“Never came back?” Stuart was incredulous. “How … what …?”
“Boggles the mind, doesn’t it?” Cotton pointed out the back side of the Welcome to NoWherE County sign coming up on their right and directed Stuart to pull over on the side of the road. “Stuart, you are about to find out why they didn’t come back.”
Cotton gestured down the road leading into Beaufort County. “There’s a little convenience store about two miles from here. I want you to drive us there. I’m not going to say anything else. Just drive there and stop, and then … everything will make sense.”
Stuart doubted seriously that there was any sense to be made of any of it, but he did as he was instructed because he didn’t know what else to do. He pulled the red Lexus back onto the road and kept driving.
The Jiffy Shop where Stuart pulled in a few minutes later had propane gas canisters for sale on one side of the front door and bagged ice from a machine for sale on the other. A man came out of the store as Stuart pulled up. Bib overalls, filthy tee-shirt underneath, jaw swollen by a plug of tobacco, barefoot. Barefoot! Surely he and the guy who blew a hole in the road had been extras in the same movie — Deliverance. A sign advertising that Kentucky Lottery tickets were for sale inside proclaimed, “Somebody’s got to win. Might as well be you.”
Stuart felt a little strange, almost like he’d just awakened after a nap, thoughts jumbled, wasn’t sure why he’d stopped — he was thirsty. Yeah, that was it. He’d stopped for a soft drink.
When Stuart came out of the Jiffy Shop with a soft drink, he found an older black man leaning up against the hood of the Lexus. He had no change to give the man and certainly didn’t have time for panhandlers right now. He had to find some other route into Nower County because the road from Lexington had a hole in it the size of a Sherman Tank. And the man who blew the hole … no, not going there.
“Stuart,” the man said.
“How do you know my name?” Stuart asked. And as he examined the old man closer he realized that he didn’t look like a panhandler. But how did he know Stuart’s name?
“I’m Cotton Jackson,” the man said, but didn’t extend his hand as if he were introducing himself.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Jackson?”
The man pointed to Stuart’s shirt pocket. “You can take that piece of paper out of your pocket and read it.”
“What piece of—”
When he patted his pocket there was, indeed, a piece of paper in it. How’d this guy …? Stuart was instantly suspicious.
“Look, I don’t know who you are or what you want, but—”
“Mr. McClintock, you are looking for your wife and your little girl so you’re in a hurry.” Stuart’s shock must have shown on his face.
“How—?”
“Just read what’s on the paper,” the man said. “Read it … and then we’ll talk.”
Stuart took the piece of paper out of his pocket. There were words written on the back of it — a DMV envelop to use for a mail-in parking fine. He looked at the words. They were in his own handwriting, but they made no sense.
“All the houses are empty. There’s nobody here, everyone has vanished,” the first sentence said.
Stuart’s head snapped up and he looked in shocked surprise at the old man, whose expression hadn’t changed.
“I wrote words on a blackboard and then other words appeared beneath them. Then all the words vanished.”
Stuart was so shocked he couldn’t speak. How … why …?
“Mr. McClintock, if you’d just give me a ride …” He pointed in the direction the woman at the register said was Nower County. “It’s not but a couple of miles and you’re going that way anyway. Do that, and I’ll explain how we met each other.”
Stuart was suspicious, wary of getting in the car with this man who obviously was a couple of sandwiches shy of a full picnic. But he didn’t look … dangerous.
“I’m not armed,” the man said, as if he’d read Stuart’s mind. He lifted his jacket out to show pockets, turned so Stuart could see he had nothing concealed down the back of his pants. “You’re a great big football player and I’m a wimpy old man. What harm can it do?”
Stuart was consumed with curiosity, and totally confused, so he gestured to the passenger side door.
“Get in. It’ll be interesting to hear what you have to say.”
“You have no idea how interesting."
A few minutes later, Stuart pointed at the Welcome to Nower County sign just up ahead.
“My wife told me about that, how teenagers added the H and the E and nobody changed it because it seemed to fit.”
“Charlie told you,” the man said as they passed the sign.
“Yeah, Charlie. How do you know …?”
And then Stuart knew.
It was all there, everything that had been … gone.
What in the world …?
He was suddenly terrified, as terrified as he’d been when the Tibbits guy blew up the road. And then vanished. As terrified as he’d been in Charlie’s kitchen watching words disappear off a blackboard – his words and hers, too. They were her words! Weren't they?
“You best pull over, son,” Cotton said, and he could see from the concern on the man’s face that he had registered Stuart’s emotional state.
Stuart managed to pilot the car onto the shoulder of the road. Then he leapt out of it, put his hands on his knees and vomited violently into the dirt. The nausea had hammered him without warning, a horrifying clenching in his gut that wouldn’t let up until he had emptied out all the contents. And even then, he continued to reflexively dry-heave.
When it was finally over, he staggered back against the car, gasping for breath.
“You might feel better if you get back in and close the door,” Cotton said from the front seat. “Smelling that won’t do anything for your stomach and it’s sure not doing anything for mine.”
Stuart got into the car, closed the door, put the car in gear and drove fifty or sixty feet before stopping again. Then sat for a few minutes, panting.
“You knew this would happen. That was what the note was about.”
“I didn’t know that this specifically would happen, that you’d even forget who I was, that you’d get sick, but I knew something like it would, pieced it together.”
“That’s why …”
“Why nobody did anything about what’s going on here. No sense bothering you with all the other places I went, things I tried. And not just me. I’ve run into other folks, a dozen or more people who came home to nothing like I did. People who did the same thing I did – they went to the police. Simple mountain people, uneducated – I'm probably the most credible of the lot. The same thing happened to them. I’ve even met two other people who showed up here later, like you did; one was a guy looking for his grandmother. It always ends the same. It stays here, in Nower County. Whatever you saw or did inside the borders of Nower County -- it doesn’t leave with you. You forget all about it.”
“That’s impossible!”
Cotton lifted his eyebrows. “You sure about that?”
“This isn’t real. This cannot be happening.” Stuart’s mind went into full bore revolt. “Things like this don’t happen in the world. Vanishing people, vanishing belongings—”
“Vanishing memories. The constant in all of it is ‘vanishing.’ Disappearing. For some reason, there is some … force, some … there isn’t word for it. All I know is that whatever it is, it can make people vanish, memories vanish. Time vanish.”
“Time?”
“In the morning, a house looks like it was built yesterday. In the afternoon, the same house looks like it was built a hundred years ago. All those years in between, the time it would have taken for the decay to have happened, that time … vanished.”
“I think I’m losing my mind.”
“Join the club.”
Stuart suddenly thought of something. “Wait a minute. I forgot but you didn’t. You remembered it all. Why—?”
“The forever and always answer to all why questions is going to be ‘I don’t know’ so it’s really useless to keep launching them out there into conversations.”
“Ok, what—?”
“What I have observed is that it’s about being from Nower County. Being born here. You ‘outsiders’—”
“People from Away From Here—”
Cotton smiled a little. “Charlie educated you good. Yes, you flatlanders are subject to a mind sweep.”
“And nowhere people are immune?”
He nodded. “I’ve talked to Shep Clayton about it, though he’s not making much sense most of the time. His wife was supposed to show up at the neonatal unit of University Hospital in Lexington to pick him up. He’d stayed the night with their newborn son, who was scheduled to be released. But his wife never showed up. And when Shep went home … his house, it was one of the old ones. The roof was caved in, old boards holding up a shell of walls. He’d left it the day before — less than twenty-four hours — had sent his wife home to get a good night’s sleep, fix up the baby’s room — and when he came back all evidence that he or his family had ever been there was gone, blown away and decayed by time.”
“Shepherd Clayton, you say?” Stuart’s mind was spinning.
“He lost it when he saw the house. His family, they’re … simple people. They’re from waaaay back in the mountains around Poorfolk Hollow near Drayton County. Most of his people lived on the other side of the county line and when they came home, their houses were just like they’d left them. Whatever this is, it’s only happening inside Nower County. They went to the police, too, tried to report it, didn’t get anywhere. And Shep hasn’t been right in the head since.”
“Shep’s wife — her name wouldn’t be Abby, would it?”
“Yes, how do you know?”
“Because the name ‘Abby Clayton’ was written on the calendar in Charlie’s kitchen, on June fifth or sixth.”
Stuart felt himself shiver, but didn’t think he actually had, not physically anyway. “It was a reminder … for a graveside service. In Charlie’s world …” He didn’t like saying it like that, but the words fit reality. “Wherever Charlie is, Abby Clayton is dead.”
Cotton said nothing for a few moments, trying to get his own mind around it. Then he said, “We need to go pay Shep a visit.”
“To tell him I believe his wife’s dead? How’s that going to work?”
“Maybe … we won’t have to tell him anything. Maybe he already knows.”