The Preacher: A Supernatural Thriller (Solom Book 3) Read online

  THE PREACHER

  (SOLOM Book #3)

  By Scott Nicholson

  Copyright ©2015 Scott Nicholson

  Published by Haunted Computer Books, Inc.

  “One of the most thrilling writers working today. Miss him at your peril.” – Blake Crouch, Wayward Pines

  “Like Stephen King, he summons serious scares.” – Bentley Little. His Father’s Son

  “Always surprises and always entertains.” – Jonathan Maberry, Patient Zero

  Look for the other Solom books:

  Solom #1: The Scarecrow at Amazon US or Amazon UK

  Solom #2: The Narrow Gate at Amazon US or Amazon UK

  CHAPTER ONE

  Life was almost back to normal, if such an adjective could ever be applied to the tiny North Carolina Mountain town of Solom. Normal except for those hoof prints that simply ended twenty feet from the barn, as if the horse and its rider had climbed the morning mist and vanished.

  Katy Logan hadn’t mentioned them to her daughter Jett, whose attention was consumed with being seventeen and dramatic. Jett banged the tin bucket off her hip, and the goats bleated with hunger in the October dawn. As Katy opened the heavy barn door, she gave one last look at the trail of prints dotting the expanse of mud in the barnyard. The very last set of prints was sunken, as if the rider had stopped there to watch the farmhouse for a long while.

  But Katy was done with such things.

  Two years after her new husband tried to kill her and a year after a supernatural showdown with the Horseback Preacher, a wicked scarecrow, and a herd of bloodthirsty goats, her biggest worry these days was saving for Jett’s college fund.

  And, okay, she also had to deal with her ex-husband Mark, who had moved to the area after sobering up and finally fulfilling his paternal duties with Jett.

  Still, since surviving all the ghostly horrors that Solom could throw at them, Katy and Jett had finally settled into the farm she’d inherited from her psychotic, murderous spouse. With autumn bringing its frost and brown leaves to the North Carolina Mountains, her days were filled with harvesting corn, canning tomatoes, baling hay, and milking goats. Odus Hampton was still around as an occasional farmhand, and since it was Friday after school, Jett was available for slave labor.

  And although Jett didn’t receive any cash for her chores, she extracted payment in complaints.

  “Squeezing these teats is going to turn my youthful fingers into old-lady claws,” Jett said, sitting on a three-legged stool in the milking stall.

  “Builds character,” Katy said, leading Greta, the oldest nanny, into the stall. “You’re going to need character when you go to App State.”

  “UCLA.”

  Katy looped Greta’s front legs into nooses to keep her still, shoved a bowl of grain in front of the animal’s nose, and handed Jett a stainless steel bucket. “Only if they take tuition in goat cheese.”

  “I’m going to get scholarships. It’s not like you’ll have to sell the farm.”

  “You’d love that. Back to the big city.”

  Jett brushed a black bang from her forehead. “I’ve given up on that dream. Just call me ‘Ellie Mae.’”

  “You’ll be free soon enough. Don’t rush it.”

  “It feels like I’ve been seventeen forever.”

  Katy grinned. “Seems like two minutes to me. Keep squirting, Squirt, I’ve got to feed the critters.”

  As milk streamed into the bucket, Katy climbed the rickety wooden steps to the loft. She hated the dusty loft with its bales of golden-brown hay. That’s where Gordon kept his creepy scarecrow costume. But she wasn’t going to let Jett see her fear. That was why she’d kept the farm after all the horrors they’d endured: she’d earned this ground and nobody—dead or alive—was going to take it from her.

  Although at times like these, when she entered the barn loft or the attic of the old farmhouse, Katy resented her stubbornness. Show bravery, even if it killed you. Maybe she was just showing off.

  She resisted the urge to grab the pitchfork that hung from two nails driven into the siding. The barn was outfitted with the variety of blades and bludgeons typical of a farming life: axes, chains, hoes, shovels, crosscut saws, ball peen hammers, scythes, sickles, pruning shears, trowels, two-handled corn seeders, wood rasps, and a dozen other antique woodworking and digging tools she’d yet to get around researching on the Internet.

  If I ever want to sell out, we could hold one hell of a Hoot’n Holler hillbilly yard sale. In the meantime, here’s a hundred ways to shred a bloodthirsty scarecrow or a ghostly preacher.

  Katy glanced down at Jett, who was busy frowning at her task, ear buds now tethering her to an iPhone. Katy plucked a baling hook from the wall. The wicked curve of metal with the wooden handle could pass for an innocent and necessary tool. But better if Jett didn’t see it.

  Because her daughter might think Mom was scared.

  Katy climbed the remaining steps and stood before the door made of weathered oaken planks. She lifted the metal hasp with an ungodly squeak. Jett didn’t hear it over whatever throbbing emo-tech filled her ears. Katy took a breath and entered the loft.

  “Anybody home?” she whispered, gripping the baling hook so hard that her fingers hurt.

  Of course nobody was home. Except for some spiders and mice.

  The morning sun slanted through the open squares of windows, which were covered with chicken wire that allowed the moist autumn breeze to drift through. Dust motes cut lazy yellow circles in the air. Katy crinkled her nose, fighting off a sneeze.

  Her chore involved dragging a bale of hay over to an opening cut in the floor. She could cut the twine and remove smaller sections of the bale at a time. The hay wouldn’t chafe her skin through her flannel shirt and blue jeans, but that would require more back-and-forth trips. Which meant more time spent in the loft. Better to drag a full bale over and then cut it loose, tumble it down to the floor below, and let the goats pull the hay loose with their teeth.

  There was plenty of vegetation in the pastures, but the barbed-wire fence was suited for cattle and not goats. Odus was in the process of stringing welded-wire fencing, an expensive and time-consuming job that wouldn’t be completed until spring. The goats had gnawed the grass in the goat lot down to white nubs, so their diets had to be supplemented with hay and the occasional bucket of sweetened grain. Hay was the cheapest option, although Katy questioned for the hundredth time why she was so obsessed with the animals.

  Sometimes she felt like she didn’t even have a choice. A dominant-submissive relationship.

  Fifty Shades of Baaaah.

  Still, she was at the top of the food chain, considering she was the one tossing bales down to the herd milling below. Of the nine goats, two were male bucks and six were kids, and there was one more milker nanny. She raised her arm and drove the baling hook into the compacted hay—take THAT, Gordon, she thought, to fuel her strength—and dragged the bale over to the cutout. She knelt and looked through the opening.

  “Good morning, critters,” she said.

  Their quivering nostrils sniffed at the air as they peered up with those strange, heavy-lidded eyes that sported dark rectangular slits for pupils. The animals alternately bellowed and bawled in anticipation of food. Katy conducted a quick head count.

  …five…six…seven…

  With Greta, that made eight.

  One of the kids was missing: Snowball, the white buck with the dirty gray tail and little ochre nubs of horns.

  The Southern Appalachian Mountains were full of large predators, including coyotes and mountain lions, and even a domesticated dog might be tempt
ed to take down young and frail prey. But the animals had been penned inside the barn all night, and even if Snowball slipped under a gate or pushed through a gap between loose boards, the fenced barnyard would protect it. She’d seen no movement in the barnyard, but perhaps she’d been too distracted by those prints.

  By now she’d convinced herself Odus had ridden over last night on one of Sarah Jeffer’s roan mares. He usually confined his equestrian pursuits to daylight hours, but if he’d been in the bourbon—almost a certainty on a Friday—then he might’ve been off to the races in more ways than one. That didn’t explain how the prints ended abruptly, but she was sure if she looked more closely, she’d see where the rider wheeled and the horse headed back in the direction in which it had arrived.

  The goats would stand no more delays, as their bleats rose in a desperate chorus.

  “Chill, guys,” Katy said, pulling a folding Case knife from her back pocket, flipping it open, and snicking the silver blade through the twine. She kicked a few squares of hay onto the goats, which pushed and butted as they snapped their teeth. Once the animals were occupied, she tossed more squares in the corners of the pen. As they fed, she poked her head through the cutout and checked for crevices in the walls where Snowball might’ve escaped.

  Looks solid.

  She pushed the remaining hay through the hole and returned to the stairs, forgetting to hide the baling hook. Jett had finished milking and she pointed at it dangling from her mother’s hand. “Scared?”

  Katy looked down at it with horror but managed to shrug. “It’s a tool, that’s all.”

  “Sure, Mom. Nobody could possibly need a sharp weapon in the loft, could they?”

  Katy figured changing the subject was the best way out of this. “Snowball’s missing.”

  Snowball was one of Jett’s favorites, and her face scrunched with worry. “Pushed the gate open?”

  “No, it’s latched.”

  “Maybe he walked through the wall.”

  “Not funny, honey.”

  Jett untied Greta’s legs and led her to the pen so she could eat with the others. “I’ll go look for him.”

  “Okay, I’ll join you in a minute.”

  Katy collected the bucket, which held about three pints of rich-smelling milk, and exited the barn. She went immediately to the trail of prints and studied them more closely. The sun had burned away the early fog, revealing a thin blue sky with high, ribbed clouds. The distant fields were bright with goldenrod and Joe Pye weed, their blossoms bending from the weight of dew. A thread of smoke rose from over the hill, likely from Betsy Ward’s woodstove. If not for these prints’ existence and Snowball’s disappearance, it would be a beautiful, pastoral morning full of promise.

  Katy followed the indentions in the mud to their conclusion. No detour, no retreat, just four curved prints showing the outline of metal horseshoes. She stood for a moment, imagining the rider’s view. There were four windows on that side of the farmhouse, the lower floor housing the kitchen and the largely unused storage room that had once been Gordon’s study. The two upper windows opened onto a bathroom and Jett’s room.

  Odus might be a drunk, but he wasn’t a pervert. He was practically an uncle to Jett, teaching her to fly fish and patch a bicycle tube, never once exhibiting the slightest amount of creepiness. Besides, how could Odus make his horse vanish into thin air, and himself with it?

  No, this was something much worse.

  She hurried the milk to the fridge so she could join Jett’s search for Snowball.

  They never found him.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Ray Tester pressed the lever beneath the fuel control of his Massey Ferguson, raising the hydraulic arms at the rear of the tractor. The arms held a bush hog, an oversize lawn mower attachment that hacked meadows into hay. Ray only had ten acres, the smallest of the parcels that had been divided among the family when Zachariah Tester died. Old Zack had been the preacher at Rush Branch Primitive Baptist Church, a position now held by David Tester, Ray’s oldest brother. David had gotten sixty acres in the will and Ray’s attendance at the church had been spotty ever since, mostly funerals, weddings, and whenever some good home-baked pies were being served.

  Ray surveyed the slain grass behind him. Bennie, his five-year-old son, rode on the back end of the tractor, straddling the PTO hitch. The signs called for dry weather, and if the rain held for five days, Ray could get the hay rolled and stacked safely in the shed. He had a dozen head of cattle, but the way people were breeding goats up here, he might be better off culling his herd and paying his property tax bill by selling hay. He could understand the temptation to raise goats over cows: goats preferred to browse on high branches instead of graze close to the ground, so you could turn them loose in the woods and they did gangbusters. They didn’t mind a steep slope, either.

  On the downside, and Ray had learned there was always a downside when it came to farming, goat meat was like a gamier version of venison and you’d never find it served up at McDonald’s. Some of the organic farmers that had settled in Solom over the last decade had taken to milking goats. A nanny raised holy hell if you didn’t tug her teats twice a day, the yield wasn’t all that hot, and unless you were squeezing the milk into cheese, you had to hustle it off to market in Asheville or Charlotte. Both of those cities were full of queers and Asheville in particular was known to harbor witches, so as far as Ray was concerned, the organic hippies could keep that little business.

  “See any snakes?” he asked Bennie.

  “No ‘nakes, Daddy,” the boy said. Bennie was still working on his talking, and Ray hoped that wouldn’t get him marked down as “special” when he started kindergarten next year. The damned liberals fell all over themselves trying to give every kid a little help to make sure nobody got left behind. From where Ray was sitting (and his tractor seat had endured its fair share of flatulence over the years), no kid had much of a chance to get ahead either.

  “Good,” Ray said, easing back on the throttle. “We wouldn’t want a copperhead to jump up and take a nip.” He gave Bennie a little pinch on the arm that caused the boy to squeal in surprise.

  Ray wiped the sweat from his bald head. A Cadillac passed on the road, white as a virgin, with tinted windows and tires wide enough to roll out pizza dough. Damned tourist. Ray thought about flipping a finger, but Sarah down at the general store had lectured him on how outside money was good stuff, Yankees with summer homes paid the county plenty in taxes but didn’t require many services, since they were only up here two or three months a year.

  Still, a Yankee was a goddamned Yankee, and the invasion that had started in the War Between the States with Colonel George Kirk and finished up with General Sherman had never really ended, just changed tactics. Instead of cavalry and carpetbaggers, New York sent its developers, stock brokers, and architects and their scrawny, pale wives.

  But the driver of that heavy-assed hunk of steel was probably spending money down at Sarah Jeffers’ store, and she was as sweet as sugar cane, so Ray lifted his hand in a half-hearted wave. Tourists liked that sort of thing, the farmer in his field, like a picture postcard hearkening back to a simpler time. Wasn’t nothing simple about it. You couldn’t barter for what you needed anymore, and the government had gotten bigger every year, despite the Republican takeover of the South. Ray could sell down at the farmer’s market in Boone and pocket some tax-free income, but he also had to be on the Agricultural Extension Office books so he could get his handout when the government decided to subsidize some crop or another.

  “You know them?” Bennie asked, climbing up his back and yanking the strap of his coveralls.

  “Nah, just being neighborly.”

  “They ain’t our neighbors.”

  You got that right, son. But that Disney Mouse feller says it’s a small world after all.

  The Cadillac disappeared around the curve and Ray turned the tractor for another pass, Bennie hanging on for dear life. He lowered the bush hog and the thick blad
e cut into the clover, dandelion, rye and sour grass. The green scent filled his nostrils. A horsefly landed on the back of his neck and he swiped at it. The fly lifted and settled again just above his ear. Ray slapped again, twisting his neck, so he wasn’t watching as his tractor hit a hump, causing the front tires to bounce. Bennie grabbed onto the back of his shirt to keep his balance. Ray’s left foot reached for the clutch but the back tires had already rolled over the same hump. The bush hog blade made a whining noise, and Ray looked back to see a stream of dark liquid spew from beneath the protective metal shield.

  “Shit fire,” he said, disengaging the tractor’s transmission and throwing the PTO into neutral, stopping the blade.

  “What was that, Daddy?” Bennie asked. “’nakes?”

  “Don’t know. You stay right there.”

  He set the hand brake and climbed down from the seat. Sometimes you hit a nest of rabbits in a hayfield. Once, Ray had accidentally chopped up a fawn. If a doe left her fawn, the fawn would remain at that spot until the mother came back, no matter what, even if a giant, smoke-spitting mountain of steel was heading for it. But this was no bunny and no fawn.

  A little goat, its head gone, the carcass ripped with red gashes.

  Somebody had slaughtered it and tossed the body into the knee-high grass. Somebody who wasn’t interested in goatburger or rank cheese.

  “Don’t look,” he said to Bennie, but he could feel the boy’s eyes as wide as silver dollars, and he couldn’t really blame him. Cutting hay didn’t offer a whole lot of excitement.

  Ray killed the Massey Ferguson’s engine and leaned against a rear tire, watching the flies swarm around their decaying feast. The first buzzard appeared in the sky, its black wings buffeted by the high October wind.

  Hippies. Had to be. Or Yankees, maybe. Who else would kill a damned goat for no good reason? Though Ray saw no use in the stubborn critters, he wouldn’t kill them on purpose. He was raised to kill only for food, anyway, and who would want to eat a goat besides a buzzard?