of work nobody was of a mind to go track down a lone coal camp who’d apparently left voluntarily.”

  “You mentioned someone you talked to about what happened after the miners vanished — who was that?” Malachi asked.

  Thelma dropped the words like stones into a still pool. “The Witch of Gideon.”

  Chapter Nine

  Jolene turned off Elkhorn Road onto the road she called Danville Pike — which apparently became Lexington Road when it came out the other side of the intersection in the Middle of Nowhere. The road signs merely identified it as County Road 278. Stuart tried to fight his way through the haze in his mind by adding up how many hours of sleep he’d lost since he’d left Chicago a lifetime ago. He gave up, decided it’d be easier to figure out how many hours of sleep he’d actually gotten — that was a smaller number.

  He had slept remarkably well Friday night, all things considered, after the back-to-back gut-punch phone calls — one from the rental agency in the Lexington Airport saying Charlie had not returned the car she rented two weeks before, and the second from Charlie’s publisher saying she’d missed two book-cover conference calls. But then, after all, he could explain. He really could explain.

  So let’s say Friday night — six hours, and that was generous because he’d been sipping coffee in the executive lounge at O’Hare Airport by 6 a.m. Still, call it six.

  Saturday night on the lumpy cot at Cotton Jackson’s house, he had likely gotten two or three hours before he woke up in the grip of the worst nightmare he’d ever experienced — the one where Charlie and Merrie were
corpses …

  He pushed the images out of his mind.

  Say three hours on Saturday night and that was generous, too.

  Last night … if he’d slept a wink, he’d been unaware of it. He’d never even gone to bed, just sat drinking coffee with Cotton at his kitchen table. He did nod off every now and then; his chin would fall forward and he’d jerk awake with a start, images of his wife and daughter filling his mind with horror.

  So do the math. Six Friday, three Saturday, none last night. Nine hours of sleep between Friday night and Monday morning. That was worse than the double-dipper all-nighters he used to pull in law school.

  “… ran over a striped unicorn the size of a sperm whale—”

  He turned to Jolene.

  “What did you say?”

  “Ahhhh, finally. I’ve been sending out ‘Earth to Stuart, do you read me?’ messages for the past two miles.”

  “I’m sorry. Did you say a unicorn with purple—?”

  “Just trying to get your attention. Are you with me now?”

  Stuart shook his head. “Not fair — you’ve just missed one night of sleep. Last night was my second.”

  “I didn’t miss the whole night. Just the part after I woke up screaming.”

  “You never said what the nightmare was—”

  “I don’t want to talk about it!”

  “Ohhhh, snappy and short-tempered. Cotton was right about the irritable part. If you had let me finish, I was going to say I didn’t blame you for not wanting to share your dream. You don’t have to. I’ve seen that film, could likely quote the dialogue.”

  “Nobody was talking.”

  “Because they were dead.”

  She shot him a look, but changed the subject. “Since we’re discussing dead people, think we’ll be seeing the Tibbits family today?”

  “Reece and his charming wife and daughters — I didn’t catch their names. I’m hoping they don’t put in an appearance, but I think we ought to be ready for it.”

  “And how, exactly, does one prepare oneself to encounter a dead man with bugs dropping off his tongue and the corpse of a homicidal child?”

  Jolene almost managed the right dismissive tone to hide her fear. Almost. Stuart reached down to the floorboard and picked up the tire iron he’d put there. He’d felt mildly foolish when he’d gotten it out of the trunk of his rental Lexus. But when he curled his fingers around the cold metal now, he was glad he’d brought it.

  “I’m not going unarmed this time.”

  “You think a tire iron will stop a dead man?”

  “We’ll find out. I played football, not baseball, but I can put some muscle behind this thing if I have to.”

  “I figure we get in and out of there fast.”

  “Copy that. You wait in the van, keep the engine running, while I search the—”

  “No way, José, you’re not going in there alone.”

  “Okay, you unhook the equipment while I fend off the meanies.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that. It took both of us a couple of trips to haul all that stuff in there. If the various Tibbitses try to stop us, we’ll be outnumbered … with our hands full.”

  Stuart turned the tire iron over in his hand.

  “And I’m not entirely sure it’s possible to kill somebody who’s already dead.”

  “Well, there is that.”

  Stuart couldn’t manage a smile, but a hint of one skittered across his lips.

  “All the equipment is important — I get that — but can we prioritize what we risk our lives to retrieve? Are there a couple of things that—?”

  “A couple, yes. The GaussMaster EMF meter and the—” She caught his look. “Two or three of my thingys have the most impressive data. I’ll show you which ones. In a pinch, we grab those and boogie.”

  As it turned out, they didn’t have to boogie. Didn’t have to rush at all. Nobody was home.

  They could tell the difference as soon as they pulled up in front of Reece Tibbits’s ramshackle house. There was no … sense of foreboding. The hairs on the back of Stuart’s neck remained resolutely in place instead of snapping to attention. When they got out of the van, the air was cool, the reasonable cool temperature of an overcast day with storm clouds. It wasn’t cold.

  They exchanged an encouraged look, then went inside what was left of the building. They sensed no … presence. They might as well have walked into some random old building, decomposing into nothingness on the side of the road.

  Stuart’s head was on a swivel, surveying his surroundings, his nerves frayed, his muscles tensed. He reluctantly laid aside the tire iron he’d been clutching like a little kid’s security blanket so he could help carry the equipment to the van.

  He was going back in for a second load when he heard Jolene cry out. He whirled and found her fiddling with the dials on the piece of equipment she’d just set on the floor in the back of the van.

  “No!” she cried. “No, no, no, no!”

  She slammed her fist down on the metal casing on the whatever-it-was and turned to the smaller gizmo beside it that had several dials and knobs.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s gone. It’s all gone!”

  She rushed past him back into the building to the large machine on the rolling equipment tray, pushed buttons, turned knobs, then let out a sigh and turned toward him. She was leaned against the equipment cart and having trouble keeping the tremor out of her voice.

  “The data. It’s gone.”

  “And that means …”

  “I set everything back to its default settings when we brought it all in here. The data, the readings we got at my father’s house, it was all recorded, stored … except it wasn’t. It was all backed up … except it wasn’t that either.”

  He’d crossed the overgrown yard when she ran past him and he now stood in the doorway.

  “So we don’t have any—?”

  “Proof? No, we don’t. We have nothing. All my grandiose plans to lure teeming hordes of people here to see what happened … gone.”

  “How could—?”

  “I don’t know how it happened, I can only tell you what happened. All the data has been erased.”

  Stuart heard himself say the words before he thought them. “Like my memories when I crossed the county line.”

  Her head snapped up and their eyes met. Hers were wide with shock.

  “You’re not saying you think it … the Jabberwock can …?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  She was silent, calculating. He watched the look on her face shift from shock through anger to resolve.

  “Let’s find out.” She turned and picked up a machine, gesturing with her chin toward the one sitting on the floor beside it. “We’ll get some new readings and see what happens to them when we take the equipment across the county line.”

  “New readings where?”

  She paused, then looked him full in the eye. And he knew.

  “At Charlie’s mother’s house.”

  Chapter Ten

  She musta heard wrong.

  “Me? He come to see me?”

  “Yes, Miss Rose, there’s a man who would like to visit with you.” That was the ugly one Rosie called Stink Bug because she had a fat back. Who had a fat back? People were supposed to get fat in front, not down their spines, but Stink Bug looked like she’d shoved a pillow down the back of her shirt. Not that she was skinny everywhere else, of course. Mama always said that looks was skin deep but stupid went all the way to the bone. Well, Rosie’d discovered fat went all the way to the bone, too.

  Stink Bug’s smile looked like she’d stuck it to her face with roofing nails. She was the one who pretended she didn’t notice when Rosie’d messed the bed and Rosie’d have to lie in it all night ‘til the next shift of “attendants” came on in the morning and cleaned her up. ‘Course the morning shift didn’t like Maudie Faye for doing that no more’n Rosie did. Sometimes, Rosie entertained herself as she lay
in her own crap in the dark, fantasizing all the ways she was gonna kill Maudie Faye … if she could get out of the bed, which she could, but they didn’t know it. She could walk standin’ straight, no hump bending her over like a broke camel. She could fly, too, like a little sparrow, one tree to the next.

  Or maybe not. The flyin’ part. Prob’ly not. Maybe that was part of the systems failure. She’d heard that phrase on television once and liked it, thought it had sounded more colorful than dementia or Alzheimer’s — which was what they said she had, depending on which one of ‘em you listened to. And she did, she knew it, watched as one batch of circuits after another in her head failed her. Names was the worst. The staff wore name tags, of course, but Rosie figured the day wasn’t far off when she wouldn’t be able to read ‘em.

  It was awful to go like that, pieces of your mind missin’. Like you left somethin’ important in the attic and when you needed it, you couldn’t find it.

  Days of the week, months, years, who was president, things like that washed through her head and out the other side slick as eating green apples and getting the squirts. But she hadn’t known any of those things when she was “wilding,” neither. That was the word she used for living in the woods, making do there with her mama. She and Mama never gave a fig what day it was so she sure as Jackson didn’t care now.

  Some days was worse than others. The days when Rose understood that she really couldn’t get out of the bed, that her legs wouldn’t hold her up, days when she knew, was aware that she was shedding brain cells outta the inside of her head thick as the dandruff that rained down off the outside of Stink Bug’s.

  She enjoyed life more on the days she wasn’t sure. Could convince herself wasn’t a thing wrong with her, thank you very much, and she was pulling a monumental prank on all them idiots out there who thought there was. On days like that her mind felt too bright, like it was lit up with football stadium lights, and her ‘magination took her on wild rides. Then she’d conjure up stories that she was almost sure weren’t real … but maybe. Most of ‘em was ‘bout how she was gonna kill them as done her dirty.