Unbury Carol(98)

He told her not to worry, he could feel her heart beating. She was alive, he told her, alive.

Soon he could see the town through the trees. The rooftops and chimneys were welcome sights. People lived there. Carol lived, too. He walked faster, the mare a memory, left behind, untethered in the woods.

When he exited the forest he felt like he’d broken through it, an unseen barrier, as if he and Carol had taken major steps toward something better, toward reconciliation, toward forgiveness.

Stumbling upon a dirt road, homes on either side of him, Moxie’s boots and breathing were the only sounds. Faces appeared in the windows but nobody stepped outside to help him. He was, of course, just another dangerous man from the Trail, a man certainly to be avoided, with his ashen face, his shining eyes, and the way he walked like he was carrying something, or thought he was carrying something, though his arms were clearly empty.

Ahead, Moxie saw Silas Hite in the open door of what looked like a stable. It wasn’t Silas as he looked behind bars in Albert’s Port, not how he looked when Moxie once woke him, carrying Carol, years ago, but as he looked now, after so many years of rotting.

“Silas!” Moxie called. “She just fell! I need to get her to a doctor!”

The sun pooled dull in the indentations in Silas’s face. His teeth looked made of corn.

“Silas?”

White hair clung to Silas’s misshapen head, and when he spoke, his voice was not sweet like Molly’s.

“I know a doctor, James…an excellent man of medicine…”

The thin texture of Silas’s hair sparked detailed memories for Moxie…of Jefferson’s home…of the jail cell in Albert’s Port.

Of Abberstown.

But these memories were not connected to anything solid in his mind. Only pictures with no frames.

“Where is he, Silas?”

Silas smiled, and when his lips parted Moxie took a step back. Something foul escaped his throat. Something not all laugh and not all language, either.

He pointed farther up the road. Toward town.

“A doctor you say?” Moxie asked. “Will he be there?”

Silas nodded. The Adam’s apple sank lower, too low, in his throat.

“Do you like how she walks?” Silas suddenly asked.

Moxie, already walking toward Main Street, responded without looking back at him.

“She’s fallen, Silas. Thank you for—”

“Does she smell like the lamb’s wool to ya?”

Moxie could smell it again. The compost of rot from Silas’s body. As if Silas slept in the morgue.

The smell of Molly.

The smell of Silas.

And now…something else…

Moxie looked down at Carol and shook his head no.

“You are alive,” he said…



* * *



—

…By the continued light in Howltown, a light that began with a flickering candle in the storm room of her home, a light no doubt lit by a monster that wanted her to see in full the events of her premature death, Carol saw a horribly distorted version of Robert Manders remove a mirror from his pocket and place it under her nose. The mirror, too, was distorted, and the woman she saw reflected in it was screaming, Help, I am not dead, I AM NOT DEAD!

And beyond her own pleading face, reflected, too, she saw the very monster floating, wheezing, eyes bright in a face exhausted with change. And as Manders checked Carol for unlikely, improbable life, the monster spoke.

It’s too late, Carol. You may wake yet, but you will wake in a box.

Then, as Manders removed the mirror, she saw the terrible thing float away, as if concerned with something else, here, in Harrows.

Then Manders closed the lid of her casket. And to Carol it looked like a living wall of stone falling dead, forever, upon her…



* * *



—

…When he reached Main Street the sky was bright with streaks of orange, reminding Moxie that it was, despite the sense of it being one unbroken nightmare, a new day. And yet the few early risers populating the dirt road looked upon him as they might their own death. His face and hands were covered in soot from the oil fire, and he wore the blood of Smoke across the chest of his red shirt. Carol’s body lay malleable as clothing in his arms. His hat was partly burned, and one onlooker, a cook, told his boss there was a maniac in the street who smelled something like decay. Moxie’s eyes and teeth flashed through the dirt and ash, and had Sheriff Opal been on the street instead of at the Manders Funeral Home, he would have stopped the outlaw on principle alone.

He found the doctor immediately.

In an empty storefront window with no sign declaring its purpose, Moxie saw the doctor who had first seen Carol some two decades past. He, too, looked to have been yanked from the grave. His muted-blue suit was marred with dirt and stains from what looked and smelled like garbage. His thin brown hair appeared glued to his shriveled head.

String, Moxie thought. Like Silas’s hair. The stringy coif of the dead.

The doctor held open the door for Moxie to enter.

“Doctor,” Moxie said, confused by the memories (hadn’t he seen this man by the fire?), “she’s fallen. Will you look at her?”

The doctor gestured for Moxie to bring her to a cold steel table. His fingertips were black.

Moxie set her down gently.