“Shush,” Becca Faye said, though she giggled. Haywood cleared his throat uncomfortably.
Mama Bet turned around and looked Sonny in his oily eyes. “You’d best open them big ears, mister,” she said. “You don’t get many chances at salvation in this life. So you best be ready when the light shines on your stupid greasy head.”
Becca Faye looked around nervously, like a cat caught in a hedgerow, a whiff of her fear carried on the scent of department-store perfume that probably went by the name of Passion Flower or Wild Meadows or such. Sonny’s eyes grew bright and fierce.
“I ain’t the one that hung Wendell McFall,” he said. “None of us are. So why do we got to pay for it?”
Mama Bet shook her head, her mouth wrinkled in weary amusement. “You ain’t heard a single word Archer’s said. Sacrifice is the currency of God. It ain’t a sacrifice if all you’re doing is paying what you owe. No, you got to pay more than you owe.”
Haywood tried to change the subject. “Did y’all hear about the car that run off the road? Jim Potter says it just went over the side for no good reason. Probably a drunk or something.”
“Nobody went to help them?” his wife Noreen said.
Haywood glared at her. “They ain’t of the old families, so what’s it to us?” He added, as if to himself, “Wonder if they had insurance?”
Mama Bet glanced past them to the other rows, at Alma Potter, Lester and Vivian and Stepford Matheson, the Buchanans in the back row, where their barnyard smell barely reached her, Whizzer sullenly chewing on the stump of a half-smoked cigarette. And across the aisle, oh, yes, there they were.
The Day family, minus that meddling David, the boys wide-eyed and fidgeting, the mother glowing with an expectant pride.
There he was, the one Archer needed.
A warmth expanded from Mama Bet’s chest to the rest of her body. Let the cleansing begin.
Icy coffin black.
Drifting, on beyond black. So easy.
So cold.
At Samuel’s viewing, Frank had touched his little brother’s hand. Samuel had looked lost in the splendid folds of the casket, a little too pink-skinned and hollow-cheeked. His lips were unnaturally red, a shade they had never been in life. But worse than the interrupted smile was the coldness of Samuel’s skin, colder than November air, colder than shaded marble.
That same coldness gripped Frank now. It flowed through his veins, clasped him in its shocking dullness, enveloped him in its numbing shroud. He was dimly aware of the currents around him, the water softly swirling around his skin. The river murmured in his ears, telling him to drift, to surrender, to submit to the embrace of long sleep.
Years passed in that near-perfect state, years in which Frank remembered the roughness of his father’s hands, callused and cracked from farmwork, hands that could break a locust rail if they had to. Those same hands had met, tucked under chin in desolate prayer, during Samuel’s funeral. A week after, those same hands had threaded and looped one end of a thick rope. Then the hands’ owner joined his youngest boy in whatever afterlife they each deserved.
And Frank’s mother followed six months later. She also killed herself, though she wasn’t cowardly or brave enough to take a direct route like her husband. No, she was subtle. She went into the darkness by fading a little at a time, losing appetite and health and soul to the great erosion of apathy. And only Frank had carried on, the weight of all their deaths on his shoulders, pressing down on him as heavy as a cross, the guilt a constant, cold lump in his heart.
And now he followed them into darkness. He could almost hear their whispers drawing him forward, pulling him more deeply into the numbing cold. They were waiting.
He almost smiled in his sleep. So many years of waiting, so many more years of journey ahead.
But what would be waiting?
The bright light of heaven, as promised by his parents and the Baptist preacher and practically everybody in Pickett County.
But if heaven was bright and warm and welcoming, then the change should start occurring any moment now. Because if God and Jesus wanted the eternity of worship they deserved and demanded, then they were being robbed of Frank’s servitude by this extended dark purgatory. This cold and peaceful drifting. This slow suffocation.
He was aware of hands reaching, hands darker than the darkness, gentle hands. He relaxed, glad for the end to this interim end. Anxious for heaven. Anxious for the love and light and heat.
Then the hands clamped onto his wounded shoulder, and he screamed into the darkness.
His eyes snapped open against wetness, and he realized he was underwater. Then he remembered the crash. He struggled against the current as the years of drifting became seconds of chaotic tumbling and thrashing and pain. His body was trapped in the submerged car.
The hands on his shoulder . . .
Sheila.
The hands worked down his arm, and Frank stopped flailing, realizing she was trying to help him. The seat belt loosened across his chest. He reached for her, and his fingers brushed her softly flowing hair, and then she was gone.
He blinked into the blackness, his limbs stiffening from the intense chill. His right hand found the door, then the opening of the shattered window.
The water he’d inhaled burned in his lungs as he kicked through the window. A small pocket of air in his chest told him in which direction the surface lay, and he fought toward it.
The car had tumbled into a deeper part of the river, so the current was sluggish, but the weight of his wet uniform limited his progress. Bright streaks of lime and fluorescent orange rocketed across the backs of his eyelids as he paddled upward. Then he broke through the skin of the river, his lungs greedy as he gulped at the night air.
The air tasted of muck and mud and fish, and he spat to clear his mouth, then drew in another gargling gasp. The current tumbled him lazily against a boulder, then another, the rush of the river like white noise.
In the glimmer of the moon, he saw the scarred ground and broken saplings where the car had rolled down the bank. He spun around in the water, looking for Sheila. Nothing but black stones and the white phosphor of the current.
He spat once more, took a deep breath, and dove toward the twin streams of yellow light that rippled ghostlike in the riverbed.
The current pulled him away from the underwater lights. He frantically paddled toward the bank until his feet hit bottom, then waded back upstream, his teeth chattering. He’d been up for nearly a minute. Could Sheila hold her breath that long?
When he reached the spot where the car had gone under, he dove in headfirst. His hand hit smooth metal and he opened his eyes. Judging from the position of the swirling headlight beams, he was on the roof of the car. He let the current drag him to the driver’s side. Luckily, the car had settled nearly flat on the riverbed, so he didn’t have to worry about the door’s being jammed.
Frank forced himself deeper, his lungs already longing for a taste of oxygen and nitrogen. He found the door handle, opened his eyes again, and thought he made out a shadow in the front seat. But the water was dark, as dark as his drifting dream of death.
He yanked the handle up, and the dented door opened with a burp of released air. Reaching inside, he felt the vinyl of the seat, the warped steering wheel, the freely drifting seat belt.
He probed deeper, holding himself suspended in the cold water with his left hand on the chassis. He found her draped halfway across the seat, her legs dangling limply.
How long had she been under? Had she reached the surface, then come back to rescue him? Or had she been submerged all along? Frank was losing track of time, his thoughts gone fuzzy from lack of air, and he knew they were in trouble.
He squirmed his body into the cab and reached for her torso. Wrapping his arm around her, he tugged her toward the door. His knee caught on the steering wheel and the horn emitted a pathetic, drowning bleat. He pulled again, and the current nudged them out of the vehicle. Vomit and fear forced Frank’s mo
uth open, and rank, muddy water rushed between his teeth.
He spun lazily and acrobatically with Sheila in his arms. He thought of Friday night hoe downs at the Gulp ‘n’ Gulch, how he’d never had a partner this graceful. He nearly laughed. Choking on Potter’s Mill River, with the ghost of his dead brother waiting for them up on the road, with the red church owned by whatever nightmare inhabited Archer McFall’s transient flesh, with everything he’d ever held as sane and right and normal now as distant as the sweet night air above, he’d finally found a dance partner.
At least I’ll die in somebody’s arms, and not all alone, like I always figured would happen.
And he almost surrendered again, almost opened his mouth and let the river sing its song, almost let the cold black in-between sweep them both away to the endless sea. But just as he thought of it, just as he realized that your life doesn’t flash before your dying eyes, only the very end of it does, he pictured Sheila. He pictured her behind her desk, and him standing before it, explaining to her why he’d given up.
A little bit of pain? she would say. You were cold and tired and just wanted to rest? It was easier to give up than face a world where things were topsy-turvy gone-to-hell, where spirits walked and shape-shifters drove luxury cars and you had to stare your embodied guilt in the eyes? You gave up on me, you gave up on yourself, you gave up on us, just because you didn’t have faith?
And her imagined anger flooded his wet and scalding chest, lit a fire in his rib cage, made him angry. Frank kicked until his feet found solid purchase. He shoved upward, his arms tightly clutching Sheila around the waist.
He silently prayed as they rose through the water, though he could not decide to whom to send his prayers or what he should ask for. His limbs were so numb he wasn’t even entirely sure it was Sheila in his grasp. It could easily have been an old sodden stump.
And then they broke the surface, the air as sweet as a ripe plum, the moon as welcome as a smile, the million bubbles of froth on the river joyously whispering in Frank’s ears.
He tilted Sheila’s head back so that her mouth and nostrils were clear of the water, then half swam, half drifted to a sandy shallow. He carried Sheila to a flat outcropping of rock and laid her gently on her back.
He had learned CPR as part of his officer certification, and leaned over her face, ready to pinch her nose and force breath into her lungs and reach inside her shirt to massage her heart back to action.
But suddenly she coughed, spat, and blew a clear viscid fluid from her nose. She coughed again, and Frank called her name, then rolled her onto her side so that she wouldn’t choke. Her skin was white in the moonlight, almost glowing in its bloodless pallor.
“Sheila?” he called again, louder this time, so that his voice carried over the rushing waters. Her eyelids fluttered weakly, and she coughed again. Then her eyes snapped open and she raised herself on one elbow, her hair trailing water onto the gray stone.
“C—cold,” she said, teeth chattering. That reminded Frank of his own chill, settling as bone-deep as a toothache. But he brushed aside his discomfort in the face of this miracle. How long had she been under? Two minutes? Three? Five?
“Are you okay?” he asked, knowing how stupid his words sounded even as he said them.
“Next time . . . you take me for a swim . . .” she said, panting, her throat rattling with trapped liquid, “can you make it . . . a heated pool?”
She sat up, tucking her knees against her chest and hugging them. Her body trembled, and Frank pressed against her, even though he had little body heat to offer.
“You saved my life,” he told her. She felt good in his arms, even with cold flesh.
“No . . . you saved my life,” she said. Her shoulders rose and fell with her deep, even breathing. She was recovering quickly.
Too quickly.
There must have been a pocket of air trapped in the car, perhaps near the back windshield where her head had been. That was the only explanation. That, or else maybe there really was a God, prayers sometimes did get answered, sometimes miracles happened.
Frank glanced at the deep black sea of sky overhead, at the winking blue-white stars that stretched out and out forever. Then he cleared the brackish aftertaste of the river from his mouth and spat into the dark water. Sure, God just happened to break from His constant job of keeping the stars burning to actually save a human being. That was a laugh.
God hadn’t bothered with saving Samuel, or Frank’s father and mother. He hadn’t saved Boonie Houck or Zeb Potter or Donna Gregg. Hell, if you got right down to it, He hadn’t even saved His only son, Jesus. God was cold and uncaring, as distant as the blue behind stars. God didn’t even deserve Frank’s hate, only the apathy He showered upon those who would love Him, so Frank spat once more and turned his attention to Sheila.
“Are we dead yet?” Sheila said, her eyes bright with her old sarcasm and verve and maybe that little glint that comes only from seeing the light of life’s end.
“No, but you’re going to have so much paperwork, you might wish you were,” he said. “You wrecked a Pickett County patrol car, and the taxpayers are going to want an explanation.”
“And the worst part is, you’re only half joking,” she said, followed by a laugh that turned into a cough.
“That Frankie, he’s a laugh a minute,” came a voice from the shadows along the riverbank.
Frank’s blood temperature plummeted the rest of the way to zero. Sheila tensed beneath his embrace.
A milky shape came out from the dark trees.
“Samuel?” Frank said.
“Thought you were going to get baptized for sure that time,” the dead boy said. “Somebody up there must like you.”
Frank had often dreamed of the apologies he wished he could make to Samuel, all the ways he could try to put things right, a hundred ways to say he was sorry. But now that he had the chance, all he could do was respond dumbly to his brother’s ghost. “You mean God?”
Samuel’s laughter drifted across the river like a mournful fog.
“No,” came the hollow voice. The ghost turned its head up the embankment toward the hill, where the orange lights of the church windows flickered between the trees. “I mean Archer McFall. Him what owns God.”
“Samuel?” Frank held up a quivering hand as if to touch the thing that couldn’t be there, that couldn’t possibly exist. “Is that really you?”
“What’s left of me.”
Sheila squeezed Frank’s forearm. Frank wanted to ask Samuel so many things. But his dead brother spoke before he could think of anything to say.
“Why did you let me die, Frankie?” The hollow eyes became part of the greater night. The wispy threads of the ghost rippled as if fighting a breeze. Then the ghost turned away.
Samuel drifted up the steep bank and disappeared between the mossy boulders. Frank stood, his wet clothes hugging him like a second skin. He was to follow. He knew it as surely as he knew that all the roads of his life led to the red church, led back to that night of his greatest failure, led forward to Archer and the Hung Preacher and the Bell Monster with its Halloween laugh. As surely as he knew that even the dead weren’t allowed to rest in peace. Until Archer said so.
And the thing behind Archer?
Did it have a name, or did it have its own Archer, its own God to obey?
No matter. All that counted now was the arrival of midnight. He took Sheila’s hand and helped her to her feet. Wordlessly they began the climb to the red church.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Ronnie’s nose hurt.
Not so badly that the pain drove away the throbbing in the side of his head where Whizzer had punched him, but plenty bad enough. Whizzer had glared at him when the Day family entered the church, had even tried to stand, but one of Whizzer’s moronic brothers held him back. Whizzer grinned around his cigarette butt in an I’ll see you after church expression.
Ronnie flipped him a secretive finger and followed Mom to the second row.
Tim sat between Ronnie and Mom, looking around the church with an awe struck expression. Tim wasn’t that hard to impress. Ronnie had trembled a little coming up the church steps, but now that he was inside and could see this was just a church like any other, only a little bit older, he was able to bite back his fear.
He recognized most of the people in the church, though he didn’t know everybody’s name. There sat creepy Mama Bet McFall, who had stopped by last week to sell Mom a few jars of pickled okra. Anybody who ate okra at all, much less pickled it, must be batty. Plus she was Archer McFall’s mother, and Ronnie knew that Archer had something to do with the trouble between his parents.
“Sit still,” Mom whispered to Tim, who had been kicking his legs back and forth in his excitement. He sat back in the pew and held himself stiff for about twenty seconds, then started swinging his legs again.
Ronnie looked at Mom. She seemed happy, her eyes shiny in the candlelight, a little smile wrinkling the corners of her mouth. She hadn’t smiled this much in years, not ever in the Baptist Church, hardly ever at home, not even at the Heritage Festival at the school when Dad made her get out on the floor and do a little flatfoot dancing. But she was happy now, her hands held over her heart as if she were going to reach in and grab it, then give it away.
The other parishioners whispered to each other, as agitated as Tim. Something was up. You could feel it in the air like a mild dose of electricity, sort of like the shock you got when you touched a wire between the posts of a car battery. Not bad enough to hurt, but enough to make you uneasy.
This felt like one of those turning points. Ronnie didn’t like so many turning points popping up in such a short period of time. If you turned in too many different directions, you got twisted up in knots and couldn’t tell which way you were headed.
Mama Bet turned around in her seat and smiled back at the Days. She was missing three of her teeth, and the grin looked like that of a sick jack-o’-lantern. “Glad you could make it tonight, Linda,” she said, her words liquid and snuffy.
Littlefield: Two Supernatural Thrillers Page 24