Long Holler Road - A Dark Southern Thriller (18 page)

  “I can’t tell what that is from here,” I said. I started looking around with my flashlight, trying to see if their might be an old limb or something laying around that I might reach it with. I realized immediately that was foolish. There wouldn’t be any limbs in here unless someone happened to bring one in to build a fire or something. I shined my light back on the object. It could be a dead animal, I thought. But I really didn’t think so. I looked at the rocks all around the waterfall to see if there might be a way to climb over and get closer. The closest rock was a good ten feet above and it would be as slick as owl shit, so I quickly abandoned that idea.

  “I gotta know what that is, boys,” I said. “And there ain’t but one way that I can see to find out.”

  “You ain’t about to jump in that water are you?” Glenn asked incredulously. One thing me and Glenn had never even considered was jumping in the deep pool of the cave. It was deep, cold and dark, and the fish looked too weird.

  “Can you see another way to get over there?” I asked.

  “No. But whatever that is ain’t worth riskin’ your damn neck for. It’s prob’ly just somethin’ somebody threw in the water like an old bag of trash or some kinda junk. If you git in there and git a cramp or somethin’, I’ll have to come in after you and we’ll prob’ly both drown.”

  I thought for a minute about what Glenn said. I knew the water shouldn’t be any colder than the temperature of the cave, but we had walked almost five miles to get here in ninety degree heat. I didn’t know what the shock of jumping into the water would do. We were constantly being warned about cramps by the older folks when we went swimming. Especially in the deep quarry pond. Then it dawned on me. We all had ropes in our backpacks. I took my backpack off and dug through all the stuff we never used and pulled it out. I told Glenn to hold the lantern close. I carefully made a harness that fit around my torso, making sure it was tied tight.

  “Now all you’ll have to do is pull me out if somethin’ happens,” I said.

  “I still wouldn’t jump in that water,” Glenn replied.

  “Me neither,” Snake agreed.

  I sat down and pulled off my boots and socks. I started to empty my pockets, then got the idea that I would just pull my pants off. I didn’t want to be weighed down by anything.

  “Them fish are liable to eat you alive,” Glenn said, not believing I was about to jump in without my pants on. “Hell, they’ve gotta be hungry. What is there to eat in a cave? They might jump all over a big chunk of meat like your legs, thinkin’ they’re giant worms.”

  I had never heard of any fish indigenous to Alabama ever eating anybody, even in a cave, so I ignored Glenn’s warning and walked over to the edge of the pool. I’ll admit I was nervous and didn’t know what to expect, other than knowing I was about to get wet. I thought about sticking my foot in and testing the water, but instead just took a step, put my hand on the edge of the rock and vaulted over it, like springing over a picket fence.
                           

  The water did feel cold, but not as bad as I expected. I swam underneath the waterfall in the direction of the unknown object. All I could see once I was in the water were the rock walls and the waters surface. Snake kept trying to shine his light at different angles to help me, but it made no difference. I was just going to have to feel my way around. The fish were apparently ignoring me because I couldn’t feel them nibbling at my toes like the little fish that were in the quarry pond would sometimes do. Snake and Glenn were telling me which direction to go as I dog paddled through the black water.

  “You’re nearly there,” Snake yelled. “Just a little bit to your left.”

  I followed his direction and suddenly felt my foot touch something soft. I reached out with my left hand while treading water with my right. I found the unknown object and ran my hand over it, trying to identify it by feeling of it. It felt like cloth of some kind though it was hard to tell being saturated with water. Then I felt something more firm. I moved around to the rock ledge and rested one hand on it and pulled with the other. Whatever it was, it was hung up on the rocks and I was going to have to work to free it. If I had done all this for a burlap sack of useless junk, I wasn’t going to be happy,. But that is exactly what it felt like. Maybe a bundle of old clothes somebody had thrown away. But why would they throw them in a cave?

  I thought about cutting it loose with my pocketknife, then remembered I had pulled my pants off.
What a damn fool thing to have done,
I thought. Finally, after pulling and tugging with all the strength I could muster with one arm, the object broke free. I rested for a minute holding on to the rock ledge, then started swimming with one hand, pulling whatever I had with the other.

  When I got maybe five feet from where Glenn and Snake were standing, shining their lights on me, Snake let out a horrible scream and threw his flashlight against the rocks behind the waterfall. It shattered into tiny pieces. I instinctively let go of whatever it was I was dragging through the water and swam to the edge where Glenn was. I climbed over the edge of the pool in a flash, wondering what kind of hideous creature I had pulled from the rocks.

  Glenn was still shining the light on whatever it was that had caused Snake to go berserk. He was speechless and white as a sheet and his hand was shaking, causing the beam from the flashlight to dance on the water. I grabbed the light from him and held it steady on the body of what looked like a girl, judging from the long hair that was waving back-and-forth in the water. I looked from the body back to Glenn, waiting for a response.

  Glenn sat down on the edge of the pool, still shaking visibly. “Are we ever gonna quit findin’ bodies?”  

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  We very reluctantly pulled the body out of the water and found that it was indeed a girl that looked to be not much older than we were. Apparently, the constant, cool temperature of the cave and being in the water had preserved her body well. Of course we had no idea how long she’d been dead. The tracks we saw at the cave entrance and the skid marks looked fresh. She could have been dead only a short time for all we knew. Maybe less than a day. Maybe only a few hours. Her body was stiff, but other than that she just looked like a girl who was asleep.

  Snake couldn’t stop crying. We didn’t blame him given all he’d been through in the last two months. He was feeling sorry for the girl but even more so for the family she was leaving behind that had to grieve for her. Through his sobs he managed to get out a few words, “That’s Glooooria,” he cried, unintelligibly.

  “What did he say?” Glenn asked me, as if I could decipher Snake’s words better than he could.

  “I…it’s Gl..oooria.”

  “Did you say Gloria, Snake?” I asked him, grabbing his shoulders and shaking him.

  “Yeah, Gl…Gloria Reeves. She…she was in Frank’s cl…class in school.” Snake was now snubbing like a young child who had been on a long crying jag.

  “I know her,” Glenn said. “You do too. She was a cheerleader the same time Prissy was, only she was a year older. She came home with Prissy once.”

  I remembered then who Glenn was talking about. She was a very pretty girl from Collinwood who we got the hots for as soon as we were old enough to fantasize about girls. Collinwood school went from the first through the twelfth grades and was all on one campus. I remembered seeing her in her cheerleader uniform at the football games and pep rallies we had at school. She looked a lot different now. I believed she had graduated year before last because Glenn’s sister, Prissy, had just graduated the past year. 

  “What do you reckon happened to her?” Snake had calmed down and was kneeling beside Gloria, running his fingers through her long, chestnut colored hair.

  “I ain’t got a clue,” Glenn said. “She might’ve just fell in the water and drowned. Surely she wasn’t by herself, though.”

  “She wasn’t by herself. Didn’t you see all those scuff marks over there?” I said, nodding toward the cave entrance. “I believe somebody drug her in here. She was either already dead or she was fightin’ whoever had her, but you can tell by those marks she was drug.”

  We all stood up and walked over toward the entrance. Snake was about to say something when I held my finger up to my lips and put my hand up. I thought I could hear voices outside somewhere. We tiptoed quietly to the entrance and stopped, listening. There were definitely voices and they were getting closer. I motioned for Glenn and Snake to follow me and led them over to one of the deep crevices on the side of the cave opposite the waterfall. It was awfully narrow, but I had squeezed into it before. I pushed Snake in first and Glenn followed, squeezing poor old Snake in like packing dirt in a post hole. We squeezed back into the rock as far as we could and turned off our flashlights. Glenn extinguished the flame from the lantern.

  From where we were we couldn’t hear them climbing down the rope, but we heard one of them as soon as they entered the cave.

  “I thought you said she was dead when you threw her in the water,” one of the voices yelled.

  I peeped around the corner of the rock to see. One man was inside and the other had just let go of the rope and was looking at Gloria’s body.

  “Oh, shit,” the other man said. “How in the hell did she git out?”

  “Well, was she dead or not?”

  “Hell yeah, she was dead. I’m positive of it. I held her head under the water for a long time just to make sure. Somebody had to have found her and pulled her out. Unless it was some kind of animal. Do you reckon it could have been…..”

  “Shit fire, no. It wasn’t no damn animal. It was prob’ly one of them boys from Long Holler like that Burt boy or George Patrick’s boy. They’re always out huntin’ or walkin’ these ridges. Whoever it was has prob’ly already called Andrew by now, or will shortly. I didn’t tell him what you did, so he won’t know not to send out a bunch of damned deputies and state troopers, ’specially with all the damn bodies poppin’ up everywhere lately.”

  I’d heard enough to know that the voices belonged to Jake Bullard and his oldest son, James. I knew the Bullards were capable of most anything, but didn’t expect it to be Jake and James. They didn’t seem like they were as mean as Jake’s younger boys, Bruce and Freddy. I’d heard Jake and James made illegal liquor and probably did some other shady stuff, but they didn’t seem as dangerous as the younger boys. I was trying to think beyond the fear I was feeling. What had Jake said about the sheriff? What did he mean he hadn’t told him what James had done? It didn’t make any sense to me.

  I was hoping that Snake could remain quiet until they were gone. I knew Glenn could, but I wasn’t too sure about Snake. He’d never been quiet for more than a couple of minutes in his life. Just as I was having that thought Snake made some kind of noise. I couldn’t tell if it was from the crying binge he’d been on or if it was a cough, but it was loud enough that James Bullard heard it. I saw him look at his daddy and motion for him to stay quiet. Then he reached in the waistband of his pants and pulled out a pistol. Jake followed suit and pulled out a little snub nose .38 from the bib of his overalls. I held my breath as I watched the two men shining their flashlights around trying to find the source of the noise James had heard, or at least thought he had.

  “What did you hear?” Jake asked him.

  “I don’t know. It sounded like somebody cryin’ or somethin’.”

  “Hell, boy. You’re just a-hearin’ thangs ’cause your nervous.”

  James walked back over to the cave entrance. He bent over, looking, and then started following our footprints until the shallow mud turned into solid rock.

  “Somebody’s been here and it ain’t been long,” he said to Jake. “Those footprints are headin’ this way and they are real fresh.”

  “We’re in a damned cave, boy. There ain’t nothing to rub footprints away or wash ’em off. How do you know they’re fresh?”

  “I just know,” James said, still walking and shining his light in our direction.

  “Dammit, let’s get this girl outa here ‘fore some of them damned lawmen git wind. There ain’t nobody here and we ain’t got time for you to go cave explorin’ and a-huntin’ after somethin’ you thought you heard. It was prob’ly a bat. Bat’s den in caves and they roost in the daytime.”

  James didn’t answer for a minute, but kept shining his light all around the cave walls. He walked within a foot of the edge of the crevice. From where I had been standing before I crept back to where Glenn and Snake were, I could have reached out and touched him. He shined his light behind a few of the rocks that were close to us but not into the narrow crevice where we were. We had made ourselves as small as we possibly could. I know we were about to mash Snake’s guts out since he was on the inside. James turned and the beam from his flashlight illuminated the wall above our heads, but he didn’t bother to look into the crevice. Maybe he thought it was too small for anybody to be hiding in. Maybe it was just God watching out for us like He always did. Whatever the reason, he gave up and walked back over to where Jake was.

  “Maybe it was a bat, but I know I heard something,” he said to Jake, not about to admit he was wrong.