The Southern Watch Series, Books 1-3: Called, Depths and Corrupted

by Robert J. Crane

  ***

  Alison watched Duncan steer the car around the slope. They were set to tackle the middle of the road, between the overlook and the bottom of Mount Horeb. It had been quiet in the cab so far; she could tell the demon liked silence. So did she. But there were some questions that just needed to be answered.

  “So,” she started, “what’s it like being a demon?”

  When Duncan looked over at her, she just smiled. She could tell he didn’t know what the hell to say.

  ***

  Lauren stood at the overlook up the side of Mount Horeb looking out on the town. It always made her feel tiny, like she was a nothing and a nobody being here. Midian looked pretty small itself, but not as small as she felt staring down at it. She stretched her hamstrings, felt the pull and the pressure as she did so, leaning against her car.

  Molly. Molly was on her mind now. She’d left work behind, and now all she could think about was Molly and whatever she was getting into. Probably nothing good.

  But maybe not. She was pretty responsible, wasn’t she? She wasn’t the kind to just get crazy—

  Oh, wait. Neither was Lauren herself, but that had changed when Molly’s dad came into the picture. Charming son of a bitch. Lying, charming son of a bitch. Lying, charming, deadbeat son of a bitch. Not that she was still irritated at him or anything. A little help might have been nice, though.

  She shuffled back and forth, preparing herself mentally. She’d run down the side of the mountain road before, and fortunately it had a lot more shoulder than the average road. She’d need to be safe on the tight turns, maybe move a little closer to the edge, but she should be fine. It was a pretty safe place to run, after all, low traffic, and fortunately a decent distance from Midian, what with all that had happened down there of late.

  She grabbed her water bottle and took a last squirt for hydration before she headed down the mountain. She’d need to turn back before she got very tired, because the trip back up was going to be the real killer.

  ***

  Erin knocked on the door of Chauncey Watson’s house with the back of her hand. It was a solid wood door in a solid wood house, an A-frame monstrosity that looked out over the valley. Hell of a view, probably go for a hell of a cost nowadays, but Chauncey Watson had been living here forever. Or at least since she’d been a girl.

  Erin could hear the motion inside the house and glanced back to the car. Lerner was just waiting in the passenger seat, watching the whole process with a measure of disinterest. This was the third door she’d knocked on, and Lerner hadn’t showed any more interest in house number one or number two.

  Erin stood there, baking in the damned heat, feeling the sweat pour down from her scalp. It was tracking lines down the back of her neck and across her forehead. She would swear to it that noon was nothing compared to the late part of the day, when the heat settled in on the valley before sundown and shit just got sweltering. It made her back itch, and she longed for the cool air conditioning in the car.

  The door cracked open and a magnified eye peeked out at her through a glass thick enough it could have been cut off the bottom of a Mason jar. Chauncey Watson stared out at her, the half of his face that was exposed telling her that he was looking at her like she was a specimen for dissection or something. “Erin?” he asked. “Erin Harris?”

  “Hey, Chauncey,” Erin said. She’d known him a little here and there, just like she knew a lot of the town folk. Chauncey Watson worked at a big engineering concern near to Cleveland just down the interstate, doing something with numbers or schematics or some such shit that she didn’t pretend to understand. She’d known him from his work volunteering for the engineering club when she was in high school. As far as she knew, it might have been his only human contact with people other than when he’d shop for groceries once a week. He’d always been sweet to her, at least for the year she was in the club. Always said hello to her when he’d run into her in town, too.

  Chauncey pushed the door open all the way, and she just about took a step back from habit. The man was standing there in nothing but his boxers, tanned, sunken chest and skinny body distracting only slightly from those 40x magnification glasses he wore on his head. They really were magnification lenses, too, not real glasses, because no one’s damned eyes were that fucking big normally, were they?

  “Whatchoo doing up here on Mount Horeb, Erin?” His voice was high and meandering. He glanced at her clothing. “Oh, I s’pose it’s Deputy Harris now. I always thought you’d have been a good mechanical engineer, you know, but—”

  “Chauncey,” she said, interrupting him gently, “I’m awfully sorry to bother you, but I got a question.”

  “Oh?” He stood there, his sunken chest heaving up and down with the effort of keeping him breathing. The man didn’t look like he ate even one meal a day, and his expression was what she’d called gentle befuddlement. “What can I do for you?”

  She started to say something then stopped, trying to decide if she should mention his state of undress. She decided it was better to skip it. “Did I catch you in the middle of something?”

  “I was just painting a miniature army,” he said, still staring at her through magnifying glasses. “They’re gonna be my fourth army this month, getting ready for a tournament up in Knoxville next weekend. Those dadgummed boys from Johnson City—last year’s champs—they ain’t gonna know what hit ‘em.” He laughed, a loud, high sound, then blinked, and fumbled for the magnifying glasses on his head, tearing them off self-consciously. “Sorry,” he said. “I forget they’re on, sometimes. I wear ’em so much in the evenings, you know, cuz I’m working on my armies. Damn, that’s embarrassing.”

  She glanced downward at his skinny, hairy legs, exposed from the crotch on down. “Yep.” She looked back up at him and he watched her earnestly, without a trace of self-consciousness. “I can see how that might be a little … uncomfortable. Listen, I’m investigating a noise disturbance up here—”

  “Oh, you talking about that eerie-ass noise that comes rumbling down the mountain in the early evening and early morning?” Chauncey leaned forward, mouth slightly agape. He was definitely interested in what she was saying.

  “You’ve heard it?” Erin asked, feeling a chill. The last two houses hadn’t.

  “Shoor ’nuff,” he said. “Every night for the last three. Rolls through just as dusk is coming on—we get dusk a little earlier here than y’all do, being in the shadow on this side of the mountain and whatnot. Noise comes rumbling in, then passes back up just ’afore daybreak.”

  She listened to him with increasing interest. “Chauncey … did you happen to see what it was that made the noise?”

  “You know, I actually did not,” Chauncey said with mild disappointment, as though he’d forgotten a can of tuna he’d paid for at the grocery store. “Last two times I tried I was too slow, only saw a little of it as it went ’round the curve over yonder.” He gestured toward the downward slope where the road wended just past the trees at the perimeter of his property. “I’m just not as light on my feet as I used to be. Anyway, looked like a black cloud moving down the mountain, all different parts going at once.”

  “Was it big?” she asked, taking a breath.

  “Fair big, I s’pose,” he said. “Wide, more like. Flat, not high off the road, from what I could see. Hell, it was all shadows but looked like a mass just sweeping on down. Coulda been anything. I was running through my brain trying to figure it out, but coming up dry. Saw some … something like a reflection from it, but uh … I don’t know. Figured maybe it was one of them big ol’ groups of running people going from coast to coast like they did in that one movie with that feller had the slow mind—”

  “Forrest Gump?” Erin stared at him in mild disbelief.

  “Course that don’t account for the noise …” Chauncey was now in a world of his own, not even looking at her. “I believe it sounded like a buzzing, like bees or something, but different. You know, I really don’t have the first
idea what that is. I should set up on the road tonight and maybe take some pictures—”

  “Chauncey,” she cut him off. “You really shouldn’t. Whatever this is, it’s killed two people so far.”

  “Killed ’em?” Chauncey’s jaw dropped open, his skinny mouth falling open to reveal perfect, shining teeth. “Holy shit. You know, nobody ever tells me nothing, all alone up here on the mountain. Oughta include that sort of stuff in that Emergency Broadcast System, cuz that is news you need to know! What if I’d gone out there tonight and got myself killed, too?” He leaned in toward her, eyes wild. “How’d they die, you don’t mind me asking?”

  “Looks like they got run over by something,” Erin said, and she shot a furtive look back to Lerner, still in the car, before turning back to Chauncey.

  “Well, now that don’t make no kind of sense at all,” he said, and she could tell his engineer’s mind was brainstorming out loud. “Whatever that was, it was moving way too low to be a car of any kind. In fact, it was kinda like … oh.” Chauncey straightened, and his mouth formed a perfect O with his last word. “That’s what it was.”

  “What?” Erin stared at him. His eyes were far away, looking past her to the road. “What was it, Chauncey?” She waited, but his mind was still adrift. “What the hell was it?”

  ***

  Arch opened the car door and got back in, feeling the cool air conditioning hit him in the face as he sunk down in the seat. It was danged warm, way too danged warm, and he’d had just about enough of summer by now. The rains that had come a few days earlier, as ugly as they’d gotten, sure had been a nice cooldown for the town. If it weren’t for the whole flooding problem, he’d gladly have had them back right about now. He glanced at the dry dust in the driveway he was parked in. Looked like the ground might be grateful, too.

  “Any luck?” Hendricks asked. The cowboy was still wearing his full-length drover coat, that black nightmare that made him look like some sort of cross between Batman and the Lone Ranger. Arch had seen a couple kids in town laugh at Hendricks’s getup behind his back, but he didn’t feel compelled to share this with the man.

  “Not as such, no,” Arch said. “People have heard a noise, but they got no clue what it came from. Some don’t even rightly know when it came through. Sounded a little like a train to this last couple.” He’d been viewed with a little surprise, maybe a little suspicion, at the first house. Things like that happened sometimes when the police came to call unexpectedly on a door out here. But at the second house he’d been invited in for crumb cake and coffee, which he’d had to decline. Being a football hero in Midian had its perks, that was certain.

  This house had about been a bust. Older couple, didn’t even seem to realize that their house was across the valley from train tracks. They’d been nice enough, though, in spite of not inviting him in for crumb cake.

  “Damn,” Hendricks said as Arch put the car into gear. He backed into a turnaround in the driveway and aimed the car down the rutted gravel driveway back toward the road. “I suppose it might make some sense, though; this house is set back awfully far from the road.”

  “Land’s a little flatter here, closer to the bottom of the mountain,” Arch said. “Got themselves a nice parcel where they could build back a ways.”

  “More than those last couple houses, anyway,” Hendricks said. “Maybe we should leapfrog to the next house over, or the one after. There’s a spur up the way, I noticed—”

  “Old mining road,” Arch said, nodding. “I hadn’t ruled out that this thing could be coming from up there. Not sure we want to go poking down that way until we’re sure.” The thing was gated, actually, and as they’d passed he’d looked carefully; it didn’t seem to have been disturbed in a half century, though it was hard to tell, he supposed. “Might be some exposed shafts out there.”

  “You make it sound like a bathhouse,” Hendricks said with a grin.

  Arch felt the frown come automatically. “Is everything a dirty joke to you?”

  Hendricks just kept grinning infuriatingly. “I got a dirty enough mind to find something naughty in just about anything, yeah. It’s a talent.”

  Arch turned away before rolling his eyes. “It’s an unsavory habit. Like swearing.”

  “What is the problem with swearing for you, anyway?” Hendricks asked. Arch gave him enough of a look to see he was being genuine, not mocking. “I mean, I can understand goddamn—”

  “The Third Commandment would be my problem with that one, yes,” Arch said, a little irritated. Did he have to do that in front of him, always?

  “But what about the rest of it?” Hendricks said, leaning back in his seat and tipping his hat. “Where in the Bible does it say you can’t let loose with a ‘fucking shit’ or a ‘son of a whore’ every now and again?”

  “Philippians 4:8,” Arch said, giving him an annoyed look.

  “You’ll have to forgive me,” Hendricks said, looking unimpressed. “My knowledge of the Bible is a few years out of date. And also fairly unimportant to me in the scheme of things.”

  Arch stifled a sigh of frustration. “It’s a letter from the Apostle Paul to the Philippians, in which he tells them to dwell on that which is pure and good.” Arch drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “The idea being that if you’re constantly dwelling on the impure, your mind is not where it is supposed to be in order to be a good servant of the Lord.”

  Hendricks had his mouth slightly open, and Arch just waited for the jibe. It never came. “Okay, then,” Hendricks said, but he didn’t sneer. He just waited. “So … where does it talk about getting blow jobs?”

  Arch did roll his eyes at that one, after slamming the brakes so he could turn to Hendricks and give him the full attention for this. “She’s my wife, and she and I can do anything—”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” Hendricks said. The car was halted just a few yards from the road. The end of the driveway was nestled between two big trees, and the entire property line was shielded from view of the road by a line of woods no more than twenty or thirty feet deep. Just enough to obstruct the mountain road from the house.

  Arch paused, still ready to unload on Hendricks for his disrespect. “What?” he asked, not bothering to conceal the anger in his voice.

  “Do you hear that?” Hendricks asked, holding a single finger aloft, pointing to the ceiling, as though something was coming from above.

  “Hear what?” Arch said with purest irritation. But as he sat there in the silence, he realized he could hear it too. A faint, buzzing sound, growing louder as it came down the mountain road ahead.

  ***

  Lauren was making good time down the mountain, but she could tell she was feeling the first strains of fatigue. This was the easy part, she told herself. The downhill run. Turning back, that was bound to be a cast-iron bitch.

  The sun was setting, and the orange glow didn’t quite reach her over the peak of Mount Horeb. It was over there somewhere, to be sure, but she couldn’t see it from here, not on this side of the mountain, and that meant she was going to be running in the dark in an hour or two.

  Reluctantly, she slowed, pulling to a stop in front of an old mailbox that said “Cooper” on the side in faded white letters. She was sweating prodigiously, feeling the burn in her legs from not doing this for a few days and now pulling this shit on her body on a damned mountain. She’d feel it tomorrow, but if she could just get a little further along, it’d be all good because at least she’d get the endorphin rush. Runner’s high. She loved that feeling; it kept her doing this even though the amount of time she had for it was nearly nil.

  She was just hooking around when she realized there was a noise over the sound of her heavy breathing. Something … buzzing. Something loud. She looked back up the mountain but saw nothing. The road made a sharp turn around a bend to the left just a hundred yards ahead, and everything past that was well out of her sight. A steep cliff’s edge to her left blocked the one side of the road, and the shoulder only extended a
few feet to her right. The yard of the Cooper house—she didn’t know who that was, some out-of-towner’s cabin in all likelihood—came to an end just ahead. She followed along the road, listening to the sound.

  Whatever it was—probably a semi with engine trouble—it sounded bad. A little ominous, too, but … bad. Like someone’s car was not having a good day. Like it had smashed into a train and was clacking as it rolled down the mountain.