The Devil Walks in Mattingly (43 page)

“That’s far enough, Jake,” Taylor told me. “Step inside this ring, what happens is on you.”

I skidded against the riverbank’s soil and stopped just outside the fire’s light. Taylor kept the gun on Lucy and turned. His eyes caught the small movement I made behind my back.
Taylor shook his head and smiled, daring me. I moved my hand away but held my ground. Standing there in the dark with the river churning beside him, I wanted nothing more than to be dreaming again. All the horror in all those nightmares could not match what I saw in the person on the other end of that barrel. Taylor Hathcock looked not like a man at all but a boy grown old on a diet of poison.

I saw Phillip’s light spilling over my shoulder and heard Kate approach. She stopped when I stretched out my hand. Phillip passed through the gap between us and entered the wide ring of the fire’s glow. Taylor wavered and shrank back, swinging the shotgun from Lucy to Phillip.

Phillip continued on, unconcerned. He walked through the center of the flames and stopped mere inches from the barrel.

“Fly from me, demon,” Taylor cried. “I’ve no quarrel with you.”

Lucy cowered against the rocks, her body shaking at the sight of Taylor shuffling away. She looked from him to me to Kate, then back to Taylor. It was that scatter-gun I should have been paying attention to—how the barrel wavered and how the finger upon the trigger shook, ready to fire. But Taylor’s shotgun was the furthest thing from my mind. It was Lucy Seekins I watched and her face I read. I don’t think she saw Phillip at all.

Kate eased from my side and skirted the edge of the fire to the rocks. Taylor’s eyes followed her. Phillip moved, setting his body between them. In one slow motion, he raised an upturned fist to Taylor’s eyes, and I understood that if Kate and I were in a trap, Taylor had been snared as well.

Faced with too many threats, Taylor seemed unsure where to steer the gun next. He settled on my head. He raised the stock to his cheek and stepped around Phillip’s fist, moving me
back. The barrel moved to Kate and Lucy and to Phillip again. Taylor stopped only when he reached a position between the fire and the rocks where he could watch us all.

“What hell have you conjured, Jake?” he asked. “Is this your play?”

Kate moved closer to Lucy, who huddled farther into the stones. Lucy’s head shook no. I heard her whisper, “This isn’t real, this is n’t real, this is n’t real.”

“It’s no conjuring,” I said. “Phillip’s drawn us.”

“No,” Taylor said. “
NO
. Not him. You deceive me, Jake. He is my
aid
.”

Taylor’s finger sat at the trigger, and he did not see Jake’s hand draw back. His eyes were on the boy—not at his glow (witchlight was what he’d told Lucy, and witchlight it was, Taylor had seen plenty of that both in the Hollow and in his dreams) but at his feet. At the boy’s shoes. He lowered the shotgun and peered at the footprints left in the riverbank’s soft mud. Ones Taylor remembered well.

The shotgun trembled in Taylor’s hands. He spoke with a reasonableness that sounded just short of insanity—calm at first, louder in the middle, and at the end a shout that echoed off the cliffs above: “You cain’t be my salvation. You cain’t be here, boy. I Woke you up. You came at me with your arms wide and I Woke you up, I Woke you up and
YOU CAIN’T COME BACK
.”

The boy eased his arm to his head. When he opened his hand, there was only the brilliant skin of his palm. He drew back the hood of his sweatshirt and lifted his chin. Light poured forth from the wide gash where his throat had once
been. Taylor’s knees buckled. Kate and Jake shielded their eyes. Lucy looked on into the night as though darkness surrounded them.

Taylor let the shotgun drop to his side. He reached into his back pocket with his free hand and drew out the same flint knife he’d carried into the Holler that day long ago. He looked at Lucy, his eyes filling with a terror that stopped her. It was a look Taylor never expected to share with his true love. It was hope lost.

“Stop it,” Lucy screamed. “Stop it stop it stop it. There’s no one there. Can’t you see there’s no one there and why don’t you just go and leave us alone?”

Kate came to her slowly and crouched by the rocks. From the corner of her eye, Lucy saw Kate’s hand rise to stroke the jagged ends of her hair. She didn’t feel Kate’s touch. Lucy could feel nothing at that moment other than the slow unwinding of her life.

“You did it,” I said. I looked from Phillip to Taylor, to the knife in his hand. “You killed him. You cut his throat.”

Taylor shook his head. “That weren’t what happened, Jake.”

Phillip looked at me and then to the crags above. And was there the faint start of a smile upon his lips?

“You were both up there, on the cliffs. Is that right? They found his daddy’s truck on that switchback. Sheriff Houser said you must’ve took a walk and got lost. What were you doing here, Taylor? Were you running away too? Both of you,
to here. Somehow in all this land, you reached the same spot. And then you murdered him.”

Taylor said, “I . . .
Woke
. . . him.”

“That’s how you saw me,” I said. “You were watching the whole time. Phillip was bashed to pieces when I found him. That gouge on his neck, it’d just look like he’d hit another rock when he jumped. No one ever thought otherwise because no one ever thought anyone else’d be in this Holler.” I looked to Phillip. “You never spoke in my dreams. I heard you in my head. Because you couldn’t talk. You traded worlds and came back, but you couldn’t talk.”

A smile. That’s what I saw upon Phillip’s face. And when he once more raised his fist slow to Taylor’s eyes, I saw in that smile not a threat to take but a want to give.

Taylor raised the gun.

“No,” I said. “Taylor, listen to me. He doesn’t want to hurt you. Neither do I. Let’s just go. We’ll take Lucy and we’ll go. We’ll end all of this.”

“There will be an end, Jake. That end comes here.”

Taylor put his back to the mound I had built, steadying himself. Phillip stepped forward, breaking the rough circle we’d all formed, and looked down when he reached the log Taylor had bent to before. I saw trouble on Phillip’s face. I saw the same pleading he had shown before Taylor rose up behind that fire with a gun in his hands. Yet while then that look had been,
Hurry
, it now said,
Do something, Jake
.

I have often wondered how things would have gone if I had done something else. Despite what Kate and Taylor and I always thought, it was choice rather than fate that governed our lives. It was choice, not Phillip, that had brought us to the riverbank. It was a frightened girl choosing long ago to play a trick on two innocent boys, and those boys choosing to be led
away by her. It was a child who’d lived in his father’s shadow until wilting, choosing to go to the rusty gate to prove himself a man. It was Phillip choosing to wander through the woods rather than go home, and it was Taylor choosing to give in to his rage. In her own way, Lucy was the same. The only difference between her and us was that she had chained herself to a dead mother while we had chained ourselves to a dead boy. Now we were all there, four poor souls who could no longer carry the burden of knowing all that lay before us would always be colored by all that lay behind. God in His mercy had allowed us to settle our accounts and put an end to our struggles. And Taylor meant to put an end to those things as well.

Taylor looked from Phillip to Kate. The gun swung there. “You ruined me.”

Phillip looked at me, pleading. My hand moved slow, an inch at a time.

“I’m sorry,” Kate said. “I’m so sorry, Taylor.”

Lucy rose from her crouch. She took two steps before Taylor stopped her. “Go, lady,” he said. “Back to where we started. Holler’s yours now, and all that’s in it. I’ll keep them here. They won’t follow.”

My hand, closer.

Lucy took Taylor’s words like a punch. “No, Taylor, I’m not leaving you.”

“Go now,” he said. Tears welled in his eyes. “I’d not have you see what comes.”

“Don’t go, Lucy,” Kate said. “It’s going to be okay now. We’ll take you home.”

Lucy wheeled and screamed, “This is home. Don’t you understand that? I’m never going back there.”

My hand shook against fear and fatigue. I thought of the
tree stump behind the sheriff’s office and how Justus said trees don’t kill you if you—

“Stay if you want,” Taylor said. “Only step away from Kate. Jake’s right. It ends here.”

Kate shrank against the stones and called my name. Phillip raised his fist to Taylor a final time. Waving it. Begging.

Taylor moved his finger from the guard.

Kate screamed at the trigger’s pull.

Bessie flew.

13

You hear stories of time slowing in the midst of something gone terribly wrong. It was true with me that night along the riverbank. But at first it was more like time skipped, that there was a moment when Bessie sat tucked at my back and another when her blade cleaved the air. Taylor raised on Kate and I saw his finger squeeze on the trigger, and I ask you this: What man would not do as I then did? What woman? That’s what I’ve told myself. I tell myself that I saved my wife, even if I really didn’t save Kate at all.

Because just as Bessie closed the distance between Taylor and me, that trigger pulled. And what followed was not an explosion of buckshot, but the dry click of an unloaded gun.

And then time slowed. Kate’s mouth stuck in a scream. Her hand covered her face as her body slumped against the rocks. I froze in my follow-through as that click came and I knew I’d let Bessie go and there was no pulling her back. I knew it even as I heard the wet, heavy thud of the blade entering Taylor’s chest just inside his left shoulder and a sound like
Hawp!
as the air was forced from his lungs. The shotgun
clattered onto the riverbank. Taylor’s head jerked back. He fell as though pushed by a hard wind.

Time lurched forward again when Lucy screamed.

She was too late to catch him. Taylor landed in the shadow of the rocks and did not move. Lucy knelt over him. Her fingers trembled over Bessie’s buried head. Blood flowed from the wound in Taylor’s chest like a hidden spring.

“No,” she wailed, just that word again and again, like some mantra that would undo what had been done. “
NOTHISISN’TREAL.
”

Taylor reached for the tomahawk and grasped it by the haft, wrenching it from his body. He coughed a spray of red into Lucy’s face. She gasped and tried to wipe it away, but the blood mixed with her tears and streaked her face. Lucy’s hands went from Taylor’s chest to his head, hoping that touch would be enough to anchor him to the world. Phillip watched. Light still shone from within him, yet it only made the despair on his face clearer and deeper. Kate rose from her place against the rocks and stumbled toward Lucy.

Taylor’s eyes were wide with surprise and pain. He reached for Lucy and said, “Run now, lady. We’ll have our day.”

“No,” she cried, “I’m not leaving you, I’m—”

Kate placed her hands on Lucy’s shoulders, trying to ease her away. Lucy twisted and shot a fist upward, missing Kate’s face but connecting with the side of her head. I caught Kate as she wheeled backward.