As they left the collapsed house where Shep Clayton sat, an old pickup truck turned in the lane and Cotton waved at the driver. He waved back.
“Shep’s brother,” Cotton said, “coming to get him and take him back to his mother’s house.”
Cotton drove the winding mountain roads in the dark as confidently as he had done in broad daylight. The two were silent. Seen through the clear mountain air, the stars twinkled big as chunks of ice floating in the sea of ink above their head.
Neither of them asked the question out loud, but it was implied, printed in flashing LED lights on the silence.
Now what?
Stuart glanced up at the Big Dipper and remembered pointing it out to Merrie on the deck of their house in Clarendon Hills. A lifetime ago. Two.
“You can’t leave, you know,” Cotton said. “Can’t go back to Lexington or get a motel room in Richmond. Wouldn’t want you to come driving in here tomorrow morning intent on doing what we already did today.” Cotton offered the scraps of a smile. “Living in Groundhog Day is exhausting.”
“Then where—?”
“You’re welcome to stay at my house,” Cotton said. “It ain’t much, but I’ve accumulated the rudiments of existence over the last couple of weeks. I got a storage unit in Lexington where I keep my camping gear and I hauled a bunch of it here — sleeping bags, basic cooking utensils, that kind of thing. The cots feel like they’re lined with rocks.” He paused. “There’d be cookies baking in the oven five minutes after we walked into the house if Thelma were home to bake them.”
Stuart wondered how many times it would take for the impossible to slam into him like a wrecking ball before he would no longer be surprised by it.
“A cot’s fine,” he said. “I don’t think I’ll be doing a lot of sleeping.”
But he was wrong.
After a supper of bologna sandwiches in Cotton’s kitchen, eaten in a dead silence that bespoke their preoccupations, Stuart settled himself down on a cot and tried to get comfortable. Cotton Jackson deserved a truth-in-advertising award. The cot did feel like it was lined with rocks. He didn’t think he would get a wink of sleep, tossing and turning in discomfort, but he fell asleep instantly. And he dreamed.
He’s walking through fog or mist so thick he can see nothing, absolutely nothing. It seems like he has been walking for a very long time. Hours. Days maybe. Never getting anywhere. Never leaving anywhere. Just there in the mist walking.
Then he hears the cries.
Someone’s calling his name.
“Stuart, Stuart, where are you?”
It’s Charlie!
“I’m here, right here,” he calls out. Except he doesn’t. He opens his mouth but no words will come out. Only a scream, a high-pitched cry that sounds like ripping sheets. A sound like the man on the road, Reece Tibbits, made before he disappeared. He clamps his hand over his mouth to stop the screaming but it goes on and on, and he’s afraid Charlie is still calling for him but he can’t hear her above the noise he’s making.
He grits his teeth together with every ounce of strength he possesses, and still the sound comes from his throat, but it’s not loud now, muffled by his closed mouth.
“Stuart, where are you? I can’t find you.”
He can hear Charlie’s voice, much closer now and he almost responds to her, but knows if he opens his mouth he will only be able to scream. So he waves his hands around in the mist in front of him, the way you feel around for the wall when you’re in a dark, unfamiliar room. Feels and makes grunting sounds of stifled screams, and listens for Charlie to call—
“Daddy! I’m scared, Daddy. Help me!”
Merrie.
He loses it then, opens his mouth and forms words on the howling scream, a distorted ghastly sound that he means to say, I’m coming, honey, but which just garbles the words and sounds so terrifying even to his own ears that he is sure it would scare little Merrie to death.
“Daddy, please, come get me. Dadeeeeee—”
Her cry is cut off abruptly. Like the scream of the man in the road.
“Merrie! Merrie.” He thinks the words in his head but doesn’t say them, because he is only barely able to hold his jaw shut to keep from screaming himself. He tries to run—
He stumbles over something in front of him. Bangs into it and tumbles to the ground. He rolls over, feeling the bruises on his shins and looks at the thing he tripped over. It is an oblong box made of wood, about four feet long and two feet wide and ten inches deep. He examines it. There is no lid, no clasp, no hinges, nothing but a box — but it is not a solid block of wood because he can see the seams where it is put together.
Suddenly, a stench emanates from the box that is so foul he falls back in dismay. A smell so unutterably gross he’s afraid he will vomit and if he does he will choke to death with his mouth clamped shut to muffle his screams. Except he isn’t screaming anymore. The sound that was forcing its way up out of him is gone.
He doesn’t want to get near the box because it smells so bad. Then the smell becomes a color. The stench flows out into the mist, coloring it a putrid green, flowing out into it like a drop of ink into water until all around him is green and the smell is so bad he—
The top of the box begins to lift up. A lid there he had not seen is rising up off the rest of the box, pushed up by something inside. The stink increases by a factor of ten when the lid is lifted and Stuart turns aside and vomits violently, projectile vomiting, his stomach ejecting the contents with such force it comes out his nose and mouth, chokes and gags—
Except it doesn’t. He’s vomiting, but nothing at all comes out even though he heaves and heaves. He finally gets his breath back from not-vomiting and turns back toward the box. The lid is lying beside it and green smell-fog is foaming up out of it.
He should want to get away from the box, as far as he can get, but he doesn’t. He wants to see what is in the box, has to see what’s in it. He gets to his knees and crawls the few feet to the box and looks inside, where the green stench is so thick he can see nothing.
And then the stench is gone. What was making it is not. It is a decaying corpse, horrifying beyond any description, blisters on the skin, beetles crawling out the eye sockets. All that is identifiable is the hair. The curly black hair. On the little body in the box.
The eyes pop open and death is in their depths. Now, Stuart wants to scream but can’t, sits frozen as the eyes look at him, and the mouth that is only held together by dangling decaying tissue opens and sound comes out.
“Daddy.”
Then Stuart screams.
Someone was hollering, making a horror sound that jarred Stuart out of sleep so suddenly he sat before he even realized he was awake and came close to tumbling out of the cot onto the floor. The real-world scream that dragged him out of the depths of the green-fog horror sounded remarkably like his own dream screaming had sounded. He staggered to his feet, tried to run toward the sound and banged painfully into something—
He lurched into the hallway and threw open the door to Cotton’s bedroom. He lay on the floor in a sleeping bag, tossing and turning, moaning now instead of screaming. He knelt on the floor and grabbed his shoulders, shook him hard.
“Cotton! Wake. Up.”
His eyes popped open but he continued to thrash around for a moment before Stuart could see recognition and understanding dawn on his features. Then he sagged back into the sleeping bag panting.
Stuart sat down on the floor beside him.
“I don’t know what you were dreaming …” He stopped, started again, his voice softer. “But I think I was dreaming the same thing.
“I shoulda told you about the nightmares,” Cotton said, hanging his head. “Shoulda warned you.”
“You have had—?”
“Started the first night I slept in this house. Four or five days ago they stopped. I thought maybe it was because I didn’t leave the county during that time. I’d been going out every day, trying to get somebody to listen to me, but by then I’d given up. Tonight … I had another one. the worse one yet.”
“What did you dream about?”
Cotton didn’t answer at once. Finally said, “Dead bodies, I don’t want to talk—”
“That’s what I dreamed about, too,” Stuart said.
“I think I know why the dreams stopped and then started again.”
Stuart thought he did, too, but he let Cotton say it.
“I think they stopped because I quit trying to do something about the missing people.”
“And they started again when you met me because—”
“We’re trying to figure it out.
Stuart absorbed that. Whatever was going on here, it wasn’t some random, mindless force that had … had done whatever it was that captured a county full of people. The thing Shep called the "Jabberwock" took action in response to what he and Cotton had done. Cause and effect.
Why Jabberwock? Where did the name come from? Who knew? He let it go.
He got to his feet and extended his hand down to Cotton.
“How about you make a pot of coffee.”
Cotton took his hand and pulled himself up.
“You got it. Strong enough to trot a mouse across … because I am not going back to sleep.”
“Copy that!”