The Narrow Gate: A Supernatural Thriller (Solom Book 2) Page 10

  The sunglasses hid the man’s expression, which could have been disbelief or impatience. Odus didn’t much care. It wasn’t like losing a steady job or anything. If he’d even wanted a steady job, that was.

  “I’ll listen to the tape and get back to you,” the man said. “What’s the best way to reach you?”

  Odus took the toothpick from his mouth and pressed the tip into his callused thumb. “I don’t have no phone. Usually you can find me here at the store or around.”

  The man smiled, vanilla cream on his upper lip. “Okay, ‘Mouth of the Mountain.’ Have it your way.”

  He paid for the cassette and left the store. Odus watched through the screen door as the man made his way to the park.

  “Sold a tape,” Sarah said. “There’s another buck-fifty for you.”

  “Except I don’t get it for six more months,” Odus said. “That royalty thing.”

  Sarah took a five out of the cash register and held it out to him. “I’ll report that one as damaged. Call it an advance.”

  Odus swallowed hard and went to the counter. The store was quiet. An elderly couple was browsing in the knick-knacks and a kid faced tough choices at the candy rack. Odus reached out and took the bill, but as he pulled his hand away, Sarah grabbed his wrist with all the strength of a possum’s jaws.

  “Take it and buy you a bottle, and forget about it,” Sarah said. “You ain’t seen nothing, and I ain’t seen nothing.”

  Their eyes met. Odus, at six feet two and 240, somehow seemed to be looking up at Sarah, who stood all of five feet and weighed in at a hundred soaking wet. “He’s back, and getting drunk won’t change that.”

  “Getting drunk never changed anything, but that never stopped you before.” Sarah let go of his wrist. “Don’t go blabbing it or people will think your brain finally pickled and they’ll throw you in the ward at Crazeville to dry out.”

  “The people I tell it to will believe me, because they’ll know.”

  “I heard what you told that man. Your stories ain’t authentic, they’re lies.” Sarah began fussing with the cigarette packs and cans of smokeless tobacco behind the counter.

  “The biggest lies are the easiest to swallow,” Odus said. “But they burn like hell when you puke them back up.”

  He went out into the sunshine and the last chorus of “Fox on the Run.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Carnivorous goats.

  Sounded sketchy to Alex Eakins, even from the isolated fantasyland of his libertarian paradise. He could dig zombies, even cheer for them in a way, because when you got down to it, those brainless gut-munchers from beyond the grave were about the most libertarian creatures around. Talk about your free-market economies. But goats were another matter.

  Alex was smart enough to be aware of his eccentric nature. His parents were afraid he was turning into a survivalist who would one day construct an armed bunker and have a stand-off with federal agents. But the true survivalist didn’t want to be noticed by the government, much less stage a confrontation. And a true survivalist didn’t go around ranting about man-eating goats, because that was a sure-fire way to get noticed.

  So Alex would have to figure out how to handle this on his own. The first order of business was a trip to the general store to get a few reels of barbed wire. He could add another couple of runs around the perimeter of his property as a first line of defense. His gun rack held a .30-.30, a 16-gauge Remington shotgun, and a .22 so his girlfriends could participate in target practice.

  He carried his bow and arrows, a slingshot, and a couple of sticks of dynamite he’d bought under the table at the last Great Tennessee Border Gun Show. Plus there was the contraband arsenal in his secret room. So goats, even a herd of them, were not something to lose sleep over.

  Weird Dude Walking was another story altogether.

  Because Alex had returned to the scene of the slaughter and found that not even a stitch of clothing remained. No blood on the ground, either, and not a goat in sight (the Remington was with him just in case). Goats would eat any old thing, especially natural-fiber clothing, but surely a few scraps would be scattered around, or a bone button from the coat. Strangest of all, though the ground was pocked with cloven hoof prints, there was not a single mark from the man’s boots.

  Which meant Weird Dude Walking must have risen up and floated away like Christ gone to heaven.

  Even if Alex wanted to report what he’d witnessed, he had no evidence. He never doubted his sanity, although his own family had called him “wacko” any number of times. But only a wacko would witness a man feeding himself alive to a bunch of goats.

  Maybe not wacko, though.

  Maybe special.

  If a thing like that happened in the old days, the people called you a prophet and let you boss them around. The thin line between messiah and lunatic.

  “Alex?”

  Meredith. Alex looked up, not realizing he’d been staring at his palms as if expecting them to start bleeding. “I thought you were at work.”

  “It’s my day off.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Something wrong?”

  “No, babe. Just thinking about the state of the world. It’s a guy thing.”

  “I’ve got a guy thing for you.” Meredith nuzzled her breasts against his back and put her arms around his chest.

  “Not now. I’ve got some things to work out.”

  “Don’t you want to smoke some?”

  “I need to keep a clear head. Dope is the opium of the masses.”

  “Huh?”

  “Hemingway. He said dope is the opium of the masses. But that’s pretty fried, because opium is what they make heroin out of, and not many people can hook up with some ‘H.’ I guess they didn’t smoke much weed back in Hemingway’s time.”

  “I thought he said religion was the opium of the masses.”

  “Same thing. Religion is for dopes, so it all works out.” He gave a stoned snicker, though he’d not smoked any marijuana since the night before. He was more or less riding a chronic buzz these days.

  “You want some lunch? I could cook one of your acorn squashes and some wild rice.”

  “I’m not hungry. I think I’ll go check the babies and meditate.”

  He got up from the table and went outside. He owned a small greenhouse, but he didn’t grow his dope in it. The surveillance planes might see it and that would be the first place the snooper troopers would train their little spy cameras. His marijuana was in a little shed by the garden.

  He used a wind turbine and water wheel to generate electricity for the full-spectrum lights, because one of the ways cops got a warrant was by checking the electric company’s records for a jump in kilowatt hours. The jump was “evidence” that a citizen might be using grow lights. Since he was off-grid, he was outside the system, in more ways than one.

  He unlocked the shed, checked the sky for bogies, and went in. The main room was filled with a blue glow thrown off by the bank of grow lights. Marijuana plants, spawned from Kona Gold seeds a friend mailed from Hawaii by way of Tucson, stood as tall as Alex, and the room was sweet with the fully flowering buds. The three dozen plants were grown in five-gallon buckets, and the soil was ripe with the best compost Mother Nature could produce. Alex sat cross-legged before the plants in a yoga position. He was at peace in this place, this shrine to the sacred buzz.

  Too bad he had to hide it away. In a righteous world, he could grow it out there in the garden, right in front of God and everybody. Even Weird Dude Walking. If grass were legal, maybe the country’s farmers wouldn’t need crop subsidies. Get them off welfare and stifle the Fed’s war on drugs at the same time. Damn, why couldn’t the Libertarians come up with any good candidates?

  Well, he knew why. True libertarians were like Taoists, they couldn’t exist in nature. They were snakes swallowing their own tails in an endless loop, defeated by their own inherent contradictions.

  He let his anger at social injustices slip away as he br
eathed deeply of the cannabis sativa. A spider had spun a web at the base of one of the plants. The spider was yellow with black streaks across its back, and it worked its way toward the center of the web where a struggling fly was tangled in the silken threads.

  Alex realized the display was life in a microcosm, a symbolic play. You buzz around minding your own business, and then suddenly your ass is snared and along comes Reality to suck out your juices.

  Just like the goats sucked the life out of the man in the black hat.

  Heavy.

  Too heavy to contemplate with a straight head, despite what he’d told Meredith. He just didn’t want to smoke with her, because then he’d either have to talk or else silence her in bed. The only way to shut up a woman was to stick part of yourself in her, sometimes even your heart. He needed to be alone. He pulled a joint out of his sock and fired it up, not shifting from his yoga seating as he puffed. He began a game of situation-problem-solution.

  Situation: You had a vision. Nobody else will believe you, because you don’t belong to any religion of the masses. Well, Meredith will probably believe you, but she believes in Atlantis and UFOs and even the Great Pumpkin.

  Problem: You either keep it to yourself and forget it, or you have to admit that miracles happen. And that you were specifically chosen to witness one.

  Solution: Smoke more dope.

  He took a deep draw off the joint and held the smoke in his lungs. In his mind’s eye, the blue smoke seeped into his blood stream and sent its tendrils into his brain. The drug stimulated him and relaxed him at the same time, one of its contradictions that appealed to him and suited his worldview.

  Been a long time since you were in Methodist Bible School, but miracles in the Bible sort of had a point to them. Like Jesus with the loaves and fishes so everybody could eat, and Jesus turning water into wine so everybody could get wasted. Far as I can remember, nowhere in the Bible did some dude feed his own ass to the goats. But there’s your precedent.

  Alex took another puff. The spider finally reached the fly, which must have worn itself out, because it stopped struggling. Or maybe the fly had sensed the jig was up and could see two dozen copies of the approaching spider through its compound eyes. Alex considered rescuing the fly, playing God, releasing it to go off toward it appointed tasks of eating shit and hatching maggots.

  But it wasn’t right to fuck with Nature. Besides, that would have meant standing up, and his legs had a nice tingle going.

  Situation: Weird Dude Walking had to come from somewhere. Miracles don’t just crawl down off the top of the mountain in the middle of the Blue Ridge, half a world away from the Red Sea and Egypt and Jerusalem.

  Problem: That means Weird Dude was an emissary of some sort. Sent by God or the devil or what the movie trailers called the ‘dark imagination of M. Night Shyamalan.’ An emissary sent specifically for YOU, Alexander Lane Eakins, and for you alone.

  Solution: Just because an emissary drags ass to your castle door doesn’t mean you have to open up and let him in. Pretend it never happened. Denial is A Good Thing.

  The joint was down to an orange roach, and Alex hot-boxed it until it burned his fingertips. He exhaled the smoke so that a blue cloud swept over the spider and the fly. One could get the munchies and the other could die with a shit-eating grin. Seemed to be some sort of circular cosmic justice in that.

  He sat until the sparkling edges of his buzz wore off, then he went into the house to ignore Meredith.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Sue Norwood spent the morning doing inventory.

  Winter was not a big merchandise season in Solom, and the kayak rentals all but died as the weather got colder. She normally took December off, though she’d thought about starting up a cross-country skiing racket and see if she could get the Floridians to bite. Trouble was, most of them took off at the first frost. Besides, the end of the year was a time to start lining up tax deductions.

  Today she’d only served three customers: a scruffy college kid who purchased a North Face sleeping bag, a housewife who popped in for a two-dollar tube of Wounded Warrior all-purpose healing salve, and Kim Deister, a local blond with a flat tire on her ten-speed. Sue noted that the Everharts hadn’t turned in their rental bikes during the night.

  She was patching a split seam in a kayak with fiberglass and epoxy when the bell over the door rang. She figured it was the Everharts, limping in sore and tired. “Hello?” she called from her work area in the corner of the shop.

  “Miss Norwood?”

  “Odus? Come on back, I’ve got mess on my hands.”

  Odus Hampton wasn’t really a regular, although he occasionally bought some fishing hooks or monofilament line. She sometimes hired him for heavy lifting if big shipments came in, and he was happy to work for store credit. He taught her a lot about the river, and she’d taken him out in a canoe a few times so he could show her the currents, falls, and rough patches.

  She’d offered to hire him as a river guide, but he wasn’t interested in steady work, though he’d filled in a few times when Sue was under the weather. She trusted his outdoor experience, partly because he camped out for most of the summer, even though he did it on the cheap, without a Coleman lantern, mosquito netting, or a pair of steel-toed Herman Survivor boots.

  “Busted a boat?” Odus said. “You ain’t been crazy enough to take that out on the river? The water’s probably forty degrees.”

  “I’m getting it ready for spring. This is the only time I have to catch up. Did you go fishing today?”

  Odus shook his head, his full beard brushing the tops of his overalls. “The fish won’t be biting.”

  “I thought they always bit for you.” The fumes from the epoxy were giving her a headache.

  “Not when the water’s tainted.”

  “What’s wrong with the water? Did it get contaminated?” The Blackburn River was designated a national scenic river, and President Clinton had even given a speech there. No factories or major commercial farms lay along its banks, and the headwaters sluiced down from largely undeveloped mountains. If Sue suspected problems with water quality, she’d have screamed for Greenpeace, the Southern Environmental Defense League, the local branch of the Democrat Party, such as it was, and the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources.

  Clean water was money, just like scenic beauty was money. A lot of mountain communities were selling out their slopes to millionaires who built garish houses with too many lights. Change was inevitable, but Sue wasn’t going to let Solom go to hell until she was ready to retire.

  “It ain’t what’s in the water. It’s what’s got the water,” Odus said.

  “Don’t scrunch up your eyes that way. Makes me worry.”

  “Maybe you ought to.”

  “Oh, the legend thing. The kind of tall tales you tell for money.”

  “You’re not from Solom, so you won’t understand.”

  “I’m as much a part of this place as I’ll ever be.”

  “All right, then.” Odus’s eyes roamed over the store and settled on the bike rack. “You got two bikes out.”

  “Yeah, a couple rented them yesterday and hasn’t turned them back in yet. I figure they pulled a few muscles and are lying in bed trying to recuperate.”

  “Where were they going?”

  “They didn’t say, but they headed east up the river road.”

  “I think I’ll run my truck up that way and have a look.”

  “Do I need to call them? They left their cell phone number on the deposit slip.”

  “It’s probably nothing. Just some odd goings-on got me a little spooked.”

  Sue looked up the number and punched it in on her phone. A monotone female voice came on the line and informed her that service to the number was unavailable. “This valley’s got more dead spots than a cemetery,” Sue said.

  “You got that right,” Odus said. “If you see any strangers, keep a close eye on them.”

  “I like stran
gers. They usually have money in their pockets.”

  “Not the one I’m talking about.”

  “Damn it, Odus, why do you have to be so mysterious? Why don’t you just come out and say it?”

  “Because you’ll think I’m drunk. Or worse.”

  Sue nodded in agreement. “You got me on that one.”

  “We’re having a meeting at the general store after closing time. Come over and you’ll find out more than you want to know.”

  “Sure. It’s not like I got anything better to do.”

  Odus ignored her sarcasm. Dang, maybe this is serious. Can’t even get a grin out of him.

  “I’ll come by to pick you up at eight,” he said. “I’ll need you to come with me. There’s a stop we got to make before the meeting, and it might need a woman’s touch.”

  Sue looked at her fingers, wondering exactly what kind of touch he was talking about it.

  “Are you part of Solom or not?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  Sue followed Odus to his truck, checking out the river where it made a gentle bend below the store. She’d built a small ramp leading into the water to serve as a launch for canoes and kayaks. A patch of brambles, stalks of Joe Pye weed, and tangled pokeweed stirred along the riverbank. The yellowed vegetation parted, and a goat’s head emerged. The animal’s horns caught the autumn afternoon light and gleamed like a couple of bad teeth.

  “Hell of a lot of goats around here lately,” Odus said through his open window. The engine wheezed to diseased life, throwing a clot of blue smoke into the air.

  “Should I call the police about the cyclists?”

  “Solom likes to take care of its own.”

  That’s the trouble, Sue thought, as Odus guided the truck down the road between the post office and general store.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Sarah Jeffers watched Odus drive by in his Blazer, gritting her dentures.

  Why did he have to stir things up? Just like a Hampton. Back in her father’s day, a branch of the Hamptons operated a grist mill and feed store on the back side of the mountain. When the state paved the roads in the 1930s, people found it was easier to drive into Titusville and buy their corn meal and flour rather than pay to have their own crops ground. The general store lost some business as well, but her father expanded with the times, going for cigars, candy, and pulp magazines.