“Did you hear what Buster did yesterday?” Kelvin said, and Jett was relieved by the change of subject. She hadn’t told any of her school friends all the details of that awful night, or the other supernatural crap that had occurred since then, and she was happy to keep it a secret until she died or finally fell in love and could trust somebody.
“No, what?” Hayley said. “Did he smear chocolate syrup on the bathroom stalls again?”
“Even better. He put a fish in Coach Miller’s desk drawer. Everybody knows Coach never opens his desk. Today it was so rotten they had to move his health class to the gym.”
Jett joined in their laughter, although she thought the prank was kind of stupid and pointless. “Did Buster get busted?” she asked a few seconds later.
“Delores threatened to rat him out, but she’s really just mad because he started dating Kelly Greer,” Kelvin said. “Buster may be a loser, but the girls seem to dig him.”
“Gross,” Hayley said. “I’d rather sleep with Tommy Wilson.” She glanced in the rearview mirror at Jett. “You didn’t, did you?”
Jett sucked in a sharp breath and held it. Tommy had been her drug dealer in the ninth grade, but they’d never been friends. They didn’t even have a love-hate relationship. But she didn’t want to admit she was still a virgin, either. “Don’t believe everything you hear,” she said, and left it at that, although she noticed Kelvin was studying her curiously with those big brown eyes.
“Holy shee—did you guys see that?” Hayley said, swerving the car a little and slowing rapidly. Jett and Kelvin had been staring at each other, so they hadn’t been watching the road, and Jett realized dusk was settling and Hayley had switched on the headlights. But Jett didn’t see anything unusual, just a curving mountain highway lined with pastures, farmhouses, and woods.
“I don’t see nothing,” Kelvin said.
“It was a guy on a horse,” she said. “He crossed the road right in front of me.”
“Where’d he go, then?” Jett said, gripping her seatbelt as she looked behind them.
“Went up into the woods back there.”
“You’re already high and we’re not even to Tommy’s yet,” Kelvin said to Hayley.
“I swear,” she answered. “I’m not making this shit up.”
“Lots of people ride horses in Solom,” Jett said.
“In the dark? And he had this tattered black hat and old suit, and I could’ve sworn he looked right at me, but I couldn’t see his face. It was almost like this white, cheesy blob.” Hayley didn’t stop the car but she was only cruising at fifteen miles an hour. A truck swiftly came up on their rear and blasted its horn, causing Hayley to accelerate.
“Don’t kill us,” Kelvin said. “I’ve got big plans for the future.”
Jett wanted to ask about the rider, but that would only lead to questions. Better to just act like Hayley was losing her mind. Like a real friend would. “Who cares about the future? We’ve got a party waiting.”
They fell back into high-school gossip, but Jett’s mind kept returning to the rider. If the Horseback Preacher was in Solom again, she’d have to tell Mom. And that would lead to “conversations” and “lessons” and the logic twists that justified the impossible and encouraged selective memory. Hell, she hadn’t even told Mom about joining Dad’s church, and that was way down the list of things to be ashamed of.
It was full dark by the time they reached Tommy Wilson’s house via a long gravel drive. His parents were off to the Outer Banks for the weekend to go deep-sea fishing and were cool—or stupid—enough to trust their son with their house. Naturally, he’d planned a party and invited half a dozen of his best drug customers, and word quickly spread so that only the lamest hadn’t heard about it. Of course, half the kids were too cool to hang out with a redneck, and half of the other half wouldn’t go near a guy with Tommy’s reputation. But still a couple of dozen cars lined the gravel road in front of the Wilson farmhouse, where a band was setting up on the porch.
“This is going to be awesome,” Kelvin said, fishing a twelve-pack of Miller Lite from beneath his seat.
“Yeah, if the cops don’t show up,” Jett said, knowing that was a buzz kill.
“Relax, Jetty baby,” Hayley said, checking her eyeliner in the mirror. “The Wilsons own half the mountain here. No neighbors for miles.”
As they gathered to enter the party, with Kelvin already high-fiving two guys who held frothy cans of beer, Jett checked her phone. Her mom’s last text stabbed a needle of guilt into her heart: B sure 2 check n.
So corny it’s sweet, Jett thought, but no way was she going to tell Mom where she was tonight. She’d already decided on the cover story of a bad wireless signal in a Titusville coffee shop. That was better than pretending to see a movie, or something like bowling that she’d get grilled on later. With the coffee shop story, she could just say they were “hanging out” the whole night.
She entered with Hayley and didn’t even feel awkward when the other kids greeted her with some wariness. She was still an oddball, all right, but Hayley was squarely in the center of various cliques, so Jett could comfortably ride the draft of her friend’s charisma. True, the boys went to Hayley like flies on goat poop, but Jett was decidedly off the market anyway. Well, probably. She glanced over at Kelvin, who was coolly distributing his twelve-pack among a group of pimple-faced sophomores. He was a head taller than those boys, and he already had sideburns. And a nice smile to go with those dreamy brown eyes.
“Hey, Sweet Cheeks,” said a guy who was standing so close behind her she felt his breath on the back of her neck. She jumped away before she turned, which caused him to laugh.
“Tommy, you’re still a jerk,” she said, glad that he hadn’t grabbed her ass the way he did in ninth grade, before she’d laid down the law and threatened him with broken fingers and worse.
Tommy grinned. “Haven’t seen you around school lately. You been avoiding me?”
“Only for the last two years. When I quit that crap. Glad you finally noticed.”
“Not too goody goody to miss my party, though.” Tommy knew he had her. He held up a plastic cup. “Keg’s in the kitchen.”
She took the empty cup and moved through the crowd until she found a bathroom. She filled her cup with water at the sink, intending to carry it around for the rest of the night. Most people would never bother to look into it, and if anyone did, Jett could always say she was stretching out her buzz.
Jett hadn’t told anyone about joining a church. They might think she was uptight, even though most kids in Solom were Baptists of one kind or another. In truth, it wasn’t religion that made her want to stay clean and sober. She kind of liked having her wits about her. Marijuana smoke drifted from a bedroom, and Jett hurried past it, going outside where the crowd gathered to listen to the band.
It was a garage band of the worst kind, barely able to string three chords together, but it was loud, and under the porch lights the lead singer looked almost like that guy from The Strokes. The music drowned out any chance of conversation, which was fine with Jett. She was happy enough just being off the Smith farm, sort of blending in, and appreciating how little interest she had in the booze and drugs floating around.
If Dad could see me now.
Or Mom.
That thought reminded Jett to switch off her phone before guilt took all the fun out of sneaking and lying and rocking way past bedtime.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Know them by their fruits,” Odus Hampton said. “That’s what they keep telling me, anyways.”
“The Book of Galatians says there are nine fruits of the spirit,” Preacher Mose Eldreth said, thumbing through the verses of his memory. The words had slipped some since his long-ago seminary days, but he could take a running start when needed and bluster his way through the rest. He’d learned that if you said something with conviction, most people just nodded and went right along. “Love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness,
and one other I keep forgetting.”
Odus took a drink of Old Crow, the best four-dollar bourbon around. Preacher Mose didn’t bat an eye as the man pulled the bottle from the hip pocket of his overalls, although it was the first time anyone had ever brought liquor into the church during his tenure. Mose almost reached for the bottle himself, but figured now wasn’t a good time to let his principles slide. Not after what he’d seen. Not that he’d ever admit it to the likes of Odus Hampton.
“Now I remember that last one on the list,” Mose said. “Temperance.”
“Well, don’t mind me. I never claimed to live by the Good Book. All I know is what I’ve seen at the Smith farm.”
“A trail of hoof prints don’t amount to much. And goats…well, you can hardly swing a dead cat in Solom without hitting one of the critters.”
“Do you believe me?” Odus asked.
“I believe in the Lord, and at the moment, that’s the only thing I believe in.”
They sat side by side in a front pew of the wooden church, staring straight ahead as if expecting a sermon from the silent pulpit. Mose had been in the middle of laying the new baseboard for the sanctuary when Odus stumbled in stinking of bourbon and barnyard sweat, and his tool belt still sagged around his waist.
“It’s him,” Odus said, wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve. “Harmon Smith.”
“People don’t come back from the dead.”
“I thought that was what the Bible was all about. Hell, if you don’t get resurrected, then why miss out on all the fun of sinning?”
“That happened in the Bible,” Mose said. “This is real life.”
“Fine words, coming from a preacher. A man who sells the biggest fairy tale of all time.”
Mose still had the hammer in his hand. He hadn’t relaxed his grip since the mysterious figure had appeared at the church door. The man in the black hat stood there for the space of three heartbeats, his head tilted down, face hidden. There were holes in his dark wool suit, and the cuffs were frayed. The flesh of his hands was the color of a peeled cucumber. He’d turned up one palm and taken two steps forward, like a beggar seeking alms. Mose didn’t speak, and the man finally lowered his hand and stepped out of the church without turning.
Or moving his feet, Mose recalled. Except now he couldn’t be sure if he had merely imagined the whole scene. By the time he’d finally unlocked his muscles and run to the door, the strange man was nowhere to be seen. But the sound of hooves thumping the ground in the distance was unmistakable.
Odus arrived a couple of minutes later. He was supposed to help with the carpentry work, but given the state they were both in, Mose figured the job could wait until tomorrow. Apparently Odus had suffered a vision of his own, and it wasn’t far off from what Mose himself had witnessed. From what he knew about the Old Testament prophets, none of them ever shared the same vision. The coincidence moved the whole matter closer to the edge of fact, and Mose didn’t like that at all.
“So let’s suppose what y’all say is true,” Mose said. “The Horseback Preacher came to Solom last year and y’all beat him. Then what are you so worried about?”
“We didn’t beat him so much as outlast him. I kind of believe he was on our side, because the Scarecrow Man’s even more evil than the Horseback Preacher. And plenty of folks say the Horseback Preacher is just doing the Lord’s work, reaping those souls for the good of us all.”
Mose looked up at the oaken cross adorning the wall behind the lectern. Jesus returned on the third day. And if legend was true, so had Harmon Smith. But while Jesus had appeared to his disciples and others for forty days before ascending to await His return, Harmon had come back time after time after time.
It had been a hundred and twenty years since Harmon Smith had died by violence on the backwoods trails of Lost Ridge. The same number of years God had given humans to repent and turn from evil after Adam and Eve’s betrayal in the Garden of Eden. Of course, humans just kept on being human, finding taste for murder and fornication, and so God released the flood waters. In the wake of that cleansing, humans hardly skipped a beat before they were right back to their old ways.
Why, Noah his own self was making wine and laying around drunk and naked before the barnacles had even dried on the ark. God had promised not to destroy the world with water again, but He’d never promised not to send an emissary to clean house. In fact, He’d pretty much guaranteed it.
Mose just had a hard time picturing that ragged man in the black hat as the angel prophesied in the Book of Revelation. “The signs are there,” Mose said. “The numbers line up, and whatever part of Harmon Smith is buried in the grave out there, well, maybe it doesn’t rest easy. ‘Three’ is the number of perfection and unity, but being scattered across three graves might make a soul a little bit restless.”
“What are you going to do about it?” Odus asked.
“Do? Why does anything have to be done?”
“You know the history. He’s bound to take one of us.”
“That’s just a folk tale, Brother. I can’t give it any credence. I’m an educated man.”
“Well, a preacher has to believe in miracles, so what’s to say a bad miracle can’t happen now and again?” Odus sipped the bourbon as if he’d been giving the matter a great deal of thought. A philosophy built on the flood of many pints.
“Okay, then,” Mose said. “Just supposing—and I’m doing this like maybe I was writing a spooky movie or something instead of sticking to the Word—supposing Harmon Smith did come back to life? What would he want? What would be the point? Because he’d have been swept right up to Glory when he died, and wouldn’t have any reason to come back.”
“Except for the oldest reason ever. The reason God first punished Adam and Eve in the garden.”
“What’s that?”
“Revenge.”
“The church records say he died in an accident.” Mose didn’t believe the church records, but that was what was written. And as it is written, so shall it be. “He had no reason not to rest in peace.”
“What else would you expect them to say, Preacher? That he got conked on the head by other preachers, torn to pieces, and thrown in the river because he was doing missionary work?”
“A folk tale, I told you.”
“The Primitive Baptists didn’t cotton to Harmon Smith’s ideas. Neither did the Free Willers or the True Lighters or even his fellow Methodists. Of course, when he went strange, the Methodists denied him faster than Peter denied Christ.”
“We believe in salvation. Why would our people want to kill him?”
“Gordon Smith knew. That might be why he went crazy.”
Mose ran his thumb over the head of the hammer and stared again at the wooden cross on the wall, imaging a real person hanging there. “If I told you something, would you think I was crazy, too?”
“No crazier than you think I am.”
“I maybe saw the Horseback Preacher just before you got here. He took three steps inside the church and then stopped like he realized he’d taken a wrong turn. But it might’ve been the power of suggestion because everybody’s talking about him. An educated man believes in psychology, not ghosts.”
Odus took a deep gulp of the Old Crow and coughed. “I was wrong. You are crazier than me.”
Mose stood up. “I’d better get this molding nailed down before dark so it will be ready for Sunday services.”
Odus grabbed Mose’s arm. “Didn’t one of the disciples deny Jesus Christ after The Last Supper?”
“Peter. Jesus predicted Peter would deny him three times before the cock crowed.”
“Maybe you’re like Peter. You believe in Harmon Smith, but you’re not going to admit it to anybody. One down, two to go.”
Before Odus could answer, the air of the church sanctuary stirred. A raven swooped down the aisle and landed on the pulpit, where the black bird shook its wings and regarded them both with eyes like dirty motor oil.
“Know them by their f
ruits, Preacher Mose,” Odus said, tilting the bottle once more. “Because you never know which one of them’s going to turn rotten.”
Mose suddenly changed his mind about working any later. Getting home to bed, with the doors double locked behind him, sounded like a much better idea.
And prayers.
Oh, yes.
Lots and lots of prayers.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Katy made a last search for Snowball an hour before sundown.
The Smith farm was thirty acres, not particularly large for the region and only a fraction of the three hundred acres originally held by Harmon Smith. But with ten acres of forest, Katy wouldn’t have time to cover the entire parcel before dark. And Snowball likely wouldn’t stick to the property lines, either, despite the barbed-wire fences that marked the boundaries. “Goat fence” was an oxymoron, as goats viewed confinement as a suggestion, not a decree. That was one of the things she loved about the animals, a stubborn independence that matched her own.
But maybe stubbornness wasn’t so smart. Most reasonable people would want to leave all the associated horrors of this farmland behind—a homicidal husband who dressed in a scarecrow costume, flesh-eating goats, a dead woman haunting her house, and a supernatural preacher who seemed to have plenty of unfinished business in these parts. But if indeed this was horror, then horror was certainly the stupidest genre. Because people always did the things they knew they shouldn’t do, and they usually got into trouble because of it.
Maybe even dead.
Or worse.
Standing brave against the worst Solom could throw at her was not just part of a role exhibited to Jett. No, she needed to prove to herself that she could endure the worst and come out the other side. Katy had passed an easy life for the most part, even with a divorce and widowhood on her ledger, but now that she was rounding the post at forty and staring at the finish line in the hazy distance, she sought some sense of order and meaning for the universe. Maybe if she’d been more spiritual, she could embrace reasonable answers and pass the golden years in contentment. But it seemed like life kept its deepest secrets walled off from her.
The Preacher: A Supernatural Thriller (Solom Book 3) Page 4
