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The stranger walked down the dusky little backroad that connected highway 84 to the main street running smack through the center of Maylene’s Hollow.
Branches swooped overhead, reaching out to hold hands and keep the worst of the Georgia sun from beating down on him. Of course, it would’ve only added insult to injury. The stranger had been walking for damn near two weeks. All the way from Thrush Creek, Tennessee. Plenty of time for the sun to find a path through his long blonde hair and redden his neck to make him fit right into the Deep South.
His legs ached, though not as much as one might expect, and several times, he’d considered appropriating a vehicle. But the urge always passed. The beacon that called from Maylene’s Hollow seemed to dim whenever he put a barrier between it and himself, even something so flimsy as half an inch of metal or glass. More than once, the idea occurred to him that the pull he felt was keeping his feet marching, preventing him from collapsing in a heap on the side of the highway.
The stranger stepped sideways and began walking through the dirt patch at road’s edge, tired of the incessant click click click of his weathered shoes against asphalt. A gray lizard, about half a foot in length, darted out from a mossy log and froze in the stranger’s path, drawing him to a stop. With shiny black eyes, ridged scales, and a series of dark, wavy lines running across its back, the lizard watched, seeming to study him.
The stranger frowned and brought his boot down on the lizard with a wet crunch, like stepping on a fresh chicken egg. He kicked the mess of blood, scales, and bone shards into the woods.
Deep within the trees, something stirred, sounding larger than any lizard or squirrel, and a goose walked over the stranger’s grave. These woods brimmed with something unnatural.
A pulse.
A tingle crept up the stranger’s spine at the possibilities. Squint as he might, nothing moved inside the tree line. Even the wind had stilled, suspending leaves and branches in time.
“No matter,” he mumbled, and walked back onto the asphalt, suddenly uncomfortable walking too close to the woods.
Whatever it was, it wasn’t what he’d come for. An opening act, but hardly the main event.
Somewhere in Maylene’s Hollow there was power, rippling through the ground and screaming to be heard miles away by those who knew what to listen for.
The stranger licked his lips. Just ahead, the trees began to thin. Light, scampering footsteps sounded between the click of his own. Creatures small, or at least sneaky, trodding across leaves and snapping the odd twig, he
thought. A warm day such as this, he expected a range of wildlife; everything from white-tailed deer to eastern chipmunks. None made an appearance. Even the birds held their songs. The woods appeared dead.
Before he could dwell on it any longer, the distant sounds of car engines drifted down the road and he knew he was close.
The trees opened up to reveal an idyllic little town with a picturesque main street from the depths of Norman Rockwell’s imagination. Quaint little businesses lined both sides of the road, although none of them held the stranger’s interest. That ripple of power—magic, even—this close to the source eclipsed anything he’d experienced in Tennessee. Ohio and Oregon before that. Before Oregon? Well, that was too far back to remember.
Suddenly, a different wave came over him, black and troubling. To his left sat a cabin. Half tucked into the woods, it appeared as old as the country it was built on, with eye-like windows that judged his approach. The stranger sneered at the sight and began to cross to the far side of the road.
Then came a voice, deep and sharp.
“Hello there, fella.”
The stranger froze, shoulders eking up toward his ears, then turned toward the cabin and the purveyor of the greeting. Despite the friendly tone, the cabin’s owner frowned, tree-trunk arms crossed before a burly chest. Atop his head, flurries of red hair stuck up in every direction as though he’d only just gotten out of bed.
“Frank Sicard,” he said, his frown drooping into a scowl. “And who might you be?”
What a question, thought the stranger. In his time on this mortal coil, he’d had his share of names; so many that at times he forgot the one he’d been born with. As he tried to choose one, the cabin owner studied him, a cunning look in his eyes.
The stranger would have to be careful. The dark feeling washed over him again, as if in agreement. Be clever, thoughtful, a master of disguise.
Arthur,” he said, and held out his hand.
Frank stared at Arthur’s hand for a moment, then shook it. An iron grip and a whipcrack jerk before he let go and wiped his own hand on his pants, likely unaware he’d even done it. “I don’t know you,” said Frank, with an accusatory tone. “And I know everybody around here.”
Arthur opened his mouth to answer and the shy creak of a screen door interrupted him. Up on the cabin's porch, a young boy peeked over the railing. Perhaps a touch older than ten, with fire-touched hair that identified him as Frank’s kin. The kid’s eyes pinched shut, seeming to digest Arthur and not like the taste.
“Inside, boy.” Frank barked the order, more animosity for his own son than the new transient in town.
The boy vanished beneath the railing, then the door creaked again, and he was gone.
“You were saying?” Something dimmed in Frank’s eyes. He raised his nose and sniffed at the air.
He smells an earthy scent, thought Arthur. Like a graveyard masked by pepper and clove.
Or so he’d been told.
Arthur stole a deep breath and closed his eyes. There was power to this man, as well. It wasn’t black, however, like he first thought. More than likely that was a touch of fear from when the man first spotted him. Like whatever moved in the woods, it wasn’t the scent of Frank Sicard and his ilk that had drawn Arthur to this place. Greater than natural, just not the kind that could sustain a man for a lifetime, or two.
Arthur couldn’t quite place his finger on why, but getting past Frank Sicard was crucial. His cabin functioned as a guard tower, its owner as gatekeeper.
When Arthur opened his eyes, he smiled a shit-eating salesman grin and leaned on his silver tongue; not a quality he’d been born with or learned, rather one he’d thieved a month back from a young woman who owned a pawnshop in Tennessee. He’d absorbed her knack for language even as he wrapped his hands around her neck and watched the life drain from her eyes.
“Frank,” he said. “I’ll tell it to you straight. A town like this, hidden away from the rest of the world, so far south it might slip into the ocean if the earth spins too fast, it’s just the kind of place I’ve been looking for. Heaven on earth or close to it.”
Frank raised an eyebrow, appearing unconvinced. His tone dripped with suspicion. “Lots of places that could fit that description. Why this one?”
Arthur stepped back, spun in a circle, arms raised. “The way the woods close in on this place. It’s like… well, it breeds a closeness. Community. Life.”
“Life,” Frank chuckled. “Not a whole lot of people outside those trees looking to be on the inside. Those outsiders? They talk, and what they got to say isn’t always so kind-hearted.” The words bristled, but his tone had softened.
“Ah, you see, that’s what I’ve come for, Frank.” He stepped forward, meeting Frank’s gaze and holding it. There was fear there, for sure, but Arthur didn’t think it was because of him. Something else lived in Maylene’s Hollow, something that occupied the gatekeeper’s thoughts. The longer he stared, the more that fear, that concern seemed to melt away, retreating to the back of the man’s mind.
Arthur went on. “Whatever a place needs me to be, that’s what I can be. A salve to ease the burden, medicine to ease the pain of a town with imperfections, and there are imperfections around here. I don’t have to tell you twice. Mayhaps it’s why those outsiders refuse to keep a civil tongue.”
Frank uncrossed his arms, let them fall by his side. His eyes dulled, jaw slacked.
Tell me, thought the stranger, a trickle of sweat forming on his brow. Sometimes, if he dug real deep, he could still get a message across without flapping his lips.
Silently, Frank looked over Arthur’s shoulder. Arthur turned to see what had caught the man’s eye. Beyond Main Street, a hill climbed gradually to a spot that overlooked the town; could maybe even see over the trees that surrounded the Hollow. Atop that hill sat a house with pointed arches and steep roofs. Two floors of architecture so grand it had to lord above the rest of the buildings. A fence wrapped lovingly around its borders, like a rib cage protecting vital organs.
Another ripple of the kind that had reached him all the way in Tennessee rushed through the ground, tingling Arthur’s toes and charging through his limbs before settling in his mind. Not black, this energy. More of a bright blue. Electric.
This was what he had come for. He felt it in his bones.
“Will you let me pass, Sicard?”
For a moment, Frank swayed, eyes glazed over. A flash of movement from behind him. The boy, maybe. Watching from those ocular windows. Arthur didn’t dare break eye contact.
When Frank spoke, he slurred his words like a man on a three-day bender. “Welcome to Maylene’s Hollow,” he said.
Twenty Years Later…
1
How much does it hurt to die?
It was a strange thought, one that made less sense every time it strayed through Sam Everett’s mind.
The sunshine streaming through the crack in the curtains burned, penetrating the thin skin of his eyelids and making him squint. He groaned and swung his arm toward Nellie, but his fingers brushed only crumpled blankets.
Notes of fresh brewed coffee drifted into the room. Light roast, he suspected. His favorite. A smile spread across Sam’s face as he made an earnest attempt to force his eyes open.
He listened for hints of his wife’s morning routines—padding feet, soft murmurs, the clink of a mug being removed from the cabinet, yet only the lonely burble of the coffee maker stirred the silence.
A heaviness hung in the air, but Sam couldn’t decide what caused it. His smile slipped as he studied the room. Nellie’s home IV pole loomed in gun metal gray. The sight of it always unnerved him, though it was every bit as much a fixture of their home as the television, the silver cross necklace reflecting the morning sun, or the wedding photo on the dresser. When Sam’s gaze reached the window, Morton greeted him with a petite meow incompatible with his gargantuan size. The fat feline plopped to the carpet, letting the curtain close behind him, then scampered down the hallway, disappearing into the unlit living room.
The honks and rumbling engines of Atlanta traffic, outside, buzzed through Sam’s skull like a saw. He rolled over and felt around on the nightstand until he found the stereo remote. He tapped the play button and tried to remember what he’d left on rotation while the CD loaded. As outdated as it was, the sound system still worked faster than his memory.
An opening piano run that could only belong to “Monk’s Dream” danced out of the speakers, like the legendary musician and his band were in the room. The dissonant clash of Thelonious Monk’s unique harmonies hardly made for perfect morning music, although Sam had always found beauty in everything the piano player composed. Improvisation crept into the melody and Sam forced himself out of bed.
Tinkling piano notes followed him to the bathroom, where the light peeked out from under the closed door and the fan hummed its own countermelody. Sam knocked, expecting to hear Nellie answer from the other side. Her new pills, dicycloverine, promised relief from the stomach spasms caused by the host of medication she took, morning and night, to manage her pain. As with most new medications, she traded one malady for another. Sleeplessness, in this case. Sam had seen the same old thing, heard the tired diatribe, time and time again. Take a pill to fix a
problem, then watch the side effects come on fast until they outweighed the relief. Pretty soon, it was time to try something else to combat those new symptoms. Like dominos falling in a row. It was hard not to marvel at modern medicine while also retaining a clear view of how far the world still had to go to catch up with those utopian visions of the future in which every sickness had a cure.
“Honey?” He rapped gently on the door again.
No answer.
He twisted the knob and the door eased open. The unlatched medicine cabinet doors displayed countless clear orange plastic containers, reflecting the bright overhead light. Sam scanned the printed labels from his work. The containers lined up neatly like rows of teeth, one missing every so often and lending the appearance of a grinning jack-o-lantern. He shuddered at the image and closed the hinged mirror, replacing the home pharmacy with his own reflection. Sam caught himself grimacing at the blackish-purple bags swelling beneath his eyes. Evidently, Nellie wasn’t the only one losing sleep. He splashed water on his face, hoping the cold would shrink the unsightly additions, and vowed to hit the hay before nine that night. Finished with his appraisal, he sidestepped to the toilet to void last night’s gin and tonic.
Sam emerged from the bathroom to the soothing swing of Charlie Rouse’s tenor saxophone, complimenting the melody before transforming it into something new, a rotation of smooth and staccato. He peered around the corner into the kitchen but found only an empty room. The coffee maker buzzed, warmed up and ready to provide. No sign of Nellie.
On the carafe hung a post-it note. “I love you” scrawled in Nellie’s imperfect hand. Sam pulled the note off and examined it, rubbing his thumb over the coarse paper as he read the three words over and over again. Nellie’s typical untidy script, yes, but something else in the shaky lettering. Haste? Nerves?
Shaking his head at the absurd thought, Sam walked to the window and stared down at the street below. Dozens of people crowded the sidewalk, commuting to work, running errands, or grabbing something to eat. He squinted as though he might pick out Nellie among their number. It wouldn’t be the first time insomnia, nausea, and shooting joint pain drove her to the store at an ungodly hour.
Though Nellie’s infirmities kept them from having children, he had heard stories about pregnancy cravings striking at all hours of the night. In a way, Nellie experienced the same sensations, often indulging in unanticipated, and sometimes odd delicacies she suspected her insubordinate stomach might tolerate.
The feeding tube, he thought, leaning his head against the cool glass. Of course she wouldn’t be out seeking the perfect snack. She’d had a J-tube put in only a month earlier. A minor surgical procedure to insert a feeding tube directly into her small intestine to help her body absorb nutrition, which meant until her nutritionist said otherwise—if he said otherwise—she lived on an all liquid diet.
So, where was she?
Charlie Rouse passed the tune back to Thelonious Monk just as Sam realized there was only one place left to look.
The office.
Post-it-note still clutched in his hand, Sam entered the living room and stopped a few paces short of the closed door. The plush carpet nipped at his feet as he stared at the small slip of yellow paper centered on the office door, identical in size and shape to the one he held in his hand. Some kind of scavenger hunt perhaps?
He wanted to feel excited about the idea of following clues around the house until he found Nellie, wearing something skimpy, waiting for him with a lustful smile, but the familiar heavy sensation from the bedroom returned with added weight. Morton waited dutifully at the base of the door, his meows rising in desperation.
“What’s going on, boy?” Sam whispered, more to himself than the cat.
From a world away, Monk’s piano solo interrupted the cat, alternating between rushed single-note melody and chord clusters that now contained less beauty than only moments before. Discordant note choices that had always inspired wonder in Sam turned black and hopeless, echoing the tumult in his stomach.
Sam stepped forward and plucked the note from the door.
His heart hammered, eyes glossing over the words. A faint scent clawed at his nostrils, slipping out from behind the door, almost acidic in nature. The litter box, he thought, glancing at Morton. Feral yellow eyes met him as the cat tore at the carpet where it met the base of the door, hackles up and letting out a low hissing noise.
Sam’s stomach plummeted even as his balls crawled up into his abdomen. He tried to read the post-it again. The words registered no more clearly than they had the first time. The writing on the note, more fevered than the one in the kitchen. Her hand had quivered as she struggled to fit every word, he had no doubt.
“Sam, I just can’t do it anymore. I’m so sorry. Don’t open the door. Just call the police. I love you so much.”
The last five words were nearly illegible, written in a shaking hand and punctuated by blotchy imperfections that had made the ink run like mascara. A cold, numb sensation overtook Sam as he tried to reach for the doorknob. His body refused to respond, only stood in place trembling like a tree rooted in a hurricane.
Don’t open the door.
Nellie’s green eyes, her smile, flashed through Sam’s mind. Their wedding day. She’d fought through illness to stand before the altar beside
him. Now he fought through fear to get to her.
Don’t open the door.
Thelonious Monk steered his song back into the melody, played with a flourish but also with a dark, desolate harmony. Reminiscent of the opening but somehow wildly different.
How much does it hurt to die? Sam thought again. Less than it hurts to live?
“Nellie,” he said, his voice barely a whisper. “Nelia.” A little more force this time.
Only silence came from the other side of the door.
Don’t open the door. Don’t open the door. She asked me not to open the door. Don’t… Don’t… Open the door. Open the door. Open the fucking door. Just open the fucking door…
A surge of adrenaline raced through Sam’s body and he seized the doorknob and twisted, ready to slam his shoulder into the wood and break it off its hinges if it was locked. To his surprise, the knob turned in his hand. Once the door came free with a gentle click, the adrenaline coursing through his veins cowered in fear. The door remained open a sliver. Nothing moved inside. Nothing made a sound.
Morton’s hissing and scratching subsided, and he slipped through the opening, lost to the darkness within.
“Nellie,” he whispered. Any second she would answer. She had gotten up early and closed the door so her typing wouldn’t wake him. She put headphones in to listen to music, so she hadn’t heard his calls. The note? The note didn’t matter. A misunderstanding, maybe.
Charlie Rouse lent his saxophone to the last few seconds of the song before it faded to silence. “Body and Soul” always followed, but not this time. Whether a glitch with the CD or the universe, Sam couldn’t guess. Even the
traffic below ceased its complaints.
Extending only a fingertip, he pushed the door. It met a meager resistance that clicked like tapping fingernails. A few of the orange containers rolled across the floor. Missing teeth from the incomplete smile above the bathroom sink.
Again, Sam’s feet rooted in place and his breathing quickened, becoming shallower with each inhale. He knew what he would find. Nellie had trusted him to leave the door closed, trusted him to get help. He could still back away and call the police.
Instead, he pushed the door open with a harrowing creak that the second track on the CD might have hidden if it were playing, and stepped over the discarded pill bottles into the office, no doubt left in his mind about where the acidic smell came from.
2
Nora Lewis jolted awake as a scream tore her from sleep, her heart climbing her throat. Danger. The kind of shriek that spoke of pain, but not the kind stemming from an injury. Fear, but not the type that comes from simply being startled.
This scream was manic.
Kicking the sheets aside, Nora scrambled for the gun in her closet safe. Her outstretched hand froze halfway to the closet door. Gone. She’d sold the gun years ago.
Knees shaking, she braced for another scream.
Notes of anguish and heartbreak.
It’s not in the room, she told herself. No one is in the room.
It came from the other side of the wall. The Everetts.
Nellie, she thought. Sam. breath in her lungs. She didn’t even remember picking up the phone.
1
Sam’s footsteps echoed throughout the nearly-empty department store which served as his and Nellie’s church. Hands shoved deep in his pockets, he walked with a slump past the folding-chair pews. In his formative years, a teacher had told Sam to never walk with his hands in his pockets. A single misplaced step could land him face first on the unforgiving tiled floor. He ignored the sage wisdom in high school and paid it no more mind almost twenty years later.
Pastor Chapman stood near the back of the room, where the pitiful excuse for a pulpit looked upon the empty congregation. He offered Sam a friendly smile as he flipped through the well-worn pages of his Bible, searching for a certain passage that seemed to elude him. Chapman closed the massive tome with a reverberant thump when Sam returned a ghost of the proffered smile. “Something on your mind, Sam?”
“It’s Saturday.”
“So it is, hence my fastidious scrabbling to tie a bow around tomorrow’s sermon.”
Sam nodded absently, stroked the stubble on his chin with a dry scraping sound. “I thought I might be alone here. Even pastors need a day off.” A pause. “Five months today.”
“Really?”
Sam recognized the question as an invitation to continue. He shook his head slowly as he searched for the words. When he found them, they sounded well-rehearsed. A subconscious rendering of avoided notions. “It’s the little things, Pastor, you know?”
“Timothy, please.”
“Like the guy from the Bible who wrote the letter?”
“Technically, the letter was written by Paul to Timothy, but I don’t expect you came for a lecture on the subject.”
Sam licked his lips, then sighed. “I lost my job.”
Timothy walked over and chose an aisle seat. He patted the uncomfortable metal chair next to him, then slid it toward Sam, grimacing as its legs scraped the floor. “That’s hardly a little thing.”
“Well, they snowball,” said Sam. He leaned on the chair, but remained standing. “It was a miscount here, a mislabel there. Telltale signs of a wandering mind and innocuous mistakes that got caught in time.” Sam let the end of the sentence hang as if there were more to add. Truthfully, he hoped the pastor would aid him and was relieved when his wish came true.
“One could argue medicine is a business of life and death, and there are no innocuous mistakes.” His tone was flat, but not judgmental. “I would assume the pharmacy was aware of Nellie’s… passing. ...
