The Curse of Crow Hollow by Billy Coffey Page B

yes, you better know it could get us both in trouble. Lord knows I don’t want it this way, but people need to know what’s happening. I need you to make some calls. Start a prayer chain.”
    â€œSure. What’m I supposed to say?”
    The Reverend turned to take another look. Through the small oval window, a nurse moved from the rack of desks in the center of the room toward Scarlett’s door. She carried a clipboard in her hand. The door to Cordelia’s room cracked open. Bucky walked out in search of a cup of coffee. I think it was the look on the constable’s face that clinched it for David Ramsay just then, that expression of worry and fear that besets the utterly overwhelmed. That would be everybody soon, if what Naomi said was true.
    â€œDavid?” Raleigh asked. “What should I say?”
    He told Raleigh everything.
    -9-
    By the time David Ramsay was doing exactly what he shouldn’t, Naomi sat in bed ready to do the same. She’d gone near twelve hours by then without talking to Cordy or Scarlett, having to rely on Hays for news of how they fared. Being cut off from her best friends like that was a source of anguish just as awful as the tremors and the memory of Alvaretta’s demon shouting the language of hell. She had only feigned rest, knowing it would be the only way her momma and daddy would entertain the same. With no witnesses in the room, Naomi reached under her covers and pulled out her phone.
    Belle had snuck it to her after supper, but made Naomi promise not to take it out around the nurses (and certainly not around her father). She knew it would be the one thing that might make her daughter feel better. Naomi brought it out now, scrolling through the dozens of texts from young folk wanting to know what had happened. She ignored them all and pressed the little picture that said MeTime. Her face twitched on the screen and wobbled in her shaky hands. She propped the phone against her knees and hit Record.
    â€œHey, y’all,” she whispered. Belle rustled in the chair beside her. When she settled again, Naomi saw her momma’s hands still clasped in prayer. “I’m so sorry. Scarlett wanted to go to the mines for her birthday. We shouldn’t have done that. The witch got us, that’s all I have time to say. I can’t stop shaking. Scarlett can’t talk. And Cordy . . .” She swallowed a sob. Lordy, it’s hard to imagine a body could hold so many tears. “We’re all sick. I think a lot more people are gonna get sick too. I’m so scared. Please pray for us. Pray for everybody.”
    Naomi wasn’t awake to see her video sent out into that MeTime air. She began to drift soon after and barely summoned the energy to place her phone beneath the pillow. By the time the Reverend got back, his daughter was full asleep. Not five minutes more passed before thirty of the town’s young gave her shout-outs. That number climbed north of a hundred within the hour.
    Children they were, children all, from the lowliest eighth grader to the lowliest high school senior, all the ones who’d sat in church that morning and seen the whole thing. They may have thought themselves grown and mature in the calm and tedious days that was life in Crow Holler, where the world’s always felt in shadow, but at least shrunken and predictable. But not a one knew the danger that lurked just beyond their sight. They knew not Reverend Ramsay’s war between light and dark that raged unseen and unfelt around them.
    They watched Naomi’s message on their little phones and watched it again. Their parents paced worn living room floors or sat at chipped kitchen tables and felt a heavy silence of dread press in. Fathers stared from windows and ran calloused hands through hair that felt thinner and looked grayer than it had that morning. Mothers held their telephones tight against their ears, taking information and giving it back, sifting