Don't even think about it. But her goddamned Gloomies Forget that clairvoyant crap. Well, if Tamara could see the future, why had she married such a worthless piece of rat baggage?
But she’d been right about her father. And when Kevin broke his hip. If she is dead, and you never got a chance to say you were sorry, then how are you ever going to live with yourself?
He was reconsidering battering the stupid refrigerator because he couldn't reach inside and rip his even stupider heart out, couldn't hold it to the light over the sink as it dripped its cheating blood, couldn't watch it take its last undeserved beats. He couldn't, because of the kids.
"Daddy?"
Robert turned, his fists balled. Ginger rubbed a sleepy eye, clutching a stuffed frog to her chest. Her cheeks were wet with tears.
"What are you doing out of bed, honey?" He relaxed his hands and knelt to her. She looked so much like Tamara.
"Had a bad dream." She stood there sniffling in her flannel circus pajamas as he hugged her.
"It's okay now. Let me tuck you back in, and you can tell me all about it if you want."
"I want Mommy."
"Mommy's still not home, sweetheart. But she will be, soon."
"Not if the Dirt Mouth eats her."
"Dirt Mouth?" Robert almost grinned, but his daughter's serious green eyes stopped him.
"The Dirt Mouth in the mountains." She said it matter-of-factly, as if it were something she had seen in a nature program on television.
"Honey, there's no such thing-"
"Mommy said you have to trust your dreams. Because dreams are nature, and nature never lies. And the Dirt Mouth was in my dreams. And Mommy was on the mountain with it."
"Dreams are just little tricks the brain plays on us while we're asleep. Games to help pass the night while we’re resting."
"Where's Mommy, then?"
"Just… out somewhere, honey."
"Out with the Dirt Mouth. And it’s going to eat the whole mountain, Daddy. It wants to eat everybody and all the trees and things."
Robert stroked Ginger's hair and held her to his chest. "It's just a bad dream, honey. Let's get you back to bed, and in the morning you'll see that Mommy will be home and the sun will come up and there won't be any mean old dirt mouths around."
He lifted her and carried her back to bed.
God, she's growing so fast. Blonde and gorgeous and bright eyed. She's going to be sensitive, just like her mother. She has a wonderful imagination, too.
Just like her mother.
He tucked her under the blankets and kissed her forehead. He couldn't help it. He had to know. Just in case. "Where was Mommy, honey? In your dream, I mean?"
"On the mountain, with the bad people. The barefooted mountain. Where the Dirt Mouth is, and the green light."
She yawned, then her tiny eyelashes flickered as her eyelids relaxed.
"Sleep tight, sugar. Daddy will make everything better."
"‘Kay, Daddy."
He turned off the light. Her voice came from the darkness.
“Daddy, what’s a shu-shaaa?”
“Shu-shaaa? I don’t know, honey.”
“It’s scary.”
"Don't you worry," he said to the dark bed. "Nothing bad can happen to you. Not while I’m around."
He found that lying was easy, once you got used to it. He started to sing “Baa Baa Black Sheep,” and was on the third round of masters and dames when Ginger fell asleep.
He went out on the porch to smoke a cigarette and wait.
Nettie prayed.
She asked the Lord why He had allowed her to trip over that little round headstone that was really only a rock, the marker for an ancient, anonymous grave. She should have seen it gleaming like a white-capped tooth under the grinning curd of the moon. But she had run in a panic, out of the side door of the church into the dark graveyard. And she had been blind with fear.
What purpose could the Lord have in breaking her ankle? And she was scared to call for help, because help might come in the hideous form of the preacher's wife.
Or the preacher himself, standing there in the glow of the vestry lights with his pants around his ankles and his eyes as deep as devil pits. Maybe if she could reach the parsonage, maybe if Sarah were home, maybe if she could crawl…
It was only forty yards. But the pain was a ring of dull fire above her foot and she had to pull herself along by digging her hands into the turf and dragging herself forward a few feet at a time. As she slid, the earth sent its small stones digging into her hip and the grass tugged at her skirt. She was only a dozen yards from the church when she heard the sounds.
At first she thought it was a burst water pipe, or a wet wind cutting through the rags of the treetops. Then she saw them, shadows shuffling out of the forest at the edge of the cemetery. She was about to call out, thinking they could help her.
But who would be walking around the cemetery on the dead edge of midnight?
Then she saw their eyes. Three pairs of fluorescent orbs, dancing in the dark like fat fireflies. It was more of them.
More of whatever Amanda Blevins had become.
Nettie bit her tongue so she wouldn't scream and a seam of bright pain flashed across her mouth. She grabbed her crippled leg with both hands and rolled over, trying to swallow her whimpers of agony. She huddled behind a huge marble slab, pressing against its cold smoothness. The inscription on the headstone, "William Franklin Lemly, 1902–1984," was carved in dark relief against the moon-bathed alabaster. Bill's grandfather.
"Help me, Bill," she whispered, her cheek against the slab. The three figures stepped- “stepped” wasn't the right word, they’re FLOWING — into the moonlight, and Nettie saw the green pallor of their flesh. Their heads made her think of wax fruit dipped in motor oil.
They flowed over the grass-covered bones of the dead as if they were dead themselves, with that same moist slogging that Amanda had made while entering the church, a dribble of mucus and gelatin. She recognized two of them, Hank and Ellen Painter, parishioners of Windshake Baptist who lived out on Stony Fork. The third was too rotten to be identifiable. It was sexless beneath its ripped and rotten clothing.
The three approached the light of the church door like wise men come to see a miracle image. Nettie peered around the stone as they passed, certain that they would hear her heart hammering. But their radiant eyes stayed fixed on their beloved church.
Nettie watched them stumble up the stairs, mashing together as they all tried to go inside at the same time. They fell into the church and moaned in wet voices, singing praises to or raising curses against whatever god they now followed.
Nettie clawed her way across the grass, thinking of it as hair, the scalp of an earth that sweated dew and breathed the wind. A bright orange spear of pain flamed up her leg. She crawled behind a tall monument topped by an angel that held a harp and gazed toward heaven. Nettie rested her back against it, careful to keep the monument between herself and the church, and looked toward heaven herself.
Lord, what wonders you have wrought, she prayed. If this is the End Times, please give me the strength to endure Your plagues. If this is the first trumpet note, then may all seven of Your angels blow in their turn. Thy will be done. Please forgive me, Father, but I'm going to try to live. Because I kind of liked the way my life was going before hell gave up its demons. So forgive me for being human, but I'm not quite ready to give You my ghost. Amen.
Through a shrub twenty yards away, she looked wistfully at her car sparkling in the asphalt parking lot under the security light. But the car was a straight drive, and she couldn't operate the clutch because of her shattered ankle. Her best hope was to reach the parsonage and phone for help.
Assuming that either Sarah was home or the door was unlocked. Assuming that Sarah wasn't one of them. Assuming Nettie covered the open stretch of graveyard without being seen by the creatures. Assuming she didn't pass out from pain before she reached the front porch.