Jack wanted answers.
Johnny wanted nothing to change.
Did that mean he lacked questions of his own? Hell no. Johnny had questions. Hundreds. Would he risk the life he’d made in order to find the answers? That was the simplest question of all, and the answer simpler still.
No way.
Not a chance in hell.
He recognized the denial, but didn’t care. Whatever he had was faultless and perfect and pure. He came back to those words again and again. Purity. Perfection. Faultlessness. They meant the same thing, but rolled off the tongue in threes.
His life was magic.
Magic was good.
Johnny tapped a rhythm on the wheel as the city sank behind him. Jack was overworried. That was his nature.
Nothing had to change.
Johnny turned that thought in his mind, and the anger faded as he pushed farther into the northern parts of the county. He passed an abandoned farm, an overgrown drive.
The Hush loomed in the distance.
He could feel it.
Three miles later, Johnny saw the headlights far behind, a small glow that exploded as the car raced up at terrific speed. Johnny used a hand to shade his eyes.
“What the hell?”
It was ten feet off the rear bumper. High beams. A flash of chrome. Something big. Johnny risked a glance at the speedometer—62 mph, which was about all the old truck could handle. He motioned with his arm through the window, but the driver had no plans to pass. The vehicle fell back and accelerated, twenty feet off the bumper, then five.
Johnny pushed it to 68, then 70.
“Son of a—”
A tire slipped off the road, and the wheel kicked in Johnny’s hands. His next turn was a half mile up, a final stretch of tarmac before the dirt road that would take him home. Johnny held the truck straight, kept his eyes down. Twisting away at the mirror, he watched for the turn, and felt the truck complain at the speed he took it. The back end shuddered left. Smoke rose off the pads. On the straight he gunned it, but the lights stayed with him. Five feet. Less. Johnny’s mind filled with cold, clear anger. His foot moved for the brake, but the impact came first, a crash that slammed the truck forward and knocked the back end loose. Tires screamed as Johnny fought, but the big vehicle hit him again, and that was all it took. The bed skewed right and left, and then the truck was sideways and rolling. Johnny’s head struck the dash, the glass behind. The noise was an avalanche. He saw slashing light, then gravel and grass and black trees. When the truck stopped, he was right side up, the roof crushed, glass shattered. Something ticked in the sudden stillness. A single headlight flickered and died.
“Ow. Jesus.”
Johnny touched his face, and the fingers came back red. He checked again; found a gash in his scalp, a slick of blood on the right side of his face.
“Where…?”
He looked for the car that had wrecked him, found an SUV, black and broad and still. It idled in the road, the lights cutting twin grooves above an empty field. Johnny watched, trying to get his head straight. Failing.
Why?
The car didn’t move until Johnny released the belt and fell from the open door. Something was wrong with his leg, his balance. He heard tires on crushed glass, and dragged himself up by the door, the steering wheel. The SUV dropped two tires onto the verge and stopped ten feet away. Johnny thought accident, apologies, idiots out drinking. That illusion died when the doors opened and figures emerged behind the lights. For an instant more, Johnny believed. Then they stepped his way and he saw the ax handles. The driver carried his low against the leg; the other man gripped his two-handed.
“Fellas.”
Johnny tried for normal, but his voice sounded thin. He blinked blood from his eyes; looked for some kind of weapon but had nothing.
“Your name is Johnny Merrimon.”
That was the driver. His body blocked one of the lights, and Johnny saw an Escalade with West Virginia plates. The passenger moved into the light, too. Young men, Johnny thought, late twenties and rawboned and serious.
Johnny limped to the truck’s crumpled hood. “Maybe it is.”
“It wasn’t a question. Your name is Johnny Merrimon. Yesterday, you were in jail for the murder of William Boyd.”
“What do you want?”
They moved closer. “For starters,” the driver said, “I want your undivided attention.”
Johnny saw the backswing. The rest was a blur. When his vision cleared, he was on the ground with another gash in his head. He rolled for his side, but a boot swung in and broke a rib. Johnny felt it go. He spread his fingers on the dirt; tried to rise.
“Not yet.”
The voice came first, then the hickory. One blow shattered Johnny’s wrist. Six more found his kidneys, his shoulders, the back of his head. The world went black another time, and when he came back, the pain traveled with him. It was agony. His head. The world. The driver was squatting beside him. “Are we clear on this question of attention?”
Johnny spit blood in the dust, choking. The man had bristled hair, a broad nose, and wide-set eyes. The boots were steel-toed under faded jeans, the watch a gold Rolex. “Who the hell are you?”
“My name is James Kirkpatrick Jr. You put my father in the hospital. I want to know what you did to him.”
“Your father.” Johnny choked again. “I don’t know your father.”
“The rules here are very simple. You lie to me, you hurt.”
He nodded at his friend. An ax handle whistled in, and Johnny’s kneecap split like a melon. He screamed for a long time after that; couldn’t help it.
“What’d you do to him?” The driver was intent, but patient when the silence came. “He’s the strongest man I’ve ever known, now he’s shitting the bed and scared of shadows. What’d you do?”
“Nothing.” Johnny’s face was in the dirt. “I didn’t do anything.”
Kirkpatrick nodded again, and his friend went to work. He shattered Johnny’s hand; beat his legs and back so hard and so many times that Johnny went black again.
“Jesus…” He woke, curled around the broken hand.
“What’d you do to my father?”
“The sheriff…”
“What?” Closer.
“The sheriff let me go.” Johnny heard the slur in his words. He dug deep. “I didn’t do anything. He let me go.”
“You think I don’t know about corrupt sheriffs? We own coal mines. That means we own sheriffs, too.” He took a fistful of Johnny’s hair. “Perhaps you don’t understand the kind of man my father raised. I’ve broken unions, and beaten miners bloody just to make a point. I’m talking about West Virginia coal miners, hard men. I’ve threatened reporters and politicians, and walked away untouched. I killed a blackmailer once, and no one even knows he’s missing. You don’t think I’ll kill you, too? Now, I’ll ask one more time. The hell did you do to my father?”
Johnny saw the hate; felt the breath. He wanted a way out, but truth was all he had. “I don’t know your father.”
“Don’t say it.”
He slammed Johnny’s skull against the dirt, but Johnny’s course was set. “I don’t know him. I don’t know you.…”
“Is that right?”
Johnny showed red teeth, and spit blood on Kirkpatrick’s boots. After that it got ugly. Two ax handles. Two angry men. Johnny curled as best he could, but they beat him loose and limp, then rolled his truck into the brush and came back to the place he lay dying.
“He dead yet?”
A foot settled on Johnny’s chest, and blood bubbled past his teeth. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Let’s get him off the street.”
“Put him with the truck?”
“No. Further down.” In Johnny’s mind, he screamed as they dragged him over the ditch. “Come on. Just haul his ass over.” Rocks tore skin, and forest closed like a black glove. They dragged him a long way. “This is good. Right here.”
“It’s not
too close?”
“To the truck? Maybe. Grab that.”
They drew rotted logs over Johnny’s body, then piled on brush and rocks and loose soil. It took time.
“Good enough?”
“We’ll be long gone before anybody finds this son of a bitch.”
Other words followed, but Johnny missed them. He heard the engine; had a sense of slashing lights and then nothing. Maybe they thought he was dead. Maybe he was close. Breath ran shallow behind his teeth. He tasted blood and rot, but the road was near and so was the Hush.
Johnny tried to crawl from the shallow grave.
His smallest finger moved.
* * *
Cree woke twice from dreams of Johnny Merrimon. She saw fire and faces and flickers of bright metal. In the third, she was buried alive and Johnny was in the dirt with her. Swelling blacked his eyes, but the bloody mouth moved.
I see you.
Cree moaned in her sleep, aware of the dream but held in that dark place by an unseen force that pressed her against the white man’s broken bones, the beetles that moved on his skin. She wanted to scream and run, but knew from childhood that there was power in dreams, and vision for those not frightened of deeper truths. So even as she moaned in her narrow bed, she felt the shattered legs and the broken arm, the soft spots in his skull that felt like cornmeal when she pushed. Moving dirt from his face, she spoke the bitter truth.
“You’re dying,” she said; and his eyelids fluttered. “Can you hear me?”
She pressed closer in the blackness, felt the length of him, the warm center that was his beating heart. It fluttered, too, and she closed her eyes so she wouldn’t see him die. Somehow, though, his hand found hers, and squeezed. She opened her eyes to see him watching. His mouth moved, but the voice was someone else’s.
Help him, it said.
And Cree bolted up a final time, frozen and afraid and sheeted in sweat.
* * *
It took her thirty minutes to find the courage to do what needed doing. She climbed from bed and dressed without lights. The clock read 2:19. Across the hall, her mother tossed under light sheets. It was hot in the apartment, but Cree put on thick socks and tall boots and heavy, denim pants. She was frightened of the dream and of what she might find, but what drove her was profounder and older and part of a near-forgotten life. Was it really her grandmother’s face she remembered? Her great-grandmother’s? There were no photographs by which to judge, and her mother would not discuss the subject other than to apologize for sending her to the swamp in the first place. But Cree was a child of old women and still waters. Part of that childhood involved pain and fear, but part, too, was warmth and love and mystery. Time had blurred the old faces, yes, but not the eyes or the voices.
There is such magic in the world.…
How many times had those words found her, either warm beneath the covers or seated barefoot on black earth?
There is such magic in the world, and such strong hearts to hold it.
It was a favorite memory and a favorite voice, her grandmother’s voice, same as in the dream of Johnny.
Pulling on a dark shirt, Cree cinched up her belt and eased past her mother’s door, moving with familiar care. In the kitchen, she filled a bag with apples, bottled water, and two slices of pizza, cold from the fridge. The last thing she took was a flashlight, then she was in the outside stairwell that smelled of urine, and in the courtyard formed, it seemed, of cracked concrete and condoms and empty bottles. She hated life in the city. The smells were caustic, the violence random and needless and unremitting. She kept the light off and stayed near the walls, swinging wide at blind corners. Experience had taught her that this was the sweet spot of the night, the slow time and the safest; but she hid when cars passed, music thumping, or if other people drew too close. It took an hour to find a better part of the city, and on that downtown street, with lights and cars and occasional cops, she put out her thumb and walked north. She got lucky with an old man in a Pontiac wagon. He was white-haired and withered and driving early to beat the heat. “A granddaughter up north,” he said. “About the same age as you.” He thumped the dash. “Air-conditioning went out four years back, so I make the drive at night. It’s prettier that way, too. Stars remind me of my wife.”
His wife had died fifteen years ago. Taken, he said, by the cancer. He was nice and soft-spoken and as safe as any ride she’d ever had. Up north meant Raleigh, but he went twenty miles east because he was worried about a young girl, pretty and alone in times such as these. The truck stop where they said goodbye was well lit and on the main road to Raven County.
“Sun’s up in a few hours.” He leaned across the seat, peering up as she stood beneath red neon. “You have people waiting where you’re going?”
“Yes, sir,” she lied.
“You have money?”
“I’ll be okay.”
“Here, take this.” He held out a ten-dollar bill, and refused to leave until she accepted it. “You wait on the sun, okay.” He peered down the empty road. “It’s a dangerous world for young ones alone. You hear me? Not everyone’s an old man at the tail end of a good life.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You wait on that sunrise.”
She thanked him for the ride, the advice, and money, and waited until he was gone before approaching the first trucker she saw and asking the same question she’d asked a hundred times in her life.
You going east?
* * *
Like most times, the ride ended at the crossroads, and after that she walked. It was dark enough to use the flashlight. Otherwise, she wandered off the tarmac and into wet grass. Two miles took her to a smaller road, and more walking to another road after that. By the time she hit rutted dirt, the sky was pale in the east, and the low places filled with mist. It gathered in the ditch lines and hollows, and on black water when it showed through the trees. Cree watched her feet when light found them, and saw the first blood two minutes after that. It was so shiny-wet, she thought it was oil; then she saw the drag marks. They were plain in the dusty road—scraped earth and blood—and Cree stopped, as suddenly cold and afraid as she’d ever been this close to the swamp.
The trees were mist and darkness.
A night heron called, unseen.
Clicking on the light, she flashed it in a circle, then put it on the drag marks, and bent low enough to touch the damp spots, which were fresh and dust-choked and sticky. She tracked them with the light, but the mist swallowed them after fifty feet. That left two choices: forward or back. Cree thought for a second, but had never been a going-back kind of girl. Besides, the dream had been bloody, too, and the dream was why she’d come.
Moving slowly, she followed the drag marks as the roadway filled up with false dawn’s ashen light. She kept her footsteps quiet, which wasn’t hard in air so damp and heavy, it felt to Cree that even a scream might be swallowed up. She’d known a childhood of similar mornings, but this one was colder and quieter, as if the sun might never rise. She thought of the times her grandmother had squeezed her tight and said, Don’t go into the forest just yet. It was easy to forget that the old women had feared at times, and that they’d warned her to stay inside if mist came off the river or the skies filled up with strange light. Cree had never thought the worries justified. She’d believed them to be the fears of old women, but not now.
The drag marks went a hundred yards, then farther.
The dawn was a shuttered breath.
She saw Johnny at the same time she saw the gate, both of them dark and unmoving. He lay between the ruts, and even at a distance she saw the twisted arm, the shattered legs. Closer, his head was a mask of earth and blood so profuse and viscous, he had to be dead.
Then he moved.
The good arm stretched out, and the body followed. One drag. Another. His right foot hung up on a root, and the leg twisted the way no leg ever should. She heard a sob, but it was hers.
How far had he crawled?
Cree
dropped her things, then stumbled up the dirt road and fell to her knees at his side. He kept crawling.
“Johnny.” It was the first time she’d said his name, and it hung in her throat. She could barely look at him. “Mr. Merrimon. Stop. Please. I’ll get help. Just stop moving.” She couldn’t bear the sound of it: the rasp of bone, the wet breath. He reached out; dragged himself. “Oh God.”
“Help me.”
Sound slipped past his lips, but the words were barely words. Cree looked around; saw nothing but mist and the gate. It was getting colder.
“What should I do? I don’t have a car.” Another sound escaped his throat. “What? I don’t understand.”
“Gate…”
He pointed at twisted steel, loose on a cedar post. Beyond it was his land, her childhood. “You need an ambulance.” She dug out the cell phone, but it had no signal. “Shit.” She could barely look at him: the dirt-packed cuts and shattered nose, the shredded trousers and shards of bone. He tried to crawl again. “Stop.” She was still sobbing. “Please.”
“Home…”
He slid another foot, and mist curled beyond the gate. It gathered and thickened, a shape, like a man, but not.
“Oh my God.”
Cree’s phone fell from dead fingers. The mist was more than mist. She saw gray holes and limbs and swirls of movement. She wanted to run but could barely breathe. Johnny scraped out a foot, another two.
“Johnny, please…”
“Go away,” he managed.
Then something opened the gate.
And something dragged him through.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Jack fumbled out of damp sheets, wondering if he’d ever know another good night’s sleep. The bed was too hard or too soft. Light shone in from the street, but closed curtains made it too dark, and things got worse in the dark: worry for his friend, his fear of the Hush. Dressing in silence, Jack drew back the curtains and was too ashamed to find comfort in familiar sights. He’d behaved dreadfully in front of Katherine, and that was bad enough. He should have kept the smile on his face or summoned the will to speak plainly, to stop Johnny from leaving. It was the blindness that tortured Jack: his friend’s reluctance to see the aberrant nature of his need for the Hush. Or was that explanation too simple? Maybe Johnny did see. Maybe he saw entirely too well.