Solom Read online

  He pushed his legs out, swinging like a drunken gymnast in a surreal Olympics, then lifted himself until his belly was across the scythe handle. He reached one hand and found the hayloft floor, his index finger ripped by a protruding nailhead. Blood trickled down his finger to the pad of his hand, where it fell to the barn floor below.

  The unseen movement beneath him increased in intensity, and hooves padded softly in the dirt. But that didn’t matter, because he had his balance and then his other hand was gripping a floor board and he pulled himself forward, forward, and then he had a knee on the scythe handle and he was going to make it—

  He looked up to see the scarecrow standing over him, a crescent moon of metal arced above its straw hat. Mark couldn’t be sure, but the stitched face seemed to be grinning. Then the sickle swept down, slicing into Mark’s left wrist all the way to the bone. The whole arm went numb, but he kept a grip with his right hand, even though his blood pressure plummeted and his skin grew cold as he went into shock. As the sickle reaped its sick harvest a second time, Mark let go, and as he fell, he concentrated on Jett’s face but all he saw was the long, endless tunnel of a final failure.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Katy pushed the Subaru a little fast for the winding road that followed the river, but she was in a hurry to get as far away from Solom as possible. She switched on the headlights as they passed the general store, noting that the store’s porch light wasn’t on. Usually, its deep yellow glow flooded the valley drawing, drawing insects from the riverbanks and reflecting off the plate glass window of the post office. All the buildings were dark, even the True Light Tabernacle, the squat brick building with the teepee-like steeple.

  “Looks like Solom shut down for the night,” Katy said over the sweet, aching strains of Westerberg’s “Runaway Wind.”

  “What?” Jett cupped a hand to ear, and Katy turned down the volume a little.

  “Solom,” she said. “Something weird’s going on.”

  “Hey, not our problem, Mom.”

  “Got your cell phone?”

  “Yeah, but it’s about as useful as frog’s wings in this valley. Where’s an ugly cell tower when you need one?”

  “I thought we might call your dad.”

  Jett’s grin flashed in the green glow of the dashboard lights. “Are we going there?”

  “No, I just thought we ought to tell him. He should be back in Charlotte by now.”

  “Damn, Mom. This is an emergency. Forget about your pride for a sec, okay?”

  Katy eased up on the gas pedal. “There’s a lot you don’t know, honey, and a lot that you don’t need to worry about.”

  “Come on, I saw the way you guys were looking at each other this morning. There’s a still a spark, just like Paul says in this song.” She reached over and cranked the volume as Westerberg plowed through a chorus fraught with romantic desperation, then she turned it down again. “I never saw any spark between you and Gordon. Not even hatred. Just a pair of flat-out fucking zombies.”

  “No cussing, honey,” Katy said automatically, but was thinking: Out of the mouths of babes. Jett had seen what Katy refused to see. But Katy had larger issues to consider than sparks, happiness, or love. She had to make good, she had to provide Jett stability, she had to make up for a failed marriage by making the second one work. She had to have a happy family whether she wanted one or not.

  Except that perfect plan hadn’t exactly worked out, had it? She’d ended up playing second fiddle to a woman who couldn’t even hold an instrument.

  She glanced into the rear view mirror, wanting to see the outline of Solom vanishing into the past, one more wrong turn on the road to wherever she was meant to wind up. The full moon had risen and segued with the setting sun so that full darkness had never touched the sky. It had gone from deep purple to milky silver, though the hills lay beneath it like black sleeping beasts. A few wisps of ragged clouds spread themselves across the dust of the Milky Way. Katy had never noticed how few streetlights there were in Solom, and how the stars stood out by contrast, even while fighting the dominant glow of the full moon.

  “Up ahead is where Gordon’s wife wrecked,” Jett said, pointing to a steep cut of bank that led down to the river. Hard trees danced just beyond the headlight beams. “The kids at school said the car flew off the road and flipped. She wasn’t wearing her seatbelt and—”

  “—her head was cut off.”

  “I saw her, Mom. You weren’t lying.”

  “I never lie to you.”

  “Bullshit. You lied about lots of things.”

  “Only to myself.” Katy found her foot going from the accelerator to the brake.

  “Mom? What are you doing?”

  “She needs to stop,” came the voice from the back seat. Even with Westerberg singing over a tortured blues guitar lick, the voice carried and filled the interior of the car, as if it was coming from the speakers.

  Katy swerved the steering wheel, bouncing to the narrow shoulder as the tires grabbed for traction. Jett jerked forward, straining against the seat belt. “What the fuck?” she said, her voice reverting to a prepubescent screech.

  Rebecca, or what there was of her, leaned over the front seat. The milk-white threads of her ghostly flesh caught the sick glow of the dash lights. Her head was on, her face nearly blank, though her black lips held the hint of a smile in the mirror. Even ethereal and dead, with a gruesome wound around her neck and the shadows of her bruises on her face, Katy noted that she was beautiful. The first wife who Katy could never replace.

  Jett wriggled from her seatbelt and flung the passenger door open. “Get the hell out, Mom!”

  Katy’s fingers hesitated on the seat belt latch. Westerberg was singing about the dice behind somebody’s shades. The soft, eternal whisper of the river blended with the music, and the night air carried the smell of mud that had spent eons working its way down from the high granite peaks. Rebecca had died here, and hadn’t been allowed to haunt this place. She had been banned from moving to some greater reward or perhaps a greater punishment than any cruelty this world could administer.

  Weren’t ghosts supposed to haunt their place of dying? But Rebecca had been bound to the Smith house, perhaps the place of greatest happiness or sorrow in her life. Not here, by a cold and remorseless river.

  Katy could hop in a car and run away, but Rebecca was destined to stay with Gordon.

  Their gaze locked in the mirror, and Rebecca gave a slight nod as if she understood Katy’s thoughts.

  “They found me here,” Rebecca said.

  Jett pounded on the hood with her fist. “Mom, get the fuck out.”

  Katy released her seat belt, but didn’t get out. Instead, she killed the engine, taking the headlights with it. In the vacuum of silence, the night sounds filled the car, surrounded her: a breeze rustling the dried weeds along the river, bullfrogs croaking in a symphony, a short spill of water churning against the rocks, the engine ticking as it cooled.

  “But you didn’t die here,” Katy said, the deeper, less calm part of her mind screaming: You’re talking to a GHOST.

  “No.”

  Jett ran to Katy’s side of the car, pulled open the door, and pulled Katy’s arm. “Get out, Mom. Get away.”

  “It’s okay. She’s not going to hurt us.” Something made Katy add, “She can’t hurt us. She’s dead.”

  Jett kicked the side of the car in frustration. “I don’t think she’s nearly dead enough.”

  “Look at her. She’s trying to tell us something.”

  Rebecca’s smile widened in the mirror, and though it was still a creepy, elusive, unnatural thing, Katy turned to face her. She expected a corpse smell, a graveyard wind of what passed for breath among the dead, but there was none. Ragged flesh circled Rebecca’s neck. However she had lost her head, it had not been by a clean stroke.

  Something, perhaps a piece of dull, jagged metal, had worked and rasped and gnawed at the meat. Rebecca was wearing the dress from the closet, the
one with the autumnal print, though the dress was as translucent as the woman wearing it. The bust line would have been flattering if not for the wound.

  “I died at the Smith House,” Rebecca said, her dark eyes faraway, as if staring into the cold waters of the River Styx.

  “But what about the car wreck?” Katy said.

  “Gordon brought me here.”

  “Did the Circuit Rider kill you?”

  “No. I’m a sacrifice.”

  “A what?”

  “Sacrifice.”

  “Who killed you?”

  “I’m a sacrifice.”

  “That’s just great,” Jett said, still standing by the open door. “Out of all the dead people in the world, we get the only one with a defective voice chip.”

  “Shh,” Katy said. Distant headlights flickered in the valley behind them, then disappeared as the vehicle rounded a curve. A dog barked from a distant hillside, the sound lost and lonely under the full moon.

  “Who killed you?” Katy repeated. She felt a strange affinity for the woman, now that she had accepted that dead people were just like the living, only less afraid. She and Rebecca had shared the same kitchen and the same husband. Now they were sitting in a car together, talking about Rebecca’s death as if they were discussing cosmetics.

  “I’m a sacrifice,” Rebecca said. “For his goats.”

  “Goats? Gordon killed you?”

  The morose eyes blinked, momentarily shielding Katy from their dark sorrow and pain.

  “I knew that fucker had a screw loose,” Jett said.

  “Try the phone,” Katy said, handing her the cell unit.

  “Who do you want me to call? Ghostbusters? The FBI? Scully and Mulder?”

  “911 for a start.”

  “And what am I supposed to tell them, assuming we’ve found the one little patch in the valley where there’s a signal?”

  “Tell them we have to report a murder.”

  “And you’re going to take her word for it?”

  “Shh. Go on, so I can talk to Rebecca.”

  “Great. You’re as nutty as the rest of them.”

  “I love you, too, dear.” Katy turned her attention back to the dead woman in the back seat. “Well, what do we do now? Are you coming with us, or are you like the ‘vanishing hitchhiker’ in that urban legend and are going to disappear the moment we get where we’re going?”

  Rebecca’s answer, rising from the pipes of an ethereal hollow inside, was neither of the two options Katy had offered.

  ***

  Odus thrashed through the laurels, calling for Sister Mary. He was mostly sober now, the braving effects of the Old Crow dissipated and leaving in its place a painful veil of fog. Some shining knight he’d made, some hero. His image of a tin-star stud riding into a dirty town with six-guns blazing had been reduced to a hung-over cowpoke who’d lost his ride.

  The September darkness had not settled over the sky so much as it seeped up from the cool, ancient mountains. The black stuff of night had crawled around the rude and rounded chunks of granite, out from between the roots of old-growth ash and beech and hickory, up from the hidden holes in world. Now it knitted its single, all-consuming color in a smothering strait jacket, there at every turn, ready to match every breath, flowing into Odus’s lungs and claiming its rightful space. Odus had never felt so much like an invader on this planet as he did now. In fact, he’d never given it any thought at all.

  He’d hunted these peaks, had sought squirrels and wild turkey and the occasional black bear, but he’d always come here as a conqueror. Now, entangled in its inky depths, his bearings lost, he recognized the futility of laying claim to something as old as the Appalachians. No human owned these mountains. If anything held deed to these stony and storied lands, it was creatures like the Circuit Rider, those not bound by time and space and the sad, small worries of the mortal.

  Unseen branches tore Odus’s hands and waxy leaves slapped his face. He rested for a moment, squinting through the canopy to the scattered stars and the comforting cast of moonlight above.

  “God, if you’re up there, now would be a great time to lend a little hand here,” Odus said, the prayer sounding stupid even as it left his lips. Why should God listen to a man who hadn’t stepped foot in a church in two decades, who hadn’t cracked a Bible since Sunday school in Free Will Baptist church, who hadn’t felt a single spiritual twitch since the day Preacher Blackburn had dipped his head into the chilling waters of Rush Branch and pronounced him washed free of sin?

  However, his prayer may have been answered, or at least coincided with an Earthly event, which amounted to the same thing when you dropped the fancy cloth and got down to brass tacks.

  Needles of light broke through the branches ahead. This light was filtered by the leaves, but was a solid force, pushing at the suffocating darkness and promising hope. Odus worked toward it, his footing more sure now as he could make out the black lines of trees and didn’t have to feel his way through the vegetative maze.

  He heard voices as the light grew stronger, and he recognized one of them: Sarah from the general store. What business did a 70-year-old woman have on top of Lost Ridge at this time of night? Of course, Odus could ask himself the same question, and maybe the same answer would serve for both of them.

  “Hello,” he shouted through the trees.

  “Who’s there?” Sarah said, her voice snapping like a soggy twig.

  “Odus.”

  “Well, come on out of there and count your blessings that I didn’t let loose with some buckshot first. It ain’t wise to go sneaking up on a lady in the dark.”

  “I wasn’t sneaking, I was walking,” he said.

  “Is this your horse, then?” came another voice, and Odus placed it as belonging to Sue Norwood, the young woman who’d been at the meeting at the general store last night.

  Guided by their voices and the intensifying glare of car headlights, Odus threaded through the edge of the laurel thicket and stood in a little clearing at the end of a logging road. He stepped into the comforting cone of light and shielded his eyes. Sister Mary stood by the Jeep, snorting, head twitching up and down, and Odus couldn’t shake the feeling that Sister Mary was laughing at him.

  “Well, she’s not rightly mine,” Odus said. “I kind of appropriated her for a holy mission.”

  “See,” Sarah said to Sue, who was holding Sister Mary’s reins. “I’m not the only one who’s been touched in the head. The whole blamed place goes crazy whenever Harmon Smith rides into town.”

  “It seemed like the thing to do at the time,” Odus said. “I mean, when you hear a calling, do you stop and ask questions, or do you just follow that voice?”

  “You follow it,” Sue said, and Odus could see the pick-axe in her hand, brandished like a crusader’s sword.

  “That little pig-sticker won’t do a thing against the Circuit Rider,” Odus said, then noted the shotgun cradled across Sarah’s arm. “I reckon a 20-gauge won’t, either.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Sarah asked. “And what exactly do you have in your bag of tricks there that’s supposed to kill a dead preacher? A Mason jar of holy water? A slingshot and a silver dime? An empty liquor bottle?”

  Odus’s face flushed. He’d tossed the Old Crow bottle into the hollow of a rotted-out stump, but first he’d briefly considered its potential as a spiritual battle-ax. Now the idea seemed as silly as Sue’s and Sarah’s weapons of choice.

  “Okay, own up to it, we’re poking in the dark with a limp stick,” he said. “What now?”

  “Wait, I reckon,” Sarah said. “Harmon crashed our party last night, but I think tonight he’s playing host.”

  “The air feels strange,” Sue said. “Like it’s carrying a mild electrical charge.”

  Odus had been so wired with tension his senses had honed and focused down to the tight ache in his gut. Having found company, and his horse, he was able to relax enough to draw in the moist night air. The inhalation carried the fragrance of balsam a
nd wet leaves, rich loam and moss, the safe, healing aromas of the high forest.

  But beneath that, like a corpse’s smell oozing from beneath the undertaker’s applied mask of perfume, was a corruption of sulfur and ozone, of decay and a pervasive stink of something that didn’t belong in this world. The smell almost had a physical presence, as if it was lightly stroking his skin, coaxing him into vile acts and thoughts.

  “I expect the others will be joining us,” Sarah said.

  “He’s leading us here?” Sue said.

  “Jesus had his sermon on the Mount,” Odus said. “Maybe Harmon’s ready for his turn.”

  “You don’t think ... he’s the devil, do you?” Sue said this with a tone of one who’d relegated such ideas to the realm of B-grade horror movies and backwoods tent revivals.

  “Or a dybbuk in Jewish lore,” Sarah said. “Not that I’d know anything about that.”

  “Maybe that’s a question for Gordon Smith,” Odus said. “He’s the one with all the smarts on that stuff. Come to think of it, I wonder why he’s never talked about it much.”

  “Ashamed, maybe,” Sarah said. “It’s the same bloodline. And we all got some kin that we don’t talk about much.”

  Sister Mary stepped forward, onto the stage defined by the headlights, and Sue dropped the reins so the horse could reach Odus. Sister Mary brushed Odus’s satchel with her nose, and he unzipped it and brought out an apple. As she munched it with a curious, sideways twist of her jaws, Odus was reminded of the goats, and their increasing numbers, how they were being born outside their natural gestation period.

  “Flock,” he said, dimly recalling material from Sunday School, when the class leader sold the kids on religion with coloring books and posters. Jesus was often pictured with a flock of some kind, whether it was sheep, children in robes, or grown-ups whose skin colors were varied enough and in the right proportions to make you think that, sure, black folks could get to heaven, too, only there probably wouldn’t be too many of them and God would surely give them a place off to themselves. The common theme was that gathering of creatures around Jesus, as if the Son of God would get lonely if He didn’t have living things milling around him, waiting for a wise word or a bit of free food.