“V-Ray, this is weird.”
“It’s been weird for me since we were 10.”
“I mean, weird like weird, you know?” Those gray irises were smoldering with mad yellow flecks, the red veins streaking against the white like lightning made of fire.
Vernon Ray stepped forward and grabbed Bobby’s shoulders, pulling him forward with a strength that his scrawny 85 pounds shouldn’t possess. Vernon Ray’s head tilted up and his breath was hot against Bobby’s lips and—
Holy crap, he’s trying to KISS me.
Bobby shoved hard, his forearms up and elbows back like he was assaulting the tackling dummy in football practice. Vernon Ray flew backwards against the wall, shaking the shed with the impact, and a dried-out husk of harness fell from its nail and rolled across the dirt. The tin roofing squeaked in protest then settled. In the silence, Bobby’s breath came fast and frantic and he waited for V-Ray’s whimper.
Instead, his best friend looked at him from his crumpled collapse, a thin line of blood leaking from his nose. The corner of his mouth lifted. He was smiling.
“I’ve known it ever since we were down by the creek catching crawdads that day,” Vernon Ray said. “You were on that big flat rock, your shirt off, glowing in the sun, your face so alive and happy.”
Bobby had no idea which day Vernon Ray was talking about. They’d hunted crawdads many times, and goofing off at the creek was way better than hanging around inside the hot trailer, especially if Mom was around bitching for him to clean up the bedroom. “I don’t remember—”
“July 7, three years ago.”
“You’re freaking me out, Vee.”
Vernon Ray straightened himself until he was on his knees and bent before Bobby like a penitent before a stone idol. A shaft of sunlight angled so that it suffused his face. His eyes were shining again, but not with tears. “I love you, Bobby.”
Bobby backed up a step. The path to the door was clear now, but he didn’t trust his knees. Bobbing and weaving toward the end zone between 160-pound linebackers was no problem, but those five yards to freedom now seemed a hundred miles of toxic swamp. He cleared his throat but it felt like a corncob was rammed in his windpipe, dry and abrasive.
“I know you feel something, too,” Vernon Ray said. “I’ve seen it in your eyes.”
Anger cleared his air passage. “You ain’t seen shit. You know how hard it is when everybody thinks you’re a faggot? I hear the whispers, too. Hell, they drag me into it half the time, call me your ‘Little butt buddy’ and ‘Tinkerbell.’”
Vernon Ray’s eyes shut briefly, those long lashes curling up in delicate swoops. Closed, his eyes looked a lot like Karen’s, and his mouth did, too, at least his full lower lip. Bobby’s stomach fluttered as if a pack of moths had been let loose. This was getting confusing.
“I know, and you still stick by me,” Vernon Ray said. “That says a lot.”
“That don’t say nothing. You’re my pal. Read comic books, shoplift once in a while, sneak the old man’s beer, cheat on school tests together. Guy stuff.”
“You’re afraid, and I don’t blame you. I’ve been afraid ever since I knew I was different.”
“That’s the trouble, Davis. You’re a different kind of different.” He hoped using Vernon Ray’s last name would move things back to solid ground, a normal footing that would allow them both to walk away and pretend this had never happened.
Vernon Ray put his palms on the ground and leaned toward Bobby, then slid his knees forward, jeans rasping in the dirt. He was crawling like an animal, and his eyes radiated a strange gleam that was nothing like Bobby had ever seen in Karen’s.
“Stay away, V-Ray,” Bobby said. “Don’t make me have to punch you.”
Vernon Ray moved forward, rasp rasp rasp, breathing evenly, while Bobby’s heart knocked against his ribs like a broken crankshaft in a tractor.
“Don’t deny it,” Vernon Ray said. “It’s just you and me and God. Dex isn’t around to catch you and God doesn’t care.”
Bobby backed up another two steps, glancing toward the door, almost afraid to let his eyes leave Vernon Ray. A shadow fell across the opening, and Bobby just knew it was Dex.
Great, he’ll tell everybody he caught me with my “boyfriend” on his knees. I’m frigging doomed.
But at least Dex would kill the scene, disturb the private moment that was making Bobby nauseated, lightheaded, and off kilter. Ghosts were one thing, he’d come to accept them because he trusted his own eyes, and in a strange sort of way, they made sense. You died and you didn’t want to leave, so you hung around a while and checked things out, maybe engaged in a little vandalism for entertainment. No biggie.
But this—
As the shadow grew, moving closer to the shed, Bobby wondered if his reaction would be the same if it were Karen at his feet, getting ready to worship him in whatever sublime fashion his mind and body could concoct.
Would he be sick and nervous, or would he be the cool jock stud he’d imagined?
And, worse, was there really any difference, when you got down to it?
The shadow crept, swelling larger, too tall to be Dex. Jeff Davis? One of the Eggerses? Or, Christ, his drunken dad?
In the hush punctuated only by Vernon Ray’s rasping jeans, Bobby should have heard footsteps. Instead, all he heard was the roar of blood in his ears.
“I told you I love Karen,” he said, extra loud, so whomever was approaching could hear. “I’ve been nailing it all semester.”
He would have been thrilled to hear Jerrell, Dex, or anyone come back with, “The only thing you’ve been nailing is your own five fingers.” But there was only the silent, encroaching shadow.
“We both know the truth,” Vernon Ray whispered. “You and I are the same.”
“No, we’re not the same. I like looking at titties and some sweet pink. I don’t love guys. And I don’t love you.”
Bobby didn’t realize he’d been shouting, nearly screaming, until his mouth fell shut and the echo died away among the tin and timbers. The doorway was filled now and he looked away from his kneeling friend, who was now scarcely three feet away, his head uncomfortably close to Bobby’s crotch and the electric warmth that had collected there.
The heat turned to needles of ice.
Col. Creep stood in the doorway.
He looked more solid than he had two days ago, when he’d issued the silent command that led to the bulldozer guy’s death. As if racking up a body count did wonders for the spirit.
He’s real again, and I’ll have to run right through him to get out the door.
Bobby shivered at the thought of penetrating that cold ethereal flesh.
The dead officer’s eyes glared out from beneath the brim of his slouch hat, glinting as if backlit by the hearths of hell. The hairs of the bushy beard seemed to writhe and twist like thin serpents. The man’s pale skin was stretched tight around the bones of his face, and his lips pursed as if he were amused at the tableau before him.
Then again, when you were released from the bottomless pit of the grave, maybe the living were nothing but entertainment.
“Vuh—vuh—,” Bobby stuttered. “V-Ray?”
The officer rubbed his beard with his left hand while his right stole to his scabbard and fondled the hilt of his sword.
Vernon Ray looked up at Bobby, palms pressed flat on the ground. His eyes were glazed and faraway, his mouth open and the tip of his tongue poking through. His friend was under some kind of weird spell, and Bobby wondered if a ghost who could order dead soldiers to shoot invisible rifles using real bullets had the power to make somebody do things they didn’t want to do.
Because Bobby didn’t want to stand there a second longer, but his legs wouldn’t work, the wiring between his muscles and brain short-circuiting.
Col. Creep drew his sword with a metallic snick, the first sound he’d made.
Vernon Ray turned at the sound and almost nodded, as if he’d expected company. An audience for his
coming-out party.
The officer stepped into the shed and pointed his sword at Bobby’s chest. Bobby swallowed and it felt like chunks of brick and broken glass worked their way down his gullet and into his gut.
The sword didn’t look invisible at all, and the polished metal caught the sunlight.
Bobby wondered how it would go down with his friends. Would he get a funeral and everything? Would he be the first of his class to die in a freak accident? How would the sheriff and the newspaper write this one up?
Even more importantly, where would he end up? Trapped in a casket for eternity, or was his hasty and enforced acceptance of Jesus in Barkersville Baptist enough to get him a ticket on the Big Elevator?
Or maybe he’d wind up in the Hole, the newest member of a troop destined to haunt the chilly hollows of Mulatto Mountain until the end of time.
The officer flexed his wrist and made three waves of the sword.
Motioning me to the door?
Vernon Ray nodded up at Bobby, telling him it was okay, that at least one of them would live. And Bobby’s cheeks were hot and wet, and he realized it was his turn to cry, and he wondered if V-Ray was right. He didn’t love the guy, not in that way, but maybe Bobby was different, too.
As he stumbled near-blind to daylight and freedom, Vernon Ray called out. “I’ll be okay, Bobby. Don’t worry.”
Bobby paused at the door. Vernon Ray was now standing near Col. Creep, whose sword was lowered. The ghost looked almost paternal, not at all like the mean freaky phantom that would have sliced off his head moments before.
Bobby turned his face to the golden sunshine, the blurred forest, and an escape whose only price was the betrayal of his best friend. As he ran, his feet hardly touched the ground.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The saber hovered in the air, licked with the flames of dying sunlight.
Vernon Ray stared at it, transfixed by the dance. It lifted, came closer, swayed, grew larger in his vision until it filled the shed. It was real, he knew, as solid as anything this world had ever hugged to its gravity. And it could cleave him, lop off his head, remove his heart.
Yet he couldn’t move.
The saber came closer, the shadows somehow growing deeper in the skewed corners of the lean-to. Vernon Ray settled on his folded legs, knees chafed from the crumbling dirt. His pulse rattled out a syncopated reveille, one that screamed “Retreat!” But his muscles were jelly clinging to icy bones.
The sharp steel hung motionless for a long moment. Branches brushed against the tin eaves and the old planks creaked against the Halloween breeze. Vernon Ray forced his gaze away from the killing blade and along the arm that wielded it, up the crinkled cloth of the sleeve to the terrible face.
Kirk’s skin rippled like linen on a line, shades of light and dark interweaving and stitching gossamer flesh. Dark beard and eyes swam in the shifting shadows, and Vernon Ray felt the temperature in the room drop. Goose bumps rose on his neck and arms.
He’s sucking me. Taking my heat.
The colonel tilted his head back, mouth open as if exhaling a long sigh of the grave. Amid the stained enamel of teeth, things squirmed and writhed. Vernon Ray expected something to spill from that mouth, moans or marching orders, but if anything came, it was lost in the wind that stole between cracks.
The saber lifted, higher and closer, pointed toward heaven as if gathering its strength from some distant and magical source. But Vernon Ray knew any power the colonel had was power that Vernon Ray offered. Willingly or not.
“Go ahead and kill me, so it will be over,” Vernon Ray whispered through parched lips.
At least Bobby would escape, and probably cry at his funeral, and his dad would stand there in his formal best, Mom dabbing her damp mascara with a cotton hanky, all the kids from school squirming in pews, the First Baptist Choir singing “Amazing Grace” and Preacher Staymore dishing up a eulogy that sought more to save any heathens in attendance than to celebrate Vernon Ray’s deliverance.
And as the casket was lowered into the cold red ground and the mourners filed away, Dad might linger a moment as the diggers sat on their tractors at the edge of the burial lawn like vultures. And Dad might frown at his lost little soldier, maybe secretly toss a valued relic the way others laid flowers. Perhaps a canteen, a cap, a dull brass medal, a mini ball, something to seal a connection that had never been forged on the Earth. A piece of history to carry on the endless journey, a history from some other time and not the recent one they had barely shared.
It didn’t matter if the hole were jangling or whether it was six feet deep and trimmed to rectangular precision. When you went in, it was forever.
Col. Kirk held the saber aloft as if celebrating its profane menace.
And Vernon Ray waited for it to fall.
Close your eyes. You don’t want to watch your own head bouncing in the dirt.
But he couldn’t look away from that face and those eyes that were long, black roads of misery and sin. Kirk was said to have been a cold-blooded murderer, a horse thief, a rapist who would burn churches and piss out the embers. But those eyes held none of that rage, only a vast emptiness, the ethereal flesh around them swirling like star mist into unquenchable black holes.
Then the eyes glimmered, bits of hellfire or stray sundown.
In the stillness of the shed, at that moment of surrender, Vernon Ray felt a peace descend and settle on him, wrapping him in a protective warmth that would repel any blade or bullet or hateful words. His heartbeat, which had jumped to jackrabbit speed when he’d professed his love for Bobby and then kicked a gear higher when the colonel had appeared, slowed to a steady thud and he was aware of his blood flowing through his body, the pulse pushing life to his limbs. For the first time in thirteen years, he felt alive, and he laughed aloud at the irony that only impending death could have triggered the feeling.
I surrender, but you take no prisoners.
The saber poised.
And then lowered.
Slowly.
Down, down, arcing into its scabbed sheath.
It slid home with a war-weary whisper.
Vernon Ray waited, not sure if the man would speak—could speak—and the silence stretched like a glistening spider web. He wondered if Bobby would tell anybody, then decided the colonel’s glowering eyes had contained enough threat to keep Bobby shivering under his blankets for a month. Vernon Ray finally looked up and the colonel reached into a bulging pocket of his tunic. He came away with a wad of gray fabric and thrust it toward Vernon Ray.
The boy studied those Jangling-Hole eyes for any sign of sleeping humanity. Only the long promise of night resided there. But the man nodded, in much the same way he’d motioned Bobby toward a hasty retreat, with a fluidity that was more liquid than muscle.
Vernon Ray reached for the fabric, his fingers brushing the icy ethereal mist of the officer’s hand. It was a kepi, topped with frayed wool and banded with brown leather, the canvas bill creased and stained. The colonel’s coal-black eyes narrowed, somehow no longer menacing, but strange and chilling all the same.
The eyes were almost kind. Almost fatherly.
But Vernon Ray shook that illusion away–this man had killed, captured, and maimed, he’d carved a red swath through these mountains, and the old settling families still used “Kirked” as a verb for wrongdoing. Sin could burn and embers cool to ash, and the dead could be forgiven but never forgotten.
Vernon Ray swallowed corncob dust and, with a trembling hand, placed the kepi on his head. It had been made for a boy and fit perfectly.
The colonel floated forward, looming over Vernon Ray, whose head tilted down to stare at dusty, stained boots. Then the cold fingers were on his chin, lifting his face, and Vernon Ray wondered wildly if the colonel wanted what Bobby hadn’t, if the cold company of the Jangling Hole had left Kirk as lost and alone on the other side as Vernon Ray was on the side of the living.
But the bearded mouth and wedge of cheeks and forehead visib
le beneath the broad hat’s brim showed no hunger or passion. The fingers, as soft and cool as salamanders in a muddy spring, slid along the curve of Vernon Ray’s jaw and stroked his hair. Then the hand gripped his shoulder with a strength that could have crushed granite and clawed its way out of any cave-in.
Words wended through the air, or maybe it was only the creak of rafters, or language leaking into him from the medium of necromantic connection:
We don’t belong together.
The words made no sense, but Vernon Ray wasn’t sure if they’d fallen properly in the carousel of his thoughts.
The hand lifted Vernon Ray, peculiar electricity shooting through the boy’s chest, and he thought again of battery charges and energy transformation. Vernon Ray now stood chest-high to the dead man, legs weak and quavering
He’s draining my juice, just like the reporter said . . . .
It was almost like an obscene dance of dust and air, Vernon Ray’s partner literally light on his feet, swaying to an invisible music.
Then Vernon Ray heard it: the distant cadence of the snare drum, rolling over the ghost hills, insinuating itself in the currents of shiftless air, riding the dying autumn sky as if marching an exhausted battalion home.
The colonel’s head lifted. heeding a call to arms, then his frigid fingers fell from Vernon Ray’s body, going to mist, and the juice flowed backwards, the connection severed. Strength and vitality surged through Vernon Ray’s limbs in a rush of warm blood.
Then the colonel paled, giving up the ghost yet again, the threads of his illusive form fading. The officer’s saber, sheath, and uniform with its dull brass insignia disappeared along with him, but the kepi remained, solid as the shed walls.
Vernon Ray reached up and adjusted the cap until the brim was perched over his forehead, shading his eyes against the death of day. The snare’s soft rattle fell away to silence, and only the wind remained, pushing October on past so winter could bare its icy teeth and feed.
Littlefield: Two Supernatural Thrillers Page 51