Then the colonel paled, giving up the ghost yet again, the threads of his illusive form fading. The officer’s saber, sheath, and uniform with its dull brass insignia disappeared along with him, but the kepi remained, solid as the shed walls.
Vernon Ray reached up and adjusted the cap until the brim was perched over his forehead, shading his eyes against the death of day. The snare’s soft rattle fell away to silence, and only the wind remained, pushing October on past so winter could bare its icy teeth and feed.
When twilight came, Vernon Ray left the shed, picking through trees, careful not to snag the kepi on any low-hanging branches.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The uneasiness crept in like a rooster on crippled drumsticks.
Hardy stirred in bed under the heavy quilts. Pearl’s snores were like the bleating of a lamb. She’d popped one of those blue pills Doc Sanderson had prescribed for her nerves, and those usually knocked her out pretty good.
The onions she’d cooked with the fried potatoes had tainted the room with oily air, but Hardy was nearly used to it by now. He couldn’t blame the odor for his restlessness. After all, his old flannel longhandles were nearly stiff enough to stand in his boots and walk to the door by themselves.
The wind was flapping under the eaves, rattling the wooden shutters and causing the old farmhouse to shift and creak. The moon was up, its sick light sliding between the curtains and painting a green rectangle on the floorboards. Hardy strained his ears against the groaning of wood, listening for sounds from Donnie’s room. As he rolled over, a quill poked through his feather pillow and stuck his cheek.
The thin hands of the dial clock on the night stand were pushing past twelve and beginning their slow drop into the wee hours. Hardy sat up with a creak of bedsprings. He could almost feel the sloping weight of Mulatto Mountain, its ancient swell of rock and soil crawling into the valley.
The mountain and its damnable inhabitants could fall into the sea, for all Hardy cared. Even without the ghosts, the mountain would soon be wrecked by security lights, vacation homes for rich folks, and paved highways winding across its face.
Just like when the Yankee raiders rolled through in 1864, the invasion was inevitable, and guns would do little to change the outcome. When the Yanks had done their dirty business and moved on, their lawyers sailed in on the wake and got themselves elected to local office, then proceeded to develop land-use ordinances that favored them and their friends.
The Eggers family had been lucky because their property was so steep and hard to farm that its value on the deed books was low. But the new breed of Yankee invaders put a premium on mountain views, so the steepest terrain had become the most expensive. Never mind that the wind hammered at those high houses and the well drillers had to go a quarter-mile deep in some places; the rich idiots were only there for a few weeks in the summer anyway.
Hardy moved to the window, his joints burning with arthritis. Since the incident in the barn, he’d kept to the house, and he wondered how long it would be before the whole mess blew over.
In his youth, back when Mulatto Mountain was in the hands of the Eggers family, the ghosts had been spotted here and there on occasion. Hardy had even glimpsed them a few times himself, faint wisps of mist cavorting through the trees. But he’d never seen them so up-close-and-personal—and as real—as he’d seen them when Earley had danced to the music of the colonel’s sword.
As he peeked through the curtains, Pearl’s snoring stopped. He half expected to see campfires on the mountain, as if the dead had decided to bivouac in the woods instead of the eternal dampness of the Hole. But the woods were dark and still, even near the turnaround where Budget Bill’s bulldozers and trucks were parked. The air carried a cold weight, as if the killing frost was ready to descend from the North.
“You see anything strange?” Pearl said, her voice creaky with sleep.
He’d not told her about the incident in the barn. Lately, he’d kept a lot of things to himself, and he wondered if that was how marriages faded away until they went bust. “Nah,” he said. “Just a mountain.”
She got out of bed and Hardy heard the soft rustle of her slippers. “I’ll go check on Donnie.”
“He’s all right,” Hardy said without turning.
The shuffle of footsteps stopped. “You just keep watch and let me take care of my son.”
Hardy nodded in the dark until the door closed. He switched on the bedside lamp and got his black-powder musket out of the closet. He’d seen an old episode of “The Twilight Zone” where a priest had killed a vampire by putting a silver cross on his bullets and shooting the creature through the heart.
Hardy didn’t hold with the existence of vampires, but he figured if he was going to put his faith anywhere, it would be the Lord. That evening, he’d crept to the basement and melted down Pearl’s silver chain and cross and fashioned the metal into three balls of shot. Three wouldn’t be near enough, even if the silver had any effect on the dead, but their weight gave him comfort.
He opened the Eggers family bible, which had been passed down through four generations. Preachers had talked of the Holy Ghost, and Hardy wasn’t sure how he’d feel about Jesus Christ’s spirit drifting through the wall at any moment. But if the Good Book acknowledged the existence of ghosts, and resurrection was one of the juiciest parts of the entire tale, then maybe its pages packed a little bit of magical punch.
Hardy tilted his powder horn to sift some of the explosive substance into the barrel, then rolled in one of the silver balls. He ripped out a page from the Book of Acts and used his brass rod to pack it down for wadding to hold the shot in place.
“God, make me an instrument of your peace,” he said.
The door squeaked open and Pearl padded into the room. “Is that thing loaded?”
“Just getting ready for trespassers.”
“You ought not keep loaded guns where Donnie might get at them.”
“Our son died ten years ago. He ain’t nothing now but your 195-pound baby doll.”
“Talk like that and you’ll be sleeping in the wood shed.”
“Fine way to talk to the man who put this roof over your head.”
Pearl moved behind him, her reflection distorted in the glass. Her face was aged and sad, the lines deepened by the late hour and too-little sleep. He tried hard to see his young bride in those bloodshot blue eyes, but only pain looked back at him.
“What’s happened to us?” she whispered.
Hardy laid the musket over his lap and waved toward the mountain. “The Jangling Hole happened.”
She put her trembling hands on his shoulders. “Hardy, our problem is in here, not out there. Our house has become a worse hell than anything a legend could stir up.”
“I seen them. And look what they done to Donnie.”
“Whatever it was Sunday—if there was anything—Donnie didn’t get hurt.”
“They didn’t need to hurt him. They already took everything that mattered when they got ahold of him last time. They took his soul.”
“And you call yourself a Christian. Donnie’s soul was bound for heaven since he got saved and baptized. Ever since he was 6, his soul was set.”
“Even if he don’t know no better? At that age, you don’t know what death’s like. All you’re doing is mocking back the words somebody put in your ear.”
“Saved is saved. The Good Lord wouldn’t have it any other way.”
“I took many a comfort from the Bible,” Hardy said, tapping the book. “But now I got to go with what I see with my own eyes and feel in my gut.”
“Don’t go turning your—”
Ratta tatta tat.
They stared at each other.
“Possum must have got in the attic,” Pearl said, her hushed words barely audible even in the sudden silence.
Tatta tatta.
“Yep,” Hardy said. “And it learned to carry a beat. Reckon we ought to catch it and put it in a circus.”
“They’
re coming for him, aren’t they?” Pearl pulled her bed robe tighter over her chest and held it with one trembling hand, as if somehow that would ward off invading spirits.
“They’ll come sooner or later. But this time they ain’t getting him without a fight.”
The drumming rose from across the pasture, its origin difficult to pinpoint. Hardy peered out the window, expecting to see flickering campfires or a line of marching white wisps. Instead there was only darkness and the distant trees fighting off the autumn wind.
“How can you fight them, Hardy? You already turned your back on the one power in all the world that might beat them.”
“There’s two ways to look at it. Either the Lord has a reason for them to be here, meaning it’s some kind of test, or the Lord has no power over them and we got to draw on what we can muster. Jesus is sitting on the sidelines for this one.”
“It don’t hurt none to pray.”
Ratta tatta tat.
The drumming was closer now, between the house and the barn, and its percussion trailed off in an eerie reverberation. It was joined by another pounding, a deeper, hollow, less-rhythmic pulse. Coming from across the hall.
Pearl moved first but Hardy, his arthritis screaming like salty lime in an open sore, reached the door before she did. As he stepped in the hall, the room to Donnie’s door shook in its frame.
“Donnie!” Hardy yelled, leaning the musket against the wall. His son threw himself against the door again, the wood around the hinges splintering with the force of the blow. Another meaty thud sounded as the snare drumming grew louder.
They’re on the porch.
“Open the door before he hurts himself,” Pearl yelled.
Hardy touched the sliding bolt that would allow the door to swing open. He hesitated just long enough for Pearl to push past him. She reached for the hardware and froze.
RATTA TATTA TATTA TATTA.
The drumming was beneath them now, coming from the kitchen, headed for the stairs. Donnie had stopped throwing himself against the door and now answered the snare drum with his own cadence, hammering the wood with what sounded like the balls of his fists.
The percussion rose up the stairwell, accompanied by the footfalls of boots. Hardy wondered why floaty things made of air and nightmares would need to march, but figured dead folks had no reason to follow sensible rules. When the dead got on a mission, they would hoof it through hell and back if that’s what the job required. That was as true of Kirk’s lost raiders as it was with Jesus of Nazareth.
When the time came for action, you dragged your ass off the cross and did your duty.
“They’re coming, whatever they are,” Pearl said, pressed against the door as if motherly love alone could turn back the tide. Donnie kept on with his rhythmic pounding, and the wind had risen so that the house creaked and shook on its stacked-stone foundation.
Hardy swayed on aching, bowed legs, flush with the fever of fear, his heart threatening to gallop off into a painful stretch run toward the finish line.
But he was still a man, despite his 63 hard years and his bad eyes, and he was the last line of defense between his son and the things that wanted a new recruit.
No, they didn’t want tired, used-up old men—or else the colonel would have taken him the other day at the fence line or out in the barn—but Hardy had no doubt that some fresh meat would soothe them on their long vigil of darkness, make that crack in the mountain known as the Jangling Hole a little less lonesome for a while.
They’d take the rest of his son. And Hardy would live out his days at the foot of the mountain, feeling the weight of helplessness and the guilt of failure pressing on him until it finally collapsed his chest.
No. Last time they took him without a fight. But I ain’t down for the count yet, and this battle’s just starting.
Without taking his eyes from the stairs, where the phantom platoon continued its climb, he reached behind him for the musket leaning against the wall.
His fingers came away empty.
“Hardy, look!” Pearl shouted.
The musket hovered in midair at the other end of the hall, moving away from them.
Hardy suspected that particular maneuver had never been taught on the grounds of West Point, where the great military minds sat down at their charts and maps and moved paper around as if those shifting lines didn’t cost the blood of thousands.
If you want to beat the enemy, just take the weapon out of his hands.
The musket floated a few more feet, as if it were made of dust instead of wood and steel. Then the motes around it swirled and thickened, collecting into a cottony shape.
It was the soldier from the barn, the mutineer who had been treated to the bayonet and sword at the hands of his brothers in arms. The man who had died again at the command and behest of his former leader, the dishonorable Col. Kirk.
Corporal Earley Eggers materialized, moving away from Hardy, the saber wound visible in his back. He carried the musket before him as if pushing unseen cobwebs out of the way. Maybe he was pushing through obstacles in his world, wading through something on the other side that Hardy couldn’t see. It was a land that prayers never touched and that God had seen fit to leave alone, and though Hardy felt the comfort of faith give way to the deep chill of utter solitude, he also steeled himself because he had nothing left but his own spare strength and will.
“Soldier,” he yelled, loudly enough to drown out the thrumming boots on the stairs. His commanding tone probably wasn’t as forceful as the orders the young recruit had heard at Bull Run or Chancellorsville, but the dead man hesitated all the same.
“You deserted once and you see where it got you,” Hardy said, knowing he was riding the greased rails of madness but finding no turnabout or detour. “It got you dead.”
Pearl touched Hardy’s shoulder but he gently shrugged her off. “Get in there with Donnie. I’ll take care of this.”
He was glad she didn’t question him, because he would have had no answer for her this time. The deadbolt slid from its sheath and the door creaked open, Donnie’s hammering interrupted. Earley Eggers waited, frozen in place, that gash in his old gray tunic oozing starstuff and darkness. Hardy waited for the door to close, ignoring the rattling snare drum that echoed toward the top of the stairs.
“When you going to stand and fight?” Hardy shouted at his ancestor’s back, and he could as easily have directed the words at himself. He’d always known the Hole was there and had sensed its potential to spew out plenty of damage and disaster. And yet he’d sat back and ignored it while it gobbled his son’s soul and took others along the way.
“You can’t fight what you can’t see,” he said. “But you can’t see the inside of your own heart, either.”
The drummer was on the second floor now and Hardy could sense the massed platoon coming up behind him, but he kept his gaze on Earley.
The corporal turned, those forlorn, weary eyes pouring out darkness with all their lifeless might. They were Eggers eyes, dark and flecked with gold, but the glint was more of hellfire than the spark of animation. His bony fingers clutched the musket, face set in grim determination. Earley raised the gun and pointed the barrel at Hardy, who could do nothing but stare back down the sight at the man who was readying to kill his own kin.
The barrel shifted to the right and the musket roared, the percussion hammering between the wooden walls of the narrow hallway, sulfur-rich blue smoke boiling from the end of the gun.
A cry erupted behind Hardy, the snare drum fell silent, and finally his limbs broke from their rigor and he fell with his back against the wall, sliding until he was half sitting.
At the end of the hallway stood a boy of about 12, a small kepi perched on his head in imitation of the rag-tag bunch of soldiers who gathered on the stairs behind him. A strap descended the boy’s shoulders, a snare drum against his hip. The drummer boy looked down at his chest, where a small hole appeared in the cloth just below the top brass button.
Har
dy knew the boy was dead—Christ, PLEASE let him be already dead—but his flesh looked so solid that Hardy expected blood to bloom from the wound. Surprise and confusion battled on the kid’s smooth face, as if the thought of death had never crossed his mind, though surely he’d witnessed all manner of death and mayhem on those long-ago battlefields.
“What’s going on?” Pearl screeched from behind Donnie’s door, but Hardy wouldn’t have been able to describe it even if he could make his lips and windpipe work.
The boy looked first at Earley, then at Hardy, as if acknowledging the family resemblance, and toppled forward, his kepi rolling off the side of his tousled blond head.
Now Hardy recognized him.
It was one of the boys who’d been messing around the Jangling Hole the other day—only he’d been alive and well at the time.
A soldier standing behind the drummer boy opened his mouth, and though no sound came out, the name “Earley” bounced around the inside of Hardy’s concussed head. Hardy recognized his haggard face and possum-colored beard from the barn and Col. Kirk’s execution squad.
The soldier dropped his weapon and reached with one arm to catch the boy. But when flesh met flesh, there was no resistance, and the boy continued falling until his rusted snare drum banged on the floor of the hall.
Other soldiers crowded the stairwell, silent and grim, leveling their rifles down the hallway, and at such close range, none of the bullets would miss. They wouldn’t care whether the bullets ripped the flesh of the dead or the living.
Hardy wasn’t sure he cared, either. As long as Donnie was safe behind that thick wooden door, Hardy could go in peace, knowing he’d fought to the end. But spirits didn’t obey the rules of doors and deadbolts, and Pearl would be left alone in Donnie’s defense.
Since she had nothing but prayers as a weapon, Hardy didn’t hold out much hope. He glanced at his musket, knowing Earley wouldn’t have time to reload before the platoon’s fusillade sent him to the grave for the third time.
Ghost Box: Six Supernatural Thrillers Page 52