Shep Clayton was only ever around Abby’s Uncle Virgil, her mama’s brother, at cock fights. Last time Shep seen him, Virgil had started a brawl when his bird lost, busted a chair over some fella’s head. Fella was still in a bad way, or so Shep’d heard.
Abby’d told Shep and her crazy older brother Claude, yesterday, that they was s’posed to do something about them as was making trouble for the Jabberwock — Cotton Jackson, Stuart McClintock and Pete Rutherford’s daughter, Jolene. Soon’s she did, Claude had called his uncle, asked Virgil could he round up some boys and could they meet at Virgil’s house at noon today. Didn’t say nothing about why.
Shep, Abby and most of Abby’s kin — aunts, uncles, cousins and such — lived in and around Poorfolk Hollow in southwest Nowhere County, on the far side of Hollow Tree Ridge. Her mama’d been Winona Hannaker, and over the years a whole passel of that side of the family had spread out ‘til some of them was on the Drayton County side of the hollow. Them folks hadn’t lost nothing. ‘Course they was well aware of what’d happened in Nowhere County — more’n half the family was there. Except they wasn’t there. Not anymore, they wasn’t.
Virgil’s wife, Pauline, had laid out a spread and Shep could smell the apple pie from the front porch.
“Ya’ll want to pass them black-eyed peas on down to this side of the table,” said Claude, sitting there in the big chair at the end across from his uncle, taking it as his right and due soon’s he walked in the door. Shep didn’t think none of his kin had visited Claude when he was in that nut house, so it’d been years since they’d set eyes on him, but now that he was home, he acted like he’d never left, like all the rest of the family’d ought to do for him because he was Winona’s oldest. It was clear quick that didn’t none of them want anything to do with Claude. He always had been odd, and odd had over time turned into peculiar in a bad way and after a while the family was … say the truth of it, scared to be around him. Wasn’t nobody shed no tears when they heard he’d been locked away for hacking his drug-dealing partners to death with a hatchet, and Shep was sure wasn’t none of them doing no happy dance when they found out he’d come back home.
Shep was only here cause Abby’d told him to come. It wasn’t up to Shep no more what he said or didn’t say, nor what he done. Abby was the one deciding things now. The Abby that was in his head who didn’t have Abby’s bird-chirp voice was calling the shots. Shep was sitting on the sidelines. She’d told Shep not to pay no mind to that Stuart McClintock fella as had come by to visit him on Saturday evening. Said he was married to Charlie Ryan — him a black man and her white. That absolutely was not right and Abby’d said as much, but that wasn’t why she didn’t want Shep to listen to what the man had to say. She said it was Charlie McClintock coming home that’d caused all the trouble in the first place! Abby said the Jabberwock had been waiting for her and her friends — and everybody else in the county just got locked up right along with them.
The whole thing was Charlie McClintock’s fault!
Abby told Shep that Charlie’s husband, Stuart, had flown in from Chicago and was digging around in things that didn’t concern him. She said Shep’d ought to run him off the way he’d run off a weasel that got in the chicken house.
Then Claude Letcher’d came strolling into Shep and Abby’s house yesterday — the house that wasn’t no house no more. Abby started talking to her big brother outta Shep’s mouth, told him all kinda things Shep didn’t know about what had happened and why. And who was responsible. And what she wanted him and Claude to do about it. She got real specific — which meant they had to lay their hands on some guns. Ordinarily, that wouldn’t have been no thang. Shep had all kinda guns — shot rabbits and squirrels and deer to put meat on the table like everybody else in the county did. Shep’s guns had vanished with Abby and the house.
But her kin had guns. That’s why him and Claude had come to see her Uncle Virgil.
And now they sat there at the table in Uncle Virgil’s kitchen, talking with Claude and Abby’s cousins, Billy Ray and Doodlebug Hannaker, and a couple of friends, Ronnie Potter and Jim Bob Claywell — who’d helped Shep run the McGinty tractor into a creek when they was drunk teenagers. Ronnie and Jim Bob both lived in Nowhere County but they’d been away — likely out somewhere selling weed — and come home to find their families gone, same as Shep had.
‘Cept their houses was just empty, not old. And their wives hadn’t come back like Abby had, so she was right there inside Shep’s head. He sat now listening to her speak out his mouth, asking after Doodlebug’s youngest, Effie, who had some kind of heart problem, and wanting to know if Jim Bob’s mama’s gout was still bothering her and did Billy Ray ever find his bird dog that’d run off.
“I ain’t had no home-cooked food in a month of Sundays,” Claude said, piling his plate high with fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, fried okra and black-eyed peas.
“That what you come back for, Claude?” asked Billy Ray. “Missed cornbread and buttermilk, didja, locked away in the nut house like you was?”
Claude’s cousin speaking to him like that had ought to have got under Claude’s skin, but it didn’t.
“I come back because this here’s my home and I got as much right to be here as anybody else at this table.” Then he glanced at Shep. “Least that’s what I thought I’d come back for. But when I showed up and found things the way they is, I figured out I come here for some other reason I didn’t even know, some” — he stopped and grinned — “higher purpose.”
“Just what purpose might that be?” Doodlebug asked.
Uncle Virgil chided his sons. “Now, boys, you act like you ain’t glad to see your cousin.” Which they weren’t and weren’t putting up a very good show of hiding it.
“Any of you interested in getting all the people back who’s disappeared?” Claude asked, with his mouth full of mashed potatoes. That was a conversation stopper. You coulda heard a mouse in house shoes tiptoeing across a cotton ball in the silence that followed.
Jim Bob lived in Frogtown with his wife and two boys. Ronnie and his wife, Becky Sue, lived with his parents and sister on Elkhorn Road. All them people was gone now.
“‘Course we are!” Jim Bob said. He looked around the table. “It ain’t like we ain’t been trying! We all went to the law and reported it.” He sneered at Claude. “You think you can do a better job of getting help than we did, you go on ahead — and they’ll throw you in a cell with the Caswell brothers, Truman Pettigrew, and I don’t even know who all else. Or haul you off in an ambulance like they done them folks from Wisconsin who come looking for their granny.”
Some of the Nowhere people who’d lost families didn’t take it real well that the state police didn’t do nothing. They’d got ugly about it and got locked up. And they was some away-from-here folks who kept going back and forth across the county line until they gave up because they got sick — vomiting and nosebleeds and such.
“It’s powerful queer,” Aunt Pauline said, filling up her husband’s glass of ice tea. “The law comes and they see it. They see ain’t nobody there, houses empty, everything gone. They ‘investigate’ and write it down and then they never come back with no help.”
“Their remembering’s gone,” Uncle Virgil said.
Aunt Pauline nodded. “They come down with the forgets and don’t know nothing about what they seen, throw their reports in the trash, I guess, ‘cause they sound so crazy.”
“When you go back to ask why didn’t they do what they said they’d do, they look at you like you’s the one lost your mind,” Uncle Virgil said.
“Them Wisconsin folks musta seen that they granny and everybody else was missing and then forgot they seen it,” Aunt Pauline said. “So they come back a whole bunch of times. The forgetting must be hard on you ‘cause after awhile them folks was half dead.”
“We don’t need all them outsiders to fix our problem,” Claude said, piling another helping of okra on his plate. “It’s up to us to do it ourselves, our way.”
“And what way is that, Claude?” Jim Bob asked. “You know where they at, do you — all them missing people?” His voice dropped to a whisper. “You know where my Jenny is — Derek and Jason?”
Shep told 'em then. “Abby talks to me.” He got the expected disbelieving, sympathetic looks. He tapped his temple. “She’s in my head. You can believe me or no, but she says all them people that’s gone is still right where they was — we just can’t see them.”
“That’s crazy!” Doodlebug said.
“Any crazier than a whole county full of people vanishing in the first place?” Claude said.
“And nobody remembering what they seen here soon’s they cross the county line?” Shep said.
Didn’t nobody have an answer for that.
“They’s a thing called a Jabberwock’s got them.”
“You done lost your mind, Shep.” Jim Bob shook his head — sad-like, not mad.
“The Jabberwock told my Abby it’s gonna let them all go.”
“When?” Ronnie demanded, his voice cracking with emotion. “Becky Sue’s pregnant and the baby was due a week ago.”
“Not when … if.”
“If what?” Billy Ray asked.
“If we keep folks from meddling in the Jabberwock’s bidness,” Claude said. “It don’t want all them people it took. Never did want ‘em all. It just wants three of them, but it’s gonna hang onto every mother’s child in Nowhere County unless …”
“Unless what?” Aunt Pauline asked.
“Unless we leave it alone. They’s folks buttin’ in what don’t concern them. One of them’s Cotton Jackson and another is Pete Rutherford’s daughter. Third one’s an outsider, a black man married to a white woman.” Claude spit on the floor after he said it.
“How are we supposed to stop ‘em from meddling?” Uncle Virgil wanted to know.
“Shoot ‘em,” Claude said, matter-of-fact as pass the cornbread. “That’s why me and Shep is here. We ain’t got no hardware no more. Everything of Shep’s …” He let the sentence dangle. Nobody needed an explanation. “You still got yours, though. And we need to borrow some.”
“You want us to supply you with guns so’s you can walk out that door with ‘em and shoot somebody — that what you sayin’?” Uncle Virgil was having a hard time wrapping his mind around a request like that.
Claude smiled, revealing his hoary mouth with missing and rotted teeth.
“Yup. That’s what I’m sayin’.”
They was a rumble of thunder outside, rattled the window panes. Shep wondered if maybe Abby’d done it, made it thunder. He suspected she could if she wanted to. He suspected there wasn’t nothing anymore that Abby couldn’t do.