Page 21 of When the Night Comes Knocking

Eight

But she wasn’t aware…

Watching a pregnant woman practically crush his little sister in the breakfast aisle was not on Thomas’s bingo card for a family cabin trip to the mountains. He was ready for fake niceties, indifference, perhaps some teeming disappointment; he was even prepared to grow a pair and rent a car to drive back early on his own if Jane tried to give him one more doe-eyed apology.

Now, all of it feels like dust lost to the bottom of an hourglass no one knew had already been tipped over by bloody claws.

The sobbing paired with Winnie’s barking creates a pulsing rhythm against his skull, grinding and wedging deeper until the noises seem to take root within his brain.

“What did it do to him?” Ashley cries into Jane’s shoulder. “Oh God, what did it do? What do we do?”

Thomas almost feels a speck of respite toward his sister, squished against a stranger and being asked questions there are no answers to. It fades fast. That’s what happens to people who try to absorb pain from others, who try to coddle and fix an ache that isn’t theirs to handle.

Jim turns from his position at the head of the aisle, pacing with the shotgun in his hands. “Where the hell are the cops?” he asks in that gruff sandpaper voice. He looks wired now, eyes large and flitty beneath the overheads, so that strained blood vessels rise to the surface. Each time Thomas glimpses him with the gun, it feels like they have struck a match inches away from a firecracker.

“I don’t know,” Kimi replies. She presses her palms against her eyes and forces a deep breath in and out before speaking again. “It depends when they can get enough of the roadblock cleared to pass through. But even if they do get here…” She trails off, and Thomas wonders if she has finally realized the reality of what a rescue from this truly looks like.

“How did you know that it wasn’t him?” he asks her, recalling how quick the cashier was to demand they keep the door shut against what otherwise passed as a very convincing replica of Evan. “You knew that something wasn’t right about him before anyone else,” he continues, taking a step closer as the cashier glances down at the floor.

From a few paces down the aisle, Jackson straightens. He stands from his crouched position next to Winnie, who mercifully has quieted down and now wears the expression of a puppy ready to collapse into a nap. “Wait a minute,” he says, eyes hardening slightly. “Do you know what that thing out there is? Have you known this whole time?” he asks, growing louder with each word.

Kimi opens her mouth for only a few seconds before clamping it shut. She stands rigid with her dark gaze fixed on the store’s entrance, as though she can see clear through the closed blinds and out into the night that is hunting them.

“Well?” says Thomas, halting in front of the cashier as Jackson pauses on her other side.

“Give her space,” Jane snaps.

An uneasy shot of surprise hits Thomas. The sharp tone is unrecognizable from his sister, along with the coldness that overtakes her face as she stares him and Jackson down. While Thomas has always lived solidly under his father’s wing, their mother has spent her life fostering Jane into the polite, sweet-tempered young lady that Cassie never could be, quiet and always generous in sharing a smile.

The temporary iciness leads Thomas to retreat a few steps, frowning. Jackson does the same, nodding apologetically toward Kimi, then Jane.

Jim walks down the aisle, shouldering the shotgun. He meets Kimi’s eyes, placing an encouraging hand on her shoulder. “Go on and say what you need to, honey.” His crow’s feet soften as he addresses her, familiar and fond in the way of two people who have seen each other through many phases of life.

Kimi’s eyes flit nervously to the rest of them, and as she shakes her head, Thomas sighs loudly. “We’re kind of beyond the point of being shy with each other, don’t you think?” he says.

She ignores him, instead cracking her knuckles as she shifts into a seated position on the base of the shelf behind her. Thomas is the first to follow, dropping down a few feet to the right of her while Jane carefully helps lower Ashley to the ground, then sits cross-legged next to the woman. Jackson sits down next to Jane, a bit too closely, Thomas thinks, and Jim’s knees crack as he lowers to the floor with a grunt.

They face each other in a circle like kids around a campfire about to exchange scary stories. Kimi gnaws on her lip, flipping her pocketknife over in her hands a few times. “You said it made noises. Rattled like bones,” she says, glancing up at Jim.

He nods, resting the gun across his lap.

Kimi shakes her head, closing the knife. “It’s just some local lore,” she admits, then hooks the knife back onto a belt loop. “There are old stories about monsters and ghosts all along the Appalachian. These mountains are freaking ancient, ya know?”

“What kind of stories?” Jane asks as Winnie wedges her body into the space between her and Jackson. The German shepherd’s ears are perked up as she listens along with them.

“Just silly ones mostly,” Jim answers, resting his hands over the gun in his lap. Billy’s blood has dried in a rust-colored crust beneath his short fingernails. “You heard of Bigfoot, haven’t ya?”

Jane nods in confusion as Jackson clears his throat. “There’s also the Bell Witch,” he says, glancing around a bit timidly. “That one supposedly started close to where I grew up in Tennessee.”

Thomas puffs out a sigh of impatience. “And I’m best friends with Santa Claus,” he adds, cutting a hard look back at Kimi. “What does this have to do with what’s out there right now?”

Kimi tugs out the necklace from beneath her shirt collar, frowning at the simple gold medallion. “When I was a little girl, my grandmother Ama used to tell me this story that her grandmother used to tell her.”

She hesitates on the next words, peeking up to catch Thomas’s raised eyebrows. “Like I said, the Appalachian mountains are old—over hundreds of millions of years old. No one knows how long it’s been here.”

“How long what’s been here?” Ashley asks.

Kimi briefly meets the woman’s bloodshot eyes. “A spirit was trapped here inside Blood Mountain,” she says, focusing again on her necklace. “And that spirit was cursed to be the bones holding it up.”