“Are you okay, Dad?” Bobby was almost afraid to ask, because it was the sort of question that answered itself.
“Gone around the bend,” Dad said, gripping his musket so tightly his knuckles were white. A thick drop of blood welled at the end of his ragged bandage and his other wound looked like raw hamburger.
Dad took off, heading toward the shouts of his fellow soldiers. A shot fired somewhere on the slope above, then came an answering report from behind. Bobby debated crawling back into the obscurity of the weeds, pondering sitting out the war. But Vernon Ray was his best friend.
Who cares if he has Bambi eyelashes and a little extra wiggle in his walk? He’s the closest thing to normal I’ve known in this life.
And Dad had suggested an even tighter kinship between Vernon Ray and Bobby, but Bobby didn’t have time to figure that one out at the moment. His forehead hurt as if a wire were stretched around his skull. Dad was nearly to the curve in the tracks. In a moment, Bobby would be alone.
He glanced around for some kind of weapon, but the nearby branches were flimsy. He stuffed some rocks in his pocket, the way he did when they passed the mean dogs at the Stillwell house. Rocks didn’t intimidate the dogs one little bit, and Bobby didn’t expect they’d scare the ghosts, either, but the gesture made him feel better.
Th’ow it, doof.
If he’d stayed away from the Hole in the first place, all this never would have happened. But maybe the Hole was bigger than all of them, the inside-out darkness that was barely hidden by the thin painted illusion of life that lay over it.
He dashed after Dad, expecting to round the bend and find the entire Home Guard gone, Dad included, and the rest of the world giving way to a blank netherworld, the tracks dangling into the vast white void of space like a comic book page that had been partially erased.
Instead, he saw the battle lines drawn as if the stakes were not merely life and death, but past and future as well.
The ghost patrol stood in a loose formation behind Col. Creep, their weapons glinting dully as if they’d been salvaged from an underground cache. One of the men had a slanted face, his left eye frozen open, a jagged scar over one eyebrow. The colonel stood with his shoulders square, eyes blazing from beneath the brim of his cavalier’s hat. Kirk’s gloved hands were folded across his chest as if he’d been laid to rest that way, but Bobby didn’t think the colonel had gotten much sleep in the 150 years he’d been dead.
Behind the colonel was Vernon Ray, standing among the ghost soldiers as if he’d been recruited into their ranks. He was a little pale but appeared unhurt. A ragged, stained kepi was tucked down on his head.
Cindy’s words came back to Bobby: Or they’ll take a replacement . . . .
Jeff Davis and his men stood spread across the tracks, weapons at ready. The rounded tip of Jeff’s saber was pointed at the heavens, the polished edge gilded by the sun. Stony and Whizzer knelt in the gravel, muskets leveled. Five Home Guard troops stood behind them, Dad among them.
Dad aimed his gun and his cheek was pressed against the butt of his rifle as if he were sighting down the barrel. The battle cries had died away, along with the gun smoke, and leaves flapped in the hushed wind. The air carried the funereal taste of October, clouds brushing their slow shadows across the mountainsides and tinting the trees gray.
The two sides faced off, awaiting orders from above or below. Bobby couldn’t be sure because of the woolly beard, but Kirk appeared to be smiling, though the eyes were as black as rotted sin.
They’re making their stand. Which doesn’t make a bit of sense, because even a dummy like me knows they’d be better off defending higher ground.
But maybe they already occupy the high ground, because I sure can’t tell good from evil anymore.
“Looks like you’re done running, Kirk,” Capt. Davis said, as calm as if he were playing a video game. “I’d give you a chance to surrender, but I don’t think we make garrisons that can hold such as you.”
Bobby crouched behind Whizzer and Dad, peering through the gap in the firing line. The copper stink of Dad’s wound blended with the mustiness of the old uniforms and the acrid tang of gunpowder
Capt. Davis raised his saber toward the sky and leveled his pistol. “Ready!” he shouted.
The boys of the Home Guard tensed, though across the way their undead adversaries were blank faced and as stoic as Spartans.
“Aim . . . .”
“Damn, Jeff, your boy’s in there,” Stony Hampton said. “He might get hit.”
“There’s no such thing as innocent blood,” the captain said.
Col. Creep stepped protectively–floated, Bobby thought, still not used to the unnatural, liquid motion–in front of Vernon Ray, as if his amorphous flesh could shield the boy from real bullets. Bobby’s and Vernon Ray’s eyes met and Vernon Ray gave a small nod and silently moved his lips.
Bobby couldn’t be sure, because he’d rarely seen the words formed, but he thought they might have shaped “I love you.”
“Fire!” the crazed captain bellowed, and all hell broke loose in a cannonade of thunder, smoke, and screams.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Littlefield arrived on the scene just as the smoke cleared.
Jeff Davis was poking around on the gravel bed with his saber, chinking up rocks and tapping as if checking for escape hatches. The Home Guard looked as if the soldiers were fighting off a long hangover instead of a renegade pack of ghosts. Where Littlefield had expected carnage, bloodshed, and the moans of the dying, he found only the weekend warriors collapsed about the railroad tracks, wiping sweaty hair with their caps and rising unsteadily to their feet.
“What happened?” Cindy asked Whizzer Buchanan, who in civilian life had been busted for selling weed the year before. Littlefield wished this was a hallucination from the bottom of a bong instead of the reality of a world turned upside down.
“Dunno,” Whizzer said. “We was on a maneuver and that’s about all I remember.”
“How’d we get up here, anyway?” said Elmer Eldreth, and Littlefield saw that though his hand was still bandaged, the wound on his shoulder was closed and the flesh undamaged, though his uniform had a small hole in it.
“Great,” Cindy said. “The story of the century and my eyewitnesses are blind.”
“Just be glad nobody else was killed,” Littlefield said. “As far as I can tell.”
A boy approached from the edge of the woods. He wore neither a uniform nor a period outfit of the civilian attachment. His gray eyes were wide, cheeks pale, hands shaking.
Looks like he’s still got his wits about him. At least he has enough sense to be scared.
“Hey, Bobby,” Cindy said, and the sheriff saw a glance of recognition and secret agreement pass between them. “You okay?”
Before Bobby could answer, Littlefield asked, “Did you see what happened?”
The boy shook his head. “Nothing but smoke.”
“They overloaded their battery,” Cindy said. “Went ‘poof’ like a magician’s sleight of hand.”
“Vernon Ray’s gone,” Bobby said.
“Gone?” Littlefield said.
“They took him.”
Littlefield was about to ask who had done the taking, but then realized there was only one “they.” Kirk’s Raiders might have beaten a retreat from the battlefield, but the war was far from over.
“Where did they go?” Cindy asked, but Littlefield already knew the answer. He’d known it all along, just as Cindy had accused, but he’d avoided the truth because it was troublesome and painful.
It always goes back to the Hole and the darkness under the world.
If ignoring it didn’t make it go away, maybe he could solve the problem the old-fashioned way: kill it quick and bury it clean. He’d had a bead on the colonel back at the park, had aimed true at an imaginary bull’s-eye on the tunic-covered chest, but his mistake had been shooting the dead man in the heart.
Because it turned out the colonel did
n’t have one.
Capt. Davis hustled up, his saber pointed toward the ground. “The Tennessee boys didn’t follow the script,” he said.
“They ain’t supposed to be in until tomorrow,” Stony Hampton said, swatting at a sweat bee that hovered in the fading gun smoke.
“That’s what I mean,” Davis said.
“Let me check that pistol again,” Littlefield said to him.
The captain frowned and gazed down the tracks as if a steam locomotive had hauled off half his brains. He passed the gun to Littlefield, who checked the chamber and saw that all the cartridges were intact.
“He fired it,” Cindy said. “And I doubt he had time to reload.”
“Invisible bullets,” Bobby said. “Everybody’s shooting blanks.”
“At blank targets,” the sheriff said.
Littlefield passed the gun back to Davis, who holstered it and began rallying the troops for the march back to camp. They grumbled a little, as if content in their drowsiness, but they gathered their gear. Elmer Eldreth collected his hat and musket, tipping his canteen and taking a generous gulp.
Capt. Davis led the desultory soldiers down the track. Bobby ran after his dad, said something to him, and received a lazy nod in response. Bobby jogged back to where the sheriff and Cindy stood on the tracks, reconnoitering the woods.
“Like nothing ever happened,” Cindy said.
Littlefield couldn’t resist. “There goes your Pulitzer and your book deal.”
“I’ve still got my camera.”
“If there’s anything on it. I have a feeling when they get back to the park, they’ll find Chalky Watkins strutting around fresh as a rooster, wondering where the hell everybody went. And that woman in the civilian camp will be flexing mugs of fresh coffee like some backwoods Martha Stewart.”
“That horseman got killed, remember?”
“Sure, but I’ll bet there’s not a scratch on him now, and Perry Hoyle will write it down as a heart attack or stroke. It’s almost like nothing’s changed, a return to balance.”
“Except Vernon Ray’s gone,” Bobby said, and he turned to Cindy. “Your ‘replacement’ theory. To balance things out.”
“That means one got away,” Cindy said.
“What are you two talking about?” Littlefield said. Capt. Davis and his Home Guard had gone around the curve and were no longer visible, though Davis’s tired commands were audible as he herded the troops back to Aldridge Park.
“It ain’t over,” Bobby said. “That was the calm before the storm.”
“The anticlimax,” Cindy said. “To trick these macho clowns into letting loose with a bunch of testosterone and rage so Kirk’s Raiders could sponge up the energy. Like a haunted battlefield where the ghosts linger long after the screams have died away and the blood has soaked deep in the dirt, feeding on the long memory of pain.”
“We’ve covered all this before,” Littlefield said. “So does this mean they got what they wanted?”
“Only if you’re willing to give them the boy,” Cindy said.
Littlefield gazed through the trees that were rooted and fed by the black skin of the mountain, the shadows under the kaleidoscopic canopy seeming to eddy and swirl like obscene molasses. He thought of his dead deputy, Sheila Story, and his little brother, other sacrificial lambs thrown on the altar of his ego and failure.
You feed the monsters and they go away and leave you alone.
Even if the outcome carries a little collateral damage.
At least you walk away.
You walk away.
“I guess there’s nothing else for it,” Littlefield said, then asked Bobby. “How do we get to the Hole from here?”
Bobby pointed to a slight part in the scrub, where jackvine and poison oak strangled a stand of leafless saplings. The path was barely wide enough to allow passage to a rabbit or raccoon, much less a grown man. But the gate was strait and the way was narrow. Or so said a book Littlefield had burned six years ago along with a certain contaminated church over in Whispering Pines.
“I don’t suppose I could talk you into staying out of it?” Littlefield asked Cindy.
“No,” she said, adjusting the camera on her shoulder as if preparing for a hike. “But if it makes you feel any better, I’ll keep it off the record.”
“You could never translate all this into English.”
“Enough talking,” Bobby said, heading for the animal path. “My best friend’s up there in the Jangling Hole with a bunch of dead guys.”
He slipped into the tangled brush and was swallowed by the woods of Mulatto Mountain.
Littlefield stared at Cindy as if fully seeing her for the first time, as a colleague, a partner in crime, and a woman, and he wondered if he’d always looked at people in his life as ghosts just waiting to happen. Her eyes were as blue as the sky, flecked with gold that might have been borrowed from the autumn poplar or the sun. She blinked first.
“History is written by the winners,” she said, sneakers crunching the gravel as she hurried after Bobby.
“Or the survivors,” Littlefield said, but he was the only one around to hear it.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Pearl had took sick since the shenanigans of the night before, and Hardy figured a day in bed would do her good, not to mention get her out of harm’s way in case Kirk’s bunch paid a return visit.
He’d forgotten he’d set the tea kettle on the stove to make her a cup of that fancy Darjeeling hippie-sounding stuff. When it broke steam and erupted in a whistle, he about jumped out of his skin, thinking it was the shriek of one of those contrary creatures from the Hole. He’d scalded his thumb while pouring the hot water, and now balanced the cup and saucer as he made his precarious way up the stairs.
He skipped the thirteenth step, where the drummer boy had been shot the night before. There was no blood, no bullet holes in the wall, nothing to mark the confrontation between Earley and Kirk’s Raiders. If not for the musket that had wound up at the far end of the hall, Hardy would have written off the incident as a dream, though that damnable rattling of the snare drum still echoed in the stairwells of his memory. At least Pearl and Donnie had been protected from the sight of the ghosts, though his wife’s imagination had done worse things to her than her eyes ever could.
And Donnie had no imagination worth worrying about.
Donnie’s room was quiet, which meant his son was either coloring again or else he was sleeping, or maybe just sitting cross-legged in the corner and rocking back and forth as he sometimes did. Hardy was almost past the room when he saw the opened door and the black wedge that filled the space leading behind it.
The door had been locked from the outside when Hardy had gone down to the kitchen. He’d checked it twice to make sure. Pearl might have taken Donnie into the bedroom to comfort him the way she had when he was six and the nightmares came. Except she’d been snoring loud enough to wake the dead, compliments of the blue pills the doctors had prescribed her in February, when the latest round of tests had resulted in the suggestion of a state hospital stay for Donnie.
Hardy swallowed hard and kicked the door wide with the toe of his boot. It squeaked open and Hardy slopped some of the tea on his overalls. The room held nothing but the little table with its scattered crayons and papers, the rumpled cot in the corner, and a plastic water tumbler. Hardy set the saucer on the table and picked up the lone drawing on it. He angled it so it caught the light leaking from the hall.
Stick figures. A man and a boy.
Marching toward the Hole, which held smears of red and yellow in its dark squiggles as if the devil was serving up hot peppers for dinner.
He hurried down the hall to his bedroom and checked on Pearl. The hand-stitched quilt rose and fell with her breathing. Maybe merciful God would let her sleep through it all. Hardy took the musket from the closet, knowing it was as impotent as the slack, wrinkled meat between his legs, but like that part of him that had sired Donnie, its presence gave him comfort nonethel
ess. The Bible offered a little less, but he tucked it in his overall pocket anyway, just to feel the weight of the words.
As he made his way back through the hall, he was troubled by two things. Something had unlocked Donnie’s door and then led Donnie down the creaky stairs and past Hardy in the kitchen without being seen. Well, there was a third thing, too. The Hole had come unplugged and hell had let slip a few of its occupants.
From the porch, he surveyed the pasture and the twin ruts that led to the far gate. The dew had long since dried and the cows were grazing with their heads toward the west, working the last of the season’s grass as if storing the sweetness against the dead taste of winter hay. A lone buzzard circled high beneath the clouds, lazy and patient.
The rumble of heavy equipment oozed down from Mulatto Mountain as if the ancient stacked granite was being shaken to its foundation. He thought he heard a snare cadence in the diesel-fueled throbbing, but it might have been his own erratic pulse fluttering against his eardrums.
The musket had grown heavy by the time he reached the woods, and he considered tossing the Bible to ease his load. He thought about that little inspirational picture he’d seen in the doctor’s office, where there were footprints on the beach and the bit about where there was only one set of footprints and it turned out Jesus had carried a man across the sand for a while.
There was no mention of where they both were headed or why Jesus wouldn’t allow the fellow to rest for a minute, but that was the way of things. You just kept walking, no matter the burden.
Entering the high church of trees, he shivered. The temperature had dropped about 20 degrees and the advance scouts of December had grown a little bolder, baring their teeth in the shadows. This was a time of year for digging potatoes and setting aside cabbages, hauling in the feed corn and piling it up in the barn crib. Autumn was a season of dying, and the weak wouldn’t see it through.
Scott Nicholson Library Vol 2 Page 80