When Devils Sing
Xan Kaur
For my mother and my aunt.
I made sure it wasn’t all for nothing.
&
For B and M.
Wish You Were Here.
In the Southern night everything seems possible, the most private, unspeakable longings; but then arrives the Southern day, as hard and brazen as the night was soft and dark. It brings what was done in the dark to light.
—James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son
PROLOGUE
SECRETS OF THE SOUTH
SEASON 4: TEASER
(INTRO THEME SONG)
HOST: Down in rural Southwest Georgia, there’s a sleepy town called Carrion. It’s in this town, every thirteen years, that a swarm of millions of cicadas crawl out of the earth, rising from their extended slumber.
Then, as one, they begin to scream.
FORMER CARRION RESIDENT, LEE WATKINS (phone): Now, I ain’t lived in Carrion in some years, but I still remember the sound of those damned things. Make you go deaf, if you not careful. But let me tell you this: Those cicadas bring nothin’ good. And that’s all I’m gonna say on that.
(phone call ends abruptly) HOST: What makes a town? Is it the people who live there, or the secrets they keep?
In this season, we will explore the history of a dying small town in Southwest Georgia, the wealthy lakeside community that keeps the region afloat, and the mysterious deaths and disappearances that occur on the water every thirteen years.
Because for the townspeople of Carrion, the arriving cicadas are more than just a scientific marvel. They’re an omen.
PART ONE
There’s the devil you know
The devil you don’t
The devil you wish you’d never met
CHAPTER 1SAM
Perched unsteadily next to her brother’s limp body in the back of an ambulance, Sam Calhoun prayed. To who, she didn’t quite know.
She gripped the railing of the gurney as the ambulance picked up speed, rounding the corners of Carrion’s dusty backroads. Outside the windows, there was only all-consuming dark. The population in the sticks was too sparse, too spread out for the county to justify the cost of lighting nothing.
The moon was covered by smoke that night, which only made the darkness worse. It was the last day of burning season in Langley County, the final chance for residents to burn the piles of leaves and brush on their property before it became illegal for the summer.
Sam’s throat ached.
Maybe the fires were to blame for the accident. Maybe it had been too smoky to see clearly.
Sam knew it was a ridiculous thought as soon as it crossed her mind. The blame for the accident fell squarely on the person who hit her car and drove off, leaving her and her brother for dead.
Sam leaned forward to brush Ben’s red hair from his face. His left eye was closed, his right swollen shut. He was a mess of blood and wounds. His small frame looked even smaller against the size of the gurney, made worse by the tubes and equipment attached to him.
Her brother had already been unconscious when Sam had crawled her way out of the wreckage, and he hadn’t stirred when the paramedics showed up and set to work. Sam didn’t know what kind of pain her brother was in. She hoped he couldn’t feel it, wherever he was inside his own head.
The paramedic across from her studied Ben’s vitals on the monitor. He frowned and shouted something in medical code to the driver, but Sam couldn’t follow.
“What’s wrong with him?” she asked, growing more frantic by the second. “What’re you sayin’?”
The paramedic ignored her, his focus wholly on her brother.
Sam stared at the monitor—it was only a flurry of lines and numbers, none of which she understood. Save for one.
Ben’s heart rate was slowing to a crawl.
Sam’s own heartbeat thumped harder within her chest in response.
Ben’s pulse stopped.
The machines began to scream.
The paramedic grabbed a pair of scissors and sliced Ben’s T-shirt open from collar to hem. Sam winced as the defibrillator pads were placed on her brother’s bloodied skin.
One shock.
His body jolted.
Two shocks.
His body jolted again.
But his heartbeat didn’t return.
The paramedic shouted to the driver once more. The ambulance made another sharp turn. Sam gripped the gurney harder to avoid flying off the bench.
Moments later, the vehicle lurched to an abrupt stop. The back doors of the ambulance swung open, and bodies in blue scrubs shouted to one another in more medical code as they rushed Ben’s gurney onto the ground and through the doors of the hospital.
Sam trailed after them, watching as Ben and the gurney disappeared behind a set of doors, putting further space between her and her dying brother.
A nurse in scrubs appeared and motioned Sam into a nearby room. Her lips moved, but Sam wasn’t listening. She started toward the doors at the end of the hall, but the woman moved in front of her.
“No, ma’am,” the nurse warned, “you can’t go where he’s goin’.”
Sam kept moving. Distantly, she was aware of the dull, throbbing pain in her right ankle. A stinging welt across her ribs from the seat belt. The nauseating tightness of whiplash along the length of her neck. She was aware of it all, but she didn’t feel it. Not really. She needed to get to Ben.