Malachi edged the door open with his backside, balancing a tray in front of him, and came into the storage-room-turned-hospital-room where Rusty lay — still, so very still. On the tray was a cup of coffee, along with packets of powdered creamer and sugar, and a plate with a pale yellow substance that could have been scrambled eggs or toe fungus, a single slice of burned toast — or maybe butter on a roof shingle — and a pink, rectangular something.

“What is that?”

“You’re welcome. And yes, I do know how to operate a toaster. I burned it on purpose because I found the piece of bread in the back of the breadbox with something suspiciously penicillin-like growing on it. But I killed it.”

“No, I mean that. The pink thingy.”

“What does it look like? It’s SPAM.”

Sam didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, and she was perilously close to doing both almost all the time now. Her look said, you’re joking.

“Serious as a heart attack. I was afraid you’d be a SPAM snob so I’ve been composing a soliloquy in its defense — Ode to a Small Ham Loaf.”

She shook her head and started to speak but he held up his hand to forestall any argument. “I am here to testify that SPAM won’t kill you. If it can’t kill a battalion of Marines, you’ll survive it.” Then he shrugged his shoulders. “It was all I could find in E.J.’s cupboard — unless you count a box of stale pretzels and a jar of bean dip. Eat all the eggs you want, though, they’re a renewable resource.”

“If you have a chicken.”

“Yeah, well, there is that.” He grew serious then. “You have to eat, Sam. You can’t keep going if you don’t eat. And we need you.” He landed a sucker punch then, and they both knew the manipulation for what it was. Gesturing with his chin at the still boy on the bed. “He needs you.”

Malachi set the tray down on the bedside table. “So shut your mouth and eat. Okay, open your mouth and eat.”

He stood over her menacingly, glowering at the pieces of fried meat. “Don’t make me get ugly.” He brightened. “I can get catsup, too, if that’ll make it go down any smoother.

She dutifully reached out and picked up one of the pieces of SPAM with her fingers, and took a small bite.

“More.”

Another bite, bigger.

“All three pieces.”

“But I—”

“It’s this or bean dip.”

She took another bite and he sat down on the edge of Rusty’s bed, careful not to disturb the boy. Malachi here, with her and Rusty. If she let herself go there …

“Did you get any sleep last night?”

She nodded. And she had. A little. Thanks to Malachi’s little sojourn into the Ridge to have a talk with Roger Stovall at Stovall’s Used Furniture Store. Roger was about as unpleasant a human being as Sam had ever met and somehow Malachi had talked the man into donating a piece of furniture to the clinic. Malachi said he would have “borrowed” one from Martha Whittiker’s house, where he’d gotten Rusty’s bed, but Martha didn’t have one — and besides, he didn’t like wandering around people’s houses taking their furniture without permission. He’d tried to buy it, but Roger didn’t want Malachi’s money and plastic was no good. So Malachi’d then begun serious negotiations about donation.

Sam hadn’t asked how he’d pulled it off. Hadn’t even known he was going to talk to Roger until he came back to the Middle of Nowhere with — of all things — a recliner loaded up in the back of E.J.’s van. He got Pete and Charlie to help him — his almost-dislocated shoulder really needed to be in a sling, but he’d refused. The three of them then hauled the chair in through the waiting room — past the unexplained chalkboard with the picture of the autopsy of a spider, at least that’s what it looked like to Sam, down the hallway and through the door of the storage room that’d been converted into a hospital room for Rusty.

Sam had been totally flabbergasted when he’d backed into the room, carting the platform end of the chair. Oh, she got it, she understood. Malachi’d gone on a chair safari to take his mind off … things. The body of Rev. Duncan Norman, floating somewhere in the Rolling Fork River. And his family. His sister, shot dead. His mother … well, just his mother. Sam suspected that doing something “good” might have been Malachi’s go-to coping mechanism his whole life.

“What in the world …?”

“Charlie and I knew we’d never be able to get you to go to bed, but … if I have to, I can duct tape you to this chair. Right here beside Rusty’s bed. You can lean it back, maybe doze a little.”

She’d expressed her surprise and delight with grateful babble.

Malachi’s only comment had been: “Roger Stovall is meaner than a serial killer with a sinus infection and a boil on his butt,” and he refused to provide details about the transaction. Sam had been unprepared for the sudden tears that leapt into her eyes and flowed in rivulets down her cheeks.

Sam had believed then that the surprises of the night were over.

Not.

Half an hour after Malachi’d brought the chair, the old man had shown up. An old man nobody knew. Which, of course, was impossible.

Footsteps in the hallway. Sam loathes that sound because it always signals a crisis.

“We got an incoming,” Pete says, standing in the open doorway of Rusty’s room.

“An incoming? Who …?”

“That’s the thing, Sam. Nobody knows who he is.”

Among the handful of people at the clinic, there wasn’t anybody in the county they wouldn’t recognize.

Sam casts a look at Rusty, and Pete says, “You go on now. I’ll wait right here.” He tried to smile but phony smiles just weren’t as easy to pull off these days as they’d once been. “Got this nice recliner here. Only thing I need’s a football game on television.”

Sam rushes out into the parking lot to find Raylynn, Doreen Perkins — who’d come to bring her father some supper during his shift with E.J. — Charlie, Merrie and Malachi standing in a little group around a man seated on the bus stop bench.

A stranger.

“Who …?” That’s all Sam is able to say.

“You mean, you don’t know him, either?” Charlie says. “I thought it was just me, being gone for so long.”

“I’ve never met this man.” Sam shoots a look at Malachi and Doreen. Both shrug and shake their heads.

“You sure he rode the Jabberwock?” Sam asks, knowing what the answer must be. If he hadn’t, how had he come to be sitting in the bus shelter in the Middle of Nowhere? Except he isn’t like the other “incomings.”

He isn’t desperately sick like Sam, Charlie, Malachi and most of the other Jabberwock riders had been. He isn’t blind, like Hayley Norman, or about to choke to death like Fish. He is just … what?

Well, the first stab at a diagnosis is easy to come by. He appears to be utterly insane.


Charlie and Merrie had been staying at Sam’s house in the Ridge because it was closer to the Middle of Nowhere than going back to her mother’s house at the foot of Little Bear Mountain. Oh, alright, it wasn’t closer. It was farther. But the roads were better. Actually, that wasn’t even true either. Charlie had taken to driving into Persimmon Ridge from the Middle of Nowhere down Danville Road to Elkhorn, then Chimney Rock Pike to Bat Cave — and that route definitely was neither shorter nor smoother. No, proximity didn’t have anything to do with it. Charlie and Merrie’d gone to Sam’s house on Sunday night after Viola Tackett’d threatened to kill Charlie. And they’d just … stayed. Oh, it wasn’t like Charlie was hiding out from Viola at Sam’s. That’d be the first place the old woman would look for her. And hiding was futile, anyway. There was nowhere in Nowhere County to run from Viola Tackett.

The truth still in the husk was that Charlie flat out didn’t like being alone at her mother’s house anymore. Part of the reason was the omnipresence of the kiln in the backyard. She’d have hauled the thing out of there and thrown it off a cliff if she could have, had settled for having Lester Peetree remove the door. But it was there, always there, and every time she looked out into her backyard the stone building glared back at her, the gaping doorway like an open maw. An always, always reminder of the worst day of Charlie McClintock’s life, the day she thought Merrie was dead, that crazy Abby Clayton had suffocated the precious little girl in that building.

Another part of the reason was the ever-spooky blackboard in her kitchen where Stuart had written “Where are you?” and the Jabberwock had told her “I want to play with you.” And now the even-spookier blackboard wasn’t even there anymore. Who had moved it to the clinic waiting room? And why? She’d been rolling that over and over in her head ever since Merrie’d shown it to her last night. Well, when she’d had time and energy to think about it. Time and energy were in extremely short supply right now in Charlie McClintock’s life.

As she put away the last of a meager breakfast’s dishes in Sam’s cabinet, she acknowledged that the real reason she’d been staying at Sam’s house was that she had bonded to Sam. They were closer now than they’d ever been as children, and they’d been inseparable then, playing with their baby dolls in the shade of the elementary school building. The relationship had been forged by the Jabberwock nightmare, and it was tempered steel now. Charlie needed that. She suspected Sam did, too. Particularly now, with Rusty …

Rusty.

A crazy woman had shot him, shot the poor kid with a shotgun.

How could the world get this crazy so fast? How could …?

Of course, the answer to all questions was the same. Jabberwock. The monster held the keys to every lock. She and Sam and Malachi, E.J., Thelma Jackson … all of them together or any one of them separately had to figure out the monster or Rusty Sheridan could lie in that makeshift hospital room and die. As E.J. would die.

As they all would die.

“I’ve decided, Mommy,” Merrie announced as she came bouncing into Sam’s kitchen, where Charlie had poured herself a final cup of coffee before returning to the Middle of Nowhere. She only came home … came here, now, so Merrie could sleep in a bed, could have some semblance of normal in her life. Not that the kid cared. She was indisputably the most resilient of all of them — bubbly and cheerful in the face of horror too big for her to comprehend. She was a breath of fresh air … and a reminder of what was at stake if they didn’t figure this out.

“Decided what, sweet pea?” Then she saw the outfit the little girl had selected to wear. A bright pink tee-shirt with figures of unicorns on it … over a pair of bright red plaid shorts. Charlie sighed. After all, Merrie didn’t have a particularly stellar wardrobe to choose from. Just what Charlie’d snatched from the Dollar General Store and the little bit Charlie’d packed for her when they left Chicago.

Chicago.

Stuart.

Charlie wondered how long he’d stayed in Hawaii. He and “Mrs. McClintock” had been playing bump and tickle in a motel there when Charlie had called before J-Day. He was supposed to be in Portland working, had said it was a big deal. Yeah, it was a big deal, alright.

But he was here now, though. Wherever here was. He’d written a desperate Where Are You message on the blackboard — and Pete had confirmed a stick-pin message on his county map. Stuart had come looking for her and Merrie. And when that had sunk in, oozing into the pores of her being like butter into hot cornbread, she discovered she couldn’t fit both images of the man in her head at the same time. There simply wasn’t room, not now. Not now. She couldn’t hold onto two different realities.

Stuart — her best friend, her husband, her lover and Merrie’s father.

And Stuart lying on the beach with … somebody. Some other woman.

The two were mutually exclusive and if she tried to embrace both images at once, it would rip her apart at her core. So she locked the unthinkable in a solid stone box, set it on a mental shelf in an empty room in her mind, then walked away and left it there, slammed the door behind her. Oh, sure, the corrosive evil inside that box would eat through the stone and the metal and the door eventually. She knew that. One day, the reeking corruption would begin to eat away at the rest of her mind. She’d deal with that when the time came. If she lived that long, she’d deal with that part. Right now, the only Stuart whose existence she acknowledged was the man who had come to Kentucky looking for his wife and daughter. And found … yeah, what? What was there on the other side of the Jabberwock?

“… one that bited me and the one wiff white paws. Pleeeeease, Mommy.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

Merrie looked at her with a strangely adult expression on her face.

“You wasn’t listenin’, was you Mommy. You never listen to me anymore.” And she unexpectedly burst into tears.

Charlie dropped to her knees and gathered the crying child into her arms, awash in guilt and sorrow.

“I’m sorry, baby, Mommy’s sorry. I never, ever intended to ignore you. I love you, precious. Please forgive Mommy. Please.”

The little girl pulled back out of her embrace, tears streaming down her face and a smile on her lips.

“I lube you, too, Mommy. So, can I?”

“Can you what?”

“Can I have both puppies? The one that bited me and the one wiff socks. Pleeeease.”

Charlie deftly sidestepped the question by telling the little girl she would need to see and inspect both the puppies in question before she could render a decision, then handed Merrie the bag of clean clothes she’d selected for Sam — who’d been sleeping in the clothes she was wearing — and told her to take it out to the car.

Charlie’s back was turned when Merrie opened the front door and cried, “Toby! You comed to play wiff me!”

She turned around slowly and saw Sarah Throckmorton standing with Toby beside the open door or her ancient Chevrolet parked behind Charlie’s mother Honda Legend in Sam’s driveway.

The look on Sarah’s face told Charlie something was very, very wrong.

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