Mystery Walk

driver's seat. Billy called down, 'Mom! Somebody's coming!'

Ramona glanced up from the Bible and saw the figure walking slowly up the road. 'Hon? We're gonna have some company.'

'Company,' John repeated. One half of his face was drawn tight, the other was loose and immobile. He could only speak from one side of his mouth, and on the dead half of his face the eye was a cold blue stone.

Ramona stood up. There was something written across the black van's side, but she couldn't quite make out what it said. The man was short and rounded, and now he paused to shrug off the jacket of his seersucker suit; he pegged the jacket on a finger, let it rest across his shoulder, and then continued up the slight incline, visibly huffing and puffing.

He stopped underneath the spreading oak to catch his breath. 'Ma'am, I certainly hope this is the Creekmore property. If it isn't, I'm afraid I'm going to have to sit in this shade and rest.'

'It is. Who might you be?'

'Ah!' The man's round, cherubic face brightened. There were spots of color on his cheeks, and he had a gray, neatly clipped mustache above a wildly sprouting goatee. 'I stopped at a residence just down the way, but when I asked directions, they were quite rude. These roads around here do twist and turn, don't they? So: are you Ramona Creekmore?'

'I might be, or I might not be. I haven't heard your name yet.'

The little man, who reminded Ramona of a short, fat goat, smiled and took out his wallet. The smile faltered a fraction when Billy walked out from around the house to see what was going on. 'And you must be Billy,' the man said.

'Yes sir.'

There was a stony silence from Ramona. She stepped down off the porch as the man produced a dog-eared white business card; she took it, looked at it briefly, and then handed the card to Billy. Written across the card in an ornate script was Dr. Reginald Mirakle, Performer Extraordinaire.

'We don't need any doctors; we've seen enough to last us for a long time.'

The man's canny gray eyes darted toward John Creekmore, sitting motionless in his chair with the Bible on his lap. 'Oh. No, ma'am, you misunderstand. I'm not a medical doctor. I'm a ... a performer.'

'You mean a charlatan?'

He raised gray eyebrows as thick as caterpillars. 'Some have said so in the past, I'm afraid. But that's neither here nor there. If I may? . . .' He took the card back from Billy and replaced it in his wallet. 'Mrs. Creekmore, might I trouble you for a glass of water? I've driven from Haleyville this morning, and it sure is warm on the road.'

Ramona paused for a few seconds, mistrustful of the man. But then she said, 'All right. Billy, keep the man company, will you?' And then she went back onto the porch and inside the house. John called out to the man, 'Howdy!' and then he was silent again.

Dr. Mirakle eyed the house, then looked out toward the cornfield where the scraggly stalks and scarecrow stood. 'Billy,' he said quietly. 'Does anyone ever call you William?'

'No sir.'

'How old are you?'

'Seventeen. I'll be eighteen in November.'

'Ah, yes. Eighteen usually follows seventeen. Then you're twenty, and thirty; and pretty soon you're fifty- eight.' He folded his jacket carefully and laid it on the porch floor, then took off his hat. Sweat gleamed on his balding pate, and two horns of gray hair stood up from each side of his head.

'Billy,' Mirakle said, 'have you ever been to a carnival?'

'No sir.'

'Never?' Mirakle asked incredulously. 'Why, when I was your age I could smell candied apples and popcorn in the air two days before the carnival got to town! And you've never been? Why, you've missed out on one of the best things life has to offer: fantasy.'

Ramona came out with the man's glass of water. He drank half of it at a gulp. She said, 'Now just what can we do for you?'

'Fine house you've got here,' Mirakle said. He finished the water at his leisure, pretending not to notice the woman's hard stare. Then he said quietly, 'I've searched for this house since the first of June. I had no idea if it was real or not. But here it is, and here are both of you. I've covered most of the northern half of Alabama looking for you.'

'Why?' Ramona asked.

'In my line of work,' the man said, 'I travel a great deal. I meet a lot of people, and I hear a great many stories. Most of them untruths, or at best half-truths, like the tale of the giant ghost boy who walks the forest near Moundville. Or the rebel who still haunts his ruined plantation and fires at hunters who stray too near. Or the black dog that runs the road between Collinsville and Sand Rock. Maybe there was a grain of truth there once, but who knows? A gnarled oak on a moonlit night could become a giant boy. A plantation house creaks and groans with age, and someone hears a ghost walking. A wild dog runs from a car's headlights. Who knows?' He shrugged and ran a hand through his unruly hair to smooth it. 'But . . . when one hears a tale about living people; well, that makes a difference. An old man in Montgomery told me that what I did was pretty fair, but had I ever heard of the Indian woman in north Alabama who could lay the dead to rest!'

Ramona's spine stiffened.

'I disregarded that story at first. But my profession draws the type of person who might be interested in the spirit world, and in four months on the road I might hit a hundred small towns. Soon I heard the story again, and this time I heard a name as well: Creekmore. In the next town, I began asking some questions. It wasn't until much later that I heard about the boy. But by then I had to know if you were real or simply a half-truth. I began searching, and asking questions along the way.' He smiled again, lines crinkling around his eyes. 'It wasn't until several days ago that I heard of Hawthorne, from a man who lives in Chapin. It seems there was an accident involving a pickup truck and a large oak tree. ...'

'Yes,' the woman said.

'Ah. Then I believe my search is over.' He turned his gaze toward Billy. 'Are the stories about you true, young man? Can you see and talk to the dead?'

The way that question came out caught Billy off-guard. He glanced at his mother; she nodded, and he said, 'Yes sir, I can.'

'Then is it also true that you exorcised a demon from a house where a murder took place? That you have a power over Death itself? That you called up Satan in a deserted sawmill?'

'No. All those are made-up stories.'

'That's usually the way tales are spread. A grain of truth is taken and a luster is spun around it, like an oyster with a pearl. But there is the grain of truth in those stories, isn't there?'

'Sort of, I guess.'

'People talk to hear their damned lips flap!' Ramona told him. 'I know full well what's said about us. Now I'd like to hear why you searched us out so long and hard.'

'No need to get upset,' Mirakle said. 'Folks are afraid of you, but they respect you, too. As I said, I'm a performer. I have my own show, and I travel with carnivals. . . .'

'What kind of show?'

'I'm pleased you ask. It's a show that goes back to the rich vaudeville heritage of England. As a matter of fact, I learned it from an aged magician who'd performed the very same show in his heyday, in London before the Second World War.'

'Mister,' Ramona said, 'your tongue takes more turns than a snake on wet grass.'

Mirakle smiled. 'What I perform, Mrs. Creekmore, is a ghost show.'

An alarm bell went off in Ramona's head. She said, 'Good day, Mr. Doctor Mirakle. I don't think we're interested in—'

But Billy asked, 'What's a ghost show?' and the sound of curiosity in his voice made his mother uneasy. She thought of ghost-chasing charlatans, false seers, seances in dark rooms where painted skeletons danced on wires and 'dire warnings' were spoken through voice-distorting trumpets: all the nasty tricks her grandmother had seen and told her to be wary of.

'Well, I'll just tell you. What I'd like to do, though, is sit down underneath that oak tree there and rest my