Solom

by Scott Nicholson

  Another handful of people leaked from the woods, one of them on horseback. As James Greene walked into the clearing leading a mule, the Circuit Rider issued his black grin.

  “Well, now that we’re all here, let’s see who among us is ready to enter the kingdom tonight,” the preacher said.

  ***

  “Holy fucking frijoles,” Jett said as they came upon the bizarre scene.

  Katy forgot to chastise Jett for the expletive, she was so stunned by the cars, people, and goats gathered on the isolated ridge. As she applied the brakes and brought the car to a halt, she saw the man in the black suit, the one Jett had told her about. He stood on the rock, basking in the crisp glare of the various car headlights. Katy recognized a couple of the people who stood outside the circle of goats.

  “Those are Gordon’s goats,” Jett said. “I would recognize them anywhere, especially after they tried to munch me. See that big one, up at the front? With the brown tail? That’s Ezekiel.”

  Katy turned to ask Rebecca about the goats, but Rebecca was gone. Or at least, most of her was. Her head floated in the air, ragged strips of ghostly neck flesh tugged by whatever gravity held sway over the dead.

  “Hey, don’t do that,” Katy said. “This was your idea, remember?”

  “Sorry, I haven’t been myself lately.”

  “What are we supposed to do now?”

  “Get out and listen.”

  Katy looked at Jett, who nodded. “Guess we might as well get this over with, Mom. Besides, you need to see that I wasn’t lying.”

  “How did the goats get up here before we did?”

  “Forget about that. We ought to be worrying about—hey, look!”

  A figure moved from the edge of the woods, and the crowd parted to let it through. Katy recognized the battered straw hat and the feed-sack face. “It’s your scarecrow,” she whispered.

  “Told you, Mom. But you wouldn’t believe me about the scarecrow, either.”

  The scarecrow figure held a wicked-looking sickle. Its clothes were torn and rumpled, and straw leaked from the folds with each step of cracked and flapping boots.

  Jett unsnapped her seatbelt and was out of the car before Katy could grab her arm. “Come back here, Jett.”

  But Jett was already passing the Jeep and Odus Hampton on a horse, reaching the outer circle of goats.

  “Shit,” Katy hissed, getting out of the car.

  “It’s him,” Jett screamed, pointing at the scarecrow, which was approaching the Circuit Rider from the opposite side of the clearing.

  The Circuit Rider’s pale and waxen face turned from Jett to the scarecrow. The grin froze on the preacher’s lips. Katy was pushing past Odus Hampton and Sarah Jeffers, noting the shotgun in the old woman’s arms. What in the hell is going on here? her mind screamed as her feet carried her after Jett.

  The goats stirred for the first time since their arrival, snorting and bleating as the scarecrow stomped into their midst.

  “You’re not supposed to be here,” the Circuit Rider said.

  The scarecrow’s stitched lips gave the illusion of a wicked smile, but surely that was illusion, because the feed-sack face bore no other expression. The scarecrow hopped over a fat nanny, catching one dusty boot on a curled horn. It regained its balance and leaped onto the stone beside the Circuit Rider.

  “Solom doesn’t need you anymore,” the scarecrow said, in a muffled and rough voice. “We can appease God ourselves.”

  “Solom needs me,” the Circuit Rider said. “Who else can bring the rain and the frost and the wind and the sun?”

  “You’re not the only one who understands the power of blood sacrifice.”

  Jett had drawn to a stop among the goats, about 10 feet from the stone stage. Katy dodged around the goats, ignoring their sinister eyes and wicked teeth. Her daughter was more important to her than the whole world, and she was nearly oblivious to the strange assembly of people, many of whom held weapons. At least she had proof that she wasn’t descending into madness, because if this was a hallucination, it was a communal one.

  Katy sensed more than saw the movement around her: the Sheriff’s deputy reaching in the car and triggering the blue strobes on the car’s roof; Ray Tester dashing through the goats like a drunk running an obstacle course, rousing some to their feet as he thumped against them; their reclusive neighbor, Alex Eakins, raising what looked like a bow and aiming an arrow toward the stage; a large old goat that was the spitting image of Abraham, the one that Katy had killed or crippled in the driveway, rising and stomping toward the Circuit Rider like a repentant sinner headed for the touch of a faith healer; Sarah Jeffers moving into shotgun range with the careful steps of the elderly; Odus whacking the paint pony on the flank and urging it toward the granite slab; others circling and drawing closer, wanting to be part of the malevolent miracle, some stretching out their hands like New Testament lepers reaching for the robes of Jesus.

  Jett’s quoting of the Tommy Keene title, “Merry-Go-Round Broke Down,” popped into her mind, all the pretty ponies spilling from their poles, the center giving way, the crazy carnival lights bobbing, though the smells were those of fur and forest instead of popcorn and spun sugar. She reached Jett just as the scarecrow joined the Circuit Rider as if wanting to hog half the spotlight.

  “These are my people now,” the scarecrow said, and Katy recognized the cruel, commanding tone.

  Gordon.

  “Fucking Christ on a rubber crutch,” Jett said. “It’s him.”

  Katy recalled the scarecrow outfit in the box upstairs, the blood in the locked cupboard. She’d accepted that Gordon was capable of murder in the wake of Rebecca’s confession, but she hadn’t pegged him for a lunatic until now. She figured he was just like any man, vain and cruel and possessive, but she didn’t know the possession might have worked both ways.

  But why the costume? Why dress up when the most successful killers were those who didn’t draw attention to themselves?

  Katy had no time to analyze Gordon’s motives. She hadn’t figured him out in the year she had known him, and she suspected that would be the job for a team of prison psychiatrists over the next 30 years. In fact, all of Solom’s residents would probably be scooped up in a giant butterfly net and plopped gently into soft asylum rooms, especially when they started babbling about dead preachers, man-eating goats, and mountain-top revivals where faith was challenged and madness was shared like communion sacraments.

  The scarecrow—Gordon, she had to remind herself—stood a half a foot taller than the Circuit Rider, the brims of their hats nearly touching.

  “Have you people had enough of the Circuit Rider?” Gordon shouted, the feed-sack mouth puffing out with the air of his words, the stitched lips moving in a grotesque parody of language.

  “Get out of the way and give me a clear shot,” Alex Eakins yelled back.

  Ray Tester tripped over a billy goat, and the goat snapped at his flesh, teeth sinking into his arm and eliciting a scream. Ray swung the heavy wrench he was carrying as if it were David’s jawbone of an ass weilded against Philistines. The scent of blood seemed to arouse the other goats, because several of them broke out of their languid stupor and sniffed the night air.

  Katy looked down at the goats around her legs, noting that their attention was still fixed on the Circuit Rider. The goats around Jett twitched their tails but were otherwise docile. Ray regained his balance and continued toward the stage, holding his arm, blood trickling between his fingers, the bloody wrench clutched in one fist.

  Throughout all the chaos, the Circuit Rider stood with his grave-seasoned hands at his sides, his face calm, his eyes burning with the orange and red of coals being fanned to life by an inner wind.

  “What has this preacher ever done for you?” the scarecrow/Gordon called to the crowd.

  “Is that you, Gordon?” someone said from the edge of the crowd.

  “I am the son of Ceres, the daughter of Diana,” he answered, in that bombastic, lectur
ing tone that should have been enough for Katy to call off the engagement. But she had wanted to give Jett a happy, stable home, one far removed from the troubled past, the drugs, the divorce.

  All those ordinary failures now seemed so laughable when compared to this supernatural tsunami of danger and death.

  Katy reached Jett and tried to pull her back, but Jett stood transfixed. Though it was difficult to tell where the bone-button eyes of the scarecrow mask were focused, she felt burned by his stare, which was brighter and hotter than the beams of the collective headlights. Katy could have sworn the black yarn of the lips arched into a sneer.

  “Ah, my sweet little scapegoats,” Gordon said. “Come to offer yourself to the old gods? Come to give yourself to the soil so that Solom may be fruitful and multiply?”

  The scarecrow put a hand on the Circuit Rider’s shoulders and forced him to his knees. “See how hollow this supposed Man of God is? A straw man, you might say. HAHAHAAHAAAAA.”

  Ray scrabbled the final few feet to the granite slab, pushing past complaining goats. “Take me,” Ray said. “I’m the chosen one.”

  “No,” Odus said, guiding his horse among the capricious herd. “This is my mission.”

  “Get off that horse and come back here,” Sarah called to him. “I can’t get a good shot with so many people standing in the way.”

  To Katy, the woman sounded almost grateful to have an excuse. Any of them could have attacked the Circuit Rider if that was their intention. He was exposed on the rock, presumably blinded by the glaring lights, unless his vision was guided by unnatural laws. Those at his back wouldn’t have to worry about being seen and marked by whatever wrath he might unleash. It was as if the people, like the goats, were under some sort of spell, transfixed despite their hatred of the entity that had brought such pain and suffering to their community.

  “See?” Gordon said, towering over the Circuit Rider. “Look how frail is this creature of the night.”

  Gordon yanked off the preacher’s hat, exposing the wiry gray hairs that curled over the pale, crenulated skull. Gordon sailed the hat into the herd of goats, where it caught on the horn of one and hung as if tossed atop a coat rack.

  “Look upon his wonder and be disappointed,” Gordon said. “Know him by his fruits.”

  Katy wanted to bring Jett back to the relative safety of the Subaru, but found herself as rapt and awestruck as the rest. This close, she detected not only the electric aura of the Circuit Rider, but Gordon’s mad energy created its own special and strange gravity as well. She wondered if that danger-tinged charisma had been what had attracted her to him, but the thought sickened her.

  “What’s he doing and why doesn’t that policeman stop him?” Jett said.

  “Because the policeman’s human. Like the rest of us.”

  Ray tried to climb up onto the stone slab. It was slick with September dew, and his wounded arm prevented him from gaining solid purchase in the crevices. He lodged one boot into a crack and was about to haul himself up onto the impromptu stage when one of the goats in the front row, whose brown facial fur made a raccoon mask, lurched forward and snagged his other leg, tugging on the cuff of his jeans. Another goat rose, this one with crooked beige horns, and began sniffing his calf. “Help me, David,” Ray called.

  A hissing thwack pierced a hole in the night, and the goat with the beige horns let out a bruised bleat of shock. The feathers of an arrow tip jutted from its rib cage, just above its heart. It staggered back two steps, wobbled, and collapsed as if its legs were pipe cleaners.

  “No!” Gordon moaned, as though the injury had been inflicted on him instead.

  “The fucker munched my stash, man,” Alex said. “That was private property. My property.”

  The goats near the one who had fallen began sniffing the warm corpse. One poked out a tentative tongue and licked the wound. The herd began bleating and lowing, giving off restless snorts, several of them rising.

  “Come on, Jett,” Katy said. “I don’t trust these goats.”

  “I don’t trust anything right now.”

  A grizzled billy goat, one eye made milky by blindness, nipped the air a couple of feet from Katy’s leg, brown teeth clacking with menace. She eyed the distance back to the Subaru. The rock slab was closer, but that would put them within Gordon’s reach. Gordon pointed his sickle at Alex, the other hand still pressing on the kneeling preacher’s shoulder.

  Words issued from behind the scarecrow’s mask: “You should forgive those who trespass against you.”

  “Maybe you should take better care of your fences,” Alex said, notching another arrow. “Gordon.”

  “I’m not Gordon. I am he who gives tribute.”

  “With other people’s lives,” Odus said, guiding his paint pony through the restless goats.

  “Gordon’s gone squirrel-shit nutty,” Jett whispered to Katy.

  “I think we all have,” Katy whispered, just before the first shotgun blast ripped through the forest night.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Sarah didn’t quite mean to squeeze the trigger. At least, that’s what she told herself. But an old woman’s reflexes, like all her physical responses, tended to decline with every go-round of the sun. A shotgun was a great weapon if you needed to rake down a thief from close range, but the wide pattern of the birdshot all but guaranteed a few stray pellets.

  A few bleeding goats might not be a bad bonus, she rationalized, as the echo of the gun’s report slapped off the granite boulders and rolled through the trees. Blue-gray smoke swirled in the Jeep’s headlights, and the strong bite of cordite drowned out the moist humus smell of the mountain and the stench of the goats. The frail bones of her shoulder ached from the recoil.

  She’d meant to take down those goats nearest to Ray Tester, because they looked ready to chomp down on his legs. But what really flipped her was seeing the goat that had raided her store. She didn’t usually carry a grudge, and believed all God’s creature’s had a rightful place in the world. But this was the same world that held monsters like the Circuit Rider. And it seemed Gordon Smith had gone crazy, too.

  She’d never quite trusted the man, and it wasn’t just because of his bloodline. Whenever he ate a sandwich and took coffee at the store, he always calculated the tip at exactly fifteen percent. He’d do the division long-hand on the back of his ticket and round it to the nearest penny. Sarah could only guess what that scrawny, red-headed wife of his had gone through. Now he’d slipped into some sort of Halloween get-up and had taken to killing folks.

  The gunshot temporarily restored the peace that had prevailed when they had first stumbled onto the gathering. But it was a false peace, inflicted through shock and surprise. In that frozen moment, Sarah had time to absorb tiny details just as the night exploded: Sue Norwood opening the driver’s-side door of the Jeep; Odus sitting tall on the bareback horse and looking around like a rustler wondering where to direct the stampede; the man with the hunting bow taking aim at either Gordon or the Circuit Rider; Ray scrambling onto the flat slab of stone and crawling toward the Circuit Rider; Gordon in his scarecrow outfit reaching a gloved hand to the Circuit Rider and pulling that sickly forehead back, exposing the dead preacher’s pale and knobby throat; the goats rising to their feet as if heeding some silent command; and David Tester running into the midst of the stirring animals, either chasing his brother or making the same obsessed dash toward the Circuit Rider.

  Sarah broke down the barrel and thumbed out the warm, spent shell, reaching in her blouse pocket for a fresh round.

  ***

  Katy sensed the change in the animals after one of their number had fallen. The night was electric, charged with rage and confusion.

  Ray leaped for the Circuit Rider and threw his arms around the preacher, shielding him just as Alex launched another arrow. Katy heard the wet snick of the arrow as it buried itself between Ray’s shoulder blades. Ray’s wrench bounced off the stone with a dull clink. He gave a soft grunt of surprise, huggin
g the preacher, looking up into his face as if craving a final benediction. The preacher showed no emotion, just stared back with those beetle-black eyes.

  Ray’s words were so weak and strained that Katy was sure no one heard them besides herself, Gordon, Jett, and the Circuit Rider.

  “I’m the one,” Ray said, smiling, dying, slumping against the preacher with the arrow jutting from his back.

  “Get him!” Gordon yelled, again pointing his sickle at Alex. At first Katy thought he was addressing the crowd, but the goats turned as one and sniffed the air in Alex’s direction. The goats gave out cries and squeaks as they moved. Alex backed away, but the goats nearest him had broken into a trot. There was no way he’d make the relative safety of the woods. Even if he did, the sure-footed goats would have an advantage on the rough terrain.

  The horn of a passing goat grazed Katy’s wrist, laying open the skin.

  “Shit, Mom, you’re bleeding,” Jett said.

  Jett wasn’t the only one who noticed. A long-bearded nanny paused, bucking against the river of goats and turning toward Katy. It sniffed, snorted, and kicked up its back legs, clicking its hooves. Then it struggled against the seething tide of animals and headed for Katy as if she had been dipped in honey and oats.

  “The rock,” Katy said, gripping Jett’s hand so hard her own fingers ached.

  The nanny negotiated the rumbling herd better than Katy did, because she was busy dodging bobbing horns and stomping hooves. The nanny was gaining, and Katy was still twenty feet from the rock. And even if she reached the rock, what would Gordon do to her? Cut her with his sickle, or toss her to the meat-eating monsters that somehow obeyed his perverted commands?

  The decision was taken from her as a passing goat rammed her in the stomach, knocking the wind from her. Above the high-pitched whining in her ears, she heard Jett scream, and a hundred hoof-beats drummed their death march. Then she was lifted into the air, yanked as if by the ray of a flying saucer or the crook of God’s swooping shepherd’s staff. She blinked the lime-colored sparks of pain from behind her eyes and found herself flopped belly-down over the back of Odus’s horse.