Alex Bledsoe - Wisp of a Thing

He stopped for a momentary rest, and when he looked up, he saw her just ahead, stretched out on her belly behind a log. He fell next to her, and again she put her hand over his mouth to quiet him.

He angrily slapped it away as he tried to catch his breath. Between the pain and exhaustion, his lungs could barely expand. “Goddammit, Curnen,” he wheezed, “if you don’t—”

She kissed him, then quickly touched his lips with a single finger while he was still startled. Her urgency was plain. He nodded, gasping, and waited until his breathing returned to normal. This kiss also left a tingle.

Little patches of foxfire glowed on the decaying log sheltering them. Curnen put a finger to her own lips and pointed ahead of them. He carefully rose to look.

A saggy, decrepit dwelling squatted on the side of the hill, its back wall buried in the earth. “House” was far too dignified a term for it, since he could see even in silhouette that boards had sprung loose from the sides and most of the windows lacked glass. Smoke curled from the chimney, blotting out the stars as it rose straight into the sky, and dim illumination came from oil lamps placed on the windowsills. Between the boards he saw the flickering light of the fireplace within.

He heard low, thick voices and the occasional loud, metal plink . Several figures sat on the porch, watching a pair of men in the yard. They all seemed able to see by nothing but moonlight. Some of them were enormous, round people, and others seemed thin and almost skeletal. The bigger ones were women, he realized; this must be the brood that had produced Tiffany Gwinn.

“Five points,” a man’s voice said after one loud plink . “That’s fifteen.”

Another plink . “That’s ten, you mean.”

“Dang it,” the first voice muttered.

Something beeped musically. “Will you put that dang thing away?” one of the men in the yard complained. “I can’t concentrate on tossin’ these washers.”

“I’m gonna beat this level,” a boy’s voice said, distracted.

“All you do all day is play them video games,” said a voice Rob recognized as Tiffany Gwinn.

“It helps my ADD.” He pronounced it “Aye-Dee-Dee.”

“I’ll pay attention to your deficit,” Tiffany snapped as the boy fled into the house.

Rob dug his fingers into the soil. For the first time since he’d arrived in Needsville, he felt real, bone-deep terror. Less than a hundred feet away was an entire clan of people who would no doubt be quite happy to make sure he never left this mountain alive, and his only ally was a girl who was either inbred, cursed, or both. Had this been Curnen’s plan all along?

But Curnen made no move to give them away, and pointed to a spot farther along the slope beside the cabin. In the moonlight, he couldn’t resolve the scene into anything that made sense. Half a dozen structures resembling low doghouses, complete with peaked and shingled roofs, were scattered irregularly among taller objects poking at odd angles from the ground. Was it debris from the house? Discarded auto parts or farming equipment? A kennel?

Then the tall objects resolved into tombstones , and the small, low sheds appeared to be shelters covering certain graves.

If the final verse had also been chiseled as an epitaph on one of those markers, there wasn’t nearly enough light to see it, especially if the letters had been weathered away. Also, there was no way to reach the graveyard without being seen by the people on the porch. And the flash from his phone would surely be noticed.

He slid back down next to Curnen. “So the last verse is in that graveyard?” he whispered.

She nodded.

He wished the girl’s eyes were more normal; their opaque blackness unnerved him. “They’ll see us if we try to go to the graveyard right now. We’ll have to wait until they go inside.”

She reached to his face and touched her fingertips to his cheek. In the moonlight her expression was so tender, it made something ache deep inside him. She leaned toward him, but he gently pulled her hand away. “Not now, Curnen, okay? We’ll talk about this later.”

Her expression turned eloquently sad, and he felt like a jerk. Whatever the reality, she clearly believed in the curse, and behaved accordingly. All she wanted from him was basic human kindness. And like everyone else, he was denying her.

“I’m sorry,” Rob said gently. “Look, you know I’m your friend, right? Do you have any other friends?”

She shook her head.

“See? Then I’ll be your friend, and that makes me special, okay?”

She tilted her head a little. If she tried, would she be able to make him feel as aroused as she had in the clearing? Or was her ability to manipulate him shattered now that he knew its source?

He shivered. The night was cool, and sweat soaked his clothes. Curnen silently piled leaves around them, forming a crude nest. Then she lay down beside him and scooted as close as she dared.

A guitar rang out from the Gwinn cabin. Someone yelled, “Awright, now,” and began to clap along. Feet stomped on the porch, the thud accompanied by an occasional cracking sound.

Rob smiled as he recognized the song, although he never imagined it played so harshly. He pulled Curnen close, and she nestled against him. He wondered if anyone had ever treated her like this before, or if everyone, including her own family, was either scared or desirous of her?

As loud as he dared, he sang to her:

By the time he reached the second verse, he could tell by her breathing that she was asleep.

Bliss stood on her patio looking out at the lake in the moonlight. She felt the soft breeze as something flew behind her, then heard the faint, delicate tap as feet lightly touched the wood.

When she turned, Mandalay Harris stood there, dressed in a Fresh Beat Band pajama top and a pair of cut-off shorts.

The girl made a gesture of welcome, and Bliss replied with the appropriate hand signal. “It must be important if you’re calling me over here in the middle of the night,” Mandalay said. “What’s up?”

“Something happened that I can’t explain,” Bliss said. “And it is important.”

Mandalay hopped up on the patio rail. “Tell me about it, then.”

Bliss related Rob’s story of being accosted by the younger Rockhouse Hicks. Mandalay listened without interrupting. When she finished, Bliss said, “And I don’t know what to do now.”

“Wow,” Mandalay said.

“I could use something a little more concrete.”

“It wasn’t a real haint, obviously. Rockhouse ain’t dead. So…” She looked up at the sky, where a lone cloud scudded across the moon. “The night winds must have sent it.”

Bliss’s heart almost stopped. “You can’t be serious, Mandalay.”

The girl shrugged, as if what she’d suggested meant nothing. “You know another explanation, you throw it on out here and we’ll see if it runs around.”

“But they don’t… They’ve never… They don’t get involved that way.”

“They never have before,” she agreed.

“But why would they do it now?” Bliss almost shouted.

As if it were the simplest thing in the world, she said, “They want your friend Rob to come here and do something none of the Tufa can or will do.”

“So the night winds brought him here by telling him some bullshit story about a magic song, and once he got here, they made Tiffany Gwinn smack him so hard that even though he has no Tufa in him, he can see things that should be visible only to us?”