A century after he was murdered and his body scattered across three different graves, the Reverend Harmon Smith has returned to the little mountain town of Solom to dispense justice.
THE NARROW GATE:
(Solom #2)
By Scott Nicholson
Solom #3: The Preacher at Amazon or Amazon UK
Copyright ©2012 Scott Nicholson
Published by Haunted Computer Books
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CHAPTER ONE
The Blackburn River was as old as its secrets.
Geologists said it was one of the oldest rivers in the world, erupting up and cutting through the Appalachian Mountains when those ancient peaks were still young and jagged.
The people in Solom didn’t care about history books. All they saw was the slim ribbon of silver that cut into the granite below the brown banks of the hilltops. The water brought sustenance in the spring, kept their stock alive in the summer, and in September it shot its narrow currents among the yellow and white stones. It slowed to a trickle in January, only to bust out white again during the March melt. The water, like the humans who clustered around its shores, moved with the tug of forces beyond their understanding.
The community of Solom took its name from bad grammar. Some say the place used to be called Solomon Branch, after the Old Testament king. Others said it was Solomn, a misspelling of the word “solemn,” which meant everything from formal and serious in a liturgical sense to grave and somber, as in a funeral ceremony. The permanent valley settlers had eventually trimmed off the silent letter at the end, most never even realizing it was there. If it sounded like Solom, then it was Solom.
The original residents were the buffalo that trampled ruts across the hilltops as they made their way from Kentucky in the summer to the Piedmont flatlands of North Carolina in the winter. The herds numbered in the thousands, and the ground shook as their hooves bit into the earth. The Cherokee and Catawba visited the region only in the fall, when meat was available. Otherwise, the natives had the good sense to stay off those cold and forlorn mountaintops. Then the whites came along and poured across the slopes like albino fire ants on a brown sugar hill.
Daniel Boone and the early European trappers and hunters were cold-natured enough to hang out on the trails and slaughter their quarry across the seasons, with no sense of a circular food chain. In a few short decades, the buffalo and elk that sustained the natives for centuries were gone, remembered only in the occasional place name or flea-ridden floor skin.
The Cherokee endured their own problems, driven at gunpoint to Oklahoma, where the landscape was as alien to them as if they had been dropped onto the surface of Mars. The federal government later felt guilty enough to grant them control of gambling casinos, but by then their heritage and souls had been all but lost. They dreamed of spiritual journeys where they met up with buffalo, but they woke up to a modern world that encouraged hatred in every sector of society, especially against the outcast.
Not that modern Solom paid any attention. The inhabitants were mostly the offspring of farm and lumber workers, the women thick and faithful, the men prone to drink when they weren’t in church. All were raised with a sense of duty, and church records were often the final statement on the quality of a life lived.
A man’s obituary was set down by a barely literate family member, and if the man lived a good life, he was noted as a solid provider, a friend of the church and community, and an honest trader. If he failed in any of those areas, his obituary was nothing more than an opportunity to question the eventual resting place of his soul.
Women were measured within a narrower yet more sophisticated set of parameters. Were her hips broad enough to bear a goodly number of children? Did she sit quietly on her side of church, raising her voice only at the appropriate time, after the males established the proper cadence? Did she keep the Bible on her lap instead of the shelf? Did her obituary list more than a dozen grandchildren?
But Solom’s most notorious resident made such boundaries seem foolish. No obit had ever been written for Harmon Smith, and his name was marked in no family Bible.
Many testimonials had been recorded about the work of Good Harmon Smith, a Methodist minister who crossed denominational lines in the late 1800s, whose horse Old Saint touched half of three states. A rival minister, the Rev. Duncan Blackburn, attended to the needs of Episcopalians and the few mountain Catholics. Blackburn earned a resting place on holy ground while Smith died on the slopes of what became known as Lost Ridge.
The public records said Smith was on his way to a January bedside appointment with a dying widow when a blizzard swept down from Canadian tundra and paid his holy debt in full. In the twenty-first century, Duncan Blackburn was featured in a line-drawing portrait buried in the back pages of a university library book while Harmon Smith occupied graves in three different churchyards. No one knew where Smith’s real remains were buried, but each of the congregations hoped it wasn’t their own sacred ground that had been sullied.
And some questioned if there were any remains left worth returning to the dirt.
But this was Solom, home of an old river, and questions only came from those who didn’t know any better. From outsiders, and newcomers, and those who heard the soft sound of distant twilight hoof beats.
Duncan Blackburn was history, but Harmon Smith still lived. Whenever a branch rustled in the dark forest, whenever a barn door made a slow sweep on rusty hinges, whenever an old woman needed to scare a wayward child into proper behavior, then Harmon Smith’s name was invoked. As a dead man, he’d gathered a much larger flock than he had during his days as a horseback preacher.
And on this October night, it was time to ride again.
CHAPTER TWO
It was seven minutes before his return when Sarah Jeffers ran her broom along the baseboard of the counter.
Mouse doodie.
The counter stood by the front door of Solom General Store and was dark maple, the top scarred by two million transactions. Most of the lights were turned off for closing time, and the dolls, tools, mountain crafts, and just plain junk that hung from the ceiling beams threw long shadows against the walls. After all her years as proprietor, the aroma of tobacco, woodstove smoke, licorice, and shoe polish had seeped into her skin like water.
The store was built during the town’s heyday just before World War I, when the timber industry made its assault on the local hardwoods. The train station had been a bustling place, bringing Sarah’s grandparents to the mountains from Pennsylvania. The Jeffers, who had once gone by the family name of Jaffe, built the store from the ground up, collecting the creek stones for the foundation, trading and bartering for stock, even breeding their own work force. They were Jewish but no one paid that any mind, because they kept closed services in their living room and the store remained open on both Saturdays and Sundays.
When the forest slopes were nothing but stumps and the timber cutters moved on, the sawmill shut down. After that, it was like the hands ran backwards on the clock. The earthen dam slowly eroded on Blackburn River, and the little housing settlement that sprang up around the mill began succumbing to the gray and ceaseless weight of gravity. Though the first Fords made occasional visits over the dusty mountain roads, mostly driven by lumber barons who wanted to check on their investments, the town’s slow exodus was almost entirely via horse-and-wagon. By the Great Depression, Solom was little more than a whistle stop on the Virginia Creeper railroad line. Then came the great 1940 flood, sweeping away the station and a third of the remaining houses, killing a doz
en people in the process.
Sarah’s grandparents died within weeks of one another, and the three children fought over who should stay and run the store. The short straw belonged to Sarah’s father Elisha, who promptly took on a Primitive Baptist wife, Laurel Lee, because she knew addition and subtraction and silence. Through it all the general store stood on its little rise above the river, the stock changing with the times. Chesterfield tobacco pouches and Bugler papers gave way to Marlboro tailor-mades, horehound stick candy disappeared from the shelves in favor of Baby Ruth bars. A Sears & Roebuck catalog by the register once allowed a mountain family to order practically anything a New York city slicker could buy, but that had been replaced by a computer during the Clinton era. Sarah didn’t trust it, even naming it “Slick Willy” and suspected it of swallowing a dollar once in a while, and the screen stayed black unless Greta, the thick-ankled college student who worked part-time, was on the clock.
The computer was one of the few modern touches, besides the sheer volume of cheap imported crafts designed to look folksy. The wall adornments—rusty advertising signs, farm implements, and shelves of old ripple glass bottles—furthered the illusion that the general store was lost in a time, a nostalgic reminder of more carefree days. Sarah didn’t buy the illusion, but she sold it. Times were better raking in leisure dollars rather than dunning the local folks for nickels.
Sarah had grown up in the store, dusting the shelves and tallying pickled eggs in her plain cotton shift. She remembered when the store’s first indoor toilet was installed, and though as a four-year-old she’d suffered a great fear of the roaring flush of water, she’d had an even greater fear of hanging her bare bottom over that stinky black hole in the outhouse. Even back then, she’d pushed a broom, and she asked her mother about the numerous little black needles amid the stray hair, spilled sugar, dried grass, and dirt.
“Mouse doodie,” Laurel Lee Jeffers said. “A mouse goes to heaven in a country store.”
Sarah always thought of those mice as happy, blessed creatures, scurrying under the floorboards, worrying their way through sacks of feed grain, chewing into the corners of cornflake boxes. But after nearly seventy years of sweeping up their damned doodie, she was about ready to wish them to a Baptist hell.
But at least the mice gave her something to blame when strange sounds echoed through the aisles. She didn’t like being in the store alone, but she could barely afford her two part-time helpers. So she’d spent the past decades running the broom, ignoring the evidence of her ears, and not thinking about the Horseback Preacher, the Scarecrow Man, and all the other tales her mother told her.
The bell over the screen door rang. It was ten minutes after seven, past closing time, but she hadn’t locked the door. The porch light bathed the deck in yellow light, and Sarah squinted against it at the bulky shadow.
“Howdy,” she said. It was still tourist season in the mountains, although the Floridians and New Yorkers were usually tucked away in their Titusville hotel rooms by now, afraid of getting a mosquito bite, or else squirreled away in their Happy Hollow rental cabins at $150 a night. The kayak and rafting trade from Sue Norwood’s little shop had boomed along the river, helping the general store keep its head above water. Seemed like every time the business wanted to sink down to the sandy bottom and take a nice, long nap, some money-making scheme came along and dragged it back to the surface for another gasp. Usually the scheme relied on outsiders, because there wasn’t enough cash in Solom to stock the old outhouse with paper.
The shadow stood in the door, hands in pockets, the head obscured by an outdated hat with a wide brim. All Sarah wanted was to get a little of his money and send him on his way in time for the latest rerun of “Seinfeld,” delivered via her little satellite dish.
“Can I get you something?” she asked, glad to be shut of mouse doodie for the moment. Her family’s cultured diction had given way to a mountain twang over the years, partly unconsciously and partly to help sell the down-home illusion.
The figure shuffled forward. People in these parts, even the visitors, usually answered when addressed. But occasionally a creep came through looking for the best place in the neighborhood for fast money. She did a mental calculation, figured the register held maybe eighty bucks. Worth killing somebody over, these days.
Sarah leaned her broom against the counter, flicking her eyes toward the shotgun she kept on the second shelf beneath the register. The shotgun was well-oiled but hadn’t been fired in twenty years. Currently it was covered by stacks of the High Country News, a free weekly that was such wretched oatmeal she couldn’t give it away. She’d hidden the newspapers, not wanting to disappoint the friendly young man with the crewcut who delivered them early Thursday mornings. She figured there was at least two months of bad copy between her and the firearm.
She’d have to talk her way out of this one. “Got a special on canned ham,” she said. “Nine dollars. Let the missus take an evening off from the kitchen.”
Nothing, not even a grunt. The man was three steps inside. She wished she’d left more lights on. It was the electrical cooperative’s fault. In her father’s day, the Blackburn dam ran a generator, cranking out enough juice to light up the store and two dozen homes. Then the co-op came in and hooked five counties together, and you were either on the grid or off, no in between. After that, the power bill had gotten higher every month.
Sarah could make out the man’s form now, the collar of his coat turned up even though the fall had yet to turn chilly. The front brim of the hat was angled down, keeping the face in shadows.
The stranger stood there, his breath like the whistle of a distant train. Something creaked in the hardware section, in the back corner of the store that Sarah avoided after sundown. Things went wrong in that corner: alkaline batteries leaked, boxes of nails busted open for no good reason, the fingers of work gloves somehow grew holes.
Her father sold guns, and the ammunition used to be locked away in that corner, but one afternoon some of the bullets somehow got hot and exploded, sending lead fragments whizzing over the heads of the customers. Sarah wished for a magic bullet right now, one that would knock the stranger’s hat off his head.
Because the hat didn’t belong.
“Your first trip to Solom?” Sarah said, keeping her voice steady. She eased toward the counter, closer to the register and the shotgun. She’d been driving some tacks into the shelf so she could hang her metal signs, the ones that said “A Bad Day of Fishing Beats a Good Day of Work” and “I Ain’t Old, I’m Just Experienced.” She leaned on the counter with one elbow, her other arm reaching for the claw hammer. It felt good in her hand.
“You staying up at the Tester B & B?” she asked the mute man. “Or the Happy Hollow cabins?”
Sarah brought the hammer closer to her hip, imagining its arc as she brought it into the dark, unseen face. Her lips creased into the tired, welcoming smile she gave to first-time customers, an expression meant to elicit pity and a desire to help out a little old lady through the kindness of a loose wallet. “You ain’t from around here, are you?”
The stranger stepped into the light, lifted his hat, and smiled. “Once I was,” he said, in a voice as patient as a river and as deep as Satan’s driest well. “But that was a while back.”
Sarah dropped the hammer, nearly breaking her big toe.
CHAPTER THREE
“Not bad, Mom.” Jett Draper crunched on the Banquet fried chicken, comforted by the salty crust that came from a factory batter-dipping process instead of a creepy old family recipe.
“Glad you like it,” Katy Logan said. “How’s school?”
“Boring.”
“Only boring people get bored.”
“Okay, then.” Jett started to wipe the grease from her lips with a shirt sleeve, but Katy gave a pre-emptive glare of disapproval. “Made a B on my history test, started a new etching in Art, and didn’t see a single spooky scarecrow or dead preacher.”
“Jett, please.” Katy
stood and began clearing the table, obviously dodging the issue yet again. A year had passed since Gordon Smith freaked out and attacked the both of them, as well as Jett’s dad, and besides the statement she’d been forced to give to the police after Gordon’s death, she’d barely mentioned it.
In some ways, she was just as much of a Stepford Mom now as she was back then, Jett thought.
All of them lied about what really happened. According to the official police report, Gordon attacked her dad in a jealous rage and was killed in an act of self-defense. Even though the Smith family had lived in the area for generations, he was enough of an oddball that nobody was surprised that he’d launched into a murderous rampage. Jett could still hear the whispers in the high school hallways and cold eyes followed them down the aisles of the old general store, but Jett made the most of her newfound celebrity.
She’d amped up her Goth act even more, with black, thick-soled Doc Martens and a few extra chains on her leather jacket. The three piercings in her left ear might not have stood out in the big city, but in Solom they gave a clear signal that Jett most emphatically wasn’t a native. A streak of bright blue ran down one side of her dark hair, and Mom finally relented and let her wear eye shadow and lipstick. Three years away from college, she was fully prepared to push the buttons of the hillbillies and farm boys and the occasional stuck-up tourist who rolled though the valley to look at the colorful autumn foliage.
“Is that still one of those things we don’t talk about?” Jett taunted. “So your husband tried to kill you. Big deal. Happens all the time.”
“I’m past that,” Katy said, standing at the sink with her back turned to Jett.
“Are you past the part where we were saved by a supernatural preacher from hell?”
Katy let the dishes clank together. “I’d rather not talk about it.”
The Narrow Gate: A Supernatural Thriller (Solom Book 2) Page 1
