Part 3
A memory welled in that drop as it fell. A small boy exploring the collapsed shell of a mountain cabin, feet crunching on rotten boards. A noise like the plaintive dial tone after a hangup rising in my ears. Darkness congealed into a face. The shock of a ghost touch. Freezing fire.
I remembered: my tiny foot settling on a board that snapped even beneath the slender weight of a five year old. The sudden noise made my heart freeze. In the cabin, hollowed moss-caked husk, that squatted in the woods above the ancient cottage of my mother's mother.
Even in my childhood my grandma's house creaked with disrepair, central crumbling landmark on the farm gone to seed since my grandfather died, years before I was born. Her house fascinated me with its unending nooks and crannies, with its leaning outhouse, with its chickens behind frayed wire, with its covered well.
But nothing fascinated me more than that dark relic in the woods, its shadow always drawing my eye from beneath the elm trees when I slipped out the back door to play.
Grandma was a tiny woman, her waves of grey and black hair always tied back in a sloppy ponytail, face chestnut brown with wrinkled webs around her eyes and mouth, eyes a startling pale blue beneath thick black eyebrows. She frightened me; I didn't like to be alone with her, though she was always kind. There was a tension between her and my mother, who took after her late, lighter-skinned, taller husband; a cold barrier that I sensed in some instinctual way but did not catalogue consciously until I was much older, and noticed how mom fell quiet on the rare occasions someone spoke of
her mother. Not so dearly departed, I could see. I came to believe it was all about skin color.
But, when grandma was alive, she had insisted on visits, insisted on every opportunity to see her grandson, and my parents had dutifully obeyed, making the long trek on those horrible rutted roads in the rusted WV Beetle that was all they could afford when they were young.
I asked Grandma many times about the caved-in cabin in her woods, and when she answered it was always the same. "Leave it alone, little panther."
I never asked her permission, but decided I would see for myself all the same. Toward the end of one week-long stay I snuck away from my cot in the middle of the night. I had no flashlight, but the moon was bright enough.
Then, inside. I barked my knee crawling in through a hole in the wall that gaped beneath the moon. What was I hunting there?
I remembered: the face that formed out of the dark. That terrible touch, cold lightning through every inch of me.
I couldn't recall what happened next. More blood dripped as my hand trembled.
A snatch of an image: my grandmother's eyes, practically glowing beneath the moonlight, her nose inches from mine. She had pulled me from the ruined cabin. Inside it, something whimpered.
I clenched my bleeding thumb in my fingers, once again aware of the fruity tobacco scent, the
reep reep reep of the peeper frogs.
I was a fool on a fool's mission. The old man was right — by the time I reached Massachusetts the trail would be smothered in snow. The world I was trying to escape into would flush me out without a sliver of sympathy.
That creepy storekeeper had the better of me in more ways than one.
I've always felt alone, been aware of a boundary that cordoned me off from others, evoked awkward silences and downcast eyes when I've tried to breach the gap. I once chalked that up to skin color, my mother's shame.
I didn't learn what a Melungeon was until my senior year in high school. My blood was mixed, yes, but not in the way I'd come to believe.
Melungeon was once an insult, now defanged by virtue of being mostly forgotten. They called themselves Black Dutch or Black Irish, but people believed they were a mix of Indian and Negro, and in some towns in 18th century Tennessee the government took away their property rights. The Melungeons did intermarry with blacks, because of the forces of society that throw outcasts together, but they weren't to begin with African.
No one has pinpointed for certain how they came to be. Some claimed them to be descendants of Moorish sailors from a marooned Portuguese vessel, taking Cherokee and Powhatan wives. Others sources point to the lost Roanoke colony, with its cryptic CROATOAN; some fancifully go even further back, much further, to Carthaginians fleeing the Roman tyranny, to the Phoenicians, even to a certain lost Biblical tribe. And there are tales that supposedly originate among the Cherokee of a tribe from under the hills, a tribe with features that could be called a combination of white and black and Asian, who walked without fear among the beasts of the spirit world, and did not know death until they came to live above ground.
My grandmother was unmistakably Melungeon, and she met death when I was little and didn't come back. I knew nothing of a spirit world or any beasts within it.
But I thought about that webbing in the shop door, and the way the Crabbes had known
what I was without asking, and it frightened me.
Then a shadow flickered beyond the doorway to the shelter, and I knew a different kind of fear. My gasp of surprise caught in my throat.
I saw nothing through that opening but the jumbled blur of trees in deep twilight, but at the same time I saw, unmistakably, the scrawny figure of a boy, etched out of the darkness.
He stared at me, wide-eyed.
I tried to say his name, but he had vanished. A breeze outside shifted, shaking the branches ominously.
I heard a distant, rhythmic rustling of leaves, someone walking through the brush. A stench of rotten eggs assailed me.
My bleeding thumb forgotten, I opened the Buck knife and crept to the door.
On the crest of the hill high above me, in a gap between trees, a figure stood silhouetted against the bruised twilight. The figure — a man, I thought — turned and walked below the line of the hill.
It was a strange thing to think at that moment, strange especially for a twenty-year-old man facing the unknown with his heart in his throat, but it's what I thought:
Grandma would know what to do. A woman who was little more to me than scraps of eerie memory, yet there was strength in those memories. A tiny old woman who had ventured out in the middle of the night to pull a frightened little boy from a place he didn't belong.
I stepped outside, careful to avoid leaves and brush as I stalked up the hill. As a child I'd had gift for padding silently that drove my mother crazy. This gift did not fail me then.
On the hilltop I peered down into a long, narrow gully, dug by uncounted centuries of converging water runoff. The bottom of the gully widened into a clearing, shrouded by encroaching night. Though my vision reduced most everything to mottled black and white, somehow without squinting I could see Herman Crabbe in the clearing. Gaunt, an animated skeleton, he spread his arms, and a ring of what appeared to be blue smoke stretched open in front of him.
It was as if his hands had pierced a membrane, and he was forcing the hole to gape large enough to pass through.
A bewildering double image confronted me. Though I saw Crabbe using both hands to hold the opening, other limbs were reaching through, spiny arachnid limbs.
Then he stepped completely through, and changed. What crawled out the other side of that smoky opening was not human at all.
Its legs moving like arched lightning, the monster ascended the far side of the gully, climbing through the murk with heart-stopping speed. The vast spider I beheld was formed of shadow and movement, like my ghost-boy.
Once the Crabbe-thing crawled out of sight, my heart didn't slow its pounding. But the opening he made, the blue smoky ring, still hung in mid-air, slowly shrinking.
Knife held before me, every nerve screaming for me to run the other way, I descended into the gully, stepping as light and cat-like as I think I've ever managed. I expected the Crabbe-spider to lunge from the shadows any moment. But nothing like that happened.
When I reached the opening it was little more than an eerie curl of blue light, dangling before me, glowing bait in the deep woods abyss. I poked my finger in it, and felt a mild jolt, that nerve-chilling shock that was starting to become familiar.
I shoved in two fingers, then both hands. The substance yielded to my touch. I spread my arms, as I'd seen the storekeeper do, and opened the hole in reality.
Through the hole, the trees, the gully, the shadows all looked the same, but another world was superimposed over them in double-exposure: a landscape of sourceless silver light, of odd refractions that twisted objects into shapes that hurt my eyes if I stared too long.
I put one foot in the opening and stretched it to the ground, then paused. If I passed all the way through, would the opening still be there when I returned? Would I be stuck on the other side, in the spirit world, like poor Tommy Saunders?
For now I was certain what had happened to this poor boy. Not all the pieces fit, not yet. But I was sure that Tommy Saunders, against all odds, was still alive.
The Crabbes had brought him into this shadow world, somehow, for who-knew-what horrible purpose, but he'd escaped them. Maybe they'd believed him dead, but from my meeting with them they'd gleaned in some arcane fashion that their prey still lived. And now Mr. Crabbe had returned to the shadow world, to hunt the boy. Tracking in his true form.
I didn't dare leave the opening to search in that unfamiliar space. But I'd seen the boy just minutes ago. He couldn't be far away.
Holding out my knife in the direction Crabbe had crawled, I yelled Tommy's name.
The woods fell silent. I threw away all caution, shouting, "Tommy? Can you hear me? Tommy?"
"Here!" A boy's voice.
Something stirred nearby, something large. The sound made my guts flip-flop.
"Run to my voice!" I screamed. "Run! Run! Now!"