Ghost Box: Six Supernatural Thrillers Page 6

  “And I’d best finish my rounds. I appreciate your time, Lester.”

  “Sure. Come on back anytime. And next time, plan on staying for a piece of pie.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  As Littlefield started the Trooper, he couldn’t help thinking about the part of Lester’s story that had gone untold. The part about why a bell rope no longer hung in the red church, and why Archer McFall would want to buy back the old family birthright.

  He shook his head and went down the driveway, gravel crackling under his wheels.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The dawn was crisp and pink, the air moistened by dew. The scent of pine and wild cherry blossoms spread across the valley along with the thin, smoky threads of the night’s hearths. Water swept its way south underneath the soft fog that veiled the river. A rooster’s crow cracked the stillness of the hills.

  Archer McFall nestled against the damp soil, the earth cool against his nakedness. He kept his eyes closed, looking back into the dark avenues of his dreams, chasing shadows to nowhere. The dreams were splashed with red, the color of retribution. They were human dreams, strange and new and chaotic.

  The rooster crowed three times before Archer remembered where he was.

  Home.

  The word, even though it was only thought and not spoken, left a bitter taste in his mouth. The bitterness came from the memory of old humiliations. And an older suffering, one that ran deeper than the expansive surface of sleep.

  Archer coughed. Pine needles and brittle leaves pressed against his cheek. He shivered and rolled into a sitting position, opening his eyes. After so long in darkness, he was almost surprised at the brightness of the coming day. The light slashed through the gaps in the forest canopy, sharp and merciless and full of grace.

  He gazed down at his bare human flesh. His skin seemed to fit well enough. These human bags of water and bone had always seemed awkwardly constructed to him. But he’d come among these people to take up their ways. Deliverance was more joyful when the victims thought it came from one of their own kind.

  More thoughts came back to him, more memories flooded the gray mass of brain that filled his skull. He spat. A reddish clot of half-digested pulp clung to a stump.

  As the sun warmed him and his shifting night shapes slithered the rest of the way out of existence, he planned his route back to the Mercedes. He knew the river well. It flowed below the old home grounds, below the church. He’d left his car in the woods a mile away. A Brooks Brothers suit, pinstriped and charcoal gray, was spread out in the trunk, along with leather shoes, knit socks, cologne, a Rolex wristwatch and a sky-blue tie.

  The uniform of the walking dead, the Christian soldiers, the false idol-worshippers. The pretenders. And he would pretend to be one of them.

  Archer stood and brushed the clinging loam from his body. A kingfisher swooped and lit on a branch nearby, then either smelled or sensed him and disappeared with a frantic snap of wings. Archer smiled and studied the gray mountain slopes.

  Home.

  The Promised Land.

  Creeks as old as lies, dirt as dark as hopelessness. Stones as cold as the heart of a father who had only enough love for one son. Mountains thrust like angry fists up to the sky, defying the heaven that so many people believed in, including his dear deranged mother.

  The worst part of this incarnation was the emotional turmoil. No wonder these creatures sinned. No wonder they sought refuge in lust and depravity and excess. They were God’s mistakes. But God’s biggest mistake was jealousy, the craving to build things in His image, the demand for sacrifice.

  God demanded love, but had no love of His own to spare. At least not for the second-born. Not for the one destined for dust, while the first earned a high place above. The second son was fit only to rule what he could see, left to find corrupted pleasure here on Earth.

  Archer began walking down the rugged incline toward the river. Brambles and branches pricked at his skin, but he soaked up the pain and buried it inside the hollowness of his rage. Sharp outcrops of granite tore at the soles of his feet, and he relished the flow of blood from his wounds.

  Jesus had walked in wilderness. So would Archer.

  The blood would leave tracks. Others could find his trail, if they were clever. Let them follow. He was born to lead, after all.

  And even if they found him, what were they going to do? Kill him?

  His laughter echoed through the trees, as deep as the glacier-cut and time-eroded valleys, the human vocal cords vibrating strangely as he threw back his head and chilled the spine of the forest.

  Sheriff Littlefield leaned back in his oak swivel chair. Not a whisper of a squeak came from the well-oiled springs. Detective Sergeant Storie shifted uneasily in the chair across the desk from him, her suit jacket rumpled. The morning light on her face showed that she had slept little and poorly. Her eyes were puffy and narrowed from the headache caused by disrupted dreams. Her hair was still wet from a morning shower, and the smell of her conditioner filled the room.

  Steam billowed from Littlefield’s cup of black coffee. He looked through it, and the steam parted and swirled as he spoke. “I talked to the folks out in Whispering Pines.”

  “Any eyewitnesses?”

  “Nobody saw anything.” He put a little too much emphasis on the word “saw.”

  “What about knowing? This isn’t the big city, where people don’t want to get involved. The old woman in the apartment next to mine knows it when my cat breaks wind. And the rest of the neighbors are clued in before the fumes disperse.”

  Littlefield winced. But he let the wince slip into what he hoped looked like a frown of concern. Storie was always calling him “old school” as it was.

  “Well, two people said they heard the bells ringing at the church,” he said.

  “So the killer celebrated by letting everybody know what he’d done?” Storie asked incredulously.

  “Must have been their imaginations. There’s no bell rope.”

  Storie leaned forward, tapping the report that lay on Littlefield’s desk. The pages were wrinkled, probably from where she had worried over them in bed while trying to fall asleep. “Nobody heard the screams, either, I suppose.”

  “All we have is what we had yesterday. I’ve got Charlie and Wade searching the hills up around the church. Wade brought his dogs. If there’s anything to be found, they’ll turn it up.”

  Storie stood. “I guess I’d better get to work. Any word from Chapel Hill yet?”

  “Hoyle says they should get around to the autopsy Monday. Ought to have preliminary results by Wednesday or so.”

  “What if it is a psycho?”

  Littlefield looked past her to the glass case that lined one wall of his office. He had a collection of confiscated drug paraphernalia that would make a doper weep with envy. Colorful bongs and ornately carved pipes adorned the shelves, along with photographs of a younger Littlefield posing next to marijuana plants. In the center of the case stood a brass cup emblazoned with a badge: the 1998 Law Enforcement Officer of the Year Award, bestowed by the North Carolina Sheriff’s Association.

  There wasn’t much crime in Pickett County. In Littlefield’s seven years as sheriff, there had been a total of two murders. In one, the killer himself called the department, and blubberingly narrated how he had just blown his wife’s head open with a .38 revolver. He was waiting on the porch when officers arrived, draining the last of his liquor, the gun cleaned and returned to its cabinet. His wife’s body was in the garage, gingerly covered with a hand-woven shawl.

  The other was Storie’s case, the one that had established her as a legitimate detective. In Littlefield’s mind, all the technical training in the world was useless until you actually snapped the cuffs on a perpetrator. And Storie had done that with style, making headlines across the region by helping prosecute the cop-turned-killer. After the trial, she gave the press a highly quotable statement: “If I had written the book, the final chapter would have been differ
ent. He would have gotten the death penalty.”

  So Littlefield was left with domestic disputes and civil disturbances. Some kids with a stereo blasting too loud, a drunk breaking windows, somebody rearranging the letters on Barkersville’s Main Street Theater marquee to spell out crude words. Or some longhair in an army jacket would sell oregano joints behind the high school. The crime stats looked great on paper, which was part of the reason Littlefield had won his Sheriff’s Association award.

  But sometimes he was afraid that Pickett County was just a little too sleepy, that underneath the shimmering overlay of tight community and good-natured harmony was a layer of moral rot. After all, people were people. Maybe having a mad killer on the loose wasn’t really so hard to imagine, not with what played out in other small towns across the country on the nightly news.

  “Dogs should be able to track it, whether it’s a mountain lion or a human.”

  Storie put her hands on her hips. “And?”

  “And what?”

  “The rest of the sentence. I get the feeling that you aren’t telling me everything.”

  Littlefield sighed and rubbed his eyes. Storie was now wide-awake, as if she had magically cast her weariness over to him. He didn’t know how to begin, but it would be unfair to withhold the information.

  Information, hell. It was flat-out rubber-room stuff. But she would find out sooner or later, if she talked to any of the oldtimers in Whispering Pines.

  “Well,” he started, “it’s about the church.”

  “The church?” Her eyebrows lifted into her wet bangs. “What about the church? Did you find something yesterday?”

  “Nothing that you could call a clue,” he lied. “Maybe you’d better sit back down.”

  Storie sat on the arm of the chair, clasping her hands together. Like Wade’s hounds, she was excited by the fresh scent of prey. Littlefield pretended to look through a stack of papers on his desk, then cleared his throat.

  “The church is haunted.”

  Littlefield could have sworn he heard his wristwatch ticking in the sudden silence, but that was impossible. His wristwatch was electronic. Even the police scanner, which sat on a stack of manuals in the corner, quit its squelching in response to his statement. He searched Storie’s face.

  Her eyes were wide, disbelieving, as if she had misheard him. But they quickly hardened back into a cool, professional gaze.

  “Okay, Sheriff,” she said with an irritated laugh. “That explains everything. A ghost sneaks out at night, maybe it’s pissed off because its sheets got mildewed in the wash, whatever. So it finds a drunk in the graveyard with a dirty magazine and a bottle of bourbon and decides to vent its wrath. That explains why we didn’t find any footprints at the scene. Case closed.”

  Littlefield folded his arms over his chest and let the wave of sarcasm sweep over him and die in the corners of the room.

  His tight lips must have aroused Detective Storie’s curiosity, because she looked as if she expected him to admit he was joking. “What?” Her mouth dropped open. “Sheesh, you’re serious, aren’t you?”

  He said nothing. The coffeemaker on a side table gurgled. He walked slowly over to the machine and refilled his cup. “Want some?” he said, lifting the pot in Storie’s direction.

  She shook her head. Littlefield had been dreading this moment ever since they’d gotten the call yesterday. The thing at the church had never left. All these years of hoping, wishing, and his best attempts at praying hadn’t made it go away.

  “In the 1860s, the church was the only one in these parts,” he began, walking to the closed door of his office. He looked at the hardware store calendar hanging there. The almanac said the moon was favorable for planting root crops.

  He continued, keeping his back to the detective. “Back then it was called Potter’s Mill Baptist Church, after the old grist mill that operated down by the river. Wendell McFall was the pastor. He was an ‘old school’ preacher”—he turned to judge her reaction and saw she was carefully controlling her expression, which didn’t surprise him—”all fire and brimstone and hell to pay. But during the Civil War, they say he started stretching his interpretation of the Gospel.

  “I don’t know how much you know about the history of these parts, but the war pretty much made a hard life harder for the people who lived here,” he said. “Pickett County men were part of the Fifty-eighth North Carolina Troops, and almost two-thirds of them were killed in action. Women were keeping up the fields and home chores at the same time. It was a bad stretch, as you can imagine. And Reverend McFall started preaching that the end of the world was nigh.”

  “Now, there’s an original idea,” Storie said. “They’ve been peddling that line for at least four thousand years.”

  Littlefield gulped his coffee, welcoming the hot sting in his throat. At least Storie hadn’t walked out of the office yet. Maybe rank had its privileges after all.

  “Some of the soldiers’ bodies were shipped back here to be buried,” Littlefield said. “Reverend McFall insisted on holding midnight vigils over the graves, because he said they would rise up and walk again otherwise. At the same time, he was preaching some nonsense about how God had two sons, and while the first one was merciful and good and holy, this second son was just the opposite.”

  “Too bad this guy wasn’t around in the 1980s,” Storie said. “He could have made a fortune selling cheesy paperbacks.”

  Littlefield ignored her. “So McFall starts warning the congregation that this second son would return to the earth, come to undo the good done by Jesus. Said the second son demanded love and sacrifice, like God’s spoiled little brat. In those times, the preacher was pretty much the leader of the community. While those ideas might seem a little flaky now, people were more imaginative back then, carrying with them all the legends and beliefs of their Scottish and English ancestors. So when a man of the cloth told you he had a vision, then you were bound to believe it. And with their fathers and brothers and sons dying and hunger spreading, the congregation must have felt that they hadn’t given enough tribute to God. Or His sons.”

  Littlefield had never discussed religion with Storie, or with much of anyone else, for that matter. He’d invited her to attend the First Baptist Church in Barkersville, but that was more of a rote politeness than a serious recruiting pitch. Littlefield himself usually went to services about once a month. He’d stopped reading the Bible after he finished his run through Sunday school and there was no longer anyone to force to him memorize verse. But he’d been raised Baptist, and he was going to die Baptist, even if he’d never devoted a minute to finding out what that really meant. Jesus was Lord, and that was that.

  His grandmother on his mother’s side used to tell the story of the red church while she snapped peas or shucked corn. He would sit at her feet, helping with the chore at his own awkward pace, listening too closely to the story to do much work. Sometimes Littlefield’s mother would come in and say, “Don’t fill Frankie’s head with that foolishness,” but Grandma would start right in again the minute Littlefield’s mother left the kitchen.

  Littlefield closed his eyes and tried to hear her voice in his mind. But it was no use. He fumbled for eloquent words, found none. “McFall was the one who painted the church red. Said that would bring the first son around to save them, to defeat the second son. Plus the congregation had to start meeting at midnight on Sunday instead of in the morning. By this time, according to the way the oldtimers tell it, McFall was feverish and white as a sheet. He’d stand in the pulpit, a dozen candles lighting up the old wooden interior of the church, and he’d describe his visions. He’d go into convulsions and rant about sin and violent ways and the punishment of the wicked and false idols and a blight carried unto umpteen generations. And the strange thing was, McFall never did prescribe a remedy for this punishment. No prayers, nothing. He wasn’t even passing the plate.”

  Storie was rapt now, staring at the sheriff. He didn’t know if it was because she found the l
egend fascinating or whether she was transfixed by her boss’s making a fool of himself. “So this second son...was he supposed to be the devil or something?”

  Littlefield shook his head. “McFall believed this second son had a power equal to Jesus’. And according to my grandmother, McFall had most of the congregation believing it. So the preacher was riding high, dishing out his revelations while the congregation cowered speechless in the pews. And I guess he started getting a little delusional after that.”

  “After that? Like he wasn’t before?”

  “He started taking advantage,” Littlefield continued. “Said he was the instrument of the Lord, and only he could protect them from the second son. Well, he got a woman pregnant, the wife of a soldier who was off fighting at Gainesville. People started whispering then, though they were too afraid to confront the preacher. Then, one morning following a midnight service, one of the parishioners found her young child mutilated at the altar of the red church.

  “Well, as crazy as the preacher had been acting, they figured he had played Abraham or something. Only God didn’t tell him to stop as he raised the knife, so he chopped up the child as a sacrifice. That Sunday night in 1864, the parishioners showed up for service and hauled the preacher from the pulpit. Somebody climbed up the bell rope and cut it loose, threw it out on the ground where the others stood holding torches.”

  “They didn’t,” Storie cut in. Littlefield couldn’t tell if she was still mocking him. He decided to bust on through the tale and get it over with. He could feel his neck blushing.

  “You know that dogwood by the church door? They hanged him from it.”

  “So that was that. Except his ghost still haunts the church, right?”

  “I guess the Potters and the Mathesons and the Buchanans started feeling a little guilty and decided that maybe ‘an eye for an eye’ was all fine and dandy, but once a sin was paid for, all was forgiven. They buried him out in the woods, covered him with rocks in a place long forgotten. But they said prayers over his grave even if he didn’t deserve them. They even took care of the woman he got pregnant.”