Cotton Jackson pulled into the driveway of the house he’d lived in for twenty-five years, furnished now with only the basics of camping equipment and yard sale furniture, the house from which all his belongings, and his precious wife Thelma, had vanished two weeks ago.
The van with the television-show logo for If You’ve Got It, Haunt It was parked on the other side of the driveway in front of the two-car garage.
Cotton had run a couple of errands after his conversation with Rose Topple in the nursing home and had hit a wall of exhaustion, wanted to curl up and go to sleep in the Kroger parking lot after he’d gotten the necessary few groceries, and an assortment of over-the-counter medications to keep the three of them awake.
“I’m too old for this,” he moaned to himself as he got behind the wheel, and in truth he felt older than a mere sixty-four years of living would explain. Old and tired. He rolled the windows down to focus cool air into his face and turned the radio up as high as it would go. It was a lost cause, though. Once on the road, he quickly got so drowsy he didn’t trust himself to make it all the way back to Nowhere County, was forced to pull over into the parking lot of a Carlisle strip mall to take a quick nap. He didn’t think he’d sleep but a few minutes — and would likely wake up screaming, but he was wrong on both counts. He slept soundly for several hours and might have slept even longer if the rumble of thunder hadn’t awakened him. To his surprise, he woke up refreshed. And it wasn’t hard to figure out why. The oppression he’d felt every minute in Nowhere County had lifted as soon as he crossed into Beaufort County. The tension had drained away like the air out of a balloon and he’d slept soundly until he awakened with a start to a leaden sky boiling with storm clouds. It was the middle of the afternoon.
“We were about to send out the sled dogs and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police,” Jolene said when she looked up and saw him in the kitchen doorway.
“Figured the old lady was holding you captive … for what possible reason we couldn’t fathom,” Stuart said, then seriously, “or you fell asleep at the wheel and ran off the road and down the side of a mountain.”
“Close, but no cigar,” Cotton said, and fit a smile on his face that hung as limp as a wet sheet on a clothesline. He thought maybe he better keep his mouth shut and not tell Jolene and Stuart anything — the two of them looked awful, somewhere on the other side of exhausted. They looked like they’d aged ten years.
It was clear without even asking that their mission to retrieve Jolene’s ghost-busting equipment from Reece Tibbits’s house had not gone well.
Cotton’s brief respite had refreshed him more than could be explained by a couple hours of sleep. It was more about being able to breathe without feeling like an elephant was sitting on his chest. Jolene and Stuart needed a break like that, too. Jolene could take one, but Stuart couldn’t … or he’d forget what he’d come here to do.
“Well?” Jolene said, and the two of them looked at him expectantly. “Do we have to insert a quarter to get the jukebox to start playing a song?”
“I think I have an address: Jabberwock, Fearsome Hollow, Nowhere County, Kentucky.”
“That’s what she said, the old lady — that the thing that made everybody vanish, lives there?” Stuart asked.
“Rose Topple told me that the town of Gideon and everybody in it vanished overnight. Just like she told Thelma. And I’m convinced it’s not some concocted story. It’s the truth. The town really did go poof in a puff of smoke. She said the ‘Jabberwock’ took it.”
“Seriously?” Stuart’s face lost some of its exhausted look as his interest animated it. “She used that word — called it the same thing Shep Clayton called it?”
Cotton nodded.
“If this Jabberwock thing made Gideon vanish, it made the rest of Nowhere County vanish, too,” Jolene said.
“And after the town vanished, the Jabberwock was still there. It talked to Lily, told her things.”
“What things?” Stuart asked.
“She shut down before we got to that part, but the point is, if it remained in Fearsome Hollow after it gobbled up Gideon, it’s a safe bet it’s still there.”
They looked from one to the other and it was clear nobody disagreed.
“So did you guys get the equipment back from Reece’s?” Cotton asked. “Meet any interesting people in the process?”
The air seemed to drain out of both of them and they looked as tired and disheartened as they had when he came in.
“I take back the question,” Cotton said. “I don’t want to have to jam anything else into my head right now. Not another word until we eat.” Cotton reached into the sack he’d brought into the house and looked at Jolene. “There’s white meat and dark meat, but you are not restricted to eating the meat that corresponds to your ethnicity.”
“Is that another white-person joke?”
“I got Colonel Poc-Poc on my way out of Carlisle,” Cotton told Stuart.
“Colonel Poc-Poc?”
“What mountain people call Kentucky Fried Chicken. Colonel, as in Colonel Sanders.”
“And poc-poc as in the sound a chicken makes.” Jolene then did a reasonably good imitation of one. “Poc, poc, poc-poc-pooooc.”
Cotton began to empty the contents of the bag onto the table, deflecting all questions until “we got some food in our bellies.”
“Cotton’s right,” Stuart said. “I have something resembling an appetite and I don’t think I want to hear the story of Rose Topple and the nursing home on an empty stomach.”
They ate like they hadn’t had a meal in weeks. By mutual unspoken agreement, conversation was relegated to the relative superiority of original recipe chicken versus extra crispy, a Jolene soliloquy, “ode to a Colonel Sanders biscuit,” and general belly-aching about the cardboard nature of KFC fries.
“There’s more flavor in a Styrofoam packing worm,” Jolene said.
As they cleared away the greasy paper plates, Stuart and Jolene told Cotton that Jolene’s equipment was still there and there’d been no reception committee waiting for them at the Tibbits house.
“Well, that’s good news!”
“The only good news,” Jolene said. “The equipment was there. The readings weren’t. Everything we recorded, all the data had been erased.”
Cotton recoiled from the words like from a physical blow, only then realizing how much he’d been banking on Jolene spreading the story to the world.
“So we decided to get new data — at Charlie’s mother’s house,” Stuart said but hope died in Cotton’s chest before it had a chance to draw first breath.
“Nobody home,” Jolene said. “Literally. Dead line. Not even a dial tone.”
“It was just a house — an empty house,” Stuart said, his voice ragged.
“No more paranormal activity there than all the ‘haunted houses’ I visited where I faked the presence of ghosts.”
They sat silent for a moment, then Stuart plunged relentlessly forward. Cotton was impressed by his tenacity.
“So spill … was Rose Topple senile?”
“Absolutely not!”
Cotton began his tale, told them the stories Rose Topple had told him. He’d been trying to organize it all in his head into some rational narrative, but had not been able to do much with the tangled tale but repeat it to the two of them as it was told to him. He described how the miner found bones, skeletons in the mine, and how the rest of the miners refused to go back to work, afraid they’d desecrated an Indian burial ground and the mine would be haunted.
“A representative of the mining company showed up and told them the bones were the remains of a village of ‘jigger-dancers’ that’d been massacred by Indians.”
“Jigger dancers?” Stuart asked.
“I think he was talking about Shakers — a sect, some spinoff of Quakers … who, as we all know, were abolitionists and therefore not that Southern boy’s favorite people — so the miners tossed the bones in the woods, and Lily went home to find her little brother playing with her mother’s favorite pot. He broke it, she got the blame, and she ran away into the woods and got lost. The next morning when she came home … the town had vanished.”
“So this Jabberwock thing gobbled up Gideon — did she say why?” Jolene asked.
“I don’t think she knew.” Cotton paused, remembering what she’d said at the end — that the Jabberwock and her mother had talked. “She said her mother did something that kept her on the Jabberwock’s Christmas card list, but she wouldn’t tell me what.”
“So the Jabberwock gobbled up a little mining town, and given there are no other suspects in the crime, we assume that a century later it did the same thing with a whole county,” Stuart said.
“Why? What for?” Jolene asked.
“I don’t know,” Cotton said.
Stuart stood in frustration, went to the window on the kitchen door, pulled back the curtains and looked out at the stormy sky. Then he turned back, his jaw set.
“What difference does it make why? If the Jabberwock in Fearsome Hollow is what made Nowhere County vanish … then the only way to get the county back is—”
“To go have a come-to-Jesus talk with the Jabberwock?” Cotton said.
“Something like that.”
Stuart turned to Jolene.
“That machine, the one stuck behind the others … the thingamabob that emits high-frequency sound waves, higher than a dog whistle, or something like that. You said it was bug spray for ghosts.”
Cotton vaguely recalled the description of some machine they hadn’t taken into Pete’s house. “Yeah, bug spray — gets rid of them.”
“That’s what you said, didn’t you?” Stuart said.
“Well, yes, but—”
“Does it work?” Cotton had asked the same question when he first saw it. He got the same response now as he’d gotten then.
“How would I know? I’ve never used it on a real ghost.” Jolene shrugged. “I’ve never done anything but fake readings to make it appear there’s paranormal activity when there really isn’t any, remember.”
“But your equipment detected a real presence in your father’s house — it did, didn’t it?”
“Absolutely.”
“So is it possible the thingamabob could actually get rid of spirits?”
“Well, it does disrupt electromagnetic energy, so …” She stopped. “Okay, theoretically it should work.”
Stuart looked from Jolene to Cotton.
“Anybody else got a better plan in mind, because if you don’t, this is all we’ve got.”
They grew quiet.
“I’m in for this, but before we go, I think it’s time to call Moses,” Jolene said.
“The guy you said talks to ghosts?” Cotton asked.
“What for?” Stuart asked. “You think he can zap ghosts better than your thingamabob?”
“No, not to ‘zap’ the ghosts. Moses is … I don’t know what to say about him. He’s … the real deal, the only person I ever met who wasn’t faking.”
“I’ve never heard of him so his television show must not—” Stuart began.
“Television show! Moses? Oh, no, no, no. Moses isn’t trying to … he doesn’t use his … Nobody’s heard of him. He avoids publicity, has run from notoriety for fifty years. Moses is just an old man who … if there’s anybody on the planet who really can talk to dead people, it’s Moses Weiss.”
“And you want to call him because …”
“The people who vanished out of Nowhere County, they’re not all dead!” There was such force in her words, Cotton jumped. “They’re alive … somewhere.” She looked from one to the other for confirmation and they nodded. They all believed that. They had to believe it. “That little girl, Rose Topple, her father was alive for a few days and then …” She paused, seemed to screw herself up to what she was going to say next. “It’s going to take a while, with thousands of people instead of just a couple hundred, but I think the Jabberwock intends to kill everybody in Nowhere County eventually. I don’t want to believe that, but I do.”
“So do I,” Stuart said softly. “And we’re running out of time.”
“That’s the thing — they’re not all dead now, but it’s only reasonable to assume that some of them are. The Jabberwock has killed some people already — the Tibbitses, the Tungate brothers … I’m sure lots of others. Maybe Moses could talk to those dead people.”
“But didn’t you say that this Moses guy is … that talking to dead people had driven him crazy?” Stuart asked.
“Yes, I did. And yes, Moses is … peculiar. Strange, very strange.”
“Half a bubble off plumb?” Cotton offered.
“At least that. I might not be able to reach him. I have his old number in Nashville but I haven’t talked to him in years and he moves around a lot. Still, it’s worth a shot.”
Jolene went to the phone on the wall in the hallway. Cotton could hear her talking but not what she was saying.
“It’s the right number, but he wasn’t home so I left a message,” Jolene said as she came back into the kitchen. “I told him he could get in touch with me here,” she said to Cotton. “Gave him your name, phone number and address, so all I can do is hope he calls back.” She shrugged. “But if I came home and heard a message on my answering machine like the one I just left on Moses’s …” She didn’t finish, just shook her head.
Cotton looked past Stuart out the window at the darkening sky above the hollow. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but the only thing I can think of that’s scarier than going ghost hunting is going ghost hunting in the dark.”
“Copy that.”
“You want to wait until morning?” Jolene asked.
“And spend another sleepless night on Cotton’s lumpy cot dreaming of my little girl as a rotting corpse?”
That was a conversation stopper.
Finally, Stuart spoke again.
“You really don’t think that ghost-zapping equipment of yours will work, do you?”
“Anything’s possible. But going out there armed with nothing more than my … thing-a-ma-bob … feels like going on a real safari with the toy elephant gun that fooled all the other little kids on the playground.”
“But it could be more than a toy, couldn’t it?” Cotton hated the desperation he heard in his own voice.
“The only way to find out is to shoot a real elephant with it,” Stuart said.
Jolene let out a bleat of laughter. “I keep seeing the image of Elmer Fudd—”
“Pulling the trigger on his shotgun and nothing comes out the end—” Cotton said.
“Except a flag with the word ‘Bang!’ written on it,” Stuart finished. He glanced from one to the other, then turned and opened the kitchen door behind him, mumbling under his breath, “Kill da waaaaaaabit … kill da waaaaaabit …”