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How many smooth black stones could there be in the world? And how was I going to know which ones happened to be the eyes of the river, whatever that even meant?
Maybe I’d find them on the way. Or maybe I’d already found them, and I didn’t even know it.
A magical black rock, the eye of the river.
It sounded strangely familiar. Had I heard it before?
I thought back to Amma, to all the charms, every tiny bone, every bit of graveyard dirt and salt, every piece of string she’d given me to wear.
Then I remembered.
It wasn’t one of Amma’s charms. It was from the vision I saw when I opened the bottle in her room.
I had seen the stone hanging around Sulla’s neck. Sulla the Prophet. In the vision Amma had called it “the eye.”
The river’s eye.
Which meant I knew where to find it and how to get there—as long as I could figure out how to find my way to Wader’s Creek on this side.
It couldn’t be avoided, intimidating as it was. It was time to pay a visit to the Greats.
I unfolded Aunt Prue’s map. Now that I knew how to read the map, it wasn’t that hard to see where the Doorwells were marked. I found the red X on the Doorwell that led to Obidias’ place—the one at the Snow family crypt—so after that I went looking for every red mark I could find.
There were plenty of red Xs, but which of those Doorwells would take me to Wader’s Creek? Their destinations weren’t exactly marked like exits on the interstate—and I didn’t want to stumble into any of the surprises that could be waiting for a guy behind Otherworld door number three.
Snakes for fingers might be getting off easy.
There had to be some kind of logic. I didn’t know what connected the Doorwell behind the Snow family plot to the rocky path that had taken me to Obidias Trueblood, but there had to be something. Seeing as we were all related to one another around here, that something was probably blood.
What would connect one of these plots in His Garden of Perpetual Peace to the Greats? If there was a liquor store in the graveyard—or a buried coffin full of Uncle Abner’s Wild Turkey, or the ruins of a haunted bakery known for lemon meringue pie—he wouldn’t have been far behind me.
But Wader’s Creek had its own graveyard. There wasn’t a crypt or a plot for Ivy, Abner, Sulla, or Delilah in Perpetual Peace.
Then I found a red X behind what my mom had said was one of the oldest tribute markers in the graveyard, and I knew it had to be the one.
So I folded up the map and decided t
o check it out.
Minutes later, I found myself staring at a white marble obelisk.
Sure enough, the word SACRED was carved into the crumbling veined stone, right above a gloomy-looking skull with empty eyes that stared at you straight on. I never understood why a single creepy skull marked a handful of Gatlin’s oldest graves. But we all knew about this particular tribute, even though it was tucked away on the far edge of Perpetual Peace, where the heart of the old graveyard sat, long before the new one was built up around it.
The Confederate Needle—that’s what folks around Gatlin called it, not because of its pointed shape but because of the ladies who had put it there. Katherine Cooper Sewell, who founded the Gatlin chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution—probably not long after the Revolution itself—had seen to it that the DAR raised enough money for the obelisk before she died.
She had married Samuel Sewell.
Samuel Sewell had built and run the Palmetto Brewery, the first distillery in Gatlin County. Palmetto Brewery made one thing and one thing only.
Wild Turkey.
“Pretty smart,” I said, circling to the back of the obelisk, where the twisted wrought iron fencing bowed and broke into pieces. I didn’t know if I would’ve been able to see it back home, but here in the Otherworld, the trapdoor of a Doorwell cut into the base of the rock was plain as day. The rectangular outline of the entrance snaked between rows of engraved shells and angels.
I pressed my hand against the soft stone and felt it give way beneath me, swinging from sunlight into shadow.
A dozen uneven stone steps later, I found myself on what sounded like a gravel pathway. I made my way around a turn in the passage and caught sight of light pooling in the distance. As I got closer, I smelled swamp grass and waterlogged palmettos. There was no mistaking that smell.
This was the right place.
