“Ahhh.” Jackson pursed his lips. “Old gossip, mostly. You sure you want to hear about it?”
Under his reluctance, a born storyteller was clearly dying to hold forth. I leaned against the garden gate. “Absolutely. I don’t know these woods all that well, and anything you can tell me…” I trailed off, leaving a hopefully inviting silence.
He did not so much fill the gap as leap into it with both feet. “First thing you should know—my grandma, she was from the old country. Knew all therealold stories. At least, she said they were old stories, and nobody argued with Gran.”
I raised my eyebrows, wondering what this had to do with inhabitants of the local woods. “They must have been fascinating,” I said politely.
“Oh, aye, they were. But they weren’t about ghosties and goblins and little people, if that’s what you’re thinking.” He grinned. “She knew plenty of those too, but so did everybody else. You can’t throw a rock out Asheville way without hitting an oldster who wants to tell you about leaving milk out for the other crowd. No, Gran told other stories. Like about Slith the thief and what happened to him, and the house where they hang two criminals from hooks and every now and then they come and take one down, when they find somebody who’s done something even worse, and they put that one up on the hooks instead. Or the village where they take turns bleeding people to feed the old women during a famine, so that the Mother of Winter won’t take one over.”
I must have looked aghast at this, because Jackson lifted a hand and laughed self-consciously. “You see what I mean? They used to give me nightmares, some of ’em, but Gran said that just showed I was sensible. My mam didn’t see it quite the same way, always tried to stop me from listening, so of course I snuck off every chance I got to listen, didn’t I?”
This, at least, struck me as entirely logical, even if I didn’tsee how it related to whatever had gone on in the woods. “I certainly would have.”
“There, you see? Girl after my own heart. Thing is…” He glanced toward the house, as if expecting his wife to appear and scold him. Not seeing her, he pulled a cigarette out from behind his ear and lit it. “Well, maybe ten years back, some bad stuff started happening. Felt like it came straight out of one of Gran’s stories. The war’d been over a few years by then, and Rose and I had just moved back here to take care of her mam. Animals started turning up dead, all cut up strange, and then every now and then a person’d turn up that way too. They thought it was some kind of animal, maybe a cougar, but it sure wasn’t like any cougar I ever heard of.”
“Cut up strangehow?” I asked.
He spread his hands helplessly. “Looked like somebody took a sharp knife and went to work. You’d find ’em up in a tree, head down, like somebody was draining ’em out. Cougar will drag things up into a tree sometimes, and they like a throat bite, so okay, not the worst suggestion. ’Cept I never heard tell of a cougar that hamstrung its dinner first. And they definitely don’t bite out both wrists and then the neck too.”
“Good god!”
“Yeah. People were spooked.” Jackson gestured with the cigarette, the red ember tracing a line through the air. “Lotsa bad blood got riled up. Some people thought it was the Klan, but it wasn’t showy enough for them, you ask me.”
“So what was it?” I asked, ignoring the whisper in my head saying:Blood thieves, Sally told you, they drain your blood away…
Jackson shrugged. “Never found out. You ask me, it was something smart though. It’d get real bad for a little while and people would get themselves all worked up in a frenzy, then it’d ease off, like maybe whatever was doing it had gone off somewhere else. So everybody would start to relax a little and then aseason or two later, dead animals would start turning up again. Kept happening over and over. Not just like dogs or pigs either, but wild stuff. You’d come across deer or even possums like that, except most of the time you couldn’t be sure because the vultures would get to ’em first, and after that, ain’t nobody gonna be able to tell how they died. Some people started to wonder if maybe there wasn’t a lot more of it happening than we knew about.”
I considered this. That certainly didn’tsoundlike a cougar, granted, but then again, people are notorious for thinking that wild animal bites are actually knife wounds, and a lot of them don’t understand that when, say, a fox kills a rabbit, there’s rarely much blood. It was entirely possible that there’d been one or two real attacks and then a whole string of panicky encounters with perfectly normal carcasses.
“Anyhow.” Jackson flicked the cigarette away. “It made me think of Gran’s stories. Lot of ’em were about blood. People who maybe weren’t all the way human, who fed on blood. They used to say that if you ate a wolf’s brain, you’d get the ability to change your skin for his, but you’d have a hunger on you ever after. And even around here, there were stories about dead people coming back for the people they loved, and drinking them dry so they kept coming back.”
My expression must have been obviously skeptical, because Jackson snorted. “I know, it sounds like a lot of hogwash. The missus gets mad if I bring it up. But I saw some of those bodies and I don’t mind telling you, there was something very strange going on there.”
“Oh?” I asked, trying to keep the disbelief out of my voice.
“Indeed there was. The deer were funny enough, but there was an old woman named Martha Glint. Nasty piece of work, and I can’t say I was terrible broken up. Never forgave any Black soul for bein’ freed, and the stories about what she did to people before the war would turn your stomach. Found her myself,halfway up a tree, white as a sheet, with her throat tore out and one wrist bit near through. And hardly any blood on the ground under her either.”
I winced at the image. “Still,” I said, after a moment, “she could have bled out somewhere else and been dragged there. And cougars do stash their prey in trees sometimes.”
“Funny sort of cougar that unbuttons a lady’s collar and folds back the cuffs on her sleeves though.”
I stared at him, silenced.
“Oh, aye,” Jackson said. “There was a bit of a fracas not long after that. Coupla men—that Phelps fellow was one of ’em—found two people living rough in the woods out Bynum way. White kids, barely outta their teens I’d guess, but real strange-like, they said. Real bad. Caught ’em in the middle of draining out a deer, and from what I hear, it wasn’t the meat they were after.”
I saw the Devil in these woods, Miss Wilson…
“They strung ’em up, but that wasn’t enough. They put stakes in ’em like they used to do in the old days when they dug up a coffin and found somebody in it looking a little too pink-cheeked and rosy. Then they buried ’em deep. And after that, bodies stopped turning up, so seemed like maybe they got the people responsible.”
“You don’t sound so sure about that,” I said.
Jackson dusted off his hands and lifted the latch on the gate. “I don’t know to say otherwise. I didn’t see what those men saw. For all I know, that couple was sittin’ on top of a barrel of blood and pickin’ their teeth with the bones. All I know is that afterward, Phelps took to the Bible like some men take to the bottle.”
There was a “but” hanging in the air so obviously that it might as well have been written in letters of fire. I obliged. “But?”
“Seems to me that something smart enough to lay low for a season or two when things got too hot might be smart enough to move on completely in a case like that.” Jackson grinned like afox, all sharp teeth and faded red hair. “Anyhow, that was ’bout three years ago. Wouldn’t fret yourself now. Much.”
I recognized the grin as that of a storyteller who knows that he’s succeeded in filling his audience with nameless dread. I scowled at him, which only made the grin spread wider. “Time to head into town,” he said. “Socks, tooth powder, penny candy. Right?”
