The Dark-Thirty (10 page)

Nealy shook his head.
“Saawa,”
he said, pointing to a pitcher of water.
“Saawa.”

After nervously pouring a glass of water, Leddy handed it to her son.
“Saawa.”
She repeated the word he’d used.

Nealy took it, smiling proudly because he’d finally made himself understood. After gulping down the water, he bounded off, chattering and squealing playfully.

Leddy followed behind him, desperate to know more. “Read,” she said, holding up a book.

“Froce,”
he said, taking it and climbing up onto his mother’s lap. Opening the book, Leddy pointed to the colorful pictures. “Bird,” she said.

Nealy covered his mother’s mouth with his hand and shook his head.
“Naga,”
he said.
“Naga.”

The next page. “Tree.”

“Pota.”

Leddy turned the page to a large brown bear. Nealy touched the picture with remembering fingers. “Boo Mama.” He clapped his hands and giggled. Then, trying to lift the image off the page, he shouted, “Boo Mama!” He kissed the picture.
“Toi ben tu
, Boo Mama!”

Leddy’s heart leaped with joy “You remember,” she said, putting Nealy down and rushing to the hall closet. Rummaging through a box, she found the tattered brown bear Nealy had affectionately called Boo.

She offered it to Nealy, but he pushed it away. “No. Boo Mama,” he said, pointing out the window and growing more fretful.

“This is Boo. Don’t you recognize your friend Boo?”

No matter how hard Leddy tried, Nealy wouldn’t be comforted. Looking out the window, he called again and again, “Boo Mama. Boo Mama. Boo Mama.”

That night Nealy cried himself to sleep. And so did Leddy.

At first light, Leddy and Nealy caught the bus to Knoxville. The first place she stopped was the language lab at the university. She gave them Nealy’s words and asked that they translate them and identify what language they were from. They told her it would take a few days to research, but if she’d leave a self-addressed, stamped envelope, they promised to forward their findings.

Then she went to the library and found several
books about child development. Nealy paged through a picture book while Leddy read: “Children often make up their own words for things. They create imaginary playmates and creatures with whom they can share a secret world.”

On the way to the bus station she and Nealy stopped to get ice cream. He seemed to enjoy the treat and laughed when it touched his nose.

“Thank … you … Mama,” he said haltingly. “Thank you.”

“Oh, Nealy!” Leddy shouted for joy. “You said words! And you called me
mama!”

“Toi ben tu, Mama,”
he said.

Leddy was more convinced than ever that Nealy’s strange talking was only a developmental phase. He was going to be fine—just fine.

It had been a wonderful day, until Leddy undressed Nealy for bed. A strip of hair had grown down the middle of his back. Leddy touched it with shaking hands. Overcome by guilt, Leddy reprimanded herself. “Maybe you should have let the doctors do more tests.” But as she held Nealy close in her arms, she felt comforted.

Finally Nealy went to sleep. Exhausted, Leddy fell across her bed and fell asleep, too.
She was awakened by a mournful wail that rose from the woods, filling the night with horror. Then came a metallic odor—a foul mixture of sulfur and coal—that she recognized as the smell that had been on Nealy when he came back.

Leddy rushed to the boy’s room. He wasn’t in his bed, under it, or in the closet.

She heard footsteps outside the house and looked up in time to see a large shadow move across the window. Was it a bear? Any minute she expected a wild animal to crash through the door. Leddy dropped to her hands and knees so as not to be seen, then crawled down the hallway. “Nealy!” she whispered. “Where are you?”

“Mama!” he said, running to her from the bathroom. “Mama,” he said, taking her hand and leading her to the kitchen. He wanted her to open the back door.

“No,” Leddy said, pulling him away. “Come here.” There was someone—something—at the back door. She could hear it breathing. Leddy held on to the boy tightly, but he struggled to free himself. “Boo Mama!”

Confused and terrified, Leddy yelled to the intruder, “Leave us alone. Please go away!”

It was hard to tell how long she sat on the floor holding Nealy, too afraid to move. At last,
when she thought it was safe, Leddy stood up and peered out the window, searching the moonlit backyard for signs of life.

“Mama,” Nealy said, reaching up. Leddy lifted him to the kitchen counter. He looked out the window and waved. “Boo Mama,” he said, pointing to the woods. A moonbeam fell across the boy’s face and Leddy saw, to her horror, that his eyes were flame red.

Morning arrived on a spectacular note. Spring was inching its way up Orchard Mountain, but Leddy paid no mind to the flowering dogwoods that laced the woods. She ventured into the trees for another reason.

With a shotgun hoisted over her shoulder and Nealy in tow, she waited, not knowing what to expect.

Right away she felt watched. Suddenly the normal hum of the woods had stopped. The absolute silence was unsettling. “Now is the hour. Stay cool,” she said, steeling her nerve and proceeding with the plan.

Circling the area, Leddy returned to the clearing behind the house. “Stay here in the backyard, Nealy,” she ordered. “I’m going into the house to get us some water.”

No sooner was she inside the door than the powerful odor came. Nealy recognized it and started toward the woods. “Boo Mama,” he called, his arms outstretched.

By using an old hunters’ trick, Leddy had doubled back through the house and reentered the woods from downwind. She hid in a clump of bushes that gave her a clear view of Nealy. He stood in a clearing, calling, “Boo Mama.” With the shotgun leveled and steady, she saw something incredible.

A hairy creature, big like a bear but with human features, emerged from a clump of bushes opposite Leddy. Without a single measure of fear or repulsion, Nealy rushed toward the creature, jabbering in his unknown tongue.

Gently the creature bent to scoop the child in its enormous arms, enveloping him with a big hug. “Boo Mama!” Nealy squealed happily.

Leddy watched the bizarre reunion with a mixture of fear and surprise. She was bewildered by the obvious trust and affection Nealy had for the creature. None of it made sense. Stepping from the safety of her hiding place, she aimed the shotgun at the creature’s head. “Put my baby down, or I’ll blow you to kingdom come.”

The creature pivoted and lowered Nealy to the ground. The boy clung to its legs.

“Come to me, Nealy,” Leddy ordered in her no-nonsense voice, holding out her arm.

Nealy was confused and looked to the creature for permission.

It nodded. “Mama.” The boy walked toward Leddy, looking back to make sure his friend was still there.

“Who? What are you?” Leddy asked. “What have you done to my child?”

The creature remained motionless, gazing at the gun with wondering red eyes.

Leddy studied the creature cautiously. “You’re not a bear or an ape,” she reasoned.

No response. “Look,” Leddy said, “if you can understand me, please say something … do something to show me you don’t want to hurt Nealy and me.”

Still no response. “Look at my son’s eyes!” she screamed. “Look at his back! He’s changing into—what?” Hot tears stung Leddy’s face. She pushed Nealy behind her. “Please tell me what’s going on. What have you done to him? Try to understand. Nealy is all I have in the world.”

The creature sighed. “I know.” The voice was thick and raspy but clearly female. Speaking
slowly, she said, “I brought him back to you.”

Nealy slipped from around his mother and rushed toward the creature. “Boo Mama!”

“So you’re the one he calls Boo Mama—it makes sense,” Leddy whispered, remembering Nealy’s teddy bear. There was a gentleness about the creature that eased Leddy’s fear. Feeling less threatened, she lowered the gun.

The creature explained, “You call us Sasquatch—Big Foot. We are the Gen. We are human, but different. Sun is not good for us. We live deep inside the mountain. There are others like us—everywhere.”

“Why did you take Nealy?”

“I found him hurt. He fell from a ledge.” Leddy gasped. “He was mostly dead,” the creature continued. “He needed blood or he would die. So we transfused him with our blood. We didn’t know what would happen. But Nealy lived.”

Leddy looked at Nealy’s red eyes and fought back tears. His hair had grown overnight to shoulder length. Patches of hair were growing on the backs of his hands. “Is he changing into one of you?”

“Yes. We should have kept the boy. But you cried and cried. I heard and brought him back.”

“How long will it take before he looks like—like you?”

“We don’t know.”

Leddy felt helpless. She kicked at the dirt with the toe of her shoe, then slumped on a nearby rock ledge. She wanted to hate the creature, but in spite of herself she couldn’t. After all, it had saved Nealy’s life.

“What is your name? I know you only as Boo Mama,” Leddy said.

“I am Noss,” the creature said, sitting beside Leddy. Nealy played contentedly between the two of them, and as much as her limited English would allow, Noss talked about her civilization. Her people had conquered disease, overcome hatred and greed, and harnessed resources within the earth to prolong life. Noss was one hundred and seventy years old, but considered middle-aged.

Leddy sighed. “A lot of people have been locked up, beaten, and even killed for daring to dream of such a world,” she said, remembering.

Darkness always came to the woods faster. Noss sniffed the air, then ended the conversation by standing. Leddy grew uncomfortable. She hopped to her feet, too. “I’d better be going now,” she said, taking Nealy’s hand.

Noss blocked her way. “The boy must come with me. He can no longer live in your world. He will die.”

Leddy felt her knees buckle. “No,” she said, grasping at straws. “There must be some other way.”

“No,” Noss said, calling Nealy in her language.

“No!” Leddy said, raising the shotgun. “Come to me, baby.”

The child looked from one to the other. “Mama. Boo Mama.”

Noss spoke to the boy in her language.

The boy answered, “
Toi ben tu
, Boo Mama.
Toi ben tu
, Mama.”

Noss turned to Leddy, and in a single movement she took the shotgun and twisted it into a heap of metal. “He says he loves us both. What if you and Nealy both come with me?”

“You want
me
to come too?”

“It is your choice.”

Leddy looked at Nealy. His red eyes sparkled beneath bushy eyebrows. “
Toi ben tu, Mama,”
he said, smiling.

“
Toi ben tu
, Nealy,” Leddy answered. “More than anything in
this
world.”

For a while folks in Orchard City talked about
Nealy and Leddy’s disappearance from the mountain. Finally they decided that even though they left all their belongings, there was no sign of foul play. Perhaps Leddy and the boy had relocated somewhere else.

That explanation satisfied everybody except Leddy’s old friends and Sheriff Martin. Every now and then Germaine and Sylvia would come up to Orchard Mountain. They’d go to Leddy’s place and look around, hoping to find something that might explain her disappearance. Sheriff Martin helped, despite the fact that his inventory of clues was scanty. In the clearing he’d found a twisted shotgun and a series of footprints that led nowhere. In the house he’d found a letter from the university stating that the words Leddy wanted looked up—
saawa, froce, naga, porta
—weren’t part of any known language.

Standing on the ledge where Nealy’s teddy bear had turned up, they discussed a scrap of paper, the clue they felt was the key to solving the case. Why, they wondered, had Leddy written
BOO MAMA
and underscored it several times?

L
aura paused to look in the window of the Mother Africa Shop. She smiled when she saw the small ebony figure of a squatting woman with her arms folded around her knees. It was a pose her four-year-old daughter Lizzie took whenever she discovered something fascinating in the grass and wanted to observe it more closely.

Laura decided to go inside. But as she approached the door she gasped and stepped back. Glaring at her from the window was a hideous toothless hag with burning silver-hot eyes.

But once in the shop Laura saw no one. Where’d that thing come from? she wondered. She blamed stress—with a big S—the culprit of the nineties. Moving to a new city and a new job, all in the past eight months, had finally taken its toll.