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  The Jangling Hole glared back at Bobby Eldreth like the cold eye of the mountain, sleepy and wary and stone silent in the October smoke.

  “Th’ow it.”

  Bobby ignored Dex’s taunt as he squeezed the rock and peered into the darkness, imagining the throbbing heartbeat that had drummed its slow rumble across the ages. The air that oozed from the Blue Ridge Mountain cave smelled like mushrooms and salamanders. He could have sworn he heard something back there in the slimy, hidden belly of the world, maybe a whisper or a tinkle or the scraping of claws on granite.

  “Th’ow it, doof.”

  Bobby glanced back at his heckler, who sat on a sodden stump among the dark green ferns. Dex McCallister had a speech impediment that occasionally cut the “r” out of his words. Dex was so intent on pestering Bobby that he failed to note the defect. Good thing. When Dex made a mistake, everybody paid.

  “I hear something,” Bobby said.

  “Probably one of them dead Rebels zipping down his pants to take a leak,” Dex shouted. “Do it.”

  Vernon Ray Davis, who stood in the hardwood trees behind Dex, said, “They didn’t have zippers back then. Nothing but bone buttons.”

  Dex sneered at the skinny kid in the X-Men T-shirt and too-tight, thrift-store jeans that revealed his pale ankles. “What book did you get that out of, V-Ray? You’re starting to sound like Cornwad,” Dex said, using the class nickname for Mr. Corningwald, their eighth-grade history teacher at Titusville Middle School.

  Bobby hefted the rock in his hand. Though it was the size of a lopsided baseball, it weighed as much as the planet Krypton. Probably even Superman couldn’t lift it, but Superman wouldn’t be dumb enough to stand in front of a haunted hole in the ground, not while he could be boning Lois Lane or beating up Lex Luthor.

  Dex and Vernon Ray were thirty yards down the slope from Bobby, in a clearing safely away from the mouth of the cave. Not that any distance was safe, if what they said was true. The late-afternoon sun coated the canopy of red oak and maple with soft, golden light, yet Bobby shivered, due as much to the chill emanating from the cave as from his fear.

  “I’ve been to the camps,” Vernon Ray said. “My daddy’s got all that stuff.”

  “That’s just a bunch of guys playing dress-up,” Dex said.

  “It’s authentic. 26th North Carolina Troops. Wool pants, breech loaders, wooden canteens—”

  “Okay, Cornwad,” Dex said. “So they didn’t have no goddamn zippers.”

  “Daddy said—”

  “Your daddy goes to those re-enactments to get away from you and your mom,” Dex said. “My old man drags me along, but you always get left behind with the girls. What ya think of that, Cornwad?”

  During Dex’s bully act, Bobby took the opportunity to ease a couple of steps away from the mouth of the cave. The noise inside it was steady and persistent, like a prisoner’s desolate scratching of a spoon against a concrete wall. The Hole seemed to be daring him to come closer. Bobby considered dropping the stone and pretending he had thrown it while Dex wasn’t looking. But Dex had a way of knowing things.

  “Bobby’s chicken crap,” Vernon Ray said, changing the subject away from his dad and deflecting Dex’s attention. “He won’t throw it.”

  Good one, V-Ray. I thought we were on the same side here.

  Dex tapped a cigarette from a fresh pack, then pushed it between his lips and let it dangle. “Ah, hell with it,” he said. “You can believe the stories if you want. I got better things to worry about.”

  Relieved, Bobby took a step downhill but froze when he heard the whisper.

  “Uhr-lee.”

  It was the wind. Had to be. The same wind that tumbled a gray pillar of smoke from the end of Dex’s cigarette, that quivered the bony trees, that pushed dead autumn leaves against his sneakers.

  Still, his throat felt as if he’d swallowed the rock in his hand. Because the whisper came again, low, personal, and husked with menace.

  “Uhrrrr-leeee.”

  A resonant echo freighted the name. If Bobby had to imagine the mouth from which the word had issued—and at the moment Bobby was plenty busy not imagining—it would belong to a dirty-faced, gaunt old geezer two hundred years dead. But like Dex said, you could believe the stories if you wanted, which implied a choice. When in doubt, go with the safe bet. Put your money on ignorance.

  “To hell with it,” Bobby said, throwing extra air behind the words to hide any potential cracks. “I want me one of those smokes.”

  He flung the rock—away from the cave, lest he wake any more of those skeletal men inside—and hurried down the slope, nearly slipping as he hustled while feigning nonchalance. One more whisper might have wended from the inky depths, but Bobby’s feet scuffed leaves and Dex laughed and Vernon Ray hacked from a too-deep draw and the music of the forest swarmed in: whistling birds, creaking branches, tinkling creek water, and the brittle cawing of a lonely crow.

  Bobby joined his friends and sat on a flat slab of granite beside the stump. From there, the Hole looked less menacing, a gouge in the dirt. Gray boulders, pocked with lichen and worn smooth by the centuries, framed the opening, and stunted, deformed jack pines clung to the dark soil above the cave.

  A couple of dented beer cans lay half-buried in a patch of purple monkshood, and a rubber dangled like a stubby rattlesnake skin from a nearby laurel branch. Mulatto Mountain rose another hundred feet in altitude above the cave, where it topped off with sycamore and buckeye trees that had been sheared trim by the winter winds.

  He took a cancer stick from Dex and fired it up, inhaling hard enough to send an inch of glowing orange along its tip. The smoke bit his lungs but he choked it down and then wheezed it out in small tufts.

  The first buzz of nicotine numbed his fingers and floated him from his body. Relishing the punishment, he went back to mouth-smoking the way he usually did, rolling the smoke with his tongue instead of huffing it down. His head reeled but he grinned toward the sky in case Dex or Vernon Ray was looking.

  “We ought to camp here sometime,” Dex said, smoking with the ease of the addicted. He played dress-up as much as the Civil War re-enactors did, though his uniform of choice was upscale hoodlum—white T-shirt and a windbreaker that had “McCallister Alley” stitched over the left breast pocket. Three leaning bowling pins, punctured by a yellow starburst indicating a clean strike, were sewn beneath the label. Dex’s old man owned the only alley within 80 miles of Titusville, and about once a month Mac McCallister was lubed enough from Scotch to let the boys roll a few free games.

  “It’ll be too cold to camp soon,” Vernon Ray said, constantly flicking ash from his cigarette like a sissy. Bobby was almost embarrassed for him, but at the moment he had other concerns besides his best friend maybe being queer.

  Concerns like the Jangling Hole, and whoever—or whatever—had spoken to him. The wind, nothing but the wind.

  “Best time of year for camping,” Dex said. “I can get my old man’s tent, swipe a couple six-packs, bring some fishing poles. Maybe tote my .410 and bag us a couple squirrels for dinner.”

  “There’s a level place down by the creek,” Bobby said.

  “Right here’s fine,” Dex said, sweeping one arm out in the expansive gesture of someone giving away something that wasn’t his. “Put the tent between the roots of that oak yonder. Already got a fireplace.” He booted one of the rocks that ringed a hump of charred wood.

  “I don’t know if my folks will let me,” Vernon Ray said.

  “Your dad’s doing Stoneman’s, ain’t he?” Dex dangled his cigarette from his lower lip. “Since he’s the big captain and all.”

  Stoneman’s Raid was an annual Civil War re-enactment that commemorated the Yankee incursion suffered by Titusville in 1864. The modern weekend warriors marked it by sleeping on the ground, drinking whiskey from dented canteens, and logging time in the saddle on rumps grown soft from too many hours in the armchair.

  If they were like Bobby’s dad, they spent t
heir free time thumbing the remote between “Dancing With The Stars” and “The History Channel,” unless it was football season when the Carolina Panthers jerseys came out of the bottom drawer.

  “Sure,” Vernon Ray said, voice hoarse from the cigarette. He flicked his smoke twice, but no ash fell. “Mom will probably go to Myrtle Beach like usual.”

  “The beach,” Dex said. “Wouldn’t mind eyeing some bikini babes myself.”

  There was a test in Dex’s tone, maybe a taunt. Perhaps Dex, like Bobby, had been wondering about Vernon Ray. “What ya think, Bobby? A little sand in the honey sounds a lot better than watching a bunch of old farts in uniform, don’t it?”

  Bobby’s gaze had wandered to the Hole again and he scanned the crisp line where the dappled sunlight met the black wall of hidden space that burrowed deep into Mulatto Mountain. As Dex called his name, Bobby blinked and took a deep, stinging puff. He spoke around the exhaled smoke, borrowing a line from his dad’s secret stash of magazines in the tool shed. “Yeah, wouldn’t mind some sweet tang myself.”

  Dex reached out and gave Vernon Ray a chummy slap on the back that was loud enough to echo off the rocks. “Beats pounding the old pud, huh?”

  Vernon Ray nodded and took a quick hit. He even held his cigarette like a sissy, his pinky lifted in the air as if communicating in some sort of delicate sign language. Vernon Ray, unlike most of the kids at Titusville Middle School, already had a hair style, a soft, wavy curl flopping over his forehead.

  Bobby wished he could protect his best friend, change him, rip that precious blonde curl out by the roots and turn him into a regular guy before Dex launched into asshole mode. When Dex got rolling, things went mean quick, and Vernon Ray’s eyes already welled with water, either from the smoke or the teasing.

  “I heard something at the Hole,” Bobby said, not realizing he was speaking until the sentence escaped.

  “Do what?” Dex leaned forward, flicking his butt into the cold, dead embers of the campfire.

  “Somebody’s in there.”

  Dex twisted off a laugh that sounded like the wheeze of an emphysema sufferer. “Something jangly, maybe? Bobby, you’re so full of shit it’s leaking out your ears.”

  Vernon Ray looked at him with gratitude. Bambi eyes, Bobby thought. Pathetic.

  Bobby put a little drama in the sales pitch to grab Dex’s full attention. “It went ‘Urrrrr.’”

  Dex snorted again. “Maybe somebody’s barfing.”

  “Could have been a bum,” Bobby said. “Ever since they shut down the homeless shelter, I’ve seen them sleeping under the bridge and behind the Dumpster at KFC. They’ve got to go somewhere. They don’t just disappear.”

  “Maybe they do,” Dex said. “I reckon those wino bastards better stay out of sight or they’ll run ‘em plumb out of the county.”

  The shelter had been shut down through the insidious self-righteousness of civic pride. Merchants had complained about panhandling outside their stores and the Titusville Town Council had drafted an ordinance against loitering. However, the town attorney, a misplaced Massachusetts native who had married into the fifth-generation law firm that had ruled the town behind the scenes since Reconstruction, dug up some court rulings suggesting that such an ordinance would interfere with the panhandlers’ First Amendment rights.

  Since the town leaders couldn’t use the law as a whip and chair, they instead cut off local-government funding and drove the shelter into bankruptcy. Vernon Ray had explained all this to Bobby, but Bobby didn’t think it was that complicated. People who didn’t take the safe bet lost the game, simple as that.

  “Even a bum’s not stupid enough to sleep in the Hole,” Vernon Ray said. “Cold as a witch’s diddy in there.”

  Dex grinned with approval. “That why you didn’t th’ow the rock, Bobby Boy? Afraid a creepy old crackhead might th’ow it back?”

  “Probably just the wind,” Bobby said. “Probably there’s a bunch of other caves and the air went through just right.”

  “Sure it wasn’t the Boys in Blue and Gray?” Dex said, thumbing another smoke from the pack. “Kirk’s See-Through Raiders?”

  “Like you said, you can believe the stories if you want.” Contradicting his bravado, Bobby’s gaze kept traveling to the dank orifice in the black Appalachian soil.

  They should have stuck to the creek trail and not followed the animal path into the woods. The trail was the shortest distance from the trailer park where he lived and the Kangeroo Hop’n’Shop, a convenience store run by a family that Dex called “The Dot Heads.” Bobby wasn’t sure whether the family was Indian, Pakistani, or Arabian, though one of the daughters was in his English class and had a lot of vowels in her name. Dot Heads or not, it was the closest place to buy candy bars and football cards, not to mention sneak a peek at the oily, swollen breasts flashing from the magazine covers.

  Half an hour before, the boys had made their ritual Saturday visit, flush with pocket change collected over the course of the week. While tobacco had become a controlled substance on the order of liquor and Sudafed, even in the tobacco-raising state of North Carolina, not all packs were kept on shelves behind the cash register.

  A promotional two-pack of Camels, shrink-wrapped with a lighter, was perched on the edge of the counter by the ice cream freezer, and as Bobby had paid for a Dr. Pepper, Dex swept the package into the pocket of his windbreaker. Bobby caught the crime out of the corner of his eye, but the middle-aged woman at the register, who had a slight mustache riding her dark, pursed lips, was focused on counting pennies.

  “Let’s smoke ‘em at the Hole,” Dex had said, once they were out of sight of the store. Neither Bobby nor Vernon Ray had the guts to protest.

  The Jangling Hole was half a mile’s hike up rocky and wooded Blue Ridge terrain. Bobby had been there before with his two pals—after all, who could resist the most notorious haunted spot in the county, especially during Halloween season?—but they usually just eased around it and went to the headwaters of the creek where you could hook rainbow trout all year round, because no wildlife officers ever hoofed it that far back into the hills. That was back before Budget Bill Willard, the famous local photographer, had bought the property and posted “No Trespassing” signs all over it.

  Dex had knocked down the first such sign he’d seen, unzipped his trousers, and urinated on it. Then he’d cajoled his reluctant merry band of pranksters to the Hole. After Dex had dared him to “th’ow” the rock, Bobby had no choice but to march up to the crevice, which was as wide as a pick-up truck. Nobody in his right mind would go near the cave that harbored the spirits of—

  “Bobby?”

  At first he thought the voice had come from the cave, in that same reverberating whisper that reached into his ears and tickled the bottom of his nasal cavity. But it was Dex, arms folded, chin out, squatting on the deadfall like a gargoyle clinging to the edge of some old French cathedral.

  “You going to pretend it was them Civil War ghosts?” Dex said, letting one eyelid go lazy as if suggesting they could play a good one on Vernon Ray.

  “I’m bored.” Bobby’s mouth was an ashtray, tongue dry as a spider web, nicotine ramping up his pulse. He’d wished he’d saved some of the Dr. Pepper, but Dex had knocked it from his hands as they’d crossed the creek.

  “What you guys doing tonight?” Vernon Ray said.

  “Your momma,” Dex snapped back.

  “I claim sloppy seconds,” Bobby said, though his heart wasn’t in it.

  “For real,” Vernon Ray said. “Think you can get out for a movie?”

  “What’s playing?” Dex said, faking a yawn and showing his missing molar.

  “Tarentino’s got a new one.”

  “We can’t sneak into that, dumbass,” Dex said. “It’s rated ‘R’ for racks and red blood.”

  Bobby was about to suggest a round of X-Box, anything to get away from the cave, when Vernon Ray held up his hand.

  “Shhh,” the curly-haired boy said. “I hear some
thing.”

  Bobby couldn’t help sneaking a glance at the Hole, wondering if Vernon Ray had heard the whisper. Dex groaned. “Jesus, not you, too, V-Boy.”

  “Serious.”

  “That’s the roaring of your own fat skull.” Dex stood and looked down the slope into the woods, where the animal path widened. He blinked and flung his cigarette away as he turned and bolted.

  “Over here!” came a shout. The rhododendrons shook along the edge of the clearing and a man in a brown uniform burst out, breaking into a run. Bobby caught the gleam of metal on the man’s belt.

  Cop. Crap.

  His heart jumped against his ribs and fluttered like a bird in a cat’s mouth. His dad would bust his ass good if he got in trouble with the law again. Dex headed for the back side of the mountain, where the steep slope bristled with brambles and scraggly locust trees, cover fit for a rabbit but little else.

  The overweight cop was after him, wheezing, shouting at him to stop. Vernon Ray, who had fled down the path toward the creek trail, froze in his tracks at the command. While Bobby was still deciding which way to run, a second cop emerged, the brown-skinned store owner beside him.

  “Is them,” the store owner said. The cop, a young guy whose cheeks were blued with stubble, put his hand on his holster, no doubt weighing the wisdom of drawing on a couple of kids.

  As the second cop hesitated, Vernon Ray cut to the right, through a shaded thicket of hardwoods and jack pine. He was soon out of sight, though his route was discernable by snapping branches and rattling leaves. The cop took three steps in pursuit, and then apparently realized Bobby would be easier prey.

  Bobby took a backwards step. As a Little League All-Star, he could dash ninety feet between bases with no problem, and the safety of the woods was only half that distance. Dex would get away clean, he was as slick as a snake in a car wash, but the swarthy cop would probably net Vernon Ray if Bobby fled. And Vernon Ray was Honor Roll, the pride of the trailer park and Bobby’s best friend.

  “Hold it right there, son,” the cop said, though he was barely a decade older than Bobby. The stem of his sunglasses was tucked in one pocket, the lenses like a second pair of accusing eyes. Sweat splotched the cop’s underarms, and the badge caught a stray bit of sunlight as if God had signaled a secret moral message.