Realizing the truth of her words calmed her enough to focus. Vern inhaled and exhaled. Reverend Sherman vanished. “It’s just the two of us now,” Vern told Gogo, drying what remained of her tears with the collar of her shirt.
“Come here. Sit down,” said Gogo, but Vern needed to pace. “Tell me what happened. Are you okay?”
“Lucy’s dead,” said Vern. A chill passed through her as she admitted the truth aloud. Gogo’s silence told Vern she’d already suspected as much.
“How can you know for sure?”
“Reverend Sherman said that’s how I get the memories. When someone dies, they go into the land.”
All along it had been that simple. The fungus ate the brains of the dead who had hosted it, bringing them back to life in its mycelium.
Gogo sat with her elbows on her knees, her chin on her clasped-together fingers. “I’d been wondering what the mechanism for that was. I’m so sorry about Lucy. I know Ina will be sorry to hear it, too.”
“It’s not like I didn’t know there was a good chance of it.”
“Still.”
Vern sucked in trailing snot. “Sherman said a lot of stuff.”
“Stuff you can trust?”
“I think so.”
Vern tried to remember everything he’d said, and Gogo wrote it down in her notebook.
“It doesn’t sound good,” said Gogo.
“You think they’re planning something?” asked Vern. Brother Freddy’s talk of a new plane of existence. He was another government plant, I bet, following in Eamon’s footsteps. “I should talk to my family. Make sure they’re okay.”
The thought of this Freddy grooming Carmichael—he was just a child. She’d once called him a foolish boy who’d grow into a foolish man, but that was the thinking of a juvenile. He could not be expected to maintain his dignity in the face of a man deliberately undoing him.
“My little brother might listen to me. He might find a way to leave. I can’t not help him.”
Gogo grabbed Vern by the hand and pulled her close. “You know I understand.”
That morning, Vern called the office of the Blessed Acres from a burner.
“Good morning, this is Ruthanne speaking. How may I help you this blessed day?”
Vern did not hesitate to speak this time. “It’s me,” she said. Ruthanne hung up, and this time, she did not call back.
18
JOY DIDN’T COME EASY amid late March showers. Gushing heavens, gray as a Gulf Coast winter, roused visions of the drownt child.
“Tell me your name,” Vern commanded the child with a boldness she did not feel. Was he a Cainite, too? Another test subject? Gogo theorized that the only hauntings to awaken were those in which the fungus had fed on their brains in full. Otherwise, they were mere glimpses.
Brown water spurted from the drownt child’s throat, and a stream of river slime dribbled from his eyes. Festering holes sprouted where fish feasted on his flesh.
“Tell me!” Vern cried, more fungus than girl. The day terrors haunted from dawn till dawn till dawn till dawn. From every tree dangled the bodies of the lynched, and from every pit of bubbling mud rang the desperate squeals of corpse-pigs awaiting slaughter.
Vern had left the Blessed Acres more than four years ago, but the hauntings were a reminder she could not wrest herself from the compound’s hold.
The compound. Vern sneered. Laboratory was a name better suited to what was going on there. Cainites weren’t victims of humanity gone awry. They were survivors of government experimentation.
“Mam!” Howling called through the cabin’s screen door.
“What do you want?” asked Vern, voice shrill. On the porch swing beside her, a woman who was not there was whistling her dogs home. Her shoulder brushed Vern’s, and Vern had to hold her breath to keep herself from vomiting.
“Come here, please,” Howling said, face pressed up against the screen. The gray mesh distorted his puffy cheeks and lips.
Vern stood from the swing, but the hand of the not-there woman slithered around her wrist. “Why don’t you stay out here, John? Aint the sunshine so pretty?” Rain pelted the clearing in thick droves, and blooms of ash-colored clouds darkened the sky.
Trembling, Vern gently tugged her wrist away. “Suit yourself,” said the woman.
Inside, Howling and Feral sifted through a box of picture books Bridget had bought for five dollars from the community resale.
“Mam, can you read to me?” asked Howling. His childish request would’ve been welcome distraction were it not for the four little girls bundled in a blanket in front of the woodstove, lips blue from cold.