Page 116 of Stay Buried

“We need to go!” I screamed at him now. I dragged my uncle a few feet, but he was larger and heavier and I didn’t have the strength.

“The roof’s about to go!” a voice shouted in my ear, above the roar of the flames, the hideous squalls of laughter that had clearly turned back into screams.

It was Luther St. James. Together we pulled Uncle Thomas from the burning barn. We dragged him into the numb and quiet circle of men and women who stood in the melting snow, watching the fire take the old barn with a quickness I could never have imagined.

I reached up, felt my own singed hair and eyebrows. I looked at my uncle—his face was burned, blistered in places, his lips cracked and oozing.

No one spoke. All of us seemed to be holding our collective breath as the roof came down with a fiery crash, flames shooting up, sparks flying out like a thousand tiny demons, set free at last.

FORTY-NINEASHLEY

October 18, 2016

Oh, thank goodness you came!” Josephine exclaimed. “You’ll be safe here.”

The three of them stood in her living room, the faces of hundreds of clothespin dolls—the dead of Boone’s Ferry—looking at them. Ashley glanced at the shelf where the tiny figures of their great-grandparents, Thomas and Margaret, stood watching, the Frankie doll beside them.

What are you going to do now?they seemed to say.

“We need to use your phone,” Ashley said, practically pushing past the old woman and going for the phone on the wall. She would have expected an ancient rotary dial like the one Gram had, but Josephine had a modern cordless phone. She picked up the receiver, clicked the call button, and nothing happened. No dial tone, no faint buzz of static. It was dead.

“Phones are out, dear,” Josephine said matter-of-factly. “Happens all the time, I’m afraid. Usually gets fixed within a few hours, though we aren’t the phone company’s top priority, that’s for certain.”

“Do you have a car?” Malcolm asked the old woman.

Josephine laughed, exposing her large, blocky, horselike dentures. “Oh my goodness, no! I haven’t driven in years. And a good thing too, with my eyesight the way it is.”

“Well, surely you know someone with a car?” Ashley said. “Someone who can help us?”

Josephine took in a deep breath and let it out.

“I’ve lived here in Boone’s Ferry my whole life. Can’t imagine living anywhere else. Wouldn’t want to. I feel like I belong here just as much as that big old oak in the backyard belongs. I’ve got my roots down deep too. But there are things about living here, things that are hard for outsiders to understand. Your grandmother, she knew what those things were. What was expected of her. And there came a time when she’d had enough. I never understood what enough meant. Not until now. Now—now I’ve had enough too. But I’m afraid it might be too late.”

“What are you talking about?” Malcolm asked.

“I don’t understand,” Ashley admitted.

“Once you get the mark, he hunts you down. Everyone in the village will help him.”

“Why? Why do they help him?” Ashley asked in disbelief.

“Are we talking a cult here? Some kind of mass delusion?” Malcolm said.

“Delusion?” Josephine repeated, as if she was considering it. “No, dear. They know what will happen if they don’t help him. If they go against his wishes, the whole town will suffer. Crops will fail. Cows will dry up. Animals will die. And there will be sickness, perhaps terrible sickness; a sickness as bad as what happened all those years ago.”

“But surely you see that that’s all superstition, Josephine,” Ashley said.

Josephine smiled ruefully. “I can see why you’d think that, truly Ican. But the curse is very real. He holds it over us each and every day. So far, we’ve been safe. There’ve been a few deaths. A few bad years, some… difficulties. But we’ve never done anything to cause him to unleash his true fury. Not yet.”

There was a knock at the front door.

They all jumped, then looked at each other, frozen.

“Quick,” whispered Josephine. “Into the basement. Both of you.”

Before Ash had time to ask any more questions, Josephine was hurrying them down the hall toward the kitchen and stopped at a narrow door just before it. She unlatched a heavy metal sliding bolt at the top and opened the door, turned on the lights with an old-fashioned push-button switch. A single lightbulb lit up at the bottom of a set of worn wooden stairs. A damp, musty smell drifted up.

There was more knocking at the front door. Louder. More insistent.