“Ronnie,” came Tim’s weak whine.
Ronnie wriggled like a speared eel, forcing his eyes along the slick wrist to the arm that was swathed in ragged flannel.
Flannel?
His skewed carousel of thoughts ground to a halt.
Why would a deadghost thing be wearing flannel?
The arm was attached to a bulk of something behind the tombstone.
The hand clutched tightly at nothing but air, then quivered and relaxed. Ronnie scrambled away as the fingers uncurled. Blood pooled in the shallow cup of the palm.
Ronnie reached Tim and began removing the chunks of concrete from his little brother’s stomach. “You okay?”
Tim nodded, charcoal streaks of mud on his face where his tears had rolled through the sprinkling of potting soil. One cheek had a red scrape across it, but otherwise he looked unharmed. Ronnie kept looking back to the mangled arm and whatever was behind the tombstone. The hand was still, the sun drying the blood on the clotted palm. A shiny fly landed and drank.
Ronnie dragged Tim free of the toppled concrete. They both stood, Tim wiping the powdery grit from the front of his shirt. “Mom’s going to kill me. . . .” he began, then saw the arm. “What in heck . . .?”
Ronnie stepped toward the tombstone, his heart hammering in his ears.
Over his pulse, he could hear Whizzer: They got livers for eyes.
Ronnie veered toward the edge of the graveyard, Tim close behind.
“When I say run. . .” Ronnie whispered, his throat thick.
“L-looky there,” Tim said.
Dorkwad didn’t have enough brains to be scared. But Ronnie looked. He couldn’t help it.
The body was crowded against the tombstone, the flannel shirt shredded, showing scoured flesh. The head was pressed against the white marble, the neck arched at a crazy angle. A thread of blood trailed from the matted beard to the ground.
“Boonie,” Ronnie said, his voice barely as loud as the wind in the oak leaves.
There was a path trampled in the grass, coming from the underbrush that girded the graveyard. Boonie must have crawled out of the weeds. And whatever had done that to him might still be in the stand of trees. Ronnie flicked his eyes from Boonie to the church. Had something fluttered in the belfry?
A bird, a BIRD, you idiot.
Not the thing that Whizzer said lived in the red church.
Not the thing that trapped you and then got you, not the thing that had wings and claws and livers for eyes, not the thing that had made a mess of Boonie Houck’s face.
And then Ronnie was running, tearing through the undergrowth, barely aware of the briars grabbing at his face and arms, of the scrub locust that pierced his skin, of the tree branches that raked at his eyes. He heard Tim behind him—at least he hoped it was Tim, but he wasn’t about to turn around and check, because now he was on the gravel road, his legs were pumping in the rhythm of fear—NOT-the-thing, NOT-the-thing, NOT-the-thing—and he didn’t pause to breathe, even as he passed Lester Matheson, who was on his tractor in the middle of a hayfield, even as he passed the Potter farm, even when geezery Zeb Potter hollered out Ronnie’s name from his shaded front porch, even as Zeb’s hound cut loose with an uneven bray, even as Ronnie jumped the barbed wire that marked off the boundary of the Day property, even as the rusty tin roof of home came into view, even as he saw Dad’s Ranger in the driveway, even as he tripped over the footbridge and saw the sharp, glistening rocks of the creek bed below, and as he fell he realized he’d hit another turning point, found yet another way for the world to end, but at least this end wasn’t as bad as whatever had shown Boonie Houck the exit door from everywhere.
CHAPTER TWO
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Like you’d understand? You didn’t understand the first time.” Linda Day balled her hands into fists. She could smell beer on David’s breath.
Drunk at three o’clock, she thought. Doesn’t he know that the body is sacred? If only he were more like Archer.
David closed in on her. She backed against the kitchen table. He’d never hit her in their fifteen years of marriage. But his face had never set in such a mix of hurt and anger before, either.
He waved the papers in the air, his thin lips crawling into a sneer. “A lie. All those years . . .”
God, he wasn’t going to CRY, was he? Mr. Ain’t-Nothing-It’ll-Heal that time he flipped the tractor and had his forearm bone poking through his denim jacket?
She looked into his wet brown eyes. Who was he? What did she really know about him? Sure, they’d gone to high school together, were both in the Future Farmers of America, lost it together one fumbling Friday night in the pines above the Pickett High football field, never really dated anybody else, got married like everybody expected and—after that little California interlude—settled down on the Gregg family farm after cancer had chewed her father’s lungs away.
More than half of their lives. Not nearly enough time to figure David out.
“Don’t start that,” she said.
“I ain’t the one who started it. You said when we got married that all that foolishness was over and done with.”
“I thought it was.”
“Thought it was?” he mocked. His face twisted.
“I was going to tell you.”
“When? After you’d sneaked another hundred lies past me?”
Linda looked away, anywhere but at his burning, red-rimmed eyes. The stick margarine on the counter was losing its sharp edges in the heat. Two black flies were playing hopscotch on the kitchen window screen. The roses that made a pattern on the yellowed wallpaper looked as if they needed watering. “It’s not like that.”
“Sure, it ain’t.” A mist of Pabst Blue Ribbon came out with his words. “When a man’s wife gets love letters from another man, why, that’s nothing to worry about, is it?”
“So you read them.”
“Course I read them.” He stepped closer, looming over her, six-three and shoulders broadened by lifting ten thousand bales of hay.
“Then maybe you noticed that the word ‘love’ isn’t in a single one of them.”
He stopped in his tracks. Linda thought about retreating to the hall entrance, but she was trying hard not to show fear. Archer said fear was for the meek, them that huddled at the feet of Christ.
David’s brow lowered. “There’s lots of different kinds of love.”
She studied his face. Twice-broken nose. A white scar in one corner of his mouth. A strong chin, the kind you could forge steel with. Skin browned by years of working in the sun. Had she ever really loved the man who wore that face?
“There’s only one kind of love,” she said. “The kind we had.”
“The kind you and Archer had.”
“David, please listen.”
He reached out. She held her breath and leaned away. But he didn’t touch her, only swept the can of Maxwell House from the table behind her. It bounced off the cabinet under the sink and the lid flew off, sending a shower of brown granules onto the vinyl floor. The rich smell of the coffee drowned out David’s sweet-sour breath.
His teeth were showing. Broad and blunt. Pressed together so tightly that his jaw trembled.
Linda scooted along the edge of the table to her right. There was a knife on the counter, a skin of dried cheese dulling the flash of the blade. If she had to-
But David turned away, slumped, his shoulders quivering.
David never cried, at least not in front of her. But since he’d found the letters, he was doing a lot of things he’d never done before. Like drinking heavily. Like leaving her.
“Hon—” She caught herself. “David?”
His work boots drummed the floor as he strode away. He paused at the back door and turned, looking down at the letters in his hand. Tears had shimmied down one side of his face, but his voice was quiet, resigned. “Archer McFall. Pretty funny. Who’d you put up to doing it?”
“Doing what?”
“We both know it ain’t Archer, so quit lying. Is it one of your buddies from California?”
Linda shook her head. He doesn’t understand. And I had hopes that he would join us. “No, it’s nobody.”
“Nobody? Nobody who’s been writing you letters while dumb-and-happy David Day runs a hammer and eats sawdust for ten hours a day, only he don’t mind because he’s got a wonderful family waiting at home each night waiting to shower him with love and bullshit?”
His bulk filled the door frame, blocking her view of the barn and the pasture beyond. The room darkened as a cloud passed over the sun. “I told you, it’s not the way you think,” she said.
“Sure. Archer McFall just happened to walk back into your life at the exact same time that you started to get the letters. That’s a mighty big coincidence.”
“This isn’t about Archer or the Temple. It’s about us.”
He flapped the letters again. “If it’s about us, how come you didn’t tell me about these?”
“I was going to.”
“When? After hell finished freezing over?”
“When I thought you were ready to listen.”
“You mean when I was ready to swallow it hook, line, and sinker. And get reeled into that mess the same as you. I thought you learned your lesson the last time.”
The cloud passed, and the sun lit up the mottled spots on the window. She looked past them to the reddish square of the garden, at the little rows of green that were starting their seasonal push to the sky, then looked beyond to the wedge of mountains that kept North Carolina from slopping over into Tennessee. Two hundred acres of Gregg land, every inch of it stony and stained, every ash and birch and poplar stitched to her skin, every gallon of creek water running through her veins like blood. She was as old-family as anybody, and the old families belonged to the McFalls.
“It’s only letters,” she said. “That doesn’t mean I’m going back in.”
“Why did you ever have to fall for it in the first place?”
“That was nearly twenty years ago. I was a different person then. We were different people.”
“No, you were different. I’m still the same. Just a mountain hick who thinks that if you say your prayers and live right, then nobody can break you down. But I reckon I was wrong.”
“You can’t still blame me for that, can you?” But his eyes answered her question by becoming hard and narrow. “Don’t you know how terrible I thought it was to be trapped here in Whispering Pines forever? Stay around and squirt out seven kids with nothing to look forward to but the next growing season? To be like my mother with her fingers as knobby as pea pods from all the canning she did? What kind of life is that?”
“It’s good enough for me. I didn’t need to run off to California.”
“I must have asked you a dozen times to come with me.”
“And I asked you a dozen-and-one times to stay.”
“You were just afraid you’d lose me.”
He hung his head and shook it slowly. “I reckon I did,” he said, barely above a whisper. “Only it took me this long to find out.”
“The kids will be home soon,” she said. “Ronnie’s been looking forward to seeing you.”
He held up the letters again. “You’re not going to drag them into this mess, are you? Because, so help me, if you do—”
The threat hung in the air like an ax.
“Archer’s not like that.” Linda said it as if she only half-believed her own words.
“You said the group broke up.”
“I . . . most of us left. I don’t know. When they said he was dead, I—”
“He’s dead. Now, the question is, who’s trying to bring back this?” David held up one of the letters, more for effect than anything. Because Linda knew perfectly well what was on the letter.
She could see the symbol from across the room, even though it was bunched into the top right corner. It looked like one of those Egyptian symbols, only the cross was topped with two loops. Two suns. The Temple of the Two Suns.
Not that she needed to see it, because she was sure now that it had been seared into her brain, that its power had reached over years and across three thousand miles and through the thick white walls of her renewed faith in Jesus. Because, after all, there was only one true savior. And his name was Archer McFall.
If only David would open his heart. Sure, he’d been born with Baptist blood, he’d been dipped in the river below the red church so that his sins would be washed away, he’d given his ten percent, but there was so much more to faith than the rituals and scriptures and prayers. Her own heart was swelling again, budding, unfolding like a flower under a bright sun. No, under two suns. Twice the love. If only she could share that with David. But he wouldn’t understand. He was as blinded by Jesus as everybody else was.
David watched her carefully, waiting for her reaction. She swallowed her smile and let her face slacken.
“The Temple,” he said in a sneer. “You promised you were over it. But I guess I’m the fool.”
“He’s not asking for money.”
David laughed, a bitter sound. He rubbed his forehead with his right hand. “Probably the only thing he’s not asking for, whoever it is.”
“Since you read the letters, you know exactly what he wants.”
“Yeah.” He held up one of the letters. “‘We’ve missed you, sister,’“ he read.
“And that’s all.”
“‘There will come great trials, but we bathe in the light of faith.’“ He shuffled to the next letter. “‘The stone is rolled away.’“
“Where’s the love in that?” Linda was straining to show disinterest. David wasn’t from one of the old families. She had been a fool to think Archer would accept him, anyway.
“Where’s the love? Where’s the love? Why, right there on the bottom, where it says ‘Forever Yours, Archer McFall.’ On every single one of them.”
“Maybe he didn’t die. Or maybe somebody started up the group again and is using his name. That’s all it is. I don’t care one way or another.”
But I DO care. I’ve always cared, even when you thought you and your Christian friends had “cured” me. There was always a little room in my heart tucked away for nobody but Archer.
David’s eyes had cleared a little as he sobered, but kept their bright ferocity. “You don’t care so much that you didn’t even bother to throw the letters away, huh?”
“Don’t matter none to me.”
“That so?” David started to crumple the letters into a ball.
Linda’s mouth opened, and her arm reached out of its own accord.
David smiled, but it was a sick smile, the kind worn by a reluctant martyr. He crushed the paper into a hard wad of pulp and tossed it on the floor at her feet. “I seen him come around. Last week. Laid out of work just so I could hide up in the hills and watch the house. Just me and a six-pack. Mostly I was curious if you were sending out any letters yourself.”
“You bastard.”
David licked his lips. “Is ten o’clock the regular meeting time?”
Linda felt the blood drain from her face. How much did he know?
“Got himself a Mercedes. I guess this ‘cult’ business pays pretty good.”
“It wasn’t—” Linda started.
David nodded. “I know. It wasn’t Archer McFall. Then why don’t you tell me who it really was?”
Linda wondered how many times David had watched the house from the woods. Or if she could trust anything he said.
Trust. That was a good one.
David slowly approached her. She was like a deer frozen in the headlights of his hate. She looked down just as his boot flattened the wad of letters.
“How long?” he said, and his eyes were welling with tears again. As if the reservoir had been filling all his life and, finally full, now had to leak a little or bust.
“It’s not like that.” She looked again at the butcher knife on the counter, close to tears herself.
>
He took another menacing step. “I wondered why you been acting strange lately. And why you ain’t been up to going to church.”
Linda grabbed a gulp of air and scooted from the table to the kitchen counter. David was close behind her and caught her when she spun. His hands were like steel hooks in her upper arms, holding her firmly but not squeezing hard enough to bruise.
She stared at his stranger’s face with its wide eyes. She’d never noticed how deep the two creases on his forehead were. The hard planes of his cheeks were patched with stubble. He looked old, as if all his thirty-seven years had dog-piled him these last few weeks.
“Tell me who it is,” he said.
She shuddered with the force of his grip. Those hands had touched her so tenderly in the night, had softly stroked her belly when she was pregnant with the boys, had tucked daisies behind her ears when they fooled around in the hayfield. But now they were cruel, the caresses forgotten, the passion in them of a different kind.
She turned her face away, afraid that he’d see the fear in her eyes. The knife was beside a bowl of melted ice cream, within reach. But David grabbed her chin and twisted her eyes back to his.
Archer had warned her what the price of belief would be. Persecution. Pain. The loss of everything human. She could hear Archer’s voice now, pouring from the geysers of her heart. There will come great trials. And great sacrifices. Because sacrifice is the currency of God.
But the reward was greater than the sacrifice. Belief paid back a hundredfold. Devotion now brought Archer’s steadfast love unto the fourth generation. Surrendering to him meant that her offspring would reap the harvest. She had been telling herself that ever since Archer and the Temple of the Two Suns reclaimed her heart. And she reminded herself now, locked in David’s grip.
He’d never hurt her before. But Archer said those who didn’t understand always fell back on violence, because violence was the way of their God. That was why the world had to end. From the ashes of their heavenfire would come—
“Who is it?” he asked.
She grunted through her clenched teeth. David relaxed his grip until her mouth could move. “Ahh—Archer.”
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