Neverland (33 page)

Like a lightbulb that is almost out, blinking and buzzing; like a television screen warming up and turning on; like the mind of a little boy just wiping the sleep from his eyes and not surrendering his dream to the waking moment, so the world came back to me then. My head ached like a truck had rolled over and flattened it. I was sure I’d been blinded, and I reached up and touched my left eye: It was liquid, but as I rubbed it, I could again see. Blood was dripping down from my forehead. As I rubbed it away from my eyelids, I said, “Dang, I’m still
alive.”

Zinnia stood directly above me.

I thought you liked me,
I thought, feebly, sure that she would bring the rake down and tear my face right off.

“It’s not me doing this,” she said. But she hesitated.

From somewhere in the corridors of my brain, I heard Governor wailing.

My mother was screaming, too. She had fallen a few feet away, rain batting her face, while Zinnia’s brothers descended on her, the one still choking on the catfish, the other chanting, “Eat flesh, drink blood, eat flesh, drink blood.”

In Goober’s left hand was one of Aunt Cricket’s croquet mallets. He had already begun pounding my mother’s knees. “Eat flesh,” he hit it against her ankle, “drink blood!”

“You want to see something neat, cuz?” Zinnia said, twirling the rake like a baton. Sumter was not making a pretense anymore: It was his voice.
I had been right—they weren’t proper ghosts, but some kind of collision between Sumter and the place on which Neverland had stood. The rotting corpse towering above me was merely his dummy. “Like the ultimate gross-out? The tragic show to end all tragic shows?”

“Don’t you think
I
hurt?” Sumter’s words were coming out fast, and as he spoke he began stuttering. “Don’t you think I hurt? All the
time
I
hurt.
I hurt so much I could just explode!” Zinnia brought the rake down and scraped the mud. “You broke your oath, and for that, Beau, I’m not even gonna take you with me. You can become like
them,
Beau, you can be a liar and a cheat. You can be a
grown-up.”

Zinnia seemed confused. Whatever power was behind that rotting corpse, it was getting mixed signals. It wasn’t sure of itself. It’s what Sumter always feared most: self-doubt.

Mama shrieked as another mallet blow caught her in the shin. “My God, my God,” she whimpered, trying to crawl away from the two boys. But they wanted to keep playing.

“Lucy,” Zinnia’s mouth pursed, “Lucy is my god.”

“Not with the sacrifice. I’m gonna put the skull together with the rest of her, and then she and me, and Governor, can always be in Neverland.”

“Where I am is Neverland,” Zinnia said, but her jaw was sagging.

“Hurts.” Sumter’s voice came from Zinnia’s open mouth. He sounded whiny and tired. “Hurts.”

“That’s it. You had your chance and you screwed up.” Zinnia lifted the rake and swung it down at me. With all the strength I had, I held out my hands and caught the rake just beneath its teeth; my hands stung as it
whopped
against my palms. I tugged on it, and the dead girl came toppling down on me. I gagged as she pressed her lips against mine. Like saltwater and a festering wound, the smell and the taste overpowered my senses. I struggled for my breath as she drew her head back. Turning the rake around, I scraped its teeth across her face, and the flesh tore from the bone like it was marshmallow.

A dark figure, like a wavering shadow, swung a croquet mallet down against the dead girl. Her body rolled, lifeless, off me.

“Lucy?” I asked wearily, dizzily. “Mama?”

Before I passed out, I glanced over and saw Mama. Wilbur and Goober lay in the mud, unmoving. Somehow this was over. I wondered if Mama was all there, or if she had gone off to a Neverland of her own. She was bruised and bleeding, but her expression indicated that in the fight between flesh and spirit, her spirit had fled. But she was alive. I was fainting, and I thought a silly thought.

I was closing my eyes and thought I saw an angel, but it was just Julianne Sanders peering at me to see if I was still breathing.

The rest of the island was in a state of panic, and I would only learn later of the strange occurrences. The first thing—besides the fact that there was a solar eclipse that day that was only perceived by Gull Island residents, and there was a hurricane that had come out of nowhere to sweep across the coast—was the birds. Gulls, to be specific. They were falling dead from the sky just like they’d forgotten how to fly. Two traffic fatalities that morning were attributed to sea gulls smashing through windshields while a
panicked driver rammed head-on into another. It was this first sign that caused Julianne Sanders, our former nanny, to call up to the Retreat. Naturally, she discovered what everyone on Gull Island was just finding out: The phones were down, as was most of the electric power. So she got in her VW and headed back up to the house. There were mudslides all along the main road, and then coming up the gravel proved to be truly hellish, full of enormous splits in the earth that could easily swallow a car whole. But Julianne was driving a Volkswagen, after all, and not only were those Bugs airtight, but they’d go anywhere. She veered off the road and drove across muddy lawns; summer residents on our side of Gull Island were few and far between, and with uprooted trees and dead sea gulls scattered like a messy child had left them in his wake, who was going to notice some tire treads across their front lawns?

She parked the car and, getting out, heard cries coming from the bluffs. She couldn’t see much with all the rain and birds coming down, but she ran out there. The sight she beheld didn’t shock her so much as confirm something for her.

“I knew, Beau, the first time I saw your cousin—he was like an iron filing, and the bluffs were a magnetic field. I worked as hard as I could not to believe—but when I saw those dead children . . . and me, armed with what every Gullah woman knows are her best weapons,” she explained when we were both back inside the Retreat, “my two hands.”

She found it easy enough to wrestle the mallets from Wilbur and Goober. It seemed Sumter, the master puppeteer, wasn’t really great at walking and chewing gum at the same time. “My granddaddy said, ‘It ain’t the dead you got to watch out for, it’s the living,’ and he just maybe was right.” Then when I had raked off Zinnia’s face, Julianne was there to knock her off me.

I awoke in the living room a few minutes later. Uncle Ralph had gone out to bring Mama in, and when he did, Mama recognized no one but kept calling out for Governor. They put her upstairs to bed with a good stiff drink; Aunt Cricket and Uncle Ralph, themselves armed with stiff drinks,
were up there tending to her bruises. All I could hear of them were my mother’s shrieks for her baby and the rushing sound of water running in the bathroom: A boiling hot bath was Aunt Cricket’s remedy for everything life threw at you, and she would no doubt be trying to dunk my mother to keep the hysteria to a minimum. Uncle Ralph was shouting to my sisters to stay in their room or they’d get a whupping, but I could hear them whispering and Missy’s exclamations of “Wow” at the top of the stairs.

Julianne said to Grammy, “You knew all along what that boy was up to. You could’ve stopped him.”

Grammy replied, “Could I? Can you stop imagination? Can you tame impulse? And what do you call what he has? Birthright?” My eyes fluttered open and closed. “Sumter speaks to you, doesn’t he?” she asked me.

I nodded. “In my mind’s eyeball. We sometimes talk. To each other. But it’s all from him. It’s only when he wants to talk to me.”

“I hear him sometimes, too,” she heaved a big sigh, “just like I used to hear my Babygirl. Even . . . even after she died. I saw what happened to her body. When she died. I saw her shift, turn, her corporeal self shimmer and become monstrous and twisted. She became beastlike, covered with hair, her teeth sharp and long, and then she was like a boy, and then an even younger girl, she changed so fast before my eyes, at times like a lizard, and then herself, and then a shiny eel in my hands. It was her
mind;
she had no control, do you understand? She had
no control.
She was pulled by a tide I could not see.”

“Sumter took Governor. To her grave. Where—where is it? It’s where he’s gone.”

“Dear God.” Grammy was calmer than I’d ever seen her. “She’s on Gullah ground. Sacred ground.”

“The bluffs,” I said.

“No, child, the bluffs aren’t sacred. It’s the swamp, the island.”

“Where the dead dance,” Julianne Sanders said, as if repeating something she’d heard for years, “the island in Rabbit Lake. It’s where the first
Gullahs here were believed to be buried, and the water was to lock in their souls. They could not travel over water, for it always would bring them back.”

“I knew that legend,” Grammy Weenie said, “and I thought perhaps, just perhaps, it would keep her soul there, keep her from returning.”

“But she
is
back. I seen her. In my mind’s eyeball. And she’s small like a dwarf and’s got white hair, not red like you lied before, Grammy.”

Grammy clutched her breast with her shriveled hand. She was moving her lips but not exactly talking. I had never seen tears come to her eyes before, but they did, and they were fat tears that just sat there on the lower lids.

“Dear Jesus,” she gasped. “Beau, her hair
was
red, in the end. Soaked with her own blood. I had forgotten . . . I had thought it was always red, because that’s how I remember her looking. That way. The last moment I ever looked at her face, and it colored my memory. My God, I’d
forgotten.”

I tried to sit up, but Julianne pushed me back.

“And he’s
really
gonna do it. He has Governor. And I know where he is,” I said.

“What?” Grammy asked. “Where, child?”

“Where you buried her body. ’Cause that’s where he’s gonna sacrifice Governor. He’s gonna try to bring Lucy back with Governor’s blood. And with her . . . the other one. His father. The Feeder. The All. He’ll be down there, down there with Governor—” I said, still dizzy but trying to sit up. “If I can just—”

But my words were cut off when we heard the sounds of my sisters screaming from upstairs—and the growling of a wild animal.

What Nonie later told me was she and Missy had been running amok through the house when I had run out to see if Daddy would flash his headlights. Missy was terrified of storms, so she thought she was having heart palpitations, and when Nonie tried to get her to calm her down so
she wouldn’t run around like a chicken with its head cut off, Missy slapped her so hard that Nonie hit her head against one of the doorknobs. My sisters started hitting each other, and Mama, who was in a tizzy on account of Governor being gone, yelled at them to stop right this instant.

“She started it,” Nonie complained, but Mama was too confused to respond.

“Where’s Beau?” Mama asked, and when she didn’t get an answer, she grabbed Nonie by the shoulders and shook her. “Where’s Beau?”

“He took off outta here.” She pointed to the door that was swinging open with rain coming in the front.

“Maybe he knows where the baby—” As she said this, a tree branch crashed through the hall window and the glass sprayed in. Nonie went to her bedroom to get her sandals so she wouldn’t cut up her feet.

Mama looked distracted when she got back from the bedroom, and Missy whispered, “She’s gone round the bend, I knew she would.”

“Mama?” Nonie asked. “You doing okay?” Mama’s hands seemed unusually warm as my sister held them.

“I’m going to have to take Cricket’s car,” she was saying aloud, but it was like she was talking only to herself. “The roads’ll be washed out, but I need to get help. Maybe Daddy came back and took the baby. Maybe that’s what happened. Where the hell is your daddy?” She drew her hands away from Nonie’s grasp. She started wiping her face over and over with both hands like she wanted to pull the skin right off. Aunt Cricket was coming up the stairs looking like a shambles of her usual run-down self. She had been keening like a madwoman in the kitchen, trying to locate her boy.

Aunt Cricket said, “You children tell me everything you know right now or else, you hear me? You hear me? You tell me where my boy is!”

Missy, who never liked being accused of so much as coughing, started bawling right there, backing up against the broken window and scratching her feet up something awful with the glass chips on the floor. “We don’t know where he is,” she whined. “We just got up. Leave us alone. We didn’t mean for him to be like this.”