It was going to sound crazy, Charlie knew. But she couldn’t let everybody leave without saying anything. She and Sam and Malachi had agreed. It was important.
“I wasn’t supposed to be the one to say this,” she stammered. “It was supposed to be Malachi.”
“My Malachi?”
Viola pulled the attention back to the stage. She looked genuinely surprised.
“Yes, Malachi—”
“He didn’t never mention to me he’s planning on giving a speech.”
Charlie didn’t know how to respond to that. Malachi had been spending a lot of time at the hospital with Sam and Charlie. She didn’t know what he ordinarily did with his time, but surely he had been spending less of it with his mother than he had been since the Jabberwock.
“He and I and Sam … we’ve been talking, you know, trying to figure it all out. The Jabberwock.”
Charlie realized as she spoke that she had been put in her place. That Viola had re-established herself as the person in charge, the person who was to be listened to. Instead of addressing the crowd, Charlie was answering Viola Tackett’s questions. Like a good little girl.
She resolutely turned to speak to the others in the room.
“We can’t leave here tonight without talking about something more important than whether or not somebody’s hay rake got stolen.”
“Ain’t nothing more important than establishing peace and order among ourselves. The nowhere people got to stick together.”
That hit Charlie like a drop of water in hot grease.
In one sentence, Viola had set up an us-versus-them mentality. Viola and everybody else in the room was us and Charlie was them. Well, that wasn’t going to happen.
“Don’t make it sound like I’m some outsider, some flatlander from away from here,” she snapped in a tone she suspected was not used often with Viola Tackett. “I grew up here. My mama was Sylvia Ryan. She made pottery, bowls and … she gave ceramics classes.”
She had to establish some street cred.
“My daddy left Nower County in 1967 for Vietnam and never came back. Missing in action. Killed in action. We never knew. But the three of us, me, my mama and my sister Mallory made our lives right here in a house at the foot of Little Bear Mountain.”
Though she wasn’t looking at Viola Tackett, she could feel displeasure pulsing off her in waves.
“I’m nowhere people, same as you.”
“Where you been all these years?” Viola said, feigning simple curiosity, but Charlie was quickly learning that the dumpy little woman with the big bun of black hair — who was still holding a rifle on the crowd — didn’t do or say anything that didn’t push forward her own personal agenda.
“You don’t stop belonging to the club just because you move away,” she snapped, and would not look at Viola Tackett — aware that a look from Viola right now would cause internal bleeding.
“We are all in this together whether we like it or not because not a mother’s child in this room can get past the borders of Nower County, no matter how important you are” — she looked at Sebastian Nower — “or how powerful you are.” She did not look at Viola Tackett but she was sure the meaning was not lost on her. “Or how famous you are out there in the wide world.”
Only a handful of people knew Charlie was really the bestselling children’s novelist C.R.R. Underhill, but she would wager Viola knew it, because she didn’t imagine there was much that went on in this county that escaped her notice, even if she did live in a log cabin on a mountainside out past Killarney, without a phone or indoor plumbing.
“We’re stuck here together — but that’s not the worst of our problems.”
There was a murmur in the crowd.
“What’s happening here … it’s more than just a mirage you can’t cross or you end up puking your guts out in the Dollar General Store parking lot.”
“How do you know—?”
And Charlie actually cut her off.
“I don’t know. None of us knows. But I will tell you what we have seen and what we understand — Malachi, Sam Sheridan … and,” she choked up and had trouble getting the words out through her clogged throat, “Liam Montgomery and I have seen things maybe the rest of you haven’t. Or if you have, you didn’t take any note of them. Or pretended you didn’t see at all.”
“What things?”
“Old houses.”
“They’s lots of old houses in Nower County, empty that somebody moved out of” — Viola said the rest with a sneer — “to go live somewheres else.”
“Oh, come on, you know I’m not talking about that.” The words sounded dismissive and disrespectful — and that was just fine with Charlie. “I’m talking about the old houses that just got old, the ones that looked like yours one day and the next day they’ve aged a hundred years. You’ve seen them, don’t tell me you haven’t.”
The crowd was silent then. Even Viola Tackett kept her mouth shut.
“Don’t you wonder what happened to those places?”
“Do you know what happened to them?”
“No, not exactly, but—”
“Well, if you don’t know what you’re talking about why are you taking up our valuable time—?”
“I know what’s happened to the people who used to be in those houses.” She let that soak in before she continued. “And so do you.”
She made eye contact with Betty Ann Gribbins, who’d either paid Bobby Joe Mattingly for a bunch of chickens or hadn’t. She looked at Bobby Joe and his wife, Norma Jean, who had a strawberry birthmark covering one whole side of her face. Bobby Joe looked away, Norma Jean looked scared.
She looked at Thelma Jackson, who’d taught history at the high school and Thelma met her gaze straight up and held it for a beat. Gave a little nod, too, or maybe Charlie imagined that part.
She looked at Ethel Crump, who’d hidden from the Jabberwock in her basement, Billy Dan Singleton, who’d lost his souped-up Chevy and Becky Sue Potter who might just have that baby right there on the auditorium floor.
“You know, you just don’t want to look at it, don’t want to admit it’s real because if it is—”
“What are you talking—?”
“People are vanishing!” She cried out the words with emotion that might have sounded like weakness, or hysteria, but she couldn’t help it. “Abner Riley, Harry Tungate, Reece and Cissy Tibbits and their girls, Sue-Sue and Patty. There are more, a lot more I don’t know about, but those half-dozen are enough. One minute the house is here, and folks are fixing breakfast, and the next minute the house is a falling-down, hundred-year-old shack and the people are … not there. Vanished.”
“What is it you’re trying to say—?”
Charlie whirled on her and the fire in her eyes matched Viola’s spark for spark.
“What I am saying — that your son, Malachi, was going to say here tonight — is that it’s not enough to kick back with a beer and go on with life just like you’ve always done.”
“Why ain’t it—?”
“Because you’re wrong.” She literally spit the words out at Viola, then turned and said the rest to the crowd. “About two very important things.”
She held up one finger.
“You think the Jabberwock’s going to go poof in a puff of smoke and be gone when you wake up in the morning and then you can go on up to Lexington to get new tires for your truck or over into Beaufort County fishing.”
She shook her head.
“That’s not true. It’s pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking. Daydreaming. The Jabberwock didn’t blow in here with the storm. It’s not some meteorological phenomenon, some explainable freak of nature that’ll work itself out. “
She held up a second finger.
“And you think that even if the Jabberwock doesn’t leave, even if it keeps you locked up here, all you gotta do is figure out how to put food on the table, maybe drink a little shine now and then or smoke some weed, which really isn’t a bad life, not all that different from how you were living before J-Day …”
“And you’re saying …?”
“That’s wrong. All of it. The Jabberwock isn’t going anywhere because it isn’t a thunderstorm or a tornado turned wrong side out. It is a being. It has a will. A purpose.”
Nobody spoke after that, not even Viola.
“This is bigger than just figuring out a way to get along with each other.” She cast a pointed look at Viola Tackett that she suspected earned her a permanent spot on that woman’s bad side. And that was not somewhere anybody wanted to be.
“It’s not just that we can’t leave! That’s not all of it. As we stay here, we vanish. It’s happening right now. The Jabberwock consumes us, we cease to exist. You can’t just sit back and make do with a life that ends at the county line. You better get up off your backside and start trying to figure out how to fight something that’s going to eat you while you sit there.”
You could have heard a mouse tiptoe across a cotton ball in the room.
“All of us are smarter than any one of us. We’ve got to figure this thing out — all of us. Together. Or the Jabberwock will pick us off one at a time until it gets us all. And we will vanish …”
Her voice lowered, not just for effect but because she had suddenly run out of enough air to finish what she had to say in a normal voice. “… just like Gideon did.”