He lost track of time and was unsure how long it had been when Rhodes returned, shutting the door behind him with a depressing thud. He sat down across the table from Ben and began shuffling through some paperwork but said nothing.

  “I want a lawyer,” Ben said. He knew enough of the American legal system to make that request.

  Rhodes looked up briefly from his paperwork but said nothing.

  “Look, I know my rights,” Ben said. Some of them, at any rate. “I know I don’t have to talk to the police without a lawyer.”

  Rhodes stacked the papers in a neat pile then looked at him, face calm and serious as death. “Mr. Potter, you appear to be laboring under the mistaken impression that you are involved in some kind of criminal investigation.”

  “I’m not?” Ben asked. “Because the handcuffs and being locked in a windowless room kind of suggest otherwise.”

  Rhodes shook his head. “Officially, you are no longer under arrest,” he said. “Turns out I lacked the probable cause to believe you had committed a crime. Sorry.” His tone was less than sincere.

  Ben began to stand up. “Then I’m free to go, right?” he asked before Rhodes waved him to sit back down.

  “I didn’t say that,” Rhodes explained. “I’m just waiting for someone else to join us. When he arrives, we’ll ask you some questions. Nothing’s going to be used against you in court. You’re not going to jail. We just need to talk.”

  “This is bullshit,” Ben said. “Either charge me with a crime or let me go.”

  Rhodes leaned back in his chair, looked at the ceiling, and let out a frustrated sigh. “Mr. Potter, how much did you know about West Virginia history before you came here a few days ago?”

  “Not much,” Ben said. “It’s not a subject taught in much depth in English schools.”

  Rhodes let that pass without comment. “And in your research these past few days, did you read anything about how much authority the local sheriff had back in the early twentieth century? How much leeway he was given in order to protect the people of his county?”

  “No,” Ben said, stiffening a bit with discomfort. “I saw a lot of talk about the sheriff and people who wanted to be sheriff.”

  “For good reason,” Rhodes said.

  “Fascinating, but how is any of that relevant to your detention of me against my will?” Ben asked.

  “Let’s just say that some things haven’t changed much around here for over a hundred years,” Rhodes said.

  Before Ben could ask precisely what that meant, there was a knock on the heavy metal door that rattled through the room. Rhodes got up and opened it.

  “Bet that offer’s lookin’ pretty good now, ain’t it, boy?” McGee said as he waddled through the door. “Shame you turned it down.” McGee settled into the chair with Rhodes taking up station behind him.

  “What’s he doing here?” Ben asked of Rhodes. “He some sort of deputy or something?”

  McGee leaned forward and gestured for Ben to do the same. “You see, Mr. Potter, Sheriff Rhodes and I are a bit of a two-man committee,” he said in a loud whisper. “We’ve sworn to do something that most wouldn’t understand or would simply laugh off.”

  “If you mean pick up foreigners, arrest them on trumped-up charges, and lock them in a windowless room, I can tell you I don’t find it funny at all,” Ben said. Why be subtle now?

  McGee grinned at him. “Come now, Mr. Potter. I can’t believe that you are truly as naïve as you would like us to think.”

  “Thank you?” Ben asked, unsure if it was compliment or insult.

  “Surely you must know by now that this town and this county have a secret,” McGee said. “A secret that Sheriff Rhodes and I are intent on keeping.”

  “Wait a second,” Ben said as several things fell into place in his head. “Are you saying that you not only know about those… whatever they are up in Moore Hollow, but you’ve sworn to keep their existence a secret?”

  “Your questions will be answered,” McGee said. “Your persistence has earned you that much, at least. But first, we have some questions for you of our own.”

  Rhodes picked up a piece of paper off the table. “Your full name is Reginald Benjamin Potter, IV, correct?”

  “Yes,” Ben answered.

  “Born in Leeds, Yorkshire, England to Reginald Benjamin Potter, III and his wife, Judith, correct?” Rhodes went on.

  Ben nodded.

  “You are a journalist, of some kind,” Rhodes said. “One of the places you’ve published work is something called the London Journal of the Paranormal, isn’t that right?”

  “Yes,” Ben said.

  McGee relaxed a bit in his seat. “Cut the shit, boy,” he said, pointing a pudgy finger at Ben. “You aren’t here on some sort of feel good mission of family business, are you? You’re here because of that journal, or some other one like it, aren’t you?”

  “How’d you find out all of this stuff?” Ben asked. He damned well knew but was trying to string things along until he figured out his next move.

  “I told you, Mr. Potter, I have my means,” McGee said. “I won’t pretend that we are London or New York or even Charleston, but even in little ol’ Jenkinsville we’ve heard of the Internet.”

  Ben knew he was caught, but he couldn’t be sure how much they knew. Did they know what to look for to find all his dirt? Did they know to look for newspaper reports about the libel case? If not, he could still figure a way out. All he wanted to do now was get out of here and he had to assume he could manage it.

  “All right, you got me,” Ben said, throwing up his hands in mock surrender. “I’m an investigative journalist. Yes, I’ve written pieces for the London Journal of the Paranormal. And, yes, they were the ones who paid my way here.”

  McGee turned and looked at Rhodes. They shared a look of quiet satisfaction.

  “But what I told you before, about my family problems? That’s all true too,” Ben said.

  McGee sat and looked him, clearly not impressed. “We’ve blown your cover, Mr. Potter. There’s no need to continue this deception.”

  Ben shook his head. “It’s not a deception. The only reason the Journal sent me here is because the editor found an old diary that belonged to my great-grandfather. He really did work here between about 1905 and 1907. He really told his son stories about the 1906 election, which his son—my Granddad—then told to me. It’s been a huge wedge between my father and me for years. So, yes, while it’s true that the Journal sent me here, the only reason I agreed to come was because of the family issue.”

  Ben stopped to see what McGee would say next, but nothing was forthcoming. He decided to push on.

  “Besides, if you actually read anything I wrote for the Journal, you should be able to tell that I don’t really believe in any of that nonsense. I debunk it, more or less, within the confines of a piece published in a place like the Journal.”

  Rhodes and McGee looked at each other again. It looked like they were buying it.

  “Now that we’ve got that out in the open, the question is what comes next?” Rhodes said. “What’s it going to take for you to keep quiet about what you’ve seen? To not tell anybody else about it?”

  Ben put on an air of pleasant cooperation. “Not a bloody thing. No story, no problem. My editor told me when I left that if I came back with a story, that’s great, but if I didn’t it was no problem. That happens sometimes in this business. She said I could write a travel piece about my journey and sell it somewhere, but to be honest, that would be a pain in the ass. I don’t have any great desire to tell the world what’s going on down here, if I’m telling the truth.”

  “What about your family?” McGee asked. “Your father? You’ll give up this information that you’ve wanted to have for so long just because we say so?”

  “Look, it’s not that important,” Ben said, trying his best to mean it. “My father and I haven’t gotten along for a long time due to things that have nothing to do with your situation here. After all, I’m sure you’ve got some good reason to keep this all secret, to go so far as to violate the rights of a subject of Her Majesty to secure his cooperation. What’s a little family squabble compared to that?” In his heart, Ben knew this was not completely a lie. He was skeptical that his father, presented with any kind of evidence, would change his mind about Granddad. At least it let Ben seem sincere. “But if I’m going to go along with you, I at least want to know the truth.”

  McGee and Rhodes looked at each other again.

  “That’s the price of my silence,” Ben said. “I want to know the truth. About everything. About what I saw out in Moore Hollow, about the being I saw shuffling down the highway the other night, about this little violation of my civil rights.”

  “How do we know you’re not bullshitting us?” Rhodes asked with surprising directness.

  “Well, for one thing, you know everything about me, apparently, so what else could I possibly hide?” Ben said it, dearly hoping he was right. “For another, I’ll turn over all my notes.”

  “Notes?” McGee asked.

  “A few of them are handwritten,” Ben said. “But most of them I dictated into a digital recorder. It’s got the interview with Gabe’s old friend too.”

  Rhodes skipped a beat at that reference. Their boat had sprung a leak, even if a small one.

  Ben grinned, just a bit. “It’s all yours. Lock it up, burn it, throw it in the bloody river, I don’t care. Even if I talk, without anything to back me up, who’s going to believe me?”

  “What about the journal?” Rhodes asked. “Your great-grandfather’s, I mean.”

  “Sorry, it’s back in London,” Ben said. “I’ll get rid of it.” That was most definitely a lie. It was Artith’s anyway.

  Rhodes turned, walked to the large one-way mirror, and sighed. “Go ahead.”

  Ben sat back, relaxed just a bit, convinced he knew the measure of their knowledge of him. They didn’t know about the libel suit, didn’t know he was a court-sanctioned liar.

  “You know about the 1906 county court election, right?” McGee asked.

  “Coleman versus King Tommy,” Ben said. “Sure.”

  “Right,” McGee said. “So you know that King Tommy was already on the court and a very powerful man. He wasn’t popular, though. The miners, particularly, hated his guts. They waited for another candidate to step up and speak for them.”

  “Which was Coleman,” Ben said. No new information yet.

  “Right,” McGee said. “There had been others before him, you know. Coleman was different. He wasn’t some commie bomb thrower. He was politically smart, had experience in other places. He was better than Tommy at the nuts and bolts of a campaign, the organization, the mobilization of voters. He put the fear of God into Tommy, that’s for certain.”

  “So King Tommy had to do something drastic,” Ben said, growing a little impatient.

  “He knew that the county voter rolls hadn’t been purged in forever. People weren’t taken off after they died. God knows how many dead people were technically still eligible to vote in Vandalia County. King Tommy thought he could use that to his advantage but knew he couldn’t just add some names to the vote totals. Too easy to get caught.”

  “So he decided to raise the dead,” Ben said. It was not a question, just a statement of fact.

  McGee sighed and shook his head. “We still don’t know how he got a hold of that damned book.”

  “Would that be Employing the Undead, or A Treatise on the Raising and Care of Those Deceased?” Ben asked. “Got that one too. Back in London.” It pleased him to surprise them.

  “That’s the one,” McGee said, trying to hide his shock and not doing well. “He used it to raise the dead, a bunch of people who had died in the past few years but who were still on the voter rolls. About forty of them. He figured that would be enough to swing the election.”

  “Since Coleman won the election, I know it didn’t work,” Ben said. “But why not?”

  “Nobody’s quite sure, really,” McGee said. “Maybe Tommy didn’t read all of that book before he raised ’em, didn’t do somethin’ he needed to. Or maybe they can’t be controlled at all. You saw ’em. How do you control a bunch of beings that don’t even acknowledge that you’re there?”

  Ben laughed. “You’ve got to appreciate the irony. Here’s the other thing I haven’t been able to figure out—what happened next? I mean, why are they still here?”

  “Once the election was over, the zombies…” McGee paused for an aside. “We don’t really like to use that term, but it’ll do for now. Anyway, they were just here in town, maybe with a few out wandering in the hills. They didn’t do anything. It wasn’t like in the movies, ya know, with them charging around eatin’ brains or what not. They didn’t eat anything. They didn’t drink anything. They didn’t do anything!” McGee’s personal aggravation, either at Ben or the situation in general, was evident.

  Rhodes took over. “Two schools of thought popped up in town, both led by local ministers. One argued that the zombies were abominations unto God and needed to be destroyed. He never got so far as to explain just what he meant by that or what it would entail, but he was very hostile and developed a vocal, if small, group of followers. The other minister argued that, regardless of their undead state, the zombies were children of God too. They were harmless and, more to the point, defenseless, and it would be wrong to simply do away with them. As good Christians, the community had some obligation to protect them. In the end, the county court went with the second viewpoint. Completely off the record, of course.”

  “That explains all the oblique references to election irregularities,” Ben said. “All right, that’s step one. So how did they wind up in Moore Hollow?”

  “That was actually Coleman’s idea,” McGee said. “He said the best thing to do was find a place where those folks could stay, out of the way of the townspeople and where they could be left alone. They didn’t need anythin’ much, just some place to congregate. They wouldn’t be forgotten about, necessarily, but put out of mind. For their own protection.”

  “As for why Moore Holler itself, we just don’t know,” Rhodes added. “You have to understand, none of this is written down anywhere. It’s all been passed down, word of mouth, for years.”

  “So some people came together, found that spot just outside an old mine shaft, cleared out the area in front of it, and herded the zombies down into it,” Rhodes explained. “It works pretty well, in terms of keeping ’em there. One gets out every once in a while, but they never get very far. By the time all that was done the ‘destroy ’em all’ minister and his faithful had left town as it was cursed and rife with sin. You understand.”

  Rhodes changed mood sharply and stepped toward Ben until he was almost on top of him, glowering down. “Which brings us back to why we’re all here in this room. Since 1906, it’s been the responsibility of the elected sheriff and one upstanding member of the community—that’s Mr. McGee here—to ensure both that those folks stay where they should, but also that they be left alone and in peace.”

  “So how many people know about this?” Ben asked. “A few? A dozen? How can the entire town not be in on it?”

  “At first, the entire town was,” McGee said. “It was a more close-knit community back in those days. But as the years passed, people forgot. The people who ran the town decided it was better to let folks stay ignorant. Easier to keep things under wraps, understand?”

  “What about Wylbert?” Ben asked. “He knows, right?”

  McGee shook his head. “A few requests here and there is all that’s needed. Keep a lookout for outsiders comin’ ’round asking odd questions.”

  “How do you think I knew to look for you?” Rhodes asked. “You think the sheriff does road patrol every night?”

  “So, that’s it? Just the two of you?” Ben asked.

  “It was, until today,” McGee said, sighing. “Now your friend Mel knows too.”

  “What?” Rhodes said as surprised as Ben.

  “She’s a historian!” McGee said. “She was gonna start asking questions, anyway. Thought it was better to bring her into the conspiracy, so to speak.”

  Ben’s accent had given him away, naturally. “But what about the one that got out, that I saw on the road that night? You can’t keep that from people forever.”

  McGee laughed. “You’d be surprised in a small town how much people don’t want to see, Mr. Potter. It’s easy enough to see some poor soul shambling down the street and see just another Oxy addict, just another meth head. Nothing out of the ordinary.”

  “But it’s such an amazing story,” Ben said, much to his own surprise. “Proof of the undead here, among us, deep in these mountains. Doesn’t the world have a right to know about what happened here? Hell, don’t the people living down the road have that right?”

  Rhodes was silent.

  McGee tut-tutted through his teeth and looked at Ben. “Mr. Potter, what d’you think would happen if this story got out? If the world, as you say it, knew the truth?”

  Ben said nothing, having not thought it through that far.

  “People would be down on us like fleas on a hound,” McGee said. “While that would certainly provide a needed economic boost for the area, at what cost would it come? People would just be comin’ to gawk at those folks up in the holler. They can’t talk to ’em. Can’t study ’em, really. What’s the point?”

  Ben struggled for a moment to think of a retort. He couldn’t. “So you’re just going to go on keeping it a secret?”

  “We’ve done it for over a hundred years,” Rhodes said. “We’ll keep it up as long as we can. Which is why—”

 

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