November Mourns by Tom Piccirilli Page B

heaved around him, and he kept going further inside himself, hoping to talk to his mama, demanding it to be—that he was developing a skill that would come in handy in prison.
    He tried to center himself before the tombstone of his mother, drifting for a second while he sought out the dark, quiet place behind his eyes. Your strength had a name that wasn’t your own, and there were times you were going to need it. It would also need you.
    With one foot set on his mother’s grave, the other toed into his sister’s, he kept his eyes open waiting for Mags’s hand to flit into his vision once more and give him another sign. He shoveled the blackness aside like dirt covering her. The sound of his own heartbeat faded.
    His depths parted. He went further, intent on her whisper. He didn’t know what might happen if he ever hit bottom. It didn’t matter. You went where you were called.
    He kneeled, held out a fist to the ground, thinking how killers liked to stick close to their prey, even after it was dead. Would the malevolence in the hills climb down this far?
    He aimed himself. The world shifted to red as Shad hooked on to somebody, or perhaps something, moving in and out of view, brooding about him again. He held his hand out farther and slowly wriggled his fingers, the way you do to get fish to rise to the surface. His chest grew warmer. Mags was helping. Maybe Mama too. He started panting, eventually hyperventilating, as the indistinct and somehow
imperfect
shape, the glowing broken threads of an anguished aura still wheeling from it, turned its unfinished face toward him. And beneath it, another face, slowly becoming recognizable.
    There.
    Easy.
    He was almost there.
    Another moment, Mags. This is for you.
    He was almost . . . yes . . .
    . . . when he felt a weak influence fuss beside him, like a kid tugging at his elbow. Intruding on his purpose. Tushie Kline used to do it all the time, jabbering on about books, his homeboys, and anything else that flitted into his head. Tush couldn’t turn off his talk.
    It was over. Shad’s breathing returned to normal. The irritating force continued to pluck at his concentration until he looked over.
    Preacher Dudlow stood beside him, staring down at the ground, with his hands clasped over his mammoth belly, sucking at the edges of his mustache.
    Well now,
Shad thought.
    Most preachers Shad had run into were still brimstone types, thin as cottonwood and harsh as sun-scorched bone. They visited the hollow in their vans and set up tents out in the fields. They raved and slammed the meaty part of their palms into sinners’ foreheads and commanded them to heal. They took crutches and canes and busted them over their knees. You watched the cripples struggling to stand upright on their diseased, gnarled legs. Folks threw silver. Gospel singers caterwauled like beasts. Deaf men leaned over mumbling, “
I cahn heh thuh voice’a Jehsus
.” Maybe they could. They were as punchy as if they’d knocked back a jug of moon.
    But Dudlow had always been a happy, robust man, perfectly round but still sort of muscular, with his face tanned by his outdoor sermons in the pastures and his baptisms at the river.
    This afternoon he was bundled tightly in a sheepskin coat and wearing a bright red hunter’s cap with the flaps down over his ears. A mauve knitted scarf had been wrapped twice around his throat and still trailed over both shoulders, down to his ankles. Mrs. Swoozie, Dudlow’s mother, lived next door to him, around the side of the church. The only thing she’d ever found to ease the pain of her arthritis, so she said, was to keep busy crocheting and cooking around the clock.
    Shad didn’t know if Dudlow was genuinely unaware of his wife Becka’s lifestyle or not. The preacher might have simply repressed his knowledge beneath the weight of his religious beliefs. It was hard to admit to that kind of failure, especially to yourself. But Becka was usually crocked out on meth and a lot of