Chapter Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Eight
As soon as Jonah heads back down Mud Street in the direction of the sheriff’s office, I grab Lo and drag him to the truck. We climb inside and I crank the engine to life. It coughs and sputters, but finally evens out.
“It’s Ira,” I say.
“Why would Ira be killin’ people, Dovie? He’s been so good to all of us. To this whole town.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know.” I’m frustrated that he suddenly expects me to have all the answers.
We’re bumping down Mud Street now, avoiding potholes and tryin’ to keep from waking the whole town up. I never realized in the daytime how loud this damn truck is.
“And why would he be leavin’ the bodies for me to bury? Why not just bury ’em himself?”
That’s the question that’s burning in the pit of my stomach right now, too. Why torture Lo? Why make him part of this? If it really is Ira, I hate him for what he did to those hikers. To Riley. And to Hannah. To all of them. It’s evil. Pure evil.
But I swear to God I’ll kill him with my bare hands and put him in his own shallow grave for the way he’s destroyed Lo.
“I don’t know,” I tell him. “I don’t know the answers to any of those questions. But we’re gonna figure it out. Tonight.”
We’re making our way up the mountain now. Clouds have rolled in to block out the moon, and it’s so dark that, even with the headlights on bright, I can only see a few feet ahead of us. We hit a deep rut and the truck bounces hard. “Goddammit,” I mutter as we bottom out and skid sideways toward the trees. Lo grabs for the handle above the door. The “oh shit” handle is what Daddy calls it.
“You gotta slow down, Dovie,” he tells me, and I know he’s right. The truck is a piece of junk. It’s older than me with four bald tires. It can’t take any more jolts like that. But Xan is out there somewhere, and I cannot stand the thought of his bones starting to sing.
So I don’t slow down.
It’s almost three o’clock in the morning when we drive under the sign welcoming us to Moonlight Crag Lodge. I turn off the headlights and we creep toward the parking lot like pirates, but driving blind in the dark I hit another huge rut and the truck drops hard. There’s an ominous pop , and by the time we roll into the gravel lot, Lo and I both know by the way the truck is limping that we’ve blown a tire.
But that’s something we’ll have to deal with later.
The lodge looks quiet. Daddy’s stained glass lamps still glow in the huge lobby, but the lights are off in the guest cabins scattered around the main building and in the restaurant. All the windows are dark. Ira lives at the top of the lodge. He has the whole fourth floor for his private quarters, and there’s no sign of life up there, either.
“Come on,” I say. “Let’s see if we can find a way in.”
We climb out of the truck and shut the doors as gently as we can, then we keep low and close to the shadows as we sprint toward the building.
Lo and I flatten ourselves against the outside of the lodge as I reach for a maintenance entrance door, but it’s locked. I don’t know why I thought we’d just be able to waltz right in.
“Look,” Lo says, and he points to two huge black barrels sitting out on the loading dock. The word Antifreeze is printed across them in big block letters.
“The dogs,” I whisper, and Lo nods. “Fucking Ira.” I can’t believe it. I’ve always been so won over by those red curls and the laugh lines around his blue eyes, and by the way he spreads his money around so generous and easy. Like he’s the damn tooth fairy.
The whole town has been completely fooled by him.
We make our way around the building, trying every door we come to. But none of them open.
“What are we gonna do?” Lo asks, and I’m getting pretty tired of him firing questions at me I don’t have any answers for.
“Keep trying, I guess.”
We’re creeping around the building toward the deck where we ate bison burgers yesterday when Lo grabs my shirt and jerks me down hard toward the ground. “What the—” His hand flies up to cover my mouth and he points up with his other hand.
We peek over the edge of the deck to see Ira and the guy from the lobby, the one who didn’t want to hunt, sitting at one of the tables smoking cigars. There’s a bottle of something and a couple of glasses between them. They’re talking in voices so low that I have to hold my breath to be able to hear them.
“I didn’t think I’d have the nerve, I really didn’t,” the other guy says, and Ira claps him on his back. “God. What a feeling.”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself. You still gotta finish it,” Ira says, and he pours the guy a drink and slides it across the table to him. “You did the hunt.” Ira downs whatever is in his own glass. “You gonna have the balls to take it all the way?”
The guy throws back his drink and Ira pours him another. “After the fortune I paid you, I’d better.” The two of them laugh low and quiet, and the sound of it makes my skin crawl. “They never even heard you comin,’?” the stranger says, and a slow, creeping horror starts to settle in my bones, the way the damp from the air is settling on my skin. “Where’re you keepin’ him?”
Ira takes a long drink. “I got him hidden away.”
“They told me you were the best,” the guy says. “And they were right.”
“To the hunt,” Ira says, and he raises his glass in a toast.
“To the kill,” the other guy adds, and Ira nods before they clink glasses.
We watch while they finish their cigars and stub them out in an ashtray before they head back inside the lodge, then Lo and I sink down to sit on our knees in the grass at the edge of the deck.
“They’re not huntin’ hogs,” Lo whispers. “Are they?” I shake my head.
My stomach lurches and my body goes ice cold in the oppressive summer heat, but I’m focused on one thing. “Xan’s alive,” I tell Lo. “At least for tonight.”
“Where, though? Jesus, Dovie. He could be anywhere.”
I’m trying to think. There’s something at the edge of my brain. Some connection that’s just out of my grasp. “Shit. Shit. Shit.” I ball up my fists in frustration.
I’ve got him hidden away. I’m racking my brain, trying to figure out why that sounds familiar.
Suddenly that conversation with Daddy on the crag comes rushing back to me. I turn to Lo and he’s watching me with huge, frightened eyes.
“I think I know where he might be. There’s a cave down under the bluff. Daddy said they used to hang out there before Ira built the lodge. Ira was livin’ there at one point. They called it their hideaway.”
I pull the flashlight out of my pocket and glance around before I dart across the perfectly manicured lawn toward Moonlight Crag with Lo hot on my heels. We cross the exposed rock at a run and head on toward the woods beyond. Once we hit the trees, we have to slow down, but I don’t dare click on my flashlight until we’re far enough into the thick of it that no one from the lodge would be able to see the light.
We’re picking our way through the brambles and briars in the dark. Tripping over rocks and getting our feet caught in vines. The forest is fighting us every step of the way. It’s twisting and overgrown. Treacherous and claustrophobic. If Ira really does keep the hikers down here somewhere before he kills them, then he doesn’t need any guards or boobytraps. The woods will do the job for him.
Suddenly Lo grabs my arm and jerks me backward, hard. “Watch out!” he hisses, and I look down to see that my toes are hanging over the rocky edge of a steep drop-off. I gasp and Lo pulls me against his chest. I let myself melt into him, just for a few minutes. “Thanks,” I whisper, and he presses his lips to the top of my head.
I pull away from him to shine my light over the edge of the bluff. “There’s gotta be a way down there,” I say, but it takes us a good half hour of hunting through the brush to find a steep, rocky path leading downhill.
We slip and slide and skid our way to the bottom, until suddenly we’re standing at the mouth of a cave. The entrance is almost hidden by undergrowth. If you weren’t specifically looking for it, you’d probably hike right by it and never know it was there.
Lo and I are both frozen, peering into the darkness of that yawning mouth in the mountain. If we go in there, there’s no telling what’s waiting for us.
I realize that I’m hearing the sound of water from somewhere. I shine the light around until I find the spot where it’s trickling out of the rocks. The spring water splashes into a little pool, then trickles into a rocky stream bed barely as wide across as my foot. From there it heads on down the mountain.
“Smell that?” Lo asks me, and I nod. Sulfur burns my nose and stings my eyes. “That’s the headspring for Lucifer’s Creek. This is where it starts.” He shakes his head and turns his attention back to the dark mouth of the cave. “There’s something bad here, Dovie. Something evil lives in this place.”
“We have to go in,” I tell him. “Xan could be in there.”
Lo nods. “This is what we came to do.” He looks back over his shoulder into the blackness. “It’s what they want me to do.”
I take the light and push aside the overgrowth to step inside the cave. My skin starts to crawl and I’m instantly choking and gagging on the overwhelming smell of sulfur, but Lo takes my hand and squeezes hard. “Stronger than the dark,” he whispers.
The inside of the cave is small and wet. And empty.
Somehow I feel empty too. Like my body is a deserted grave. That crushing silence almost makes me miss the bone song.
Nothing sings here.
With each step, I feel the press of something heavy. A wave of despair comes washing over me. I’m suddenly swimming in misery, and a voice rises up to jeer at me from somewhere in my own mind.
Your fault, Dovie.
Your fault your mama left.
Your fault Riley is dead.
And Hannah.
Your fault Xan is going to die.
And probably Lo, too.
A simmering rage starts to bubble in my stomach, and I fight it back down.
“You feel that, Dovie?” Lo whispers, and I nod. His face is twisted in anguish. I wonder what he’s thinking about, but I don’t have time to ask. We need to find Xan and get out of here before Ira comes to check on his prisoner.
There’s a path leading back farther. It’s narrow and we have to go single file. Me inching forward with the light. Lo right behind me with his hand on my shoulder. The farther we go, the heavier the weight of despair settles on me, and the stronger the rotten-egg stench of sulfur gets. Like we’re slowly making our way straight to hell.
The walls of the cave are slimy. I feel things scurrying over my feet. Crawling up my legs. I shudder hard and knock them away, but I never get all of them. There are way too many. Something scratches and squeaks at us from a crevice and I bite my tongue against the urge to scream.
Finally the passage opens up into another cavern, bigger than the first. I bend down to flick a crawling spider off my shin, then I shine my light around to check it out. “Xan?” I whisper his name to the bugs and the rats, but I look right over him on the first pass with the light. I don’t see him until Lo grabs my wrist and points.
“Wait. Dovie. Look.”
Xan is lying on his side against the cave wall. He’s hog-tied with his hands and feet bound behind him, and his mouth is taped shut. But his eyes are open. They’re huge and wide and terrified and blinking in the blinding glare of the flashlight beam.
“Xan! It’s me. It’s Dovie.” I hurry over to him and kneel down to pull the tape off his mouth.
“We gotta get out of here,” he says, and he’s sucking in great gulps of air. “We gotta get the fuck out of here. Before they come back.”
“Shit,” I say. “I don’t have anything to cut the ropes with.” Another tsunami of agony slams into me, and it’s so overwhelming that I’m almost incapacitated.
Your fault, Dovie.
No. The misery gives way to a swelling anger. Resentment. This is their fault. Xan’s and Lo’s. Not mine. I ball my hands into tight fists and grit my teeth, fighting to not get swept up in my own rage.
The terror in Xan’s eyes is the only thing that gets me moving again. Lo and I work at the knots for a few minutes, but it’s no good. We can’t get them undone, and there’s no way we can get Xan out of here hog-tied like this. “Dammit.” I’m on the verge of crying from frustration and Xan looks like he’s about to have a full-on panic attack.
“Wait.” Lo takes the flashlight and shines it toward a pile of rocks. He grabs a sharp, jagged one and saws at the ropes holding Xan hostage. Xan keeps begging him to hurry, and I keep touching Xan’s face and his hair. I’m telling him it’s okay. To be patient. That we’re going to get him out of here.
Lo finally gets Xan’s feet free, and it only takes a few more minutes to get his hands. “Come on.” Lo grabs Xan’s hand and pulls him up off the ground, and then the three of us are making our way back down the narrow passage. Lo is leading the way, and Xan is behind me. “I thought I was going to die tonight, Dovie,” he whispers. “I thought I was going to die like Riley.”
“Nobody is going to die tonight,” I promise him, and I repeat it again, louder this time so Lo can hear it too. “None of us are going to die. Not tonight.”
We finally make it back to the mouth of the cave, and we step out into the night air to suck in lungfuls of oxygen. I’m trying to shake off that misery that settled on me in the cave, like I could feel the whole weight of the mountain sitting right on top of my rib cage.
“You found me.” Xan hugs me tight. “I knew you were magic.” He puts his hand on my chin and pulls my mouth toward his for another kiss. There’s something urgent in it this time. Something feverish and frantic. Something needy and greedy.
Something grateful.
When I pull away, Lo is studying the water coming out of the rocks. He’s working so hard not to look at us that it kills me.
“Old timers around here used to say, if you drank too much water from Lucifer’s Creek, you’d go mad,” he tells us. “Blind with rage. Or sick with worry.” Lo shifts his focus from the water to me. “My granddaddy used to bathe in it, even though it burned. That’s what Nana told me. She said it’s how the meanness got in him.”
“How are we gonna get out of here?” I ask. “The truck has a blown tire, and it’s not like Ira’s gonna let us in to use the phone to call for help.”
“Couldn’t we follow the road down?” Xan asks. “How long would it take to walk back to town?”
“Hours. Besides,” I argue. “It’s too risky. If Ira finds out you’re gone and comes after us, we’d be too exposed. We gotta stick to the woods.”
“How are we gonna know where we’re going?” Panic is creeping back into Xan’s voice. He’s realizing that we may have cut his ropes off, but he’s a long way from safe.
“We’re gonna follow the creek,” Lo announces. “We’re gonna follow Lucifer’s Creek all the way down the mountain to town.”
That makes me almost as scared as walking right down the middle of the dirt road for Ira and everyone to see, but I can’t say exactly why. So I keep my mouth shut. Lo knows these hills even better than I do. If he thinks we should follow the water, we should follow the water.
The three of us start down the rocky slope, keeping the tiny creek on our right. We have to move carefully. The woods don’t want us getting home tonight. They do their best to keep us trapped on the mountain. They claw and bite and scratch at us with thorny hands. But we keep moving down. Following Lucifer’s Creek. The farther we go, the more the stream widens out. That sulfur smell hangs thick in the air, and it makes it hard to breathe.
We fill Xan in on everything we know, keeping our voices to occasional whispers so we can hear if someone is out there stalking us.
Not that we’d ever hear the Ghost of the Ozarks.
The only part we leave out of the story is how Lo buried the bodies. What matters right now is what Ira did. Lo will be dealing with what he did for the rest of his life. He doesn’t need to lay it all out again tonight.
It’s too unspeakable. So we don’t speak it.
Xan can’t tell us anything at all. All he remembers is being behind me on the trail, then being in the cave with two guys. “The redhead and the other one,” he tells us. When we tell him we think people were paying Ira to take them hunting for human beings in these hills, Xan stops and stares at us. I see his brain stutter and stall. He can’t wrap his head around it. “That’s what happened to Riley?” he asks, and his voice splinters when he says his brother’s name.
“Yeah,” I say. “I think so.”
“That’s what happened to all of them?”
“Yeah.” Lo answers him this time. “We’re pretty sure that’s what happened to all of them.”
“Jesus,” Xan whispers. He still hasn’t moved. I don’t think he can. “You see that kind of stuff in horror movies. But real life? What the fuck is wrong with people?”
“There’s darkness in all of us,” Lo tells him. “Most of us keep it at bay.”
Just then a horrible, strangled howl tears through the valley. Loud enough to shake the leaves on the trees.
“What the hell was that?” Xan whispers.
“It’s the Howler,” Lo tells us, and he takes my hand to pull me next to him. “He’s here.”
Terror rips into my flesh with its sharp teeth. “You mean Ira?”
Lo puts a finger to his lips and shakes his head.
There’s a snuffling sound behind us, the grunts of a big animal, and we turn around slow to stare into the night. There’s a shape there in the darkness. I can just barely make it out, but it’s huge. Bigger than any bear you’d find in these hills.
It breathes and paws at the ground. I still can’t quite see it, but I can smell it. The odor is thick and pungent and musky. Lo and Xan and I don’t breathe. We don’t blink. My heart isn’t beating anymore.
The thing in the shadows pauses for a moment to drink from Lucifer’s Creek in long, loud gulps. When it’s had its fill, it throws back its head and howls again.
And then it’s gone, tearing off into the dark forest.
“What was that?” Xan whispers. I can feel him trembling beside me.
“That was the Ozark Howler,” Lo tells him. “The harbinger of death.” He looks at me. “Someone is going to die tonight.”
“We gotta get home,” I say. “We have to get out of these woods.”
We turn around and start following Lucifer’s Creek again, moving as fast as we possibly can. The slope gets steeper. We’re working our way downhill, trying not to fall as we scramble down a rocky path.
We slip and slide and skid our way to the bottom, until suddenly we’re standing at the mouth of a cave. The entrance is almost hidden by undergrowth. If you weren’t specifically looking for it, you’d probably hike right by it and never know it was there.
Lo and Xan and I are frozen, peering into the darkness of that yawning mouth in the mountain. If we go in there, there’s no telling what’s waiting for us.
I realize that I’m hearing the sound of water from somewhere. I shine the light around until I find the spot where it’s trickling out of the rocks. The spring water splashes into a little pool, then trickles into a rocky stream bed barely as wide across as my foot. From there it heads on down the mountain.
“Smell that?” Lo asks me, and I nod. Sulfur burns my nose and stings my eyes. “That’s the headspring for Lucifer’s Creek. This is where it starts.”