Unbury Carol(60)

Dwight had carried her to the coach. Carol heard every grunt, every heavy step, every creak on the way.

But more important, she saw it.

The light had not been put out.

As Dwight took her from the slab, Carol wasn’t sure which she feared more: losing the light, or it somehow coming with her. Dwight was taking her somewhere new.

Where?

The graveyard?

Was this it? Her burial?

She did not cry for help. Instead, she did something she had never done.

Carol sat up in Howltown.

Whether or not this action was replicable, possible, in the real world, Carol did not yet know. But the act of rising, even half rising, was a triumph.

Oh, how she wanted to tell John Bowie! Oh, how she wanted Hattie to know!

Mom! Mom! I sat up! By no accident or lucky mistake, I sat up!

And yet…the monster had made a mistake. The monster had rolled her over, turning her wholly toward the direction from which she’d fallen. And for the first time ever inside the coma, Carol held out hope that she might have some control in the coma.

Sitting up proved as much.

It happened as the image of the storm room was strangely replaced with the image of the cellar at large, as if Carol were looking through a photo album, a book of pictures too fine for even the most affluent Harrowsers. Yes, in the light that still shone inside the coma (the light the monster no doubt left for her) the storm room became the cellar, then the cellar the cellar stairs. From there Carol saw still images of the kitchen, a hall, the dining room, the parlor, the foyer, the front door. All flipped, it seemed, by unseen hands. She did not see Dwight, who carried her, and so the moments played out as if Carol were a ghost, floating through the very house she owned.

Dwight’s voice came from far away, deep within the clacking of his shoes upon the kitchen floor, steps like falling rocks in Howltown.

“Hide your lady, he said! Hide her I am!”

By the time he’d carried her out the front door, he was breathing hard. Carol saw a still image of the coach in the drive. Then a similar image but with the coach door open. Then she was inside it. Sitting up. On the floor. And yet not sitting up, too.

The Carol whom Dwight hid lay as deathlike upon her back as she had in the storm room.

But while the sense of unfathomable progress (Sitting up! In Howltown!) waged war with the horrors of betrayal and electrified nerves, Carol’s senses of place and time were confused even more so by the image she saw inside the coach.

The image of herself, still on her back.

She saw her own eyes closed, her hair splayed across her forehead. The same yellow dress and brown boots she’d worn while walking with Farrah in the garden. Carol stared long at her own image as Dwight snapped the reins and the horse hooves erupted like a stone avalanche in Howltown.

A mirror, she thought.

Dwight had placed a mirror inside the coach with her. He’d set it on the floor, facing her, as if he’d wanted her to see that, despite her incredible achievement, she was actually no better off than she was before the monster made his mistake in the storm room.

But Dwight couldn’t have known about that. And the mirror frightened her, not only because of what it showed her, but because it meant Dwight had plans. And what might they be?

“Hide your lady!” Dwight called. And his voice was the muddy crest of a freshly dug grave. “And hide her I am!”

Carol looked to her sleeping form in the mirror. She recognized it as a mirror John Bowie had brought to the house one evening, what he studiously described as the kind of mirror you set up in the middle of the room. It reflects on both sides. That way you can see yourself, no matter where you are. And if you were to fall in its presence…who knows…maybe watching yourself fall might help.

Dwight didn’t know John had gotten it for her. Nor would he have cared. Yet despite the helpful gift John had presented it as, Dwight was now using it for some means Carol could not guess at. And the anger she felt at her husband, for using anything John Bowie had given her at all, gave her a deeper strength. One she badly needed.

She looked to her hands in the glass. She concentrated on her fingers.

The Carol who was sitting up watched the Carol inert on the floor of the coach.

And as she tried to move her fingers, as Dwight directed the horses toward the unknown, Carol’s unknown, she succeeded in lifting her fingers, her physical fingers, slightly, from the coach floor, then, momentarily defeated, let them fall limp again.

Then she heard the crazed sound of many hoarse voices, many throats erupting into laughter, like the many faces that appeared and then vanished in the impossible candlelight of the storm room.

Light or no light, Carol was still in Howltown. And no glimpse of herself in the real world was going to get her out.





Edward Bunny was playing cards in a saloon in Portsoothe when the man named Hickory came through the swivel doors. Edward knew his face well: Hickory was an outlaw-liaison, a man with news, and when he showed up it meant he had something to tell you.

Edward Bunny himself was a Trail-watcher. Triggermen were hired every day. Outlaws ran rampant. Bunny kept track of them all. To some men, it was very important to know where the killers on the Trail were at any given point in time. None of the guns had permanent homes. Hardly any of them went by real names. Bunny’s job was to track them, report where they were, hire them out, then report on the status of their job.