Nightwise Read online

  “You got any beer in the fridge?” I asked Grinner as he and his wife fell on the couch into a pile.

  “Been dry for about two years,” Grinner said. “Got some smoke, if you want.”

  “Thanks. I’ll pass,” I said. I walked down the hall and opened the door on the right. There was a bare, stained mattress thrown in the corner. The room was about ten degrees colder than the rest of the apartment. The only illumination was the sodium light bleeding in through the broken window covered in cardboard and duct tape. Something scuttled deeper into the shadows in response to my entrance.

  I dropped my bags, fell onto the mattress, kicked off my boots, and was asleep before my cigarette became ash between my fingers.

  FOUR

  It was 1972 when I first learned what I was, what I was capable of, and the price you pay for power.

  I was five years old, my pa had been dead for two years, and I spent most of my time with my granny: Mable Thornton Pugh. Granny was the best—I know I’m biased since she pretty much raised me, taught me all the important things. But you’ll hear the same from a lot of folks who are a damn sight closer to good than I am.

  After Pa passed, Ma still had to work at the factory, and to make ends meet she started cocktail waitressing at the Destiny Lounge out on Route 16. Granny kept me as much as her own job at the factory allowed. She kept working until she honestly couldn’t see anymore. Tough old knot.

  I stayed at Granny’s a lot. Cold glass bottles of Dr Pepper with narrow necks, ham sandwiches on Wonder Bread. Horehound candy, half-moon pies made with the green apples off the tree in her backyard and fried up in a cast-iron skillet. She’d play Buck Owens songs on the old guitar she taught herself how to play as a girl.

  I remember being snuggled up under heavy quilts she made herself. We would sing old mountain songs, spirituals, hymns. She’d sing Elvis, Hank Williams, and George Jones. She would tell me tales—Fool Jack stories and the Three Billy Goats Gruff and Br’er Rabbit’s foolishness. She always smelled of talcum powder, and that scent still has an association for me with love. Her arms were saggy and strong and could defend against the fiercest nightmare monsters the dark could hurl at me.

  Going to sleep, nestled over Granny’s arm, hidden under her covers, I think was the safest I ever felt in this world.

  Over time, I learned the history of our clan, the stories. Old stories from back before people wrote stuff down. They told it, felt its truth in their bones, like the cold, or love, passing it along as best they could.

  Granny’s mother, my Great-Gran Beulah, used to order medical books from the Sears, Roebuck catalog. When someone was in trouble having a baby, and there were complications and she needed a midwife, she would call on Great-Gran Beulah. If a whole family was down sick with the black vomit or the flux, maybe whooping cough, Great-Gran was all they had to count on for a hundred miles in any direction, and they would call for her. Granny told me her mother would often get calls to help from counties far away. She was the closest thing to a doctor, a sage, or a protector most folks in that part of the West Virginia wilderness had back then.

  Sometimes folks came running to Great-Gran for help with things people didn’t like to talk about, hell, didn’t even fully know how to comprehend. Once, Granny told me, a little girl named Eda Pruitt got hexed when she fell down an old well. After they rescued her, she started talking in the voice of an old, dead German farmer. The voice said it was a servant of Scratch himself. Hogs started dying on the farm, and then people started getting sick. That’s was when Sears, Roebuck failed you, when reason and rationality failed you, and you had to go back to the old ways, the secret ways. Our clan was steeped in them too. Great-Gran would take up her waking stick and put her medicines, herbs, poultices, amulets, and books in a satchel and set off to help, walking there most of the time. Granny still had her mom’s walking stick and satchel. I remember it from a hundred walks, Granny’s bony fingers wrapped about it

  “It’s in our blood, Laytham,” Granny would say as she grunted at the exertion of climbing higher and higher, me trailing behind her with my own stick Granny had cut from a tree branch with her ubiquitous, never-dull pocketknife. “It’s our way. When people are hurtin’ and wickedness is being done, it’s our load to help them, darlin’, the sick and the defenseless and the just plain stupid, any way we can. It’s the price of the gifts the good Lord has given us.”

  Those gifts had many different names, depending on where you grew up. I’ve studied all over the world, and I’ve heard many of those names. Great-Gran Beulah and Granny were known as Wisdoms—wise women. They had the power to traffic with the unseen, the haints; the Waiting, spirits of the dead; and the Elementals, the old, green spirits of the land; the Little Folk, the Fae and their tricks and beauty; even the High-Named: the Watchers, gods, angels. They knew the names and signs of the fallen spirits too: the Hungry, the things squatting in the Void, but it was folly to truck with them. Folly—Jesus, looking back, how far I’ve fallen. They knew the secrets of the plants and herbs, how to dowse to find water, or objects, or people lost; they could heal or hex, cure or curse. Dreams spoke to them; Granny taught me everything speaks to you, if you just shut up and listen.

  And I believed it all, especially the parts about helping people in need and punishing the wicked. Hell, back then I still believed in the Easter Bunny.

  The power did run in our blood. Granny was the first to see it in me, to really see me at all, truth be told.

  Now, there has been a lot of bullshit written, said, and whispered about me—urban myths, legend, and outright lies about how I got my power. A lot of the stories sprang up from that Dutch filmmaker’s documentary about me and the gang back in 2000. Some from that little blogger pissant. He ended up writing a book about me, published it in 2008. Lying piece of garbage didn’t even use a good photo of me for the cover. Thought about suing him, but I just covered his junk with acidic boils for six months instead.

  Most folks figure the power comes to you from God or a deal with the Devil, some near-death experience, or a past-life revelation, or getting struck by lightning, or bit by a radioactive necromancer, blah, blah, blah. There is no anointment; the universe has no time for pretentious shit like that. Power simply is. It flows like water, it seeks paths of least resistance into this world, conduits through which it can work with minimal effort. It transmits, and some folks have the hardware to receive. There are no Chosen Ones, but there sure as hell are a lot of grifters, like your humble narrator, who make a living off of self-important marks who think there are.

  You end up able to access and comprehend the power the same way you end up with anything else of real value in this world—either through pure dumb, blind luck, or you get born to it. You can’t get it by choice, any more than anyone chooses to be born Angelina Jolie or Stephen Hawking; beautiful, autistic, brilliant, alcoholic, wealthy, or gay—the cosmic lotto simply has its few winners and lots and lots of losers.

  My granny was the only one who ever thought I was a winner. The day I was born, Granny made a big deal out of the fact that I was a caul bearer. She said it was rare for the men in our clan to be born with the placenta, or the caul, stretched over their head, like a veil. She insisted mine be kept and rubbed onto paper for safekeeping, and she was its guardian. My folks thought she was crazy, but they did it. It was unwise to cross Granny.

  Even if you end up with power, that’s no guarantee of anything. It takes discipline and a very fluid mind to make something of power. It is also takes will, unshakable will to believe, to control it, and to have the balls to use it. And there is a price you pay for power. Like everything in life, there is always a price.

  When I was five, Granny picked up her walking stick and her satchel. She packed it with ham sandwiches, fried apple pies, Dr Peppers, and a few other things.

  “C’mon, Laytham,” she said, “let’s go for a walk, darlin’.”

  The “walk” was a hike about two miles up the rocky side of a moun
tain. Granny’s backyard opened onto shallow, rocky rises that grew to become the giant of the Appalachian Mountains, and we often climbed the gentle slope full of moss-covered rock outcroppings, thick oaks, and green brush. We’d find a big, flat, comfy rock high up to give us a good view and sit down and have our picnic. Today Granny was looking for something particular, and we kept climbing, higher and higher.

  “Your legs tired, boy?” Granny asked, smiling as she paused. Her thin gray hair was a curly, wiry mop. She wore a simple thin flower-print shift with tattered stockings that ended below her knees and simple navy blue sneakers. Her nose was like that of a hawk, and her dark eyes held a wicked light—humor and maybe a touch of something smarter and just a hair mean. Granny did not suffer fools.

  “Uh-huh,” I said, nodding.

  “Well, why didn’t you say something to me, then?” she asked. The few teeth she still owned flashed. The two in front were small and side by side. Sometimes when Granny smiled I thought of a rat.

  “I didn’t wanna make a fuss, be no lazybones, Granny,” I said.

  Granny groaned. She planted her walking stick and rested her weight against it. “I know, Laytham, but don’t be a fool either, darlin’. Something stuck in your craw, you speak it. You tired, then you stop and rest.”

  So we did. We settled on a large, flat boulder covered in a cool carpet of green moss. Granny unpacked the satchel while I struggled to climb the side of the rock that wasn’t gently sloped into the ground, my legs kicking and fingers grasping for a hold.

  “Always like to go the hard way, don’t you Laytham?” Granny said as she opened the two bottles of soda.

  I grinned and pulled one leg, then the other onto the green surface of the bolder. “Uh-huh. It’s more fun!”

  As a reward for my climbing skills, I devoured my sandwich and two (!) apple pies. Granny kept looking about, and I could feel she was waiting for something.

  “Why’d we go up so high today, Granny?” I asked.

  “Came up here to show you something important, Laytham. You gonna need to see it sooner or later. I cotton to sooner,” Granny said.

  “Now, Laytham, I want you to do something for me,” Granny said. “I want you to feel the sun shining down on you from above, sparkling through the leaves of the trees, feel the warmth on your face. Close your eyes, darlin’.

  “I want you to feel the cool stone under you, the soft living moss, feel it beneath you. Feel it connected to the dark soil, to the roots of the trees, and feel it all connected to you.”

  I could feel it, everything around me was alive and cradling me. It felt like I had Granny’s arm around me. I kept my eyes closed; my breathing was slow and even. I felt anchored, like I belonged. I could feel Granny’s smile, like the sunlight kissing my face.

  “Very good, Laytham. Now, I want you to reach out and tell me what you feel, different, in motion. When you have it, I want you to open your eyes.”

  My heart beat faster, my breathing quickened. I could feel energy, wild, uncontrolled, a tiny pulse thudding like a 1-1 drum. It was in me, part of me. I slowly let it move away from me, like pushing a balloon away, to the proper spot, to where it was supposed to be in space, and opened my eyes and gasped. There was a little gray squirrel with a bristly tail. I saw it scamper down a tree and bound across the field about fifteen yards behind me. It stopped, stood on its hind legs, and regarded me. I was its lightning heartbeat, I was its panting breath and twitching nerves, but I was also me. It was an effort to keep the space between us. I looked back to Granny. She was still, calm. She was the mountain we stood upon, she was the trees and the rocks, the sun and the soil. She rested her hands on her mother’s walking stick and regarded me with as serious a face as I had ever seen.

  She narrowed her eyes and nodded slightly toward the squirrel. “Now be still and watch,” Granny said.

  Suddenly there was a whirring sound in the tall grass and the squirrel froze, its eyes wide and dark with fear. I felt the other flowing along the ground, cold, muted thrumming, like meat machinery, a steady pulse, no fear, no joy, only hunger and terrible emotionless purpose. The squirrel began to jump, but it was too late. The rattlesnake struck a whip-crack blow. I felt the jolt of impact, felt the venom, like acidic ice, slowing the racing little heart. I saw the squirrel stagger and then drop. My emotions were a nova that shattered the connection, and I was me again, alone in this universe and cut off from everything by the blinders of my perception. I started to rise to help the squirrel.

  “Laytham, no!” Granny shouted. Her voice stopped me. “What do you think you are doing?” she asked calmly.

  “I’m … the squirrel, Granny. I could feel it, it’s dying. I gotta…”

  “Help it?” Granny said. “How, darlin’? Poor thing is dying, Laytham. Everything living has got to die.”

  “Why?” I said. My eyes were hot and welling with tears, my whole body was shaking, and my fists were at my sides clenching and unclenching. I could see the squirrel twitching and the snake crawling closer to it. “It ain’t fair, Granny, he didn’t do nothing to nobody, least all that mean old snake!”

  Granny’s eyes softened as the sobs shook me. She looked like she was going to come hold me, but then she tightened her grip on her mother’s walking stick and the steel settled again behind her brown eyes.

  “I know, darlin’,” Granny said. “And you’re right, it ain’t fair one bit. Not even one drop of fair, but it is right, Laytham, and you need to learn the difference.

  “Life has to be fragile for us to understand it, to not abuse it, to cherish it, and each other. Snake’s just doing his job. Did you feel any mean in it, feel anything at all, darlin’?”

  “It was hungry,” I said. “It’s cold, up in its head, though, Granny, it’s cold and scary.”

  “That’s ’cause it lives its life cold, honey,” Granny said. “It’s made that way; it’s not warm, like us. But that don’t mean it’s evil, it just means it’s made to do what it does as best it can.”

  “Kill,” I said. “It’s made to kill, Granny? Why would God do that?”

  “No, don’t be puttin’ this all on the Almighty,” Granny said, wagging a bony finger. “When you are tryin’ to put together a puzzle, and you haven’t seen the whole picture and you don’t get all the pieces to finish it at once, it’s easy to blame the puzzle maker. God puts the pieces here for us. We are pieces of the puzzle, Laytham, just like that squirrel, and that snake, but he also gave us the ability to put the pieces together any fool way we want, to build our own picture. But like any puzzle, it has to have boundaries to frame the picture.”

  The squirrel shuddered one last time and was still. Granny pointed at the dead creature. “That,” she said, “is a boundary.”

  “No,” I said. The anger welled up in me, anger at the puzzle maker, anger at the snake. It wasn’t fair, and I didn’t give a damn about how pretty the picture in the puzzle turned out. I remembered the state troopers and the men from the mine office calling on Ma and Granny to tell them Pa was gone. It was the same feeling, only mixed more then with paralyzing fear and sadness, confusion, and a feeling of powerlessness, smallness.

  I grabbed my crooked little walking stick, jumped off the boulder, and ran shouting in rage toward the rattler and the dead squirrel. Granny was shouting too, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying over the sound of my anger and the blood hammering in my ears. I stood on one side of the dead squirrel, and the coiled rattler was on the other. I swung widely and missed the snake with my stick. It struck too, but I didn’t feel anything. I swung again, and this time landed a solid blow. The snake looped in pain and confusion. I hit it again and again and again. I felt Granny’s hand on my shoulder.

  “Laytham, honey, stop, the poor thing is dead.”

  I did stop; I gulped at the air and looked at the snake. I had bashed in its head, and its body was still looping, mechanically. It was horrific: a biological robot trying to continue its function while its bloody, crumpled skull l
olled lazily to one side, its broken jaws trying to open and close, to bite, to perform its function.

  “Do you feel better now?” Granny asked. There was no malice in her voice, only concern.

  I kept looking at the snake. And suddenly I understood the lesson I was supposed to take away from all of this, and the anger was stoked in me again.

  “Yeah,” I said, “I do. But I ain’t done yet.”

  I knelt by the squirrel and I tried to slow my heartbeat, tried to calm myself. I had no idea what the hell I was doing and I had no names for the techniques I was trying to undertake. I did notice that, for some strange reason, my anger made me feel calm; it helped me focus. Everything slowed, expanded, merged, like it had under Granny’s guidance. It was easier now. I knew it was possible and, therefore, I could do it again.

  “Laytham Ballard, what are you getting into?” Granny asked. I ignored her and regarded the squirrel. It was cold, dark. The frenetic light that had filled it was gone. There was no difference between it and the dirt it lay upon. Dust to dust.

  I knew what I needed to do. It came to me. At five years old, it came to me as easily as breathing. I dropped my bloody walking stick and picked up a sharp, thin stone. I raked it across my palm. The pain was as distant as Granny’s protests. She was talking, but she wasn’t stopping me, wasn’t about to stop me, either. No one could stop me. No snake, no Wisdom, no God.

  I squeezed my hand into a fist, and the blood swelled and leaked between my fingers and dripped onto the squirrel’s body. The blood was fire—my anger, my life, my power. Mine. I felt the drops, was the drops. As they soaked into the dead animal’s fur, each drop was an exploding sun, a dying star, life and death in its purest, most beautiful form. I drew a deep, powerful breath and then exhaled. The world exhaled through me. The squirrel’s chest expanded then, contracted, in time to my breathing, again, again. I held my breath and the squirrel kept on breathing.

  I stood. Everything was indistinct and bright and dreamlike. My head was swimming. I heard the world’s heartbeat and it was my heartbeat. Sunlight flashed through the roof of trees, and a flock of black birds exploded into flight across the constellations of scintillating emerald light. I felt soft, strong hands hold me up and smelled talcum powder close to me.