Chapter 38
TWO DAYS LEFT
A few hours later, we drove out to the place the witch had told us about, where the road intersected with another in a cross. She said no one took this route anymore, since they built the highway to the east.
I stared out the window at the dense forest, and I imagined somewhere, some time, Belle was among these very trees, waiting for the devil to come and strike a new deal.
I imagined each of us putting a palm up to the time barrier between us, unable to touch but comforted knowing the other was there, gripped by the same fear.
We pulled to a stop on the shoulder beneath the dense canopy. The clock on the dash said 11:00. One hour until midnight. We sat with the windows rolled up and the air dying in the car.
“What are you going to do if he comes?” Hess asked.
I’d been wondering the same thing. First, I would plead for mercy.
But if that didn’t work, what did I have to give?
What could I trade for my life? I had not inherited the ability to sing—only the curse attached to it.
Perhaps that was something to discuss. If I had not been given the talent, then why should I suffer the punishment?
That was the essence of the deal, and he had not held up his end of the bargain.
“I’m still working it out,” I answered.
Hess turned her head and gazed out the window.
“Being here is so…” She trailed off. “I feel like I understand Lou better now, experiencing it. I used to get kind of annoyed when she teased me for being a rich city girl, as if she was so different—sometimes it felt like she oversold her bit about being a ‘hillbilly.’ ” I turned toward her, and she put up her hands.
“Her word, not mine.” She looked back out the window.
“But we really did come from completely different worlds.”
I knew what she meant—it had been one thing to immerse myself in the research of these mountains and the curse, but it was an entirely different experience to be here, at the source.
Even my time hiking the AT hadn’t prepared me for it.
I thought back to Clayton’s memory of Craw Valley as a strange town that many in the area avoided.
There was certainly something about the place that made my mind tingle—not exactly in a bad way, but not in a good way, either.
“I keep thinking about what Enoch said,” Hess continued, “about Lou’s mother and her grandmother taking their own lives.” She stopped, weighing whether she wanted to continue. “I always wondered if maybe Lou had done that, too.”
I looked over at Hess, surprised by her honesty. “You don’t think she was high when the plane went down?”
She furrowed her brow and kept looking out the window.
“Well, it could have been both. There’s a fine line there.
But the truth is, I thought a lot of things when she first died.
I wondered if it was drugs, or if she did it on purpose, or if it was truly an accident.
In my wildest moments, I wondered if someone had tampered with her plane and it had been some sort of elaborate murder.
” Her eyes unfocused, lost to another time.
“But eventually, I had to admit to myself that I didn’t know.
And the not knowing… that was more painful than any explanation could have been.
” She pressed her lips together. “So I guess that’s my real answer. I still have no idea.”
There was something comforting in her honesty. Even if Hess could never understand what I was going through, I could meet her in this space of unknowing.
Her phone suddenly vibrated in the cupholder. “It’s Tima. She’s probably just checking on us.” She accepted the call, and I opened the door and stepped out.
Insects buzzed in the sweltering evening, and electricity hummed in the air, though I couldn’t see any power lines among the treetops. I wandered around the dark undergrowth, feeling vibrations coming up from the ground as well. Where it felt the strongest, I lay down in the grass.
I stared up at the starlit sky through a gap in the trees, and I felt my body shrink under its expanse. I held my hands up and saw that they were a few sizes smaller than normal, the fingers glowing childlike in the dark.
I glanced over at the black car gleaming like new in the moonlight. Where Hess once sat, the window was now empty.
The thick foliage gradually receded from the road, taming itself, reversing its encroachment.
I fished in my pocket for my phone, but I found I was now wearing a dress, and my only way of telling time was a thin gold wristwatch I had never seen before.
Something was happening. Something new. My body wasn’t evaporating this time, so much as changing, the sensations familiar but with a tinge of weirdness, like being in a stranger’s body. I knew what it was to be in a body, but not in this body…
The tiny clock face read one minute to midnight.
Soon, it would be time.
She imagined her great-great-grandmother lying in the same dirt and looking up at the sky, wishing with all her being for beauty that she didn’t have to pay for, for something no one could take away from her. Oh, to make music with her own body. She couldn’t imagine anything more divine.
Could she blame her for making such a deal?
She watched the minute hand move in a circle around the mother-of-pearl face, and she demanded he talk to her.
She wanted to make a new deal. He owed her at least that. After all these years. After all the deaths, and all the lonely children left without anyone to love them.
Still, he did not answer. After tormenting her for months, his voice in her ear singing those terrible songs and showing up at the cabin to threaten her child, only now, when she really needed him, he refused to speak.
Midnight came, and then went.
She screamed for him, but she received no answer. Only the sound of buzzards beating their wings in the treetops and the caw of crows gliding over the empty road.
This was only a game to him.
She stood up and walked into the woods toward Papa’s old church.
He’d died a decade prior, along with her grandmother, her aunt, and her bastard uncle.
The rest were still here somewhere, tucked away in the hills.
She wondered if they’d recognize her, but she was kidding herself; she knew they would.
Now, more than ever, she could feel herself returning to what she once was—a lonely demon child roaming the woods, listening to songs no one else could hear.
As she walked among the trees in the dark, she thought of the night she left Craw Valley for good. Her uncle had come home drunk from the logging camp, stripped down to his stained white underwear, and cornered her in the kitchen with his large pale body glowing beneath the full moon.
She’d tried to dodge him like she usually did, but that night he was quick, and he grabbed her by the shoulders and thrust her over the counter.
She heard him fumbling with his buckle, and she reached for the knife in the butcher block and plunged it into his side.
He reeled back and fell to the ground, and she sat on his chest. She pulled the knife from his fleshy belly, and blood sprayed her face and clothes.
She held the knife above him, the blade sparkling in the moonlight, and watched the black holes in his eyes expand.
Then she cut a slash in each cheek, so that even when she was gone, she’d never be forgotten.
Up ahead in the trees, a faint light appeared, and she saw it was the cave, lit up at the mouth, music pulsing from within.
She walked toward it, daring herself to keep going.
Then she entered, and a wall of life engulfed her.
The cavernous hollow was filled with people and flickering candles.
The air was humid with damp and sweat. A woman clanged away on the warped piano as if possessed, and the choir shrieked.
The preacher, a young man with unforgiving blue eyes in a white robe, was calling for all those in the grip of the devil to come forth. One by one, people from the crowd wandered up to the pulpit as if in a daze, and she wandered up with them.
She stood before the preacher, and he brought his hand up and passed it over her face.
He told her he could sense him. The devil. He was in her, all right.
It felt so good to be validated. To be in the presence of a believer.
The preacher told her to kneel in front of him, and she obeyed. She bowed her head, and he shouted for the sinners to think of all that they had done, the rot inside of them that the devil feasted on.
Every Sunday when she was a little girl, they forced her to go to the front and have the devil cast out from her body. She never felt a thing.
This time, though, she felt something. She thought of everyone she’d hurt: Hess, Rhea, Tima, Phoebe, Martha, Clayton, Tate, even her own mama.
Everyone she’d ever loved, she’d lied to and betrayed.
What had she done with her life other than follow her silly dream of becoming a star? She was so ashamed.
Maybe she deserved it. The curse.
But maybe there was a path to redemption.
Maybe this man could cast her evil out.
She felt hands placed all over her body, and then the preacher started to bark again, this time addressing the devil directly.
He said, “Out, demon! Out, devil! By the power of the Almighty and the Everlasting Love of his Son, I order you to leave this woman. This church. This holler. Slither back to the wet hole you come out of!”
She felt something wriggling in her belly, moving up through her chest, and then up her throat, nearly choking her. She watched a snake slowly exit through her mouth, its silken scales rubbing against her lips.
Afraid to move, she watched its corn-colored body slide across the dirt floor to the preacher in front of her, moving up his shoe and disappearing beneath his white pant leg.
She tried to warn him, but no sound came from her mouth. When she looked into his blue eyes, she no longer saw his indifferent cruelty.