The Narrow Gate: A Supernatural Thriller (Solom Book 2) Page 14

  “Man, talk about a jailbreak,” Jett said.

  As soon as the fence was stomped to the ground, the goats stampeded, heading down the driveway.

  “At least they’re not headed for the house,” Katy said.

  “Do we call Odus to round them up?”

  “Just between me and you, I think they’ve earned their freedom.”

  “So you’re saying you’re chicken?”

  “I’m making a conservative decision.”

  Jett shook her head as the goats trotted past the cornfield and headed for the Ward farm. “I hope our insurance covers this.”

  “Come on,” Katy said. “Let’s make those pancakes.”

  “Shouldn’t we warn people?”

  “It’s just a bunch of goats. They can take care of themselves.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  The Horseback Preacher somehow found his faithful horse and was mobile again, but Odus was eager to track him.

  Odus figured he would either be at one of his three Lost Ridge grave sites or else up on the Snakeberry Trail where he’d been killed. He’d need a horse himself if he was going to roam the back-mountain trails. A motorcycle would probably work better, but the engine noise would kill any element of surprise. Plus he didn’t think he could hotwire a Harley without rousing half the police in the county.

  Besides, it seemed only proper to track the Horseback Preacher by horseback. Since Odus was going into this showdown without any weapons, he figured he ought to make up the rules as he went along, on the theory that like could slay like.

  Odus parked his truck on a gravel lot by the river at the McHenry farm. He was near the bridge that led to Rush Branch Road, a steep strip of crumbled asphalt that gave way to mud as it wound around the mountain. The Smith property lay on the other side, in the valley at the base of the mountain.

  The Primitive Baptist Church stood near the peak, just where the pavement ended. Some three-story houses were perched on the steep slopes here and there, up where the late wind shook the walls, but they were mostly summer homes for Yankees and were empty this time of year. It would be easy to ignore their fences and “No Trespassing” signs. The Horseback Preacher certainly wouldn’t observe human laws, and Odus better adopt that same mindset.

  He found a horse on a riverside pasture, a stretch of flat bottom land that would have been developed for condos already if not for the spring floods that sometimes washed over it. The horse was a pinto mare of mixed colors, probably two or three years old. It shied away as Odus approached, which was just fine because Odus needed to lure the horse out of sight of the river road.

  The horse was pastured with cows, a mistake on Old Man McHenry’s part, because horses didn’t know how to behave after spending time with cud-chomping sacks of sirloin. Odus helped McHenry put up some hay last fall and knew his way around the barn. The house was up the road a quarter mile, so Odus was concealed while he rummaged. The horse followed him to the barn because it smelled the apple in Odus’s pocket and, despite the bad bovine influence, an apple to a horse was like a sweet lie to a woman. They both got you what you wanted.

  In the barn, Odus rounded up a halter and reins. He didn’t like sliding the steel bit in the horse’s mouth. Folks said horses didn’t mind, but it looked uncomfortable anyway. He gave the pinto the apple to work on while he cinched the saddle. Odus had ridden here and there in his work as a hired hand, occasionally putting in some saddle time to exercise horses for lazy people. He was no John Wayne, or even Gene Autry, but he knew enough to keep from getting bucked.

  The church crowd would be filling the roads any minute now, and he’d have to either use the bridge or find a shallow spot to cross Blackburn River. He liked the idea of fording the river. That’s probably how the Horseback Preacher did it. With any luck, or some kind of higher power pitching in a little help, Odus would be able to track Harmon before nightfall.

  Because night was a time when things like dead preachers grew more powerful. Odus didn’t need a scientist to tell him that. Dark things loved the dark, and the dark loved them right back.

  Odus swung in the saddle and gave the pinto a twitch on her flank. “You got a name?” he asked her.

  The horse whinnied, spraying a few specks of apple.

  “I’ll take that as a ‘Yep,’” Odus said. “You speak human better than I speak horse so I’ll just have to make something up. Harmon has Old Saint, so let’s call you ‘Sister Mary.’ What do you think of that?”

  Sister Mary’s snort might have signaled disgust, or it could have been a request for another apple. Either way, she headed out of the barn when he gave the reins a shake. He guided Sister Mary past the cows, who stared as if they’d bought tickets, and toward the river.

  Just before Sister Mary put a tentative hoof in the cold water, Odus glanced up the ridge at the next pasture. McHenry’s goats were lined along the fence, watching them, as menacing as the Apache warriors in a wagon train western.

  “Don’t pay them no mind,” Odus said. “We got business elsewhere.”

  He gently bounced his knees against Sister Mary’s ribs and they entered the current.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  He only takes one.

  That had been the way of Solom for as far back as the legends reached. All a body needed to do was keep his head down, stay inside, and wait for somebody else to get claimed. That philosophy served Arvel well for sixty-eight years and counting. As a boy, when he’d first seen the Horseback Preacher on the little pig path that led to his Rush Branch fishing hole, he’d managed to escape for some reason.

  He’d tried to tell his dad, a no-nonsense, up-with-the-sun Free Will Baptist, about the encounter, but Dad cut him off at the first mention. The Horseback Preacher wasn’t real, and that was that, and no amount of blabbing and blubbering would change that. Except Dad’s wrinkled-raisin face had grown as pale as a potato root, leaving Arvel to wonder if Dad might have undergone his own little run-in with the dead preacher.

  Arvel kept himself scarce for the next two days, feigning a bellyache so he wouldn’t have to go to school or do chores. That wasn’t much of a stretch, because he was so nervous he puked every time a spoonful of food hit his gut. From the bedroom he shared with his brother Zeke, he could see the Smith barn, and under the moonlight shadows sometimes moved in the hayloft. He’d clamp his eyes tight, but one of them would end up creeping open like the lid of a vampire’s coffin. He didn’t sleep much those two days.

  Then, his brother didn’t come home from school. The county schools ran buses, and the Wards and other kids in their area walked a mile down to the river to catch one. The bus stop was a favorite spot for shenanigans, with a dozen kids of different ages killing time with jokes, cutting on the signpost with pocket knives, and the occasional round of post office or show-me-yours-and-I’ll-show-you-mine.

  Zeke had taken up cigarettes, another time killer, but none of the other kids dared smoke. Of course, that made Zeke the idol of the dirt-road neighborhood, but he also knew he would get his rear end worn to a pile of rags if the folks caught him. The kids say he showed them the pack of cigarettes that morning, unfiltered Viceroys in a shiny pack he must have swiped from the general store.

  As big a show-off as he was, Zeke thought he’d best slip off into the woods to do his puffing. Arvel guessed his brother was just as afraid of coughing and hacking in front of the others as he was of being spied by an adult. Whatever the reason, Zeke went into a laurel scrub and lit up.

  The kids watched for the trail of smoke to be sure that Zeke wasn’t joshing them, then turned their attention back to their games. It was only when the bus rolled up and one of the kids hollered Zeke’s name that they realized he’d been gone way too long to just smoke a cigarette.

  Arvel’s best friend, J.C. Littlejohn, went into the laurel to find Zeke. The bus driver honked and the other kids shouted names, according to J.C., but Zeke didn’t come out of hiding. J
.C. found him sprawled on the ground, belly down, the moist butt of the Viceroy inches from his lips, the ember on the lit end burning a hole in a dead leaf. Zeke’s Ked sneaker had lodged in a protruding root and he’d tripped.

  Freak accident, the county coroner said. His forehead hit a tree trunk and snapped his neck back, killing him instantly.

  And Arvel’s first thought upon hearing the news: I’m glad the Horseback Preacher took him instead of me.

  He was having a similar thought now. Betsy was home from the hospital and was going to be just fine. That was the trouble. Arvel was hoping Betsy would be the one the Horseback Preacher took this time. Not that he wished ill of Betsy, but after all these years, he was still so sweat-shaky scared of Harmon Smith, he’d rather die a thousand different ways rather than end up done in by him. Because them that the preacher claimed had a way of showing back up.

  Arvel saw his brother a decade after his death, when Arvel was newly married and had taken over running the farm after Daddy’s final stroke. Arvel made a habit of keeping watch on the Smith barn, and his adolescence was haunted not by his brother’s fluke accident, but by the shifting wedges of darkness that seemed to cavort just beyond the sunlit windows.

  On a cold March morning, when Arvel was on his way to slop the two hogs, Zeke was standing by the collard patch, barely visible, wreathed in the fog as if he were woven into it. His head lolled to one side like an onion hanging by a piece of twine.

  “Soon as he finds his horse, you can come join me,” Zeke said, the words seeping out of the mist as if growing up from the dirt. “Gets lonely over here waiting.”

  Arvel dropped the slop bucket, splashing sour milk, table scraps, eggshells, and apple peels on his jeans. He ran back into the house, where Dad saw the smelly clothing and whooped him for spilling the slop. Dad sent him back out to retrieve the bucket, and Arvel had no choice, you didn’t cross Dad on pain of death or worse.

  Zeke was gone when he reached the spot by the collards. Arvel didn’t look too hard for his dead brother. Instead, he found an excuse to hang around the house or work in the barn for the next several days, only venturing to the garden in broad daylight.

  And even through the fear of that encounter, another thought pierced through like sunshine through a church’s plate-glass window: I’m glad it was him and not me.

  Which is the same way he felt when he’d come in the kitchen and seen Betsy sprawled on her back by the stove. The gouge in her side was the mystery. The Horseback Preacher wasn’t known to mutilate his victims. Sure, they didn’t die pretty, but almost always whole.

  Some said that Rebecca Smith had been taken by the Horseback Preacher, but Arvel figured that was just a plain old car wreck on a twisty mountain road. Harmon Smith hadn’t been seen in the days leading up to her accident, and it hadn’t really fit the pattern of the preacher’s rounds. Although considering how Gordon Smith went crazy and attacked his wife, maybe there was a lot more to the story than anybody knew.

  But the preacher was back now, that was for sure. The first night that Betsy was confined in a Titusville hospital room, Arvel laid awake until 4 a.m., listening for the sound of hoof beats outside, his heart jumping every time Digger let out a bark. Once he’d gone to the window to check on the Smith barn, but the windows were dark and the moon was buried behind the clouds.

  Last night, he’d curled up on a couch in the hospital waiting room, a magazine in his lap as if expecting a diagnosis, and napped just enough to have a nightmare of the Horseback Preacher chasing him down the pig path from the fishing hole.

  He didn’t feel much safer there than he did now at home.

  “Arvel?” Betsy called from the bedroom.

  “On the way, honey.”

  He poured a cup of tea for Betsy and checked the lock on the back door. He didn’t know if locks would keep the dead preacher out. For all he knew, the door had been locked when Betsy experienced her little accident. She had no memory of falling or hitting her head, only a headache she compared to the one she’d suffered the morning after Arvel got her drunk on moonshine and became engaged to her the old-fashioned way.

  Betsy was local, half Rominger and half Tester, and she knew about the Horseback Preacher, like everyone else who grew up in these parts. She didn’t talk about it, and didn’t seem to connect her accident with the preacher’s return. So there was still a chance that Betsy was the intended victim.

  The preacher could certainly do worse: Betsy was a decent cook and didn’t run her mouth too much, she was beholden to men and honored the local traditions. She could can a mean batch of relish or sauerkraut, wasn’t above butchering a chicken, and she laid there proper when he crawled on top of her to wallow about once a month when he needed satisfaction. Heck, Harmon Smith could give her to Zeke for all he cared.

  Arvel didn’t know exactly what the preacher did with them after he got them, but he didn’t want to find out. All he knew was if he survived this time, he probably wouldn’t live long enough for another turn of the Horseback Preacher’s wheel. And that was plenty fine with Arvel.

  This was Sunday, the very day Harmon Smith had been killed all those years ago. If ever there was a day for the preacher to carry a grudge, this would be it. And no doubt Zeke would be out tonight, maybe hanging around the garden carrying a hoe or flitting through the apple orchard like a shredded kite.

  He added a spoonful of sugar to the tea and carried it up the stairs, glad that he wouldn’t be alone tonight.

  “How you feeling?” he asked.

  Betsy was propped up against the headboard with pillows, a white gauze bandage on her head. “Like death warmed over.”

  “You’ll be up and around in no time.”

  He turned to go back downstairs and check the doors and windows again. Her voice stopped him.

  “You think the preacher is going to take me?” she asked.

  “Over my dead body.”

  She gave a pained smile and sipped her tea. “I bet he came back for the Smith widow.”

  “I don’t wish ill on nobody, but that would be fine with me. If Charlie Smith ends up with the property, he’d probably sell me a chunk. Wouldn’t mind some of that sweet bottom pasture.”

  “But no goats, okay?”

  “Not a chance in hell.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Sister Mary proved to be a rugged animal, despite a lifetime spent in the companionship of cows. Odus guided her up the mountains and traversed the roughest trails he could find, twisted paths that were scarcely wide enough for deer. He half expected the horse would put her nose to the ground like a bloodhound and instinctively know they were on the scent of something bad. Odus figured that two hours had passed, and maybe Old Man McHenry had already noticed somebody had stolen his pinto mare.

  At one point, the forest gave way to a granite shelf, with rocks settled into the Appalachian soil like droppings from some ancient giant bird. Odus tied Sister Mary to a stunted balsam and gave her some of the bread from his sandwich. As she smacked her lips around it, Odus eased to the edge and looked down in the valley below.

  Solom was sprawled like a faded patchwork quilt of yellow meadows, brown forests, and the small gray squares of houses and barns. The river wound like a loose length of spilled yarn through the bottom land, the water white where it tumbled over rocks. The two-lane road followed the river, except for an intersection near the general store where the covered bridge, post office, and Sue Norwood’s shop cluttered up the geometry.

  This stony promontory looked like the kind of place where the Horseback Preacher would step out and survey the community. Maybe this was part of his original route, back when he was a Methodist preacher sent down from Virginia. If so, he might have passed his eyes over the green valley and decided it was just the kind of place to set up shop. A Promised Land, of a sort, one maybe just a little bit remote from the eyes of God, where a fellow could practice whatever kind of rituals he wanted.

  Sister Mary let loose with a wet s
nort.

  “All right, don’t get your neck hairs in a tangle,” Odus said. He went back to the horse, unhitched her, and mounted. His rump was a little sore from the jostling ride, but it wasn’t sore enough to complain. He pulled the Old Crow from the knapsack and gargled on a two-finger slug. He was slipping the bottle back into the pack when a twig snapped in the thicket behind him.

  “Who’s there?” Odus said, and despite all his high-spirited notions about not needing a weapon, he wouldn’t have minded a rifle right about then. Not that there were any wild animals left in the mountains big enough to threaten a man or a horse. The occasional bobcat was about as predatory as it got these days.

  Whatever was thrashing around in the brush didn’t answer. Not that Odus expected a reply. He eased Sister Mary down the path a little, wanting to put some distance between them and the cliff edge. Sister Mary seemed to notice her passenger’s unease, because her ears pricked up. Odus gave her a pat on the side of the neck to calm her.

  He was twenty feet down the path when the goat emerged from the stand of laurels. Odus almost laughed in relief. Except the goat’s head was tilted sideways, the way a man might look at a car he was thinking of buying. Or maybe which steak from the butcher’s counter he craved for that night’s supper. Sister Mary drew up short without Odus having to pull back on the reins.

  “Get on,” Odus said to the goat. The goat was nearly a quarter the size of the horse, fat and white, a string of dirty fur trailing from its belly to the ground. Its eyes were rheumy, the corners full of yellow pus. It stank of piss and the musk of its rutting scent. The horns spread wide, with just the slightest bend to them. Its lower jaw dropped, the worn and stained teeth showing in a corrupt grin. Odus recognized the animal now, from the Smith farm’s herd.