The Scarecrow: A Supernatural Thriller (Solom) Read online

  “Why would they do that?”

  “Maybe they needed to borrow the clothes.”

  “You didn’t tell your dad any of this, did you?”

  “I told him everything. The parts I know, at least.”

  “You didn’t tell him I thought I was being haunted—”

  “He loved that part,” Jett said. “I thought he was going to laugh right into his coffee. Good old Dad. He can’t handle any alternate reality unless it’s caused by drugs.”

  “You shouldn’t talk that way. Mark loves you.”

  “Yeah, but he loves drugs more. I could see it in his eyes. He’s still just a smoke monkey, despite all the big talk about being strong for the family. About letting go and letting God and all that bullshit. But you’ve heard that line plenty of times, huh?”

  Katy left the room, dishes piled against her waist and butter smeared on her blouse. She didn’t want Jett to see her tears.

  They should get out of the house. Pile into the Subaru and drive down to Florida, stay with Katy’s mom for a while, dig in the flower garden and get sane. She needed time to sort things out. Rushing into a bad marriage was one thing, but dragging Jett along made it ten times worse. And now she was hallucinating, or maybe cracking up.

  Yet the smell of lilacs was real. It was strong in the kitchen, heady and thick, as if Rebecca had walked through the room only moments earlier. But Rebecca was dead. She’d had her head sheared off in a car crash. Rebecca wasn’t keeping house any longer, nor was she brushing her invisible hair. No scarecrow slept in the attic. The man in the black hat was probably Odus, dropping in at odd hours to catch up on chores. Jett had merely seen a shadow, a trick of the moonlight, and her youthful imagination did the rest.

  They couldn’t both be going crazy.

  But the goats were real. They were cunning and sinister and dangerous. Gordon talked about them as if they were family, and he showed them more affection than he showed his own wife and stepdaughter. He tended and nurtured his flock, but offered no warmth to the humans living in his house.

  “Mom,” Jett said from the doorway.

  Katy was at the sink, elbow-deep in suds. The clock on the wall read a quarter before six. She’d been standing there fifteen minutes. Only two plates stood in the dish rack, and she could see her blurred reflection in the nearest. For a flicker of an instant, she appeared dark-haired, smiling, eyes as mysterious as those in the locket she’d found in the attic. Rebecca’s face had superimposed itself over hers, and a ragged rim of flesh encircled her neck.

  She reached up to touch the wound, but found only the lump in her throat.

  “You’re blanking out again,” Jett said.

  “No, I’m not. Everything’s fine. We’ll get through this—” Katy couldn’t bring herself to finish. It was all hollow; the whole new life she’d tried to build was just a stack of cards waiting for a breeze. She despised cooking, and God had invented the dishwasher for a reason. These clothes were too cheerful and bold, too goddamned chirpy.

  She was trying to be someone else. Someone whose head had never been found.

  “Jett, I think we need to leave.”

  “You mean go back to Dad’s?”

  “No. That wouldn’t be right. But I can’t stay in this house another minute.”

  “What about Gordon?”

  “I’ll call him later.”

  Jett grinned, the first real joy she’d shown since moving to Solom. “Wow, Mom. I’m impressed. You’ve really got some balls.”

  “So to speak.” Katy turned off the water. She didn’t even set the dirty dishes in the sink to soak. Let Gordon wash his own damn dishes. It was his house, after all. His and his dead wife’s.

  “Go upstairs and throw some things in your backpack,” she said, the weariness lifting from her body. “Clothes, toothbrush, pajamas. Just enough stuff for a few days. We’ll come back and get the rest after I’ve had a chance to talk with Gordon.”

  Jett raced across the room and lifted her arm, open-palmed. Katy did the same and Jett leaped and slapped a high five. “You rock, Mom. I love you.”

  “A hug and a kiss aren’t cool enough?”

  Jett hugged her and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. “Ooh, gross, Mom. Where did you get that stinky perfume?”

  “I’m not wearing perfume.”

  “Smells like flowers.”

  “Oh, that’s her smell. The dead woman’s.”

  “Whatever. Let’s blow this backwoods Amityville and go where there’s traffic, noise, and people.”

  Katy followed Jett up the stairs, wondering if she was making another mistake. She had probably stayed in her relationship with Mark several years too long, but what if she was skipping out before she’d given Gordon a chance? No doubt Gordon could explain everything and ease their fears, show them that ghosts weren’t real and scarecrows were nothing but straw and cloth.

  No, he’d had plenty of chances. Katy couldn’t love him or even trust him, despite his pledge to protect her and take care of Jett. All she had to do was imagine his face during that morning they’d had intercourse, when he’d opened his eyes and seemed shocked to find her on top of him. As if he was expecting someone else.

  Gordon—and Solom—would just have to get along without her.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Jett tucked a stone-washed denim jacket, a pair of black stockings, and a sweat suit into her backpack. She looked around the room. She’d never really settled into this place. Maybe it was Gordon’s dreariness hanging over the entire house, or the faceless generations of Smiths who had lived in this room before her. A Johnny Depp poster and a diaphanous black scarf over the lampshade didn’t make a place any more inviting to a Gothling.

  Mom had said to hurry, so Jett flipped through the CD stack. She passed over the Bella Morte, Marilyn Manson, Nine Inch Nails, the music that had once seemed to match her mood. Now it all seemed so childish. Nihilism was great when it was part of a stage character, like make-up and black-leather props and facial piercings. But when you had stared nothingness in the face, and it stared right back and grinned, then the romanticism was lost.

  Jett nudged the CDs aside and plucked up some of her mother’s favorites. Echo and the Bunnymen, XTC, The Replacements. Seemed like music to escape by, stuff that let you be yourself with no questions asked. Songs that made you feel stoned without drugs.

  She crammed a couple of changes of day clothes in the bag. She didn’t know if she’d ever see this room again, or the rest of her stuff. It depended on how well Gordon handled Mom’s leaving. He might go postal and come after them with both guns blazing, or he might just as easily sit by the fire with a glass of wine, intellectualizing the reality of abandonment. That was the problem with Gordon. He didn’t seem human, so you couldn’t expect a human reaction.

  Jett suffered a moment of wistfulness over the pot the goat had stolen. It never hurt to have an escape plan. But what good was escape when you eventually had to break back into the place from which you’d fled? Whether it was Solom or your own head?

  It was time to look reality in the face, without a haze of smoke or bleary eyes to cloud her perception.

  And reality was a creepy stranger in a black hat, a gooned-out living scarecrow, a goat that sniffed your skin like you were apple pie, a ghost that haunted your mom, and a psycho stepdad.

  This was weirder than any drug trip. Those would all be memories one day, and the more time that passed, the less she’d be able to believe them. But maybe it was Solom that was stoned. Maybe this whole piece of screwed-up real estate had smoked a God-sized bowl of Strange.

  Textbooks lay scattered across the desk. No need to worry about that geography test next week. The sun was touching the mountains, and the first long shadows reached between the curtains. She wanted to be out of Solom before dark, and would bet her leather bracelet that Mom felt the same way.

  Jett snatched Captain Boo off the bed, flung the backpack over her shoulder, and ran down to meet Mom at t
he car.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Jett opened the door to find Gordon standing there in the hall outside her room.

  “Where do you think you’re going, Jessica?” he said, hands on his hips, blocking the hallway.

  “Um, out for a drive with Mom.”

  Gordon grinned, and it looked like the expression of a cartoon possum, eyes narrow behind his thick lenses. “Mrs. Smith isn’t driving anywhere. She told me so.”

  He doesn’t know her name? Jett looked wildly around. Gordon looked so psycho he might have tied up Mom and shoved her in the trunk. “Where is she?”

  “In the attic. Going through some old things.”

  Jett leaned to the side and looked past Gordon. The linen closet door was shut tight. The closet was too small for the attic ladder to unfold without the door open. Either Gordon was lying or else he’d shut the access door with Mom up there. But why would Mom go up there, especially after the ghost had scared her silly?

  Jett decided Gordon was lying, and figured that deserved a lie in return. “I was smoking pot that time in the barn,” she said. “When I saw—I mean, thought I saw—the scarecrow the first time. I guess I just freaked out.”

  Gordon’s eyes narrowed. “You know the rules. No drugs in this house.”

  “Well, technically the drugs weren’t in the house.”

  “I’ll have no sass from you, young lady. You’re a member of this family now. You’re expected to act like a Smith.”

  Jett’s cheeks flared red in defiance. “You’ll never be my dad, no matter how hard you try. And I’ll never be a goddamned Smith.”

  Gordon reached out as if to grab her arm, but she ducked past, slinging the backpack around. She tried to crawl between his legs but he brought his knees together, clamping her like an oversize vise grip. Her sides ached from the pressure, but she wiggled while he reached down to her. Gordon was shouting, his voice scarcely recognizable. Some of his words sounded like Latin, intoned like the traditional liturgy of a Catholic priest. Like something out of “The Exorcist” or some Goth band’s hokey attempt at demonic incantations.

  Gordon had one of her boots, but they were recently polished and he lost his grip. She kicked free and crawled on her hands and knees down the hall, her mind blank except for the unbidden thought: How could Mom have been dumb enough to fall for this psycho?

  Then she regained her footing and sprang forward, launching herself down the stairs three steps at a time, clutching Captain Boo. She toyed with the idea of sliding down the railing, but there was a large wooden sculpture on the bottom newel post, and Jett pictured herself breaking a leg, lying there flopping and moaning on the landing while Gordon loomed over her.

  What would he do to her? Even if he knew they were running out on him, which wasn’t likely, considering what a wet mop Mom had been lately, surely he wouldn’t do anything worse than scream and yell. Yet he had tried to physically restrain her upstairs, and she’d heard some guys went into possessive red rages when a woman ditched them. His heavy shoes punished the stairs behind her.

  When she reached the first floor, she dared a backward glance and suffered an acid flashback.

  At least, she hoped that’s what it was, because a woman was floating—floating!—behind Gordon.

  She was thin as threads, almost invisible, and she was pulled forward as if riding Gordon’s draft. Her lack of flesh was almost as startling as the fact that she had no head.

  Jett hadn’t seen anything that bizarre on her actual acid trips and couldn’t imagine how a flashback could be so intense and disturbing. But she also accepted the supernatural as just a fact of Solom. And in a weird way, she was glad to have proof that Mom wasn’t cracking up.

  Of COURSE there’s a ghost in this house. Why wouldn’t there be, when creepy scarecrows live in the attic and the barn, when goddamned goats scarf your dope and try to eat your ass, when a man in a black hat peeps in your windows?

  Jett was nearly out of breath when she reached the front door, but she had twenty feet on Gordon—and thirty feet on the headless ghost. She threw open the door and was racing across the porch when she saw them.

  Goats, dozens of them, a veritable army of horny-headed stink factories, staring at her with their weird, glittering eyes. They blocked Jett’s path to the driveway and surrounded the car. Mom sat in the driver’s seat, clawing her cheeks in anxiety. One of the goats lowered its head and gave the driver’s side door a solid thwack with its horns and forehead.

  “Going somewhere?” Gordon said behind Jett, and she could hear the smile in his voice.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  “Damn, damn, damn.” Katy beat the steering wheel as the goat rammed its head against the door a second time. Another goat, this one a hoary old-timer, with gray and white streaked among the brown patches on its face, reared up and settled its front hoofs on the bumper and glared at Katy over the hood.

  She’d tucked her suitcase in the trunk and had just closed the front door when the goats appeared. She had looked over the driveway and the gravel road, checking things out before fleeing, and the coast had been clear. Admittedly, she’d been looking for Gordon’s SUV and not goats. She figured he was still out making whatever weird rounds he kept on Sunday evenings.

  The goats had appeared out of nowhere. First had come Abraham, the only one she could distinguish because of the horn that corkscrewed crazily behind his right ear. Abraham had waltzed down from the pasture like a show pony, in high spirits, even kicking up and clicking his back hooves. Katy had grinned at that one, even though Abraham had broken out of the fence. That was Gordon’s problem now, not hers. Katy mourned briefly for the perennials she’d planted along the front porch, the forsythia, hosta, and snowball bushes that the goat would no doubt munch, but this wasn’t her house any more.

  It was never your house. It was Rebecca’s.

  She’d checked her watch and noted it was a quarter after seven. She debated running into the house and getting Jett. She’d also forgotten to call her mother and announce their unexpected arrival. When she looked up from her watch, three goats came around the house like a gang of gunfighters in a spaghetti western. That was when the first alarm had gone off inside her head, an insistent, irritating beeping.

  Then she saw the rear of Gordon’s vehicle, parked behind the barn. How long had he been there?

  She was about to open the door when the rear-view mirror revealed a half-dozen more goats, popping up as if they had formed from smoke. She didn’t like the look of their eyes. And while she hadn’t quite believed they were dangerous before, despite her own bizarre encounters—after all, a goat was an herbivore, not a carnivore, right?—she accepted it now, because the goats moved with a common intent, as if they shared the same mind and the same hunger.

  When Jett opened the front door, Katy wanted to scream at her to go back inside the house. Then she saw Gordon behind Jett, and the ghost—Rebecca—behind him, and decided goats were the lesser of three evils. Jett paused at the edge of the porch, clearly sizing up her chances of making it to the car. By now dozens of goats filled the yard, their restless legs kicking up dust, their hooves pawing the ground, ears twitching.

  Katy needed to improve the odds a little. As the butthead slammed her car door for the third time, she turned over the ignition key. The Subaru engine roared to life, and she threw the gear shift into drive and hit the gas.

  The goat perched on the bumper (for some reason, the name “Methuselah” came to mind) lost its balance and bounced off the grill with a meaty thump. Gravel spat from beneath the rear wheels like Uzi slugs, and startled goats emitted bleats of surprise and pain. The fishtailing rear of the Subaru slewed into a small group of the creatures, scattering them like soft bowling pins. Katy heard limbs snap, and a stray horn clacked against a side window and caused the glass to spider web.

  Some of the goats danced out of the way, their long, angular faces almost comical with those obscene eyes set deep beneath heavy brows. Katy nav
igated an arc, parking the passenger’s side door at the foot of the porch steps. She leaned over and flung the door open as Jett hopped toward the car. Gordon looked shattered, as if he wanted to cry but couldn’t find any water in his dried-up heart. Katy would almost have felt sorry for him, but she was pretty sure he was distraught over the dead and injured goats and not over losing his wife.

  “Hell, yeah, Mom, you rock,” Jett said as she climbed into the front seat. Katy was already pulling away before the door closed. “Grand Theft Auto, yo.”

  The goats had by now figured out a monstrous steel predator was in their midst, and they had parted like the waves of the Red Sea.

  “Moses,” Katy said. “Did he have goat named Moses?”

  “That one,” Jett said, pointing to the left. “The one with the black hairs in its beard.”

  Katy veered out of the way and clipped Moses head-on. The goat bounced up on the hood and pressed against the windshield. For one horrifying second, Moses glared through the glass at Katy, as if admonishing her for breaking some unwritten commandment. Then he rolled to the side and was flung from the car, which was by now halfway down the drive to the Ward house. When Katy checked the mirror, Moses was flopping and flailing on the dirt road.

  “Sweet!” Jett yelled, as if this were a sequel to “Thelma and Louise,” only this time co-written by Federico Fellini and George Romero.

  “Fasten your seatbelt,” Katy said, her hands no longer trembling. She hadn’t had time to be frightened, but now the reverse endorphins were kicking in and the blood drained from her face, her bruised eye throbbing.

  “I saw your ghost,” Jett said after obeying the parental command. She put her backpack in the floor between her legs, opened it, and rummaged while Katy aimed for the paved highway.

  “It’s not my ghost,” Katy said to her. “I’m still very much alive, thank you.”