The Narrow Gate: A Supernatural Thriller (Solom Book 2)

by Scott Nicholson

  “Good one, Mom, now let’s get out of here,” Jett said.

  “We’re not done yet.”

  “Do we have to?”

  “You want to be able to sleep, don’t you?”

  Jett glanced up the loft stairs as if looking into an endless cave. “Okay, but you have to go first.”

  Katy veered around the goats and shined the flashlight along the barn walls and up to the loft door. Jett had encountered the Scarecrow Man up there, and even now she wasn’t sure whether it was a supernatural creature or merely Gordon dressed up in his murdering costume. But it certainly was Gordon who attacked Mark up there with a scythe, and the blood still cast dark stains on some of the framework.

  What the goats couldn’t reach with their tongues, that is.

  Katy grabbed the pitchfork—it was old habit by now—and let its tines lead her up the creaky steps. The goats bleated contentedly below, their musky smell filling the air. Jett followed with the walking stick. Jett visited the loft often during the day to use her cell phone and didn’t take the routine as seriously anymore, thinking it boring, but Katy considered it an important part of their healing.

  You don’t want to be jumping at shadows the rest of your life. And neither do I.

  Katy pushed open the loft door with a groan of rusty hinges. She swept the flashlight beam over the bales of hay that Odus and Ray Tester had stacked there over the summer. They’d made a deal with Ray to cut two of their pastures in exchange for half the hay, and Ray paid Odus for helping. Katy didn’t want to drive a tractor, much less buy one, so the arrangement worked out well. The store of hay was plenty enough to get the goats through winter.

  But hay wasn’t the reason they were here. Katy waited until Jett was in the loft and then she spotlighted the two figures hanging from baling wire from the rafters. The first was a limp stack of rags with a burlap sack face, features crudely stitched. The fabric had ripped and brown cotton leaked from the opening. A broad-brimmed straw hat was perched atop the head, and dirty work gloves were sewn to the ends of each flannel shirt sleeve. The faded jeans were tied into thin, footless bundles at the end of each leg. Katy liked to reassure herself that, even if the Smith family scarecrow managed to free itself of the wire from which it hung, she’d still be able to outrun it.

  The second scarecrow was the one she’d originally found inside a crate in the attic of the farmhouse. This one wore a long linen dress and apron, clearly more feminine in its shape than its counterpart. Even with the hay dust floating thick as snuff, the odor of lilacs was piercing and sweetly distinct. This scarecrow held its cheesecloth head in its “hands,” a small red smile stitched in the white fabric.

  “See?” Katy said. “Still there.”

  “Why don’t we just burn them?”

  “It just feels…wrong. Here in the barn, we can keep track of them. But if we can’t see them, then we have no idea what they’re up to.”

  “And you have to face your fear or the fear wins. Blah blah blah.”

  “Hey, we’re winning here. We’ve got the hang of this farm life, lots of fresh air and sunshine, organic produce and eggs, and a flock of goats that practically worship us.”

  “‘Tribe,’ Mom. A group of goats is called a ‘tribe.’ Sheep and chickens are flocks.”

  “Oh, right, Science Girl. Remind me why you’re making a B in that class again?”

  “To tick you off. Why else?” Jett tapped the walking stick against one of the empty wooden barrels. “No bodies in there. That’s a good sign.”

  “Looks good to me. What say we head back to the house for some no-bake cookies?”

  Jett gave her a look. “You don’t want to bake? Wow, you really are getting back to normal.”

  Katy wasn’t sure what constituted “normal” anymore. She might have been possessed by the spirit of Rebecca, Gordon’s first wife, but she didn’t want to dwell on it. If you started down that road, you began doubting every thought and action until you were deliberately doing things just to be sure you weren’t someone else.

  As Jett headed down the loft stairs, Katy gave the loft one last scan with the light. She caught movement at the edge of the beam, and she focused it on the scarecrow man. It appeared to be swaying just a little, even though the air in the loft was still.

  And she couldn’t be sure, but its black-stitched smile seemed to be turned up a bit more in the corners.

  Don’t start down that road.

  She closed the door and followed Jett through the goats, which were now kneeling near one another to sleep.

  Like one big happy family.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Odus Hampton pulled his battered Chevy Blazer into the general store’s rutted parking lot. It was a quarter before nine in the morning, which almost guaranteed he’d be Sarah’s first customer of the day. He figured on buying a cup of coffee and a honey bun, something to kick the hangover out of his head before he went up to Bethel Springs. In addition to odd jobs, he worked part-time for Crystal Mountain Bottlers, a Greensboro company that siphoned off fresh mountain spring water, shipped it to a factory for treatment, then charged idiots more than a buck a bottle. Even with all those tricks the Arabs were pulling, gas was still cheaper per gallon than the stuff Odus pumped through a hose into Crystal Mountain’s tankers.

  He stepped from the Blazer with a silent groan, his ligaments tight. Maybe if he stuck to spring water instead of Old Crow bourbon, he wouldn’t feel like a sixty-year-old twenty years too soon. He stabbed a Marlboro into his mouth and fired it up, counting the number of steps to the front door to see if he could get half the smoke finished. Even good old Sarah had given in to the “No smoking” bullshit, and though she sold two dozen brands of cigarettes, pipe tobacco, and snuff, she wouldn’t let her customers use the products in her store.

  That whole tobacco thing was as bad as the Arabs and their gas, only this time it was the federal government turning the screws. Did away with price support so cigarette companies had farmers by the balls, then taxed the devil out of the stuff on the back end.

  Odus coughed and spat as he climbed the porch steps. The general store wasn’t as grand as it had been in his childhood, when he’d bounced up those steps with a quarter in his pocket and all manner of choices.

  A quarter could buy you a Batman comic book and a candy bar, or a Pepsi-Cola and a moon pie, or a pack of baseball cards and a bubble gum cigar. Now all a quarter did was weigh down your pants. And Odus’s pants needed all the help they could get, what with his belly pushing down on his belt like a watermelon balanced on a clothesline.

  The front door was open. That was funny. Sarah always kept it closed until nine on the dot, but if you were a regular, you could knock and go on in if you showed up a little early. Odus took a final tug of his cigarette and threw it into the sand-filled bucket with all the other unfinished butts. He peered through the screen door, looking for signs of movement.

  “Sarah?”

  Maybe she was in back, checking on inventory or stacking up some canned preserves that bore the Solom General Store label but were actually contracted to a police auxiliary group over in Westmoreland County. Odus called again. Maybe Sarah had gone over to her house, which sat just beside the store. Decided she’d need a helping of prunes to move things along, maybe. At her age, nature needed a little push now and then.

  Odus went to the deli counter at the rear of the store. The coffee pot sat on top in a little blue tray so customers could help themselves. Non-dairy creamer (which was about like non-cow hamburger if you stopped to think about it), straws, white packets of sugar, and pink packets of artificial sweetener were scattered across the tray. The coffee maker was turned off, and the pot was empty and as cold as a witch’s heart in December. Sarah always made coffee first thing.

  A twinge rippled through Odus’s colon, as if a tiny salamander were turning flips down there. It might have been a cheap whiskey fart gathering steam, or it might have been the first stirring of unease. Either way, Odus felt
it was time for some fresh morning air.

  As he passed the register on the way out, he saw Sarah’s frail body curled across a couple of sacks of feed corn. Her eyes were partially open, her mouth slack, a thick strand of drool hanging from one corner of her gray lips.

  Odus went around the counter and knelt on the buckled hardwood floor, feeling for her pulse. All he felt was his own, the hangover beating through his thumb. He turned her face up and put his cheek near her mouth. A stagnant breeze stirred, with that peculiar old-person’s smell of pine, denture paste, and decay. She was alive.

  “Sarah,” Odus said, patting her cheek, trying to remember what those emergency techs did in the television shows. All he ever watched were the crime scene shows, and those dealt with people who were already dead. He turned back to the counter and was searching among the candy wrappers, invoices, and business cards for the phone when he heard a soft moan.

  Sarah blinked once, a film over her eyes like spider webs. She tried to sit up, but Odus eased her back down.

  “Sarah, what happened?”

  Her mouth opened, and with her wrinkled neck and glazed eyes, she looked like a fledging robin trying to suck a digested worm from its mother’s beak.

  “Easy, now,” Odus said, his mouth drying, wishing Solom wasn’t in the dry part of the county and a cold beer was in the cooler alongside the seventeen kinds of cola.

  “Hat,” Sarah said.

  “Yes, ma’am, it’s sure hot for September,” Odus said. “You must have worked up an early sweat. Overdid it a little. But you just sit and rest now.”

  Sarah slapped at his chest with a bony hand. “Haaaat.”

  “I know. I’ll get you some water.”

  Sarah grabbed his forearm, her fingers like the talon of a red hawk. She sat up, her face rigid. “You damned drunken fool,” she said, spittle flying from her mouth. “The man in the hat. He’s back.”

  Sarah’s eyes closed and she collapsed onto the gray, coarse sacks, her breathing shallow but steady.

  Odus renewed his search for the phone. Going on about a hat, of all things. She must have suffered a stroke and blown her senses. Most males in these parts wore a hat, and it wasn’t unknown for them to come back now and again.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Maters.

  Those blessed tomatoes were going to be the death of her.

  Betsy Ward canned, stewed, frozen, and dried about thirty pounds of those red, ugly things. The blight hit hard because of the wet summer, and the first frosts killed the plants, but her husband Arvel brought in a double armload just before the big autumn die-off. Now tomatoes sat in rows across the windowsill, along the counter, and on the pantry shelves, turning from green to pink to full sinful red, with the occasional leaking black spot. The thing about tomatoes was that no bug or cutworm would attack them. The plants were as poisonous as belladonna, and bugs were smart enough to know that maters would kill you. But people were a lot dumber than bugs.

  Betsy wiped the sweat away with a dirty towel. She’d been born in Solom and managed to get off the mountain for a year to attend community college. She’d wanted to be a typist then, maybe get on with Westridge University and draw vacation and retirement. But Arvel had come along with his pick-up and Doc Watson tapes and rusty mufflers and he’d seemed like the Truth for a nineteen-year-old mountain girl, and then one night he forgot the rubber and nine months later they were married and the baby came out with the cord wrapped around its neck. They tried a few times after that, but now all they had was a long piece of property and a garden and so many tomatoes that Betsy wanted to grab Arvel’s shotgun and blow them all to puree.

  She looked out the window and saw Gordon’s widow checking the mailbox. Even after more than a year on the farm, the woman still wore that big-city, washed-out look, as if she couldn’t wander into daylight without a full plate of make-up. Still, she seemed harmless enough, and not as standoffish as the other outsiders who had flooded the valley since Betsy’s knee-high days. And Betsy was sick to death of her kitchen, anyway. She flicked the slimy seeds from her fingers and headed for the door, determined to gossip with her neighbor.

  Three mailboxes stood at the mouth of the gravel drive. Arvel’s place was the closest to the highway, followed by the Smith farm, then by a plot owned by a fellow Betsy never met, although she’d peeked in his mailbox and learned that his name was Alex Eakins. A pretty young woman drove by to visit him about once a week or so, probably up to fornication and other sins.

  “Howdy,” Betsy called from the porch.

  The redhead looked up from the box where she was thumbing through a stack of envelopes. Her eyes were bloodshot and weepy-looking. Betsy wondered if she was a drinker. Gordon Smith wouldn’t have stood for too much of that behavior, even though he turned out not to be as harmless as everyone in Solom—Betsy included—had figured.

  “Hi, Mrs. Ward,” She smiled with nice, straight city teeth. Her ankles were way too skinny and would probably snap plumb in half if she ever hitched a mule to a plow and cut a straight furrow. Still, she looked a little tough, like a piece of rawhide that had been licked and stuck out in the sun. And she’d walked the quarter-mile to the mailbox instead of jumping in a car. “How are the tomatoes this year?”

  “The Lord was way too good to us,” Betsy, thinking the exact opposite, but such things weren’t said in God-fearing country. “How you liking Solom these days?”

  “We’re getting used to it. A little different from Charlotte, though.”

  Betsy wasn’t so sure the redhead meant that first part, since the corners of her mouth were turned down and her eyes twitched like she hadn’t got a wink of sleep. “So you and your girl gonna be staying on a while longer?”

  “We don’t know yet. The case may go to court.”

  “Then it’s going to depend on which judge you get. Johnson is an honest man, but Overcash is related to the Smiths. You’d probably lose out if he’s holding the gavel.”

  “We’re just taking it day by day,” the woman said. Betsy knew the woman had stayed with the name of Katy Logan, because she’d never taken the Smith name in matrimony, and her daughter carried a different name yet. Big-city nonsense, that’s what it was. Who could keep up with who?

  Betsy also knew the woman subscribed to foolish magazines like Money, National Geographic, and Time when she should have been reading the farmer’s almanac and seed catalogs. A woman who stuffed her head with information instead of wisdom was doomed in Solom. And Katy had survived one close call already.

  She might not be so lucky when the Horseback Preacher came back around. Especially since Harmon Smith was Gordon’s ancestor and just might want to lay his own claim to the family land.

  Arvel’s border collie, Digger, dragged itself from under the shade of the porch and stood by the steps, giving a bark to show he’d been on duty all along.

  “Solom’s beautiful this time of year,” the redhead said. She turned her face to the sun and breathed deeply. “All these mountains and fresh air. It’s still a little strange at night to fall asleep without lights burning everywhere.”

  “Oh, we got lights,” Betsy said. “God’s lights. Them little specks in the sky.”

  The redhead stopped by Betsy’s gate. Digger sniffed and growled.

  “Hold back, Digger,” Betsy said. “It’s neighbors.”

  “The constellations,” the redhead said, her face flushing a little. “You can see them all the way down to the horizon. In my old neighborhood, you saw maybe four stars at night.”

  “I don’t mean to pry, but how’s Jett’s dad?” Betsy most certainly did mean to pry, but she figured the Lord would forgive a little white lie in service of a greater good.

  “He’s fully recovered now, although his left arm is not as strong as it used to be. He says it’s all history now.”

  History just means you lived too long, Betsy thought. Valley families have made their peace with the past. And with the Horseback Preacher. The families that are st
ill around, anyhow.

  In a way, Betsy admired Katy standing up to her husband, even if it defied the Old Testament. Why, if Betsy so much as opened her mouth in anger to Arvel, he would slap her across the cheek and send her to the floor. In the Free Will church, she kept her trap shut except for the occasional hymn or moan of praise, and she sat to the left with the other wives and the children. It was important to know your place in God’s scheme of things. First there was God, then the Horseback Preacher, and then the husband.

  Still, the skinny woman caused two men to fight to the death over her. The fact that one was a lunatic and the other a drughead didn’t make it any less impressive.

  Katy not only walked away a widow, she’d done it to the tune of a property deed. Maybe Betsy could learn a thing or two from her.

  Digger growled again, sensing Betsy’s unease.

  “How’s Jett liking school?” she asked, happy to change the subject.

  “Okay so far. You know how kids are.”

  Betsy knew, despite never having raised one. “It’s tough at that age when the boys start sniffing around. Like Digger here after a bone, but nowhere near as genuine.”

  Katy laughed. “I think she can take care of herself.”

  If you two stood up to Gordon Smith gone crazy with a scythe and the Horseback Preacher all in the same night, I don’t much doubt that at all.

  “Well, I’d best get back to my canning.”

  “Could you show me how to do it someday?”

  “Sure thing.” Though Betsy had no intention of giving away any family secrets.

  “It’s supposed to be a cold winter, so it’s good to stock up.”

  Betsy gave her an appraising look. Maybe she wasn’t so dumb after all. “Squirrels hoarding like crazy, the stripes on the woolly worms are mostly black, and August was foggy as all get-out. Signs like that means bad weather ahead.

  “Well, best to be prepared either way.” Katy waved and added a “Good doggie” for Digger’s sake, although Digger was having none of it. Betsy left the dog on the porch to encourage Katy on her way. The bony woman made her way up the gravel road, grabbing at the goldenrod that bloomed along the ditch.