Ghost Box: Six Supernatural Thrillers Read online

  Yeah, sure. Sounds like something a murderer’s lawyer would make up. It’s nothing but a stain, old paint or something.

  It was larger than it had been the day before, yet still retained its weathered quality, as if the stain had been embedded in the floor ages ago. And Littlefield wondered if it had been even smaller before Boonie’s death. As if . . .

  He didn’t want to give legitimacy to his superstitious turn of mind. Telling Detective Sergeant Storie about the ghosts had been foolish enough. But now that the thought was trying to form, he held it outside himself, examined it rationally.

  . . . as if the stain is made from the blood of its victims.

  There. Now that he admitted it, it seemed safe and perfectly silly. A psychotic killer wasn’t on the loose. Something worse was on the loose, somehow finding legs and hands and a pair of eyes and a soul.

  A soul.

  “See anything unusual, Sheriff?”

  Archer’s voice pulled him from a pool of dizziness. He met those brown eyes again, eyes that were now as dull and faded as the ancient woodwork of the church. Some famous person had said that eyes were the windows to the soul. Well, Archer’s windows needed a good washing. Except then, you might be able to see inside.

  “I don’t believe you have anything to worry about,” Littlefield said. “Now that you’ve cleaned up, there’s no place for a killer to hide.”

  Except right out in the open.

  Archer smiled, standing with his arms crossed. He was taller than the sheriff. “I never worry. I have God on my side, remember?”

  “Yeah, but isn’t that what the other side always says, too?”

  Archer laughed again. “So they do, Sheriff. So they do.”

  Littlefield walked back through the church, Archer following. “I used to come to services here when I was young,” the sheriff said. “Back when it was Potter’s Mill Baptist Church.”

  “Oh, is that so? Being inside it must bring back a lot of memories.”

  Littlefield didn’t respond. He paused in the foyer to look up at the square hole in the ceiling. “You going to get a new rope?”

  “Sooner or later. And I hope none of the congregation gets a crazy notion to hang their preacher.”

  “God stopped Abraham’s knife.” Lester and the Day woman were standing in the doorway. They drew back as he went back into the sunshine. “Thanks for your time. Guess I’d better get on over to Zeb’s.”

  As Littlefield was getting in the Trooper, Archer called to him from the steps: “Say, Sheriff. Why don’t you come back sometime for a service?”

  “When?”

  “First one’s tonight at midnight.”

  Midnight. It figured. Nothing could be ordinary about this church.

  Maybe he would come to a service, Littlefield thought as he drove away. Crazy as it was, maybe he would.

  The thing with wings and claws and livers for eyes clicked sharp bone against Ronnie’s window. Can you hear him aknocking?

  Ronnie was trapped by the weight of blankets, frozen in sweat, clenched around the tight fire in his belly. Close your eyes and it will go away. Close your eyes—

  His eyes were already closed. He opened them.

  The sunlight coming through the window made his head hurt. He’d been asleep for so long that he couldn’t remember where he was for about a minute. Plus he’d been having really weird dreams about the red church and a walking bloody thing and something to do with Mom.

  “Mom?” he called, his throat dry.

  His nose wasn’t as sore today, but he felt as if somebody had taken a hand pump and blown his face full of air. He licked his thick lips. “Mom?”

  Tim came into the room, still wearing his pajamas. And he was eating chocolate-chip cookies. Mom was going to kill the little dork if she caught him eating cookies so early in the day. But, after the scary dreams, Ronnie was actually kind of glad to see his brother, though he’d never admit it in a million years.

  “Where’s Mom?” Ronnie asked.

  Tim shrugged. His belly button showed below the fabric of his top. “Ain’t seen her this morning.”

  “What time is it?” Ronnie groaned as he tried to sit up, then fell back onto the pillows.

  “Almost eleven.”

  “Eleven?” That meant that Mom was skipping church again. It was the first time she’d missed church two weeks in a row since Tim was a baby. Not that Ronnie minded, because his Sunday school teacher, Preacher Staymore, usually told him he needed to be saved, then made him wait after class while everybody else went to the main sanctuary for worship service.

  Preacher Staymore would sit beside Ronnie and ask the spirit of Jesus to move into Ronnie’s heart so that the child might be spared, and though Jesus loved the little children, there was only one path to salvation and that was through the blood of the Lord. And Preacher Staymore would tremble and put his palm on Ronnie’s head and invoke the mercy and the power and the goodness, then ask Ronnie if he could hear the Lord aknocking. And the whole time Ronnie would be thinking about how Preacher Staymore’s breath smelled like a basket of rotten fruit.

  “Can you hear Him aknocking?” the preacher would say, his eyes shining and glassy. “He’s awanting in. And all you got to do is say, ‘Come on in, Jesus. Come right on into this sorry sinful heart of mine and clean house.’ If you won’t do that one little thing, then don’t go crying to the Lord when the devil comes to drag you into the pits of hell.”

  And Ronnie would always be afraid. That message, along with the preacher’s pungent breath, made him hastily agree to be saved, to let the Lord shine His everlasting light into the darkness of Ronnie’s heart, to throw the door wide open and say, “Come in, come in, come in.”

  Getting saved always filled him with a kind of warmth, as if something really had come into his heart. But the feeling always faded, and he’d slip back into his sinning ways. Preacher Staymore said there were two kinds of sin: the kind of the flesh, and the kind of the spirit. Ronnie suspected that sins of the flesh had something to do with the naked women like those in Boonie’s magazine, but his own sins were mostly those of the spirit. Still, any kind of sin made his heart beat faster, and maybe that drove the Lord away, what with all the noise and commotion in his chest.

  So every few weeks, Preacher Staymore would sense that Ronnie needed another saving. Ronnie was scared enough of the hellfire not to take any chances, even though sometimes he wondered, if the Lord was merciful, why would He make people go to such a bad hot place? And if sinners went to hell, what was the point of Jesus dying for them in the first place? And if the Lord was all-powerful, why didn’t He just make people so they didn’t sin? And if He already knew what happened in people’s hearts, why did there have to be a Judgment Day when all the sins were revealed?

  But those kinds of thoughts were sins of the spirit, and led to a fresh need to be saved. Ronnie didn’t want to think about that right now. He had enough troubles, like a broken nose and his parents separated and a scary red church and bad dreams.

  “Have you seen Mom?” he asked Tim.

  Tim bit a crescent of cookie and shook his head. “Not since last night,” he said, spraying cookie crumbs onto the floor as he spoke.

  “Dang.”

  “The police are out again.”

  Ronnie sat up. “Here?”

  “No. They’re over at Mr. Potter’s.”

  “Mr. Potter? I guess maybe the sheriff wanted to ask him some questions.”

  Tim shook his head. His bowl haircut made him look like a turtle. “I don’t think so. Their blue lights were flashing when they drove up. And I saw the ambulance over by the barn.”

  “You’re fooling.”

  Tim’s eyes widened behind his spectacles. “No, I ain’t. You can go look.”

  Ronnie rolled himself out of bed with a groan. He leaned against the railing of the top bunk, dizzy from spending nearly two days in bed. Through the window, he could see two police cars on the Potter farm. The sheriff’s ve
hicle was parked by the house. One of the deputies walked toward the barn, the sun glinting off his handcuffs and black shoes.

  “You don’t suppose . . . ?” Ronnie said.

  “That whatever got Boonie Houck got Mr. Potter?” Tim sounded almost pleased at the prospect. “That would be cool. Like one of those movies Mom won’t let us watch.”

  Ronnie remembered his dream. Maybe it was just his overactive imagination again. “Did you hear anything last night?” he asked, trying to sound like he didn’t care one way or another.

  “Not really. I heard some bells ringing. I don’t know what time, except for it was dark.”

  “I hope Mom is okay.” Sure, Mom would be okay. Nothing would get her.

  Not even the thing with wings and claws and livers for eyes.

  Ronnie thought of Preacher Staymore’s words: Can you hear Him aknocking? He’s awanting in.

  No way in hell would Ronnie let that thing come in.

  He shivered in the sunlight.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Sunday. A holy day, at least to the Protestants and Catholics and Mormons. Fools all. But Mama Bet comforted herself with the knowledge that they’d be burned by the light in due time.

  It was almost as if God had roped off a little section of the Blue Ridge and saved it for the Potters, Abshers, McFalls, and the rest. The original families came from Scotland and England, as white as the driven snow, though their hearts were as dark and Jesus-laden as any of their ancestors’ hearts. And somehow those families had managed to protect this piece of valley at the foot of Buckhorn from invaders and outsiders. Kept it pure, except for the original taint that they brought with them when they settled in the 1780s.

  You can’t ever shake the blood.

  She sat in her front porch rocker, looking out over the mountains she loved so much. Heaven ought to be this nice. A fresh spring breeze cut through a gap, working up from the foothills to stir the jack pines and locusts and poplars. The sky was clear enough for her to see the gray face of Grandfather Mountain forty miles in the distance. Even with her cataracts, she could make out the features that looked like a brow, a nose, and a long granite beard.

  Her goat bleated below the porch. She kept a few chickens, too, but they were free-ranging up in the woods. She was getting too old to track down their eggs, and plucking their feathers was too rough on her fingers. Come to think of it, she didn’t know why she bothered with a goat, either. She hated the taste of goat’s milk, and she didn’t know how to cook the animal up even if she could bear to kill it.

  “What are you thinking about, Mother?” asked Archer. He sat on the porch swing, uncomfortable, his face rigid, as if holding his earthly flesh together took all his concentration. He was a fine boy, handsome and respectably clean-shaven, with the whole world laid out before him. All a mother could want for her son.

  She felt a tug in her heart, or maybe it was a spell of the murmurs. The murmurs were coming on a lot more often lately. God was priming her for a trip up to the kingdom, striking her with all the little ailments that added up to the miseries of old age. God could be downright cruel when He set his mind to it. But He allowed good stuff to happen, too. Like Archer.

  “I was just remembering,” she said. “When you was little, you used to go up yonder on that knoll and pick gooseberries. You’d eat them things till you turned green and got sick to your stomach. And I’d lay you down in bed, tuck you in, and give you a nice cup of peppermint tea.”

  “And you’d tell me stories,” Archer said. His voice was different from the one he’d used on television. It was softer, more down-home, a little of his Carolina mountain accent creeping in between those California words.

  “Sure did. You probably don’t remember any of them silly stories.”

  Archer leaned forward, sniffed the air. “I remember them all.”

  “All of them?”

  “Yeah. The Old Testament. Jack tales. Ghost stories. And the real story of Jesus. Except that one always gave me nightmares.”

  “I hope I done right. It wasn’t easy, raising you by myself. I reckon I made some mistakes along the way, but I always acted out of love.”

  Archer left his porch swing and knelt before her rocker. He took her hands and looked up, his brown eyes shining with that same radiant depth they’d had when he was a baby. As he grew older, those eyes got him in trouble. They made the other kids suspicious and made adults uncomfortable. Those eyes, plus the fact that he was a McFall, pretty much brought the persecution on him. Many was the time he came home from school with a black eye or a skinned knee or his little shoulders shaking with sobs.

  All she could tell him was that the lamb must walk among wolves. He seemed to accept that he would be persecuted, that the human hatred was all part of God’s plan. He came up with that bit about “There will come great trials” all by himself. What willpower it must have taken to keep from lashing out, what patience and understanding Archer had possessed even from an early age. Of course, he always knew that he was the Second Son. She was up-front about that right from the moment he could speak.

  “You did everything perfectly,” Archer said. “God should be proud.”

  “Well, I ain’t so sure about that. If I was so all-fired perfect, maybe I’d be out of this place by now.”

  “Why don’t you let me buy you one of those chalets at Ski Village?”

  Mama Bet looked at the scar that ran up Wellborn Mountain. The steel threads of the lift cables arced along the barren slope. The snow had melted weeks ago, leaving nothing but a mud patch. She despised those ski people. “No. People best stick to their own kind. Besides, I reckon God put us here for a reason.”

  And that reason just MIGHT have something to do with that little hell-hole in back of the root cellar, the one I got to keep plugged with prayers. But I ain’t going to worry YOU with that.

  Something beeped in Archer’s pocket. Mama Bet looked at him suspiciously.

  He smiled. “Cellular phone. You ought to let me get you one, Mother.”

  “That’s the devil’s tool,” she said, frowning. “I don’t even trust words that come over wires. When it’s invisible, there’s no telling where the messages are coming from.”

  Archer pulled his phone from his jacket pocket and flipped it open. He put it to his head. “Archer McFall.”

  He listened for a moment, then put his hand over the mouthpiece. “Excuse me, Mother. It’s the foundation offices in California.”

  She nodded. She’d been against his exodus to California from the start. Nothing out there but heathens and hippies and all manner of strange cults. Archer had no business among that sort.

  But children had to learn on their own, didn’t they? All you could do was fill them up with love, and let them wander the path. You couldn’t hammer faith into them. You couldn’t drive goodliness and grace into them like nails. You couldn’t make them believe the things God wanted them to believe. They just had to search in their own hearts, and, God willing, come up with the truth.

  She watched him as he carried on a conversation, something about stock splits, portfolios, and divestitures. She didn’t understand why God kept Archer meddling in such affairs. But then, there was a lot she didn’t understand about God. And she had to admit, that black Mercedes looked awfully shiny and clean down there in the driveway.

  She rose from her rocker and headed for the door. Archer glanced at her questioningly, but she waved him back to his phone conversation. She entered the house, walking over the same boards that the McFalls had trodden for more than two hundred years. The main room was the original cabin, thick hand-hewed logs chinked with yellowed cement. Not much had changed in the room since her great-great-great-grandparents Robert and Hepzibah McFall had first blessed these walls with love and devotion.

  The old stone fireplace was black from ten thousand fires. The room was dark, the small wooden windows nailed shut. Three sides of the cabin were partially underground, built that way to cut down on the wind leaki
ng through the cracks, though the room always stayed as cold as a Christian’s heart. Water was piped from a spring up the hill, and a leak dripped steadily into the freestanding ceramic sink in the corner.

  A few rooms had been added onto the south side of the cabin, and these had glass windows. The sun poured through, God’s pure light, but it barely touched what had once served as kitchen, bedroom, and living room combined. When electricity first reached these parts in the 1950s, Mama Bet wouldn’t allow them to hook up the original part of the house. Some things were to be kept sacred, untouched by the progress that marked the spread of the devil’s influence.

  Mama Bet went past the rough hemlock table where Wendell McFall had once taken his meals. She parted the gingham that curtained off the pantry. She took a candle from a counter and lit it, and looked to make sure Archer was still outside. She stepped inside among the shelves and rows of canning jars, dried beans, and sacks of cornmeal. The chill from the back of the pantry crept over her like a live thing, a giant shadow, an ice-cold invisible lover.

  She pushed aside the rotted boards that lined the back of the pantry. A fungal, earthy smell filled her nostrils. She extended the candle into the root cellar, peering over the rows of potatoes and red apples into the darkness. The candle shrank from the stale, still air, its light swallowed by the dirt walls of the cellar.

  “I’m getting too old for this, God,” she whispered in silent prayer. God said nothing, but she knew He was up there, watching, biting His tongue to keep from laughing. She wiggled the base of the candle into the red clay until it stood without her holding it. She could see the stone that blocked the narrow tunnel, a tunnel that wound down and down and deep into the earth.

  This was the one secret she had spared Archer, the one that had been passed down through eight generations of McFalls. The Appalachians were the oldest mountains in the world, had risen from the hot magma when God crushed the world together. And she knew exactly why God made the earth. He had trapped the devil inside it, wrapped billions of tons of rock and dirt and molten lava around the beast. And, oh, how the devil must have kicked and struggled to get free, shoving up mountains and causing the rifts that became the oceans.