Unbury Carol(30)

What face, Moxie thought, could such a voice belong to?

“I’ve known young, sir,” the hidden man said. “I’ve known so young that they do not yet exist.”

Moxie looked to the man’s fat fingers upon the chair’s armrests. The towels across his face appeared to tighten, and features emerged beneath them. The cheekbones rose, tenting the fabric as it valleyed smoothly into wide lips. And where there should be eyes, two bumps trained on Moxie’s own.

In the shadow by the neck of the slip, Moxie saw a worm’s-skin throat.

Moxie removed his gun from its holster.

“Why, I’ve known so young it’s tragic. I’ve known young enough to be just a kernel…a guilt-addled thing floating at the surface of an old man’s watery mind.”

The throat moved, sluglike, and Moxie believed, momentarily, that a great asp writhed beneath the towels.

And the cloth grew tighter to the suggestion of a face.

“If it’s young you’re looking for,” the hidden man said, “I suggest the womb. It’s the furthest young can be from old and you can still see it. Swimming in there…feeding off the blood of the mother. Dark hair did you say? Yes, I may have seen her, strung up as she was in a tree…her young blood dripping on the old earth…pooling like a mirror there…reflecting the bottom of her feet…the length of her legs…and up her filthy loose skirt.”

Moxie saw the fingers were thin and gray now, rice paper, flaking with the wind of Moxie’s own question.

“Who are you?”

The towel was still, but the voice continued.

“I’m a young girl hanging from a tree. I’m a goat starved with no master to feed it. My ribs poke the flesh of my flank. I’m the hollow of the trunk where the big spiders live and lay their eggs. I’m a thing old enough to know that old was once young and that because young becomes old there is no love of life, only a fear of decay. There is no favorite bow, nothing to keep it all from coming unwrapped. There are only bright flashes that hide the shape of me curled in the corner…reaching. I am a young girl’s reflection in her own blood. I am one step beyond decay, sir. I am Rot.”

Moxie spun from the figure. From the memory, too. But the thunder of his boots on the barbershop floorboards was interrupted by the thunder of the voice.

“Go home, James Moxie. You passed on your chance to help her.”

Moxie whirled back and rushed the shape beneath the slip. He was upon it before the barbers could stop him.

“WHO ARE YOU?”

Moxie tore the towels aside. A fat man with eyes bloodshot from sleep sat up in the seat, raging.

“What in God’s name are you doing, man?”

A new voice. A different man. The other was gone.

Rot. Moxie recalled a blurred evening in Portsoothe. Advice to leave the woman he loved.

As the fat man continued to shout, as the barbers rushed to pull Moxie aside, the possibility that the thing, Rot, had been here, scared Moxie deep. Was he losing his mind? Only a few hours upon the Trail…was he losing his mind?

The details of Portsoothe were filled in: a man whose face he could barely see; whose mouth seemed not to move as he spoke; whose dark expression seemed painted with greasepaint for the stage.

Moxie pulled himself from the hands of the barbers and stumbled toward the door.

Through the glass he saw Molly again.

But Molly as she was now, dead twelve years.

“Molly!” Moxie yelled.

The girl’s eyes, once green, were now a watery white. Her dark hair now flowed with ash.

Moxie exploded out the door, reaching for Molly on the boardwalk, but his hands found nothing solid, no girl, dead or alive.

As the door swung shut behind him, he heard the fat man carrying on.

“You should be ashamed of such behavior! I’ve never heard of such a thing! Accosting a man as he gets a shave! You ought to be put away! I was attacked! That man attacked me, did he not? It’s an outrage! Accosting a man as he gets a shave!”

Moxie looked up and down the boardwalk, searching for the corpse of Molly. It struck him, insanely, that he’d take Molly as he’d seen her now, rotting, if it meant she’d repeat the past, the part she’d played in his life.

You gotta meet my friend Carol…

If it meant she would deliver him to Carol.

Seeing no girl, Moxie looked to the people of Baker for a false face, one so unnatural as to be greasepaint upon the idiot smoothness of a mannequin.

But no Rot.

No Molly.

Moxie hurried back to the mare, to the Trail, to a funeral he needed to end before it began. To the woman he needed to save from being buried alive, no matter how many memories tried to stop him.

Deep within, this idea comforted him. Despite the horrors he’d seen, the dark feelings he felt. For he had no doubt the memories were trying to stop him. Yet what need would there be to stop Moxie, if Carol were already dead?

“Ride!” Moxie called to the mare.

And the mare rode.





She could hear him pacing before she heard him speak. Dress shoes on the gravel storm room floor. Did he have a candle lit? That had always been the worst of it for her, the lack of light. Not in Howltown—Carol didn’t expect any in there—but in the cellar itself. Just because she couldn’t see didn’t mean she didn’t know the darkness of the unlit cellar. Black within black. As if the darkness below the house were pressurizing that of the coma, stuffing Carol deeper down. At first, she thought Dwight’s scuffling was rats. Farrah claimed to have seen one as big as a badger and it was difficult, now, to write that off as the hysterics of a young woman. Who knew what was down here when the lights were off, when the air was still, when no human posed a threat to their dwelling? But through the dark winds of her perpetual fall, Carol was able to determine they were shoes after all, for no animal moved with the neurotic regularity that this sound betrayed. A pendulum, it seemed, swinging beside her inert body on the slab.