As the truck bounced up the pitted mountain road, Alex realized that Weird Dude Walking, even while the goats were eviscerating him, hadn’t uttered a single sound.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The doctor must have dosed her with some sort of horse pill, because Sarah Jeffers awoke with a mild headache. The sun was already streaming low through the window, so it must have been mid-morning. She hadn’t dreamed at all, and her tongue was thick and sticky in her mouth. It took her a moment to remember where she was.
She peeled the sheet off her chest. She was dressed in a baby-poop-green gown tied loosely behind her back. Her clothes were folded in a chair at the foot of the steel-railed bed. So somebody had seen her naked, probably for the first time in at least twenty years. Served them right. They had no business poking around in her innards anyway.
She lay there, calculating yesterday’s lost profits. She should have called in one of the Hancocks, or the boy who swept up after school. Even paying somebody a full day’s wages, she would have netted fifty bucks at the least. And you never knew when a tourist bus was going to pull up, or a pack of Christian Harley riders.
This time of year, with the fall colors starting to come on, the general store needed to bank enough to get her through the winter. As frightened as she was by the return of the Horseback Preacher, she was more afraid of losing the seasonal profit that would carry her through the lean winter.
A new doctor came in, a man with a mustache that looked penciled over his lip who looked more like a game-show host than somebody in the medical field. It was getting so you couldn’t peg people anymore.
“Morning, Miss Jeffers. I’m Doctor Vincent.” The doctor put a wrist to her forehead and checked the tension on the clip attached to her finger. Apparently that little clip fed a lot of information to the video monitor on the wall. All the signs appeared to be jagging up and down in some kind of steady pattern.
“Am I fit to go?” Sarah was going to ask for a cup of orange juice but figured that would probably run her five bucks. She was on Medicare but she’d still be stuck with her twenty percent of the bill, meaning the juice would cost her a buck out-of-pocket. She wasn’t that thirsty.
“Everything looks good,” the doctor said. “You had a rough patch for a little bit, but all your signs are stable. We’ve diagnosed exhaustion.”
“I took on a spell,” Sarah said. “I’m all better now, like you said.”
“I’ll sign your discharge papers, but I urge you to get some extra rest in the next few weeks. I wouldn’t want you coming back in with something more serious.”
“Don’t you worry. I haven’t spent so much time in bed since my honeymoon, and that was before you were born.”
The doctor almost grinned. “One thing ... while you were out, you were muttering ‘Harm me,’ over and over again. Did you think somebody was going to hurt you?”
Sarah let her face slip into a mask of cool stone. “Nobody’s going to hurt me. I can take care of myself.”
“Of that, I have no doubt.” He patted her hand. “I’ll have the nurse help you get your things together. Do you have someone to drive you home?”
“I’ll call somebody.”
“Good. Extra sleep for a while. Promise?”
“Sure, Doc.”
He left the room, and Sarah lay there in the stink of antiseptic. The beeping of the monitor accelerated and the jaggedy lines on the screen became erratic. Sarah removed the clip from her trembling finger. She must have been dreaming of him, to have called out his name like that.
Not “harm me.”
Harmon.
Harmon Smith, the man in the black hat.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“The goats is riled,” Betsy Ward said.
She dried her hands on her apron, wincing because her skin was chapped and the cool weather hadn’t helped a bit. She had a sweet potato pie in the oven. It was a point of pride with her, because sweet potatoes didn’t grow worth a darn in the mountains. Yet Arvel’s crop always turned out fine. You’d think God was a tater man, judging how He blessed the Ward household.
“Goats?” Arvel was watching a reality show on TV. Betsy couldn’t tell the shows apart, but one thing they all had in common was they got the women into tank tops and tight shorts at some point. Which was all the reason Arvel needed, whether he admitted it or not.
Betsy’s tight-shorts days passed some twenty years ago, but she didn’t hold that against the skinny little things that paraded around before the cameras. No, what she held against them was the make-up, the hair styles, and all the nipping and tucking and padding that went on these days. Any woman could look good with a little cheating.
“Goats,” Betsy said. “Over at the Smiths. Except the widow ain’t named Smith.”
Arvel put in a hard day at Drummond Construction, driving a concrete mixer over the twisting mountain roads. Concrete mixers were the most contrary vehicles on earth, according to Arvel. The weight could shift in two directions without warning, and once in a while the slooshing mix of sand, gravel and mortar coincided with the deepest cut of a sharp curve, and nothing offered a mortality rate like the rump-over-clutch-pedal tumble of twenty tons of cement and steel. Or so he said.
“What are you worrying about goats for?” Arvel didn’t turn from the flickering light of the screen. “They’ve not got in the garden in two years or so. Leave them be.”
“They ain’t right. They come down to the edge of the fence and stare at me when I’m hanging out laundry.”
“Maybe you ought to lose some of that fat ass of your'n and then they’d quit staring.”
Arvel never made a mention of her weight until he’d taken up watching TV every weeknight, some five years back. Since then, he’d scarcely shut up about it. She wished she could shrink inside her gingham dress, but she was here and this was all of her. “They started up about time the new wife moved in. Been breeding like rabbits, too.”
“You know how them billy bucks are,” Arvel said. “They’ll stick it in anything that wiggles, and some things that don’t.”
A commercial came on for some kind of erectile dysfunction product, and a wattle-necked old guy was in a hot tub with a woman young enough to be his daughter. Arvel thumbed down the sound with his remote. “You keep going on about the Smith widow. If you want to know what I think, I bet you’re mad as a piss ant because she’s skinnier than you.”
Betsy was double upset. Arvel had no business checking out the neighbor’s figure. Even though Betsy did, every chance she got.
“She ain’t no skinnier than Gordon’s first wife, and you never said a thing about her,” Betsy said.
“Rebecca was different,” Arvel said, eyes flicking back to the TV to make sure the commercials were still going and Arvel was listening. “She’s from here.”
“She was,” Betsy corrected. “Was.”
“Let’s not get into that.”
“She drove too fast for these twisty roads. Heck, Arvel, I know she turned a few heads, probably even yours, but the stone truth of it is she got what was coming to her.”
“Like you know what happened to her?”
“I ain’t saying a thing. The sheriff and the rescue team called it an accident, and they know better than me.”
“Solom’s took more than a few through the years,” Arvel said. “It was her turn, that’s all. Forget it.”
“I can’t forget it.”
“You think it was the Horseback Preacher?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you know it was the preacher who took Gordon Smith, don’t you? None of us swallowed that story about Gordon trying to murder the widow’s first husband.”
“Gordon was a good neighbor to us. Kept to himself and traded fair on the livestock. Speak nothing but good of the dead, God rest his soul.”
“I sure to God hope he’s resting. Enough dead things walking around Solom.”
The commercials were over and Arvel punched a button. The sound burst
from the speaker, and a dark-skinned boy with greasy hair was explaining why somebody was kicked off the show. “I smell something,” Arvel said.
The pie. The crust must have burned. Betsy had forgotten to set the timer. She was getting more absent-minded every day, but she blamed it on worrying about the neighbors. With a possible husband-killer next door—assuming Betsy didn’t buy into the legends—not to mention his witchy-eyed stepdaughter, your train of thought was liable to get derailed now and then. When you threw the Horseback Preacher into the mix, it’s a wonder anybody in Solom ever got a wink of sleep.
She hurried from the living room and went into the kitchen, where the goat was waiting for her.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Evening fell like a bag of hammers, and Odus decided there was no better place to let the sun die on you than the cold bank of Blackburn River. Two rainbow trout waggled on the stringer and half a six-pack of Miller High Life floated in the water, the plastic ring tethered to a stick. The mosquitoes had quit biting weeks ago, and even if they were sorry enough to try to suck his blood, they would be drawing nothing but high-octane, eighty-six proof out of his veins. The bottle of Old Crow was nearly gone, and that meant another long haul into Windshake to replenish his supply. He cussed God and the Virgin Mary—and the high-minded, hypocritical voters—for making Jefferson a dry county.
He was below the old remnants of the dam. Part of the earthworks was still in place, funneling water past in a series of tiny falls. The trout loved to lie among the rocks beneath the white water, where the oxygen level was rich and food dropped down like earthworms from heaven. Odus’s hook dropped in, too, although he had to work the reel with a steady hand because the bait washed downstream in the blink of an eye.
The general store up on the hill was dark. That was contrary, because Odus had never known it to be closed for a full day. He’d called up to the hospital to check on Sarah, and the receptionist hemmed and hawed about federal privacy rules until Odus claimed to be her son. Then the receptionist declared Sarah to be in stable condition and scheduled to be kept overnight for observation.
A few tracks from the old Virginia Creeper line, some that hadn’t been washed away in the 1940 flood, lay in weed-infested gravel across the river. The creosote crossties had long since rotted, and the steel rails themselves would have been overgrown if the tourists hadn’t made a walking trail out of the line.
Tourists were the damnedest creatures: they sought out the ugliest eyesores of Solom, such as fallen-down barns and lightning-scarred apple trees, and proclaimed them a glory of Creation. Took pictures and bought postcards, put their fat Florida asses onto the narrow seats of expensive ten-speeds, and pedaled down the river road as if they were going nowhere and had all day to do it.
Beat all, if you asked Odus, but nobody asked, because he was just a drunken river rat and didn’t even own any property. He lived in the bottom floor of a summer house and kept the grounds in trade for rent.
But, by God, he knew how to troll for trout, and he could take a ten-point buck in November, and when spring came he could pick twelve kinds of native salad greens, and in summer he knew where the best ginseng could be poached, and then it was fall again and he could make a buck or two putting up hay or helping somebody get a few head of cattle to the stockyards. All in all, it was a king’s life, and he wasn’t beholden to anybody. If you didn’t count the Pennsylvania couple that owned the house where he boarded, and the Smith widow, and the people who’d loaned him money.
The sun slipped a notch lower in the sky, spreading orange light across the ribbed clouds like marmalade on waffles. Fish often bit more at dusk, just as they did at the break of dawn, because the insects they fed on were more active then. A lot of the tourists went in for fly-fishing, and all the gear, complete with hip waders, LL Bean jacket, floppy hat, woven basket and all, would run you upwards of $300 at River Ventures. The little shop up the road rented out kayaks, canoes, bicycles, inner tubes, and every other useless means of transportation known to man. Odus figured the tourists must be bad at math, no matter how many zeroes they notched in their bank accounts, because $300 would buy you more grocery-store trout than you could eat in a year.
But that wasn’t his worry. Odus wanted one more rainbow on the trotline before he headed home for a late supper. He planned on stopping by Lucas Eggers’s cornfield on the way home and snagging a few roasting ears. That and some turnip greens he grew in the Pennsylvania folks’ flower garden were plenty enough to keep the ache out of his belly.
He hit the Old Crow and was about to draw in one of the Millers for a chaser when he saw weeds moving on the far side of the river. The rusted-iron tops of the Joe Pye weed shook back and forth as something made its way to the water. Probably deer, because, like the fish, they got more active at sundown. But deer were likely to stick to a trail, not tromp on through briars and all.
Odus played out some slack in his line and waited to see what came out on the riverbank. Odus didn’t have a gun, so he couldn’t kill the deer, and so didn’t care if it was a deer or a man from outer space. As long as it wasn’t a state wildlife officer ready to write him up for fishing without a license.
At first, Odus thought it was a wildlife officer, because of the hat that bobbed among the tops of the weeds. But the hat was dirty and ragged like that of—
The Smith scarecrow?
Then the weeds parted at the edge of the river.
The sight caused him to drop his pole in the mud, back up onto the slick rocks skirting the riverbank, and wind between the hemlocks and black locust that separated the water from the river road. His heart jumped like a frog trapped in a bucket. The orange light of sunset had gone purple, and the clouds somehow seemed sharper and meaner.
A bright yellow light shone above the general store’s front entrance, the one Sarah claimed kept bugs away, though Odus could see them cutting crazy circles around the bulb. He broke into a jog, sweating under his flabby breasts and in the crease where his belly lay quivering over his belt. He didn’t once look back, and even though the river was between it and him, he didn’t feel any safer when he reached his truck.
Odus was fumbling the key into the ignition when he remembered the Miller, and for just a moment, he hesitated. He would definitely need a good buzz later. But three beers wouldn’t be nearly enough to wash away the image that kept floating before his eyes. The best thing now was to put some distance between him and what he’d seen. Maybe some tourist would be out for a walk, or a bicyclist would get a flat tire, and it could take them instead.
As he drove away, his chest was tight and he could barely breathe. He wondered if he could get a hospital bed in Sarah’s room, because now he knew what she’d been going on about as she lay on the sacks with her eyelids fluttering.
It hadn’t been the scarecrow he’d seen. It was much worse than that. The man in the black hat, face white as goat cheese, as if he’d been in the water way too long.
And he had, if you believed the stories.
About a hundred and fifty years too long.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Did you hear something?” Jett asked.
“Nothing but a creaky old farmhouse doing a slow dance in the wind.”
But Katy had heard it. It wasn’t the settling and groaning of old wood. The sound was light and percussive. Like footsteps.
Above them.
They were sitting in the living room, Katy tapping away at her laptop, checking out her old Charlotte friends on Facebook. Jett was doing homework, or at least shoving enough papers around to make it look like she cared.
“If that’s a goat up there, I’m not moving a muscle.”
“Doors are locked,” Katy said. Even though rural communities were supposedly safer than the big city, Katy had gotten back in the habit after Gordon had gone psycho. “Can’t be a goat.
“Great. That means it’s either Rebecca or the Horseback Preacher.”
“Or maybe nothing.”
; “Mom, please. We can’t both be experiencing the same auditory hallucinations. Unless you’re taking acid without telling me.”
“Drugs aren’t a joking matter, especially after what they’ve done to our family.”
“Jeez, Mom, lighten up. I thought getting attacked by a psycho hubby in a scarecrow outfit while being chased by an army of killer goats might have mellowed you out a little.”
The percussive noise upstairs faded, and Katy realized Jett was trying to distract them both from fear. But both bedrooms were up there, and Katy didn’t want to go up there after dark. Better to check it out now.
Or else plug your ears and go “La-la-la” and hope it goes away.
“All right,” Katy said, setting her laptop on the coffee table. “You get your homework done. I’ll take care of business.”
Jett gleefully shoved her papers into her math textbook and slammed it shut. “Seriously. Remember your catchphrase? ‘We’ll get through it together.’”
“That doesn’t work if we both get killed.”
Jett headed for the stairs. “It’s been a year. Things are about as normal as they’re ever going to get.”
Katy wasn’t so sure. She hadn’t see Rebecca’s decapitated ghost since Gordon attacked them, but she’d seen wisps of movement out of the periphery of her vision from time to time. The headless scarecrow Gordon crafted as some sort of bizarre effigy of her still hung in the barn. Maybe Rebecca was just waiting for the right season to return.
Katy hurried to hit the first step before Jett, swinging out from the newel post to give her daughter a bump with her hip. They raced up the stairs, giggling like kindergarteners. They stopped when they reached the upstairs hall.
The closet door between their bedrooms was open.
“Were you in there?” Katy asked.
“Not lately. Nothing in there but towels and toilet paper.”
The Narrow Gate: A Supernatural Thriller (Solom Book 2) Page 6