Earl stood up. “C’mon,” he said. “Let’s roll on out to Elmer’s.”
* * *
Drink in hand, Doc Fletcher watched Pitch cross the room. Most everybody was here. Every now and then a straggler would wander into their meeting place on the second floor of Pitch Place, where several people had huddled into their own small groups. Arleta Briscomb and her retarded boy were drinking and talking to Frannie Mitchell and Robert Clark, all four of them laughing about what had occurred in front of the Dime Store. Amos Abbot and his brother stayed busy at the bar; Harold mixing the drinks while Amos passed them around the room.
Fletcher didn’t like knowing he would have to follow that madman down to the basement, but for some reason, it didn’t terrify him—even though last night he had seen Jerry Hodges eviscerated, and Jack Colbert’s brains explode from a gaping hole in the back of his head.
He shook his drink and looked down at the ice cubes swirling around the glass.
Everything had been crystal clear: Fletcher, driving up Seeker’s Mountain, dreading what might be waiting in that mansion, sitting around with Pitch and the rest of the group. Evie Miller snorting like a hog while bloody roast beef juice dribbled down her chin. Teddy Levay complaining about Reverend Stone; he himself bitching about Marty Donlan. And above all of that, Fletcher remembered Pitch, settling back into his easy chair, smiling and taking it all in. Then came the money, stacks of cash handed out by their benefactor, right before he lowered the boom.
From that point on it was like looking through a wavering, shimmering light, quivering and undulating all around him. As if he had woken in the middle of the night and was now trying to see his nightmare through a thick sheet of smoky glass: Pitch’s words, droning and drilling and tumbling through his mind, the room tilting, the walls closing in; the eerie, silent march to the basement floor. He still couldn’t believe he had lifted that bloody chalice to his lips. But he had, and he knew he would do it again tonight. And for some reason, that didn’t bother him at all. He was, in fact, looking forward to it. He could hardly wait to get down to the basement and feel that dark presence come crawling across the floor, inching its way ever closer to him.
Fletcher raised his glass as Judge Croft entered the room, smiling and calling out a friendly greeting to Sid Haines while the young doctor ran a hand through his blond hair.
What a day, he thought.
Pitch, standing next to Teddy Levay, motioned Judge Croft over. “Well, well, well,” he called out as Croft approached. “Look what the cat drug in!”
Doc Fletcher stood up and joined them by the double doors that led out to the balcony, while Pitch waved at Harold Abbot, the bowlegged sawmill operator. “Fix my pal the judge a drink here, would ya, Harold?” To Croft, he said, “Your spirits certainly have seemed to improve since this afternoon.”
“Goddamn right they have,” he said, a self-satisfied smirk spreading across his face as he accepted a glass from Abbot, who had just clabbered across the room like a human crab.
“Well?” Pitch said.
Croft pulled a silver cigarette case out of his pocket, plucked out a smoke and lit it. He offered one to Levay, snapping the case shut and returning it to its home when the mayor declined.
“Yeah, Judge,” Fletcher said. “Tell us all about it.”
“Like you don’t already know.” Croft chuckled, smoke flowing from his mouth while Fletcher shook his head, grinning as he pictured Harold Carter screaming and crying, the good doctor cutting off his boot, pulling off his sock and shaking two severed toes from the blood-soaked piece of fabric.
“Goddamn it, Judge,” Pitch said. “You gonna tell me or what?”
“Soon as I heard about my godson, I told Jared to send a couple of his boys out to that goddamn hillbilly’s shack. I knew he’d show up sooner or later—if he hadn’t gone straight there and got his stuff and hauled ass.”
“Don’t guess he was smart enough for that, huh?” Levay said.
Pitch laughed. “Don’t sound like smart and this ol’ boy know each other too well.”
“You got that right,” Croft said. “They parked their truck behind the house and waited inside in the dark. Jared and I went over to see the sheriff and that moronic deputy of his.”
Pitch chuckled.
“I let ‘em have it with both barrels, waving my fist all around, shaking it in that goddamn giant’s face. Told him if he didn’t go straight out to Elmer’s place and arrest his ass, come mornin’, I’d have his job.”
“What’d he say to that?” Levay asked him.
Croft smiled, took another drag off his cigarette and let the smoke flow free from his nostrils. “Just what I knew he’d say. Told me to take his badge and stick it up my ass.”
“Ho!” Fletcher chortled, wishing he could have been there to see the look on Croft’s face when that happened.
“Earl ain’t no pushover. He’s young, dumb, and full of cum. I knew sure as shit if I demanded he go straight out there, he’d take his sweet time doin’ it. Told me he was gonna go home and eat, and then him and Alvie Ross would see if they couldn’t round the cocksucker up. Hell, they probably still ain’t gone out to his house.”
Croft paused long enough to take in another lungful of smoke. “But we have,” he said, tapping the cigarette with his index finger, sending spent ash dropping to the floor.
“Sorry,” he said, looking up at Pitch.
“Don’t worry about it,” Pitch said. “I’ll have my new houseboy clean it up later. Go on and finish your story.”
“Yes,” Teddy Levay said. “By all means, continue.”
“When we got there, Harold and Mikey Campbell had him on the floor, kicking the shit out of him.”
“Those bastards.” Smirking, Levay shook his head, while Fletcher smiled and nodded his agreement.
“Yeah, well, they did good this time. Until Elmer pulled out that big-assed huntin’ knife of his and nailed Harold’s foot to the floor with it.”
“Ouch,” Pitch said, flinching as if picturing it.
“What!” Levay said.
“Goddamn right, ouch,” Croft continued, smiling. “Nailed that son of a bitch good. Gotta hand it to the prick, though. Curled up in a ball, all beat to hell and back, knowin’ it was all over but the dying. He didn’t give up without a fight. Took the only chance he had made good use of it.”
“I’m surprised Mikey didn’t shoot him,” Levay said.
“That would’ve been too easy. He did pull his gun, but Jared whipped his own gun out, stuck the barrel against Campbell’s head and dared him to pull the trigger.”
“Dared him?” Fletcher asked.
“Well, more or less. Told Mikey if he shot him, he’d dress him down like a goddamn deer. And he would have, too.”
“Goddamn it,” Pitch said. “Where the fuck am I when all the fun stuff’s going on? Bank robberies and murders, goddamn revenge killings. You really oughta let a fella know about this shit ahead of time.”
* * *
“There’s his truck,” Alvie Ross said, pointing out the passenger window at the white pickup in front of Elmer’s house. They turned into the dirt driveway and Earl pulled up beside the truck, cut the ignition and eased his door open. Alvie Ross did the same, and both men got out, leaving the doors open as they advanced on the truck, where Earl placed a hand on the hood.
“Cold,” he said, and then motioned for Alvie Ross to follow him.
Beneath the nearly full moon, the two policemen made their way across the yard.
Lights were on inside the house, but all seemed quiet. No sounds inside, nothing outside, beside the wind blowing through the trees, and the shallow breathing of the two men as they stood in front of the porch.
Earl drew his sidearm and stepped onto the porch.
Alvie Ross drew his weapon, too, and made his way quietly to his side. They stood in front of the door, Alvie Ross tapping the butt of his pistol on the doorjamb, shouting, “Elmer! Open up! It’s Alvie Ross!�
�
He moved a few feet to his right and peered through the living room window, hoping like hell Elmer would have sense enough not to try and shoot his way out of there. The last thing he wanted was to gun him down in his own home. But maybe that would be better than having that old prick of a judge send him off to the electric chair, which he most definitely was going to do.
“See anything?” Earl asked him.
“Huh uh.”
“Don’t look good, huh?”
No, it doesn’t, Alvie Ross thought. Elmer had to have heard the ruckus he was making. But he wasn’t showing himself, and that could mean only one thing: trouble.
Earl grabbed the doorknob and gave it a twist. It was unlocked, so he pushed the door open, Alvie Ross following him across the threshold, nodding at a bloodstain on the wooden floor as he stepped to the side, looking down at the drops and spatters leading back to the doorway.
“This isn’t good,” Earl said.
“I’ll say.” Alvie Ross pointed down at the floor, at the blood-smeared footprints heading down the hallway to the kitchen. “C’mon,” he said.
Halfway there, Earl stopped. “Hold up,” he whispered. “Listen.”
Alvie Ross stopped as a board creaked in the kitchen. “You hear that?”
They made their way to the kitchen, where they found the back door standing wide open.
The creaking continued, but it wasn’t a board, and it wasn’t coming from the kitchen. Bloody tracks spread out across the faded-yellow linoleum floor led Earl and Alvie Ross out to the back porch, where they saw Elmer Hicks bathed in the moonlight, hands tied behind his back as he hung from a rope which had been fashioned around his neck in a hangman’s knot. Dark splotches decorated his white shirt, beneath the handle of a hunting knife someone had left buried in his chest. His right eye bulged from its socket. Something covering his left eye gleamed in the moonlight as the body moved slowly back and forth, strips of intestines dangling like coils of bloody rope from the wide-open cavity of his stomach, which had been ripped down the middle, spilling on the ground beneath him what looked like oil. But it wasn’t oil, of course.
The rope, which had been thrown over a branch of the tree and tied to the base of the trunk, held the body suspended over the ground as it twisted back and forth, drawing a groaning creak from the tree branch with each of its slight movements.
“My God,” Earl said, as the two policemen holstered their weapons and hurried down the stairs, across the yard.
“Jesus, Earl. Look at that,” Alvie Ross said, pointing up at the butterfly broach pinned to Elmer’s eyeball like a child’s game of ‘pin the tail on the donkey’, at the wadded-up envelopes stuffed into his open mouth.
“Christ Almighty,” Earl said, gazing up at the corpse as Alvie Ross, sighing, said, “It’s over… Poor bastard.”
“Maybe we can—”
“What? Go over to Jared’s house? ‘Cause that’s who did this, a couple or three of his boys. Maybe he was here with ‘em. The judge too, for all we know.”
“Let’s cut him down, go back inside and search the place, see what we can find.”
“Then what, go have a circle-jerk with Jared and Judge Fuckface?”
Frowning, Earl looked up at the body, at the house and then back at Alvie Ross.
“We ought to do… something.”
“Yeah. We’ll do something. We’ll go back inside and look for a way to tie Croft and his goddamn sidekick to this shit—which we both know ain’t gonna happen. Then we’ll ride over and tell Ezra Butcher he’s got another one to throw on the pile.” Alvie Ross, turning and looking up at the moon, shook his head and turned back to Earl. “This is fucked-up.”
“No shit,” Earl said, as he stared at the bloody mess dangling from Elmer’s torso.
“No.” Alvie Ross nodded up at the sky. “That.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“The moon, it’s almost full. Just like it was thirteen years ago when those three little boys disappeared.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Bobby Jackson looked up into the darkness. He was groggy, and had been since waking up strapped to this stone table, his head hurting, his feet bound together while something cinched tightly around his wrists held his arms securely by his side. His wrists, blistered and chafed from all his efforts to work them free, were burning like all git-out.
He didn’t know where he was, and had only a vague idea of how he had come to be here. The last thing he remembered was walking down Dingess Street on his way home, Jimmy Tomlin pulling up beside him with a trunk in the bed of his pickup. Jimmy, smiling, had and asked him if he could help carry the trunk into that big ol’ mansion on top of Seeker’s Mountain. Told him he’d pay him fifty cents if he would. Bobby had never been anywhere near that fine looking house, but he’d seen it nearly every day ever since he could remember. Walking up the hill to school, he would turn and see it looking down on the valley. Sometimes on his way home he would stop and gaze out on the horizon, wondering what it might be like to live in such a glorious place. Bobby didn’t care about the fifty cents. He would have gladly helped carry the trunk just so he could get a close up look at Pitch Place.
When Bobby opened the door, he smelled something funny. Jimmy Tomlin told him he’d spilled some gas on himself. But when Bobby climbed into the truck, it didn’t smell much like gasoline to him. It smelled sweet, and the next thing Bobby knew, that was all he could smell. Until he woke up in the dark—naked except for his underwear—the dank, musty odor of an old cave washing over him. That’s where he figured he was now, tied up in an old coal mine somewhere. But why? Why would Jimmy Tomlin tie him up like this? And what was he going to do when he got back?
Somewhere in the distance, a door creaked opened. But it couldn’t have been a door, could it? Not in a cave. He arched his back, craning his head toward the noise, and through a thin veil of tears, saw a dim yellow light faintly illuminating a long and winding stairway. The light faded as the concrete stairs gave way to the landing, and then surrendered to the darkness hovering a few feet away.
The door slammed shut and Bobby kept his eyes on the stairway. Footsteps scuffed and scraped as leather-clad feet came into view, followed by a pair of legs clothed in dark trousers. The back of his neck prickled. Goose bumps crawled up his forearms, as a waist, and then shoulders descended the stairs. His neck hurt, so he relaxed and turned his head forward and waited for the pain to go away. When he looked back at the stairway, a man was standing at the bottom. Bobby couldn’t tell for sure, but he looked a lot like Jimmy Tomlin. Whoever it was carried a club in his hand. And whoever it was stepped forward into a pitch-black cloud of darkness that seemed to have a life of its own. Bobby thought he saw shapes forming and swirling in the billowing black mass, wicked and vile things Reverend Stone said would be waiting in Hell to feast on all the sinners. A thick ball of dread squirmed in Bobby’s stomach as he thought of all the times he and his friends had stood around swearing and taking the Lord’s name in vain. And his Mama’s warning: ‘You’ll go to the Devil for that, Bobby Jackson!’ But he never listened, because he didn’t think God would do something like that to an eleven year old boy. Now he wondered if Jimmy Tomlin had killed him and he had woken up in his own little corner of Hell, where little boys cower in the dark while bogeymen slip quietly down the stairs, swinging a big old club with rusty spikes hammered through its head.
Footsteps echoed across the way, and Bobby arched his back, craning his head sideways, his frightened eyes sweeping the darkness as the clicking footsteps drew near.
“Mister Tomlin?” he tried calling out, but the words caught in his throat as someone chuckled in the darkness.
“Ji… Jimmy… Tom… Tomlin?” Bobby’s words came out in a choking sob as soft peals of laughter echoed around him. And now the footsteps sounded close—too close. His body shook. His teeth chattered and tears flowed down his face. And now he knew something bad was about to happen.
T
o him!
The scritch-scratch of a match, a whoosh, and the crackling of fire.
A flickering light appeared behind him, and Bobby closed his eyes.
A flash of warmth passed by his head and he shuddered.
“Why won’t you answer me!” he called out, his voice rising and falling, his body heaving as he continued to whimper.
“Not to worry, Bobby,” a voice taunted, clutching Bobby’s heart in an icy-cold grip, sending his mind careening into a deep, dark pit, where a maddening chorus of screams echoed up around him, until he realized they were his own screams merging with the maniacal laughter coming from directly in front of him.
He opened his eyes to see a man standing with his back to him, using a flaming stick to light a torch in a metal stand.
The torch caught fire and the man turned, wedging his stick into a cranny beside the burning and crackling piece of wood. He wore a suit and tie, like the mayor, or Mr. Fraley, the banker. His jet-black hair awash in the firelight; a mouth full of teeth sparkling as he smiled down at Bobby. A large gold ring with a dark stone setting adorned his left hand, the golden P stamped in its middle gleaming as he took a step forward. “Hallo, Bobby,” the man, the apparition, the… Devil taunted, as he sidled up to the stone slab and laid a hand on Bobby’s leg.
Leather straps looped through metal rings on each side of the slab cinched Bobby’s wrists securely in place as he looked down at the rope knotted around his ankles, at the bejeweled handle of a knife protruding from a leather sheath dangling from the slab. The stone table slanted downward, and as Bobby saw the rivulets and smears of dried blood on it, he thought of the story he had learned in Bible School about God telling Abraham to sacrifice his own son, causing him to pull and thrash, to struggle to break free.
“Pu… please,” he said. “Please, mister.”
“Please? Please, what?”
Lord of the Mountain Page 21
