The Devil Walks in Mattingly (17 page)

“Hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, Jake. We didn’t talk long. I couldn’t, what with Zach there. Eric’s brother—Jabber’s what he calls himself—said he needed to get to the hospital. He wanted to know if you could meet him at the BP. Said there was something he needed to get.”

“What is it?” Jake asked.

“He wouldn’t say, but I told him you’d meet him down there after dinner. I’m sure it’s nothing Alan Martin can’t part with.”

“Okay. I’ll get down there.”

Kate said nothing for the rest of the service and moved only to scratch a spot on her left foot, where she feared a dandelion had brushed. It was enough to have Jake there, even if it felt to her like a part of him had fallen missing. They sang old hymns and passed a plate full of ones and fives, the bounty of common folk. Preacher Goggins announced that given the events of the previous night, his sermon would not be the one he’d prepared. He spoke of the pain of this world and the darkness that shrouds its every corner, even a place so peaceful and good as Mattingly. He talked of the burdens of living and the faith needed to overcome them, and Kate found her heart opened and raw. It was like cool water poured into a fresh wound.

When the final blessing was given and the congregation was sent back out into the world, two sights greeted the congregation. One was another county police car making its rounds in search of a murderer. The other was Trevor Morgan happily stuffing a thick stack of Sunday papers into the box across the street.

2

Taylor woke believing it had been a nightmare, that was all. Nothing more than the ones that had come all those times before. What told him otherwise was the lady staring at him from the table.

Memories like butterflies fluttered from his reach the more he grabbed for them, then settled as Taylor’s mind stilled. He
saw the boy he’d Woke and the old man who’d tried to stop him. He remembered Charlie and the Texaco. And he remembered her—the girl with the hair of a woebegone boy. She had saved him, had sworn she was Awake and then confessed she was not but wanted to be. Taylor remembered tying her in the chair before his weariness took hold. Now the rope lay in a coiled pile upon the dusty floor.

A wan smile crossed her face. Delicate branches of smooth skin wound their way down her sullied cheeks, marking paths where tears had fallen. She wiped her nose with a hand that had sprouted a crop of brown and black bruises.

“Your knots weren’t tight enough,” she said.

Taylor eased his weight onto an elbow and winced. His lower back felt stuffed with gravel and his pulse thumped through the wound on his head. He worked his jaws loose and said, “You didn’t go.”

“No.” She turned her head toward the shotgun against the wall. “Could have. Could have killed you the same way you were going to kill me.”

“I don’t kill,” Taylor said. He rose and managed to take three wobbling steps toward her. “Killin’s a sin.” He took his book and looked through the lone window. The sun was already over the mountains. By now everyone down in town would know what had happened. As would She. “Reckon you’re hungry, Miss . . .”

“Lucy,” she said, and Taylor had a vague notion she’d told him that the night before. “Lucy Seekins. And I think I should know the name of the man who kept me last night.”

“Taylor Hathcock. Pleasure.”

He went to the stacked crates along the wall and removed the burlap sack, then unrolled it on the table in front of Lucy. Her eyes widened at the flint knife. Taylor felt the deer sinew
that fastened the blade to the stag handle. All those years, and it still held true.

“Are you going to hurt me, Taylor?” Lucy asked.

He wasn’t. Taylor remembered pointing the shotgun at her, not wanting to hurt but willing to just the same. But she’d stayed. The girl had saved him and then she’d
stayed
.

He tucked the blade into his belt. “Left my other knife in town. Meant to keep this hidden away forever. It has power. But a man needs blade and barrel if he’s to live out here. Why didn’t you flee from this place, lady? Did fear hold you when my own binds couldn’t?”

Taylor looked into her eyes, searching. The night had changed her. Night in the Hollow often did that. It forced one’s eyes inward. Where Taylor had seen falsehoods the night before, he only saw truth now. The lady no longer cared what would be safe to say and what would be dangerous. It was truth Lucy Seekins would speak now, and Taylor saw she would follow that road where it led.

She said, “I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”

The morning stood bright, the sunlight glinting off what few leaves the dark forest allowed to grow. A soft breeze carried the perfume of wildflowers and earth. The day was as perfect as one could be in the Hollow. And yet Taylor closed his eyes to all that beauty upon hearing those words. He knew the hurt of having neither hope nor home.

“I won’t harm you,” he said. But knowing what he wouldn’t do to Lucy wasn’t the same as knowing what he would, and on that Taylor had no notion. He reached into the top crate for the binoculars. “We need a word. Some Twinkies somewhere in these crates, I imagine. Charlie liked to squirrel them away. Water’s in the barrel out front.”

Taylor left her and limped across the small clearing to the
edge of his ridgetop. He sat on the rotten log and wrote first, spelling out as best he could what he remembered from the night before, then pointed the lenses to town. Lucy followed shortly after and sat on the far end of the log. Charlie’s spot, Taylor thought, and he thought he would always refer to it as such. He passed the binoculars over the BP first, then the Texaco. Both had been roped off by the police, the parking lots empty. Downtown looked strangely quiet as well. Tiny blobs of people moved about on their way to worship. There was no sign of Charlie. Taylor wrote that down.

“What are you looking at?” Lucy asked.

“Pain and despair, lady.” Taylor looked at her, saw the way Lucy’s eyes drooped and her mouth tilted down at the corners. Her hair stuck out like blunt spikes in some places and lay matted in others. “Seems to me you may know of such things.”

Lucy ignored that. Said, “You can’t see much through those. One of the lenses is missing.”

Taylor handed the binoculars over. “See for yourself.”

She took hold of them by the brass casing and brought the eyepieces up. Taylor watched Lucy’s bottom lip give way. She brought the binoculars down and turned them over in her hands like they were a piece of alien technology. Which, he figured, maybe wasn’t far from the truth.

“How’s that possible?” Lucy brought the lenses up again and smiled. “I can see almost
everything
.”

Taylor felt a sharp pang of jealousy at the way they looked stuck to her eyes. No one had ever looked through his spyglasses. Charlie had never even asked. They were Taylor’s alone, and yet he’d handed them over to this girl like something had taken his brain hostage, like

I
was
supposed to
.

Yes, like that. Like that exactly. As though a divine hand
was gaming things, arranging them and assigning meaning. Just like the cabin and the binoculars themselves. Like the rotten log upon which he sat, there at the perfect spot to gaze down over the valley and the town. Lucy looked at him, her pale smile brighter now, and Taylor gave himself over to the belief that this was perhaps the way things were supposed to unfold all along—something had to come up from the grove so Taylor would take Charlie to town so the boy could be woke so they could go to the Texaco so Charlie could be lost so Lucy Seekins could come.

“You said last night you was Awake,” he said. “Then you said no. Then you said you wanted to be. Which of them was fiction? I’d have your answer, lady, and I’d have it true.”

Lucy’s smile disappeared. She handed the binoculars back to Taylor.

“I was scared.” She looked away, down into the valley. The wind played with her hair. “I didn’t understand. The rope came off right after you fell asleep. I thought about running away.”

“Holler would’ve taken you. There’s things here that’re hungry, lady, and for more than meat.”

“Maybe,” she said. “I was going to try anyway, though. But then I thought about what you said. I want to know what you meant.”

“I’ll speak to it as much as I’m able,” Taylor said. “It’s nothing I’ve spoken to afore. I believe I must, as we’ve been drawn together.” Taylor rubbed his beard, not sure where to start or how much to say. “I come to this wood as a young’un. You’ll find that hard to believe. No one comes to Happy Holler, you’d say, but I did. Ma an’ Pa’s gone then. He’s a drunk and cared not for me. She cared for any man but not the seeds they’d plant in her. I was with my aunt then, but I come here for good when I was of age. I imagine she was glad to see me go.

“I was running, you see. We all run from something, Lucy
Seekins, and I remember it was a terrible thing before it turned beautiful. Sometimes I still dream of it, but in that dream all I hear’s voices in shadow. That’s when I found this place. Found that cabin. There was a fresh stack of wood in the hearth, but no ashes. Cot was made but not slept in, and there was the busted mandolin agin’ the wall. Fresh water in the barrel outside, like it’d been just poured. And these here spyglasses sitting in the middle of the floor. It was like someone put all this here just for me. Don’t know who built it all. Maybe it’s always here, waitin’. So I stayed on. I stayed and I found the truth.”

“What truth?” Lucy asked.

And so here it was.

Taylor rose from the log. When he bent down in front of Lucy, she did not flinch.

“The truth, lady, is that all you see through those spyglasses, all you know and think and feel, all you
believe
, is. Not. Real.”

He paused and held out his arms to catch her, lest the power of that revelation fling Lucy forward. She stared at him, trying to understand, and Taylor offered a slow nod that was both hopeful and sad. Lucy’s swollen belly jiggled beneath her shirt. A guttural sound worked its way from her lips. Then she exploded into a cackle that slid her backward rather than forward.

“What’d you say?” she asked.

“This whole world, lady. Ain’t none of it real. All’s a dream.”

Lucy bent forward and fell into the kind of laughter so intense and all-encompassing that it’s rendered soundless. Taylor slowly drew his outstretched arms back to himself, vaguely aware that his hands had curled into fists.

“Are you kidding me?” Lucy asked. “You’re loopin’
crazy
.”

“Why’s that?”

“Why?” She was upright now (her body, anyway, Taylor
thought on her insides Lucy Seekins was stuck in a perpetual slouch), and her laughter had gone to calm.
“Because.”

“No,” Taylor said. “Not good enough, lady. You think I’m wrong, prove it.”

“You think you’re right, prove it.”

She was having fun. Taylor couldn’t understand why that was so, but she was. And that she was in such a shiny mood in the midst of the spookiest wood in ten counties made him even more certain their meeting was no accident. It was meant to be.

“Do you know you’re in a dream when you’re dreaming?” he asked.

“No,” Lucy said, “but I know I’m awake now.”

Taylor snapped his fingers, making her at once flinch and giggle. “So you say. So everybody says. But how do you
know
?”

Lucy chortled again. “Because I’m sitting here talking to you.”

“But how do you
know
? You don’t. You only think you’re awake because you never supposed you ain’t.”

Lucy shook her head, but it wasn’t a hard shake. She smiled, but that grin was not solid. She ran a hand over her head and down the back, stopping when she felt no more hair.

“You’re wrong,” she said, and yet Taylor heard those words tinged with a weary sadness. It was as if Lucy had said that not because he was wrong but because no amount of wishing would make him right.

“Tell me what’s wrong about it,” he said. “Go on, because you cain’t. I know you cain’t, just as I know we were brung together. You tell me you’ve never once said you’re sure of what’s true and what’s false. Tell me you never felt a pain so deep and been in trouble so bad you swore it weren’t real. Confess that you never been deceived by what you feel and
what you believe.” Taylor leaned in closer. “Tell me, lady, you never searched your heart and knowed there was something beyond, some other place that’s not here you know is home.”

Lucy sat staring at him as the Hollow’s weak puffs of breeze played with the remnants of her hair. Taylor, seeing her silence but not her thoughts, only took all of that as more doubt. He looked away toward Mattingly, this time with only his eyes. The town looked smaller that way, less dangerous, though he knew that was a lie. If he would ever find who had walked out of the Hollow—if he would ever find Her—he would need Lucy’s help. The only way she would help was if she believed. And the only way she would believe was if she saw. He did not begrudge Lucy for that. Sight always came first, faith trailed after. It had been true for him, and Taylor supposed it was true for all.

“I’ll show you, Lucy Seekins,” he said. “I’ll prove you I’m right. I know a special place. Charlie, he always wants to see it. Tells me all the time. But I tell’m nosir, Charlie, that place is holy and not for you. But I’ll show you, lady, just so you’ll know. Then you’ll see. Then you’ll believe.”

3

THE DEVIL WALKS IN MATTINGLY

A special editorial by Trevor Morgan, Editor and Publisher

For nearly three hundred years, the town of Mattingly has epitomized the ideal of Rockwellian charm. Our needs are basic, our wants few. Our children roam free in unspoiled wilderness and play upon streets both
safe and clean. Danger and crime are nonexistent. Society as it exists on the evening news is a peculiar and foreign place. Those among us who must venture into that world for work or travel do so as outsiders whose hearts are continually bent toward home.

Perhaps it was arrogance that convinced us it would always be this way. Perhaps it was ignorance with which we believed we could venture into that bizarre otherness without that otherness venturing into us.
Regardless, our fair town has now taken the full brunt of what it means to live in a violent age. Mattingly could not hide forever. The world has found us.