“Flock what?” Sarah said.
“The goats made me think of it,” Odus said. “They’ve been breeding like rabbits in the past year, especially on Gordon’s farm. I could hardly walk through the field without hearing them rutting in the weeds. Made me think that Gordon was on some kind of power kick, like he needed to be the king of the heap. Like he needed a flock so he could feel good about himself. I figured that was why he married a woman who had a kid, too.”
“What’s that got to do with the Circuit Rider?” Sue said.
“He wants a flock, too. And we’re it.”
Sarah looked around, as if afraid of what might lurk beyond the false security of the headlights, the shotgun tilted to the ground. “What in the world does he need with us? He should have killed somebody and been gone already.”
“Maybe he needs something different this time,” Odus said. “Notice we both said need. Like we have to serve some purpose.”
“And maybe that’s why we feel like we’re on some sort of mission,” Sue cut in, her voice excited, reminding Odus of just how young she was, and how new to Solom and its strange ways. But she seemed to be a fast learner, or else was as loopy of the rest of them. Odus had sometimes wondered if there was some mineral missing from the local water sources, or if some element was too rich in the underground springs, and that it had slowly poisoned the minds of everyone who stayed here too long. After generations, no doubt the madness was inherited. But if cheap bourbon had never clouded his mind for less than a day at a time, then why should plain water have that power?
“Others will be coming along shortly,” Odus said, realizing how pitiful and small his lone effort had seemed, riding into the mountains like the long arm of justice.
“Well, we ain’t serving nothing by just standing here,” Sarah said. “I guess we ought to go hear our sermon.”
“Where do we look first?” Sue asked.
Odus stroked the lean, sinewy neck of Sister Mary, who nuzzled against the flannel of his shirt. “I think our animal friend here knows the way.”
***
Animals.
Alex Eakins sensed their presence as he threaded his way up the narrow mountain trail. This path had been marked by buffalo and elk, which had walked these ridges in great numbers before European hunters had permanently removed them from the landscape. Bears, bobcats, deer, foxes, raccoons, opossums, and other creatures had used the route in their stead. Mountain lions had once lurked in the branches above, waiting for easy game. Alex could feel the power of all those thousands of feet, hooves, and paws that had passed here before. But mostly, he could smell the raw musky funk of goat shit.
As daylight had failed, he’d relied on the flashlight to follow the goats’ trail. When night had finally pulled its dark sheet over the sky, his other, more primitive senses had emerged at their keenest. The air was chilly, ripe, and moist, full of the fecundity of fall’s decay. The forest had a taste that lingered with each breath, the acidic tang of oak, the bitter bite of wild cherry and birch, the muddy richness of a hundred seeping springs. His power at detecting scent had also heightened, until he found he could smell not only the goats’ spoor, but their fur and their ripe rutting aromas as well. Several times he thought he’d heard dozens of them moving through the unseen trees ahead, and wondered what he would do if he stepped into a clearing and found them all staring at him.
Alex patted the crossbow. He’d handle it, by the grace of God and the pissed-off fury of a man who had suffered trespassing.
His footing had grown more treacherous, the soles of his boots slick with the offal of those he pursued. The soil, though packed down by the centuries of use, had been scarred and tilled by the goat hooves. They were mountain creatures by nature, browsing the high forests when left in the wild, where their sure footing gave them an advantage over predators. But Alex felt his weapons and determination made him equal to the task.
The degree of the slope leveled out a little, allowing him to catch his breath. Near the peak, the trees thinned and moonlight spilled over the gleaming protrusions of granite. The gray boulders were scarred by moss, worn smooth by the slow work of a hundred thousand rains. The path narrowed as it wound between the rocks, and the hoot of an owl made the mountain top seem like the last outpost on an alien boundary. Alex didn’t contemplate the danger of breaking a leg or falling from a ledge. His path was sure and righteous. Revenge always delivered its own justification.
Below, through a gap in the trees, he could see the few twinkling lights of Solom. The bulb on the porch of the general store cast its pumpkin-colored glow, the center of a constellation of houses. The river road was like a dark black snake winding through the valley, and icy moonlight glinted off metal barn roofs.
The trees thinned and Alex came to a clearing. He paused and listened, the wind playing through the dead and dying leaves. A soft murmur arose, like the babbling of a brook. After a moment, he recognized the sound as that of lowering goats, their bleats muted but uneasy. The bastards were just ahead, probably milling around in stoned-out glory, chewing bark and rocks in their advanced stage of marijuana munchies.
Alex slipped an arrow into the Pearson bow and made a stealthy approach. The ridge seemed brighter here, as if a last finger of daylight held a tentative grip. Alex eased his way through a stand of laurels and saw what was in the clearing.
Weird Dude Walking stood in the center, on a large slab of stone. The goats knelt around him, their heads tilted up as if awaiting words of capricious wisdom. Car headlights glared from behind the opposite stand of trees, moths swirling in the twin beams. Three people stood in silhouette among the trees.
Alex drew back the bowstring, intending to send an arrow through the dude’s heat.
Weird Dude Walking turned to where Alex was hidden in the vegetation. “Welcome, friend,” he said, his voice like smoke.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
A chauffeur for the dead.
Katy guided the Subaru off the highway onto the old logging road, sure that the last bit of sanity had slipped from her, leaving the nerves of her brain raw and exposed.
Why else would she be taking directions from a ghost? Her instinct had been to stay on the highway and make time to Florida, maybe stopping at a Holiday Inn halfway between. Anything that would have put distance between Jett and Solom. But Rebecca’s lost voice had connected with her on some primal, feminine level. They were two women who had traveled the same path, though Rebecca’s had ended too early and violently.
“Well, Mom, this is just great,” Jett said. “You brought me here to get me off drugs and then you drop me right into the biggest bad-acid trip in the universe.”
Jett had been reluctant to get back in the car after Rebecca had shared her story. But Katy’s determination had convinced Jett they had a duty to obey. It was a little like a stray kitten that comes yowling in hunger around your doorstep. Never mind that this particular feline could remove its head and was built of see-through supernatural stuffing.
“Just hang on, honey,” Katy said. She glanced in the rear-view. Rebecca was gone but her words came as if she were leaning over the seat: Up the mountain.
Up, an ascension, as if the journey had a spiritual as well as physical element. But didn’t all journeys? If you thought of life as a road that must be traveled, then you had all kinds of exit ramps, signal lights, pit stops, and, eventually, a vehicle breakdown. Each fork was an opportunity, as the poet Robert Frost had pointed out, but no one had ever figured out if each road taken was a choice or an obligation. If you took the road less traveled, was it because you wanted to, or because you were compelled?
Katy decided this road was definitely the one less traveled, because the Subaru bottomed out in the ruts, the arcs of the headlights bouncing ahead like light sabers cutting a path through the wilderness. The car was all-wheel drive, which gave it enough traction to navigate the roughest parts of the old road, but it groaned in protest as it leaped and jittered like a two-ton elec
trified frog.
“Mom, what are we supposed to do when we get there?
“I don’t think we’re supposed to know,” Katy said.
“You just have to get there,” Rebecca said, suddenly whole again, or the closest she could come to that state.
Jett jerked away, sitting forward in her seat, fighting the tension of the seat belt. “Hey! Don’t do that. You’re freaking me out enough already without popping out of thin air.”
“I’m a ghost,” Rebecca said. “What else do you expect me to do?”
“I foresee years of therapy ahead,” Jett said.
“Just imagine the stories you’ll have to tell your grandkids,” Katy said, wrestling the steering wheel as the car lurched over a fallen sapling.
“If I live that long. Let’s not take that for granted yet. We’re on a place called ‘Lost Ridge’ with a headless woman in the back seat.”
“They’re waiting,” Rebecca said.
“They?” Katy asked.
“The ones who are supposed to be there.”
“What’s with the riddles?” Jett said. “If you know what’s going to happen, why don’t you tell us?”
“You already know, too. That’s the trouble with the living. They only hear the past when they should be listening to the future.”
“Oh, great. Mom, you got any dope on you? I can’t handle this.”
Katy looked at her daughter, whose face was pale green from the interior lights. Her dyed-black bangs were parted, making her look younger than her thirteen years. Yet Katy’s little Gothling was knocking on the door to womanhood and all the crazy mysteries waiting ahead. Not to mention the crazy mysteries in the back seat. “You promised, remember?”
“Yeah, yeah.” Jett sighed and reached to turn up the music again, then changed her mind and settled back against her seat, still leaning away from Rebecca. But she said to the ghost, “So, why did Gordon kill you?”
“Because he loved me. Why else would you kill someone?”
“No,” Katy said. “I think the reason is even more selfish that.”
As she compelled the Subaru up the logging road, she thought back to his fascination with myths and old cultures and his ranting about harvest gods and goddesses. No one could be that insane, though. Certainly not a well-educated resident of the twenty-first century. Gordon was plenty strange, but she’d never sensed any type of aggressive behavior in him.
But would the behavior be aggressive, considering Gordon might think offering human sacrifice was the most natural thing in the world? Maybe he viewed it as a pleasant little appeasement ritual that had been too long neglected, thus bringing about the sorry state of the modern environment. Maybe he was trying to follow in the footsteps of his forefather, Harmon Smith, in observing his own peculiar belief system. But hadn’t the goats been amazingly fruitful? How many kids had been born on the Smith farm in just the last four months? And the pumpkins, corn, and winter squash had all been abundant.
What if the sacrifice had been noted and rewarded?
Katy shivered and looked through the windshield at the rutted road ahead, wondering what sort of god would compel a man to slaughter his wife and maybe others. Surely Katy and Jett would have been next, and would join Rebecca in haunting the old wooden-frame farmhouse until the end of time.
“He did it because it was his destiny,” Katy said, raising her voice over the roar of the straining engine.
“You’re freaking me out, Mom,” Jett said.
“Destiny,” Rebecca said. “That’s as good a name for it as any.”
“So, what’s your deal?” Jett said to the ghost. “Are you stuck here or something? Why don’t you get to go to heaven or wherever?”
“I belong to Solom now.”
“Mom, maybe we’d better find a place to turn around. I don’t think I want to die here. It would be a real bitch to be stuck in Solom forever.”
“We’re not going to die,” Katy said. “There’s a reason for all this. You’ll see.”
“Does that mean I have to keep my eyes open?”
In response, Katy cranked up the volume on the Westerberg CD and a blues guitar riff tore a hole in the sheet of night.
***
God had chosen the wrong Tester.
Ray had always known it, and that was the thing that had driven him from the Primitive Baptist church. God had dropped the bucket in that matter. David had a silver tongue, there was no denying that, but when it came to sheer gumption and balls, Ray had his younger brother beat seven ways to Sunday. True, the congregation made the decision on choosing a new church elder to deliver their sermons, but hadn’t God determined all things before He even set the whole blamed shooting match in motion?
So when Ray had driven by the church and seen David crawling around on his hands and knees, mucked up to the eyeballs and looking like he’d been waltzed through a carnival house of horrors, Ray had fought the impulse to go on past without stopping. But blood kin was blood kin. Besides, it wasn’t David’s fault that God had goofed.
After all, this was the same God who had set the Circuit Rider loose in the world. If all things had a purpose, then God was basically the kind of guy who enjoyed pulling wings off flies, and He made sure there were enough piles of shit around to draw those flies.
David sat in the pick-up truck’s passenger seat, wiping his face with Ray’s orange hunting vest. The interior light was on, and in its weak light David’s cheeks were pale and bloodless. Ray’s pipe wrench lay in the seat between them.
“You seen him, didn’t you?” Ray said. They were brothers. They had fished together, fought together, lost their virginity to Mary Lou Slater together, were baptized together. They hadn’t kept any secrets, not until the day the congregation went for style over substance eight years ago.
“Yeah,” David said. “I looked in his grave.”
“But he wasn’t there.”
“No, but he came up while I was digging.”
“Dumbass. I could have told you that. When they looked in Jesus’ tomb, it was empty, too.”
“I wasn’t good enough, Ray-Ray.” David had fallen back to using a childhood nickname, proof that he’d been shaken like a rat in a terrier’s jaws. “I had the chance to defeat him, or at least give myself and save others, but I wasn’t worthy.”
Ray bit back his grin of pleasure. Maybe God hadn’t blown this thing yet. Maybe the Big Guy had set up the domino chits so the real favorite son could knock them down.
He patted David on the shoulder and gave him the kind of manly squeeze that said, Yeah, that’s some rotten possum you got served, but eat it for your own good.
“I’ve got this feeling,” Ray said. “A feeling that maybe God has other business for you. That’s how you got to look at it. Maybe you’re the fish He threw back in so you could grow up big and strong and feed the multitudes.”
David nodded, shivering a little. Mist rose off his damp clothes as the night chill settled around them.
“Maybe it’s my turn,” Ray continued. “God passed me over the first time because He had this job for me. That explains the scarecrow and the headless goats. Those were signs, and I was too red-eyed blind to see them. I’m the one, Davey Boy. I’m the ONE.”
David was drawn up and beaten, the way he’d been after wetting the bed at age five. David had to sleep on the bottom bunk, not because Ray was older and therefore deserved a higher station, but because there was the real risk that urine would dribble off his plastic sheet to the bed below if he’d been on top. David was in an agreeable mood, Ray noted, because he’d seen the light of truth. David wasn’t worthy, and that meant Ray was in the driver’s seat again. He could hardly wait until next Sunday’s service, when David announced his resignation and Ray stepped up to win their vote as the new elder.
Elder. As if that name for the church leader weren’t self-evident. It probably wouldn’t hurt the congregation to eat a little crow for going with style over substance, as if practically every lesson in
the Bible didn’t warn against arrogance, pride, and hypocrisy.
Looking through the windshield, Ray saw a faint glow at the top of the ridge, less than a half-mile from the church. He’d hunted that ridge for wild turkey, one of the most elusive creatures ever set loose on God’s green earth. The glow was more than just a collected pool of moonlight against the granite boulders. It was a spotlight shined down from heaven, marking a center stage where Ray would meet his destiny. With David serving as witness.
“The path has been marked,” Ray said. “Narrow is the gate and hard is the road, but the logging road to Lost Ridge is as wide open as Mary Lou Slater’s legs.” He punched his brother on the shoulder. “And you get to ride shotgun, just like you did that day we busted our cherries. Whaddaya think about that, Davey Boy?”
David may have answered, but Ray couldn’t have heard him over the roar of the engine’s kicking to life.
***
Sarah leveled the shotgun at the Circuit Rider, who sat on the flat boulder with his legs crossed like one of those fat Asian buddhas. Four dozen goats knelt before the dead preacher, still and waiting under the glare of the Jeep headlights. That might have been the creepiest part of the whole scene: the Circuit Rider’s eyes burned yellow in the light, his waxen face and gaunt cheeks visible under the wide brim of his black hat, and his smile was like a broken snake under his long, thin nose, but goats were never still. They usually twitched and nattered and stomped and kicked, and most of all, they were usually chewing on something. But these animals folded up before Harmon Smith as if they were dosed with tranquilizers and headed for a long drowse. Even the kids among them were motionless and relaxed, scarcely wiggling an ear.
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