Read Online November Mourns by Tom Piccirilli - Free Book Online Page A

of it filled the shack and made him clear his throat.
    He waited. Five minutes passed. It was a test of his patience, he knew. You learned more about people when they jumped than when they didn’t.
    The room was empty except for a small table in the corner, a plate and some utensils on it, and a kitchen area filled with wooden boxes and glass bowls filled with powders, roots, and herbs. Opposite that, a tiny bed with a cotton-stuffed mattress. At its foot rested the homemade wicker-backed wheelchair they would use to push her around downtown. Shad drifted over, inspected it, and recognized the work. His father had built everything in the house.
    M’am Luvell had crossed to the point where age no longer mattered. There was a timeless quality to her, like a stone outcropping barely forming the shape of an old woman. The fierce decades had passed her in these mountains and done what damage they could, but she’d survived the forces thrown against her.
    Shad tried to imagine how she might stretch her hand out and call him over to her. So that he’d crouch at her side while she patted his head with a diminutive hand, whispering words of understanding to him. You were always looking for somebody to trust.
    “Commiseration,” she said, opening her eyes. “Comfort and condolences.”
    “Thank you.”
    “First time you been by since you were a child.”
    He nodded, remembering back to when he was about five and Pa had brought him here. “You helped my father when he needed it.”
    “That wasn’t so much.” She noticed her pipe was out and laid it aside on the table. “I just gave him a game to take his mind off his troubles.”
    “It still does,” Shad said. “Considering the burden of his worries, that counts for a great deal.”
    “For some neighbors, maybe,” she told him. “But not all.”
    “Sure.”
    That was the end of it, these preliminaries. He felt it come to a close as if a cell door had slammed shut. M’am Luvell had pondered him long enough and was now ready. “So, what do you ask of me?”
    “I’m not certain,” he said.
    “Well, you think on it some.”
    She cocked her head, watching him impassively. He glanced around and wondered what the hollow folk did with their chickens when they brought them to her. Did they just toss them on the floor so that you had squawking hens flapping all over? What other payments did they make? Since there was no place else to sit, did they kneel? He couldn’t recall if his father had stood straight before M’am. Shad remembered lying on the floor, staring at spiders in the corner.
    “They say my sister just fell asleep out there in the woods on Gospel Trail.”
    “But you don’t believe it none?”
    “I want to have an answer.”
    She broke into a quiet titter that sounded like bones clicking together. “I always did like the Jenkins men. You got an easy honesty about you. Sometimes leaves you stupid and exposed, but it’s still a peculiar quality around these parts.”
    Shad was getting a little tired of people calling him stupid all the time, even if it might be true, but he said nothing.
    “You afraid of me, boy?”
    “No.”
    “Why’s that? Hex women scare most hollow folk.”
    Telling her the candid fact that geriatric dwarves didn’t hold much sway in the world most of the time just didn’t much appeal to him, so Shad went at it a different way.
    “I knew a guy in prison just like you. An older man who did a lot of smirking and chuckling. He knew people from the inside out and used it to his advantage. He talked up a streak and could slap you back into your place without half-trying. You looked at him and no matter who you were, you still saw somebody twelve feet high, with plenty of power in his face. It made a lot of cons cringe and hold their heads down.”
    “Who be that fella?” she asked.
    “The warden.”
    M’am Luvell burst into a brittle laughter and shuddered in her seat. Drool slid down her billy-goat chin and clung to the