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Authors: Tom Piccirilli

Tags: #Horror, #Fiction, #Brothers and Sisters, #Sisters, #Suspense Fiction, #Thrillers

November Mourns (8 page)

BOOK: November Mourns
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He scanned the vista on the other side of the gorge, the dying orchards clustered with snarled catclaw brambles and briars.

A scratch on her cheek.

Pharisee.

If somebody hadn’t taken Megan up to Gospel Trail Road, then maybe someone had brought her down from the back hills instead.

 

Chapter Five

 

THE LUVELL GIRL HIS FATHER HAD SPOKEN OF
turned out to be Glide, who after dropping out of school in the fifth grade spent most of her days helping make sour-mash whiskey. She was a year younger than Megan—than Megan had been—but Glide already had 36C breasts and a natural cunning and understanding of men. Like her mother and sisters before her, she was built to bear children, designed by the hollow to pass on the burden of her general simplemindedness.

Shad remembered her as a crude kid always pouting and posturing, smelling of fresh cornstalk. She’d grown into a provocative teenager aware of her sexuality but too immature to do more than stick her chest in your face. She managed to hit all the right poses that accentuated her heavily freckled cleavage.

The Luvells had come out of the bottoms only to develop a taste for their own moon. Their patriarch, Pike Luvell, had blown himself up after drunkenly stuffing five sticks of dynamite in a chuckhole chasing down a gopher. His two sons were in various stages of chronic alcoholism. Instead of selling their moon they often never even finished distilling it, choosing to sit around their rock-strewn farm and eat the mash gruel.

It was an ugly sight. Neither of them had a tooth left in his skull. The oldest, Venn, was totally addled and rarely bothered to leave the barn. The younger, Hoober, yellow-tinged and bloated from failing kidneys, was a couple of years older than Shad and had reached the final stages of cirrhosis.

Their place crouched out on Bogan Road, nestled between a frog pond and a few acres of wire grass. Four shacks covered in crow shit faced one another.

Glide had a small potbelly but Shad couldn’t tell if it was baby fat or if she was already pregnant. He made his guess as she kept on affecting mannerisms that would drive the guys at Dober’s Roadhouse out of their heads. Shad hadn’t had a woman for two years, yet he was somehow disheartened by the display.

It gave him pause. He was struck again by the alarming fact that he now understood C-Block murderers better than he did his own people.

Glide lived up to her name, swirling around Shad as she sleekly eddied about the yard, working the vats of bubbling mash. He could see the bottom of Venn’s boots sticking out from beneath a thatch of hay in the corner of the barn. Broken pottery and mason jars littered the ground, half-hidden by tufts of crabgrass. Twisted lengths of converted radiator tubing connected the metal barrels and lay piled here and there among dried shucks of corn.

It sickened him thinking of how Mags must’ve walked around here, viewing this scene of despondency. Did she ever gaze into Hoober’s slack-jawed empty maw and listen to those befuddled slurrings? See Venn crawling around consuming his gruel? Could Shad have saved her from that at least?

He had to keep turning to watch Glide as she spun and circled the steaming drums. He wondered if he’d ever be able to drink whiskey again.

Glide stayed in motion, wriggling, the little belly quivering as she kept up a constant stream of chatter. Asking him ridiculous questions but showing a real curiosity. Wanting to know about the food they served in prison, the size of the cells, and if he’d gotten any jailhouse tattoos. If anybody had taught him how to break into a bank vault. She didn’t expect any responses, didn’t actually seem to need them. But it proved she kept her mind busy.

As she flowed closer to him, her shirt lifted, and he spotted a sloppy tattoo of a bumblebee on her left hip. Slightly below it, toward the base of her spine, a warm red devil face smiled affectionately. The needle hadn’t been clean and the tats had scarred considerably.

He stood waiting for her to wind down, and when she didn’t, he stepped over, got in front, and put a hand on her shoulder. It stopped her as if she’d run into a wall. She looked up, puzzled.

“Was Megan seeing anybody?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

It got depressing, having to explain every word you said. “A boy. Did she have a boyfriend?”

“No, nobody like that.”

“You certain?”

“A’course. After the trouble with that Zeke Hester bastard, she never wanted much to do with the boys. Except some in the Youth Ministry. She thought they were all right ’cause they didn’t do much ’sides go to prayer meetings.”

“Know of anyone who would’ve wanted to do her harm?”

“No, a’course not.”

“Think about it before you answer,” he snapped.

She blinked at him, tongued the inside of her cheek, and let a few beats go by. “Everybody liked Megan. And Zeke stayed away.”

He knew Glide was answering him marginally but honestly, and she wouldn’t offer anything more than what was simplest and fastest to say.

He had to come at it a different way. “Did you ever go up there in the back hills with her?”

“Where? Which hills?”

“To Gospel Trail. The gorge.”

With a surge of panicky strength, she snapped her arm away and broke free. “Hell no, I’d never go out that way.”

The vehemence surprised him. “Why?”

“You know the talk.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Yeah you do.”

Shad was getting the feeling that he’d somehow missed an important facet to the county and was only now getting around to it. “Not really. Tell me what they say.”

Glide appeared embarrassed by her outburst, humbled enough to actually dip her chin and blush. The rosy flush of her cheeks was authentic enough to tug at his guts.

She put on a moderately enticing girlish act, as if trying to throw him off the scent of her anxiety. There was a taunt in her eyes as well, the kind that made crazed lonely men run for shotguns to battle one another, and he knew better than to put his hand on her now.

“M’am gives tell that there’s wraiths out that way. The suicides can’t sleep. Hiding in the deadwood and brambles just waiting to catch folk. The land’s got a taint to it, she warns everybody. I’m not saying I believe that, but if you ever heard my M’am going on about spirits, you’d give ’em considerable thought.”

“You’re right,” he admitted.

M’am Luvell, Glide’s great-grandmother, was a hex woman the superstitious kin of the hollow respected and feared. They brought their sick children to her, their cows that didn’t give enough milk. The pumpkin heads and the kids with flippers. They came for love potions and charms to ward off the evil eye. They carried their chickens and their terror, and she would feed on it. All of it. Shad sort of liked the lady.

“Her mama was thrown into the chasm when M’am was a missy. Diptheria, I think. Or cholera. She watched it happen. She says the wraiths came out of the rocks and spent the afternoon with her, playing with her at first, then chasing and chewing on her legs.”

After Shad’s mother died, Pa went to M’am Luvell for a tonic to take his nightmares away—moon wasn’t strong enough anymore. She’d taught him how to play chess.

“I’d like to see her,” Shad said.

“Go right on,” Glide told him, aiming her tits to show him the way. “It’s not my place to stop anyone. Nor to urge ’em on, neither.”

Venn squirmed beneath the hay for a moment, whimpered, and lay still again.

 

 

BULLFROGS ROARED IN THE POND AND THE WIRE
grass appeared alive, agitated as it knifed into the breeze. Shad moved to the nearest shanty and stood at the ramshackle pineboard door. He reached out to knock and the walls groaned in protest, tilting horribly. The years of humidity, rain, and moss bleeding into the wood had rotted it to tissue paper. He tapped with his index finger and hoped the splintering door wouldn’t fall off its hinges.

M’am’s voice, low and almost dangerous, but filled with a quaint mischief, called out through the thick spaces between the slats. “Come on inside now, Shad Jenkins. Don’t you worry none ’bout my home. It’ll last long enough to serve me my remaining years, rest your mind on that.”

He was still giving too much of himself away. He walked in and instantly felt as if he’d stepped into a pagan place of worship. A hallowed arena where the blood never finished soaking into the earth. Some areas had an innate sense of sanctuary about them. Another person’s belief could wrap around your throat as tightly as your own.

M’am Luvell sat huddled on a small seat suited for a child, smoking a pipe. She nodded at him, eyes closed. Her dwarf’s body was hidden beneath afghans and oversized sweaters, except for the stubby fingers with yellow cracked nails, wrapped around her pipe. Some of the folk in Moon Run Hollow carved their own from corncobs or hickory, but hers was store-bought and expensive. It gave the hex woman another element of contradiction.

Even so, he was a little surprised to realize she was smoking marijuana. The sweet stink of it filled the shack and made him clear his throat.

He waited. Five minutes passed. It was a test of his patience, he knew. You learned more about people when they jumped than when they didn’t.

The room was empty except for a small table in the corner, a plate and some utensils on it, and a kitchen area filled with wooden boxes and glass bowls filled with powders, roots, and herbs. Opposite that, a tiny bed with a cotton-stuffed mattress. At its foot rested the homemade wicker-backed wheelchair they would use to push her around downtown. Shad drifted over, inspected it, and recognized the work. His father had built everything in the house.

M’am Luvell had crossed to the point where age no longer mattered. There was a timeless quality to her, like a stone outcropping barely forming the shape of an old woman. The fierce decades had passed her in these mountains and done what damage they could, but she’d survived the forces thrown against her.

Shad tried to imagine how she might stretch her hand out and call him over to her. So that he’d crouch at her side while she patted his head with a diminutive hand, whispering words of understanding to him. You were always looking for somebody to trust.

“Commiseration,” she said, opening her eyes. “Comfort and condolences.”

“Thank you.”

“First time you been by since you were a child.”

He nodded, remembering back to when he was about five and Pa had brought him here. “You helped my father when he needed it.”

“That wasn’t so much.” She noticed her pipe was out and laid it aside on the table. “I just gave him a game to take his mind off his troubles.”

“It still does,” Shad said. “Considering the burden of his worries, that counts for a great deal.”

“For some neighbors, maybe,” she told him. “But not all.”

“Sure.”

That was the end of it, these preliminaries. He felt it come to a close as if a cell door had slammed shut. M’am Luvell had pondered him long enough and was now ready. “So, what do you ask of me?”

“I’m not certain,” he said.

“Well, you think on it some.”

She cocked her head, watching him impassively. He glanced around and wondered what the hollow folk did with their chickens when they brought them to her. Did they just toss them on the floor so that you had squawking hens flapping all over? What other payments did they make? Since there was no place else to sit, did they kneel? He couldn’t recall if his father had stood straight before M’am. Shad remembered lying on the floor, staring at spiders in the corner.

BOOK: November Mourns
7.81Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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