Nursery Rhymes 4 Dead Children

Chapter 1

Monday, October 11th

When all the craziness started, I was sitting on the patio chair behind my double-wide, staring at the moon, missing the way I used to enjoy its light. I’d taken so many simple things for granted, left them behind as the years piled up, as distraction overwhelmed me—responsibility always right there but guilt always stopping me from taking hold of it. Cool wind blew in off the foothills of Pennsylvania’s Endless Mountains. The place I’d grown up didn’t feel like home and I wasn’t sure if everyone felt that way at some point, if we outgrew where we’d sprouted and laughed and bled, or if the soil that housed the good things in our hearts simply eroded and left us lost in so many whirlwinds.

I wiped my eyes, thinking,
I used to be a decent person.

Everything seemed surreal since my brother Mark died. The last three days since the funeral were walking nightmares where blood-water ran fast and deep over jagged rocks, a fat moon high above, both of us drunk, me angry, dancing devils with perfect breasts playing at the edge of the woods just waiting for madness to infect us.

It was my fault he drowned.

Guilt can make us crazy. We can make ourselves suffer. But sometimes something worse comes out of the darkness and shows us that we have no idea how insane things can get.

Up the grade, the Johnston manor—a three story, black monolith—cut the sky, carving room for a demon’s throne. I tried not to think about what happened there when we were kids, or how everyone kept the history of the town locked behind half-worried smiles, because the secrets we all kept were always of our own making. All Saints Cemetery sat at the half-way point between my house and the manor. I didn’t want to look there either because it meant I had to acknowledge Mark was so close by. Even with him dead, I still loved and hated him.

Crickets chirped and Catherine’s snores poured through our open bedroom window. I rubbed my hands together, needing to get away, go for a walk, and then make myself get some sleep so I’d have enough energy to make it through my first day on the new job as Division’s only deputy. Working with Pat Andrews wasn’t my idea of fun, but it’d pay the bills and sometimes we ask too damn much of life anyway.

I stood.

A breeze rattled trees in the yard.

Movement up the hill caught my eye.

A shadow fell over All Saints as clouds crept in and blocked part of the moon. A shimmer moved in the distance, a man, walking between headstones drenched in silver. The skin drew tight on my scalp. The crickets stopped singing. I rubbed my arms as the phantom stood beneath a black walnut tree, its branches like the monster I’d been seeing in my dreams. He stared down at a waist-high headstone.

The hill seemed to swell as if inhaling. The man turned and looked at me. I held his gaze a moment and sucked in a breath, wondering if my mind had finally cracked or this was just a lack of sleep and my overactive imagination.

The ghost in All Saints turned his head and body, looked farther up the hill, at the manor. A car sped down the road and left an awful silence in its wake. The stranger stared at Mike’s old home, like he felt its pull as well. Like gravity, only on a horizontal plane. Catherine coughed. I glanced at the window hoping she stayed asleep. Sweat soaked my shirt. When I looked back up the hill, the stranger was staring my way again. He nodded then vanished as if the ground had swallowed him.

I rubbed my eyes.

Hallucinations
.

“Jesus. Like I don’t have enough trouble.” I turned to walk back inside through the sliding door. Looking back up at All Saints and the Manor beyond it, I thought I heard a child crying. The granite beast of the Johnston Estate stood out against the sky, its lightning rod like a spear pointed at heaven. Memories twisted inside me and I forced them back deep inside because I didn’t want to face them, believing at the time that if I pushed them away long enough one day they’d fail to return. At the time I was good at lying to myself.

A light glowed in one of the Manor’s downstairs windows. I hadn’t noticed it on before, couldn’t remember any lights on up there since my buddy Mike’s mom went in the hospital.

The smell of the river washed over me, the thud of a paddle against the back of my brother’s head, remembering how he’d said something about Catherine as he reached over for a beer, remembering how he’d fucked Rebecca, the first girl I’d ever loved, and how it felt good to hear him scream as he fell into the river and the water bashed him against the rocks until panic set in. But it was too late for me to take it back. To say I was sorry and have him actually hear me.

I put on my shoes by the back door, one hand on the dryer to keep my balance, already wiping the ghostly figure in All Saints from my memory, writing it off as something my mind had conjured. Taking the stairs to the basement, I realized that I didn’t look forward to going to work in a few hours. It wasn’t like Division really needed a deputy. Pat Andrews kept everything in order, but the Mayor and some others did it because of who my father had been. They did it because my dad’s dying wish was that I’d work a real job and not spend all my time writing and reading, locked in my room like when I’d been a kid and happy with that. I don’t think any of them realized what they were trying to take from me. Even Catherine, who encouraged me and praised me the past year we’d been together, had lost some of the spark, some of her faith in me because my books didn’t sell a lot of copies and no one saw the point in doing it if you weren’t going to get rich. They didn’t know anything about true satisfaction and sometimes I hated them for it.

I pulled the Buck knife from a workbench against the wall, my head stuffed with too many things I had no control over. I closed my eyes, the shift of a raft beneath me, the weight of a paddle in my hand. My mind went somewhere else as I carved the words of the dead into my chest.

Pain swelled over my heart, like a long suppressed personality released, trying to stretch my skin, make it its own. My whole body trembled, lost in this empty black space where the wind blew hot across my back and I stumbled forward through the trees to find an ivory fountain choked by overgrown weeds in the heart of the forest.

I jerked back as blood dribbled over my nipple, in my mind’s eye seeing the man beneath the monster tree, his hand on a grave stone as he nodded my way.

Pieces of flesh dangled over my heart, lines scrawled in bold strokes. My head spun and I fought against the beating black fists knocking around inside my head.

“Leave me alone,” I whimpered.

But the river roared in my ears because the past refused to stay dead.

* * *

The hills rushed toward the valley in the deep dark. I didn’t bring a flashlight because the clouds had cleared and moonlight lit the path in chunks running through the Devil’s Garden; a local attraction that saw fewer tourists every year. It was a vast stretch of beautiful rock and great trails, and somewhere I’d always gone to clear my head. I followed the blue path, marked by spray-painted wooden stakes and a dab here and there on towering granite walls.

My hiking boots crunched twigs and rubbed stones together. A rock wall ran along the path on my left for another fifty feet before it dropped to knee level. A steep hill fell away to the valley on my right. I sucked in a breath, skin crawling. Something stank like boiled pig intestines. I stopped. Turned. The forest stood still. Stars lit the sky. Water trickled down the hill and I smelled the Loyal Sock River to the north. I listened for a minute, sweat sliding down my spine. I cracked my knuckles. A branch broke in a grove of trees ahead. I patted my side and unsheathed the knife, its blade reflecting a beam of light across the path and against the black rock wall.

Could be another hiker. You might not be the only one who has to get away from it all and burn off some frustration an hour before dawn.

I shifted my feet, my hand knotted from gripping the knife handle so tightly. I kept the blade tight to my thigh and walked forward. Brush rustled, muffled by the soft down of dead pine needles. I stopped by the end of the wall, ears buzzing in the silence. The stench grew worse, causing my eyes to water as I looked under the copse of trees—the pines a wall twenty feet north, walnut and birch-like colored tiles farther beyond them bordering the abandoned Wright sawmill.

Wind hit my face. A branch broke beneath the trees. I remembered taking Cat there when we’d first started dating. She’d enjoyed the forest, too. But she wouldn’t have enjoyed it like this.

A girl cried off to my left.

Adrenaline shot through me, my pulse like a trapped moth beating at the flesh of my neck. Her voice hung beneath the black canopy of branches and died. I felt the pocket of my shorts but knew I hadn’t brought my phone because I didn’t think I’d need it.

Steeling myself, I walked off the trail. The ground seemed to vibrate against the rubber soles of my boots. Blood dripped from the wound in my chest. I pinched my nose with my left hand and held the blade out in front with my right. Branches were cut away through the trees. It looked like a door into another world.

I stepped through it.

It took a moment for my eyes to adjust. Moonlight filtered through the gaps between trees and a half mile north, the Wright sawmill leaned against the side of a hill, dwarfed by a mountain touching the sky. I pulled my shirt up over my nose and listened.

Crickets. An owl. The rustle of my heart. Pale gray shapes came into focus on the forest floor. I stepped closer trying to decipher what they were. Something shifted behind me. I turned and blackness rushed toward my face. It cracked against my skull like a baseball bat. I dropped the knife, blood in my eyes, hot and blinding, trying to get my bearings, not sure which way was up. I fell to my knees and tried to reach out, my ears ringing as if someone had fired a pistol in a closed room.

Someone grunted and the back of my head exploded with pain. I threw my arm out but couldn’t get my hands under me. Through the buzz building in my ears, I heard someone thrashing through the trees. Blood touched the corner of my mouth. I stared at the forest floor, my mind flipping over pictures of Cat and her son Ethan. As I passed out, my mind conjured an image of them at the gates of hell, a doorway cut from earth and rock. The Johnston Manor towered behind them, moonlight casting various shades of bone-white darkness over its window.

* * *

I tried to open my eyes. They felt sewn shut. I fought back a moment of panic, tried to move my legs and couldn’t. My arms didn’t respond either. The scent of pine and sweat fought against each other, the forest floor cool against my left cheek. Birds chirped in the trees and they morphed to voices. It reminded me of the talking Crows from
Dumbo
.

“He looks pretty fucked up, Rusty.” Feet shifted behind me.

Something brushed my forehead. “It’s superficial. What about the girls there?”

Slowly I remembered where I was, remembered hearing a girl scream off the path and how I’d followed the sound only to have someone attack me. My head pounded. “Is she alive?”

Pat Andrews grunted. He did that a lot. I never thought it was because he was sheriff or how he viewed himself, but how he looked at the rest of the world, other people. I’d seen his contempt for my father, they’d come to blows more than once, Pat hating my dad because the little man didn’t care if he lost, he only wanted to leave his mark and stand up for himself.

Rusty Wallace peeled my eyelids back and I groaned, smelling the whiskey on Sullivan County’s coroner breath. “You’ve got a concussion.” Rusty ran his hand over my forehead and flakes of crusty blood fell against my eyelashes. “You got lucky, McDonnell. Whoever hit you hits like a girl. It could have been a lot worse.”

The sheriff’s leather belt creaked. My eyes burned from the sun’s light sliding between the branches above us. Pat stood ten feet away. He had a build like a bear, silver hair cut close to his head, shoulders stretching his uniform blouse, mouth a snarl, a large paw slapped over his pistol. I closed my eyes again as the pounding ebbed inside my head, certain that Pat had a million questions I wouldn’t be able to answer.

“Help me get him on his feet, Pat. He’s gonna be fine. Come on.”

They rolled me over on my back. Pat swore. “What the hell happened here?”

“I don’t know.” My throat hurt like someone had force-fed me a bucket of sand. I squeezed my eyes shut and choked out, “Is the girl okay?”

Rusty said. “Can you keep your eyes open?”

“I don’t know.” I opened them again, easier now that Rusty had broken the seal of dried blood a moment ago. “I went for a walk last night. I heard a girl scream and when I went to investigate someone jumped me. Is my face jacked up?”

Rusty shook his head. “Once it’s cleaned up it’ll be fine. You need to take it easy though. Here.” He pulled a bottle of water from a red backpack draped over his shoulder. I drank, slowly, grimacing as I swallowed. Rusty pulled out a steel flask and sipped from it. He smiled but his face had that worn out look, a face of well-kept secrets—loose gray skin, pinched, chapped lips like he spent a lot of time licking them as he relived his regrets everyday—and I thought,
You’re going to end up like that if you hold on to your secret forever.
Because when you got down to it, none of us were all that different.

Rusty said, “Let us help you to your feet. Once you get moving around it’ll help get the kinks out. What time did you come out here?”

I looked up at Pat. The big man had his hands on his hips, wore a smile that kept twisting into a scowl. I hated his smugness; it was something that had always irritated the living hell out of me. People like him made life much harder. My dad was like that too, in his own way—stubborn and narrow-minded, not able to give an inch or step in someone else’s shoes.

I studied the ground, feeling like I’d lost something important, but unsure what it was. I met the sheriff’s gaze again. He was boring holes into me with his eyes, condemning me for something. I wondered if he suspected the truth about what happened on the river. “What the hell is your problem?”