The Homecoming (31 page)

“Send it,” said Axel. “Tell them we’re getting a cab. Or maybe they could pick us up?”

Rainey thought about it, hit
SEND
, and then shut his phone off. The air was chillier up here on the side of the wall. He got his blazer out of his knapsack and put it on. Axel pulled his out, slipped it on, and they both stood there, looking at each other.

Axel, who was quick, got it in a few seconds.

“No friggin’ way, Rain. We are not going up there. Up there is haunted. Like, are you whack? No way.”

Axel plucked the cell phone out of Rainey’s hand, stepped back a few feet, and hit the
CALL
button.

“Yeah, we need a cab at the top of Upper Chase Run. Yeah. The streetcar stop here. Where they turn around. Two of us. My name is Axel Deitz.”

Rainey made no move to stop him.

But he felt himself … receding … going away.

“Yeah, okay,” said Axel. “We’ll be here.”

He shut the phone off, and handed it back to Rainey. “There. They said five minutes, maybe less. Okay. No weird shit. Rain, you look funny. You gonna be sick or something?”

“No. Ax, I gotta do something.”

“No you don’t. The cab’s on the way, man. Just don’t go all zombie attack on me. Rain?”

“I gotta see something, Ax. I’ll just be a minute, okay. Don’t freak out on me.”

“Rain, please.”

Rainey shook his head, turned, and looked at the stairs, following them as they rose up, a dwindling chain of tiny yellow bars that disappeared into the dark at the distant top. The words
come and be recognized
played in his head.

He had no idea why.

But he began to climb.

“Rain, please,” said Axel, coming up a step or two after him. Rainey turned and looked down at him.

“I gotta. I’ll catch the next trolley, Ax. Be cool, okay. Tell them I’ll be right along. Tell them I had to do something.”

Axel’s eyes were welling up.

“Rain, there’s something wrong with you. I mean it, you look all white and stuff. Your eyes look funny. Don’t do this.”

Down the road a car turned the corner and came up towards them. The light bar on the roof had a sign—
CHASE TAXI
. The driver flicked his brights and pulled up alongside the station, beeped the horn, and rolled down his window.

“You guys call a cab?”

“Yes, we did,” said Axel. “Rain, come on.”

Rainey shook his head.

“Can’t, Ax. Gotta do this. You go now. I’ll be right along.”

The cabdriver blipped his horn again.

“Guys? Let’s move it, hah?”

Axel blinked at Rainey, tears in his eyes, his cheeks shining.

“Why are you doing this, Rain?”

Rainey had no answer.

Axel picked up his knapsack and turned away without another word. Rainey watched him get into the cab. The driver asked him something and he heard Axel say, “No, just me.”

The driver glanced up at Rainey, standing on the steps, shrugged, and pulled away. Axel watched Rainey as they turned and headed back down Upper Chase Run, his young face a white blur, his big eyes wide. The cab turned the corner and was gone and Rainey was alone in the yellow pool
of station light, the black immensity of Tallulah’s Wall rising up behind him, a thousand-foot wall of nothing, blocking out the stars.

It took a long time, or seemed to, but he finally reached the landing at the top, out of breath, his knapsack dragging behind him. He set his knapsack down on the landing and leaned on the railing. Niceville was spread out before him, from the lights of Mauldar Field far off to the northwest to the clustered glitter of the Galleria Mall, where something big must be going on, since there were police lights flashing all over it, and the Live Eye news chopper was buzzing back and forth above it.

Closer in he could see the golden glow of downtown Niceville, stitched all over with power lines that, from up here, looked like black netting. Farther down the river the lights of the Pavilion were all lit up like a necklace, and here and there he could see the softer glow of the neighborhoods of Garrison Hills and The Glades and Saddle Hill, buried under all those oaks and willows.

He could even see the dark triangle of the Confederate Cemetery. That was where they had found him, buried alive in a grave with a dead guy inside it. There were boats on the river, blobs of colored light. Rainey imagined people on the boats, a party, pretty girls, rich guys like Coleman and his homies.

Why was he up here?

Come and be recognized?

What did that mean?

Rainey turned away from the view of the pretty little town with a stray line from a poem they had studied in English Lit playing in his head—
anyone lived in a pretty how town … he sang his didn’t he danced his did
—and walked out onto the path that led through the old forest to Crater Sink.

There were tiny solar lights marking the path. All around him the pines and oaks and willows rose up, getting older and taller and more tangled as he got farther into the forest.

The path was stony and he slipped a couple of times, but as the bony ridge crested, it flattened out and the going got easier. There were no noises at all, just the flip-flop and skitter of his running shoes and the sound of his own breathing. If there were crows around they had all packed it in for the night.

He pulled out his cell phone, put the battery in again, flipped it on,
just to see the time, because he felt he had been walking along this path for hours, but it was only a few minutes after nine.

Of course there was a text message from Kate:

Rainey texted her back.

Kate’s reply was instant.

Rainey shut the phone off, took the battery out.

He stared down at it for a while, feeling suddenly bone-tired. When he looked up there was a girl standing in the pathway, lit up by one of the solar lights.

His chest got all cold and it was impossible to breathe. He stood and looked at her and she stared back at him with a disapproving frown on her face. As he looked at her he saw that she wasn’t really a girl at all.

She was a woman, a young and pretty woman. She was barefoot and she was wearing an old-timey dress made out of cotton or something. It was just a simple thing that covered her body from the shoulders down to her knees. She had a scarf or maybe a big necklace around her neck.

Even in the dim light from the solar lamps Rainey could see that she wasn’t wearing a bra or anything because her breasts were like right there and her nipples were sticking out like buttons. She had her hands at her side and the necklace looked more like a snake than a scarf, a pretty big snake, with yellow and red and green and black rings all along its body.

As he was looking at it, the necklace lifted up its head where it had been resting on the woman’s left breast and it stared right at him with its tongue going all fluttery in the air.

Its eyes were green and shiny and when he looked back to the woman’s face he saw that her eyes were green and shiny just like the snake
necklace, which, Rainey understood with a shock of recognition, was not a snake necklace at all but a real live snake.

He found that he could not move and when he tried to talk his mouth was so dry that all that came out was a bunch of dry clicking sounds.

The woman opened her mouth and words started to come out of it, but it wasn’t like it was a voice.

It was more like the words were coming from someplace else, someplace that had an echo, and she was out of sync with her own voice, the way it happens when the sound track and the film are out of whack.

“You afrighted,” the voice said. “That’s why you cain’t speak. You aright to be afraid.”

She had a deep southern accent, and her voice was silky, but there was nothing silky about her.

Rainey worked up some saliva and managed to get his voice going.

“Who are you?”

“My name is Talitha. I knows who you are. I knows why you walking in to Crater Sink.”

“My
mother
is in Crater Sink,” he said, in a hoarse, defensive croak, while one of his knees quivered like a plucked string. “I have a right to go see my mother.”

Talitha shook her head.

“Your momma ain’t in Crater Sink. She has gone beyond Crater Sink.”

“How do you know?”

Talitha seemed to be listening to someone else. Her attention came back to him. He felt her look settle on him. It had weight and force and it frightened him. She shook her head and her expression was full of warning.

“I knows what is in Crater Sink, boy.”

“What’s in Crater Sink?”

Talitha paused again, as if listening for something. After a moment, she spoke.

“Nothing is in Crater Sink. Nothing is what lives there.”

The way she was saying “nothing” made it come out like a name.

“I don’t understand.”

“I knows that. That’s why Glynis sent me, Rainey. To help you understand.”

“How do you know who I am?”

Talitha studied him for a while.

“I believe that deep down you’re another one of them Teagues. But not yet. You ain’t all the way a Teague just yet. You still got some of your real momma in you. But they trying to get you. They trying real hard.”

“Who’s trying to get me?”

“They is. Abel Teague, he wants to be alive again. Nothing is helping him.”

His chest was tighter now, and tears came.

“How do you know my mother is dead?”

“Your real momma or your step-momma?”

This was too much for Rainey, but not for Talitha. She was without mercy.

“Your real momma was a poor lost child kilt by Abel Teague soon as she had you. Sylvia, she was your step-momma, but she love you like her own.”

Now he was fully in tears.

“How do you know?”

“I knows because I am the one who took Anora to the mirror and Anora knows about who your mother really was. Anora and your step-momma, they is blood kin. So is Glynis. Glynis sent me to warn you because part of you isn’t a Teague yet. Your mother was a lost girl, but she had good in her.”

“Who was she?”

Talitha stopped to listen to the forest again, and then she shook her head.

“Ain’t no time for that. Did you ever meet a man named Second Samuel while you was in the mirror?”

This was said with such a note of sadness and grief and longing that Rainey felt like lying to her and saying that he had.

But she did not wait for his answer.

“I can’t ever live on that side of the mirror with my daddy, because of what I done. But it ain’t too late for you. You ain’t a Teague yet. You got good people in your life, Mercer kin, and if you go back now you can be like them and not like a Teague. But you got to leave this place now.”

Rainey felt heat in the center of his cold. He knew he’d been adopted, but he had always felt like they were his real parents. His anger rose up.

“My
father
was a Teague.”

Talitha’s expression grew infinitely colder.

“Your father was a Teague, yes. But his name ain’t Miles. You knows that. You knows you was a chosen child. Boy this is cruel hard to hear, but
I will tell you that it was Miles Teague brought your step-momma up here to Crater Sink and pushed her in. That’s what Teague men do. It was a Teague man who kilt me.”

Rainey’s knees went wobbly and his face turned icy cold. He fought for the words.

“My dad
killed
my mother? My … stepmother?”

Talitha nodded.

“Why would he do that?”

“Because she was nosy and asking questions about you. Where you come from. Who your momma was. Who your daddy was. What you really are.”

“But now my dad is dead too.”

“He is. By his own hand, yet he lies in consecrated ground with all his people.”

She spoke with such conviction in that disembodied voice that it was impossible not to believe her.

“Why did my dad kill himself?”

Talitha was silent for a time, giving every appearance of listening to something he couldn’t hear but she could.

“He killed himself because nothing was coming.”

Now Rainey heard the sound of crows.

A long way off, but clear enough.

Talitha heard it too. Perhaps that was what she had been listening for all along.

She looked up into the darkness of the forest roof and then back at him.

“Nothing is coming. Turn away now and run back down them stairs just as fast as you can.”

“What is it? What is coming?”

Talitha only stared at him with a look of sorrow and disappointment.

“If you stay you will see. I done what I could do for you. Now I have to go.”

“Why do you have to go?”

“Because nothing can kill the dead.”

And she was gone.

There was no woman on the dimly lit path. Maybe there never was. The path wound away into the darkness beyond, a dwindling sequence of
small yellow lights. Above him the forest canopy shut out the night sky. Black things were fluttering through the branches high up there, and the air was full of chittering and scraping sounds, the clacking of sharp beaks. The black flying things were coming down from the branches and settling onto the ground around him. By the light of the lamps he could see that they were crows. Their glittering eyes watched him, and when he watched them back, they puffed up their backs and shook out their wings, and then settled into stillness. Horror came into him. Horror and dread.

He turned to run back to the stair-head. His ears suddenly began to ring, a high-pitched drilling whine that seemed to slice through his skull. At first it was a steady shriek, but after a while the tone began to rise and fall. There was a pattern in it. He stood there on the pathway and found that the rising and falling of the ringing had words inside it and that he could understand what was being said. He stood there inside the milling flock of crows and listened to the words for a long time. As he listened he was aware of a
rising up
from the forest floor all around him.