The Scarecrow: A Supernatural Thriller (Solom) Page 4

  It’s just a stupid goddamned scarecrow.

  One last look and she was done.

  She galloped up the stairs to the loft door. It was locked. Had she slipped the latch herself, as she’d exited? She couldn’t remember. Below her, Abraham ate the scarecrow’s meat with a satisfied chuff.

  Katy entered the loft again, determined not to leave until she’d found the owner of the boots, if one existed. The loft wasn’t as dark as the space below, but the shadows between the stacked bales had grown deeper. The knife was heavy in her hand and her muscles ached with tension. A charred and pungent odor wended past, and she recognized it as scorched cabbage. She would probably burn the house down. Gordon would be livid. The structure had survived nearly two hundred years of Smiths and Katy would manage to raze it in less than two months.

  Something thumped, the sound muffled by the piles of hay. A patch of lesser gray shifted against the darkness. Katy swallowed hard.

  The boots drummed, or maybe it was Katy’s heart.

  The shape charged her in a shower of dust and straw.

  Katy raised the knife, her scream reverberating off the tin roofing like stage thunder in a theater.

  The goat stopped in front of her, head lifted, the oblique eyes gathering the faint light and reflecting it in emerald streaks.

  A GOAT.

  A goddamned goat had been walking around up here, scaring the stuffing out of her. It must have smelled the hay, climbed up the stairs, and gotten itself locked in.

  But who had locked the door?

  Katy was on her way to the stairs again when she heard the moan. A barn owl?

  No. It came from inside one of the wooden grain barrels that stood near a feed chute. What sort of animal would she find in there? A wounded opossum or a feral cat giving birth?

  How could she not look?

  She lifted the lid. Jett was curled inside, arms folded over her face.

  “Jett, honey,” Katy said. She sniffed for dope but it could have been something taken internally. Jett’s eyes were bloodshot but, even in the weak light, her pupils appeared normal. “Honey, what happened?”

  The girl’s mouth moved soundlessly for a moment, her face like a ghost’s in the blackness of the barrel. She blinked and looked around as if she’d fallen asleep on a car trip. “Where am I?”

  “The barn.”

  “What barn?”

  Please, no. Not again. Katy thought they’d left all that behind, and that drugs would be impossible for Jett to find in the rural mountains.

  “You’re in the barn, Jett.” She would save the mother-daughter talk for later, maybe bring Gordon into the act. Gordon wasn’t yet a potent father figure, but he knew how to lecture. Right now, she wanted to get Jett in the house so she could check her pulse.

  “There was a man ...” Jett said.

  “No, there’s nobody up here. Just a goat. I looked. What were you doing in the barrel, trying to trick me?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  Katy helped Jett out of the barrel, checking her daughter over as she did. Jett’s cell phone was on the floor. Katy reached to pick it up but Jett swooped in, grabbed it, and shoved it in her pocket.

  “Come on, honey,” Katy said. “Let’s get out of here before Gordon gets home.”

  The nanny goat, its belly swollen with pregnancy, came over and watched as Katy helped Jett down the stairs.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Jett didn’t have an appetite, so Katy put her to bed early after checking her over. Her daughter’s respiration and pulse were slightly elevated, but nothing to indicate a need for medical treatment. Her eyes were wild and frantic, and they kept flicking toward the corners of her room and the closet door. Katy hoped she wasn’t deluding herself about drug use, but she really didn’t want to face the drama of counselors and the whole judicial system again.

  Worst of all, she still couldn’t be sure whether Jett was pulling her string, a teen version of a guilt trip designed to get a little payback for screwing up their lives.

  “He was a tall,” Jett said. “Wearing an old straw hat. He didn’t have a face…”

  “Let’s talk about this after supper, honey.”

  “Can I leave my light on? Please?”

  “Sure.”

  Jett had never been afraid of the dark, not since the age of three. Katy felt guilty for leaving her upstairs, but she had to salvage dinner before Gordon arrived. She was reluctant to tell Gordon about the incident. As conservative as he was, he would want to search Jett’s room. It was a showdown in which everybody would lose. Besides, Jett said she had quit drugs, and Katy should give her daughter the benefit of a doubt. People changed, and they changed a lot faster when they were new and still learning to be people.

  Suppose there had been a man in the loft? Katy had heard the boots walking on the loft floor, and they’d sounded much louder than goat’s hooves. She didn’t want to think about that, either. A goat made more sense than a stranger in black. Odus Hampton, Gordon’s part-time farmhand, wouldn’t have skulked around; he would have called out in his friendly but deferential voice.

  “Why don’t you read something?” Katy said, going to the bookshelf. “How about a comic book? ‘Sandman.’ That sounds like it could put you to sleep.”

  “Mom, you’re so out of it.”

  “Music, then?” She scanned the row of CDs. Jett had raided Katy’s collection and plucked some of the most rebellious titles. Here was Patti Smith, the manic street preacher warning people away from the golden stairs of heaven. Kate Bush, a reclusive genius whose voice could seduce and excoriate in the same breath. Souxsie and her Banshees, who smothered you with sonic layers that were as sweet as funeral flowers. The Psychedelic Furs with their frantic saxes and dark lyrics. Jett had some newer music that Katy was unfamiliar with, Angelfish and Bella Morte, but she seemed to prefer her mother’s past to her own present.

  Katy knew what it was like to be a teen. She’d been there once, and not so long ago. Decadence and doom seemed like perfectly reasonable pursuits for a girl on the verge of becoming a woman, as long as it was confined to the realm of rock ‘n’ roll. But, in a quirk that secretly pleased Katy, her daughter had also sneaked a lot of upbeat guitar pop out of Katy’s collection: The Replacements, dBs, Let’s Active, Tommy Keene, and Robyn Hitchcock.

  “I just want to lay here and think,” Jett said.

  “‘Lie here,’” Katy corrected.

  “Yeah, I was going to say that, but I’m not lying. I really saw him.”

  Katy sat down on the edge of the bed and felt Jett’s forehead. Clammy, no sign of a fever. “Okay, we’ll see about whether you’re up to school tomorrow.”

  “I want to go to school.”

  “New friends, huh? A guy?”

  Jett twisted her lips into a “yuck,” but her eyes narrowed into a secretive expression. Without her dramatic eyeliner and face powder, Jett looked innocent and girlish. Her careworn teddy bear, Captain Boo, was tucked against her chin. If only those who judged her by her boots and chains and dyed hair with the purple streak could see her like this, Katy thought, maybe they’d give her a break.

  Like that would ever happen. Katy had a hard enough time keeping Gordon off Jett’s case, which had nearly been a deal-breaker after his sudden proposal. It was only after Gordon agreed to give it some time and let Jett deal with the transition in her own way that Katy accepted. Jett even admitted she wasn’t a serious Goth. Hers was more an act, a Goth Lite traveling show that would have been tiresome to her if it didn’t upset some people so much.

  That was the part Katy understood and supported. Despite her former career as a loan officer, very little else about her was ordinary. She’d always had an unhealthy self-image, the scrawny redhead with freckles, and she’d compensated by going out of her way to be a “somebody” in school. Sometimes that meant beating out a girl on the volleyball or cheerleading squad, and a couple of times she’d resorted to stealing one of the more popular girl’s boyfri
ends. Because she considered herself unattractive, she had to engage in behavior that was a little more extreme than that of her competitors.

  So she could cut her daughter some slack. Besides, Katy wasn’t exactly jumping into her new role as farm wife as if it were a second skin, despite a newfound fondness for Smith family recipes.

  She pulled the blankets up and kissed Jett’s forehead. She thought about asking if Jett wanted to say a prayer, but realized how phony that would sound. Jett would shoot her down by asking how come they never prayed in Charlotte.

  “I’ll come up after supper and check on you,” Katy said. “Or you can come down if you feel up to it.”

  Jett turned to face the window, hugging Captain Boo tightly. “I’ll be here. Unless he comes to get me again.”

  “Honey.”

  “Never mind.”

  Katy rose from the bed. If she had the guts, she would tell her daughter about the mysterious figure she’d seen in the kitchen, the wispy form that had vanished in the pantry. But Katy wasn’t ready to admit that the vision was real. No footsteps had sounded on the stairs when she was home alone, and the sudden scent of lilacs hadn’t drifted across the kitchen whenever she performed a domestic task. This was an old house, that was all, settling wood and seeped-in aromas. Maybe she’d leave her own mark for the next generation: blackened cabbage and funky swordfish.

  “Honey, I think it was just the scarecrow you saw,” Katy said. “I’ll bet it fell off the wall and you thought—”

  “Yeah, it fell off and walked like a man with a sharp pointy thing. Right.”

  “If it really was a man, Gordon will probably know him,” Katy said, not quite believing her own words. She’d seen its foot move, but that had been because of the goat. Because of the goat, not because the scarecrow was alive. “He’ll know what to do.”

  “Sure, Mom.” Jett didn’t believe her at all.

  “I love you.”

  “Love you, too.” Sounded like she almost meant it.

  Katy went downstairs into the kitchen, where she scraped the cabbage into the garbage. Perhaps she should dump the mess outside, but she wanted to get something on the table before Gordon showed up. She rummaged in the fridge, and then with a sigh retreated to the safety of the freezer and a microwave TV dinner. Gordon’s first wife Rebecca had never used a microwave, and Katy suspected the one she brought from her Charlotte apartment was the first to ever emit radiation in this house. Perhaps this meal was an affront to the generations of Smiths who had gone before.

  “Get used to it,” Katy said.

  Something crashed in the pantry.

  “Wonderful.” She punched up the proper cook time on the keypad of the microwave. She couldn’t handle cabbage but she was magic with instant meals.

  She couldn’t shake the vague sense that she wasn’t acting like her usual self, that her concern for Jett was somehow muted and muffled. But she couldn’t dwell on that. Dinner was waiting.

  With the microwave whirring behind her, she went to the pantry and pulled back the curtain. The aroma of lilacs was so strong it was like a slap in the face. Rows and rows of Mason jars lined the shelves, containing raspberry preserves, chow chow, sauerkraut, and a dozen other goods all expertly canned by Gordon’s first wife. Enough to last a nuclear winter.

  On the floor, juice leaking from shards of curved and gleaming glass, was a jar of pickles. Broken like the spaghetti sauce. As Katy knelt to pick up the largest pieces, she felt the curtain stir behind her, as if someone was through with business in the pantry and had chores elsewhere.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Mom banging around in the kitchen. Give it up.

  Jett tried to muster a little sympathy, because Mom was trying to be some kind of trophy wife and didn’t have the sense to recognize it just wasn’t in her blood. Mom had just been plain uncool lately, a slave to the kitchen, fussing over the house, keeping dirty laundry off the floor. All to please Gordon, a man who wouldn’t notice his slippers were on fire unless somebody turned a hose on him.

  She tugged her iPod from the lower shelf of her bedside table. She almost wished she had a joint. That would go over well with The Cure whispering through the headphones, Robert Smith going on about how he couldn’t find himself even when he was in love with someone happy and young.

  No wonder. You should ditch the “happy” part and find a real woman. I’ll gladly volunteer.

  After all, Jett was a drug-addict loser who had finally gone so far over the edge she was imagining mystical encounters with giant scarecrow men. If she had been stoned, she could have laughed it off. But she had promised Mom that drugs were a thing of the past, a habit left in Charlotte, and she was determined to keep the promise. If Mom could change, so could Jett. Although it looked like neither of them was changing for the better.

  The front door closed downstairs, and over the guitar solo she heard Gordon’s belly-deep professor’s voice delivering his standard catch phrase. “Where are my favorite girls?”

  Jett wormed deeper beneath the blankets. Gordon never entered her room after she was in bed, thank goodness. That was one advantage of his being a religious guy. He had some weird Old Testament code that kept women in their place but also placed them on an altar. Mom had swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. After Dad’s neglect, any sort of attention was a cause of mindless joy for her. Not that Dad was a bad guy. He just had his own crap to deal with, truckloads of it, and Jett wished she could call him right now. She needed somebody real to talk to, somebody who would understand about stupid scarecrow men.

  But what would she tell him? She couldn’t really remember. The whole thing in the barn seemed like a bad acid trip, and Jett knew all about that because she’d dropped it a second time—the time Mom didn’t know about—at Melissa Sanderson’s fourteenth birthday party. She’d spent the whole night hiding under Melissa’s bed, talking to the dust bunnies. The weirdest thing was that the dust bunnies had talked back, and they even acted like bunnies, hopping around, frolicking, twitching their little whiskers. But that was a lifetime ago and a whole other person. That had been a stupid, skinny kid trying to fit in with the crowd.

  Now, she was trying to fit out of the crowd.

  Jett checked her cell phone, just to confirm what she already knew. No signal. And she hadn’t called Dad while she was spaced out in the barn.

  It wasn’t her fault the landline was downstairs, right in the middle of everything where nothing was private. If they caught her making a secret call to Dad, they’d think something was up, and then they’d be “keeping an eye on her.” She couldn’t afford to arouse any more suspicion. Mom had a hard-enough gig as it was, faking the whole hillbilly Stepford Wife thing.

  She cranked up The Cure to full volume and put the blanket over her head so Mom would think she was asleep. She wouldn’t sleep. She didn’t dare. Because, if she closed her eyes, she might see the tall, dark, faceless man with the scythe.

  But soon, with the television droning in the living room below, and Gordon lecturing Mom about something or other, she drifted off.

  Somehow, morning came just the same.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Odus Hampton wished he’d skipped work and gone fishing instead.

  He had agreed to help Gordon put up some corn, though it hadn’t quite gotten frozen enough to harden for feed. Now, ripping and twisting the brown ears from their stalks, he decided that Gordon’s crops were Gordon’s business, as long as the man paid cash. Odus was thirsty as usual, and he’d picked up a quart of whiskey from the Titusville liquor store. A few hours of September sweat and he’d have earned a sip or two.

  Gordon usually left the grunt work to Odus, but today the professor was pitching in, working the rows right alongside him. They filled bushel baskets and carried them to the end of the row where Gordon had parked his riding lawn mower. Gordon didn’t own a tractor, although a metal relic from the horse-drawn days gathered rust between the barn and garden.

  “Guess it’s time to
take down the scarecrow,” Gordon said.

  Odus looked up at the form on the wooden crossbar whose head stood a good two feet above the dried blooms of the corn. It wore an old straw-reed hat that had been bleached by the sun and mottled gray by the rain, tied with twine to the feed-sack face. People in Solom were peculiar about their scarecrows, treating them like family members, using the same one from year to year.

  Odus had always thought it was some sort of good-luck ritual. The habit was to store the scarecrow in the barn, where it would hang on the wall and watch over the livestock during the long winter. Odus had been working for Gordon three years. The usual time to tuck the straw man away was in late October, when the nights grew short and the wind rattled strange syllables in the leaves.

  “A little early yet, ain’t it?” Odus asked.

  Gordon put a gloved hand over his eyes and scanned the clear sky. “There’s a storm coming.”

  “Don’t believe so. The birds aren’t quiet and the mice are no busier than usual.”

  Gordon pulled off his glove, fished a handkerchief from his jeans pocket, and wiped his glasses. His eyes were glittery and unfocused, and he looked lost. “I’m talking about a different kind of storm, Odus.”

  Odus plucked another ear and twisted it free with a crackle of ripped vegetation. He tossed it in the basket then moved the basket a few feet forward.

  “I don’t know anything about that,” Odus said.

  “Do you know the scarecrow is more than just a trick to keep birds away?”

  Odus didn’t like the way Gordon’s soft eyes looked past him to the pastures beyond. “Well, I’m not so sure they even do that worth a darn,” he said. “I had to replant three times this spring. The little raiders just swooped on in here like nobody’s business.”

  Gordon kept on as if he’d not heard Odus, who imagined that this was how the professor got when he was lecturing in the classroom to a bunch of stoned-out rich kids. “The scarecrow is as old as domesticated crops. Way back to Babylonia, which many scholars believe is the Garden of Eden of the Bible.”