Out of Devil's Hollow

By C.S. Whitman

Suzy Jennings is nine years old. The year is 1957. While playing
in a dry creek bed on the back acres of her parents farm, she
overhears an argument between two men. Frightened she keeps
this knowledge to herself with deadly circumstances.
Clyde and Lorna Jennings has a secret. A secret that they have
protected for twenty-five years. When their way of life and
family is threatened by exposer Clyde swears he will do anything
to protect his family. But murder? When events take a turn.
Inhabitants of the hollow take care of their own.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781796074932

Book preview

Prologue

Tormented souls still lingered in this place; voices still cried out from the in-between. Voices … real or imagined, she could no longer tell.

She had buried her mother today in the old graveyard by the small Baptist church beside her daddy’s grave. They were born here and died here, secrets forever buried with them.

An old plywood FOR-SALE sign hanging listlessly on a rotted post stared back at her. No offers in seventeen years. No one had an interest in a land of shadows.

Suzy Wyman herself had hammered the old plywood sign into the earth near the entrance to her family’s homestead—120 acres of the richest farmland in Devil’s Hollow. She had hoped the developers from Cedar View subdivision would be interested in buying the Jennings land to further expand the subdivision, but like everything else in Devil’s Hollow, the homes in Cedar View were now in need of paint and repairs with owners who had little hope of finding money for either. Builders were long gone. As time passed, different owners moved in and out at regular intervals. So it was with the Jennings land—land of overgrown, dense woods; fields of bramblebushes; and buildings falling in upon themselves, rotting under vines and choke weeds that devoured what remained of any existing structure.

For now, Devil’s Hollow belonged to her. It was a home she once loved as a child before she became old at the age of nine, the summer before her tenth birthday. A summer that still haunted her seemed to now mock her presence. It felt as if she had always been old—as old as the resolute pain she felt.

A light mist fell from the gray sky with no promise of sun today. Wild roses, wood ivies, and weeds claimed the now rutted path that led to what was left of the old farmhouse where Suzy was born and where her family had died either of natural causes, sickness, or evil. Only lost souls were left to the remembrances of horror that had blanketed the lives of so many that summer.

Pausing at the old iron gate under the cover of ancient oaks, she began to make her way through brambles and mud, zigzagging her way on what gravel remained of the rutted road that once was lined on either side with tall cedars, now no more than an overgrown path. She looked back to where Mark, her husband, was waiting in the car, keeping the motor running. A quick look around, she thought. She could not resist the pull from the past that kept her moving forward till the remains of a brick chimney came into view.

Almost there. Tightening a scarf over her auburn hair and shoving her small hands into the pockets of her raincoat, she began to walk into the past.

Suzy melted among shadows. She moved among the burned remains. Suddenly, she stopped and looked back. The sounding horn startled her from her musings. The car was no longer in sight. Suzy knew Mark was impatient to return to the city, away from this place and the unpleasantness of the day. She lingered a bit longer, falling back into another time and place … a place where Mark did not exist and would never exist in this world.

She moved toward the backyard where her home once stood, looking for the opening where the dense woods still waited for her. The woods where it all began. She knew the images were still there down that chamber of terror. Could she have changed things if she had only spoken out? Even now as her heart beat faster, she could not dare to look lest she saw the images again. Sighing, she turned back and made her way to the waiting car. A cold wind buffeted her past the ruins of her childhood. Would she never escape the nightmare that was forever branded in her mind? Could she have prevented the horror that summer when her childhood was stolen from her, or did her silence become the beginning?

Suzy rarely came back to the hollow since graduating high school and moving on to college where she met Mark Wyman. Through college, the memories faded as she kept to her studies before her graduation and a new job. When she and Mark married, she felt protected. She wondered if there was any protection from the past, a past that fell around her like a cloak of steel. If she allowed the memories of that past to seep from the recesses of her mind, where they were locked away, would she still feel Mark’s protection?

She looked back over the field toward the Baptist church. Everyone had left, leaving the dead with the dead. She did not know many of the members who now worshipped in the small church, just a few old-timers along with her brother Charles and his wife. Not many friends left to attend the ceremony, but it was something Suzy had to do. She had made a promise when Mamma left the farm and moved into town some years back that she would bury her in Devil’s Hollow next to Daddy’s grave. After her father died, it just seemed safer to move her mother into town, away from the loneliness of the farm where there was no one who could care for her or the land. Suzy had an obligation. The last deed was done, the last of many deeds since that summer of ’57 in the hills of eastern Kentucky.

Suzy remembered; she always remembered. Frightened and breathing heavily, she stopped at the gate entrance. She had to compose herself. She would have the sign replaced and hire an agent. She didn’t have much hope, but she needed peace.

Mark, now outside the car, had started heading toward the gate when he saw Suzy and waited for her, his hands pushed into the pockets of his trousers. He didn’t want her to come here. She had been crying for days; her nerves were spent. Mark only wanted to take his wife home and resume their routine away from this place, a place Suzy rarely visited yet could not seem to let go of. What was it she still held on to where the weaving of cobwebs filled her own soul? Maybe with Mamma gone, she could let go.

Her mood darkened just as the clouds had darkened everything else in Devil’s Hollow. She turned once again to the hidden home where happiness once lived. Her head began to pound to the vivid painful thoughts. She heard the creaking of the old swing, chains buried fast into the bark of the big oak tree. How lonely it looked now without the squealing delight of Jeannie under the shade of this enormously ancient playground, whiling away hours of her innocence.

Come, Suzy. You’re soaked. Into the car and off with the coat. Let’s get you warm and dry. What do you say to dinner out tonight? Give you a bit of rest, and you’ll be good as new. Once back to your job and a daily routine, we can put all this behind us.

You’re right, Suzy said. How she wanted to believe all would be well again once she settled back into her job. Once seated in the warmth of the car, Suzy turned to Mark as he backed the car around. Mark?

Hmm?

Always a man of few words, Suzy thought. I think it’s time to hire an agent and press on even harder with the sale of the old place. Don’t you agree?

Mark, stopping the car, looked at Suzy. After seventeen years and no buyers? You think things have changed? Seeing the expectancy in her eyes, Mark said, We can try, Suze. We can try. God knows it will put an end to a past that you no longer belong to. We’ll do what we can. No one left to question now, eh?

Turning her face toward the fogging window, Suzy looked back again. Everything was still a haze. No one left to question now, she thought. Only the ghosts, if there was such a thing, and Suzy thought there might be—ghosts of whom the voices belonged. Mark didn’t know the half of things, and the few who remained never spoke of that summer. And now her mother was buried today along with secrets that lay hidden, concealed from and never spoken of. Fear could do that.

Suzy sank into the seat, resting her head against the headrest. With an inward shudder, she closed her eyes and dozed as the hum of the motor soothed her into a light sleep. On the fringes of her mind, she saw the old home as it used to be before things changed. She saw herself running from the old creek bed through the woods, her mamma calling out …

1

Suzy! Suzanne Estelle! Get up here now!

Shading her gray eyes, Lorna Jennings stood on the back porch of their old farmhouse, looking past the green fields to the woods beyond. Shadows were coming close. Fields took on the hazy look that only a hot day could bring some evenings. She knew Suzy was down in the creek bed again, lost in her own world of things. Suzy was as familiar with the woods and surrounding acres as she herself had been at that same age. Had she ever been that young? She could barely remember her childhood. Back then, Lorna had a love for the creek bed and her own dreams—broken dreams … lost dreams.

At the age of sixteen, she had married Clyde Jennings. He was handsome, tall, wiry, and muscled with the most beautiful blue eyes. His smile melted her. Lorna pictured Clyde and herself back then, a million years ago. She wasn’t sure she was in love with Clyde when they married; she didn’t feel like she had a choice at the time. Clyde was her future, and nothing could change that now. It wasn’t that Lorna didn’t love Clyde and her family. She just sometimes wondered what may have been had they not stayed in the hollow. Lorna wanted something more for Suzy, more than just the life of a farmwife, a life of constant worries and hard work, which came with the everyday chores that never ended. Three generations passed, and nothing had changed but those left to take over the backbreaking work. The choice was to leave and find a new life or stay and carry on the same dreary existence. Lorna knew no other way to live, but she had a feeling Suzy would make it one day. This daughter would find a different way of life, a life without memories that shrank into withered relics.

Lorna believed nothing or no one would hold Suzy back. Even at nine years old, Lorna saw the independence and self-assurance that could not be satisfied within the confines of Clifford County for her headstrong daughter.

Since 1948, the year Suzy was born, changes in Devil’s Hollow were few and far between. How would folks around here change when change was now being merged with progress in the idea of the Cedar View Development Company? What sacrifices or privileges the change might bring to these parts were hard to tell. A hard adjustment for many when there had been little or no discernable change in the past thirty years, years filled with the monotony of every day.

Most of Lorna’s generation were unlearned drudges eking out a living. Lorna knew a change was coming. More of old-timers, her parents, grandparents, and others like them had moved on to live with other family members as age crept up on them, most now dead. It seemed that right after high school, the young men and women looked forward to college or jobs that would take them away from farm life. Who could blame them?

Old friends and neighbors stayed on. The young men and women who stayed in the hollow helped work the fields or carry on with the small businesses of their parents, either out of obligation or the fixity born from fear of what lay outside the only world they had ever known. Young men spent time in Johnson’s pool hall, riding around the hills and hollows and dedicating themselves to drinking and making mischief. Nothing in small towns and farms attracted those with ambition. Cities held better opportunities. Jobs with a steady paycheck was preferred to working crops or fattening cattle for the slaughterhouse. For those who left, even the prospect near the outskirts of town was not far away enough for them. Burdens of farm life or the dull life in a small town did not offer a future to be desired by those who sought college scholarships or work in a factory where a certain independence could be achieved with less physical labor. Hangers-on … sometimes she herself felt like a hanger-on. What else was there?

New homes would be coming close to Devil’s Hollow off State Road 62 and Picket Knob Road. Investors were hoping to lure families away from the busy city life they were accustomed to with the idea of a quiet rural area just a short drive to and from their jobs in Millersburg, New Bedford, as well as Allentown. They hoped it would attract those who wanted to get out of the city.

A large billboard was plying happy couples with the promise of clean, safe living. Lorna could not imagine what sort of people would think Picket Knob would be a tempting change. Perhaps it was just the same for city folk stuck into a routine. Lorna thought this could be anywhere. Everyone had a routine. Maybe a move would get them out of the same type of rut that most folks found themselves in as time went by.

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Clyde Jennings owned 120 acres up to where Picket Knob Road and State Road 62 came together, where the large billboard depicting sun-soaked homes, shiny new cars, and smiling families could be viewed when leaving or entering the gravel road that led to the entrance of Jennings farm. Once, over two hundred acres was owned by the Jennings family. The depression came, and times were hard. Clyde’s mamma was a widow with eight kids, living in near poverty.

People did what they had to do. Lorna accepted this fact. What else could they do if they wanted to survive? Farming and living were hard out here. The thought of escaping seemed as distant as the other side of the moon.

Lorna looked at her surroundings as a part of who they were, so deeply rooted into their being as to have a heart and soul of its own.

The 120 acres was now separated by fields of hay, wheat, barley, tobacco, and field corn. The remaining land away from the homestead was acres of dense woods and brush.

The old creek bed ran through the woods into a culvert then joined on the other side where the land that once was owned by Lorna’s family, Grace and Ed Carroll, had been pieced out after their deaths. About a quarter mile from the creek on Jennings land was a natural spring. Clyde’s own grandfather built a two-story frame house that was their home now.

Outbuildings, their sidings rotting and separating from their wooded frames, surrounded the barnyard, sentinels of their permanence. Black Angus cows, large white pigs, and chickens were all a part of this permanence of being. The sights and smells were as permanent as the buildings, never changing. While their life in the hollow might seem narrow to outsiders … indifference was wide.

There had been repairs along the way, but just enough to keep the farm going. Rusted tin roofs of gray leaning structures were held together by the wild brush vines and scrubs that grew over and around, crowding out sunlight, married by years of companionship, heavily bound to saplings choking their growth.

Mildew, decay, and burning kerosene mixed with cooking smells were what Lorna smelled every day inside the walls of their home. Some days, Lorna would step out and smell the earth and crops growing in the fields, flowers, blooming trees, and wet grass after a rain when everything looked and smelled clean—a welcome reprieve from the cloying smells of past lives that seemed to stalk her every movement. Without electricity and with the only water supply coming from a pump near the large vegetable garden. Well, what was to be done? Glancing over at the leaning cylinder gas tank, she supposed she was lucky to have that convenience from the old wooden cookstove that belonged to Mother Estelle.

Lorna thought of the years that followed her marriage to Clyde—the move from the small clapboard house of her parents to the big whitewashed house of the Jennings. The first year of adjustment to a husband, a baby daughter, and a mother-in-law became an absorption of herself. The births of William and Charles had absorbed even more of who she was till she no longer recognized herself as an individual. Lorna was thirty-five when Suzy was born. Jeannie came two years later. Both girls were hard births. She was now forty-four, and Clyde was fifty. She sighed. Too old and gettin’ older.

She thought of the constant orders dished out by Mother Estelle on child-rearing, housekeeping, cooking, and the making of a true farmwife suitable for her oldest son. It wasn’t long before Lorna knew who the real lord of the Jennings family was.

Fifteen years of Mother Estelle as the head of the household was another burden Lorna just accepted. Mother Estelle was a hard woman. Those years wearing on Lorna were at times desolate and intolerable. Families took care of their own. There was no refuge except the one Lorna sought by burying herself deeper into her work, where the removal of everyday life could be forgotten for a while. Some days, she felt her life was as insignificant as she believed herself to be. Year after year, the stagnation had grown, developing within her a hollowness, even a loneliness she herself could not find words for. She just was.

Lost in another day and time, there was a brooding melancholia about her marriage to Clyde, marriage vows that could not be broken any more than they could break from this farm. After the death of her mamma and daddy, their land went to her and her two siblings: Lorna and her brothers, Kenneth and Owen. Her brothers had sold their acreage to the Central Land Development Company ten years back, took the money, and went back to Ohio.

The Carroll land was a sore spot with Clyde as he had offered a fair price to buy their shares, but the development company offered more than Clyde could afford to borrow from the bank. He was not happy with the new subdivision being so close to what he believed should have been Jennings land. His grumblings made no difference and soon became something he just accepted as he did everything else in life.

Lorna blinked several times, bringing herself out of the past held by sweet and bitter memories. She sighed and looked out over the deer field, so named because the deer ate as much of the corn crop as what was harvested every year.

Shaking her head to clear her reminiscences, Lorna called out for Suzy again, her voice echoing back to her from the hollow, an eerie reminder of how dense the woods were beyond the fields.

Lorna developed a dull ache in the temple of her brow. Rubbing the area around the widow’s peak of dark brown hair now showing too much gray, she looked out to her vegetable garden. Canning season would be here soon. Year after year, work merged itself, past and future, into a tired and weary way of life.

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Suzy knew her mother would not expect her to return to the house after the first call. She had a little time before William or Charles would be sent to fetch her. On this day, Suzy was enjoying the coolness of the creek bed and the familiar smells.

Suzanne Estelle! ran through the hollow. Lorna was a bit put out by this ritual this evening. Perhaps her musings and subsequent headaches had her out of sorts. She could almost hear her own mother’s voice calling out to her in the same way. If asked, Lorna could not say why she was thinking of the past so much lately.

Tired old girl, just steady on, she whispered to herself. Laughing quietly, she sighed heavily and looked at the darkening clouds gathering overhead as she kept an eye on the open path leading out of the woods, waiting for Suzy to appear from the shadows that now hugged the tree line around the entrance.

Even as Suzy heard her name bouncing through the woods, she did not hurry. Her mother seemed more anxious lately. She didn’t like to worry her parents in fear she would have to stay away from the solitude she found here. Sometimes she thought about her family and how many times she would catch Mamma sitting with a solemn gaze and looking out to something or somewhere that only Mamma could see.

Spread out beside her on the flat limestone, which she had perched herself upon, were the treasures she kept hidden beneath the ancient mossy stone. Picking up Granny’s broach with the missing clasp, she wondered about the old woman she was named after. When she asked Mamma why she could not be named Linda or Debbie, like the popular girls in her class at school, instead of Granny’s name, Mamma said it was out of respect for Daddy’s mother.

Suzy didn’t know Granny; the Lord took her before she was born. Often thinking about who she looked like most in her family, there was only her sister Jeannie who came to mind; and even though Mamma dressed them alike, they weren’t twins. Her best friends, Lottie and Lea, were twins who looked nothing alike; but Mamma said they were twins just the same.

Lottie and Lea were nine years old, same as herself, and always talked about what they were going to do when they were old enough to leave the hollow. They mostly talked about the big houses they would live in with their husbands and children in some big city. Big ideas, Suzy thought. Big ideas were always their favorite subject.

Suzy did not tell anyone her own plans for when she grows up, but she was sure of one thing: she would come and go just as she pleased. She was not particularly interested in boys or a husband or babies.

In her hand was the tiny heart necklace that was given to every girl who went to the the twins birthday party last year. She hoped that when her friends did move to their fancy homes in the big city, they wouldn’t forget her. They had been friends since second grade, and Suzy loved them even with all their big ideas.

She returned the broach, heart necklace, and a green pair of earrings like little flowers given to her by her big sister, Brenda, the same year Jeannie had gotten blue ones. They were always given the same gifts, just in different colors.

Suzy was almost two years older than Jeannie. Suzy was all bony arms and legs and was tall for her age, not like Jeannie who was small for her age and still holding on to baby fat. Jeannie was the baby of the family, and she knew it. Jeannie never came here to her secret place, and this suited Suzy just fine. Jeannie was a talker and a blabbermouth, always whining and jabbering on about this or that and getting on Suzy’s nerves. The creek was her quiet place, and no one else was welcome.

She liked sitting quietly and listening to the birds chirping and squirrels chattering as they jumped from tree branch to tree branch that hung over the creek. There were all different colors of the seasons in the woods, with bright colors in the spring and rustling leaves in the fall. The pungent smell of wet earth and something older hung around the creek, almost a soothing and familiar being to her.

The sounds and smells filled her with a sense that everything was just fine here in the hollow as far as she was concerned. Only the muffled grinding sound of the monstrous equipment from the state road interrupted her daydreaming. Mamma said the hollow was on the move with the new subdivision coming in, and Suzy figured a lot would be changing. She just didn’t know how much it would take to make a difference in this sleepy place.

Suzy was thinking about Brenda as she rolled the earrings around inside the jar with a clinking sound. New foundations, she said out loud. Just like Brenda said it would be once the new homes were built. The developers of these homes were still buying up land from those willing to sell.

Once Suzy had asked her brother William how a subdivision was different than living in a house in the city, he said it was a bunch of little houses with little yards all built together where you could talk to your neighbor without even leaving your front porch, just like in the city with streets, but not so much noise. He said a subdivision meant less people like us and more people with fancy ideas. Fancy people. Different people. William shook his head and spit. Brenda was fancy, so Suzy didn’t think they could all be bad even if they had fancy ideas. What was wrong with that anyway?

Folks got to do what they think is best for them, said William, sounding like Mamma. No matter what it was. Even if they weren’t welcome.

She didn’t know William, who worked with the land crew on some days, didn’t welcome these new people. William was twenty-two, and she thought he would be leaving home soon. Many of his school buddies had taken jobs at the cabinet factory outside of Millersburg or at the canning factory in New Bedford. William didn’t have his own car. He just drove the old pickup, but everyone knew he was saving for a car from the extra money he was