“Creature,” shit. There I go personifying inanimate objects again. Should have checked into the loony bin the first time I ever saw a talking, shape-shifting stack of dirt. That would have spared lots of people lots of trouble, and maybe kept a couple of them alive.
Littlefield looked down to see his pistol hand was shaking. So much for all those Louis L’Amour novels. The sheriff’s only comfort was in knowing the Hole was on the far side of the mountain, hundreds of yards from the ridge and Perriotte’s apparent target.
“Cover me,” Littlefield said to Morton. The kid’s eyes were wide and wet like oily olives, but he nodded in something approximating confidence. A sheriff’s hiring practices rarely came down to a life-and-death roll of the dice, but Littlefield hoped Morton lived up to the bluff and bluster on his resume. Littlefield took three steps, then lost his footing in the slick leaves and fell on his rump. A fart escaped his clenched rectum.
He bit back a curse and rolled to his hands and knees. Keeping low, he scuttled to Morton’s and Perriotte’s concealment. Perriotte’s eyes were wide and blank, staring through the canopy as if scanning for angels against the high clouds. The downed officer was an Iraqi war vet, had served two tours with a National Guard unit before finishing his criminal justice training. Maybe he was suffering delayed post-traumatic stress disorder and had lapsed into some sort of bizarre episode, though the North Carolina ridges were far removed from flat sand, crumbling mosques, and roadside bombers.
“You okay, J.R.?” The new generation of deputies went by initials while on duty, an annoying habit that had migrated from the ranks of the state highway patrol. Littlefield would have preferred to call the man “Jimmy,” which would have seemed a little more humane. The deputy looked like he could use all the human connection he could get, because his lips were stuttering soundlessly and his eyelids twitched in broken focus.
“He’s been like that ever since he fired the third shot,” Morton said.
“Did you see what he was shooting at?”
“No, he just yelled, ‘See that?’ and cut loose. He dropped his gun and curled up in a ball, and he’s been like this ever since.”
Littlefield put two fingers to Perriotte’s jugular. The pulse was strong and rapid. No physical injury. But the deepest wounds were invisible and a lot of soul juice could leak from them before the protective scars formed.
“We were in pursuit of them kids,” Morton said. “J.R. went after the fastest brat, chased him around the ridge.”
“Were you guys near the Hole?”
Morton’s eyes narrowed and he rubbed at the raw skin of his close-shaven neck. “We could see it, but we didn’t go in. You think somebody was hiding in there? A fugitive, maybe, who got spooked when he saw cops?”
“Did he say anything after the first two shots?” Littlefield played his gaze along the ridge line but saw nothing. Even the crows had been startled into silence.
The ridge was like the backbone of a dinosaur, lined with boulders and spiky trees, the branches shorn and stunted by the endless winds. The Appalachian Mountain chain, the world’s oldest, was worn by eons, but parts of it had resisted age, as if beholden to laws besides the natural. Mulatto Mountain was such a place, and Littlefield could have sworn the mountain throbbed. He checked his watch and saw the numbers hadn’t changed since he’d stepped from the cruiser. He shook his left wrist and tapped the watch with the butt of his gun but the red numerals winked in a mockery of mortality: 5:53.
“When I reached him, he said what sounded like ‘He’s walking on nothing.’ What do you think that means?”
Sounded to Littlefield like a quote from some book or movie, but Perriotte wasn’t exactly among the culturally hip. He was more of a pork rinds-and-roller derby kind of guy. Though the deputy had a fondness for videogames, he mostly stuck to the shoot-‘em-up kind where the line between the guilty and innocent often blurred and both were acceptable in piling up body counts. Perriotte was a registered Democrat, though you couldn’t tell it by his shop talk, and he attended the big new Baptist Church in Whispering Pines. Littlefield wasn’t one to meddle in his people’s private lives, unless there were suggestions of behavior that might come back to haunt his department.
Right now, Perriotte looked to be suffering from a problem bigger than psycho girlfriends and party politics, and Littlefield wondered how he would spin this to keep the deputy’s jacket clean. Anytime an officer fired shots in the line of duty, the State Bureau of Investigation stuck its beak into the situation and it became a race to see who could whip it out the fastest and measure it the longest. Under normal circumstances, Perriotte could defend the shoot. But this time there was no inciting action and no target.
Which probably meant Littlefield could cover it up. But he wasn’t sure he could wipe the slate of Perriotte’s memory as easily, because the man hadn’t blinked since Littlefield’s arrival two minutes before.
“He wasn’t shooting at the kid, was he?” Littlefield asked Morton.
“No, sir. The brat was long gone by the time I caught up.”
“Did you get a look at him?”
“All those brats are the same. Skater punks. There were a couple on the other side of the ridge but they took off when we heard the shots.”
“We?”
“Me and Ammanahiya whatever. The store owner.”
“So there’s another witness to worry about.” Though Littlefield wondered if it counted as “witnessing” if there had been nothing to see.
“I doubt it. He took off faster than the kids, squealing like a teenybopper at a Clay Aiken concert.”
Littlefield looked down the slope, which was quiet, not even the breeze rustling the trees. He was glad now that he had ordered the deputies to stake out the main roads. The fewer who knew about this the better, at least until he came up with a good story.
He had more than just Perriotte to worry about. The suits of Elkridge Landcorp had a lot at stake on Mulatto Mountain, and the county commissioners were wetting their pants over the potential tax revenue that would roll in when the slopes were stacked with million-dollar summer homes. A little bad publicity might slow down the project, and three of the commissioners were coming up for reelection. They couldn’t fire him, but they could jerk his chain and make roll over and beg.
“Let’s get him up,” Littlefield said, pointing out the overgrown logging road. “My cruiser is closer than yours. About a hundred yards that way.”
Perriotte swayed like a drunken sailor but stayed on his feet, flopping against Morton’s shoulder. Littlefield got them balanced and wobbling in the right direction.
“Want me to call an ambulance?” Morton said.
“No, we’ll deal with it at the office. I’ll catch up in a second. I got to check out the ridge first. Can you handle him?”
“Hell, I’ve had dates groggier than this, and I got them to bed just fine.”
“Well, treat him like a lady, not a woman.”
Morton tried to crack a grin but the strain and uncertainty were evident on his face. “What do you think he was shooting at?”
“Don’t worry, we’ll come up with something. Bear, dog with rabies, hell, maybe even a wild, man-eating goat. Stranger things have walked this goddamned mountain.”
As the two deputies negotiated the stumps, fallen trees, and jagged stones, Perriotte leaving long black strips of mud where his patent-leather shoes dragged, Littlefield climbed the last hundred feet to the slope. The pines, oak, and beech trees at the top of Mulatto Mountain were bleached by acid rain, the limbs jagged and broken from savage winds and ice storms. While the woods below were comforting, the kind that evoked images of cute little chipmunks and dewy-eyed deer, the ridge was raw and bristling, full of sharp edges and broken chunks of granite.
From the top, which was about a thousand feet in altitude above the valley floor, Littlefield took in the 360-degree view. Titusville spread out in a chaotic grid, the streets squeezed together to accommodate the uneven topogr
aphy. The main strip was a four-lane boulevard that looked like Anywhere, USA, with a Walmart, Western Steer, Taco Bell, Burger King, Auto Zone and enough different banks to foreclose on half the county. When Littlefield was a boy, the town had been little more than a motel, general store, and a Greyhound bus terminal with a gas station attached. Now Titusville was the biggest town in three counties, evolving into a business park for Realtors, lending institutions, and lawyers, who were basically all hogs at the same trough sucking down the swill of vacation-home owners.
But not everything was new and glistening with white concrete, glass, and steel. Mulatto Mountain had stood watch over all of it, and its legends had seeped into the dirt and run down the gullies like spring freshets spawned by melting snow. The forest, despite having been logged heavily a century before and now squarely in the sights of a development group, still had a primal feel, as if extinct predators might emerge from cover at any moment and give a hungry grin. Though the town was an hour’s hike away, it might as well have been a thousand miles.
Littlefield walked the ridge, looking for any signs of recent passage. He found a lump of animal spoor, most likely from a deer, but it was too dried and desiccated to have dropped from Perriotte’s target.
“He walked on nothing.”
That didn’t sound much like a deer, either. Being dead didn’t always account for much in Pickett County. The dead could rise up and walk, though not many people remembered the last time it had happened. And those who remembered tended to keep it to themselves.
He was about to give up and head back to the cruiser when he saw a series of long gouges in the soil. It looked like feet had dragged across the ground and kicked up small piles of leaves. The line of footprints tracked from a deadfall to a fern-pocked cluster of rocks. Littlefield followed the trail, one hand on his pistol, but when he reached the rocks, he saw only a mound of dirt. The footprints had abruptly ended, and no feet were in sight. Nor any face, body, or soul.
Littlefield knelt and rolled the cool, dark dirt in his hand. If it came to it, how could you fight a mountain and its most sacred and sick secrets?
CHAPTER FIVE
Bobby struck a match and held it aloft, the momentary stench of sulfur overpowering the fungal, wet-fur smell of the cave. “You hear that?”
Vernon Ray nodded, and then realized Bobby couldn’t see his face. They were about twenty feet inside the Hole, and though they could still see the jagged opening and the forest beyond, daylight didn’t penetrate to where they stood. The floor of the cave was uneven and peppered with tiny rocks that glinted in the bobbing flame. Vernon Ray wanted to grab Bobby’s sleeve for comfort, but didn’t want his best friend to think he was a sissy. That’s why he’d entered the Jangling Hole in the first place, despite every cell in his body screaming at him to run.
The rattling snare had faded a little, as if the drummer were marching deep into the bowels of the mountain. “Maybe it’s some geology thing,” Vernon Ray said. “A settling of tectonic plates or something.”
The explanation sounded feeble even as it left his lips, because as the world’s oldest mountain range, the Appalachian chain had seen its earthquakes and volcanic activity epochs before. The upward thrust and breaking of mantle was ancient history, the Earth cracking its knuckles, and now all that remained was the slow sinking under the gentle persuasion of time. Besides, the cave had collapsed when Union troops blasted it with cannons. If you believed the stories.
“No, man, that’s a drum,” Bobby said.
“You think it’s a ghost?” Vernon Ray wanted proof, something to tell his Dad—You’re right, Capt. Davis, the Civil War never ended—and maybe there was nothing more to being a man than sticking your neck into unnecessary danger. If it would make him a man, he’d march down into the Jangling Hole until he came to the ass end of Hell.
Though he’d keep his eyes closed, just in case.
“Why would a ghost play a drum? Ouch.” Bobby dropped the match, throwing them into near-pitch darkness. A pungent waft of burnt flesh teased Vernon Ray’s nostrils.
“They got anything better to do?” Vernon Ray’s false bravery failed as his voice cracked. “Light another match. Hurry.”
“Shh.”
The drumming had faded to a muted drone, the staccato beats blending together in the distance. A match scritched and as the yellow light flared, Vernon Ray glanced at the ceiling. Were symbols carved up there, or were the shapes just the flickering shadows cast by cracks in the stone?
“This is where the soldiers camped,” Bobby said, kicking at a rock.
“My dad said they did an archaeological survey,” Vernon Ray said. “No artifacts were found besides a few Cherokee tools and flint. If any troops were ever here, they must have been way down in the hole and got trapped.”
“Who are you going to believe, a bunch of pencil pushers like Cornwad or your bestest bud?”
“Who do you expect me to believe?”
“I saw one of them.”
“One of who?”
“Them. Why do you think I came in here?”
The second match went out and they stood in the dark, which pressed against Vernon Ray’s flesh like stagnant water. The space was silent except for their breathing and the soft rustle of wind through the trees outside. Vernon Ray’s heart was racing as fast as it did when he touched himself under the midnight covers of his bed, fueled by the same fearful anticipation of something that couldn’t be missed, no matter the consequences.
“Don’t dick with me, Bobby.”
“Serious. One of them called me. Well, actually, he said ‘Early,’ but you know.”
“I’ve heard of ghost whisperers, but I never heard of a ghost whispering back.”
“I heard it, plain as day,” Bobby said. “When I was running from the cops, he called again.”
“Who called?”
“Nobody. I mean, he was barely there.”
“Did you and Dex smoke a joint behind my back? Because you’re acting like a freakozoid.” Vernon Ray shivered. He didn’t like having this conversation in the dark, and the cave seemed to be sucking down the sunshine and digesting it, because now the entrance looked forty feet away even though they hadn’t moved.
“People say ghosts hide out in the Hole, but this person had flesh and bones,” Bobby said in a flat tone, as if reciting a line from a half-remembered movie. “It moved around and talked and smelled like chewing tobacco and coffee.”
“Hit another match.”
“Asked me if Stoneman had passed through yet. Asked me if the war was over. Asked if he could go home.”
Vernon Ray took another step closer, at the risk of being called a homo, until he bumped into Bobby. “Give me the matches.”
Vernon Ray found Bobby’s outstretched hand and took the matches, fired one up, and tore two more matches from the pack. Tiny twin flames reflected off Bobby’s eyes, giving his face the appearance of a hell-spawned demon. As the match burned low, Vernon Ray lit another and bent low, looking for tracks. Though the light didn’t penetrate much of the cave, the muddy floor appeared to show only their two sets of footprints.
“I don’t see nothing now,” Bobby said.
“Maybe you heard a fox or something. Or bats.”
“It was a soldier.”
“It’s dark in here. Easy for your imagination to run wild.”
I’m trying to talk you out of it because I want to believe it so bad.
Bobby turned away, toward the back of the cave. Vernon Ray looked over his shoulder, stepping closer, toward his friend’s comforting body heat. A solid wall of murk stood before them, and somewhere beyond it lay the bones of soldiers. Vernon Ray could picture the pale skeletons, bones picked clean by vermin, mold and moss sinking spores into the dried marrow. Whatever Bobby had seen, it was best to let it rest in peace in this stifling tomb.
“Let’s get out of here,” Vernon Ray said, lighting a third match and holding it until it nearly burned his fingers. Despite his
academic assessment of Appalachian tectonics, the walls looked fragile, rock stacked on a whim, glistening with the moist sweat of the world. He could imagine primordial reptiles slithering in its crevices, the first furry creatures huddling for cover.
Bobby pointed toward a dark stain on the wall, a splotch of faintly fluorescent indigo. “That looks like dinosaur crap.”
The air was ripe with must and decomposition, as if the cave were in constant decay, the world rotting from the inside out. Stones were bones, after all, just dying at a different speed. It was all star stuff, and cosmic nonsense aside, the cave was a graveyard, a garbage hole, a place where light and life were sucked toward the inevitable. And maybe that consumption, the bottom of the hole, was the final resting place of all that walked and breathed and prayed.
Vernon Ray tossed the final match down, plunging them into darkness again, and glanced back at the entrance to the cave. He hadn’t taken a single step, but now daylight appeared fifty feet away. He closed his eyes and saw lime-green flashes where the flame had imprinted his retinas. When he blinked several seconds later, the cave seemed darker, as if the sun were going down outside. But it was probably only six o’clock, an hour before dusk.
“Come on, the cops are probably gone by now,” Vernon Ray said. The cops had become an abstraction. Even a jail cell would be better than the unseen but constricting walls of granite around them.
He was glad to feel Bobby’s hand on his arm, though the fingers were cold and moist. He only wished his friend hadn’t gone so silent. He could no longer hear Bobby’s breathing.
A faint ticking filled the air. Ratta-tat, ratta-tat.
The snare drum became audible in the same way it had faded out, swelling as if the invisible, impossible drummer were marching toward them from the depths.
“Come on, Bobby!” Vernon Ray tugged his friend’s hand, leading him toward the safety of the forest outside. But he lost traction in the mud and the air had grown heavy, and he fought against it as if wading through a receding tide. The mouth of the cave now appeared uphill and despite taking a dozen slow, straining steps he was no closer to safety. The drumming gained in volume, echoing off the wet walls.
Littlefield Page 33
