James Mabry
Another journey on foot
[This story is part of the Good Witch universe. If you need to catch up on what these crazy kids are doing, check out the Table of Contents. James Mabry’s a new character, though, so feel free to enter here and look back later.]
The only thing worse than losing a fight with a cop is winning a fight with a cop. Reese Wynne was thinking of his cousin James Mabry when he said that on night in May, and perhaps it’s a case of having someone’s name in your mouth means they’re on their way, because James Mabry was at that moment walking down Highway 108 from McMinnville to Whitwell.
James was a thin pale Eminem-looking fellow, blond hair shading to gray, lips and fingernails a little gray. He was past 40 years old now, or 20 years out from winning a fight with a cop, slouching along towards home in a pair of donated jeans and button-down work shirt ditto. Evening turned to night as he neared Gruetli Laager. To his left he saw a fence and a wide cow pasture. He crossed the pasture, disturbing no one — the cows glanced at him, bored and friendly, and he looked back in the same spirit — and climbed a second fence, just a bit of barbed wire he could put his boot on to bend to the ground, really, and passed through a line of scrub cedar and came on a meadow sloping uphill. He heard water running and climbed the meadow toward it. Toward the top of the meadow he found a bit of exposed cliff — sandstone and churt — not much taller than he was, with a damp dell of ferns at its base and a spurt of water leaping out to form a little spring and a pool that trickled off and was lost in the tussocky grass.
He filled his hands once, twice, three times. The water spilled steadily from the rock, ice cold and tasting like iron. Then he climbed the side of the hill and came to the top of the cliff, where he held a dogwood trunk and looked back down the way he had come — meadow, fence line, cow field, highway 108 running north to south. Light fell on the highway, but he stood in shadow. The sun had already set under the mountain behind him.
James Mabry made a bed there on top of the small promontory. It was harder than the ground below, but at least he could see who was coming. He had a bit of a pack he used for a pillow.
Because it was a May night in southeast Tennessee, a mosquito bit James Mabry’s hand. Then a mosquito bit his throat. He put his baseball cap over his face and tucked his hands inside the opposite cuffs, leaving almost no skin available.
A little bit of neck. An exposed wrist bone.
Where they could, the mosquitos bit, bit.
After a while the cool night wind blew down the mountainside, bringing the smell of pine and scattering the mosquitos.
What the Mosquitos Did
Obligatory predators, Reese had called them. Little fliers, little she-cousins. He had been right and oh so wrong.
The mosquitos finished biting James Mabry, dispersed on the breeze, and collected themselves again further downhill. They can’t travel far, mosquitoes, so I’m afraid they cried their shrill cries — made of wings, of wind — and beseeched the bats to come and eat them.
Bats travel further than mosquitoes, you see, from cave and chimney up hill and down holler, miles when they want to.
These had less than 30 miles to go and they made it home by morning.
Messages travel — did you doubt it? — by blood and the thrum of blood, and when the bats got to Chattanooga the Prince of the City (we’ll use the popular language, why not, the Mind’s Eye fetishists made it trendy in the 90s and the vampires picked it up) stepped out onto the walkway around the old water tower down in the abandoned industrial site between Southside Gardens and the river.
The Prince held out his arms and the bats latched on, toes and clawed wing-tips clinging, awaiting his will.
James Mabry on the Mountain
Asleep, he fell down.
Falling, he flew.
Flying he traveled exactly where he wanted to go. The while farmhouse out from Whitwell where he had grown up. Where his cousin Reese now lived.
He had not walked this way for 20 years but the mountains didn’t change, or didn’t change that fast.
Once he knew every cave and aquifer. Once he could have gone by underground, swimming like a trace of indigo dye, Middle Tennessee to Chattanooga.
Now his legs walked and walked in stillness, the countryside spun before his sleeping eyes in darkness, he relived the day’s journey in a long silent film
Falling
Beautiful James, who could have been a hydrogeologist or a fancy sport spelunker or both had he not beat up that cop.
This was his first day in decades lived wholly, or mostly, or more than 30 minutes at the most, under the sun. Even asleep, his head spun. Sun east to west. He relived the wheeling light. And fell and flew up hill down dale, fleet as bird
The stipple of red bite bumps on his wrist and neck spoke to him. Conducted a charge. He became a filament.
He lit up the high valley and the Prince of Chattanooga, standing on his water tower gazing to the right of the setting moon, saw him.
The Prince rose up on wings of air and darkness (think about poor Reese, spraining his ankles jumping out the barn loft, well, yes, some vampires can really fly) and whirled north, steering west of Dunlap.
Though young, James had been a man of learning. He had used his stoic mindset and lean physicality bent toward endurance — even endurance of that hardest of all goads, boredom — to put himself to sleep for the better part of two decades. He had existed, but had not lived. That way he had stayed out of trouble. But he had forgotten who he was, and now he had no way of knowing that he was becoming someone else.
Darkness swarmed in at his nose and ears like a flurry of mosquitos.
I’m becoming myself again, he thought. I’m waking up.
Waking, he saw dawn sweet as apricot across the valley. He frowned.