“What has this preacher ever done for you?” the scarecrow/Gordon-thing called to the crowd.
“Killed us, that’s what,” shouted Kim Deister. “And we’re sick and tired of it.”
Katy reached Jett and tried to pull her back, but Jett stood transfixed. Though it was difficult to tell where the burnt eyeholes of the scarecrow mask were focused, Katy felt burned by his stare, which was brighter and hotter than the beams of the collective headlights. Katy could have sworn the black yarn of lips arched into a sneer.
If Gordon’s spirit was in there somewhere, he no doubt harbored a special hatred for the wife who’d betrayed him.
“Ah, my sweet little scapegoats,” the scarecrow said to Katy and Jett. “Come to offer yourself to the old gods? Come to give yourself to the soil so that Solom may be fruitful and multiply? You thwarted me last year, but maybe now you have accepted your place?”
The scarecrow put a hand on the Horseback Preacher’s shoulders and forced him to his knees. The preacher stooped so that his black hat covered his face, submitting to the scarecrow.
The scarecrow raised its voice to the crowd. “Solom killed him a hundred and fifty years ago, but he didn’t learn his lesson. He’s not wanted here.”
Claude scrabbled the final few feet to the granite slab, pushing past complaining goats. “Take me,” Claude said. “I’m the chosen one.”
“No,” Odus said, guiding his horse among the capricious herd. “This is my mission.”
“Get off that horse and come back here,” Sarah called to him. “I can’t get a good shot with your big butt in the way.”
To Katy, the old woman sounded almost grateful to have an excuse not to fire. Any of them could have attacked the Horseback Preacher if that was their intention. He was exposed on the rock, presumably blinded by the glaring lights, unless his vision was guided by unnatural laws.
Those at his back wouldn’t have to worry about being seen and marked by whatever wrath he might unleash. It was as if the people, like the goats, were under some sort of spell, transfixed despite their hatred of the entity that brought such pain and suffering to their community.
Or maybe they were more frightened of the Scarecrow Man than the Horseback Preacher. Better the devil you know.
“See?” the scarecrow said, towering over the Horseback Preacher. “Look how frail, this pathetic creature of the cloth. Look at the thing that has kept you cowering in your beds at night.”
The scarecrow reached down a gloved hand and yanked off the preacher’s hat, exposing the wiry gray hairs that curled over the pale, crenulated skull. The scarecrow sailed the hat into the herd of goats, where it caught on the horn of one and hung as if tossed atop a coat rack.
“Look upon his wonder and be disillusioned,” the scarecrow shouted, his voice echoing off the granite boulders. “Know him by his fruits.”
Katy wanted to drag Jett back to the Subaru but found herself as rapt and awestruck as the rest. This close to the drama, she detected not only the electric aura of the Horseback Preacher, but the scarecrow’s corrupt radiance as well. She couldn’t deny the magnetism of his authority.
“What’s he doing and why doesn’t that policeman stop him?” Jett whispered.
“Because the policeman’s human,” Katy said. “Like the rest of us.”
“Gordon needs to die for real.”
“That’s not Gordon, honey.”
“Like hell. See what an asshole he is?”
The scarecrow slammed the preacher facedown against the stone and planted a scuffed boot on his back, grinding the heel into the preacher’s yielding flesh.
Claude tried to climb up onto the stone slab. It was slick with dew, and his wounded arm prevented him from gaining solid purchase in the crevices. He lodged one boot into a crack and was about to haul himself up onto the impromptu stage when one of the goats in the front row, whose brown facial fur made a raccoon mask, lurched forward and snagged his other leg, tugging on the cuff of his jeans.
Another goat, this one with crooked beige horns, pushed forward and began sniffing his calf. “Help me,” Claude called.
A hissing thwack pierced a hole in the night, and the goat with the beige horns let out a bruised bleat of shock. The feathers of an arrow tip jutted from its rib cage, just above its heart. It staggered back two steps, wobbled, and collapsed as if its legs were pipe cleaners.
“No!” the scarecrow moaned, as though the injury had been inflicted on it instead of the goat—as if they were connected somehow.
“The fucker munched my stash, man,” Alex said. “That was private property. My property.”
The goats near the one that had fallen began sniffing the warm corpse. One poked out a tentative tongue and licked the wound. The herd began bleating and lowing, giving off restless snorts, more of them rising on their knobby legs.
“Come on, Jett,” Katy said. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
A grizzled billy goat, one eye made milky by blindness, nipped the air a couple of inches from Katy’s leg, brown teeth clacking with menace. She eyed the distance back to the Subaru. The rock slab was closer, but that would put them within the scarecrow’s reach. The scarecrow pointed his sickle at Alex, his boot still pressing on the preacher’s back.
Words issued from behind the scarecrow’s mask: “You should forgive those who trespass against you.”
“Maybe you should take better care of your fences,” Alex said, notching another arrow.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Sarah didn’t quite mean to squeeze the trigger.
At least, that’s what she told herself. But an old woman’s reflexes, like all her physical responses, tended to decline with every go-round of the sun. The recoil nearly knocked her to the ground, but she wobbled back into balance.
The echo of the gun’s report slapped off the granite boulders and rolled through the trees. Blue-gray smoke swirled in the Jeep’s headlights, and the strong bite of cordite drowned out the moist humus smell of the mountain and the stench of the goats. The frail bones of her shoulder ached from the gun’s kick.
She’d meant to take down those goats nearest to Claude, because they looked ready to chomp down on his legs. But what really flipped her was spying the goat that raided her store. She didn’t usually carry a grudge, and believed all God’s creature’s had a rightful place in the world. But this was the same world that held monsters like the Horseback Preacher and that scarecrow thing.
In that frozen moment, Sarah had time to absorb tiny details just as the night exploded: Sue Norwood opening the driver’s-side door of the Jeep; Odus sitting tall on the bareback horse and looking around like a rustler wondering where to direct the stampede; Alex Eakins taking aim at either the scarecrow or the Horseback Preacher; Claude scrambling onto the flat slab of stone.
Sarah broke down the barrel and thumbed out the warm, spent shell, reaching in her blouse pocket for a fresh round.
+++
Katy sensed the change in the animals after one of their number had fallen.
The night was charged with rage and confusion. Katy heard the soft snick of an arrow as it penetrated the scarecrow’s straw-stuffed chest. The arrow passed almost completely through the thing’s body, with only the feathers protruding. The supernatural creature reached behind its back, found the tip of the arrow, and pulled it the rest of the way through.
It laughed—just like Gordon, Katy thought—and flung the arrow against the stone. “Only the dead can kill the dead,” the scarecrow shouted with profane glee. “But the dead can kill the living, too.”
Maybe that was what Rebecca had been trying to tell Katy, but then, why did the ghost guide them up the mountain to this madness in the first place?
“Fetch him!” the scarecrow yelled, waving his sickle at Alex. At first Katy thought he was addressing the crowd, but the goats turned as one and sniffed the air in Alex’s direction. The goats gave out cries and squeaks as they moved. Alex backed away as the goats nearest him b
roke into a trot. There was no way he’d make the relative safety of the woods. Even if he did, the sure-footed goats would have an advantage on the rough terrain.
The horn of a passing goat grazed Katy’s wrist, laying open the skin.
“Shit, Mom, you’re bleeding,” Jett said.
Jett wasn’t the only one who noticed. A long-bearded nanny paused, bucking against the river of goats and turning toward Katy. It sniffed, snorted, and kicked up its back legs, clicking its hooves. Then it struggled against the seething tide of animals and headed for Katy as if she’d been dipped in honey and oats.
“The rock,” Katy said, gripping Jett’s hand so hard her own fingers ached. “Climb.”
The nanny negotiated the rumbling herd better than Katy did, because she was busy dodging bobbing horns and stomping hooves. The nanny was gaining, and Katy was still twenty feet from the rock. And even if she reached the rock, what would the scarecrow do to her? Cut her with his sickle, or toss her to the meat-eating monsters that somehow obeyed his perverted commands?
The decision was taken from her as a passing goat rammed her in the stomach, knocking the wind from her. Above the high-pitched whining in her ears, she heard Jett scream, and a hundred hoof beats drummed their death march. Then she was lifted into the air, yanked as if by the ray of a flying saucer or the crook of God’s swooping shepherd’s staff. She blinked the lime-colored sparks of pain from behind her eyes and found herself flopped belly-down over the back of Odus’s horse.
“Where’s Jett?” she managed to whisper, breath like wet cement in her lungs.
“Can’t reach her,” Odus said. He slapped the horse on the thigh and said, “Come on, Sister Mary, let’s ride out this stampede.”
The horse whinnied and reared, jostling Katy, and for a horrifying split-second she thought she would be hurled from the horse and back among the milling goats. But she grabbed the horse’s neck and held on as they waded through the herd, which was thinning now as the stragglers made their way toward Alex.
Another shotgun blast sounded, and two goats bleated squeals of pain. Katy saw Jett at the edge of the rock, climbing up, finding handholds on the mossy surface, gaining her footing.
The scarecrow released the Horseback Preacher, grabbed Jett by the hair, and yanked her against his ragged clothing. “You’re mine,” the creepy Gordon-voice said.
Jett managed to kick free before the sickle could descend, and the Horseback Preacher rolled over and rammed into the scarecrow’s spindly legs. As they grappled, Jett fled to the edge of the flat boulder, but the turbulent ocean of lethal goats prevented her from jumping to the ground.
“We have to save her,” Katy shouted in Odus’s ear so she could be heard over the bleating and panicky cries.
“These goats have gone crazy,” Odus said. “Look. They’re eating people.”
He was right. Alex reached a beech tree and scrambled up into the safety of the branches. Two goats butted the tree trunk, but its girth was several feet in diameter and the tree barely shook. A man screamed as another shot rang out, and Katy looked around to see the deputy with a goat latched onto his leg, another biting the hand that held his pistol. A wounded goat shivered at the officer’s feet, thrown into spasms by a head wound.
Kim Deister got off a burst of gunfire that felled several of the creatures, but then she was dragged under a snapping, snarling horde of them. One ragged red hand reached out of the chaos, quivered, and then fell limp.
Sarah Jeffers dropped her shotgun and climbed onto the hood of the Jeep, and several goats tried to clamber up the bumper. An old man in a leather jacket, whom Katy didn’t recognize, leveled his shotgun and blasted toward the Jeep, sending pellets scattering across the metal and driving the goats away. The old woman cursed and gripped her knee.
A woman and a younger man with pitchforks stood back-to-back, jabbing at the goats that encircled them.
“All hell’s breaking loose,” Katy said.
“We were already in hell,” Odus said. “We’ve gone way past that now.”
“I’ve got to reach Jett,” Katy said.
“Best to get away from here or we’re all dead.”
The goats lost their communal goal and scattered into the night, chasing the people who had been summoned to the surreal revival. Their bleats became guttural cries of hunger. Katy saw one digging its teeth into the neck of one of its brethren that had fallen victim to a gunshot.
Odus guided Sister Mary toward the logging road, urging the horse into a trot. But Katy kicked free, falling to the ground, twisting her ankle as she rolled. She struggled to her feet in the rough, tilled soil where the goats romped. Goat manure streaked the knees of her pants, and the smell was enough to make her vomit.
But she blocked that out, along with the screams of the people and the unnerving cries of the goats. She focused on the rock, where the eerie scarecrow grappled with the preacher, two nightmares in a bizarre battle royale.
Katy limped toward Jett, stepping over the preacher’s trampled hat. A goat trotted past her, a dripping chunk of what looked like potted meat clamped between its buck teeth.
Jett crawled around the rock’s edge toward Katy, reaching to help her up.
The scarecrow drove its sickle in a swift arc and dragged its tip across the preacher’s back, slicing into the black wool coat and causing a gush of milky fluid to erupt from the preacher’s flesh. The scarecrow spun, shaking liquid from the wet sickle, and grabbed Jett with one gloved hand.
He yanked her upright and into a scratchy embrace and let the sickle slide lower.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
The buck-toothed bastards had him treed like a raccoon.
Alex dropped his Pearson bow when the herd started chasing him. He’d managed one decent shot at Weird Dude, but that scarecrow fucker had gotten in the way. And the arrow to the heart hadn’t even slowed it down. The government must have cooked up some serious mutant shit with that particular project, no doubt wasting ten billion tax dollars in the process.
He looked down at the bleating, sneering creature closest to him, who was reared up on the tree trunk. The strange eyes with their boxy, oblate pupils glittered in the gloomy sweep of headlights.
“Yeah, you’d eat the original U.S. Constitution if it was right there in front of you, wouldn’t you?” he taunted. “The powderheads wrote it on hemp paper, and I know how much you bastards love hemp.”
The goat twitched its ears in fury, and another goat butted the tree, horns clacking against the bark.
Alex wasn’t in position to work the submachine gun, but he unfastened the snap on his hip holster and drew out the Colt Python. Weird Dude and the scarecrow were still on the rock and out of pistol range, so he couldn’t take down their shepherd.
But the goats seemed to be over their Weird Dude trip and now acted like they worked for the scarecrow fucker. And the scarecrow was holding the neighbor Goth girl. A man’s private business was a man’s private business, but it didn’t look like your typical Hallmark Family Special moment.
Alex aimed the pistol down in a two-handed grip. The goat stared back along the length of the barrel.
“You are one fuggly piece of work.” Alex squeezed the trigger and a brown dot erupted on the animal’s forehead. He knew goats possessed thick skulls because of their bizarre mating rituals that sometimes caused them to butt heads until one of the males dropped from exhaustion. They weren’t symbols of depraved lust for nothing.
But a Python bullet was more than a match for the thick plate of bone, though the entry wound was a little messier than usual. The back of the goat’s head exploded, raining bits of meat and bone on the half-dozen goats surrounding the base of the tree.
The goat’s lips peeled back in a grin.
Leave it to the government to build a goat that wouldn’t die.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Jett squirmed in the Scarecrow Man’s grip, nearly sneezing from the dusty, moldy stench of him.
Her throat hu
rt where he stuck the point of his sickle against her skin, and a warm trickle descended the slope of her neck. The persistent strobe of the police lights made her dizzy as screams and frantic bleats blended into a muddy music. Gunshots thundered here and there across the woods as people fought off the attacking goats.
She met her mom’s eyes and could read the look. That sappy old “We’ll get through this together,” but for the first time, Jett welcomed it and needed it.
Whatever this scarecrow was—a demon, Gordon’s ghost, or something conjured by the Horseback Preacher—it was as solid and real as the stone beneath her. And the sickle was real, its blade cold and sharp.
The burlap face rasped her cheek as she struggled, and the burnt eyeholes in the mask revealed two hellish sparks of light, as if some mad fire burned away inside. He squeezed the breath from her and hooked the sickle around her neck. One upward jerk of the blade and she’d be as headless as Rebecca.
Katy scrambled atop the rock. “Let her go, Gordon. If you need a sacrifice, take me.”
“I’m not Gordon,” the scarecrow said. “I’m something more.”
Jett could barely draw air into her lungs, but she wheezed, “Run, Mom!”
Katy glanced down at the prone form of the Horseback Preacher, and Jett knew what she was thinking: Is he going to save us again?
But it looked like the Gordon/scarecrow thing had won the turf war and now was ready to pillage.
“I’ll accept your sacrifice,” the scarecrow said to Katy. “But I’m taking this little bitch, too. All of you belong to me now.”
Jett was going to die here with all these outlandish characters and be stuck in the afterlife asylum of Solom forever. Her only hope was that Mom would keep her promise of getting through it together, but she didn’t see an exit from this one.
Katy took another step forward as a bullet glanced off the stone between her feet, kicking up a spark. A staccato burst of gunfire strafed the Horseback Preacher, but his limp form didn’t move as the bullets tore through the dark cloth of his suit.
The Narrow Gate: A Supernatural Thriller (Solom Book 2) Page 19
