The Dragon Book (73 page)

“Hunting monsters,” the old man said.

As we scrambled in a straggly line toward the two-lane on the other side of the mountain, the old man in the lead was silent, but I harkened at the others whispering among themselves.

“Who they got this time?”

“I hear they got Polly, and Bert, the youngest Lunsford boy, and the Mainer twins.”

“I say that you’re a fool. Polly was on the porch swing when I went by there. It’s Lula, Polly’s sister, what got carried off.”

“Carried off by what?” I asked.

“The sheriff, of course. And his deputies, damn their eyes.”

“But why? Are they the monsters Mr. Ash meant?”

“Shut up,” said Silas, cuffing my ear. “You ask more questions than a girl.”

“All I know is, they won’t take no more of our neighbor younguns to the operating room, not if I got a say in it.”

“Hush, all of you,” said the old man. We were headed down again. His lanternlight picked up the cat’s-eyes of the reflectors along the curve of the two-lane below. We all fell silent, but between what I had heard and what I had felt through Silas’s grip on my arm, I had plenty of information to chew on, none of it pleasant.

For months, all over the county, young boys and girls from the families on the slopes and in the hollers had turned up missing, by day and by night, one or two or a half dozen at a time, hoes or fishing poles or berry baskets left where they dropped. Boys and girls of courting age were warned to stick close or stay in groups, but they paid about as much attention as courting boys and girls in all places and times, so the disappearances continued. Then the first ones came home. Weeks after the parents had gone from panic to grief, they would hear the dogs barking and come out on the porch to see, wonder of wonders, Vassar or Hazel walking up the lane, dazed and dreamy-like, in the clothes they went off in, always with the same story to tell: They had been snatched off the mountain by Sheriff Stiles or his deputies. The lawmen said they had a court order. They were driven alone or in carloads or truckloads to the state hospital—usually Staunton, sometimes Lynchburg, though a few had been taken as far as Marion, Petersburg, Williamsburg. There they were poked and prodded but treated right well, fed real good and given haircuts, so they said, and by the way, the girls all added, the doctor said my appendix had to come out, so that’s what this scar is, see? The doctor said soon it’ll be only a pale line across my belly, how about that? The boys had scars, too, ones less visible and more embarrassing, but soon enough they realized the equipment still worked just fine, and so some were inclined to shrug off their brief adventure, no stranger than some other things that you heard tell of in the hills, like red-eyed dogs that cross your path at night and crows that speak in the voices of men and farmers who drop from sight in the middle of a field into the Gone Forever. But the more young men and women got rounded up for the hospital, the madder the mountain folks got, and the better able to figure that appendicitis was not what the operations were meant to prevent. Then Ash Harrell’s daughter had not come back at all, so now Ash Harrell and his neighbors would make some law of their own.

“Here they come,” the old man said.

Across the cut, a pair of headlights swept around the last curve before ours. At nighttime in the deep mountains, oncoming cars give plenty of warning if you keep watching the next curve across the way. It sounded like a truck, and its brakes squealed as it hugged the curve. Someone was in a hurry to get down the mountain, now that it was dark.

Silas kept hold of my arm. His thoughts were all confused now, mostly from fear I judged, but his interest in the Harrell girl was not brotherly, and his favorite pie was peach.

Just below, the old man knelt on an outcrop and raised his rifle, while the three others kept going, slid down the rocks onto the gravel shoulder and walked into the middle of the road, swinging their lanterns back and forth like the Brown Mountain spook lights.

The engine got louder.

Just as the sheriff’s truck rounded the curve, I dropped the hex that hid my true self. Within Silas’s grip, my upper arm changed from a young man’s to a young woman’s. He looked at me—now a foot shorter and a girl besides—then let go and jumped back with a gasp.

I turned and ran—not down into the road, but along the hillside in the same direction as the truck, which now blared its horn and veered around the men trying and failing to flag it down.

As I ran along the trackless hillside, I said to myself one of Mr. Hohman’s charms for surefootedness:

Jesus-magic had never been my long suit, but what could it hurt?

Below and just behind me, the truck roared onto the far shoulder and nearly skeeted off the edge of the cliff, but the driver fought it back onto the asphalt past the highwaymen and sped up again, into the right-hand lane and catching up to me. Just as rifles fired behind me and the right rear tire blew, the truck passed directly below, and I took a deep breath and ran off the ledge,
Wham!
onto the roof.

“Hold!” I cried, and just in case
that
spell didn’t take, I seized the luggage rail tight in both hands as the truck squealed into the next curve, rear tire flapping. My body swung sideways, and my feet kicked air off the edge of the roof, but I held on, and before us now was a long, straight downslope. The driver had done a fine job so far to avoid a wreck, but now what? That tire was plumb gone, and the truck began to fishtail. The brakes smelled like a miner’s lamp. Did I know any arts that could stop an out-of-control truck? All I could think of was one to stop mad dogs, but as the truck began to speed up—toward a bad curve below, and a void beyond—I decided that would have to do. Without letting go of the rail, I pointed both index fingers at a spot halfway down the grade and yelled:

I kept repeating this, my eyes focused on that same rapidly approaching spot in the road, even as I remembered that the mad-dog hex should be placed, ideally, before the dog sees you. But hellfire, no one
in
the truck had seen me yet, had they? And just as it hit that hexed spot in the road, the truck slewed sideways, nearly overturned but didn’t, and stopped dead.

“Well, I’ll be,” I said, then scrambled backward as the front doors flung open beneath me.

“Who’s up there?” someone called. Of course—as long as they thought I was armed, they wouldn’t risk poking their heads out of the truck. As quiet as I could, I shinnied over the roof’s edge at the rear of the truck and dropped to the pavement. Behind me was the steep, wooded downslope; in front of me, the truck’s headlights illuminated a rock face split with glittering trickles of runoff. I ran for the downslope, then stopped myself, skidding in the leaves and cursing silently, ran back to the rear of the truck and made a two-handed pass over the latch. I never had been so pleased to unlock a door. “It’s open!” I hollered. “Run!”

The rear doors flung open, nearly knocking me down, and out poured a dozen whooping, yelling people, men and women, some maybe fifteen, some maybe nineteen. The instant they landed on the pavement, they all lit off into the woods, and I took off right behind them—or thought I had. But someone tackled me from behind, and I fell on my face just off the road, the wind knocked out of me. I struggled to my knees, coughing leaves, but a man’s strong arms wrapped around my chest and held me tight.

“I God, I knew it was you!” a voice said. “I knew you were out there somewhere, Allie Harrell!”

I saw a lightning flash, a pillar of rock, and a redheaded girl coming at me, and felt a searing pain that made me cry out. Then the man threw me to the ground, and my memories were my own again.

“You ain’t Allie,” he said. “You ain’t one we just picked up, neither. What witchery is this?”

I rolled over. Standing above me was a broad-shouldered man with a badge gleaming red in the taillights. Just as I registered that something was wrong with his face, he seized my collar and hauled me up like a hooked fish. His mouth hung crooked, his skin was taut and shiny, his hair was an uneven stubble, and one ear was nearly gone, melted flat against his head. His eyes were dark, hot coals.

“You’re burned,” I said.

“I appreciate your noticing,” he said. With his free hand he pawed at me, yanked up my flannel shirttail to look at my belly.

“Not fixed yet,” he said.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked. “Why don’t you want the mountain folks to have children? Why cut off their generations?”

“Someone’s put notions in your head,” he said. “In this county, Missy, we enforce the law, and Virginia law says the feebleminded and shiftless, like you hillbillies, should not be allowed to reproduce theirself. It ain’t my say-so, it’s the state’s.”

“It’s criminal,” I said.

“That ain’t what the U.S. Supreme Court says. What the U.S. Supreme Court says is, ‘Three generations of imbeciles is enough.’”

“Allie Harrell,” I said, “is no imbecile—”

He slapped me, hard.

“—and you know it,” I finished.

From up the slope came another rifle shot, and the taillight behind him exploded. He didn’t look around, just dragged me by my jacket into the shelter of the downhill side of the vehicle. Two other men with badges crouched there, guns drawn.

“Here they come, Sheriff!”

“If you see ’em, shoot ’em,” the scarred man replied, still staring at me and not them.

“Watch out for a flamethrower,” one deputy told the other. “That’s how they got Larsen, and, uh.” He nodded toward the sheriff.

“When’s backup getting here?” the sheriff asked.

After a long pause, the talkative deputy asked: “You want us to radio for backup, sir?”

This time the shooter got one of the headlights.

Still looking at me, the sheriff shook his head, and muttered, “Dumber than owl shit.” He turned away, and said, “Yes, call for backup, you lunk-head! These crackers might kill us by accident, even if they mean only to pin us down, while that trash gets … away …”

I heard his voice trail off, as he realized he was holding an empty jacket. By the time he began to roar, I was halfway down the leafy slope. All I had needed was for him to break eye contact; a distraction hex helped, but my being quick helped more. And since I had come away with my hat and my soogin sack and the rest of my clothes, I couldn’t begrudge him my jacket, though I’d play hell finding another that fit me so well, whatever shape I used. And as I ran down the mountain toward the lights of the town, I pondered four facts. One, the sheriff didn’t know where Allie Harrell was, either. Two three four, the Old Fire Dragaman had sung me a song about a girl named Allie, and said he was spoken for, and invited me to supper.

THERE was no trick to finding Buzzard’s Rock the next afternoon, any more than there is to finding Chimney Rock in the North Carolina mountains. Climb to the highest point you can find, and look around, and there it is, a splinter of rock rearing up over the ridge.

As I clambered up the rocky trail, the thing put me in mind of the tower in Genesis, the one that Nimrod built; or the tower of ill omen in the Rider deck, with flames and lightning and two figures falling, one caped and one crowned. You’d swear Buzzard’s Rock was one of God’s ruins if you didn’t know ruins were purely human-made things.

The base was a jumble of boulders with barely room to stand, much less anything resembling a dwelling or a door in that wild place, certainly no log cabin like the Dragaman’s song. The day had been warm and sun-shiny, but up there on that exposed rock the wind cut through me, and the sheriff had my jacket. I shivered and held myself and kicked aside the smaller rocks in the pile, only to turn up larger rocks I couldn’t move so easy. There was nothing for it but a tether-and-plumb. I hunkered down in the lee of the rock spire, rooted in my soogin sack, found my roll of twine, and cut two one-foot lengths. The two ends that had been joined together I put in my mouth and held there, wet them down good, so they both would know me. Then I tied one of the lengths around my left wrist and said, “Plumb,” only not in English. The other length of twine I laid on the flat top of a shoulder-high rock. I pressed it down, and said, “Tether,” in the same old tongue I had used before. Then I began walking widdershins around the clearing at the base of Buzzard’s Rock, in the widest circle I could manage given the boulders all around and the precipice just the other side.

Now I warn you, before you try it your own self, that this way to open an unseen portal and lower yourself into it does not always work; sometimes it accomplishes what a lot of magic accomplishes, which is slap nothing, and sometimes it
closes
an unseen portal and takes unexpected parts of the world with it, and that can be hard to explain to the neighbors, at best. But on this afternoon at Buzzard’s Rock, my hopes were higher because I had some powerful help: Cauter Pike had asked me to come to his house. A Dragaman’s invitation can slice through a lot of magics that otherwise would keep folks out, would keep me turning in a circle atop this rock until they came to take
me
to a hospital.