My metal folding chair creaked as I turned to watch the guard
bring in Tommy Lawson. The guard, whose red, rummy eyes hung down like those of
an exhausted hound, led Lawson around to the chair on the opposite side of the wooden
table. Lightning flashed outside as a thunderstorm continued to ruin the dismal
afternoon.
The links in Lawson’s handcuffs clinked on the tabletop as
he sat. “You want me to leave his restraints on?” the guard asked. The badge on
his faded gray uniform shirt said “Sherman,” which made me wonder if that was
his first name or his last name.
I looked at Lawson and sized him up. He was scrawny and had
seen better days. Rode hard and put up wet.
His craggy face was riddled with acne scars. Greasy strands
of black hair hung down around his melancholy face. There was a macabre tattoo of
a black widow spider on top of his right hand, faded with age.
“You can take the cuffs off,” I said. “We’ll be fine. Right,
Tommy?”
Lawson nodded as the guard produced a stubby key from his shirt
pocket. A few seconds later, the restraints were off, and the guard left the gloomy
room.
“You want to know about Kill Devil Hill?” Tommy asked.
“That right. How’d you know?”
“I just know,” he said. “Just like me and you have never
met, but I know you’re Eli McMorn, nightshift reporter at The Claiborne Herald.”
I figured the guard must have told him who I was and had maybe
given him the option to deny the interview. It would have saved the old guard a
few steps and simplified his shift.
On the other hand, Lawson could be a regular reader of the
newspaper. For years, The Herald has dropped off a complimentary bundle of
papers at the Haines Island mental hospital for its staff and inmates. I’d seen
a copy of today’s edition at the nurse’s station when I walked down the hall.
“You were the lone survivor from that night,” I said. “I want
to hear your side of the story.”
“Why?”
“People say it’s impossible to spend an entire night on top of
Kill Devil Hill, and I plan to do just that,” I said.
A wide grin broke across Lawson’s face. “Your funeral,” he
said. Through his parted lips, I could see a wet, moldering tooth in one corner
of his mouth. Lightning flashed outside, boom of thunder followed, a whiff of ozone
wafted down from the flickering fluorescent lights overhead. “You’ll find out
if you go up there.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because if you’re not bright enough to let sleeping dogs
lie, then you get what you deserve,” he said. “I wonder who’ll write the story about
you. Maybe they’ll come see me one day with questions about you.”
I ignored him and tried to get him back on track. “What were
you guys doing that night?”
“Just fooling around, like kids do,” Lawson said. “You know,
something that was never mentioned is that I only knew one of the kids who died
that night. Jimmy Creason was his name.
“He would show up sometimes to listen to my band, the
Dagons. We had the same tastes in music. I didn’t travel in the same circles
with the others.”
“So how’d you end up on Kill Devil Hill with the rest of
them?”
“We’d talked about the hill before,” he said. “Jimmy knew
that I could guide them to the hill in the dark. Which I did.”
“Why is that?”
“Because I was a lonely teenager who would do anything to
fit in.” Lawson drummed the fingers of his right hand on the tabletop, and I observed
that his fingernails had been chewed down to the quick. The spider tattoo on
the back of his hand moved oddly with the roll of his skeletal fingers.
“So what happened?”
“I took them up there,” he said. “They set up their little tents
and got a cheesy campfire going. We’d been there for a while, and everything
was cool until Jimmy’s sister brought out that Ouija board. That’s when
everything went sideways.”
(All rights reserved. This story is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author's
imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or
locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.)
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