She knew this as surely as she knew that Archer was a savior. You didn’t question universal truths. You accepted them on faith. You tucked them in your heart and made the best of them. You fought for them. You made the sacrifices that kept those truths alive.
Who knew when the devil had first wormed its way finally to the surface of the world? It could have been tens of thousands of years ago, or a few hundred. All that mattered now was that the devil was loose upon the face of the earth, and Archer had to defeat it.
That had to be why Archer had returned to Whispering Pines, why God had called His son back home. The devil was still here, tied to this mouth of hell, living in those original families. The devil had hidden behind the faces of the Littlefields, worn the masks of the Houcks, slipped into the blood and meat of the Mathesons.
Archer would have to perform the cleansing. And she had to help. Even though she was as worn as these mountains, eroded by time and tides, by the forces of God’s tireless punishment. Even though she was only mortal.
She crawled to the rear of the root cellar and rolled away the flat stone. In the weak light, she could see the small crippled cross that had been carved into its surface. She stuck her face near the black opening. She never understood why the path to hell was so bone-chillingly cold. It should have been blazing hot, and smelling of sulfur and brimstone and smoke instead of dirt. But God worked in mysterious ways, and the devil worked just as strangely.
She cast her prayers into the pit. She could hold back the hordes. With her faith, she could win the battle below. Let God and Archer take care of the devil up here.
Mama Bet finished her prayers, the same ones the McFalls had been saying for over two centuries. She replaced the stone, sweating with effort even though her fingers were stiff from the cold. On aching knees she backed her way to the pantry, retrieved the candle, and replaced the boards along the back wall. She wiped the dirt from her hands and cussed God for burdening her with this holy work. As if filling her up with a messiah weren’t bad enough. No, He made her crawl on her belly like a serpent.
She blew out the candle and peeked through the gingham curtains. Archer was still outside. She could hear him carrying on with his business deals over the telephone, acting for all the world like an ordinary person. Well, Jesus had taken on work as a carpenter before starting up his career as a liar. Archer might as well be a rich preacher as a poor one.
She turned on the kitchen tap and stuck her hands under the frigid springwater. The dirt ran red down the drain. She put the candle away and wiped her hands on a towel. Her dress was stained at the knees, but she didn’t like to change clothes in midday. That was wasteful, the kind of thing a Christian might do.
She heard voices outside. They ain’t supposed to gather here, not with Archer around. The church will be ready soon enough.
She hurried onto the porch. Archer folded his phone and put it away. At the edge of the yard, in the shade of the trees, stood some members of the congregation: Stepford Matheson, Sonny Absher, Donna Gregg, and Rudy Buchanan. Rudy carried a shotgun and a Bible.
They started forward, Rudy’s broad face split with a grin, Sonny and Stepford red-faced from drink. Donna Gregg hung back, tugging Sonny’s sleeve. He brushed her away and scowled.
“What do y’all want?” Mama Bet called, shading her eyes so she could see them better. Archer stood beside her, looking down on them.
“We been thinking,” said Rudy, apparently the leader of this shoddy crew.
“Well, there’s a first time for everything.”
Rudy’s thick lips curled. Mama Bet could almost hear the gears churning rustily inside his head as he tried to think of a comeback. He soon gave up, and settled for raising the shotgun barrel until it pointed at the sky.
“We’ve been hearing a lot about the red church, and the day of reckoning, and all this foolishness about ‘great trials,’” Rudy said. “Now all of a sudden you’re telling us that Archer’s the Second Son of God. And that somehow we’re all part of it, because of what our kin did way back when.” He looked at Stepford and Sonny.
Stepford swayed a little, and Rudy pressed the Bible against him until he regained his balance.
“Yeah,” Stepford said. “You’re telling us that this”—he pointed to Archer—”is the earthly face of God? Then God must be one hell of a practical joker, I say.”
Mama Bet started to speak, but Archer raised his hand. “I don’t blame you for your doubts,” he said to them. “I know some of you were raised as Christians. But people use God for their own purposes, they twist His ways to benefit themselves. People build up the idols that are easy to accept. And they always destroy what they can’t understand.”
Sonny spat. His eyes were bloodshot and bright. “We didn’t hang Wendell McFall.”
“You don’t think it’s fair that you have to suffer for the sins of your ancestors. But blood sins require payment in blood. And sacrifice now will protect your blood unto the fourth generation.”
Rudy elbowed Stepford. “Tell him.”
Stepford moved reluctantly closer, until he was at the foot of the porch steps. Mama Bet’s goat, which was tied to the porch rail, came over and sniffed his dirty jeans. Stepford shooed the goat away and looked up at Archer. “We decided we ain’t so sure you’re a messiah after all.”
Rudy nodded, his courage bolstered by the shotgun. “Yeah. All we hear is fancy talk. Sure, Boonie Houck and Zeb Potter got killed. But how do we know that has anything to do with these ‘great trials’ we keep hearing about?”
“Getting killed sure don’t take no sacrifice,” Stepford said. “It ain’t like they were asking to die, or anything.”
Donna Gregg pressed close behind Sonny, her chest against his back.
Dirty sinners, Mama Bet thought. It’s a wonder that God and Archer don’t strike them down on the spot. And Sonny married, at that. Of course, his wife took down to Raleigh after she got tired of getting beat up every time he got drunk. I can hardly wait to see them adulterers get cleansed.
“This is about sacrifice,” Archer said, his voice lifting now, resounding with the power of his faith. Mama Bet’s heart swelled with pride.
“More big talk,” Sonny said. “But we ain’t seen no signs.”
“Yeah,” taunted Rudy. “Why don’t you whip us up a miracle? Maybe break us up some loaves and fishes?”
“To hell with that,” slurred Sonny. “Do something worthwhile, like changing some water into wine.”
The drunken trio laughed, Donna smiling uncertainly behind them.
“True faith doesn’t require proof,” Archer said.
“Exactly what I’m saying,” Rudy said. “I can’t rightly call my faith ‘true.’ It’s more like it’s been shoved down my throat. And I don’t much like the taste of it.”
Mama Bet saw that Sonny and Stepford wore similar expressions of rebellion.
The devil’s in them so deep they can’t even separate it out from their own selves. Can’t they just accept that the time for the cleansing is here, that God’s back and ready to do the job right this time?
“Archer?” Mama Bet said. Her son was holding his head in his hands, his knuckles white from the pressure of squeezing. He bowed forward, wobbling unsteadily, and nearly fell against the porch rail. Mama Bet hurried to catch him.
My poor baby.
Muffled moans of anguish came from behind his hands. His legs and shoulders quivered. She touched him, and her fingers felt electrified. Suddenly the moans turned into roars and Archer threw his arms wide.
The sky darkened as if a large cloud had passed over the sun.
Donna screamed, and Sonny joined in. Rudy dropped the shotgun and clasped the Bible to his chest. Stepford fainted dead away, his legs folding up like a wet stretch of rope and his eyes rolling up to stare at the top of his skull.
Mama Bet looked on her son with love. Archer smiled, all wings and claws and livers for eyes.
Detective Storie knelt in the hayloft o
f the Potter barn. The sledgehammer lay on the warped boards of the floor, its handle slick with blood, the eight-pound head clotted with grue. A few strands of gray hair clung to the shredded matter that had once been encased in the delicate shell of Zebulon Potter’s skull.
The sheriff’s face turned ashen as he looked at the body. “Zeb was a friend of my parents,” he said, looking out the window as though the mountain slopes were a movie screen and the past were being projected onto them. “I used to help him bale hay during the summer. He even gave me a hound puppy a long time ago. So long ago that Samuel was still alive.”
Storie didn’t like the vacant look in the sheriff’s eyes. She’d seen that look once. During a criminal transport, in her first week on the Charlotte Metro force, she had met evil, if such a thing could possibly be embodied. She’d been green then, a rookie who thought that police officers could actually make a difference simply by caring.
The middle-aged suspect in the back of the car had allegedly raped an eight-year-old girl. He bragged about it as they drove to the Mecklenburg County jail, his unshaven face broken into a satisfied grin, his eyes afire with some secret madness. Storie was riding shotgun, fuming and helpless. Innocent until proven guilty, even if they’re guilty. That was what they taught in cop school.
“The puppy was named Roscoe,” Littlefield said quietly, rubbing his scalp. “Got run over before it was barely big enough to bark.”
Perry Hoyle knelt and examined the open cavity of the victim’s skull. Storie took another photograph and the camera’s flash glinted off Hoyle’s bald head. She pulled a metal tape measure from her jacket pocket. “You mind holding that end?” she asked the sheriff.
He started as if jerked from a dream and took the end of the tape. Storie pointed to the hammer. The sheriff held the tape near the handle and Storie let the tape unwind until it stretched near the body.
“Seventeen feet,” she said, though she doubted the sheriff was listening. He was so damned hard to figure out, at times friendly, at times cold and distant. But she didn’t need friends, and she didn’t need to waste thoughts on Frank Littlefield. She wrote the measurement in her notebook.
Long ago, the child rapist had put his face near the wire screen that separated the front seat from the rear. His breath smelled like sardines and gasoline. “Hey, good-looking, what you doing after work?” he’d said.
Storie had clenched her fists, fighting the urge to pull her nightstick from her belt and drive it into the rapist’s face. But, no, he was a suspect and he had rights. No matter that he’d already pulled three years for two separate indecent liberties raps. No matter that he’d be out on the street in two years. No matter anything but that the world was absolutely, hopelessly insane. God had made a pretty good stew, then He’d screwed it up by mixing in humans and giving them free will and brains.
Brains. Zeb Potter’s brains were as gray as the old oak boards that covered the barn walls.
“I can finish up here, Sheriff,” she said. He nodded absently and moved to the workbench. Deputy Wade Wellborn helped Hoyle put the body on a stretcher. The body made a sticky sloughing noise as it was lifted from the pool of blood.
“Guess I’m not helping much,” Littlefield said quietly. Storie didn’t want to show him up in front of the others. She understood that vacant look. Because she knew it well.
She’d seen it herself, in her own eyes, in the mirror of a Charlotte Metro police car. As she was transporting a rape suspect with a familiar face and secret mad eyes. It was the same suspect she’d arrested a few months earlier. Purest evil wearing meat. This time, he’d gone for a six-year-old. The girl had died on the way to the hospital.
The rapist recognized Storie. “Hey, honey, you can lock me up, but I’ll be back. One of these days, I might even get around to your part of town.”
Storie had nearly pulled the car over and shot the creep in the head. But she did her job and took him in, handed him over to a judicial system that was fair but overmatched.
That was when Storie made two decisions: she would leave the Metro force and get a job with a rural department. And she would try her damnedest to make a small difference, even though the world was absolutely, hopelessly insane. Even though God was insane.
Or was God, like the serial rapist, also innocent until proven guilty?
She watched Littlefield follow Hoyle, Wellborn, and the cold body of Zeb Potter down the loft stairs. Outside, a small breeze played through the trees, the sound she imagined gave Whispering Pines its name. Somewhere out there, a killer was harboring a secret madness in his eyes. Storie didn’t like secrets.
CHAPTER TEN
David Day watched from the hills as the sunset threw bands of orange over the dark lines of the horizon. The air was moist and smelled of damp leaves. Normally, being alone in the woods gave him a sense of peace. But under these trees where he had spent some of the happiest hours of his life, he felt like an intruder. Because now the forest belonged to something else.
Below him, the old Gregg farm was spread out like a wrinkled green carpet. He still thought of it as home, even though he hadn’t slept there in weeks. But all the things that made the place home were still behind those white walls of the house: the boys, the bed, the maple gun cabinet, the trophy heads on the wall. Everything but her.
He hated that the boys were alone. But they were safer at the house than with Linda at the church. She would give them to Archer sooner or later, unless David could find a way to stop Archer again. But this time would be more difficult.
The red church was crouched on a little rise to his left, above the road and the curve of the river. Six or eight cars were parked by the old building. People milled around the cemetery grounds, going into and out of the church. They moved like ants on a sugar hill, heads meeting, seeming to communicate silently from that distance. One of those ants was Linda.
The police were finally finished at the Potter farm. David had seen them carrying a stretcher from the barn. From the way the deputies’ backs stooped, the load must have been heavy. The sheet-draped load was marred by a dark stain. They’d slid their burden into Perry Hoyle’s station wagon. Then the vehicles had driven away one by one, including the sheriff’s Trooper. The cruiser driven by that woman deputy was the last to leave, about an hour ago.
Poor old Zeb. And Boonie before him. In California, the killing hadn’t seemed as brutal, as casual. But David hadn’t known any of those victims. Boonie and Zeb were mountain folks. These were his people who were dying this time, not nameless longhairs and drifters.
Archer was gathering a flock, just as he had done in California. And David had learned that there were only two kinds of people who followed Archer McFall: the dead and the about to be.
David lifted his Marlin rifle and peered into the scope, the odor of gun oil comfortingly strong. Through the magnifying lenses, he saw Lester at the church door. The crosshairs were centered on the man’s beet-red face. David shifted the scope and saw Becca Faye Greene, her smile a rapture of lipstick. Another shift, and Linda’s face filled the small circle of the scope.
Linda.
They’d met in the ninth grade, a Buckhorn Mountain boy and a valley farm girl. Most of the families, including the Days, who lived on the back side of Buckhorn were the descendants of Union sympathizers. Some people in these parts still held a grudge, the ones who had Rebel-flag license plates and considered summer tourists to be invaders. In seedy bars at each corner of the county, the Civil War was renewed every Friday night.
But, Day or not, Linda had let him pick her books up that time she’d dropped them in the mud getting off the school bus. She had thick books, math and social studies. All David had was an auto-repair manual and a set of plans for a wooden desk.
She had pushed her hair back with one hand and actually looked into his face. Her eyes were deep and blue and seemed to penetrate his skin so that she could see everything he kept hidden. He looked back and grinned like a sick mule. His hands felt as if
they were made of wood as he wiped the books clean against his pants.
“Thanks,” she said, smiling. Her teeth were only a little crooked, just enough so that David didn’t feel self-conscious. He gave her the books. She walked away, her figure shifting attractively inside her knee-length dress.
He had solved the mystery of those curves, though it had taken years. But the waiting was far from a waste. David knew that she liked yellow squash better than butternut, and she hadn’t laughed at his big dream of owning a saw mill. She liked Bob Seger, and David liked him a little. She cried every time they slaughtered a beef steer. He cried when each of the boys was born.
Through the scope, her blue eyes were damp and bright. But the depth had been replaced by a flat glaze, her pupils large. She was scared or excited or aroused. Or maybe all three. Just the way she had looked in California.
David swiveled the rifle barrel slightly to the right. Archer smiled into the crosshairs of the scope. The preacher was looking through the lenses at David, the magnifying process somehow reversed, David the prey and Archer the hunter. David shuddered and blinked and the illusion passed.
He couldn’t hold the rifle steady. From this range, the .30-06 round would drop only a few inches in trajectory. The hot bullet would pierce Archer’s chest, chew up his heart, and shatter his ribs. And then what?
He pictured Linda, screaming, spattered by the gore of her messiah. She would kneel by Archer, the other disciples crowding around as his death tremors passed and his blood cooled. Then their wailing would lift and fill the darkening sky, the moon would moan, the red church would howl in anguish. Just as legend said happened the last time one of the McFall preachers was killed. And those buried in the cemetery would . . .
David closed his eyes and let the barrel of the gun tilt slowly to the ground. Sweat stung his eyes, and the metallic stench of his fear overwhelmed the green smells of the forest.
Forgive me, Lord, for I am weak.
He leaned against a cold hickory and waited for midnight.
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