McFall

by Scott Nicholson

  Ronnie didn’t want to remind her that the sheriff had saved them all from Archer McFall years ago. Linda only remembered that Archer had tried to raise a congregation for the little wooden church around the bend, and that he’d skipped town over some controversy or other. The McFalls always seemed to be leaving under a dark cloud. “Well, I’m not afraid to talk to him, but I don’t know anything else.”

  “What’s it like?” His mother’s brown eyes took on an unwholesome, hungry gleam.

  “What’s what like?”

  “To touch a dead body.”

  Weird. His mom had touched plenty of dead bodies, especially given the Southern Baptist penchant for open-casket funerals. The mourners were expected to line up and walk past the deceased before giving the family their condolences, all while marveling over the fine condition of the dearly departed, who was “just sleeping.”

  He thought of Tim’s bloody cartoon caption: Smile! God loves you.

  “It was kind of squishy but rubbery,” he said. “I guess he’d been dead long enough to bloat a little bit. I didn’t look too close. Once I saw what it was, I just screamed my head off until Bobby and Dex ran down the bank.”

  They both heard Dad’s big Ford pickup crunching up the road and shared a look. The conversation was over. David Day didn’t put up with foolishness, and talk of dead bodies, ghosts, and old mountain legends never sat well with him. Linda pretended to be a normal mom, asking, “Have you and Tim already eaten?”

  “We had some SpaghettiOs.”

  “I’ll make your dad a ham sandwich, then.”

  The door opened with a squeak. The jamb was out of square, and the corner of the door rubbed each time it was opened or closed. “Going to have to fix that,” David Day said for the hundredth time, almost to himself. “Hey, honey. Ronnie.”

  He put his thermos and metal lunch box on the counter and kissed Linda. He smelled of pine sawdust, metallic sweat, old coffee, and new beer.

  “You’re later than usual,” Linda said to him.

  “Got invited out for a cold one after work.”

  “Just one?”

  Ronnie headed out of the kitchen, hoping to be gone before the Linda & David Show really got rolling. But his dad stopped him. “You’ll want to hear this, Ronnie, since it affects you, too.”

  Ronnie braced himself. This could mean anything from Dad demanding a divorce to Linda being pregnant. But Dad was smiling, so it was likely neither of those things. “Got a real good job lined up. It’s going to keep us busy past Thanksgiving, easy. No more piecing together a renovation here and a roof patch there. This is new construction from the ground up.”

  Even Linda managed a smile. “That’s great, honey.”

  Ronnie felt some weight fall off his shoulders. That meant he’d be able to take a full load of semester hours and work maybe ten hours a week on the side instead of fitting classes around a full-time job. Life around the Day home would be a little less stressful, and Ronnie might even be able to save up for his own car instead of sharing one with Mom. His social life was enough of a hardship without the handicap of bumming rides. No wonder Melanie went out with Bobby more than she went out with him.

  “That’s really cool, Dad,” Ronnie said. “What’s the deal? I thought the housing market was dead.”

  “Well, every rainbow has a pot of crap at the end of it. I’ll be working for a McFall.” David’s face tightened as he studied Linda’s eyes for any reaction. Ronnie’s breath turned to stone in his lungs.

  “The one who just moved to town?” Linda asked.

  David smiled again, but this time it was tight, a cruel jester’s expression. “Didn’t take you long to meet him, huh?”

  “I just saw him at the funeral is all. I’d never heard of him.”

  “Larkin McFall,” David said. “I asked him if he was kin to the Mama Bet branch, and he said he was a distant cousin. But somehow he ended up with the family place.”

  “And the church?” Ronnie couldn’t help asking, although the abandoned church was now legally part of the two hundred acres of McFall property.

  “All of it,” David said. “That’s one of the projects. He wants to put up a housing development there.”

  “But we’re ten miles from town. Who would want to live way out here if they can afford a new house?”

  “I don’t care,” David said. “I hate to see the community get crowded, but it’s paid work. Bill Willard, Mac McAllister, and the usual gang are silent investors, apparently. That’s good, because it’ll keep the building inspectors from getting too picky.”

  Ronnie’s throat was tight and he barely trusted himself to speak. “They’ll have to leave the graveyard alone, right?”

  David opened the refrigerator and tore open the carton of Budweiser, fishing out two cans. “All graveyards have a permanent easement on them. So the dead are guaranteed their rest.” He popped one of the cans with a whoosh of spray. “Even the ones at the red church.”

  “I hope they tear that church down,” Linda said.

  “It’s about to fall over on its own,” David said. “A hundred and fifty years will do that.”

  Ronnie hated that goddamned church. It sat there on the hill just above the road, the mottled and mossy tombstones jutting from the ground around it like the crooked teeth of some sleeping monster. They had to pass it every day, and most of the time Ronnie could avoid looking, but whenever he couldn’t resist, he usually saw a ripple in the old glass, a shadow darker and larger than geometry could justify, or the flapping of a loose shingle when there was no wind. Sure, it had been used as a barn for years before Archer McFall had revived it for services, and it had stood empty since, but it was still a sinister storehouse of unwholesome darkness.

  Ronnie’s faith had matured since those days, so he couldn’t reduce anything to a simple battle of Good versus Evil. There were too many shades of gray, where one of those sides masqueraded as the other. But if Evil had fortified secret strongholds across the globe, the red church was certainly one of them.

  David had already finished his first beer. He crushed the can and tossed it at the recycling bin in the corner of the kitchen, spattering wet stains across the vinyl flooring. Linda threw a dish towel at him. “Clean it up,” she said.

  David opened the second beer. “Got to get my strength up first.”

  “If you keep guzzling like that, you won’t be able to work tomorrow.”

  Ronnie had endured enough. “I better check on Tim,” he said. Neither of his parents paid any attention to him, already squaring off for the night’s verbal brawl.

  The bathroom door was open, and the living room was dark. In the bedroom, the overhead light was off but the desk lamp sent a cone of yellow onto the floor. Tim must have gone straight to bed. Ronnie’s bed was on a raised platform that harbored bookshelves and a dresser beneath it. He kicked off his shoes, but when he pulled his shirt over his head, the breeze gave his bare chest a brisk scrubbing.

  “Did you open the window, Runt?” Ronnie turned to see the curtains billowing. Tim’s bed was empty.

  No way. No way would he be that stupid.

  Through the window he saw a flashlight beam bobbing across the pasture.

  Tim was heading up the hill toward the flickering torches. The red church waited on the other side.

  He recalled his earlier words to his brother: “I don’t have to protect you from things that don’t exist.”

  But it was the things that did exist that had him worried.

  He put his shoes back on.

  EPISODE TWO

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The church stood in silhouette on the hill, as if it had siphoned the color out of the surrounding dusk, congealing it into the deep, rich shade of old blood.

  As the car rounded the curb, Sheriff Frank Littlefield was consumed by a fear that was almost childlike in its intensity. Perhaps “fear” wasn’t the right word. What he felt was sheer terror.

  “Looks like that church is abou
t to fall over,” Cindy Baumhower said from behind the wheel of the Prius.

  “Slow down,” Littlefield said, wary of the treacherous traction of the gravel road that wound beneath the base of the hill and into the valley.

  “Is this where the car went off? The night your detective drowned?”

  “Somewhere over there.” Littlefield waved vaguely to the left, where the dark river wound somewhere below them. He couldn’t pinpoint the exact location. Too many saplings had grown up, and the weeds were lush from recent rain. But he would never forget the sight of his little brother, Samuel, standing in the road that night, more than twenty years after he’d died. That memory was unchanged, the details as crisp as if they’d been recorded in high-definition digital video and imprinted in his DNA.

  “You don’t believe the church is still haunted, do you?”

  “No.” He’d told her about seeing his brother’s ghost, and she had taken him seriously. So seriously she’d assembled a regional group of paranormal investigators to conduct a fruitless hunt. The team hadn’t received permission from the McFall heirs, but Littlefield had let that slide. To him, the whole thing had just been a big carnival of technology. Did anyone really believe ghosts would leave a convenient trail of evidentiary breadcrumbs?

  No, ghosts were like faith—you couldn’t prove they existed, but you knew it when you experienced them. Strangely, they were part of the reason he no longer had faith in much of anything.

  Picking up on his mood, Cindy slowed the vehicle. Littlefield forced his gaze to the summit of the hill. The sun was still clinging to the backside of the world, throwing a purple halo across the rim of the mountains. The forest came down to the edge of the cemetery, and the grave markers were nearly invisible in the river mist that hung across the weed-choked grounds.

  Besides the additional years of weathering, the church had changed little since his last visit. The wooden cross atop the steeple had broken, leaving only a sliver of bare wood angling toward the heavens. The belfry was cloaked in shadow, but the old-fashioned windows, capped with stained-glass triangles, caught glints of the dying light. It was easy to envision them as the eyes of watching creatures—bats and rats and slithering reptiles.

  Then Littlefield realized that light was glinting from around the church. Orange reflections flickered against the glass.

  He’d intended to roll right on past the church and stop in on the Days. But he couldn’t ignore suspicious activity, even while off duty. And Darnell Absher had died barely half a mile away just ten days ago.

  “Pull in,” he said to Cindy, inadvertently reverting to his “sheriff voice.”

  “Aye-aye, sir,” Cindy said, veering into the church’s rutted driveway. A steel cable was stretched between two stone pillars, from which swayed a scarred metal sign that read “PRIVATE PROPERTY.” Because of the ghost stories, the church had become an occasional destination for bored teens who dared each other to go up and knock on the door. But the place was so foreboding that no one came back a second time, and the teens had found livelier places to drink beer, smoke weed, and fool around.

  “Thought I saw something.” Littlefield got out of the car, not waiting for Cindy, which caused her to yell in protest.

  “Don’t you think you need a ghost hunter if you’re going up there?”

  “You’re not a ghost hunter,” Littlefield said, although he waited for her to catch up. “You’re an occasional paranormal enthusiast.”

  Littlefield had left his revolver in his Isuzu Trooper back at the courthouse, and now he felt naked and vulnerable. He didn’t even have a flashlight. What had possessed him to come out here? Had he wanted to stare down the past because he no longer had much of a future to worry about?

  “What did you see?” Cindy said. “The legendary Hung Preacher dangling from a tree?”

  “I cut that tree down five years ago.”

  “Doesn’t matter. If there are ghost people, there can be ghost trees, right?”

  The church was about fifty yards up the barricaded driveway. The spring mist settled around Littlefield like damp gauze, chilling him in his taut gut. Frogs croaked from the mud of the riverbanks, and even the distant lights of the farmhouses set among the forest did little to quell the foreboding sense of isolation.

  It was as if the church grounds and the entire ridge that comprised the McFall property had its own rules of geology and physics. Gravity was stronger here, night was blacker, and all the attendant forces inexorably tugged at anyone who was audacious or insane enough to approach the church doors.

  The church’s red color was almost a mockery of its original virginal white. In the night, it was the color of burnt motor oil. Littlefield fought an urge to grab Cindy’s hand for comfort. He was the sheriff, and protecting this church was his responsibility. He didn’t get to pick and choose his duties. Enforcing the law was all or nothing.

  Unless that was just another of those lies he had told himself to give his life importance and meaning.

  “What’s that?” Cindy said, and Littlefield instinctively looked up at the belfry, bracing for a winged slice of darkness to tear from its roost and swoop down for blood.

  But Cindy was pointing toward the trees at the edge of the black forest. Light flickered in a coruscation of yellow and orange among the trunks.

  Littlefield lowered his voice. “That’s what I saw from the road.”

  “Trespassers?”

  “Those are either flashlights or torches. Or maybe Coleman gas lanterns.”

  “Looks like more than one person.”

  “You better wait in the car.”

  “Sorry. You’re off duty, and we’re on a date. So you don’t get to boss me around.”

  “This might turn into a ‘situation.’”

  “Good. It’ll give me something to run in Wednesday’s edition of the paper.”

  “Sometimes I think you’re only dating me for the scoops.”

  Cindy squeezed his arm. “I date you for the crazy monkey sex. The scoops are a fringe benefit.”

  She always gets her way. I’m getting to be a damn pushover in my old age.

  He sighed. “Okay, but if things get dicey, stay behind me. If I get a civilian hurt while I’m out on unofficial police business, you’d have your headline and the county commission would have my ass.”

  And maybe you’d score an extra obituary.

  The lights glimmered brighter and more frequently as the figures who carried them approached the church, picking their way through the trees. Another light, removed from the rest by thirty yards, bobbed down the steepest part of the ridge from the north.

  Littlefield veered well clear of the church, passing between the old tombstones and worn gray markers. His trouser cuffs were soaked with dew. Cindy was close behind him. She uttered a sharp hiss of breath that trailed into a “Sheee-it.”

  “You okay?” Littlefield whispered.

  “Stubbed my toe on a rock.”

  “Might have been a skull.”

  “Ha ha.”

  He took her arm to help support her. “If you’d waited in the car—”

  “Hush. Hanging with you, I’m used to pain.”

  The lights had almost reached the edge of the forest now, and Littlefield thought he saw dark silhouettes moving in tandem with them. The lights pulsed with an uneven intensity. The lone, steadier light to the north was also closer, sweeping back and forth through the scrubby vegetation. Littlefield worked his way to the side of the church so that he was between the building and the forest.

  The first figure emerged from the trees and held a torch aloft. It was made from a blunt branch topped with rags, and it gave off smoke that smelled of diesel fumes. The man holding it was dressed in tan coveralls and a broad-brimmed hat that threw most of his face in shadows. Another figure emerged, then another.

  “Creepy,” Cindy whispered.

  Because of the mist and settling darkness, the three men didn’t see the sheriff and Cindy. One of them grunted wi
th effort, his torch swaying with motion, and then something hard clattered off the wooden side of the church.

  Throwing rocks?

  A second man drew back and hurled a rock, and this time glass shattered. “Hell, yeah,” one of the men whooped.

  Littlefield decided it was time to move. “Hold it right there,” he called, his voice firm and calm.

  He expected the men to flee, but the nearest just raised his torch higher. The movement revealed his face. Littlefield instantly recognized Stepford Matheson, a stonemason who’d done some work on the courthouse steps.

  “Who’s there?” Stepford called.

  “Sheriff Littlefield. You gentlemen are trespassing on private property.”

  Not to mention that if the woods weren’t wet from mist and recent rains, you probably would have set the whole mountain on fire.

  “Since when did you want to protect this old church?” Stepford said.

  “Yeah,” said the second man, whom Littlefield recognized as Sonny Absher, Darnell’s older brother. “Your brother got killed here, just like mine. Enough people done died because of this place.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss, Sonny, but your brother’s death was an accident.” The sheriff took several strides forward, assuming a position of authority. Now he could make out the third man in the group, too: Cole Buchanan, a scrawny scarecrow of a man who had recently served six months for breaking and entering.

  “Just like Samuel Littlefield’s death was an accident,” Sonny Absher said. “Sure seems to be lots of ‘accidents’ round these parts.”

  Cindy, in defiance of Littlefield’s orders, moved to his side so that she also stood between the men and the church. Littlefield hoped they would think she was a deputy. He didn’t want any more gossip about him to make the rounds, although at this point in his career, probably no one gave a damn. Still, he had taken a stand and now he had to follow through.

  “What are you fellows doing with those torches?” Littlefield asked.