Littlefield

by Scott Nicholson

  “See you brought the boys.” Mama Bet nodded at Ronnie, then reached out to pat Tim on the head. “Little Timothy Day. What do you think of the church?”

  Tim shrank back from her gnarled fingers, then shook his head from side to side as if to shed himself of her lingering touch. “It ain’t so scary,” he said in that defiant nine-year-old way. “They said it was scary.”

  Mama Bet’s eyes narrowed, and some of the Mathesons at the other end of the pew stopped whispering and stared.

  Tim went on. “I mean, it’s supposed to be haunted, but it’s just like the Baptist church, only it smells funny. Like wax and old meat and-”

  Ronnie elbowed Tim in the side.

  “Your mom did a lot of work on it,” Mama Bet said. “Cleaned it up right good, along with some of the other folks. Made it worthy of Archer’s glory.”

  Ronnie frowned. Archer’s glory? In the Baptist church, they always talked about the glory of Jesus and God. People weren’t supposed to be glorious, at least not until they were dead. But here was Mama Bet saying bad stuff right in the middle of the church. And God didn’t come out of the woodwork and strike her dead.

  Mom’s smile faded. “What’s wrong, honey?” she asked Ronnie.

  “Preacher Staymore says that everything is for the glory of Jesus.”

  Mom and Mama Bet laughed in unison.

  “This church is a little different,” Mom said.

  “You mean like the Methodists and Catholics and all those other people that Dad says don’t know any better?” Tim said.

  “Sort of like that, yeah,” Mom said. “Only here, when the plate is passed, you get to take instead of having to give.”

  “Cool,” Tim said.

  Ronnie had a bad feeling in his stomach, as if he had swallowed a boot. “Mom?”

  “What?”

  “You ever been to California?”

  Mom and Mama Bet exchanged glances. The Mathesons had gone back to whispering among themselves, but suddenly fell silent again as the little door off to the side of the pulpit opened. Mama Bet turned and faced forward. Even the candles stopped flickering, as if not daring to absorb any of the preacher’s precious oxygen. The night beyond the windows turned a shade blacker. A stillness crowded the church like water filling a bottle, and thirty pairs of eyes fixed on the man in the doorway.

  Archer crossed the stage like an actor. Mom’s mouth parted slightly, as if she were witnessing a miracle. Ronnie studied the preacher’s face, trying to see what the others must see, the special quality that held the congregation rapt. Archer met his gaze, though surely that was Ronnie’s imagination, because the preacher was looking everywhere at once, meeting every eye in the church.

  Ronnie had seen eyes that intense only once before. Painted eyes. In the color plate of his Bible, on the portrait of Jesus. Sad, loving eyes. Eyes that said, I’m sad that you must kill me, but I forgive you.

  Ronnie shivered. He wished Preacher Staymore were here. The preacher would tell Ronnie in a calm yet strong voice that Jesus was the light and the truth and the way, that the Lord was aknocking and all you had to do was open up. But Preacher Staymore was miles away, and this wasn’t even Sunday. Ronnie didn’t even know if you could be saved on any day besides Sunday.

  If only Preacher Staymore had told him all the rules. Then this new preacher with his peaceful face and wise eyes and graceful hands gripping the lectern wouldn’t scare him so much. If Ronnie knew the rules, if he didn’t need the preacher to help show Jesus the way into his sinning black heart, then maybe Ronnie wouldn’t dread the words about to come from the preacher’s mouth. If Ronnie could be positive that Jesus was still inside him, then nothing else would matter. Except Mom and Tim and Dad.

  But he wasn’t sure.

  Archer smiled from the lectern, his teeth gleaming in the candlelight. And twenty-nine people smiled back, Mama Bet and Whizzer and Lester Matheson and Mom and even Tim. Only Ronnie doubted. It seemed in all the world, only Ronnie failed to understand and believe.

  And Ronnie wondered if he was the only one who heard the stirrings and scratchings in the church belfry.

  “Sacrifice is the currency of God,” Archer said to the flock, gathering the prepared communion from a shelf beneath the lectern. The plate was covered with a dark cloth, but stains were still visible on the fabric. Archer inhaled its sweet aroma.

  Conducting the ritual was Archer’s favorite part of playing messiah.

  Rituals were important to the congregation. It was as true for the Catholics and the Baptists and the Jews and the Muslims as it had been for the unfortunate members of the Temple of the Two Suns, and now, the fold of the red church. This was the act that bound them together and bound them to Archer, that made them willing to pay the currency of sacrifice. And the preacher’s job was to make the show worth the price of admission.

  “And God sent the Son, who led the world astray,” Archer said, lifting the communion. “And that Son, the terrible, blasphemous Jesus, who was called the Christ, gave his flesh to the people, that they might be tainted. And God looked down, and saw that evil had been set loose upon the world.”

  Archer looked out at the congregation. The “old families.” The living flesh of those who had murdered Wendell McFall so many decades ago. They deserved their cleansing. Anger burned his chest, but he kept the beatific smile on his face. One corner of his mouth twitched, but he doubted that anyone noticed. The lambs were too intent on the offering.

  “And because we have been tainted, we must be cleansed,” he continued, raising his voice, working toward the payoff.

  He sensed the stirrings in the belfry, and knew that his shadow had chosen a new victim. Tonight it would be the boy.

  But first, the families must taste the bitterness of their treason. They must know the depth of their iniquities. They must prove themselves worthy of cleansing. He would feed them. Matheson, Buchanan, Potter, Day, all.

  He looked down at his mother in the first row. Even dear Mother must be cleansed. Perhaps she was more deserving than anyone. The ritual was his sacred duty, the reason he had been fashioned into flesh. He would not disappoint her.

  Archer held the plate before him and gazed upward.

  For you are a jealous God.

  He bowed his head to hide his smile, then stepped off the altar and gave the plate to his mother. He removed the cloth and watched her face as she took some of the communion in her fingers. She opened her mouth and slid the host between her rotten teeth.

  Outside, the world slithered toward midnight.

  Frank and Sheila were on the roadbed below the church when the congregation fell silent. Then a sermon began, filling the wooden shell of the church, and though the words echoed together into an indecipherable wall of sound, Frank recognized Archer’s voice.

  Through the trees twenty feet ahead, the washed-out flesh of Frank’s brother floated among the bright tombstones. In the still night, Frank could almost hear the whisper of the clouds that brushed the face of the moon. The sheriff gripped Sheila’s hand tightly, as much to reassure himself that she was real as to ease his fear. She squeezed back.

  Samuel turned, Frank’s dear, departed brother, Frank’s greatest failure. “You gotta kill me again, Frankie,” Samuel rasped. Though the ghost smiled, the blue eyes revealed nothing.

  “Kill you?” Frank stumbled into the border of weeds and saplings that surrounded the cemetery. He knew where Samuel was now. He recognized the curve of the granite marker, the two tombstones beside it. Home. Samuel’s home.

  “Samuel?” Frank said, keeping his voice low. He had talked to his dead brother many times, kneeling in that lush grass whose roots were fed by his brother’s decay. But he never dreamed that Samuel would one day talk back.

  “Kill me, Frankie,” pleaded the ghost, and suddenly Samuel was a small boy again, not a thing to be feared, just a scared and lost and lonely little boy. A brother. “You got to set me free.”

  “Why me?” Frank said.

&
nbsp; “Because it will hurt you,” Sheila said. Samuel’s mouth parted in a wicked grin as he nodded agreement.

  “What the hell does that mean?” Frank said, angry at his own helplessness and confusion. Guilt and fear were in a battle that rivaled the great bloodfests of the Old Testament.

  “Because it’s the hardest thing you can ever do,” Sheila said. “Killing Samuel again would be your greatest sacrifice.”

  “And sacrifice is the currency of God,” Samuel said.

  “You got your gun?” Frank asked Sheila.

  “No. Lost it in the river.”

  Frank crashed through the brush, not caring if the congregation heard him. Sheila was right behind him. Frank felt foolish, thinking of killing a ghost. But what else could he do? He finally had a chance to fix a past mistake, but all he could do was repeat it. He had to kill Samuel for real this time, up close and personal. He had to take Samuel away from whatever or whoever owned the boy’s spirit.

  Samuel spread his arms in supplication, awaiting whatever would happen after the afterlife. His mouth writhed and bulged with the worms that crawled among his teeth. One slipped out and poked its sightless head around, and Frank fought back the revulsion that curdled his stomach. He crossed the grass, weaving between grave markers and monuments. As he came nearer he could smell Samuel, the odor of maggots and loam hot in the air.

  He reached Samuel’s grave, saw the shadow of the bas-relief lamb engraved on the marker, read the words “May God Keep and Protect Him,” felt the coldness radiating from his dead brother’s flesh as he reached his hands up to grip Samuel’s neck. And his hands met empty air as the apparition flickered and faded before his eyes.

  Frank fell to his hands and knees and ripped at the grass, heedless of his shoulder wound.

  “Samuel,” he yelled, his voice breaking. He clawed at the soil, ignoring the pain as his fingers raked over small stones. He dug like a starved dog after a buried bone, throwing dirt high in the air. Finally he collapsed on the marred grave, the deep reservoir of his tears overflowing, the water of pity and self-pity backed up for too many years.

  Archer’s sermon was building in intensity inside the church. Frank listened to the mad rhythm of the words as his sobs subsided. After a long, slow thunder of heartbeats, Frank felt a hand on his head.

  “It’s okay, Frank.” Sheila’s voice was as soothing as an evening summer breeze, silk on a sunburn.

  He lifted his face from the mud he had made. “I failed him again.”

  “What could you do? Just then, or twenty years ago? It’s not your fault.”

  He met her eyes. They were understanding, forgiving, sympathetic. All things that he had never seen in a woman’s eyes. All the things he had never looked for, until now.

  “I don’t know why, but Samuel still needs me,” Frank said.

  A shadow fell over Sheila as a dark hulk blocked out the moon. Frank stiffened. What madness was the night sending next?

  “You have to kill these things more than once,” said the looming figure.

  David Day.

  The barrel of David’s rifle caught the moonlight and sent a menacing glint into Frank’s eyes. Sheila tensed beside Frank, ready to attack. The sheriff clutched her arm to restrain her.

  “Only, I can’t be the one who does the killing,” David said.

  Frank suspected the carpenter had a screw loose. David had already pulled the gun on him once today, had already proven himself dangerous. But there was something conspiratorial in David’s tone, and his eyes were focused on the church instead of on Frank and Sheila.

  “What are you talking about?” Frank asked him.

  Sheila interrupted. “He’s crazy, Frank.”

  “And what ain’t, around here?” David replied, crouching behind a concrete angel whose wings were so rain-worn that the feathers had lost detail. David aimed the rifle toward one of the windows of the church and squinted through the rifle’s scope. He seemed to have forgotten all about Frank and Sheila.

  Inside the church, Archer’s voice rose to a fevered pitch, though the words were unintelligible. It reminded Frank of those old film clips of Adolf Hitler’s speeches he’d seen, the same thundering and maniacal tirade. He’d always wondered how people could be so stupid as to fall in with anybody so obviously insane. Now he knew the kind of odd power and charisma that could totally pull the wool over people’s eyes, power that could make them forget their own hopes and hearts and even humanity.

  It was the kind of power that Archer possessed. Or that possessed him.

  Power that no human should have, because no human knew how to wield it. But then, Archer wasn’t human. Frank looked at David’s form huddled around the rifle and wondered if anybody was human. Then he felt Sheila’s hand in his.

  Yes. Somebody was human.

  Somebody lived and breathed and loved.

  “What did you mean by ‘You have to kill these things more than once’?” Frank asked David.

  The man turned from his aiming, the shadows eerie on his eyes. “Remember what I said to you out at the house today? About killing Archer as many times as it takes?”

  “Yeah?”

  “When he took all those local girls out to California, he set up the Temple of the Two Suns. Don’t know if you knew that part of it, but I expect it was just more of the devil’s work. I went out there to bring Linda back. She was eighteen. Hell, she didn’t know what she was doing. I guess I didn’t, neither. All I knew was that I loved her, and I wasn’t going to give her up without a fight.”

  “Some people don’t need to be saved,” said Sheila.

  “No offense, Detective, but them twenty-dollar opinions won’t buy you a dirty cup of water in these parts,” David said. “I went out to California for Linda’s good, not my good. That’s when I saw what happened to one of them girls that went out there with Archer.”

  Frank’s stomach tightened. Archer’s voice ranted, roared, reached heights of frenzy that even a Baptist evangelist at a tent revival couldn’t match.

  “He killed her,” David said. “Cut her up. Took her heart, and maybe some other things. I shut my eyes after that first part. But not before I seen them pass around the plate of meat.”

  “Just like he did the ones here,” Frank whispered. Then he remembered the odd taste that had filled his mouth after attending Archer’s service. What had happened during those lost hours?

  “No,” Sheila said, shaking her head in disbelief.

  But nothing was beyond belief anymore. They had both seen Archer McFall change shape before their eyes. They both had watched as Sheila shot him five times at point-blank range. Yet here the preacher was, tending to his flock, culling the stray lambs, feeding them the Word.

  “That’s why I shot him,” David said. “Killed him, or so I thought.”

  A thick cloud passed over the face of the moon, momentarily darkening the hill. The candles burning in the church cast the only visible light. There were no streetlights in Whispering Pines, and the scattered houses were hidden by the hills. Frank felt as though they were the only people in the world, that everything outside the cemetery and the surrounding mountains had fallen away into a dark emptiness. And all that remained of civilization, of humanity, hope, and sanity, resided right here. Frank and Sheila and David. Archer and the congregation.

  And the church.

  The red church, with its golden eyes.

  The church that had swallowed Samuel.

  The church that also claimed Frank’s father and mother.

  The church that held secrets in its stained and stubborn boards.

  The church that had hoarded the iniquities of the old families, that had leered at their weddings and eavesdropped on their funerals and absorbed the soft, spirited seepage of their prayers.

  The church that housed the ghosts of memories.

  The cloud drifted on and the moon again gave its baleful glare. The steeple thrust toward the sky, the awkward broken cross barely visible against the night
sky. The dogwood’s branches dangled in the gentle breeze, brushing the steeple like a mother caressing a babe. The shadows shifted in the belfry, the darkness dividing itself.

  “You see it, too, don’t you?” David said.

  Frank nodded.

  “What?” Sheila said.

  “The Bell Monster,” David said.

  “The thing that killed Samuel,” Frank said.

  Yes, the church was to blame, not Frank. If the church hadn’t stood all those years, gathering legends like a stone gathered moss, then Frank, Samuel, and the others wouldn’t have been there that fateful Halloween night. If not for Wendell McFall’s sins, none of the tragedies would have occurred. If, if, if.

  If Samuel were still alive, he wouldn’t be dead. If Samuel were still dead, he wouldn’t be a ghost.

  David’s next words interrupted Frank’s thoughts and brought back the river chill that he’d been trying to ignore.

  “You’re the one that’s got to do the killing, Sheriff.”

  “What are you talking about?” Sheila said.

  “You’re of the blood,” David said, ignoring her. “You’re of the old families. That’s why my bullets don’t do nothing. It’s got to be done by one of Archer’s own.”

  Maybe. Sheila didn’t say anything, but Frank knew what she was thinking. Her bullets hadn’t killed Archer, either. Maybe that was the way this thing worked.

  Wendell McFall had been killed by his own people. And if Wendell was behind this, if Wendell was a restless spirit that was tied forever to the church, then maybe the scene had to play itself out again. . . .

  Frank balled his hand and ground his fist into his temple. The pain drove away the foolish thoughts. What was the use of trying to figure out why Whispering Pines was go-to-hell inside out? The important thing was to make it all go away.

  “He’s right, Frank,” Sheila said. “I know it sounds silly- hell, you know I don’t believe any of this- but if there are rules to this game, that one makes as much sense as any. That’s what Samuel was trying to tell you.”

  “My boys are in there,” David said, nodding toward the church. “You’ve got to save them. And Linda, too. I reckon if the Lord can forgive her, I can, too. I guess when you save somebody once, you owe them.”