Last time, Abishai Godfrey happened upon the small town of Jackson Hollow. The timing of his arrival in the mountains overlooking the town was providential, putting him in just the right place to rescue a young girl from two pursuers.
It was totally dark by the time Abishai and his new acquaintance, Jared Carter, made their way back to the cave. Abishai doubted whether he could find it again, but Carter, who had introduced himself as “Constable Carter” said he thought he knew where the site was.
There was no police station in Jackson Hollow as far as Abishai could tell. Earlier that evening, when he had turned onto Main Street with Mabel in tow, the only place where there had seemed to be any activity was the barber shop. The pair peered inside where a group of men were huddled around a wood stove.
A few minutes later the constable was there accompanied by a gray-haired woman with a kindly face who turned out to be the town’s mayor, Judith Bolling. Trailing only a little bit later was a fleshy, bespectacled man who introduced himself as Dudley Tayloe, pastor of the Jackson Hollow Community Church. Judith—never Judy, she insisted—said that she recognized the girl as the daughter of a family from the next town and offered to take her in for the night; there was no phone service in the area and their radio was waiting on some replacement parts.
“Besides,” Judith said, “she ain’t got no one to go back to there. Her parents died last winter.”
Mabel looked at her feet and shuffled them slightly.
“You’ll be all right with me for the night, won’t you, child?”
Mabel nodded slightly but didn’t look up.
“You can even call me ‘Meemaw’ just like my grandbabies used to. How’s that sound?”
The girl shrugged and gave the same reluctant nod as before and that had seemed to settle it. Pastor Tayloe offered Abishai the room above his garage for as long as he needed it, promising that it would be ready as soon as he and the constable got back that night.
“I’ll leave the door unlocked and the porch light on. It’s the big house with the pillars on the front porch; you can’t miss it.”
Abishai nodded his thanks and started back the way he had come with the constable. The temperature had dropped considerably in that short time, so Abishai retrieved his old-fashioned “bomber” jacket from his pack and pulled up the collar to brace against the oncoming chills.
“He should be right up here, I think,” Abishai said. The flashlight that Carter had brought was only a little help; the full moon had been their guide most of the way.
“Yep, I see it,” Carter said, pointing in the direction of the cave. “And there’s Trevor, just like you said.”
“The knife fell over there, I think.”
Carter swept the area with the flashlight and the light fell on the knife. The constable used a bag he had turned inside out to pick it up. Judging by the handle that jutted out of the bag, Abishai took it to be some kind of kitchen knife, though in the dim light he couldn’t be sure.
“So far, Mr. Godfrey, your story checks out. And folks around here know the kind of business that these two were always up to. I got no reason to doubt you acted in self defense, but just the same it’d be good if you stay in town—just for a few days, mind you. Give me time to try to find Jay and bring him in and clear all this up for good.”
“That’s fair, I suppose. My feet could use the rest anyway.”
As they headed back to town the constable studiously avoided asking about the events of earlier that day. Perhaps owing to his office, however, he seemed unable to resist the urge to do at least a little prying.
“Remind me: where did you say you were headed?”
“I didn’t.”
“Oh,” the lawman said. “Reckon I musta misheard. You said you had just come from … where was it again?”
“Didn’t say that either.”
They passed several moments without speaking. The gurgling of the stream and the crunch of leaves insured there would be no silence.
“Meaning no offense, Constable Carter, but I prefer to mind my own affairs. As soon as I see that the girl is well-provided for I’ll be on my way.”
“No offense taken, son. I’m sure you can understand why I might want a little more information about a man who just seemed to … drift into our town out of nowhere.”
Abishai didn’t much care for the shift to “son” as the colloquial form of address—though up here in the mountains he could give the constable the benefit of the doubt—but the hesitation at the word “drift” troubled him somewhat more. Had he been named merely “stranger” that would have carried a negative connotation enough, but to be labeled a “drifter” would be enough to poison any little town against him.
Half a dozen witty replies came to Abishai’s mind—he might have told him of his hometown, reduced to rubble, that he had been forced to flee or of the young wife and three daughters who had been taken from him, the smallest of whom, Hannah, would have been no older than Mabel—but he held his tongue, settling instead for a grunt and a nod. The two parted ways after returning to the barbershop and agreed to meet back there in the morning.
The walk to Pastor Tayloe’s house was not a long one, but by that late hour Abishai was weary. Much to his relief, the house was, as promised, impossible to miss. The pillars were of the Jeffersonian Revival style that had been so popular before The Uprising; on the tiny streets of Jackson Hollow the house was conspicuous by its opulence. The front was well-lit, but Abishai saw that the detached garage, several yards off the street, was covered in darkness. Being raised a good Southern boy, he decided not to trouble the pastor if he could help it. In any event, he was pretty sure that he could just make out the contours of the staircase that promised a place to lay his head for the night.
He reached the weather-beaten banister at the foot of the stairs and was just about to lift his foot to the first step when he heard something behind him. Abishai turned on his heel in time to see a shadow hurtling toward him. He sprang to the side, away from the garage, at the last moment; where the attacker had apparently meant to tackle him, the assault had only succeeded in knocking him off balance. He stumbled, but regained his footing in time to brace for the second attack.
Abishai caught the assailant by the wrists as he—for it was only then that Abishai could be sure it was a man—crashed into him again. They tumbled to the ground and Abishai was sure he would have had the breath knocked out of him were it not for his pack breaking the fall. The wrists Abishai clasped were startlingly thin, making the strength the man exerted seem impossible. The attacker, though he had landed on top, was no match for his would-be victim.
The pair rolled, switching positions. Abishai pinned the man’s arms to the ground and used his legs to immobilize the rest of him.
“Who are you?”
The man made a kind of guttural, growling noise in response. In the darkness it was impossible to say for sure, but Abishai thought it sounded as if he were hissing through clenched teeth.
“Who are you?” Abishai repeated more forcefully.
With a convulsive lurch the man tried to free his wrists from Abishai’s grasp. He failed in the attempt, but succeeded in moving his head closer to Abishai’s left arm. Before he realized what was happening, Abishai winced in pain: the man was biting him! Providentially, however, he was still wearing the thick-sleeved bomber jacket; even a junkyard dog would have had trouble tearing through it.
Seeing that the man would not give up, Abishai felt he had no choice. He allowed the man to keep pointlessly clamping down with his jaw, while he leaned slightly back with his own shoulders. In a flash Abishai threw his forehead down, crashing into the attacker’s head just above the temple. His jaw unclenched and went slack. Abishai got up from the ground and rolled the man onto his side; his breath was shallow and ragged, but it was there.
Perhaps a quarter of an hour later a groggy, confused Pastor Tayloe and an irritable Constable Carter stood around the still-unconscious man with Abishai.
“He came from over there, I think,” Abishai said, gesturing toward the dark line of bushes that formed the border of the property. Pastor Tayloe swung the light of the kerosene lamp in that direction, revealing nothing useful.
The trio moved to stand behind the fallen man and, for the first time, Abishai noticed that the man’s shirt had been torn during their struggle. Most of his upper back was exposed. Apart from the fact that the skin seemed to have been pulled taut over his bones, something else caught Abishai’s attention.
Just above the man’s shoulder blade was a peculiar tattoo. It was a circle within which were three straight lines that spread apart and grew wider as they moved downward. Atop each line was a dot or circle. Abishai didn’t think he had ever seen the symbol before, but just as he was taking note of it the light swung away.
“We should get him up to the lockup, don’t you think, Constable” Tayloe said.
The “lockup” Abishai would later discover was an old utility closet with a cot in it, just off the front hallway of the abandoned high school building on the far eastern end of town.
“Do you need my help?” Abishai asked.
Constable Carter coughed and said, “No. Just help me get him in the back of the paddywagon there.”
Even “paddywagon” seemed too grandiose a name for the makeshift, mule-drawn cart that the Constable had brought with him. But Abishai, like so many others, was still in the process of adjusting both his vocabulary and his expectations.
“I’m sorry about that,” Tayloe said as the cart rattled down the street into the darkness. “I don’t know what must’ve gotten into him.”
“You know that … fellow?”
“Yeah. Jed’s more or less the town drunk, I guess you’d say. He sleeps under the stairs there sometimes, but I’ve never known him to get in fights.”
Abishai let the remark about “fights” slide, but the rest puzzled him. Admittedly he had not been focused on it at the time, but he and Jed had been close enough to feel each other’s breath. He recalled no smell of alcohol. When he was alone in the room over the garage, after the pastor had said his goodnight, he smelled the sleeve of his jacket where his attacker had left noticeable bite marks. There, too, there was no lingering odor of anything but bad breath.
This “Jed” may well have been the town drunk, but Abishai sensed that there was more to the story. The fact that he had been in sight of Jackson Hollow for a matter of hours and had already been attacked twice made him uneasy—not so uneasy, however, that it overcame his fatigue. He laid his rifle within easy reach and fell asleep quickly.
Continue reading “Beneath the Hill” here.