The Breakfast Club convened in the breakroom/war room of the animal hospital while Merrie played with the kittens and puppies and Sam’s son, Rusty, spent the day with a friend.
Malachi’d had time for a shower and a shave in E.J.’s apartment after he’d dumped the bodies of Howie Witherspoon and the dog into an abandoned mine shaft. He had just settled in with a cup of coffee when Charlie arrived.
“How’s E.J.?” she asked Malachi as soon as she saw him.
“Not good. I’m no doctor … but it appears to me he is getting more ‘not good’ every day.”
“True that,” Sam said from the doorway. “I just checked on him. He still has a fever, so there’s an infection … somewhere. I just can’t figure out where — it’s not in the leg.”
It would have surprised no one if an infection had developed in the gory wound where the rabid Great Pyrenees had taken a hunk out of E.J.’s calf.
“Until I can get that infection under control … he’s just getting weaker and weaker.”
Of course, it wasn’t the injury or the infection that was most concerning. Neither was likely to kill him … but the rabies growing in E.J. daily eventually would.
If they didn’t figure this thing out soon, E.J. would die a grizzly death. Bottom line, nobody in the county would survive if somebody didn’t do something.
Apparently, the three of them were the only somebodies who were trying.
Well, not the only ones. There was Thelma Jackson, too, who had called the night before, telling Sam she had information she thought might be useful in their efforts to understand the Jabberwock.
As if summoned by his thoughts, Thelma appeared at the door.
“Hello, Mrs. Jackson,” he said, rising. She was tall, about Malachi’s height, six feet two inches, which made her slightly taller than Sam. Malachi’d always thought there was something regal about Thelma Jackson, with her wide forehead, high cheekbones and ebony skin, like she was an Ethiopian princess. She must have been a knockout when she was young because even at — must have been mid-sixties — she was still beautiful, with wide eyes and a full-lipped mouth, the kind men went all stupid over. Her hair was more salt than pepper, as glossy and shiny as he remembered it, falling in curls around her face. Her smile came easily. Soft-spoken and a good listener, she wasn’t as irresistibly likable as her husband, Cotton, who’d taught math. That man could make an enemy into an ally between one bus stop and the next. But you could tell she was a true, loyal friend. The kind who’d come to get you when your car stalled in the rain at two in the morning.
“Thelma,” she corrected.
“Good luck with that.” Sam smiled. “I’ve been trying to call her by her first name for a decade and I still revert to ‘she’s my teacher and I can’t call her Thelma!’ mode eventually.”
“It’s nice to see you again … Thelma,” Charlie said, then looked at Sam. “It is hard, isn’t it?”
“If you don’t call me Thelma I’m going to feel even older than I do right now — with the three of you grown up, pimples all gone.”
They’d all been zit-faced for a time when they were in high school, but Malachi remembered Sam’d had a brush with real acne — the ghastly kind with big bumps and yellow pimples. He’d forgotten about that. Gratefully, it had left no scars, and her skin was creamy smooth now.
“Don’t remind me!” Sam blushed bright red and looked away.
Malachi thought for the first time how awful it must have been for a beautiful girl to suddenly look like her face was made of ground beef. He hoped that hadn’t been the reason she and her steady boyfriend, Jimbo Mattingly, had seesawed in and out of a relationship their senior year. Surely not. Malachi had barely known Jimbo, but he didn’t believe a guy who’d sacrifice his life to save a child from a burning car would be that shallow.
“Have a seat,” Charlie told Thelma.
“You look … tired,” Sam said. “Is everything okay?”
Of course, it was Sam who noticed how drawn Thelma looked. Sam was all about other people. She’d always been like that.
“You mean, other than the fact we’re all trapped here and are gradually going to be … absorbed?”
“Well, there is that,” Malachi said, deadpan, and got a smile out of her.
“No, everything’s definitely not okay, as a matter of fact.” She sat down heavily in the seat offered. Charlie held up her own coffee cup and nodded to the coffee pot. Thelma shook her head. “But the rest of it is …”
“Too weird to talk about?” Malachi asked, and she looked surprised, then relieved.
“We have a rule — a little like the umbrella of mercy.” He didn’t know if Thelma knew what that was but he didn’t bother to explain. “The rule is that nothing is off the table on the weirdness scale here. Nothing in life is normal anymore, and the only hope we have of figuring this thing out is if we pool what we know. All of what we know. No self-editing.”
“When Charlie spoke up at the meeting … I finally had somebody to tell,” Thelma said. “I started thinking about this on J-Day, but … you know, we all thought it’d blow back out of here and then it wouldn’t matter. And when it didn’t go away, I knew there had to be a connection. I mean, a word like ‘Jabberwock’? — how could that possibly be a coincidence?”
Malachi exchanged a startled look with Charlie and Sam.
“You’ve heard about the ‘Jabberwock’ before?” he asked. “Fish just pulled the word out of his head that day. It was random. How could—?”
“Might not be as random as you think,” Thelma said. “Maybe Fish heard the name somewhere before. Maybe he wasn’t making it up but repeating it.”
Sam sat back in her chair. “Goody. Another can of worms.”
“I suppose we need to have a talk with Fish, too,” Charlie said.
“I guess we ought to do that before we go to Charlie’s house and try to become pen pals — no, with a blackboard, I suppose it’s “chalk pals” — with the Jabberwock,” Sam said.
“You’re communicating with it?” Thelma was thunderstruck.
“It’s only one-way communication so far,” Malachi said. “It wants to play with Charlie.” Malachi held up his hand before Thelma could launch questions. “We’ll tell you the whole story, but let’s take this one thing at a time. What was it you wanted to talk to us about?”
Thelma took a deep breath.
“I came here to tell you what I know, what I’ve found out over the years. It’ll sound crazy, but …” Her voice trailed off.
“Start small, with the history,” Charlie encouraged her. “Then you can kind of ease into the Twilight Zone stuff.”
Thelma nodded.
“The Jabberwock isn’t anything new. It’s been here for years, for centuries. Maybe all the people, the souls it absorbs … I think it feeds on the energy. And it grows.”
Her words knocked the wind out of Malachi. If that was starting small … He could tell the others were as startled as he was.
“How about we back up a little.” His voice sounded breathless. “How is it you know … whatever it is you know.”
“I’ve been tracing ancestries since I was old enough to realize that my grandmother was my mother’s mother and that she had a mother, too. Like beads on a string. I was fascinated. After I retired, genealogy became a hobby. I was particularly interested in places and people who … didn’t matter.”
She let that lie there in the air between them, then went on.
“That’s what got me interested in Gideon. It was just a coal camp, miners they hauled in from West Virginia and Pennsylvania — throwaway people. Nobody cared about them when they were alive and nobody noticed when they vanished.”
“Then you believe Gideon actually vanished?” Sam asked. “Are you certain?”
“Absolutely,” Thelma said. “I’m sure of it.”