Old Saint was tied to a tree at the edge of the clearing, and it was the first time Sarah had ever seen the fabled creature. He was an admirable hunk of horse flesh, if “flesh” was the right word. He might have been a couple of centuries up from the grave, but he looked as solid as the oak that served as his hitching post. The horse nibbled at a patch of moss on the tree, as if he’d already heard the sermon that Harmon Smith appeared about to deliver.
Sue sat behind the wheel of the Jeep, frozen by the sight that had greeted them upon pushing into the clearing. Odus, who had regained Sister Mary’s good graces, sat astride the paint pony to the left of the Jeep. The young man who held some sort of bow-and-arrow stood on the opposite side of the clearing, as if he’d found another route to the top of the ridge.
Sarah recognized him from a couple of his shopping trips to the store, where he bought only cheap stables like rice and dried beans. She figured it was no coincidence that the man had shown up here at the same time as her little trio, and had no doubt that the reason for their mutual summoning was buried in the skull space beneath that ragged-rimmed black hat.
If the Circuit Rider even had a brain, that was. Sarah suspected if that skull was laid open with a shotgun blast, it would ooze a stinky, sticky tar. The juice of madness and evil, the sort of stuff that might pump through Satan’s icy hot veins. She was tempted to give Harmon Smith a load of birdshot, just to test the waters, so to speak, but she had a sense that the stage wasn’t completely set yet. Harmon had a few other pieces to move into the picture, and he seemed in no particular hurry, as if a full-moon Sunday night were just the right time for a nice, peaceful gathering of good company.
“Shoot him, Sarah,” Sue said from the Jeep’s cab. Young folks were so impatient.
“You don’t just up and shoot a man without giving him a chance to explain himself,” Sarah said, keeping the fright out of her voice. “Otherwise the gender would have been wiped out years ago. Besides, sometimes it’s fun to hear a man open his mouth just to hear what kind of lie comes out.”
“I bring only the truth,” Harmon shouted, though he was too far away to have heard Sarah, just at the edge of effective shotgun range. But he looked to be in range of the man with the cocked arrow, who raised his own weapon. Sarah saw the man had other weapons slung over his shoulder, and wore a sidearm in a belt holster. He was equipped like a secret agent in a movie that couldn’t keep its time period right.
“Do these shitbag animals belong to you?” the man asked, voice quivering with either fear or anger.
Harmon swept out a casual hand to indicate the ridge and the valley below. “All this belongs to me,” the preacher answered. “And other places as well. My road is long and my service is never done.”
“Drop the double-talk, Weird Dude,” the man said. “If these are yours, you’ve got reparations to pay. Because you trespassed against me.”
“Fences are for the living. I go where I want because Solom belongs to me.”
Sarah thought the man’s release finger on the bow-and-arrow looked a little itchy. “My deed is registered at the courthouse,” he said.
“And mine is recorded in the Book of Knowledge.”
“Are you with the government?”
“I answer to one law.”
“What’s with the riddles, man?” He raised his voice, addressing Sarah, Sue, and Odus. “What are you guys doing up here?”
“We’re here for the same reason you are,” Sarah said.
“To kill some damned goats?”
“They came because of me,” the Circuit Rider said. “As do all my creatures.”
“Hey, dude, I saw those goats eating you.”
“I provide nourishment to my flock.”
Sarah figured Harmon Smith, back when he was alive, had been touched in the head somewhere along the line, about the time he traded in his Methodist leanings for a belief in fleshly sacrifice. After a couple hundred years roaming the back woods to visit various Appalachian communities, killing somebody here and there along the way, he’d probably made peace with his madness. The miles were long and the path dusty, but a mission of that kind would require a man to embrace solitude. Even with a horse for company, the Circuit Rider worked alone, abandoned by both God and the Devil and shunned by every mortal creature. Then why were those creatures gathering around him like moths drawn to a porch light?
“I have a revelation to deliver,” Harmon Smith said, as if he’d looked inside Sarah’s head. He drew his ragged wool coat about him with gaunt fingers. “But we’ll have to wait for the others.”
“Others?” Odus said.
At that moment, Sarah heard a mechanical roar rising from the slopes below and echoing in the cup of the valley. Cars, at least three and maybe more, the rumble of a convoy as the engines whined against the climb. She wondered how many the Circuit Rider would summon tonight.
Harmon Smith sat on the rock in his yoga position, the snake of a smile bending into a deeper smirk. “My children,” he said. “All my lovely children.”
***
Jett figured her mom was taking some kind of heavy downer, because she seemed calm as she navigated the narrow, rutted road, looking freaky with her one bruised eye. A couple of times the Subaru had swerved over to the ledge and the valley opened up in a dizzying tableau below.
In those moments of vertigo, Jett covered her eyes and imagined what her obituary would look like. She figured her obit would have the same problem as most people’s: it would be way too short. Plus it would leave out the cool stuff, like her acid flashbacks and the ghost in the back seat.
Rebecca’s ghost had a part in this whole clusterfuck called Solom, and Jett had come to accept that Gordon’s goats were evil and the man in the black hat wanted her for some very special and creepy purpose. Solom was the biggest bad-acid trip of all time, and she and Mom couldn’t escape until the drug wore off.
She was aware that most people used the term supernatural to describe such occurrences, but to Jett they seemed completely natural. In a world gone crazy, why shouldn’t the dead and the living occupy the same space? Why shouldn’t a ghost guide them up a mountaintop in the dark of a Sunday night, even though Mom had been determined to flee this place for the comparative sanity of Florida’s crime, congestion, and pollution?
The road leveled out and grew wider. Mom steered the car over a grassy area, though a path appeared to have been tattooed into the dirt. Tire tracks cut twin grooves in the open stretch of land, flattening the wet weeds. The tracks were recent.
Jett turned to Rebecca, still not quite used to the shock of that pale face, the hollow eyes that looked out as if from the bottom of a deep and drowning cave, the thin lips that were as insubstantial as mist. Jett realized that, if the ghost hadn’t helped her, Gordon might have caught both Jett and Mom, and then they might have been trapped at the Smith House forever. This was some drug-addled scriptwriter’s twisted version of a Scoobie Doo episode, except nobody got doggie treats and the bad guy’s mask didn’t come off at the end.
“Somebody came here before we did,” Jett said to Rebecca. “Do you know why?”
Jett didn’t like the way the torn flesh around the woman’s neck rippled as she spoke, as if unearthly air passed through her windpipe. “We’re all on the same path,” the ghost said.
“Yeah, but what does that mean?”
“It means we have to look,” Mom said, turning her head for a moment. “We can’t just go off and leave a mystery hanging.”
“Sure we can, Mom. Remember the scarecrow? Remember the goats? What do I have to do, die or something to get your attention?”
“We can get through this together.”
Jett almost choked on the Mom-ism, but decided to go with it this time. After all, she had no choice. Even if she jumped out of the car and survived, she’d still be facing a long hike down the mountain. And then what would she do? Call Dad and beg him to turn around and come back?
No, Dad was out of the picture
for the moment. He hadn’t believed a word she’d said this morning. A weary sadness had pressed itself over his face, and she knew he blamed himself for her problems, her delusions, her dark imagination. Some family she’d been born into; if either parent had spent half as much energy accepting responsibility as was invested in embracing guilt, they could have made a go of it.
As it was, she took her spiritual guidance where she found it. Even if the spirit in question had to keep adjusting its head atop its shoulders.
“Rebecca, tell Mom this is crazy.” Jett recognized the inherent lunacy of her request.
“This is crazy,” the ghost said, mouth parting to reveal darkness inside the translucent flesh.
“Yes, but we can’t leave until we know what happened,” Mom said.
“What happened?” Jett gripped the dashboard as the Subaru leapt a vicious rut. “You act like it’s already too late to do anything about it.”
“It’s not too late,” Mom said, applying the brakes. “Looks like the party’s just started.”
Through the windshield, Jett saw a scene that would have made Stephens both King and Spielberg wish they had thought of it first. The man in the black hat sat on a rock, surrounded by goats, while people came walking out of the woods to gather around the ridge-top clearing. Jett recognized some of them: there was Odus, who helped Gordon with farm chores, sitting astride a horse; Jerry Bennington, her math teacher, stood to one side, wearing his bow-tie; the man who lived up the road from the Smith House and occasionally rumbled by in his battered pick-up hunched at one edge of the clearing, holding some type of hunting bow and arrow. Jett saw the old woman who owned the general store, a shotgun across the crook of one knotty elbow. A Jeep bathed the group in light, and as Mom parked the Subaru, its lights joined in, giving the menagerie a strange, stark radiance.
“That’s the guy I was telling you about,” Jett said.
“It looks like he found us,” Mom said.
“Mom, you’re tripping.”
“No, I’m pretty straight at the moment.”
Jett turned to query Rebecca on this weird gathering, but Rebecca was gone. At least, most of her was. Her disembodied head hovered in the rear passenger area, slowly fading to thin air. The last to fade were those dark, hollow eyes, and they seemed to hold a challenge and a glimmer of triumph.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Odus gripped the reins to steady Sister Mary as more people came out from the trees, vehicles groaned up the old logging roads of Lost Ridge, and a few stray goats staggered into the combined glare of a half-dozen headlights. It was like some kind of bizarre revival service, with the Circuit Rider calling his flock.
Odus suddenly didn’t feel so special. He was ashamed to think that he would be the one to rid the world of the Circuit Rider. He was unworthy. He was just a drunk who couldn’t hold down a steady job, a dirty horse thief, part of a bloodline that had squatted on these lands since Colonial times but had not really improved them.
The Eakins boy, the one who owned a piece of property above the Smith place, stood with his crossbow, unsure of which direction to aim. Loretta Whitley and her son Todd each held pitchforks, looking like frightened members of a mob storming Victor Frankenstein’s castle. Amos Clayton sported a shotgun of a larger bore than Sarah’s, though he seemed uncertain about using it.
Odus wondered if they each had suffered the same delusion, of being called to kill the Circuit Rider and finally lay the preacher to rest, bringing peace to the valley. Or perhaps they had come because they each wanted to offer themselves on the altar of life.
Several more vehicles rolled into the clearing, and the smell of exhaust briefly muted the stench of the goats and the bright metallic odor of human fear. Odus recognized Ray Tester’s Ford pick-up, and a sport utility vehicle pulled up beside it. A Sheriff’s Department patrol car, a Crown Victoria, had been beaten up by the rough road, but the front-wheel drive had dragged the car to the peak. The door on the patrol car opened and a deputy stepped out, half his face blotted by a red birthmark, one hand on his sidearm. Odus figured the deputy would try to take control and restore order, but he seemed as much under the Circuit Rider’s sway as the rest of them.
“Welcome, all,” the preacher said, standing on legs that seemed to unfold like broken black sticks. In the combined glare of a half-dozen sets of headlights, he seemed almost a silhouette in his moth-eaten black suit. He lifted the brim of his hat and turned in a semicircle so that all the assembled could see his face. The skin appeared to be as smooth as hardened wax, and just as brittle. The preacher’s eyes were the bloodied color of a harvest moon just after sundown.
The crowd fell silent, as if each word might be the one that delivered the Truth. The late-arriving goats joined their kind near the stone that served as the Circuit Rider’s pulpit, and they, too, settled into passive and meek positions. The people who had emerged from the woods—Odus saw Marletta Hoyle, the wispy-haired English teacher at the elementary school, carrying an eagle-head cane as if she meant to brain Harmon Smith like a wayward student—drew closer around the stone with an air of expectation. The Tester brothers had climbed out of the truck cab and stood at the outer edge of the goats, David looking a little beaten down but Ray with his shoulders thrown back and head held high, like a dog waiting for a treat.
“We’re not all here yet,” the Circuit Rider said.
A man in the concealed safety of the forest called out, “Go back to where you come from, you black devil.”
The Circuit Rider grinned, showing teeth as orange as candy corn. “This is where I came from.”
The unseen man hollered, “You wasn’t born to Solom. The damned Methodists sent you.”
“It was a Methodist who rode into this fair valley all those years ago,” he said, in a voice that would make any preacher, living or dead, proud. “But that Methodist found other, older ways here. Ways brought over with the first white settlers.”
“We’re God-fearing folk, Harmon Smith,” Loretta Whitley said, slamming the point of her pitchfork handle into the ground for emphasis. “Why don’t you go on about your business and leave us alone?”
“This is my business,” the Circuit Rider said. “Your church leaders couldn’t tolerate my beliefs, so they did away with them the only way they knew how.”
“By killing you,” Sarah said, surprising Odus with the strength in her voice. “The same was we’re fixing to kill you again.”
The Circuit Rider laughed, a sound as raw as an owl’s screech and as deep as the howling of a red wolf. “We all serve a purpose under God’s sky. The tree is known by its fruit.”
“What about your goats, Weird Dude?” asked the Eakins boy. The way his hands were trembling, Odus figured the arrow would let fly at any second. Maybe all of them were waiting to see who would attack Harmon Smith first. Then they could all join in with whatever weapons or talismans they had brought. Odus realized he still hadn’t decided on a weapon. He had trusted that the way would be shown, but now that the moment was at hand, no voice from the wilderness gave him instruction. Through all his false courage, he was alone. As were they all, despite their number.
“Which one of us do you want, Harmon?” Ray Tester called. “We know you need to take one of us, and we know you’ve done passed over a few.” Ray shot a glance at his brother.
“I want all of you,” the Circuit Rider said. “Why do you think I keep returning?”
“You’re just a pesky old buzzard,” Sarah said. “You pick at the bones of the past. But we don’t need you around no more.”
“It’s not about what you need, Sarah Jeffers. It’s about what’s meant to be.”
“Well, I ain’t meant to be standing on the top of a cold mountain in the middle of a September night.”
“You’re here, though, aren’t you?”
Sarah had no answer for that. She thumbed at the hammer of the shotgun as if debating whether to try a shot in such a crowd. No doubt stray pellets would strike innocent
bystanders. But maybe, Odus figured, none of them were innocent. After all, they belonged to Solom, and Solom had slaughtered the Circuit Rider.
Maybe the years had led to this moment just as surely as the Circuit Rider’s route brought him back again and again. While the past drew only farther in the distance, the Circuit Rider was caught in an endless loop, playing out his fate with no hope of rest.
Odus was surprised to hear his own voice, not aware his thoughts had slipped to his tongue. “We’re here because we have to be.”
“That’s the same reason I’m here, Mr. Odus Dell Hampton. Because you all need me.”
Odus felt the Circuit Rider was looking straight through him, and he was sure that everybody in the crowd had the same feeling. Though the headlights must have been burning his eyes, Harmon Smith didn’t squint as he surveyed the creatures gathered on the ridge.
“Let’s kill the fucker,” the Eakins boy said.
The Sheriff’s deputy barked in an authoritative manner, “Hold it right there. Nobody gets killed here unless I say so.”
Odus wondered if anyone was going to point out the irony of killing a dead man, but the assembly merely waited with half-held breath. Amos Clayton raised his shotgun but it was pointed toward the leering moon above. Will Absher, who had once been Odus’s fishing buddy before Odus had caught him stealing change out of his truck ashtray, stepped from the laurel thicket carrying a muzzle-loading rifle that appeared to date to back before the Civil War. Odus wondered if that was the means of sending the Circuit Rider on to heaven or hell or lands in between: a weapon from Harmon Smith’s own mortal time. Odus was getting a headache from thinking over the possibilities, and decided his original idea was the best one. The way would be shown when the time was right.
If the time was right, Odus amended. He’d seen no sign that Harmon Smith was bound to die again tonight.
Sister Mary’s flank muscles quivered beneath Odus, and for a moment Odus wasn’t sure whether it was his own shivering, building until it was transmitted into the horse’s mottled flesh.
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