The Nightmare Frontier

by Stephen Mark Rainey

  “Is Levi around?”

  “He’s out yonder somewheres,” Joshua pointed to the meadow that bordered the road. “He’s just wandering, you know how he enjoys that.”

  “Remember what I told you—it could be dangerous to wander alone, even on your own land. I still don’t know what’s out there.”

  “Right, right, I’ll mention that to him. I ’spect he’s fine, though. He’ll take care of anything that bothers him, you can be sure of that. Hey, you know what?” Joshua leaned in close. “I think Levi’s got his eye on somebody. Won’t that be somethin’ if he got him a new mom for Malachi?”

  Grayson dropped his jaw, then tried to close it without looking too startled. “Who’s he interested in?”

  “Can’t say. If he wants you to know, he’ll tell you. I just mention it in case you see him around town.”

  “Well, that’s most interesting.”

  “I guess you’ll be getting on back to work then, huh?”

  “Yeah, back to work.” He clapped Joshua solidly on the shoulder. “You take care of your granddad, now. Like you said, he’s getting up there. And you and Levi be watchful.”

  “We’ll do that.”

  “See you later.”

  Grayson started toward his car, but Joshua called after him. “Granddaddy gave you some good advice, din’t he? I hope you got it in your head to mind him.”

  He didn’t turn, but a stab of fear nearly stopped him in his tracks. He forced himself to continue on to his car and merely waved a hand in acknowledgement.

  He had just reached the end of the driveway when a yellow school bus rounded the curve from the direction of town. Its flashing lights came on, and it pulled to a stop just in front of the house. Its final passenger, Malachi Barrow, stepped off the bus, crossed the road, and headed toward the sheriff’s vehicle with an inquiring expression. Grayson leaned out the window and gave the teenager a taut smile.

  “Afternoon, Malachi. Doing all right?”

  “Hey, Mr. Mike. Whatcha doing out here?”

  By even the most generous standard, Malachi could not be considered anything other than ugly. He was tall and lanky, with a bony, oversized head that resembled his uncle Joshua’s more than his father’s. But like Levi’s, his black hair was long and stringy, and his violet eyes gleamed oddly beneath a single, coarse eyebrow.

  “I came to see your great-grandfather and your uncle. I guess your dad’s not home.”

  “Daddy’s got his business and all. You been talkin’ to Great Granddaddy, I s’pose.”

  Grayson almost trembled under Malachi’s knowing gaze. “We had an interesting visit.”

  He snickered, its harsh sound remarkably similar to his uncle’s. “I reckon he’s still fond of you.”

  “I should hope so,” he said, trying to hide his increasing apprehension. “Hey, Malachi, you knew that young Lawson boy, didn’t you?”

  The bright eyes darkened. “I reckon I did. You still looking for what killed him, I ’spect.”

  Grayson hardened his expression. “Yeah, I am. I guess you don’t know anything about that.”

  “I know he’s dead, sure enough. Ain’t that something?”

  “Let me guess. You didn’t like him very much?”

  Malachi’s eyes flickered toward the house, and Grayson saw movement behind one of the windows. Abruptly Malachi said, “Well, I gotta go now, Mr. Mike. I’m gonna say goodbye, awright?”

  “Maybe we’ll get to talk later.”

  “I reckon. Goodbye, Mr. Mike. Goodbye.” Malachi started toward the house, and Grayson pulled out of the driveway and accelerated up the road toward town, now more anxious than ever to get away from the Barrow property. He threw a last glance in the rearview mirror, only to see Malachi standing by the front door, waving after him, his homely face five miles long.

  Grayson could no longer suppress the shudder he had been holding back, for something was very different about the family he had known for so long. They had always considered themselves above the law, this much was true, and they went about their business with little or no regard for others. Hell, Grayson had personally kept their names out of every controlled substances investigation in the county for the last twenty years. They had never posed an active, physical threat to anyone who didn’t meddle in their affairs; now, though, Grayson wasn’t so sure. Above all, he was positive that his favored status had somehow become tenuous, hinging on his decision to side with the family in whatever matter they had instigated. He dreaded the idea that they were, in fact, responsible for the violence that had come to Silver Ridge, for if they were, he could no longer deny the sight of his aging but still discerning eyes.

  And the Barrows knew it—even Malachi, for there could be no mistaking in the boy’s long, regret-laden wave the clear intimation of absolute finality.

  Chapter 7

  Thad Smallwood had never enjoyed the drive into Silver Ridge from the Midland Brewery Distribution Center in Clarksburg, even though once every two weeks it provided him with a respite from the bane of his existence—traffic grinding to a screeching halt on what ought to be wide-open road. There was no Interstate to Silver Ridge, just a few of the worst two-lane roads in the state, and despite the picturesque mountain scenery, something about the surrounding countryside always seemed desolate and oppressive. The folks at the few Silver Ridge stores where he unloaded showed every bit as much prejudice toward a black man as the poorly educated clods of the much deeper south; unlike at most of the bigger stops, they never offered him a decent meal or even so much as a soda or cup of coffee.

  Today, the road seemed even less hospitable than usual. Route 201 had needed maintenance for years, but now Smallwood’s Sterling Acterra bounced and jolted mercilessly over hidden bumps and potholes, forcing him to hold back even on the rare straight stretches. It could only be his imagination, but as he drew nearer to the town limits, the curves seemed far more acute than they should have, the dips and inclines longer and steeper than ever before. Beneath the towering trees, a deep darkness smothered the highway, but sporadic mid-afternoon sunbeams cut through the canopy like gleaming blades, briefly blinding him with their brilliance.

  Smallwood didn’t think he’d ever been so uncomfortable in his twelve years of professional driving.

  Odd; by now he should have come upon the Chicken House, which was the only place around to get decent home cooking, and he had somehow missed seeing Buck Wagner’s Texaco, which had to have been a couple of miles back. And the eons-old billboard for the Skylark Motel (“We’re here for YOUR comfort!”)…had it been taken down since last month? No way he could have passed it by.

  The road veered sharply to the left, which somehow didn’t seem proper, but he braked normally to go into the hairpin curve. Then his foot jammed the pedal to the floor because, a shockingly short distance ahead, the road abruptly became a narrow dirt path, which vanished into a wall of pine trees that solidly blocked his passage.

  “Jesus God-a-mighty!” he exploded as the truck shivered and shook to a sliding halt, only a few feet shy of smashing into vast boles that could not possibly grow where they were growing. A cloud of hot, fetid dust billowed up and swirled around the cab, completely obscuring his view for a long minute, during which time torrents of sweat began to stream down his forehead to sting his disbelieving eyes.

  His mind zoomed back over the last several minutes of his trip. He had not made any unusual turns or been detoured by construction. His eyes had never left the road, and by every indication, he had followed the exact same route he had taken once every two weeks for the last ten months. His truck was not equipped with a GPS system, but his sense of direction was faultless; he had ceased needing a map to this locale by the time his first haul to it had ended.

  So where the hell was he—and how did he get here?

  The only thing to do was back up the truck, find a place to turn around, and drive until he found a familiar landmark. He must have somehow taken a wrong fork, regardless of how certai
n he had been of his route. He couldn’t worry about that now, though, for negotiating this narrow, winding road in reverse would take all his concentration; hazardous as hell, but under the circumstances, necessary. He was just about to shift into reverse when a distant, electric blue flash in the woods ahead captured his attention. He leaned forward and peered into the distant shadows, hoping to catch another glimpse of it. A second later, he did. And again a few seconds after that.

  He shut off the engine, shoved the door open, and dropped to the ground, landing on dry but yielding gray-brown loam. He took a few steps toward the trees, his eyes anxiously seeking the source of the light—which flashed again, evidently a long way off, somewhere down the narrow path in front of the truck. When he glanced up, he realized that these trees were easily the tallest he had ever seen—their tops so high they actually seemed to reach the clouds! The sight of them sent his head reeling, so he turned his eyes back to the path, his heart racing with apprehension, his feet reluctant to take the first step into the silent darkness of the woods.

  It was damned quiet out here. Not the first birdcall or insect chirp or sigh of the wind; only the soft crunch of his feet on the earth as he strode forward, penetrating the veil of shadow beneath the awful black pines. He stifled the urge to call out because his voice had no business intruding on this eerie, silent cavern of wood, and though his heart implored him to turn around and get back in the truck, the flashing blue light mesmerized him, beckoned him like a ghostly hand through the artificial night. So he trudged on, glancing around constantly, warily, half-expecting something to materialize out of the darkness, some subtle vibration to shatter the overpowering absence of sound. And as he drew near to the source of the light, he finally broke into a run, recognizing but not quite accepting what he was seeing.

  It was a dogshit brown Ford Crown Victoria bearing the insignia of the Byston County Sheriff’s Department, its blue lights flashing erratically, the driver’s door hanging suggestively open. The car was empty, its engine off, though when Smallwood peeked cautiously inside, he found the keys in the ignition. The hood was still warm.

  So here the car was, tucked in among the densely packed pines with absolutely no means of ingress. It could not have passed between the trees from the direction he had walked, nor any other that he could determine. By all indications, the vehicle must have been dropped here—yet it bore no sign of damage, and not a tree limb above it appeared bent or broken. Besides, these pines rose hundreds of feet above his head, and in the lush evergreen canopy, he saw no significant breaks.

  It almost seemed as if the forest had spontaneously grown around the car.

  Now he could not help himself. Before he fully realized what he was doing, his mouth had opened and his voice was echoing with shocking, terrifying volume through the incredible forest: “Hello! Is there anybody here?”

  Now, a sharp, staccato clicking, almost insect-like, burst from the darkness around him. His eyes frantically scanned the shadows, trying to lock onto the source of the sound, but it was impossible. When he looked left, the rapid click-click-clack, click-click-clack seemed to come from the right; when he looked behind, it came from the front. Some distance farther down the trail, bright daylight shone through a break in the trees, and thinking it the most likely direction the car’s occupant might have gone, he started jogging toward it. To his relief, as he put some distance between himself and the sheriff’s vehicle, the bizarre sounds began to abate.

  Even though his mind had yet to grasp the nature of his predicament, he stalwartly clung to the belief that the world itself had not changed; he simply didn’t have enough information to process what was happening. But the moment he set foot in the open space between the great trees, his last bastion of rationality crumbled and dispersed on the four winds like so much dust; his breath caught in his lungs, and his body nearly collapsed beneath its own weight.

  Miles and miles distant, beyond a series of mist-shrouded ridges, a stone tower ascended to the heavens like a monolithic needle, dwarfing the multitudes of block-like structures, immense in their own right, that gathered at its base. Taller than any manmade edifice, the thing bore a strangely organic aspect, as if it had thrust itself out of the ground and climbed toward the sun, seeking to pluck it from the sky. The dimly glowing, oblong objects that drifted in the air around it, diminutive in comparison, had to be bigger than whales to be visible from such a distance.

  Smallwood heard a rustling sound behind him and, fighting back nausea, dazedly swiveled around. Of the shocking images his eyes had just beheld, the one standing before him was surely the most incongruous: a disheveled-looking white man with long, greasy hair, dressed in tattered denim, regarding Smallwood with hostile, deep violet eyes. His lips slowly spread in a shark-like smile to reveal a mouthful of crooked yellow teeth. He was obviously not the driver of the sheriff’s car.

  “Whatcha say, nigger?”

  For a second, Smallwood stared in disbelief, as rooted to the earth as one of the giant pines. But the words served to anchor the chaos in his mind, and like a low flame, fury began to displace his terror. Then, before he even realized what he was doing, he leaped forward with a cry and began to pound the smaller man with his fists. With every blow he landed, his dread diminished ever so slightly.

  “You son of a bitch,” he growled. “You wanna know what I say? This is what I say.” He smashed his fist straight into the man’s nose, and his hand came away bloody. “What the hell’s the matter with you?”

  The smaller man staggered slightly but maintained his footing; and then, shrugging off the punches as if a child had delivered them, he rose to his full height and offered Smallwood another mocking smile. “That kinda attitude ain’t gonna get you nowhere, boy.”

  Before Smallwood could even consider a reply, the clicking sounds again rose all around him, and now he could see signs of movement in the underbrush between the trees. Here and there, flecks of light appeared in the shadows, and a strong acidic odor, like the smell of ants he had crushed in his fingers as a child, rushed to his nostrils, bringing water to his eyes. He backed away from the strange white man, trying to orient himself so he could make a break for his truck.

  As the click-clack noises grew louder amid the trees, behind him, from the direction of the tower, a deeper, heavier sound rose, as if in response to the others. Like the pounding of drums, the noise grew stronger, more tangible, vibrating through the ground so intensely that he felt it in his shins. The sunlight dimmed, as if a cloud had passed overhead, but a small, timid voice inside assured him that the sky was cloudless; and with a cry of near-mindless panic, he suddenly bolted and ran at breakneck speed into the trees, back in the direction of his truck.

  Behind him, the chattering noises rose in volume and pitch. And mixed in with them, the distinct sound of human laughter: the cruel mirth of the man who had called him “nigger.” Soon, Smallwood could no longer hear laughing, human or otherwise; only his own shrill cries as he dashed up the path toward his truck, which seemed as remote as the safe, comfortable life he had left behind in a world that no longer existed.

  Chapter 8

  The blended aroma of fresh produce, seafood, tangy spices, pine oil cleaner, and old sweat transported Copeland back almost thirty years, to a place in his memory that would have remained sealed if the unique and apparently timeless smell of Cooper and Rankin’s Supermarket had not unexpectedly unlocked it. The store’s interior had probably been remodeled a time or two since the 70s, but one would never know to look at it. He could almost be an adolescent again, walking in to buy some groceries for his mom and dad—or to sneak a peek at some of the magazines they used to keep behind a special partition in the far corner of the store.

  Lynette needed a few items that well-wishers from Rodney’s wake had not provided, so he had volunteered to go shopping for her. For the better part of the day, she had been writing thank-you notes and signing insurance documents, holding up admirably, but still a few days short of being
up to sort through Rodney’s room and personal belongings. Without being insensitive, he hoped she might manage it while he was still around to help her.

  From the moment he had awakened this morning, it was Debra Harrington who had dominated his thoughts; not just her nascent influence on his emotions but also her strange “vision” at the Barrows’ place the previous afternoon. That, together with the bizarre events of the past couple of days—among which he counted the weird light he had seen on the ridge and maybe even Lynette’s sleepwalking—added up to a disturbing and so far unfathomable mystery that nagged at him relentlessly. That each inexplicable occurrence tied in with the others he had no doubt, yet the prospects of piecing together such a puzzle seemed bleak when each disparate fragment defied comprehension.

  Again and again, in his judgment, the clues led to the doorstep of Barrow manor. The idea that such a degenerate clan might be at the center of some heinous but simple intrigue was hardly a stretch, but this community’s recent tribulations were far from simple. Unfortunately, the strongest evidence against the Barrow family was his intuition, and on reflection, he could not ignore the possibility that their worst offense might be the fact they offended him. But each time he considered offering them the benefit of the doubt, the image of Levi Barrow’s cunning, staring eyes—or the shocked face of Zack Baird as he fled from the Barrow property with the devil at his heels—removed all doubt from his mind.

  He had just picked up some soap and a package of razors when he felt a tap on his shoulder. Turning, he saw a stooped, grizzled octogenarian clutching a wooden walking stick and regarding him curiously from behind Coke-bottle glasses. “’Scuse me, sir. You live around here?”

  “Not really, no.”

  The old man sighed. “That figures. You look like you got some sense about you.”