“I’m the best. Of course they sent me.” Theron gave a mocking bow.
“Are you the Lead Enforcer now, my old friend?”
“Someone had to take your place. Who better than me? But you are no friend of mine, traitor.” He spat at the other’s feet, barely missing Ephraim’s dusty leather boot.
“Don’t be so quick to choose, Theron. You should hear what he has to say.”
“I don’t need to hear what he has to say. I still serve our people. The rambling words of a deranged rabbi will not show me my path. The Council's laws have protected our people for over four thousand years. You,” he pointed an accusing finger, “have violated them.”
“His words would save you, my friend,” Ephraim said, so softly Theron almost didn’t hear him.
Theron laughed. “Save me? As they saved you? You are a handful of seconds away from Hell, and you would presume to save me?” In that instant, Theron determined he would make Ephraim’s death as unpleasant as he could manage. He threw his sword to the floor and willed his claws to grow. In a few moments his fingernails grew long and thick. The brief but intense pain in his fingertips was worth it. He would rip the traitor’s head from his shoulders. “You should worry about saving yourself, old friend.”
“I did,” Ephraim replied, just before Theron leapt at him.
It was over quickly; Ephraim didn’t fight back. When Theron grabbed Ephraim’s head between his clawed hands, the traitor only stared at him with a sad, wistful expression on his face. He didn’t speak, not even to beg for his life, which was a bit disappointing. Ephraim didn’t flinch at Theron’s touch, and he didn’t scream, not even when Theron drove his clawed fingers through the flesh of his throat and began to twist, rending tendons, tearing muscle, and sending a spray of blood all over the wall. Once the head rolled off onto the floor, it was over. Theron felt let down. It was too easy.
A quick search of Ephraim’s body turned up a rolled piece of parchment. Theron noted the red wax seal, which matched the E on Ephraim’s ring, and snapped it in two. He unrolled the letter and read every word, but it didn’t tell him anything he hadn’t already surmised. It was only a letter to Malachi. Apparently Ephraim had wanted the butcher to be prepared in the event of his death, but in the end it proved too little, too late. Now both lay dead, and Theron had his answers. He dropped the paper onto Ephraim’s headless torso and went to the back of the house to find a shovel. He would need to bury the bodies so they would not be found, at least not before he completed his business in Jerusalem.
***
It took a long time to bury Ephraim and Malachi. The hole had to be deep enough to keep any stray dogs from smelling the bodies and digging them up. Due to Malachi's tremendous girth, it also had to be wide and tall. Theron spent the better part of four hours digging the hole, rolling the bodies into it, and covering them up. He also tossed in Ephraim’s last letter to Malachi. He wouldn’t need it to convince the Council; he had proof enough already.
Afterward, he carefully replaced the layer of grass and sod to better hide the corpses, though the telltale bulge of the earth would be a dead giveaway if anyone came looking. By the time Theron finished the arduous task, dawn loomed a mere two hours away. That didn’t leave much time to make his way through the city, but he thought he could manage it.
He walked away from the house, carrying his macabre prize in Ephraim’s burlap sack, which he carried slung over his shoulder. Ephraim’s head, which bounced and jostled along inside the bag, wore neither fear nor malice on its lifeless features, instead the dead vampire's expression seemed... peaceful. Theron didn’t care. The job was done; the Council would be pleased. What’s more, he had the information they sought, for Theron now knew the identity of the person to whom Ephraim had betrayed his people. It could only be one man, the same man who’d acquired followers from all across Israel over the last few years. The very man Malachi swore his life to protect only a month ago.
Jesus, they called him. Jesus of Nazareth.
Visit David McAfee on the web at http://mcafeeland.wordpress.com
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DRUMMER BOY
By Scott Nicholson
On an Appalachian Mountain ridge, three boys hear the rattling of a snare drum deep inside a cave known as “The Jangling Hole,” and the wind carries a whispered name.
On the eve of a Civil War reenactment, the town of Titusville prepares to host a staged battle. The weekend warriors who don their replica uniforms and clean their black-powder rifles aren’t aware they will soon engage in mortal combat. This is a war between the living and the dead, because a troop of Civil War deserters, trapped in the Hole by a long-ago avalanche, are rising from their long slumber, and their mission is far from over.
And only one misfit kid stands between the town and the cold mouth of hell…
CHAPTER ONE
The Jangling Hole glared back at Bobby Eldreth like the cold eye of the mountain, sleepy and wary and stone silent in the October smoke.
“Th’ow it.”
Bobby ignored Dex’s taunt as he squeezed the rock and peered into the darkness, imagining the throbbing heartbeat that had drummed its slow rumble across the ages. The air that oozed from the Blue Ridge Mountain cave smelled like mushrooms and salamanders. He could have sworn he heard something back there in the slimy, hidden belly of the world, maybe a whisper or a tinkle or the scraping of claws on granite.
“Th’ow it, doof.”
Bobby glanced back at his heckler, who sat on a sodden stump among the dark green ferns. Dex McCallister had a speech impediment that occasionally cut the “r” out of his words. Dex was so intent on pestering Bobby that he failed to note the defect. Good thing. When Dex made a mistake, everybody paid.
“I hear something,” Bobby said.
“Probably one of them dead Rebels zipping down his pants to take a leak,” Dex shouted. “Do it.”
Vernon Ray Davis, who stood in the hardwood trees behind Dex, said, “They didn’t have zippers back then. Nothing but bone buttons.”
Dex sneered at the skinny kid in the X-Men T-shirt and too-tight, thrift-store jeans that revealed his pale ankles. “What book did you get that out of, V-Ray? You’re starting to sound like Cornwad,” Dex said, using the class nickname for Mr. Corningwald, their eighth-grade history teacher at Titusville Middle School.
Bobby hefted the rock in his hand. Though it was the size of a lopsided baseball, it weighed as much as the planet Krypton. Probably even Superman couldn’t lift it, but Superman wouldn’t be dumb enough to stand in front of a haunted hole in the ground, not while he could be boning Lois Lane or beating up Lex Luthor.
Dex and Vernon Ray were thirty yards down the slope from Bobby, in a clearing safely away from the mouth of the cave. Not that any distance was safe, if what they said was true. The late-afternoon sun coated the canopy of red oak and maple with soft, golden light, yet Bobby shivered, due as much to the chill emanating from the cave as from his fear.
“I’ve been to the camps,” Vernon Ray said. “My daddy’s got all that stuff.”
“That’s just a bunch of guys playing dress-up,” Dex said.
“It’s authentic. 26th North Carolina Troops. Wool pants, breech loaders, wooden canteens—”
“Okay, Cornwad,” Dex said. “So they didn’t have no goddamn zippers.”
“Daddy said—”
“Your daddy goes to those re-enactments to get away from you and your mom,” Dex said. “My old man drags me along, but you always get left behind with the girls. What ya think of that, Cornwad?”
During Dex’s bully act, Bobby took the opportunity to ease a couple of steps away from the mouth of the cave. The noise inside it was steady and persistent, like a prisoner’s desolate scratching of a spoon against a concrete wall. The Hole seemed to be daring him to come closer. Bobby considered dropping the stone and pretending he had thrown it while Dex wasn’t looking. But Dex had a way of knowing things.
“Bobb
y’s chicken crap,” Vernon Ray said, changing the subject away from his dad and deflecting Dex’s attention. “He won’t throw it.”
Good one, V-Ray. I thought we were on the same side here.
Dex tapped a cigarette from a fresh pack, then pushed it between his lips and let it dangle. “Ah, hell with it,” he said. “You can believe the stories if you want. I got better things to worry about.”
Relieved, Bobby took a step downhill but froze when he heard the whisper.
“Uhr-lee.”
It was the wind. Had to be. The same wind that tumbled a gray pillar of smoke from the end of Dex’s cigarette, that quivered the bony trees, that pushed dead autumn leaves against his sneakers.
Still, his throat felt as if he’d swallowed the rock in his hand. Because the whisper came again, low, personal, and husked with menace.
“Uhrrrr-leeee.”
A resonant echo freighted the name. If Bobby had to imagine the mouth from which the word had issued—and at the moment Bobby was plenty busy not imagining—it would belong to a dirty-faced, gaunt old geezer two hundred years dead. But like Dex said, you could believe the stories if you wanted, which implied a choice. When in doubt, go with the safe bet. Put your money on ignorance.
“To hell with it,” Bobby said, throwing extra air behind the words to hide any potential cracks. “I want me one of those smokes.”
He flung the rock—away from the cave, lest he wake any more of those skeletal men inside—and hurried down the slope, nearly slipping as he hustled while feigning nonchalance. One more whisper might have wended from the inky depths, but Bobby’s feet scuffed leaves and Dex laughed and Vernon Ray hacked from a too-deep draw and the music of the forest swarmed in: whistling birds, creaking branches, tinkling creek water, and the brittle cawing of a lonely crow.
Bobby joined his friends and sat on a flat slab of granite beside the stump. From there, the Hole looked less menacing, a gouge in the dirt. Gray boulders, pocked with lichen and worn smooth by the centuries, framed the opening, and stunted, deformed jack pines clung to the dark soil above the cave. A couple of dented beer cans lay half-buried in a patch of purple monkshood, and a rubber dangled like a stubby rattlesnake skin from a nearby laurel branch. Mulatto Mountain rose another hundred feet in altitude above the cave, where it topped off with sycamore and buckeye trees that had been sheared trim by the winter winds.
He took a cancer stick from Dex and fired it up, inhaling hard enough to send an inch of glowing orange along its tip. The smoke bit his lungs but he choked it down and then wheezed it out in small tufts. The first buzz of nicotine numbed his fingers and floated him from his body. Relishing the punishment, he went back to mouth-smoking the way he usually did, rolling the smoke with his tongue instead of huffing it down. His head reeled but he grinned toward the sky in case Dex or Vernon Ray was looking.
“We ought to camp here sometime,” Dex said, smoking with the ease of the addicted. He played dress-up as much as the Civil War re-enactors did, though his uniform of choice was upscale hoodlum—white T-shirt and a windbreaker that had “McCallister Alley” stitched over the left breast pocket. Three leaning bowling pins, punctured by a yellow starburst indicating a clean strike, were sewn beneath the label. Dex’s old man owned the only alley within 80 miles of Titusville, and about once a month Mac McCallister was lubed enough from Scotch to let the boys roll a few free games.
“It’ll be too cold to camp soon,” Vernon Ray said, constantly flicking ash from his cigarette like a sissy. Bobby was almost embarrassed for him, but at the moment he had other concerns besides his best friend maybe being queer.
Concerns like the Jangling Hole, and whoever—or whatever—had spoken to him. The wind, nothing but the wind.
“Best time of year for camping,” Dex said. “I can get my old man’s tent, swipe a couple six-packs, bring some fishing poles. Maybe tote my .410 and bag us a couple squirrels for dinner.”
“There’s a level place down by the creek,” Bobby said.
“Right here’s fine,” Dex said, sweeping one arm out in the expansive gesture of someone giving away something that wasn’t his. “Put the tent between the roots of that oak yonder. Already got a fireplace.” He booted one of the rocks that ringed a hump of charred wood.
“I don’t know if my folks will let me,” Vernon Ray said.
“Your dad’s doing Stoneman’s, ain’t he?” Dex dangled his cigarette from his lower lip. “Since he’s the big captain and all.”
Stoneman’s Raid was an annual Civil War re-enactment that commemorated the Yankee incursion suffered by Titusville in 1864. The modern weekend warriors marked it by sleeping on the ground, drinking whiskey from dented canteens, and logging time in the saddle on rumps grown soft from too many hours in the armchair.
If they were like Bobby’s dad, they spent their free time thumbing the remote between “Dancing With The Stars” and “The History Channel,” unless it was football season when the Carolina Panthers jerseys came out of the bottom drawer.
“Sure,” Vernon Ray said, voice hoarse from the cigarette. He flicked his smoke twice, but no ash fell. “Mom will probably go to Myrtle Beach like usual.”
“The beach,” Dex said. “Wouldn’t mind eyeing some bikini babes myself.”
There was a test in Dex’s tone, maybe a taunt. Perhaps Dex, like Bobby, had been wondering about Vernon Ray. “What ya think, Bobby? A little sand in the honey sounds a lot better than watching a bunch of old farts in uniform, don’t it?”
Bobby’s gaze had wandered to the Hole again and he scanned the crisp line where the dappled sunlight met the black wall of hidden space that burrowed deep into Mulatto Mountain. As Dex called his name, Bobby blinked and took a deep, stinging puff. He spoke around the exhaled smoke, borrowing a line from his dad’s secret stash of magazines in the tool shed. “Yeah, wouldn’t mind some sweet tang myself.”
Dex reached out and gave Vernon Ray a chummy slap on the back that was loud enough to echo off the rocks. “Beats pounding the old pud, huh?”
Vernon Ray nodded and took a quick hit. He even held his cigarette like a sissy, his pinky lifted in the air as if communicating in some sort of delicate sign language. Vernon Ray, unlike most of the kids at Titusville Middle School, already had a hair style, a soft, wavy curl flopping over his forehead. Bobby wished he could protect his best friend, change him, rip that precious blonde curl out by the roots and turn him into a regular guy before Dex launched into asshole mode. When Dex got rolling, things went mean quick, and Vernon Ray’s eyes already welled with water, either from the smoke or the teasing.
“I heard something at the Hole,” Bobby said, not realizing he was speaking until the sentence escaped.
“Do what?” Dex leaned forward, flicking his butt into the cold, dead embers of the campfire.
“Somebody’s in there.”
Dex twisted off a laugh that sounded like the wheeze of an emphysema sufferer. “Something jangly, maybe? Bobby, you’re so full of shit it’s leaking out your ears.”
Vernon Ray looked at him with gratitude. Bambi eyes, Bobby thought. Pathetic.
Bobby put a little drama in the sales pitch to grab Dex’s full attention. “It went ‘Urrrrr.’”
Dex snorted again. “Maybe somebody’s barfing.”
“Could have been a bum,” Bobby said. “Ever since they shut down the homeless shelter, I’ve seen them sleeping under the bridge and behind the Dumpster at KFC. They’ve got to go somewhere. They don’t just disappear.”
“Maybe they do,” Dex said. “I reckon those wino bastards better stay out of sight or they’ll run ‘em plumb out of the county.”
The shelter had been shut down through the insidious self-righteousness of civic pride. Merchants had complained about panhandling outside their stores and the Titusville Town Council had drafted an ordinance against loitering. However, the town attorney, a misplaced Massachusetts native who had married into the fifth-generation law firm that had ruled the town behind the
scenes since Reconstruction, dug up some court rulings suggesting that such an ordinance would interfere with the panhandlers’ First Amendment rights.
Since the town leaders couldn’t use the law as a whip and chair, they instead cut off local-government funding and drove the shelter into bankruptcy. Vernon Ray had explained all this to Bobby, but Bobby didn’t think it was that complicated. People who didn’t take the safe bet lost the game, simple as that.
“Even a bum’s not stupid enough to sleep in the Hole,” Vernon Ray said. “Cold as a witch’s diddy in there.”
Dex grinned with approval. “That why you didn’t th’ow the rock, Bobby Boy? Afraid a creepy old crackhead might th’ow it back?”
“Probably just the wind,” Bobby said. “Probably there’s a bunch of other caves and the air went through just right.”
“Sure it wasn’t the Boys in Blue and Gray?” Dex said, thumbing another smoke from the pack. “Kirk’s See-Through Raiders?”
“Like you said, you can believe the stories if you want.” Contradicting his bravado, Bobby’s gaze kept traveling to the dank orifice in the black Appalachian soil.
They should have stuck to the creek trail and not followed the animal path into the woods. The trail was the shortest distance from the trailer park where he lived and the Kangeroo Hop’n’Shop, a convenience store run by a family that Dex called “The Dot Heads.” Bobby wasn’t sure whether the family was Indian, Pakistani, or Arabian, though one of the daughters was in his English class and had a lot of vowels in her name. Dot Heads or not, it was the closest place to buy candy bars and football cards, not to mention sneak a peek at the oily, swollen breasts flashing from the magazine covers.
Half an hour before, the boys had made their ritual Saturday visit, flush with pocket change collected over the course of the week. While tobacco had become a controlled substance on the order of liquor and Sudafed, even in the tobacco-raising state of North Carolina, not all packs were kept on shelves behind the cash register.
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