Those Who Went Remain There Still (18 page)

***

The phantom woman leaned down again to say something more, and Meshack cringed away. She raised a hand as if to strike him, and stopped. She looked to me again and crooked her neck to indicate a hole beside me, and behind me.

I turned to see it, and against the raw, damp skin of my cheek there was air—I was almost certain of it. It was
moving
air that didn’t stink so wholly of shit and decay.

“Meshack!” I said. “This way, it might be…it must be…” I
floundered in my excitement.

***

Meshack was alone again. Nicodemus was at the edge of the pit, shaking and retching where he stood. It was odd to watch a man vomit that way, without crunching over or aiming his mouth at the ground.

“Get him,” Meshack said. “And let’s go.” My poor nephew, he was shaking so hard, and dribbling blood down his forearms and chest. It was pooling against his belt, soaking his shirt. He’d be no help in lifting the other man out.

I tried to climb down gingerly, but I tripped and went face-first into the bone pit, bruising myself in ways too horrible to contemplate. I staggered, and thigh-deep in the terrible wreckage of humanity I seized Nicodemus by the arm and dragged him—vomit and all—up over the edge and onto firmer turf.

“I thought you were going to leave him,” I said to Meshack as I hauled the other man up. It was almost like towing a drowned man.

“We’re going to need him.”

“We are?”

“Yes, unless you want to stay here and live in the valley. And you don’t want that anymore than I do. So it’s got to be
him
.” Meshack was staring down at the outermost paper, holding his candle past it and over it.

I’d forgotten he could read.

XVI

The Instructions

Neither Heaster Wharton Senior nor Junior could read. The
message must’ve been dictated.

First man out alive, Mander or Coy, whoever’s got these papers gets the whole of my property on two conditions: One, he blows up the entrance to that cave our folks call the Witch’s Pit and he leaves it closed forever. Two, he stays in the valley and sees to it that the cave stays shut.

My pappy and Mr. Boone, they should’ve killed that thing off when it was just the one. Maybe they didn’t mean to let it live and breed. Maybe they didn’t know it was full with a litter of little things, down there in the cave. Maybe they didn’t know they’d only crippled it and made it madder, and meaner—and they’d let it birth some company.

Or maybe they were just scared and didn’t know what else to do. I don’t know. I weren’t there. My pappy told me about it, though, and he told me he didn’t think it was finished.

Well I
know
it wasn’t finished. And if my kin can’t cut it off, then they’ll have to live here with it. I know everyone wants me to divvy up the land all fair, so that’s just as fair as I can make it.

And if no one gets out, and no one ever reads
this, it just goes to show that none of them deserved it anyway.