No one spoke as Jolene drove her van along the winding roads through the mountains to Fearsome Hollow. Stuart tried to distract himself by looking out the windows at the vistas and thought as he had when he first arrived, that Nowhere County, Kentucky was one of the most beautiful places he’d ever seen. Well, except for what people had done to deface it.
Poverty spoke its hopelessness differently here than in the ghetto where Stuart had grown up. Not trash on the streets, needles and condoms, prostitutes on every corner and every wall slathered with graffiti.
Here it was something else.
Here, trailer houses clung to the mountainsides like bird daubers’ mud nests on a rock face. Clinging precariously there, affixed by satellite-dish stick pins. Yards with no grass, broken toys, rusty swing sets, appliances on the porch, car carcasses in various states of decay, and even the houses that had not been aged by the strange phenomena that had gobbled up the people looked unutterably old and tired.
It rained hard, a white sheet of water, then it stopped. The swollen clouds promised more downpours as they wound through hollows where the mountainsides came down to the road, leaving room enough only for the road, maybe a railroad track and always a creek.
They turned off Pebble Bottom Road onto Byrne Lane, then onto Rooster Run Road and then off that onto a smaller, bumpier thoroughfare Cotton said was Zebulon Road.
“Welcome to Fearsome Hollow,” Jolene said. “Come for the mists, stay for the monsters.”
They were entering into a crack between two mountains that rose up around the road, and Stuart could see patches of mist ahead clinging to the treetops. Jolene answered the question he didn’t ask.
“Only here in Fearsome Hollow. It’s the only place in the county there’s mist like this.”
“Oh, mists hang over the creeks everywhere in the early morning,” Cotton said. “But they burn off before ten o’clock. Here, though … there’s a mist somewhere in Fearsome Hollow all day long, and not just hanging over the creeks.”
Stuart looked apprehensively up into the trees where the mist clung like tatters of spiders’ webs.
The clouds hung low over the mountaintops, gray storm clouds not tethered to the trees like the mist. Lightening flashed inside the clouds and the low rumble of thunder accompanied them up the road, reminding Stuart of the slow rattle of drums in a funeral cortege.
He shivered.
Rounding a bend, the ghost town of Gideon leapt out of the shadows around the trees. It could have been a movie set for some old Western, except there was no saloon with doors hanging ajar, squeaking in a prairie wind. The buildings stood like gray gravestones beneath a dreary sky the same color.
“I can’t figure out why these buildings are still standing,” Jolene said. “Coal camps were built of such shoddy materials the houses sometimes collapsed while there were still people living in them.”
“I used to wonder the same thing,” Cotton said. “Now …”
“Now what?”
“Now … I think the buildings have been kept upright. I think whatever force is here … it wants this town to stay here. Wants people to see it. And remember.”
They pulled the van to a halt near an ancient tree that stood in the center of town, and Stuart got out and gawked at it.
"Now that is some serious tree-ege," he said, craning his neck to look up into the canopy of leaves. "I've never seen a California redwood, but this baby's got to be a kissing cousin."
"It's called the Carthage Oak. I'm sure it's the biggest tree in the county – though not in the whole state, I wouldn't think. There's some virgin timber in the Daniel Boone National Forest that could probably give it a run for its money."
Jolene killed the engine and thunder rumbled menacingly around them.
“It was a dark and stormy night …” she said, but even she didn’t smile at the reference. “As we were driving I made a decision. I’m not going to crank the EMS meter and the EVP recorders and—”
“Mayonnaise words,” Cotton said.
“Okay, the equipment that detects the presence of paranormal activity. I figure that’s a given, and I only have so much battery power. I’m going to plug it all into the …” She stopped herself. “The thingamabob that is supposed to disrupt and disperse that kind of energy.”
“The ghost-zapper.”
“Riiiiight.”
Thunder rumbled again and a couple of fat raindrops splatted down on the windshield.
Stuart looked around. “The thing, the Jabberwock, the spiritual force is in the mist, right? That’s what we think, anyway.”
“Yeah, so—”
“There’s no such thing as mist in the rain, is there? You can’t have fog in the middle of a storm, right?”
Jolene shrugged. Cotton didn’t appear to have heard the question, was scanning the world all around, his eyes searching and fearful.
“Let’s do this and get the hell outta Dodge.”
Rusty lay in the dark of the car trunk, trying not to imagine that he was suffocating. He knew it was just his imagination, that he was having trouble breathing because he was scared and who wouldn’t be scared when a crazy woman with a gun hauls you out of bed and kidnaps you!
It was kidnapping. That’s what she’d done. And he’d seen lots of television shows where people who’d been kidnapped were thrown into the trunk of a car and none of them ever suffocated. A car trunk wasn’t airtight, he knew that. If he could just calm down enough to concentrate, he was sure he’d be able to smell the exhaust of the car. Not that car exhaust was a good thing. It was a very bad thing. But the point was that if he could smell the exhaust, it meant the trunk wasn’t airtight, so there was air in there and he wasn’t going to suffocate.
“Get a grip,” he said out loud. Whispered.
It took all his concentration to wrap his will around his panic and keep it from expanding until it filled him completely up. Panic never ended well. Not one time in any story he’d ever heard or movie or television show or real life — not once was it a good thing for the person in danger to panic. Panicked people did stupid things … that got them killed.
His heart ricocheted like a bullet fired into the rocks at the thought of getting killed and he had to grab hold again and yank tight.
He wasn’t in danger of getting killed. Mrs. McFarland wasn’t going to kill him.
She wasn’t, was she? Why would she—?
Stop it.
He had no idea why she had done what she had done, but it made logical sense that if she had wanted Rusty dead she would have shot him as he lay asleep in his bed. She didn’t go to all the trouble to stick him in the trunk of the car and drive him somewhere just to kill him when she got there.
She was crazy, that was all. He’d always believed that and this certainly proved he’d been right. The woman was certifiable, needed to be locked up somewhere and probably would be after pulling this stunt. He couldn’t imagine what she intended to do with him, but he knew it was futile to try to figure out what a crazy person was going to do.
He couldn’t control what she did or didn’t do but he could control what he did. That’s what his mom always said. He had to concentrate on what he could do, what he would do when they got wherever it was they were going.
So what could he do?
Well, for one thing, he could stop being a schmuck and playing by the rules. Be respectful to your elders. That rule probably didn’t apply anymore when your elders were crazier than an outhouse rat. Mrs. McFarland was bigger than Rusty, but not much. A little taller, certainly heavier, probably had him by fifty pounds. But he was a strong twelve-year-old boy and she was fat and old and no way could she overpower him if he fought back.
He had to have a plan, though. Suddenly, he felt the car begin to slow.
A plan. A plan!
The element of surprise. That’s what he had going for him. That was all the plan he could come up with before the car rolled to a stop and he heard the front door open and close.
Surprise.