Down in the Holler: The Dream
Episode I
This is Down in the Holler, a serial speculative mystery novella featuring Judith Temple, psychic detective.
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Mist leeches through the mountains like a living thing, pouring down undulating hills and entombing the wet-leafed ground, darkened by the clustered trees.
A footpath runs through the dense, fog-shrouded wood, locked in the gray dark before sunrise. Leaves are slick with the dregs of winter. White clouds billow with each anticipating breath.
A trickle, a faint rush. Somewhere nearby a stream tumbles over rocks and tangled roots.
Ahead – a depression in the leaves, a concealed hole. A disturbance, unnatural in this isolated place.
Closer.
Wet, damp, hungry soil, grasping for air and light. Long-fallen leaves, a thick, dead carpet, impenetrable as the lid of a coffin.
A hole covered by ravenous soil and the decaying corpses of leaves.
Closer.
Leaves stir. A nudge, a straining for release.
Rustling. A glint, pale and translucent, faintly purple, peeking between the brown.
Closer.
A rough scrabbling. Deathly white fingers burst from the leafy carpet. A hand, palm creased with soil.
Reaching, grasping.
Judith’s eyes flew open with electric suddenness. But she didn’t jerk upright in bed, wheezing and sweating. Not this time.
She lay there, frowning, covers pulled up to her chin. Drawing long, deliberate breaths through her nose, she waited until her heartbeat slowed from a rabbit’s frantic pitter-pat-pitter-pat to a calm, dull thumping. Then, swinging her legs over the side of her bed and sliding into her slippers, she snatched the small notebook from her bedside table.
Mountains. Fog. Stream. Fallen leaves. Hand in the soil.
She scrawled the date in the upper corner, then tugged on a fluffy robe and padded through the dark house to the kitchen.
Flipping on the light to chase away the shadowy corners of the quiet house, Judith filled the kettle and plopped a tea bag into a mug. She glanced at the news app on her phone, grimaced, and turned away.
In the news, she might find an answer.
She might see a name, a story. A missing persons report, an Amber alert, a search party.
She might see a name, and the dream would make a twisted kind of sense.
Couldn’t she, for a few minutes, just enjoy tea and buttered toast in peace?
She would figure it out sooner or later. She always did.
Judith stuck her phone on top of the fridge. Out of sight, out of mind.
The sun, with its pale late-winter harshness, bloomed over the kitchen as Judith screwed on her thermos lid over her black coffee. Slinging her laptop bag and purse over her shoulder, she was just heading for the door when her phone rang from the top of the fridge.
Her phone. She’d almost left it. Judith set down her coffee and stood on tiptoe to reach to the top of the fridge.
The number wasn’t in her contacts. But it was a Kentucky number.
Could be spam, she thought, her thumb hovering over the screen.
Or it could be a client. “Hello?”
“Hi.” A woman’s voice came over the line, and from the first syllable Judith could hear a thick country drawl in her vowels. “Um. Is – is this Judy Temple?”
“Judith Temple.”
“Judith. Sorry. My name’s Anna May Schneider. I, um, I saw your ad. Online.”
“Yes?”
The woman gave a nervous laugh which shifted into a sigh. “This is probably gonna sound crazy.”
“I do the initial consultation for free, in which I let you know if I think your case is a good fit for me,” Judith said. “After that, readings come with a fee. And if I have to come to you, then you’ll pay travel costs as well.”
“Oh. Is this the, uh, consultation?”
“Yes.”
“Is this a bad time?” Anna May said, faltering. “You sound like you’re in a hurry. Should I call back later?”
“No.” Judith pressed the bridge of her nose. Don’t be rude. Her sister made being pleasant look so easy. Why could she never seem to master it? “No, it’s fine. I was about to head out the door when you called. But I set my own schedule, so it’s – fine.”
“Oh. Okay. So do I just…go ahead?”
“Yes. What’s the reason for your call?”
“Okay, like I said, this is gonna sound crazy.” Anna May gulped a breath of air, and in the long pause that followed, an image of her appeared unbidden in Judith’s mind: Sandy hair in corkscrew curls, fleshy and sturdy as a Michelangelo painting. A cigarette stubbed out nearby. Trying to kick the nicotine habit, but nerves made her slip up this morning, after the dream.
So here was her answer. It had found her, as it always did.
“You had a dream, didn’t you?” Judith sighed. “Tell me if this sounds right: Walking along a mountain path, lots of fog. You see what looks like a hole in the ground covered over by leaves. You look closer, and a hand reaches out toward you.”
For several moments, Anna May was silent on the other end. “How did you know that?” Her awkward cheeriness was gone, her voice quiet.
“Because I had the same dream.”
“That’s –” Anna May took another noisy breath. “I guess Google led me to the right person.”
Judith pulled her notebook from her purse, flipped to the most recent page, and scrawled Confirmed beside her scribbled dream. Then she sat down at her kitchen table and opened her thermos. She had hoped to get to the co-op early to settle into her rented office. Didn’t seem like early was going to happen anymore.
Yet, like weeds through concrete, through her chagrin poked a tingle of excitement. “Tell me what you think the dream means.”
A thick pause stretched over the line. “It’s just – I guess I don’t really know how to do this. I’ve never called a psychic before.”
“Just start at the beginning,” Judith said.
“The beginning?”
“Lots of people have weird dreams. With this particular dream, what made you pick up the phone and call a psychic detective?”
“It was –” Anna May floundered again, her breaths heavy on the other end.
Judith poked her fingernails into the skin of her palm, fighting to hold her tongue. She was not patient by nature. And she had a work deadline to meet. She needed to get the newest version of her project’s code to her boss by Friday, and this nervous, slow-talking Kentucky woman was eating into her Wednesday morning.
“I think the dream is from my sister.”
“Tell me about your sister,” Judith prompted after another pause.
“Well, she – she disappeared years ago.”
Okay, a missing persons case. This is nothing new.
“So what makes you think this dream is from her?”
“My sister, her name was Autumn. Autumn Hanson. She was partying with some friends one night – this would have been twenty-one years ago this April. They say one minute she was there, the next she wasn’t. Which was pretty normal for her. Mama called her a free spirit. Our stepdad said she was irresponsible and flighty. Sometimes she’d disappear for a few days and then show back up, saying she’d been staying with friends or her boyfriend or something. She was getting high; even I knew that. Oxy hit our town real bad around that time.”
“Oxy?”
“OxyContin,” Anna May said. “You know, the opioid.”
“Your sister was an addict?”
“You come up in the hollers, where all the movie theaters are closed down and the closest bowling alley is two hours away in Lexington, you’ll find most everyone is an addict,” Anna May said, a defensive prickle in her voice.
“Oh.” Judith shifted in her seat. She knew rural Appalachia had a drug problem. She’d heard the news reports and seen the headlines of essays and think pieces. But the stony reality of Anna May’s tone made Judith feel exposed, stupid. “So she had a habit of disappearing and getting high. What happened?”
There was a pause, a breath. “She didn’t come back. It wasn’t until almost a week later that my mama even called the cops. We never saw hide nor hair of her again, never heard a word. She was just gone.”
“What do you think happened to her?”
Anna May laughed, her loping voice breaking in a rueful, ragged sound. “I wish I could say I think she ran off somewhere, found a job, met a nice guy. But it’s been twenty years. Twenty years without a word. What else could have happened? I know she’s dead. Buried somewhere up in the mountains where there are no houses, no roads. If a young girl goes missing in these parts and doesn’t turn back up, that’s where she is.”
Judith swallowed. “Okay. So you say your sister sent you this dream. What is it that makes you think that?”
“I think – I think she’s trying to tell me something.”
“Like what?”
“If I knew that, I wouldn’t be calling you,” Anna May snapped.
Fair enough. A little more blunt than she’d expected from a coal country woman, but Judith could respect the sentiment. It was the sort of thing she herself would have said.
Anna May gave a little gasp. “I’m so sorry. That was rude. I don’t normally say things like that, especially to strangers. I guess it just gets me wound up, talking about this.”
“Not a problem,” Judith said. “So what is it that you want me to do?”
That was a little trick she’d learned from an online negotiation class: Don’t ask why questions. Not Why did you call me? That question prompted defensiveness, not answers. Much better were: What is it that you want? What is it that you saw? Neutral questions that led to concrete answers.
That course had done wonders for her conversation skills. Which, she had to admit, were in fairly dire need of help. Constance was the chatty, charismatic sister, not Judith. Constance could charm a story out of a rock. Judith could code a computer program to simulate the rock’s geologic formation over time or build a wall made of virtual rocks that fit together in a perfect mathematical pattern. Or, as she was now learning, she could have visions of the rock, about who touched it, who brought it to where it was, who hid a body beneath it.
“I want you to find her,” Anna May said. “I want to know what happened to her. It’s been over twenty years; I know she’s not coming back to us. I just – I want some peace for her.”
Judith’s eyes roved over her kitchen, with its tidy countertop, its shelves that she had organized for maximum efficiency. The silverware in the optimal drawer for easy placement when she needed to empty the dishwasher. The plates, stacked by size and color, in the cabinet near the stove. The spice rack alphabetized. No photos, no plants, no cozy lamp like Constance had in her apartment.
This dream, this phone call, this rural Kentucky missing persons case – none of it fit into her schedule.
But –
She had a project due on Friday. Almost everyone at the company took time off after a big project. She had plenty of paid leave, and she’d allotted a portion of it for cases like this that might pop up. There was nothing stopping her from taking next week off.
Judith pushed the bright, sprouting weeds of excitement, intertwined with sharp tendrils of fear, back under the concrete and took a breath. “I have a work project to finish this week, but I can drive to you on Saturday and stay through next week if needed. You said you’re two hours from Lexington?”
“That’s right. Salt Fork. It’s a little mountain town.”
“And you want me to do a reading to try to find your sister’s body?” Even as they left her mouth, the words tasted bitter on Judith’s tongue, but how else was she to say them? Massaging words to make them more palatable was Constance’s domain. Judith’s domain was precision.
A sniff on the other line, and Anna May’s voice, when she spoke, was thick and wet. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Okay, well.” Judith drummed her fingertips on the kitchen table and bit her lip. There was no way to be delicate about this. “I accept payment up front. PayPal, CashApp, Venmo, whichever you prefer. I’ll forward you my information and contract.”
With a hasty goodbye, Judith hung up and slung her laptop bag over her shoulder. It was a strange, liminal space, this in-between where she’d been living since her visions started. Judith was a creature of habit – schedules, plans, checklists. But these dreams, visions – whatever they were – they didn’t fit into her schedule, couldn’t be coded. And they weren’t always precise, however hard she tried.
Striding over to the dry-erase calendar on her wall, Judith drew a line through the next week, marking off the days with small, tidy letters.
COLD CASE. SALT FORK, KENTUCKY.
Read Episode II: The Family →
I should NOT have started this so late at night.
Yay!