As Stuart bounced along the road on his way to meet Shepherd Clayton, he understood that he was traveling through more than space. He was traveling from one culture to a totally different one that appeared similar on the outside but was distinct and separate in every way that mattered. Oh, Charlie had told him about it, about how remote the hollows were in the mountains where she had grown up. About the people who lived there who never saw strangers and wouldn’t welcome one if they did.
“The words on the calendar about Abby Clayton’s graveside service — you’re sure they were in Charlie’s handwriting?” Cotton asked as he piloted the car around the hairpin turns with an ease that unnerved Stuart.
“Her handwriting slants backward. I’ve teased her about it, told her that her sentences looked like all the words were facing a strong wind. Charlie wrote that note.”
“Which means …?”
“Yeah, Cotton, what does it mean? Clearly, Charlie was there, was in that house … sometime. She planned to go to Abby Clayton’s graveside service.”
“You think she knew Abby Clayton? There wouldn’t be any reason I could see that they’d have crossed paths. Abby was an 18-year-old high school dropout who lived … you’re about to see how far back in the hollow she lived. I bet the sun only shines here a couple of times a week.”
Stuart bleated out a frustrated bark of not-laughter.
“This doesn’t make any sense Cotton. None of it does.”
Cotton glanced at him with a sympathetic look, and Stuart decided not to make any more odd sounds because he didn’t want Cotton to look at him, to glance away from the road even for a second. It was darker here at seven-thirty than it was “out there on the flat,” and the mountain roads seemed even more treacherous. Stuart realized there was no true sunset or sunrise here and that struck him as sad somehow and he didn’t know why.
“You bump along through life with the world operating today the same way it did yesterday and the day before,” Cotton said. “And you never think about the functioning of ordinary reality. It is what it is. And then one day reality jumps the rails and goes off in a whole new direction, and you’re left standing there, stunned, wondering … what just happened here?”
“Where is my wife? My little girl?” Stuart ground the words out between clenched teeth. “This can’t be happening.”
Gratefully, Cotton didn’t look away from the road when he responded this time, like maybe he didn’t want to make eye contact. “I suspect they are wherever Thelma is. And where everybody else in Nower County is.”
“And where’s that?”
He did shoot Stuart a look this time and his voice was anguished. “I’ve spent the past two weeks banging my head against the wall trying to figure that out.” He looked back at the road. “But according to what your wife wrote on that blackboard, Abby Clayton’s not there anymore … wherever ‘there’ is. She’s dead.”
“Died … of what? And is that it, do you think? The houses that are suddenly old. Are the people who lived there … dead?”
Stuart could launch that out there into the air between them because Cotton’s house and Charlie’s mother’s house were untouched. But what if they returned to them after they visited Shep and found them old, dilapidated? What did that mean? He shook off the thought — and yawned to pop his ears. Changes in elevation plugged Stuart’s ears so severely it sometimes took him a whole day after an airplane trip to hear properly. The up and down of the mountains was driving him nuts.
The house where Cotton pulled over … it appeared that the ravages of time had eaten out its heart and left nothing but a shattered ruin behind. Cotton said it was inside that ruin that Shep and Abby Clayton had lived, that Shep had driven away from that house one morning to go to Lexington to stay with his newborn son overnight while his wife came home. The Claytons told Cotton that Shep’d about had to hogtie Abby to get her to leave her baby’s side even for a few hours. Shep had wanted her to get a good night’s sleep because the baby wouldn’t likely let her get much rest for a while. She never showed up. And when Shep and his baby son came “home” without her, the ruin was what the man found sitting where his house had been.
No wonder he had lost it. How did you leave a normal house and come home the next day and find this and still keep all your marbles?
There was a battered old car with missing wheels in the front yard up on concrete blocks, so ancient and rusted it was impossible to determine the make or the model. The trunk lid was held down with a piece of wire, and one back window had a piece of cardboard duct-taped in place to cover where the glass was missing.
“His mama told me that when he got home and found his house like this, he started howling, and I don’t have any trouble believing that. She said the sound went on and on, like nothing she had ever heard in her life. Then he’d turned and kicked in the back door of his brother’s car, just stood there slamming his foot into it again and again.”
“Surely, he hasn’t been living here.”
“The Claytons and the Letchers are big families spread out all over the mountains in Poorfolk and Sawmill Hollows, which bump up against the Beaufort County line. A handful of Shep and Abby’s relatives — brothers, uncles, cousins — live on the other side of the line and nothing happened to them. Shep and the baby, name’s Cody, have been staying at his parents’ house. They have a double-wide trailer on the Beaufort County side of Sharptop Mountain. Not an ideal situation.”
“I’ve never seen a trailer house I thought was an ‘ideal situation.’”
It was possible more people in the mountains lived in trailer houses than in ordinary houses, at least judging from what Stuart had seen. You could see them perched on the mountainsides, with winding dirt lanes leading up to them he couldn’t imagine would be passible in the wintertime. They all looked like they were affixed to the mountainsides with white stick pins — satellite dishes. Charlie had told him once the satellite dish was the state flower of West Virginia and he could see why that was.
“Shep’s father has MS and is in a wheelchair and he has a handicapped brother who also lives there. But apparently, Shep gets up every morning and ignores the baby, just gets somebody to bring him here and he sits all day in the ruin. He’d probably just stay here if his people didn’t come every day to take him home.”
“His people.” Charlie had called her family that, too.
“Some of them tried to stay with him, keep him company, but he told them all to go away, that he wanted to be alone. His mama said when they come get him, he doesn’t argue, goes right along, then he gets up the next morning and comes right back.”
Cotton took in a deep breath and opened his car door. “Let’s go see if he’s any more lucid than he was the last time I saw him.”
He wasn’t.
The roof of the house had caved in on one side, taking one wall on the front with it. It was not a structure that looked stable enough to venture into. Cotton led them around to the back where a part of a wall was missing forming an opening into the remains of a bedroom. The frame of a bed sat there, with a clump of rotted fabric and stuffing on top of rusty springs. Shep sat in a lawn chair, collapsible, that Cotton said Shep’s mother had put there. Before that, he’d just been sitting on the floor.
Stuart’s first impression of Shepherd Clayton was that he looked like pictures he’d seen of the people in Nazi concentration camps when they were liberated by the American soldiers. Not just that he was thin way past the point of being gaunt, with too-long dark hair hanging in his eyes. The resemblance was in the look on his face — blank and haunted, hollow-eyed and hopeless. Shepherd Clayton had looked into the abyss. And the abyss had looked back.
“How ya doing today?” Cotton asked and it took a moment for Shep to come back from wherever he’d been and focus on Cotton. It wasn’t until then that he noticed Stuart. When he did, his look turned hard.
“Who’s this? What’s he doing here?”
“This is Stuart McClintock. You remember Charlie Ryan — she’d have been a lot older than you, but she went to school here. Stuart’s her husband. Her mother was Sylvia Ryan, gave ceramics classes in her garage at the foot of Little Bear Mountain.”
There was some recognition in that, like he at least had heard of Sylvia Ryan.
“He’s black,” Shep said, the tone of voice carrying with it his disapproval.
“I’m black, too,” said Cotton, trying to turn Shep’s remark from an insult into merely an observation.
“You didn’t marry no white woman,” Shep said. But even his bigotry was off, unfocused, somehow didn’t sound genuine. It was like he was playing the part of Shepherd Clayton — who was a racist and would have said a thing like that — but in reality was somebody else entirely. “What’s he want?”
“He’s looking for his wife, too. Just like I’m looking for mine and you’re looking for yours. We came out to talk to you because we thought we could help each other. If we put our heads together, maybe we could find—”
“I ain’t trying to find nobody. I ain’t looking for Abby no more. I found her.”
Stuart’s heart began to hammer in his chest. Found her? If Charlie’s calendar was accurate, Abby had died and been buried more than a week ago. If Shep found her … was she dead or alive?
As if to answer his question, Shep said, “My Abby’s fine.”
“Fine?” Cotton’s voice was strained.
“Just fine. She said she’s doing alright where she is and told me not to go poking around looking for her, that she’d come on back home to me and Cody when the Jabberwock was done with her.”
“What’s … the Jabberwock?” Cotton asked, but Shep blew by the question and looked at Stuart.
“The Jabberwock told Abby he don’t like it, folks sticking their noses into some’m ain’t none of their concern. Folks who ain’t got no right to be here in the first place.”
“Who’s the Jabberwock?” Stuart asked.
“Ain’t none of your business!” Shep snapped and there was a light in his eyes, like somebody was home in there now. “You hadn’t ought to cross the Jabberwock.” His eyes were piercing. “You mess with him, he’ll mess with you. And you’ll wish you never set foot in Nowhere County.”
There was an otherworldly creepiness to this conversation that far out-distanced the nature of the craziness they were discussing. And Stuart began to feel that “too closeness,” the sense that there wasn’t enough air in the room, though there was a hole you could drive a forklift through in the wall. But instead of being frightened of yet another display of Welcome to the Twilight Zone, Stuart felt a flash of anger.
“You tell Abby to give Mr. Jabberwock a message from me. Tell him I’m not going anywhere until I find my wife and daughter.”
Shep just looked at him, but somehow his look shifted when he did, and when he spoke it didn’t sound menacing. In fact, it felt like Stuart was having a real conversation for the first time since he got here. Shepherd looked up at him through the shock of dirty brown hair hanging over his forehead with amusement in his eyes, like somebody who has seen the dude warming up on the other side of the ring and knows you’re about to get knocked on your can.
“A person hadn’t ought to stay somewhere they ain’t wanted, and don’t nobody want you here. Not Charlie and Merrie. Not nobody. You best leave.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “While you still can.”
Stuart and Cotton were driving away from the crazy man in the ruins of a house and a life, before it registered with Stuart.
“How did Shepherd Clayton know my little girl’s name is Merrie?”