The Devil Walks in Mattingly (30 page)

“How’ve you spent your day, lady?” he asked. “You thought on what I told you?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’ll do it.”

“What’s he call himself? Or is it a her?”

“A him. His name’s Hollis Devereaux.”

Taylor nodded. He didn’t know a Hollis Devereaux and thought he wouldn’t. “Have you dealings with this man?”

“No,” she said, “I know him, though. What he does. I promised myself I’d see to him if I ever got the chance.”

“Do you love him enough to set him free?” Taylor asked.

“I’ll set him free.”

“Such promises are easy to make and hard to keep, Lucy Seekins. You’d do well to know that.”

“This is my home now,” Lucy said. “I’ll do what I have to do to stay.”

Taylor looked down over the town again, which was now dark but for tiny specks of light downtown.

“You cannot take my blade,” he said. “It’s precious to me and holds a power you can’t wield. Gun’s cleaned and loaded, though. Can you shoot?”

“A boy taught me how once,” Lucy said. “His name is Johnny. Or was. He’s gone now.”

Taylor asked, “Are you sure you have this in you, lady?”

Lucy smiled. He saw it was not a pretty smile, more like a bobcat’s just before it pounced.

“I’ve never been as sure of anything in my life, Taylor. He’ll be in his woods. I know where they are. I’ll find him. If it takes forever, I’ll find him.”

Taylor knew that was true. What he didn’t know is if the lady beside him would succeed. It took love to Wake someone, but all he saw in Lucy Seekins was hate.

“Besides,” Lucy said, “none of this is real anyway. Right?”

Taylor didn’t answer. All he said was, “Tomorrow. It’ll be tomorrow.”

12

Zach Barnett may have been only six and fuzzy on if there really were pots of gold at the ends of rainbows or where babies came from, but he knew when his parents were fighting. It wasn’t so much that things got louder around the house, it was more they got quieter. That night the silence held such a presence that he felt it was a living thing.

The air itself carried a charge like lightning that could strike anywhere at any time. Zach felt one of those bolts when his daddy snapped at him for not wanting to take a bath. He caught one from his momma when he bucked at doing his homework. It was the heavy clink of ice in their glasses during an otherwise soundless supper and his vain attempts at conversation that were met with stares and grunts. Not even Zach’s news that he’d sat with Danny Blackwell at lunch and turned half his peanut butter and banana sandwich into a peace offering raised so much as an eyebrow. He repeated it twice, but neither one of his parents heard him.

They didn’t happen often, these fights. Zach was thankful
for that. His teachers at school had yet to instruct him in many things (pots of gold and how babies got in women’s stomachs among them), but his classmates had taught Zach plenty about divorce. No fewer than three of the kids in his first-grade class had mommies and daddies who didn’t love each other anymore, and all three shared the belief that seeing your folks fight was much like seeing a red sky in the morning—it meant bad weather was coming.

Zach didn’t think his folks were headed down that road. They most always got along. They laughed at each other’s jokes and held hands and kissed a lot, and sometimes the three of them would get into wrestling matches on the floor. Zach didn’t know a lot, but he knew about fighting and fun. He figured that if you put those two together, that made love.

So that night Zach did what every child would do—he kept his head down and his mouth closed, and weathered the storm. He didn’t ask to throw Bessie in the backyard and didn’t complain when his momma said it was bedtime, and he found his grace in believing the next day would be better because tomorrow never had any hurt in it yet. When you’re six, such things are easy to believe.

His momma still read him a bedtime story, and his daddy still ended the night by telling Zach he was proud of him and loved him. At least there was that. If his daddy had left that part out, Zach really would have started worrying about divorce.

Yet he couldn’t fall asleep. It was everything that had happened in town. He understood this even if his parents had told him little. The kids at school had talked plenty about what had happened in town that week. After their peace had been made and the peanut butter and banana sandwich eaten, Danny Blackwell had told Zach it was a zombie that had hurt Andy, Timmy, and that boy named Eric. Knew it for a fact,
Danny said, “Because I sawed it on the TV and zombies eat
braiiins
.” Zach didn’t believe that for a minute (though he did pause to consider if there really was a brain-hungry zombie loose in Mattingly, Danny Blackwell would be the safest person in the whole town). He knew the one who had done those bad things had been just a man.

And yet to Zach, that notion was much scarier. He would have preferred the zombie. Because if it really had been just a man who had upended Zach’s town, that meant his Uncle Timmy and Mr. Andy and that boy Eric hadn’t been set upon by a monster, they’d been hurt—and killed, Zach knew that and didn’t need Danny to tell him—by someone as normal as himself.

He knew about bad people. Reverend Goggins had told Zach how Adam and Eve were good until the devil talked Eve into eating that apple, after which Adam wanted his own bite. That’s when everything went to pot, because that’s when Adam and Eve looked down and saw they didn’t have any clothes on. That’s when sin started, the preacher said, and Zach always thought that must’ve been an awful thing to witness. He also figured he couldn’t blame Adam and Eve for eating that apple. Experience had taught him people tend to want a lot of things, and the things they’re not supposed to have especially. He had no doubt everyone’s original parents had a rough go from then on. On those dark nights like the one he was mired in now, Zach would sometimes think about Adam trying to keep the weeds out of his crop and Eve hollering because it hurt so bad when those babies came out of her stomach and how they both must have spent a lot of time thinking on the good old days. But he bet they probably thought on that apple plenty too, and how good it tasted.

Yes, people were bad. They did mean things like hurt other
people and make mommas and daddies fight and pull on pretty girls’ pigtails. They made you take the cap gun you kept hung from a peg on your bedroom wall and slip it under your pillow.

Zach knew that sometimes people died too, and sometimes that was because of bad people and sometimes not. He had two grandmas and one granddaddy in heaven. The other granddaddy—the one who’d once carried Bessie—had gone little mentioned in Zach Barnett’s life, and whatever questions he’d posed had been met with silence on the part of his parents. That granddaddy had become a Secret, and Zach knew secrets happened whenever there was something bad to be hidden. But even if Zach was ignorant of the machinations of the world, he understood when one and one equaled two. He could come and go anywhere in town he wished and talk to anyone he had the notion to, but Zach’s parents never let him near the phone when Mr. Justus started calling. And whenever the Barnett family was out to the Dairy Queen for supper or the carnival or church and Mr. Justus’s name was mentioned, Zach’s momma and daddy were always quick to shush and head on.

It was a surprising thing for Zach to hit on, even as young as he was—his folks had been trying to keep a secret so bad they’d given that secret away long before Mr. Justus called Zach’s daddy “son.”

Zach didn’t know why he wasn’t allowed to speak to Mr. Justus or what exactly Mr. Justus had done to get himself kicked out of the town, but he figured it had to be something bad. He’d heard his momma say once that Mr. Justus was headed for h-e-double hockey sticks when his time came. And that was the problem. Because Mr. Justus had to be a
real
bad man to end up there, had maybe even hated Jesus, and if that was true then it meant the bad in him was also in Zach’s daddy and also in Zach himself.

That nugget of insight made him shudder beneath the covers.

But Zach thought his daddy was a good man, the best man. He was sheriff of the whole town, and everybody loved him. And he thought his momma was the best woman too. She helped people and had taught him to do the same, had even let him help her with her names. That was the second best thing in the world to Zach (throwing Bessie, of course, topped that list), and he’d grown to understand that real joy meant not getting from people but giving to them. That was the lesson his momma taught. “Doing for others who can’t do for themselves is like digging for treasure, Zach,” she’d often said. “It makes the bad inside feel better.”

Zach thought on that and on all those good things he’d done with his momma and daddy, and he really did feel better. Yet there in the cool silence of the night, he also considered that his father had been acting different lately, like something was wrong. He’d tried to hide it, but Zach could see (and could hear as well, some of the screams those last nights had made it to his sleeping ears) that Jake Barnett was sick, and from more than just not sleeping.

He’d seen, too, that his momma’s lesson about helping others was one she’d maybe forgotten. Getting those names and gathering up those boxes didn’t make her smile so much anymore, and Zach couldn’t understand why. It was like his momma was still trying to dig for treasure, but she was heaping all the dirt she dug up on top of herself.

Zach’s last thought before closing his eyes was a prayer that he would open them to sunshine. He bolted upright not ten minutes later when he heard his father hollering and his mother saying it was okay. Zach saw a shadow cast on the white hallway wall. He wanted to call out, ask if that shadow was his mother or his father, but when he tried he could only produce
a whisper. He reached for the cap gun under his pillow and pulled back the covers.

The shadow was still there, unmoving, almost as if it were waiting. For him. The muscles in Zach’s face and arms tensed as he stepped around the toy town on the floor, wanting to say, Momma is that you, please tell me that’s you and please tell me what’s wrong with Daddy because I don’t know what’s happening to us and to everyone. He reached the open bedroom door. Zach’s eyes followed the shadow to its source. The cap gun went limp in his hand.

His father had been dreaming. Zach understood this, and then he understood something else—the thing standing in front of him was what had brought that dream. The fear that fell over Zach wasn’t from the way it looked or what it said, it was more a knowing that this was something he wasn’t supposed to be seeing, that maybe no one was supposed to see.

And yet children hold their souls close and have not yet learned how to forget them, and so see it Zach Barnett did. Magic comes easy to children. It’s only when they grow up that believing gets harder.

The boy Zach saw was not much older than himself and staring back at him. He wore a dirty pair of cut-off jeans and looked out from behind a broken pair of horn-rimmed glasses. The boy pulled back the hood of his sweatshirt and lifted his chin. Zach wanted to cry out. He would have if the boy’s smile had not stilled him.

“Who are you?” he asked.

The boy brought a single finger to his lips.

Another secret, Zach thought. Something bad to hide.

He gave a promise that he would be quiet. But what Zach received wasn’t a secret at all. It was the voice of heaven filling his mind.

Part V

Remember True

1

I
decided the next morning that the front door of the sheriff’s office really could use another coat of paint. The outside first, as that was the side everyone saw. The inside—the part only Kate and I had to look at—could be saved for later. Looking back, I suppose there’s not a little irony in such thinking.

I’d put two coats on that door the week before. Friday, that had been. I’d taken Kate up to the Lowe’s in Stanley (Kate had always been good at picking colors), and we’d held hands the whole way there and back. She never asked about my dreams and I never thought they were anything more than guilt.

Yes, that had been Friday. The day before Eric Thayer had died and Andy got burned and Timmy was beaten, before Charlie Givens got scared into his grave and
I’m coming for you, Jake, I’m coming for you all
, before the devil walked in Mattingly and “I know what you did in the Holler that day” and the town meeting and Justus. Back in a time when all I had to worry about was keeping my fears hidden and
whether the gray on the door would look better in “squirrel” or “sterling.”

But now it was Wednesday, and everything had changed.

Kate no longer spoke to me. We rode to the office that morning in silence, our only company the radio. I inched my hand onto the console, hoping she would place hers on top—by choice or force of habit, I didn’t care—and lace her fingers into mine. She did nothing but stare out the window and keep her hand atop the notebook on her lap. She’d said nothing of her trip to the Ruskin boy’s house.

The only words she’d offered me since I told her of Taylor had come after I woke screaming the night before. “It’s going to be okay,” she’d said. I was thankful to hear it, even if we’d both come to the point we didn’t believe it anymore. Kate had wanted to know what I’d dreamed and said she’d dreamed as well—had fallen back to a warm spring day twenty years gone, when she took a boy’s hand and led him behind the bleachers. She lay with me and said some ghosts never go away, and I knew that was true.

For me, I’d spent that night in front of a mound of rocks along the riverbank in Happy Hollow in a time I’d not yet lived. I stood with a man I knew to be Taylor Hathcock. Kate and Lucy Seekins were there too. And Phillip, standing in our midst with an upturned fist pointed to us all. There was fire and screaming, and there was an end.

I said nothing of this to my wife as we lay there in the stillness of the night. Kate fell back into her silence and found her sleep. I never did.

To make matters worse, that morning I found Kate’s hush now extended to Zach. He’d gotten out of bed and refused to say so much as good morning to either of us. Kate and I both tried prodding some sort of conversation from him, but
it was as if the times had rendered our son deaf and mute. And really, who could blame a child for being such? In many ways Kate and I had become the same. In their own way, everyone had.