Chapter Eleven

The doctor must have dosed her with some sort of horse pill, because Sarah Jeffers woke up with a mild headache. The sun was already streaming low through the window, so it must have been midmorning. She hadn't dreamed at all, and her tongue was thick and sticky in her mouth. It took her a moment to remember where she was.

She peeled the sheet off her chest. She was dressed in a baby-poop-green gown tied loosely behind her back. Her clothes were folded in a chair at the foot of the steel-railed bed. So somebody had seen her naked, something that hadn't happened in at least twenty years. Served them right. They had no business poking around in her innards anyway.

She lay there, calculating yesterday's lost profits. She should have called in one of the Hancocks, or the boy who swept up after school. Even paying somebody a full day's wages, she would have netted fifty bucks at the least. And you never knew when a tourist bus was going to pull up, or a pack of Christian Harley riders. This time of year, with the fall colors starting to come on, the general store needed to bank enough to get her through the winter. Which meant she couldn't lie there another day, not while customers turned away with full pockets.

A new doctor came in, a man with a mustache that looked pen-ciled over his lip, who looked more like a game-show host than somebody in the medical field. It was getting so you couldn't peg people anymore.

"Morning, Miss Jeffers. I'm Dr. Vincent." The doctor put a wrist to her forehead and checked the tension on the clip attached to her finger. Apparently that little clip fed a lot of information to the video monitor on the wall. All the signs appeared to be jagging up and down in some kind of steady pattern.

"Am I fit to go?" Sarah was going to ask for a cup of orange juice, but figured that would probably run her five bucks. She was on Medicare but she'd still be stuck with her 20 percent of the bill, meaning the juice would cost her a buck out-of-pocket. She wasn't that thirsty.

"Everything looks good," the doctor said. "You had a rough patch for a little bit, but all your signs are stable. We've diagnosed ex-haustion."

"I took on a spell," Sarah said. "I'm all better now, like you said."

"I'll sign your discharge papers, but I urge you to get some extra rest in the next few weeks. I wouldn't want you coming back in with something more serious."

"Don't you worry. I haven't spent so much time in bed since my honeymoon, and that was before you were born."

The doctor almost grinned. "One thing... while you were out, you were muttering 'Harm me,' over and over again. Did you think somebody was going to hurt you?"

Sarah let her face slip into a mask of cool stone. "Nobody's going to hurt me. I can take care of myself."

"Of that, I have no doubt." He patted her hand. "I'll have the nurse help you get your things together. Do you have someone to drive you home?"

"I'll call somebody."

"Good. Extra sleep for a while. Promise?"

"Sure, Doc."

He left the room, and Sarah lay there in the stink of antiseptic. The beeping of the monitor accelerated and the jaggedy lines on the screen became erratic. Sarah removed the clip from her trembling finger. She must have been dreaming of him, to have called out his name like that.

Not "harm me."

Harmon.

Harmon Smith, the man in the black hat.

When the bus picked Jett up, she walked straight down the aisle, her gaze fixed on the emergency release latch for the back door. Tommy Williamson let out a wolf whistle, and one of the third graders was opening his lunch box, filling the air with peanut butter smell. She bit her lip and slid into the empty seat on the sec-ond row from the rear. Right in front of Tommy and Grady. She ex-pected Tommy to make a grab as she sat, but he must have been too shocked by her abrupt approach. Tommy said, "Hey, Grady, I think she likes me."

"In your dreams, man."

"No, really. She knows when she's licked . .. all over.'' Tommy snickered. Jett could smell it on them, the reason she had ventured into the goonie zone.

"Why don't you ask her, then?" Grady taunted. "If you're so hot, why ain't she sitting in your lap?" Jett didn't turn. Compared to the inner-city school she had once attended, where fourth graders sometimes carried switchblades, a Cross Valley Elementary bus offered little to fear. Tommy in his Carhartt jacket with the scuffed elbows was about as threatening as Fonzie from Happy Days, in that warm-and-fuzzy era after the likeable hoodlum had jumped the shark.

"Yeah? Just watch a stud in action." Tommy leaned over the seat. Jett could feel his breath on her neck, and the smell of pot was thick and potent. "Hey, sweet thing. I dig chicks in black." She waited. Maybe he had been practicing his lines on his sister or something, because they sure were lame. He could have done better reading books like How to Talk to Girls (And Don't Call Them

"Chicks ") or hanging out in Internet chat rooms.

"What do you say?" Tommy's voice fell into a low, murmuring rhythm. "You know you want it. Can't keep away, can you?"

"I'm fine, thanks," she said without turning.

"She talked to you, dude," Grady said.

"Shut up." Tommy moved closer, and now his breath was on her ear. "Want some of what I got?"

"As a matter of fact, I do."

Tommy was silent, though he was panting audibly now.

"Seven grams will do," she said. Her father had mailed her fifty dollars, telling her it was for her personal use. This was about as personal as she could get.

"Grams? Do what?"

"Or do you sell it by the quarter ounce up here? I don't know if the metric system has hit the sticks yet."

"You ain't right, girl."

"Come on, let's not play games. You've reeked of marijuana since the first day I walked into school. The only reason the teach-ers can't smell it is because they're probably smoking it them-selves."

"Hey, big-city bitch, don't get so high and mighty. Just because you talk all fancy and got black stockings don't mean you can—"

Jett turned and put her face close to his, their noses almost touching. "Listen, redneck. Next time you lay a hand on me, I'll take your fingers and shove them one by one up your asshole until you're tickling your own tonsils."

Grady shrank into the corner, shooting a glance at the driver twenty rows up. Tommy blinked but didn't back away. A kinder-gartner was crying in the front of the bus. Trees whizzed by beyond the windows, and leaves skirled along the gravel road in the draft of the bus's wake.

"I've got money and I need grass," she said. "You've got grass and you need money."

"I don't mess with that shit."

"Like hell. What's that you were smoking this morning, goat turds?" Grady giggled and Tommy elbowed him in the ribs. "What if I could get some? I want something more than money."

"Like what?"

Tommy ran his tongue over his lips like a poisoned rat at a water puddle. "Some of your sweet stuff." Jett tucked a strand of dyed hair behind her ear. "Fine. Bring it on. But there's something you ought to know."

Tommy's eyes widened, and Grady leaned toward her, too, not believing his good buddy was going to score. "What's that?" Tommy said, in a dry croak.

"I've got AIDS. So any time."

Tommy went pale. Jett faced the front, smiling to herself. The rumor would make the rounds, and by Christmas break some teacher or other would probably call her mom. It might even get as far as the school board. She'd probably be asked to take a blood test by next semester. With any luck, it would lead to an indefinite sus-pension until the matter was cleared up.

But by tomorrow, she would have a bag of pot, even if Tommy delivered it wearing rubber gloves and a surgical mask. The good times would roll, and all her problems would go up in smoke. Katy had gone back to bed after seeing off Jett. She lay under the covers, half asleep, trying to free the stolen sheet from Gordon's clutches. This was Friday, and Gordon's only class was in the afternoon. They had taken to sleeping late that day, especially as the mornings had grown chillier. Katy felt a bit decadent, having been a chronic early riser during her banking career. She still was-n't sure if she missed working or not.

Gordon snorted and rolled over against her. His body warmth was comforting and she let herself roll against him into the curved middle of the mattress. Rebecca's weight had helped make the de-pression in the mattress, from her two thousand nights of lying here. But Rebecca was gone and now this space was hers.

Katy wriggled her rear against his thigh, hoping to elicit a re-sponse. She was rewarded when one of his hands slid across her waist. It was the most intimate he had been in weeks. She wriggled some more and his hand slid up to her breast. She wished she had removed her bra. She'd always slept in the buff but Gordon had acted like that was a dirty habit. He wore pajamas, rumpled cotton that didn't flatter him. The pajamas made him look like a nursing home inmate.

Gordon squeezed her breast and her nipple hardened. She snug-gled closer, hoping he would turn so she could feel his arousal. She twisted her neck and kissed his cheek. He smelled masculine, like wood smoke and metal. His hand worked her flesh in small circles.

"Gordon," she whispered, and then a moan escaped her lips.

She didn't want to move away from his hand, but a tiny spark had taken hold in the center of her body. She raised herself up on her elbow so that she was nearly over him. Even asleep, his body revealed evidence of his lust. His erection tented the blankets.

Katy moaned and let her fingers slide between the buttons of his pajama top. Gordon grunted in his sleep and put his hand over hers. Katy nuzzled his neck and Gordon's eyes flickered.

"Rebecca," he said in a hoarse, low whisper.

Katy froze. Maybe he was dreaming that she was Rebecca, and that was the reason for his response. He'd barely touched Katy, had not even slipped her some tongue when they kissed, had left her to masturbate on their wedding night. But here he was as hard as Pittsburgh steel and as hot as Costa Rica, and it was his dead wife that was doing it for him.

Not Katy.

But Katy was so desperate for affection and contact that a cyni-cal part of her took over. She would screw him no matter who she had to be. There was more than one way to consummate a mar-riage.

"Yes, darling," Katy said, not knowing where the endearment came from. She'd never said "darling" in her life. But she was slip-ping into a role, and the deception fueled her lust. If Rebecca was what Gordon wanted then Katy would give her to him, and fulfill her own desires in the bargain. She pressed her lips to his and Gordon's tongue probed her mouth. She was fully on him now, kicking the blankets away, press-ing her chest against his. Gordon's arms went around her back and stroked her hair. She raised one leg and straddled him, settling so that her vagina was over the straining bulge of his pajama bottoms. She rocked gently back and forth, savoring his saliva, breathing wildly through her nose. Gordon lifted himself, thrusting against her. He pulled his mouth free and gasped. "Yes," he said. His hands came down to her bra strap and he deftly unhooked it. He peeled the bra away and flung it off the bed. She reached be-tween their bodies for the waistband of his pajamas, wanting to un-button them. Instead, her fingers found the fly and slid into the little pocket toward the heat beneath. She had seen his penis, of course, he hadn't been that strange. But she had yet to see it in all its glory, pumped full of blood and quivering for release.

"Oh, honey," he whispered, and Katy no longer cared if he was talking to her or to Rebecca. The ache in her loins was taking over, and she probably would have ridden him if he had called her Catherine the Great.

"Mmmm," she said, not sure what sort of language to use. Mark liked dirty talk, and they'd often ranted themselves into a frenzy as they worked toward what were almost always simultaneous or-gasms. She blushed for thinking of Mark, but her cheeks were al-ready warm and pink and she decided that was no worse than Gordon's little fantasy. Besides, her brain wasn't the organ doing her thinking at the moment. Her fingers slipped into his pajamas and found the rigid flesh of his penis. There was still another layer of fabric over it, and she fumbled for the waistband of his briefs. Gordon's hands enclosed her breasts, kneading them with a gentle firmness that suggested experience. While he'd been chaste with Katy, he certainly was no virgin.

She was panting, her heart galloping, and a strand of drool hung from her lower lip. Her hand worked down his underwear and at last she had him. His penis was like a smooth piece of wood en-cased in warm velvet. She worked it free of the confines of cloth and stroked it, bringing tiny grunts of approval from Gordon.

One of Gordon's hands slid down her panties and she bit her lip as his middle finger slid between her labia. She was soaking wet and could smell her own juices. Gordon's other hand continued to work her breasts; then his mouth enveloped her left nipple. She opened her eyes and saw the dark tangles of his hair and the slight bald spot at the top of his skull. Gordon's throbbing heat nudged against her panties, and then he eased one of the leg bands aside and slid the head against her moist outer folds. Katy fought an urge to mash herself down onto him. This was their first time, and it should be slow. As much as she hated to break the contact of his tongue on her nipple, she tilted his head back to look him in the eyes.

"Gordon," she said, and the word came from low in her throat, like the growl of an animal. His eyes remained closed, though his eyelids fluttered as if he were asleep and experiencing the rapid eye movements associated with dreaming.

She rubbed his penis against her, making his skin damp and slick. She stroked down until she felt his coarse pubic hair, then squeezed the base of his turgid stalk. Her hips quivered of their own accord, and she knew she couldn't hold out much longer. Gordon's finger returned to the sheath inside her and caressed her clitoris. He was definitely no virgin.

"Rebecca," he said, lifting his hips off the bed and pushing the head of his penis inside her. Katy almost hesitated. This was too weird. The only way she could get laid was to pretend to be dead. Or, more precisely, be someone who had died. Her rival. The woman she hated. But another part of her saw it as revenge, as if she were seduc-ing Gordon into cheating on Rebecca. She knew how crazy that sounded, but lust made people crazy anyway, and if she was going off the deep end she wanted to go with a bang.

Katy impaled herself on his hardness and felt the burning length of it drive inside her. She raised herself again and settled, letting it slide even more deeply.

"Rebecca," he repeated.

"Yes, darling, I'm here," she said, shivering in anticipation and an odd sensation that she might have recognized as fear if she weren't so far gone. She scarcely recognized her own voice. Gordon's hands went around her waist and lifted her, then let her fall back down. They gained speed, working toward a frantic pace, Gordon grunting, his lips peeled back and teeth clenched, his eyes still closed.

Katy flung her head back, hair flailing across her shoulders. She put her hands on his chest and caught his rhythm, pushing herself down as he released her waist at each apex. His penis filled her, and a glow built from inside her belly, a tiny spark expanding into a golden fire.

"Yes, darling, yes," she said, words interrupted by thrusts. "Give it to me." She started to scream, "Fuck me harder," but something held her back. After all, Gordon wasn't Mark and she'd have to adjust her sexual habits. And it didn't seem like the kind of thing Rebecca would say. She smelled lilacs, but before she could comprehend the scent the fire expanded and electricity jumped the wires in her arms and legs and this was way better than another lonely bout with the vi-brator as the flood of his passion erupted inside her and their hips slammed together and she may have shouted something and she hoped to God it wasn't Mark's name, not that Gordon would have heard her anyway because he gave a loud, shuddering groan and thrust up against her, lifting her nearly a foot off the bed. They col-lapsed with a squeak of bedsprings and Gordon thrust again, less vigorously this time, but she was finishing her own orgasm and so pressed down enough for both of them. Their bodies writhed together several more times before slow-ing. Katy relaxed onto Gordon's chest, her hair flowing over his neck and shoulders, chest heaving from effort. The area below her waist was a warm taffy and she couldn't tell where she ended and Gordon began. His arms went around her and he squeezed more tightly than he ever had before, even when the minister David Tester had pronounced them man and wife in the little church on the other side of the mountain.

"That was worth the wait, darling," she said into the dark, curly hairs on his chest.

"As good as the first time," he said.

She lifted herself, arms trembling in postcoital weakness. "What?" His eyes, which had remained closed throughout the inter-course, now flicked open, then widened.

"Rebecca?"

Gordon sounded dismayed. Had he carried the fantasy all the way through to the end and not even allowed himself to give any-thing to his new wife? As horny as she had been, was the physical release worth this feeling of rejection?

She rolled off him, or perhaps Gordon had raised himself on one hip and eased her to the side. They separated with a slight sticky smack.

"Gordon, what's wrong?" she said, drawing the sheet over her breasts in an attempt to hide from his shocked stare.

He rubbed a hand over his face and closed his eyes. "Nothing, it was just... that was wonderful, honey."

Gordon bent and kissed her lightly on the forehead, then sat on the edge of the bed. He buttoned his pajama top, fussed with the alarm clock, and stood and stretched. Without a word, he went into the bathroom and closed the door.

Katy lay there, the heat fading between her thighs until it felt as if someone had driven an icicle inside her. She couldn't escape the feeling that she had just been cheated on by her husband's late wife. Gordon turned on the shower, and the hissing spray sounded almost like a mirthful and devious giggle.

Chapter Twelve

The cornstalks were streaked with brown from the early frosts, the tassels stiff and dry. Ray Tester worked his way between the rows, checking the ears. He'd grown Silver Queen, which produced sweet but short ears with small, white kernels. By this time of year, what hadn't been harvested or nibbled down by cutworms was left to freeze and harden. The crows, who hadn't been around since first planting, when they'd go down the rows like mechanical chickens and pluck seeds from the ground were now back for fall.

Some farmers laced loose kernels with battery acid and spread the tainted bait around the edges of their fields. Others would duck down in the rows with double-barrel shotguns, the shells loaded with small pellets to give the most scattering power. Ray figured both of those methods were useless. Crows were too stupid to learn a lesson, and if you killed one, then four-and-fucking-twenty would swoop down in its place. No, the best way to handle the black, thieving bastards was to head them off at the pass.

Which meant a scarecrow.

Not just any old scarecrow, either. Crows were dumb but they had eyes, and if you propped up something that looked like a sack of Salvation Army rags, then the crows would just sit on its head and shit on its shoulders, laughing in that cracked caw of theirs, a sound that taunted farmers everywhere. No, what you needed was something so close to flesh-and-blood that even humans did a dou-ble take. Ray was a champion scarecrow maker. He'd entered his best creation, named "Buck Owens" after the star on the old Hee-Haw television show, in a contest at the Pickett County Fair three years ago and had taken home the blue ribbon and fifty bucks. Buck had an ugly striped shirt and frayed overalls and a head that was sack-cloth stuffed with old linen scraps. The judges had especially liked the straw boater that was perched atop its head, dented and torn and weathered. Ray had been proud of his handiwork, especially since he'd dropped out of school in the ninth grade and had never been mistaken for a genius. But while the scarecrow was on exhibit for the better part of that harvest week, the crows had ravaged his fields and taken up residence in the trees above the farm. His late wife, Merlie, had a little bird feeder built in the shape of a church that hung from a wire on the porch. The crows had streaked the church with green-and-yellow runs, proof that the winged rats had no respect for neither God nor man. Since then, Ray had never entered another agricultural contest. He kept his scarecrow out in the field where it belonged, a good soldier on sentry duty who didn't complain and would give its life to defend its home ground. But even a soldier needed an overhaul every now and then, just to keep its spirits up. So Ray was bringing a moth-eaten scarf he'd found tangled in the briars at a county Dumpster site. The scarf had the extra advantage of being plaid, something that would spook even those nearsighted crows. He could hear the crows in the forest at the edge of the pasture, cawing from throats that seemed way too long for their bodies. In case some of them had witnessed another farmer scattering their kind with buckshot, he'd tucked a gun in his scarecrow's arms. It was a rusty old air rifle scrounged from the flea market for a dollar. That helped with the soldier idea, too, even though that didn't square with the "Buck Owens" name. But a banjo wouldn't have done a damn thing against those miniature buzzards, unless the scarecrow started twanging it as off-key as did those Christian bluegrass bands. The corn was about two feet over Ray's head. It had been a good year, rainy in the spring and sunny in the sunnier, and fall had been pretty slow and mellow. From between the rows, he couldn't see the scarecrow where it hung on a tall oak stake in the center of the field. But he could almost feel its gaze sweeping across the rows, alert for the slightest flicker of black feathers. Ray grinned, his feet crunching in the high weeds and dirt clods. The air smelled of that sweetness the grass and trees only gave off just before win-ter, when the sugar was breaking down inside.

At the center of the field was a rusty fifty-five-gallon drum that caught rainwater. Ray didn't have an irrigation system, but the bar-rel would provide some backup in case of a dry spell, especially when the seedlings were young and tender. That was also when the crows liked to swoop down, when the green shoots were easy to spot from above. The birds would tug the nubs out of the ground and eat the just-split kernels, sprouting roots and all. A few tools leaned against the barrel, and the scarecrow stood sentinel beside it

Ray eased back the cluster of stalks that separated him from the clearing. The first thing he noticed was the empty pole and cross-piece. He thought at first old Buck had slipped to the ground, blown by a strong wind, even though the scarecrow had been tied in place with baling wire. But there were no rags on the ground be-neath the pole. The dirt was scuffed as if someone had been drag-ging away a heavy load. Ray dropped the scarf and ran to the pole.

Not a scrap remained of the scarecrow. Ray squinted over the rows of corn to the edges of the field. Some kid was probably play-ing a prank. One of those Halloween trick-or-treat deals. But who-ever had stolen his award-winning scarecrow didn't know that some tricks weren't worth playing. Ray looked in the weeds surrounding the barrel, figuring he'd at least find the air rifle or the battered straw boater. He studied the dragging marks for footprints. That's when he realized that some-thing hadn't been dragged away, it had been dragged to. There were no footprints, just fine squiggles that looked as if someone had swept the dirt to erase tracks.

The marks led to the water drum. The stagnant water gave off the scent of rust and something ranker. Ray looked in the water. At first all he saw was a reflection of the sky in the greasy surface, the frayed strips of cirrus clouds and a sun the color of a rotten egg yolk. But a shape hung suspended beneath the surface. Ray thought of one of those carnival sideshows he'd seen as a kid, back before polite society decided freaks couldn't earn an honest dollar with their talents. He'd seen the conjoined fetus of Siamese twins floating in a milky jar of formaldehyde, two tiny arms complete down to the fingernails, two legs curved like those of a frog. The two heads hung at different an-gles, one leaning forward with a single bleary eye open. Ray got in plenty more than his fifty cents' worth of looking before the crowd nudged him along.

This shape was almost like that, except indistinct. Somehow, the extremities didn't quite add up. Ray took the hoe from beside the barrel and dipped it into the tainted water. He hooked and lifted, straining from the weight. The odor hit him before his eyes could make sense of what they were seeing. It was a goat, at least a week dead, its meat beginning to turn to pink soap. The animal had been gutted and a few ribs glinted in the afternoon light. The head hung by a narrow scrap of skin and the horns had been sawed down to blunt stumps. One leg was missing, and in the lower part of the goat's body cavity was a furry lump. Ray lifted the hoe higher to get a good look, and the head broke free and plopped into the barrel, splashing stinky water onto Ray. The head bobbed in the surface, the lips puffed into a grin.

Ray twisted the hoe handle so he could see what was inside the body cavity. He'd slaughtered plenty of livestock in his time, and he knew that guts were gray and pink and most major organs were ruby red. Nothing grew inside that was furry. He shook the corpse, expecting pieces of it to slough off and slide back into the water. It held together long enough for him to see what was lurking where the stomach, kidneys, and liver should have been.

It was another goat head, that of a billy, the horns long and slick. One of the horns had perforated the animal's skin, Ray let loose of the hoe and it slid into the barrel along with thirty pounds of scrambled goat parts. The stench was stronger now, and Ray wiped at the front of his soaked shirt. He forgot all about Buck Owens as he made his way into the sanity of the long, straight rows. The Circuit Rider might have come riding through, but he wouldn't have any business with scarecrows. He'd never been known to slaughter livestock, either, at least not since he'd passed from the mortal coil. This business was different. As mysterious as the Circuit Rider was, at least he was a part of Solom, regular, reli-able, not given to trickery.

"Better the devil you know," Ray figured. But some new devilry was afoot, and he didn't want to be caught out alone if that partic-ular devil came calling.

Ray glanced back once as he entered the corn. A murder of crows had settled onto the crosspiece. One of them fluttered down and gripped the rim of the barrel, dipping its head to drink at the sickening soup.

Jett tuned out the monotone of Jerry Bennington, her earth sci-ences teacher. That was no challenge, because Bennington was lec-turing about gravity and even though gravity tied all the stars and planets into place, he managed to make it sound as simple and bor-ing as a math problem. Like there was no magic or mystery in it at all. Public school teachers weren't allowed to address religion in the classroom, and explaining how heaven stayed in place might have made the subject a little more colorful. The boy sitting in front of her, Harold Something-or-Other, must have raided his dad's medicine chest, because he reeked of Old Spice or Brut or one of those stinky-sweet colognes. She could endure it as long as Harold didn't bend forward to pick up a pencil or something and flash his sweaty crack over the belt loops of his low-riding blue jeans. She slipped Dad's letter from her backpack and read it for the fourth time since yesterday.

Dear Punkin,

I miss you so much mucher than all the chocolate donuts in the world. Right now I'm looking at the picture of us from the Outer Banks trip we took the summer you were seven. You look a lot like your mother in that one, more than you do now. I guess you were getting ready to be your own self.

How do you like the mountains? I'll bet they're not as strange as you thought they would be, but I wish you were down here right now so we could go to Discovery Place or a Panthers game, or anywhere that sold cotton candy and root beer. You'11 have to tell me all about your school and teach-ers. I would e-mail you but your mom told me her new hus-band (I don't like to say his name, I guess that's small of me but that's the way it is) put a password on the computer so you can't use it without his permission. Plus ink and paper give you something real to hold on to, and you can keep a letter nearby for when you want it.

Are you making new friends? I finally went out with that poodle woman but I don't think any sparks flew. If they did, I didn't get burned. I guess it's taking me longer to get over the breakup than it did your mom. But she's a great woman and a great mother. I tried my best but things happen, and I'll still always try my best for you no matter what. Listen to your old man going on like this. A good parent leaves the kids out of it, they say. I wish I could have left you out of my other problems, too.

It's not that long until Thanksgiving and I'm so much mucher looking forward to having you down for a few days. You know I'm not a cook but even turkey cold cuts will taste fine with you at the table. Work's going great, I'm designing some new wrought-iron furniture, wine racks and chande-liers, fancy stuff. They pay me for all the designs they use and then I get a royalty on each piece cast from my design. I hope that will allow me more free time in the next few years so I can get up and see you whenever I want. Maybe I can even move near you, since there's nothing keeping me in Charlotte now except the manufacturing plant. All I would need is a small house and a workshop, and maybe we can work it out so you 're with me on weekends. I was not going to mention the drugs, but it seems like part of the problem that caused the Big Problem. I'm sorry if I was a bad influence on you. I let that stuff take me over and steal part of my soul away, and things might have been dif-ferent if I had given that bit to my family instead. The reason I bring it up is this: You 're going to be a big girl soon and have to make your own decisions about your life. I know bet-ter than anybody that you can't change your heart just by changing your scenery. Because my heart still belongs to you even though we're two hundred miles apart.

So tell me all about Solom and send me some pictures when you write back. I've enclosed some stamps and a money order. The money is for you and you don't have to tell any grown-ups about it. I miss you all the world and love you all the stars in the sky and think of you all the fish in the sea. See you in November.

Giant hugs and supersize kisses,

Dad

Heavy shit, Dad.

"Miss Draper?"

Jett slid the letter into the papers on her desk. She wondered how many times Bennington had called her name before she'd no-ticed. Harold turned in his seat with a faint farting noise and smirked at her. She was used to the stares by now. Solom's first genuine artificial Goth girl, and the attention was half the fun. "Yes, Mr. Bennington?"

"We were discussing Sir Isaac Newton."

"The guy who invited the delicious fig cookies?"

That got a muffled laugh out of a couple of the kids. She had to admit, it was a pretty lame comeback, but she was off her game. Maybe when Tommy came through with the pot, she'd sharpen her wit a little and really wow the crowd.

Bennington wasn't amused, his Grinchish frown seeming to stretch longer in defiance of physics as his lips receded deeper into his mouth. "We were discussing Newton's Third Law of Motion."

"Oh yeah, that one. How does it go again?"

This drew a few more laughs. Bennington glanced above the chalkboard at the clock. Two minutes away from the bell. ''It seems not everyone benefited from today's lecture, so perhaps the entire class should read chapter four in your textbooks and write a two-page report on Isaac Newton's laws." Bennington's frown lifted a little as the class let out a collective groan. "Good going, witch," Harold whispered.

After the bell sounded, Jett hurried from the room. She was to meet Tommy just before sixth period in the boiler room behind the gym. Tommy had skipped English class, so Jett assumed he'd gone off the school grounds to score. She didn't feel the least bit guilty for her part in his truancy. His attendance record was his problem. It wasn't like the goon was going to last past the legal dropout age of sixteen anyway.

The gym was set apart from the school, with a walkway that led to the bus parking lot. Phys ed classes weren't held during the last period so it was the perfect place for a little privacy. Jett passed a necking couple who were tucked behind a screened Dumpster. The boy wore dark boots and a stained baseball cap, the girl wore cheap jewelry and an outdated Friends hairstyle. From their downscale Kmart fashion wear, she pegged them for trailer trash. The girl would probably be pregnant by ninth grade and the boy would do the honorable thing and marry her, at least until he realized that di-apers didn't change themselves and three people could never live as cheaply as one.

Not that you're any great shakes, Jett, but at least you're aware of your flaws. Like criticizing others.

She hefted her backpack higher on her shoulder and cut around the gym entrance, where cigarette butts and old ticket stubs littered the gravel. The dirt around the boiler room was stained black from spilled fuel oil. A large rusty tank was half-submerged in the ground, the cap locked to prevent sabotage or theft.

The door to the boiler room was ajar. The custodian must have been performing maintenance earlier in the morning. She'd ex-pected the door to be locked and for the deal to go down in the shadows of the little brick outbuilding. The building had no win-dows. Now they would have decent concealment, and if she and Tommy were caught, they could always pretend they were just an-other couple sneaking off to swap a little saliva.

She took a look around before easing into the boiler room. It was dark and smelled of oil, musty pasteboard, and old pipes. Something rustled behind the giant steel-plated pipe-entangled contraption in the center of the room.

'Tommy?"

She reached into her hand purse for the money. She usually didn't carry a purse but had gone with a black, ruffled skirt today, with white knee hose, figuring cold weather would come soon enough so she might as well log some leg time while she could.

The noise came again, and the room grew darker. The door slammed shut behind her. A ventilation grille in the wall allowed some light, but it took her eyes a few seconds to adjust. Tommy must be playing some stupid stoner game. Or maybe he was dick-headed enough to try and get laid even under threat of death from AIDS.

"That's not funny, Tommy," she said trying the doorknob. Stuck tight.

"It's not funny," came a voice from behind the boiler. It wasn't Tommy's. It was deep and raspy and evoked a tingling familiarity.

Jett turned with her back to the door. The custodian? Maybe he hung out in here with his girlie mags in the afternoon, waiting for the last bus to leave so he could run a buffer over the hallway tiles. Except how had he closed the door when he was on the opposite side of the building?

A pipe reverberated as if someone had bumped into it. Though the boiler wasn't running, the room was stuffy. Jett tried me door again, wondering if her screams would carry to the couple by the Dumpster.

"It's not funny, it's serious," said the voice, and a blacker shadow moved in the darkness. The brim of the hat lifted and the moon-white face gave a grin. Except it wasn't a grin, Jett saw, just an illusion caused by the man's missing upper lip. She decided it was a man though she had little evidence that it had once been human. A stench flooded the room, and Jett recognized the musky aroma of a male goat.

"You're not real," Jett said moving her backpack to her chest as if to add a protective layer between her and the nightmare.

"Judge not, that you be not judged" me man said. The head turned and dull silver flashed where the eyes might be. "I just wanted to tell you something while you were away from home, be-cause home clouds your judgment."

"It's not my home," Jett said throat dry, sure she was having a nervous breakdown spiced with a bad acid flashback and a panic attack thrown in for good measure. Each breath felt like swallowing a handful of sand. She worked the knob with all her strength, chafing her palm.

"It will be your home soon enough." The man waited, as if re-luctant to leave the safety of the shadows.

"What do you want?"

"To warn you about false prophets."

"I don't know any prophets." She wondered if acid flashbacks had a time limit, or if she was likely to keep on retro-tripping until her brain was a puddle of ooze.

"Yes, you do."

"Okay, whatever. I'll watch out for them, just let me go."

"Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's cloth-ing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves."

Jett nodded toward the dark figure.

"You will know them by their fruits," the voice said, as the shad-ows merged into an unbroken darkness.

The knob turned in her hand. She staggered blinking into the sunlight.

Tommy Williamson sat on the oil barrel, legs crossed cigarette trailing smoke into the cloudless autumn sky. "What the hell were you doing in there?"

She didn't want to blow her cool in front of this ass clown. "Waiting for you." Tommy inhaled blew out a long snake of smoke as if he were sighing, then flicked his butt onto the gravel. "Who were you talk-ing to?"

"Nobody."

"You're as crazy as you look."

"No wonder the girls flock to you, with lines like that."

"Whatever." Tommy slid down from the barrel and reached into his NASCAR windbreaker. He pulled out a paper bag that had been twisted into the size of a hammer handle. "Here's your quar-ter ounce. Fifty bucks."

Jett peeled off the bills with a trembling hand, hoping Tommy would think she was nervous instead of insane. She put the paper bag in her backpack without looking at its contents. "Thanks. I've got to get to class."

"Sure. Plenty more where that came from, just say the word." She left him lighting another cigarette, her heart throbbing,

wondering how she would make it through math with the man in

the black hat's voice buzzing through her skull.

Chapter Thirteen

Katy lay on the bed, listening to the ticking of the tin roof as the sun warmed it. The afterglow of sex had faded, and only a faint stickiness remained. Her toes were cold. Her robe was tangled around her. She must have fallen asleep because the alarm clock on the bedside table read almost ten. She forced herself out of bed, legs heavy, head feeling as if it were stuffed with wet rags. On the way to the bathroom, she paused at the linen closet to get a clean towel. The closet was still a mess from moving, strewn with garbage bags full of winter clothes, boxes of shoes, and bun-dled-up coats. The door bulged open, with mufflers, pajamas, and dish towels oozing from the crack. Had Rebecca been this messy? She kicked the clothing away and opened the door, and a shoe box fell from the shelf and bounced off her shoulder. As she put it back, she noticed a string running down the inside of one wall. She thought it might be a light switch and gave it a tug, peering into the darkness above. There was a slight metallic rasp and the squeak of a spring. Katy pulled harder and saw a small wooden door de-scending. It must be an attic access.

Curious, she took a flashlight from the bedside table and carried one of Gordon's heirloom rockers to the closet. Climbing un-steadily onto the rocker seat, she grabbed the lip of the door and pulled it down until it bumped the shelf. Rough pine rungs had been hammered onto a set of steel bars, making a folded ladder. She shone the light into the opening and saw the ribs of the ceiling joists and the dull galvanized tin of the roof. Cobwebs hung in large dusty beards and the air was stale and humid. Katy shucked her robe so she could climb more easily and grabbed the highest rung she could reach and pulled herself up. She held the flashlight in her left hand, keeping two of her fingers free for gripping. She nearly lost her balance, but managed to get a bare foot on the shelf for purchase, knocking off the shoe box again in the process.

With one more heave, she got her other foot on the lowest rung and stood, poking her head into the attic. Louvered grilles were set at each end of the attic to allow air circulation, with wire covering the openings. The old house must have once been insulated with shredded paper, because bits of gray fluff hung to the wooden sup-port posts. Pale fiberglass had been rolled out in places, though a large section had been floored around the opening as a storage space. Katy focused the beam on the boxes, old lamp shades, and small pieces of furniture that were stacked around the floored area. A fuzzy orange ball bounced among the clutter; then she realized it was the flashlight's beam reflected in a dusty mirror. Katy climbed through the access hole and crawled on her hands and knees to the mirror. A space had been cleared away in front of it. Two rolls of lipstick, a makeup kit with several peach shades of face blush, and a silver-handled hairbrush were arranged before the mirror as if some woman had tended her appearance here. A small glass spray bottle lay on its side, and it took Katy a second to realize what was out of place: the bottle was free of dust, as if it had been recently used. One of the cardboard boxes was open and a cotton dress hung over the edge, bearing an autumnal print with a frilly white collar. Behind the mirror was a long, wooden box covered with books. The box appeared too large to have fit through the access hole. Katy wondered if someone had carried the boards up one at a time and assembled the box in the attic. If the box were meant for book storage, it would have been simpler to nail shelving boards be-tween the joists.

So something was inside the box.

Maybe books, maybe air.

Maybe a piece of Smith family history, something that would help her better understand Gordon. Or understand Rebecca.

As Katy crawled past the clutter, she regarded her reflection in the mirror. Because of the dust, her reflection was fuzzy. Katy tried to grin at her double that was crawling closer. In the dim light, the reflection became distorted and for a moment, Katy's face was nar-row and pinched and snarling. But was it her face? The fragrance of lilacs rose over the odor of dry wood and blown insulation. She closed her eyes and forced herself forward, knocking over a stack of Mason jars filled with a dark substance. One of the jars broke, emitting a fetid smell and spilling a tarry liquid on the ply-wood floor. Katy brushed the shards of glass away and eased her way beside the box. She carefully removed the books from its top. The lid was hinged, with one end held in place by a hasp that was hooked with an open, rusty padlock. Katy removed the padlock and laid it to the side, propping the flashlight so that its cone of light swept over the box.

The lid lifted with a groan, and Katy broke a fingernail as the lid banged back against the floor. She gathered the flashlight and brought its beam to bear on the box's contents. Katy nearly bumped her head as she drew back from the sight.

A prone figure was laid out in the bottom of the box. Its suit was faded black, spotted gray with dry rot. The arms were crossed over the chest, a straw boater hat resting on them, and straw spilled from the stained sleeves. The face was made of cheesecloth, with white buttons sewn for eyes. A gash in the cheesecloth represented the mouth, and filthy cotton wadding bulged from the opening. The scarecrow was almost a replica of the one in the barn, except this one had never been in a field. What had she expected to find? Rebecca's body?

She wouldn't have looked otherwise.

Katy was about to close the lid when the flashlight glinted off something tucked in the scarecrow's jacket. She reached toward the dusty figure and pulled the object into the light, a small chain trail-ing behind. It was a locket, its gold plate peeling away in spots, the alloy beneath smudged and worn. Katy opened it and played the light over the portrait that was set in the locket's base and covered with glass. The woman in the black-and-white photograph was beautiful. Though the hairstyle was not of any identifiable era and she'd seen no other photographs of her, Katy knew it was Rebecca. No won-der Gordon still thought of her and fantasized about her. She was ethereal, cheekbones fine and thin, eyes dark between soft lashes. She wore a dress with a frilly collar, and Katy recognized it as the dress with the autumnal print.

Gordon must have placed the locket here. But why go to all the trouble of making a scarecrow, an oversize fetish doll? Looking at the objects stored in the attic with new interest, she realized that none of these things were Gordon's. The books were mostly ro-mantic suspense, Mary Higgins Clark, Daphne du Maurier, and Anne Rivers Siddons. The few pieces of furniture might have come from a college girl's sorority room, thrift shop junk made of cheap wood. Perhaps Gordon had set up the attic as a shrine to Rebecca's memory, though there was certainly no loving arrangement to the clutter. Gordon studied religion and probably saw symbolism in ordi-nary objects. The locket was more than just a picture memory; it must have been an aged heirloom, and Katy found it hard to be-lieve that Gordon would banish it to the attic. Maybe Rebecca's loss had been so devastating that he'd put her things out of sight and out of mind, though he hadn't the heart to throw them away. Katy played the light over the scarecrow once more.

f

ad the mouth twitched? perhaps mice nested in the wadding. She let the lid drop with a wooden bang and backed away to the mirror, propping the flash-light on a ceiling joist so that it shone down like a stage spotlight. She hooked the clasp on the locket's chain and placed it around her neck. Her reflection seemed pleased, smiling back at her through the snowy film that covered the glass. Katy picked up the tiny spray bottle and sniffed.

Lilacs.

This was Rebecca's scent, the one that drifted across the kitchen or rose from the bed in sudden urgency. Katy sprayed a little on her neck, the mist tickling and chilling her flesh. She then picked up the lipstick tube, pulled off the cap, and re-garded the rose shade. This might have been the lipstick Rebecca wore when the portrait was made. Katy sniffed it. She rarely wore makeup, though as a business professional she'd had to dress in pantsuits. Her hand lifted as though of its own accord the lipstick sliding across the grinning lips in the mirror. Next she applied the blush to her cheeks. Her reflection startled her. In the yellow circle of the flashlight, she looked deathly pale. Too deathly. She stood and removed her robe. The attic was warm but her nipples swelled inside the cups of her bra. This was dirty and excit-ing, the putting on of a mask. She thought of the morning's inter-course with Gordon and his calling Rebecca's name. The memory of her own orgasm came back and she was tempted to slide her fin-ger into her panties.

Instead, she tried on the dress.

It fit perfectly.

Alex Eakins parked his pickup at the edge of the woods, below an embankment where the road had been cut to his property. He finished the last of his joint and doused the roach. He almost tossed it in the ashtray for later, but if a cop found it there, that would probably constitute grounds for a search warrant. The fucking pigs were just that way, and they'd gotten a lot porkier under the nou-veau Stalinism of the Bush II regime.

Fuck them all. Fuck big-budget Bush and his totalitarian ways. Fuck the spineless Democrats who curled up in a ball as they were kicked and fuck even his own chosen Libertarian Party for lacking in ability to capture the popular imagination. When it really counted political action was up close and personal.

He got his Pearson Freedom compound bow and arrows out of the backseat and wandered to the fence. Gordon Smith's goats grazed and browsed among the scrub vegetation, eating blackberry vines, pine trees, locusts, and pokeweed not caring what entered their mouths as long as it was green or brown. Alex considered having a neighborly talk with Smith, but that might lead to unexpected visits and snooping around, and then maybe a peek into the little shed behind Alex's mud house. Gordon was a professor, which almost cer-tainly meant he'd smoked some weed in his day, but when it came down to it, someone on a university payroll was part of the Establish-ment and couldn't be trusted. Besides, it was the goats that had fucked with his garden, not their owner. So it was the goats that had to pay. Alex notched an arrow and tilted the bow, then pinched and stretched the string back, muscles straining against the taut arc. It was power, primitive and raw and heady. Or maybe he was stoned. The flock of a half dozen had paused and given him a specula-tive appraisal when he'd parked, but the animals now returned to their chewing. The nearest goat was thirty yards away, peeling the bark from a bare sapling. It was tan and white, ears long and tun-neled, horns curved and short. The age of goats was hard to figure, since they got plump and grew beards before they were a year old but Alex figured this one for middle age. Probably was bound for the meat locker this winter.

Alex sighted down the arrow, aiming just a little high to com-pensate for the natural pull of gravity. He was about to let fly when he saw movement in a prickly grove of crab apples behind the flock. Somebody was walking toward him. Shit. Must be that red-neck goon Odus Hampton, the odd-jobber who hung around down at the general store. Odus did chores around the Smith place in ex-change for liquor money and crops, and probably had some sort of inbred devotion to his master. Mountain folk like Odus seemed to cling to the ideals their Irish and Scots ancestors had brought to the mountains as they fled to the freedom of the Southern Appalachians. They were driven by a rebel streak, but still measured themselves against the value systems of their oppressive overlords and would do anything for a dollar. Or maybe Odus was just drunk and rambling.

And maybe the Scots-Irish who wanted to be left alone had a lot in common with antigovernment stoners.

Alex was shielded by a stand of small poplars, so Odus would-n't be able to see him right away. Alex eased the tension on the string and leaned against the camouflage to wait for Odus to move on. The goats didn't turn toward Odus's approach, which didn't make sense. If Odus was the one who regularly fed them, they should have gone running at the first sniff of his bourbon-sweet stench. Alex peeked from his cover. It wasn't Odus coming down the dirt path.

It was a man in a hat and an ill-cut suit that was too short for his arms. He wore a ragged black tie that was cut in the shape of a cross, and his white linen shirt looked like a stained tooth against the grimy topcoat. His bony wrists were exposed along with a cou-ple of inches of pale forearm. He wore square-toed leather boots and his woolen pants were riddled with tiny rips and moth holes. His face was hidden in the shade of the hat's oversize brim.

Fucking Twilight Zone material, weird dude walking.

Alex debated getting back into his truck and driving away, but the man would probably see him carrying the bow and arrow. The stranger wouldn't know that Alex had been about to kill a goat, but he might tell Gordon about the encounter. And Gordon might get suspicious, drive up the dirt road and knock on Alex's door, or take a look around the property. Worse, Gordon might report Alex to the sheriff's department as a trespasser, and they would come with a warrant whether Alex was guilty or not. That's just the way the fucking cops were, they made up a stupid reason to investigate you so they could find something serious to bust you over. It was the same whether your broken taillight led to a drunk-driving arrest or a bogus trespassing claim got you busted for illegal manufacture of a Schedule I narcotic.

Alex decided to wait it out. Maybe the stranger was trespassing, too, and would walk amid the flock and head on down to the road. Weird Dude Walking could just walk the fuck right on off the stage. But the stranger didn't keep walking. He stopped in the middle of the flock, in a cleared area of trampled goldenrod and tickseed. He tilted his head forward so that even the shadow of his face was hidden by the hat's brim. He folded his hands in front of him and stood as still as a scarecrow. The goats stopped their ruminating and turned to him, one by one. The only sounds were the September breeze skirling dead leaves and the ticking of the Jeep's engine as it cooled. Even the crows had grown hushed in the high treetops.

The goat closest to Alex, the one he had planned to murder, took a few steps toward the man in the hat. It emitted a soft bleat. Another of the goats, farther up the hill, echoed the bleat, and then others joined in. It wasn't the yearning bleat that hungry goats often made. These calls were gentle and almost tender, like the sound a kid would make as it neared its mother's teats. Weird Dude Walking kept his head tilted down but slowly lifted his arms until they were suspended straight out from the sides of his body. It looked as if he were imitating a giant bird and would at any moment start flapping for takeoff. But his movements were slow and graceful, like those of someone at peace. The goats all moved forward at me same time, headed for the stranger. The largest, a fat old billy with a long, filthy beard, reached him first and sniffed at the wool suit. The man remained perfectly still, though his body seemed to relax a little, his limp hands dangling from the ends of his raised arms. Other goats crowded around, their nostrils flaring as they checked the air.

The nearest goat put its nose against the man's coat, then opened its jaws and took the cloth in its mouth. The man kept his head tilted and made no sign of movement. The goats squeezed closer, and now others put their snouts against his skin. The big billy tugged on the coat, first gently and then harder, until a lower button popped free. The other goats nipped at the fabric, yanking their heads back with the clothing clenched between their jaws, their bleats growing more frantic. Alex wondered if Weird Dude had worn some sort of scent that attracted the goats. Deer hunters would splash their coveralls with buck urine, hoping to entice does from the woods. Maybe there was a special scent to attract goats, though goats were tame enough that they didn't need to be stalked. Alex fell back on the theory that the man had fed the goats before and they associated his scent with grain or sugar. Or maybe homegrown sinsemilla bud dulled Alex's thought process. Alex liked that theory better, because then he could take the credit for growing mythical motherlode mind-fuck instead of the possibility that something fucked up was happening that might be happening whether or not the observer was stoned. Like Einstein on acid or something, or an Escher drawing where you were on the inside looking out.

Whatever, man, because it's happening no matter which theory fits.... Desperate goat mouths ripped open Weird Dude Walking's coat, the bone buttons sparkling in the sun as they arced to the ground. The man had on a flannel long john shirt underneath, but it was shredded in places and deathly pale skin showed through the open-ings. The goats tugged on the man but he kept his balance. Alex wondered why Weird Dude didn't push the animals away.

Because this is only happening in your mind. Yeah. Okay.

The man's arms were pulled down, and one of the sleeves was yanked free. Two goats played tug-of-war with the wool coat, and then jerked it off the man's back. The coat settled on a patch of dried goldenrod. Weird Dude finally lifted his face and Alex ex-pected either the awe-inspiring expression of a Mushroom God or else a Carlos Castaneda smirk. From fifty yards away, all Alex could tell was that Weird Dude looked sick, his skin unhealthy and sallow. But a smile creased his doughy face as he looked at the sky and endured the hircine assault.

The goats grew frantic, their teeth tearing the man's clothes, and Alex almost left his hidden vantage point and went to the rescue. If Weird Dude had acted in any way alarmed, Alex would have emp-tied his quiver of arrows into the goats. But his unnatural serenity caused Alex to watch and wait. The stoner stereotype called for an indecisive and befuddled re-action. Alex was no fucking stereotype. He knew he was a stoner and that put him several rungs above the people who bought his dope. For all Alex knew, this was some elaborate trick of the Drug Enforcement Agency, because the spooks would spare no expense in bringing down a single freethinking, tax-exempt American. Because from such men revolutions were sparked.

The goats ripped until Weird Dude's flannel underwear gave way, and then one of the goats bit deep into the man's side. The man should have screamed, but the smile didn't waver as the goat worked its head back and forth, trying to pull the piece of flesh free. Another goat went for the soft portion of the stomach just below the navel and backed away, a string of meat dangling from its mouth. Alex gripped the tree in front of him, the bark scraping his cheek and his breath so loud he was sure the goats could hear it above their own noise. A mantra came to him, in a dull throb that mirrored his accelerated pulse: Not Real, Not Real, Not Real. And then came the syncopated accent beat: Not-Fucking-Real.

Instead of blood spilling from Weird Dude's wounds, a milky substance oozed out, thick as cottage cheese. The goats bit into the man, and one butted him in the left thigh, causing him to lean to one side. A dirty brown goat grabbed the outstretched arm as the man tried to regain his balance. Its teeth clamped on the wrist and dragged the man toward the ground, the black hat flying from the man's head and landing in the trampled vegetation. Once the man was on his knees, the goats clambered over him, rending the flesh of his neck and back. Not once did the man cry out.

The goats' bleats grew muffled as their mouths filled. They fed on the clabbered juice that leaked from the man's torn flesh.

Weird Dude Walking ain't fucking walking anymore.

Alex broke from the trance that seemed to have fallen over him as he watched the bizarre spectacle. This was no psychedelic vi-sion, this was an ass-end-up slab of reality. He gripped his bow and arrows and stepped from his cover. "Hey," he shouted.

The goats kept feeding. Weird Dude was buried beneath the goats, hidden by the mass of dirty, furry animals that were now in a feeding frenzy. The bearded billy backed out of the herd with a prize, a swinging slab of gristle that looked like the man's cheek. No blood leaked from the ripped skin, only a few dribbles of moon-white liquid. Another goat tottered away, dragging what looked to be the strip of a forearm. A third dipped its head into the downed man's belly and came up with a swollen rope of intestines decorating its blunt horns like a satanic Christmas trimming. Alex fought an urge to vomit. The vestiges of the morning's bong hits faded, and even the high from the seedless, resin-sticky buds he'd crammed into the recent joint had deserted him. He grew kick-ass weed by any standard, but no buzz was deep enough to mask the insane scene that played out before him. Fuckers didn't just crawl out of the weeds and get eaten by goats. Didn't happen. Maybe in a video game, maybe in a shitty direct-to-video horror movie, but certainly not here on the slopes above Solom, where the Bible thumpers said God was closer than ever and the sky weighed three thousand pounds and the government didn't meddle too much and his girlfriend Meredith was sleeping off the effects of a bottle of wine and three orgasms and no fucking way in the world is Weird Dude getting reamed by goats!

Alex debated his options. He could charge into the midst of the herd and scatter them, but as much meat as they had stripped from Weird Dude, Alex didn't see any way the man could still be alive. Alex had four arrows, so he could thin the flock a little, except then they might turn their eye to fresh prey. And he knew how goats were—once they got a taste for something, they gobbled it until it was extinct. The third option made the most sense: back the hell away, get in the truck, and pretend this had all been a hallucination. Forget reporting the incident to the authorities, because authority equaled government equaled search warrants.

When he started the truck, one of the goats looked up from the corpse and stared in the direction of the noise. A couple of maggot-white fingers protruded between the twisting lips. The goat looked right through the windshield and met his eyes. Alex was probably just stoned—yeah, that had to be it—because mere was no way the goat could have been grinning. Either he was stoned or else he had cracked, and he was too rational to crack.

As the pickup bounced up the pitted mountain road, Alex real-ized that Weird Dude Walking, even while the goats were eviscer-ating him, had not uttered a single sound.

Chapter Fourteen

"The goats is riled," Betsy Ward said. She dried her hands on her apron, wincing because her skin was chapped and the cool weather hadn't helped a bit. She had a sweet potato pie in the oven. It was a point of pride with her, because sweet potatoes didn't grow worth a darn in the mountains. Yet Arvel's crop always turned out fine. You'd think God was a tater man, judging how he blessed the Ward household.

"Goats?" Arvel was watching a reality show on TV Betsy couldn't tell the shows apart, but one thing most had in common was they got women into tank tops and tight shorts at some point. Which was all the reason Arvel needed, whether he admitted it or not. Betsy's tight-shorts days had passed some twenty years ago, but she didn't hold that against the skinny things that paraded around before the cameras. No, what she held against them was the makeup, the hairstyles, and all the nipping and tucking that went on these days. Any woman could look good with a little cheating.

"Goats," Betsy said. "Over at the Smiths. Except the new wife ain't named Smith." Arvel had put in a hard day at Drummond Construction, driving a concrete mixer over the twisting mountain roads. Concrete mix-ers were the most contrary vehicles on earth, according to Arvel. The weight could shift in two directions without warning, and once in a while the slooshing mix of sand, gravel, and mortar coincided with the deepest cut of a sharp curve, and nothing had a mortality rate like the rump-over-clutch-pedal tumble of twenty tons' worth of cement and steel. Or so he said.

"What are you worrying about goats for?" Arvel didn't turn from the flickering light of the screen.

"They've not got in the gar-den in two years or so. Leave them be."

"They ain't right. They come down to the edge of the fence and stare at me when I'm hanging out laundry."

"Maybe you ought to lose some of that fat ass of yourn and then they'd quit staring." Arvel had never made a mention of her weight until he'd taken up watching TV every weeknight, some five years back. Since then, he'd scarcely shut up about it. She wished she could shrink inside her gingham dress, but she was here and this was all of her. "They started about time the new wife moved in. Been breeding like rabbits, too."

"You know how them billy bucks are," Arvel said. "They'll stick it in anything that wiggles, and some that don't."

A commercial came on for some kind of erectile dysfunction product, and a wattled old guy was in a hot tub with a woman young enough to be his daughter. Arvel thumbed down the sound with his remote.

"You keep going on about this new wife. If you want to know what I think, I bet you're mad as a pissant because she's skinnier than you."

Betsy was double upset. Arvel had no business looking at the neighbor's wife. Even though Betsy did, every chance she got.

"She ain't no skinnier than Gordon's first wife, and you never said a thing about her," Betsy said.

"Rebecca was different," Arvel said, eyes flicking back to the TV to make sure the commercials were still going. "She's from here."

"She was," Betsy corrected. "Was."

"Let's not get into that."

"She drove too fast for these twisty roads. Heck, Arvel, I know she turned a few heads, probably even yours, but the stone truth of it is she got what was coming to her."

"Like you know what happened to her?"

"I ain't saying a thing. The sheriff and the rescue team called it an accident, and they know better than me."

"Solom's took more than a few through the years," Arvel said. "Forget it."

"I can't forget it."

"You think it was the Circuit Rider?"

"I don't know."

The commercials were over and Arvel punched a button. The sound burst from the speaker, and a dark-skinned boy with greasy hair was explaining why somebody was kicked off the show. "I smell something," Arvel said.

The pie. The crust must have burned. Betsy had forgotten to set the timer. She was getting more absentminded every day, but she blamed it on worrying about the neighbors. With a possible wife-killer next door, not to mention his witchy-eyed stepdaughter, your train of thought was liable to get derailed now and then. When you threw the Circuit Rider into the mix, it's a wonder anybody in Solom ever got a wink of sleep.

She hurried from the living room and went into the kitchen, where the goat was waiting for her. Shit. Jett couldn't take another second of reality. She probably should have hidden in the woods, but needed to be close to the house in case Mom called. Jett could always claim to be feeding the chickens or something. The barn door was nearly closed, allow-ing just enough light to take care of business. Her back was against the wall, and from her sitting position, she could see the back door that led to the kitchen.

She laid out her world history book and pinched some of the pot from the plastic Baggie. In Charlotte, she'd owned an alabaster pipe carved in the shape of a lizard, but she'd left it with her best friend. It was time to improvise. She took the piece of aluminum foil from her pocket, twisted it into a narrow tube, and used her pinky to make a hollow depression in one end. A piece of baling wire hang-ing on the wall of the barn served to prick three tiny holes in the curved end of the makeshift pipe. Smoking in the barn was dangerous. During his Great Barn Tour of July, Gordon had made a big deal about how dry the place was. Apparently one of his grandparents' barns had burned to the ground in the 1940s, but that had been the fault of lightning. This barn had been built on the same foundation, and lightning never struck twice in the same place, did it?

She sprinkled some of the dark green leaves into the depression and set the pipe on her book. She'd taken some matches from the tin box on the mantelpiece. She snapped one of the sulfur-tipped stems free from its folded-over cardboard sleeve. Get a degree at home, the matchbox read, along with an 800 number, and beneath that, in smaller letters, Close cover before striking.

"Fuck it." She scratched the match head across the rough strike pad and the flame bobbed to life. She tucked the pipe between her lips, applied the flame, and inhaled. The first hit tasted like hot metal, like braces, and she nearly coughed. The harsh smoke set-tled in her lungs; then she blew out gently. The match had burned down to her fingers, so she held the pipe in her mouth while she used her other hand to grab the burnt end of the match. She then turned the match upside down so it would burn the unused portion of the paper.

The Kid knows all the tricks.

The next hit was a little smoother. She held the flame just above the grass so that it toasted rather than scorched. Yep. That was the ticket. Her throat was dry and she wished she'd brought a Sprite from the fridge. The smoke filled her nostrils, weakening the smell of old dust and animal manure. She let the buzz work its way through her nervous system, feel-ing her pulse accelerate. Tears collected in her eyes. Good shit. Tommy Williamson might be a world-class jerk, but he had good connections. A smile crept across her face, and it felt good. Why did the cops and Jesus freaks get so uptight about something that was so natural? She hadn't smiled in weeks, and now here she was with her cheeks stretching and her head feeling light.

The fucking weight of the world temporarily lifted.

Fucking. What a weird word, when you think about it. I mean, fuck, what's the big deal? Mom said I was able to have babies now and maybe that has something to do with the tingling I feel down there sometimes. I don't understand how a boy's weenie can fit in there, as little and floppy as they are. At least Mom didn't give me the jazz about safe sex. Guess she trusts me. Trust. Jett looked down at the pipe and the bag of dope, the crumbled marijuana scattered across her book.

I don't have a drug problem. "Drug problem " is what the English teacher would call an

"oxymoron." Well, the teacher's a plain old fucking moron. Jett's stoned leap of logic seemed like the most hilarious thing since Beavis and Butthead did America, and she giggled. The sound was like blue bubbles in her brain. She closed her eyes and listened to them pop.

Blop-bloop-blooooop.

Beh-eh-eh-eh-eh.

Beh-eh?

That wasn't right.

She opened her eyes to find the goat standing right in front of her, its head at eye level with hers. She rolled away with a start. The goat lowered its neck and sniffed at the marijuana, then licked at it.

"Get away, you ugly fucker," Jett said, picking up a dry, dark clod that was probably a goat turd. She flung it at the goat, but it swabbed its tongue across her stash again.

Damn it, this is war. She gave the goat a kick in the side, not too hard but loud enough for a thunk to fill the barn. The goat turned toward her. For the first time, she noticed the pale brown horns. Though they lay nearly flat against the animal's skull, the tips curled back under and out above the ears like oversize, twisted fishhooks.

"Easy, there, Fred," she said. Gordon had names for the goats but she hadn't bothered to learn them. He'd taken them all from the Old Testament. She wondered whether it was Adam, Seth, or Ruth. Couldn't be Ruth, because it had a tube of loose flesh hanging from its loins. She figured the goat didn't know its name, either, so "Fred" would work just as well.

She backed away and the goat stepped closer. At least she'd dis-tracted it from her expensive cash crop. Now if it would only go out the door and act like the brainless sack of fur and manure it was. But it didn't go for the door. It backed her to the foot of the stairs that led to the loft. And the loft was where she'd blanked out the day before yesterday. Freaked Mom out but good. The bitch of it was, the blackout hadn't been drug-related. She'd let Mom sus-pect drug use because the alternative was just a little too weird, even for her.

Jett didn't want to go up those stairs. Because the image of a man flashed across the inside of her forehead, like a still from an out-of-focus slide projector. The man with the out-of-fashion hat with the low crown and wide brim, the one who had warned her to "Know them by their fruits." She had a feeling he was waiting up there in the silence and dust of the hay bales.

The goat snorted a little and bobbed its head as if threatening her. Or else commanding her to climb the stairs.

Whoa the fuck down. Goats don't boss humans around. They 're stupid Fred-faced, squid-eyed, dumb-as-dirt pieces of meat on the hoof.

The goat grinned, revealing a five-dollar chunk of marijuana bud that was stuck between two upper teeth. Jett almost laughed. This was the kind of stoner story she'd tell at the next party, if she ever made any friends in Solom: "Yeah, a goat came up while I was smoking and gobbled down my stash." She'd leave out the part about the goat scaring her, and the man in the black hat, and the voice she'd heard in the boiler room be-hind the school. Because those were things that could get you locked up in the nuthouse, where the drugs were no fun at all, ac-cording to her friend Patty from Charlotte. Nuthouse drugs were designed to perform chemical lobotomies, eliminating the prob-lems by stripping away any desire to suffer a thought or feeling. As tempting as oblivion was, Jett liked hers in small and controlled doses.

Besides, who could be bored when a goat was after you?

The wall was covered with garden tools, ropes, and harness. She picked out a hoe, figuring she could use the blunt end of the handle to drive the goat away. The animal clambered forward as she leveled the handle and pointed it like a jousting lance. In the distance, the Wards' dog barked, followed by the sound of tires on gravel. Gordon must be home.

Great.

Gord the Wonder Nerd.

She waited for his SUV engine to die and for the vehicle's door to open. Then she could yell for help. Except the goat had paused, too, and lifted its head as if listening. Like maybe Gordon had a treat. If Gordon came to the barn, he would see the pot and bust her. She'd probably be grounded for the rest of the school year, or maybe even until high school. Gordon was one of those uptight people who made a big deal about morals without being religious. Because, despite all his blowhard lecturing at the dinner table about this and that denomination, and the fact that he was the great-great-grandson of a circuit-riding preacher, Gordon wore a sneer on his face when he talked about people going to church. Jett wasn't sure what she believed yet, but one thing was for sure, she thought Jesus Christ was the kind of guy who wouldn't put you down for a little bit of weed. True, he probably wouldn't inhale, but he also wouldn't hit you over the head with a Bible because of it.

So calling for Gordon was out of the question. She had to make a decision on whether to try for the loft and wait it out, or scoot past the goat, collect her stash, and sneak around the backyard and into the house before anyone noticed she was missing. Mom had been a real space cadet lately, so Gordon would probably make the obligatory room check. She planned to be at her desk with a text-book open, so she could bat her eyelashes at him in a "What do you want?" look. Pop an Altoid mint, drop in some Visine, and she was bulletproof. The only symptom would be goofiness, and all twelve-year-old girls were goofy.

She prodded at the goat with the hoe handle. It turned and trot-ted to the barn door, standing just beyond the reach of daylight, as if it were afraid the sun would burn its skin and turn its carcass to dust. Jett dropped the hoe and scooped up her Baggie of marijuana. She tucked it in the pocket of her sleeveless jean jacket. Though she was craving another hit to cap off the buzz, the whole scene was getting to be like a psychedelic, fluorescent-colored episode of The Twilight Zone. She expected the ghost of Rod Serling to step from one of the stalls at any second, wearing a tie-died T-shirt and a ponytail, a pencil-sized joint replacing his ever-present cigarette.

The rear of the barn had another large wooden door, suspended on rollers that slid in a steel track overhead. It was latched from the inside with a dead bolt, but Jett thought she'd be able to maneuver the heavy door open enough to slip around the back way. Gordon's SUV door slammed. That meant he'd go through the front door in about fifteen seconds if he followed his usual routine. Unless he saw the goat in the barn.

Jett Wrestled with the dead bolt. It was rusty, as if it hadn't been operated in years. She banged her knuckles trying to work the bolt free, scraping the skin. She put her knuckles in her mouth and sucked at the blood. Something nudged her hip, and she looked down to see the goat's face turned up to hers, its nostrils dilating, eyes glinting in the dim light. The animal emitted a low moan, as if a hunger had been awakened by the scent of fresh fruit.

"Back off, Fred," she said.

Jett threw back the bolt and leaned against the edge of the door, hoping to get some momentum. The door opened six inches. The goat jumped up and put its front hooves on the door, raising itself up to the height of her shoulder. It was bleating deep in its throat, and raised one hoof and banged it against the wood. Frightened now, almost forgetting her buzz, Jett flung her shoulder against the edge of the door, sending a fat spark of pain down her arm. The goat hammered on the door with both hooves as it creaked open another half a foot. Jett turned sideways and squeezed her body into the gap, squinting against the early evening sun.

As she worked her way free, she felt a rough tongue against the back of her hand. Great. Goat cooties on her wounded knuckles. She'd probably get a staph infection. She struggled through the door and moved away from the barn. The goat was too plump to get through the door. An absurd wave of relief washed over Jett. Getting stoned had been almost more trou-ble than it was worth.

As she went down the path that led between the barn and the garden to the apple trees near the house, she glanced back. In the loft opening was a dark shadow that looked a lot like a man in a black suit, arms spread, a wide-brimmed hat on his head. Jett blinked and hurried under the trees. She wanted her drug-induced visions to stay inside her head where they belonged, not out wan-dering around in the real world.

But the world hadn't been very real ever since she had moved to Solom. Thank God for dope. Evening fell like a bag of hammers, and Odus decided there was no better place to let the sun die on you than the cold bank of Blackburn River. He had two rainbow trout on the stringer and half a six-pack of Miller High Life floating in the water, the plastic ring tethered to a stick. The mosquitoes had quit biting weeks ago, and even if they were sorry enough to try to suck his blood, they would be drawing nothing but high-octane, eighty proof out of his veins. The bottle of Old Crow was nearly gone, and that meant another long haul into Windshake to replenish his supply. He cussed God and the virgin whore Mary for making Pickett a dry county.

He was below the old remnants of the dam. Part of the earth-works was still in place, funneling water past in a series of tiny falls. The trout loved to lie among the rocks beneath me white water, where the oxygen level was rich and food dropped down like earthworms from heaven. Odus's hook dropped in, too, though he had to work the reel with a steady hand because the bait washed downstream in the blink of an eye.

The general store up on the hill was dark. That was contrary, be-cause Odus had never known it to be closed for a full day. He'd called up to the hospital to check on Sarah, and the receptionist had hemmed and hawed about federal privacy rules until Odus claimed to be her son. Then the receptionist declared Sarah to be in stable condition and scheduled to be kept overnight for observation. A few tracks from the old Virginia Creeper line, some that had-n't been washed away in the 1940

flood, lay in weed-infested gravel across the river. The creosote cross ties had long since rotted, and the steel rails themselves would have long been overgrown if the tourists hadn't made a walking trail out of the line. Tourists were the damnedest creatures: they took the ugliest eyesores of Solom, such as fallen-down barns and lightning-scarred apple trees, and proclaimed them a glory of Creation. Took pictures and bought postcards, put their Florida-fat asses onto the narrow seats of expensive ten-speeds, and pedaled down the river road as if they were going nowhere and had all day to do it. Beat all, if you asked Odus, but nobody asked, because he was just a drunken river rat and didn't even own any property. He lived in the bottom floor of a summer house and kept the grounds in trade for rent. But, by God, he knew how to troll for trout, and he could take a ten-point buck in October, and when spring came he could pick twelve kinds of native salad greens, and in summer he knew where the best ginseng could be poached, and then it was fall again and he could make a buck or two putting up hay or helping somebody get a few head of cattle to the stockyards. All in all, it was a king's life, and he wasn't beholden to anybody. If you didn't count the Pennsylvania couple that owned the house where he boarded, and Gordon Smith, and the people who had loaned him money.

The sun slipped a notch lower in the sky, spreading orange light across the ribbed clouds like marmalade on waffles. Fish often bit more at dusk, just as they did at the break of dawn, because the in-sects they fed on were more active then. A lot of the tourists went in for fly-fishing, and all the gear, complete with hip waders, LL Bean jacket, floppy hat, woven basket and all, would run you up-wards of three hundred dollars at River Ventures, the little place up the road that rented out kayaks, canoes, bicycles, inner tubes, and every other useless means of transportation known to man. Odus figured the tourists must be bad at math, no matter how many ze-roes they had in their bank accounts, because three hundred dollars would buy you more store trout than you could eat in a year. But that wasn't his worry. Odus wanted one more rainbow on the trotline before he headed home for a late supper. He planned on stopping by Lucas Eggers's cornfield on the way home and snag-ging a few roasting ears. That and some turnip greens he grew in the Pennsylvania folks' flower garden were plenty enough to keep the ache out of his belly.

He hit the Old Crow and was about to draw in one of the Millers for a chaser when he saw weeds moving on the far side of the river. The rusted-iron tops of the Joe Pye weed shook back and forth as something made its way to the water. Probably deer, because, like the fish, they got more active at sundown. But deer were likely to stick to a trail, not tromp on through briars and all. Odus played out some slack in his line and waited to see what came out on the river-bank. Odus didn't have a gun, so he couldn't kill the deer, and so didn't care if it was a deer or a man from outer space. As long as it wasn't a state wildlife officer ready to write him up for fishing without a license. At first, Odus thought it was a wildlife officer, because of the hat that bobbed among the tops of the weeds. But the hat was dirty and ragged like that of—

The Smith scarecrow.

Then the weeds parted at the edge of the river.

The sight caused him to drop his pole in the mud, back up onto the slick rocks skirting the riverbank, and wind between the hem-locks and black locust that separated the water from the river road. His heart jumped like a frog trapped in a bucket. The or3nge light of sunset had gone purple, and the clouds somehow seemed sharper and meaner. A bright yellow light shone above the general store's front entrance, the one Sarah claimed kept bugs away, though Odus could see them cutting crazy circles around the bulb. He broke into a jog, sweat under his flabby breasts and in the crease where his belly lay quivering over his belt. He didn't once look back, and even though the river was between it and him, he didn't feel any safer when he reached his truck.

Odus was fumbling the key into the ignition when he remem-bered the Miller, and for just a moment, he hesitated. He would definitely need a good buzz later. But three beers wouldn't be nearly enough to wash away the image that kept floating before his eyes. The best thing now was to put some distance between him and what he'd seen. Maybe some tourist would be out for a walk, or a bicyclist would get a flat tire, and it could take them instead.

As he drove away, his chest was tight and he could barely breathe. He wondered if he could get a hospital bed in Sarah's room, because now he knew what she'd been going on about as she lay on the sacks with her eyelids fluttering.

It hadn't been the scarecrow he'd seen. It had been much worse than that. The man in the black hat, face white as goat cheese, as if he'd been in the water way too long.

And he had, if you believed the stories.

About two hundred years too long.

Chapter Fifteen

Betsy Ward didn't scream when she encountered the goat. She'd milked plenty of the critters, and the teats were tiny and tough, a workout for her hands. But they usually kept to the field even when they were riled. Occasionally one slipped through a gap in the fence or squeezed between two gateposts, but when they did that, they usually made a beeline for the garden or the flower beds. Goats had a nose for heading where they could do the most damage.

But she'd never had one come in the house before. The back door was ajar, as if the goat had nudged it open with its nose. The mesh on the screen door had been ripped. Maybe the goat had put one sharp hoof on the wire and sliced it down the middle. Goats weren't that smart, even if they smelled something good in the kitchen. In this case, the only thing going was the sweet potato pie. No doubt the goat had smelled that and come in for a closer look, though Betsy had no idea how in the world the creature had worked the doorknob. Why hadn't Digger run the goat off, or at least raised the alarm with his deep barks?

"Shoo," she said waving her apron at it. "Get on back the way you come." The goat stared at her as if she were a carrot with a spinach top.

"Arvel," Betsy called trying not to raise her voice too much. Arvel didn't like her hollering from the kitchen. He thought that amounted to pestering and henpecking. Arvel always said a wife should come up to the man where he was sitting and talk to him like a human being instead of woofing at him like an old bitch hound.

Arvel must not have heard her over the television. The goat's nostrils wiggled as they sniffed the air. The oven was a Kenmore Hotpoint, the second of the marriage. In the red glow of the heat-ing element, she could see the pie through the glass window in the oven door. It had bubbled a little and the tan filling was oozing over the crust in one spot

The goat lowered its head and took two steps toward the oven. It had small stumps of horns and was probably a yearling. Sometimes goats would get ornery and butt you, but in general they avoided interaction with humans, except when food was at stake. It seemed this goat had its heart set on that sweet potato pie.

Betsy shooed with her apron again, then moved so that she was standing between the oven and the goat. She didn't think the goat could figure out how to work the oven door, but some sense of pro-priety had overtaken her. After all, this was her kitchen. "Get along now." The goat regarded her, eyes cold and strange. She didn't like the look of them. They had the usual hunger that was bred into the goat all the way back to Eden, but behind that was something sinister. Like the goat had a mean streak and was waiting for the right ex-cuse.

"Arvel!" By now Betsy didn't care if her husband thought she was henpecking or not. You don't have a goat walk into your kitchen and expect to take it in stride. She'd gone through three miscarriages, the drought of 1989, the blizzard of 1960, and the floods of 2004. She knew hard times, and she knew how to keep a clear head. But those things were different. Those were natural dis-asters, and this one seemed a little un-natural. Like maybe the goat had something more in mind than just ruining a decent homemade pie.

Betsy put her hands out, hoping to calm the animal, but its cloven hooves thundered across the vinyl flooring as it closed the ten feet separating them. Betsy saw twin images of herself reflected in the goat's oddly shaped pupils. Her mouth was open, and she may have been screaming, and her hair hung in wild, slick ropes around her face. She didn't have time to step away even if she could have made her legs move.

The goat hit her low, its head just above her womanly region, driving into her abdomen. The nubs of the horns pierced her like fat, dull nails, not sharp enough to penetrate but packing plenty of hurt. The unexpected force of the assault threw her off-balance, and she felt herself falling backward. The kitchen ceiling spun crazily for half a heartbeat, and she saw the flickering fluorescent light, the copper bottoms of pans arranged on pegs over the sink, the swirling patterns in the gypsum finish above. Then she was falling and the world exploded in sparks, and she thought maybe the pie filling had leaked onto the element. As she slid into the inky, charred darkness, the smell of warm sweet pota-toes settled around her like the breath of a well-fed baby.

'Tie's done," she said. Her eyelids fluttered and then fell still.

"Honey, what are you doing?"

Katy turned away from the squash casserole she was making. Her hands stank of onions. Little jars and bags of spices were strewn across the counter: basil, pepper, dill weed, cumin. Eggshells lay in the bottom of the sink, slick and jagged. The clock on the wall read ten after six.

"I'm making dinner," she said.

"I hate casseroles." Gordon took off his tweed jacket and folded it over his arm.

"I found the recipe in the cabinet. I thought..." Katy brushed a strand of hair from her forehead. Her face was flushed.

"Where did you get that dress?"

She looked down and found herself in a dress she'd never seen before. It had an autumnal print and was a little more frilly and feminine than the austere styles Katy preferred. The dress was dusty but it fit her body as if it had been tailored. Why was she wearing it to cook?

"It was in the closet, I think. Must have been something I packed years ago and came across while I was cleaning."

"You look nice." Gordon went to the refrigerator and took out a bottle of Merlot. He didn't stop to kiss her as he passed. He poured himself a glass of wine and sat at the butcher block table that stood in one corner and served as a stand for several houseplants.

"About this morning," Katy said. She focused on slicing a red onion. Any excuse for tears was welcome.

"Let's not talk about it."

"We have to, honey. We're married."

"I lost control. It won't happen again."

Katy slammed down the knife. "I want it to happen again. But I don't want it to be cold and strange." If only Gordon would stand up and come to her, take her in his arms, nuzzle her neck, and make stupid promises, she would have accepted his earlier behavior. She even would have defended it. After all, Katy had her own problems. She wasn't exactly coming into the marriage as a virgin.

"Where's Jett?" Gordon asked.

"Jett?" Katy looked down at the raw food and spices. Jett was probably in her room studying. She had walked through the front door hours ago. Katy should have checked on her, or at least called up the stairs to make sure her daughter knew she was around. That was Katy's part of the deal. She would be an involved parent while trusting Jett to stay away from drugs and giving her daughter some breathing room.

"She's in her room," Katy said.

"I have a job for her."

"About the eggs," Katy said.

"Forget it I'll have Odus do the farm chores from now on. It wasn't fair for me to expect you to take on extra work. You have enough to do here in the house."

In this house that seemed more like a prison. Katy had to think back to remember the last time she'd left the house. Grocery shop-ping, three days ago. Most of her time in the house was spent in the kitchen, and she'd never liked cooking before. Now she was mak-ing casseroles.

"How was your day at the college?" It was the kind of thing a normal wife would ask, and she wanted very much to be a normal wife.

"Long," he said, then finished his glass of wine. "Try telling that idiot Graybeal that Methodists weren't the only denomination to use circuit-riding preachers."

"Graybeal? He's the dean, isn't he?"

"Yes, but you would think he's lord of the fiefdom to see him swagger around, whipping out his shriveled intellectual dingus."

"He's probably just jealous because of your book."

"No, he thinks foot washing belongs to the realm of human sac-rifice and snake handling. Anything that's not Hindu, Buddhist, or Taoist is all lumped together under 'God worship.' " Katy stared down at the yellow grue of the casserole. Should she add an extra quarter of a stick of butter? "I thought 'God wor-ship' was the point."

"Graybeal thinks Christianity is a cult. A popular one, to be sure, but a cult nonetheless." He was falling into lecture mode. His voice rose slightly in pitch, the words carefully enunciated. Katy was pleased that he was spending time with her instead of hiding away in the study, but she wanted to move the subject over to something a little closer to home. "What job did you have for Jett?"

"I want her to feed the goats."

"I thought Odus was going to do the farm chores."

"I mean tonight. Odus doesn't have a phone. I'll probably have to drive over to bis place tomorrow, or catch up with him at the general store."

Katy wiped her hands on the dish towel that hung from the oven handle. "I'll go get her."

"No, you're busy." His upper lip curled a little, as if he had smelled an unpleasant odor.

"I thought you'd like this," Katy said. "It's your family recipe."

"I hate onions," he said. "They give me indigestion." Such was marriage. You didn't learn the important things until after the knot was already tied. If you tried to be respectful and cautious, you didn't jump into the sack with the guy you were going to marry until the vows were made. At least not the second time around. You figured there would be kinks and quirks to sort out, but older people were wiser and more experienced. Or maybe just slower to admit mistakes. Gordon rinsed his wineglass and left the room. "I'll talk to her." "Be polite," Katy said. "She's trying, you know." Gordon didn't answer. Katy opened the refrigerator and took out a pint of heavy cream. She had never bought cream in her life, though she had picked some up at the grocery store Tuesday. It was almost as if she knew she would need it for the recipe she'd found this afternoon. Odus eased his truck into the gravel lot of Solom Free Will Baptist Church, parking beside the Ford F-150 driven by Mose Eldreth. Most likely the preacher was taking on an inside chore, mending a loose rail or patching the metal flue that carried away smoke from the woodstove. A dim glow leaked from the open door, framing the church's windows against the night sky. Odus cast an uneasy glance in the direction of Harmon Smith's grave, but the white marker looked no different from the others that gleamed under the starlight.

Odus didn't hold much stock with Free Will preachers, but at least Preacher Mose was local. Preacher Mose knew the area his-tory and, like most of the people who grew up in Solom, he'd heard about Harmon Smith. After all, Harmon had a headstone in the Free Will cemetery. That didn't mean the preacher would talk to Odus about it. Like Sarah Jeffers, most people in those parts didn't want to know too much about the past.

Odus went up the steps and knocked on the door. "You in, Preacher?" A scraping sound died away and there was the metallic echo of a tool being placed on the floor. "Come in," Preacher Mose said.

It was the first time Odus had been in a church in a couple of years. He'd attended the Free Will church in his youth, but the con-gregation didn't think much of his drinking so he'd been shunned out. He didn't carry a grudge. He figured they had their principles and he had his, and on Judgement Day maybe him and the Lord would sit down and crack the seal on some of the finest single-malt Scotch that heaven had to offer. Then Odus could lay out his pitch, and the Lord could take it or leave it. Though hopefully not until the bottle was dry.

The Primitives were different, though. A little drink here and there didn't matter to them, because the saved were born that way and the blessed would stay blessed no matter how awful they acted. Odus could almost see attending that type of church, but he liked to sleep late on Sundays. As for the True Lighters, they took reli-gion like a whore took sex: five times a day whether you needed it or not. Preacher Mose was kneeling before the crude pulpit up front. He wasn't praying, though; he was laying baseboard molding along the little riser that housed the pulpit and the piano. A hand drill, miter saw, hammer, and finish nails were scattered around the preacher like sacraments about to be piled on an altar. Preacher Mose was wearing green overalls, and sweat caused his unseemly long hair to cling to his forehead. "Well, if it isn't Brother Hampton."

"Sorry to barge in," Odus said. "I wouldn't bother you if it was-n't important."

"You're welcome here any time. Even on a Sunday, if you ever want to sit through one of my sermons."

"Need a hand? I got some tools in the truck."

"We can't afford to pay. Why do you think they let me carpen-ter? I'm better at running my mouth than driving nails."

The church had no electricity, and even with scant light leaking through the windows Odus could tell the preacher's molding joints were almost wide enough to tuck a thumb between. "This one's on the house. A little love offering."

"Know him by his fruits and not by his words," Preacher Mose said.

"Good, because my words wouldn't fill the back page of a dic-tionary and half of those ain't fit for a house of worship."

Odus got his tool kit from the bed of the pickup and showed the preacher how to use a coping saw to cut a dovetail joint. After the preacher had knicked his knuckles a couple of times, he got the hang of it, and left Odus to run the miter saw and tape measure.

The preacher bored holes with the hand drill so the wood wouldn't split, then blew the fine sawdust away. "So what's trou-bling you?"

"Harmon Smith."

The preacher sat back on his haunches. "You don't need to worry about Harmon Smith. His soul's gone on to the reward and what's left of his bones are out there in the yard."

"That's not the way the stories have it."

"I'm a man of faith, Odus. You might say I believe in the super-natural, because God certainly is above all we see and feel and touch. But I don't believe in any sort of ghost but the Holy Ghost."

"Do you believe what you see?"

"I'm a man of faith."

"Guess that settles that." Odus laid an eight-foot strip of mold-ing, saw that it was a smidge too long.

"Always cut long because you can always take off more, but you sure can't grow it back once it's gone."

"I'll remember that. Maybe I can work it into a sermon." Preacher Mose drove a nail with steady strokes, then took the nail set and sank the head into the wood so the hole could be puttied.

"What I'm trying to get around to is, I seen him."

"Seen who?"

"Harmon Smith."

The preacher paused halfway through the second nail. Then he spoke, each word falling between a hammer stroke. "Sure"— bang—"don't"— bang—"know"— bang—"what. . . "— bang. He paused, then wound up with a flourish. "In heaven's name you're talking about"— bang, bang, bang, BANG.

"He come down by the river while I was fishing. Face like goat's cheese and eyes as dark as the back end of a rat hole. He had on mat same preachin' hat you see in the pictures." Preacher Mose drilled another hole and positioned the nail. Odus noticed his hands were shaking.

"Sarah Jeffers saw him, too, only she won't admit to it."

The preacher swallowed hard and swung at the nail. The ham-mer glanced off the nail head and punched a half-moon scar in the wood.

"A little putty will hide it," Odus said. "That's the mark of a good carpenter. It's all in the final job." Preacher Mose swung the hammer again, this time the head glancing off his thumb. "God d—" He stuffed his thumb in his mouth and sucked it before he could finish the cussword.

"Don't be so nervous. It's just a finish nail."

"Harmon Smith died of illness. He caught a fever running a mission trip to Parson's Ford. He had a flock to tend, and his sheep were scattered over two hundred square miles of rocky slopes."

"That's the way the history books tell it. But some people say different, especially in Solom."

"And they probably say there's a grudge between us and the Primitives."

"No, they don't say that."

"We all serve the same Lord, and on the Lord's Earth, the dead don't walk. Not till the Rapture, anyway."

"Maybe you ought to tell that to him." Odus lifted his hammer and pointed the handle to the church door. Framed in silhouette was the tall, gangly preacher, the one who was nearly two hundred years dead.

Preacher Mose knelt at the foot of the pulpit and stared at the black-suited reverend. He put his bruised thumb back in his mouth and tightened his grip on the hammer until his knuckles were white. Harmon Smith's shadow started to move into the church, but dis-solved as it entered the vestibule. The last thing to flicker and fade was the wide brim of the hat.

Chapter Sixteen

Arvel remained calm when he found his wife sprawled on the kitchen floor. He'd been a volunteer firefighter for over a decade, ever since a liquored-up cousin had set one of his outbuildings on fire by dropping a cigarette in a crate of greasy auto parts. Arvel didn't know all the fancy techniques used by the Rescue Squad folks, but he'd watched them in action plenty of times. His favorite emergency tech was Henrietta Coggins, who was built like a cross between Arnold Schwartzenegger and Julia Roberts, except unfortu-nately Henrietta had Arnie's chin and hairline and the Pretty Woman's nose and muscle tone. Despite this unsettling mix, she was cool as a September salamander when the pressure was on, and it was her voice that Arvel now heard in his head. He repeated the imagined lines to his wife as he knelt beside her and felt for her pulse.

"Hey, honey, looks like you had you a little mishap." Check pulse, don't know a damned thing about how fast it's supposed to be, maybe it's mine that's thumping like a rat trapped in a bucket, but yours feels mighty shallow. "But don't you worry none, 'cause old Arvel's right here beside you. We'll get through this and have you baking lemon cakes again in no time." When Arvel had heard the noise from the kitchen, his first reaction had been annoyance, because one of the guys on TV was about to get voted off the show. It was the guy with the bandanna who hadn't shaved; there was one on every reality show. Arvel could al-ways tell which asshole was going to get cut loose, though it never happened in the first few episodes. No, they had to string the audi-ence along and let all the viewers build up a real hate for the guy, which was made worse by the fact that he just might have a chance of winning. Which would mean another asshole millionaire in the world while folks like Arvel still had to get up at 6:00 a.m. and put in ten hard hours. Well, seven if he could help it. So he'd been working up a decent dose of spite for the asshole in the bandanna when the floor shook and thunder boomed in the kitchen, as if his wife had dropped four sacks of cornmeal. But since she couldn't lift even one sack of corn meal, that meant something else had dropped. His wife, all 195 pounds of her.

Arvel put a cheek near her lips, making sure she was still breathing. He looked at the back door, where he'd seen the flicker of movement as he'd entered the room. He was almost sure it was some kind of animal, and he had been getting ready for a closer look when he saw Betsy laid out like Sly Stallone in Rocky, only Sly had managed to climb up the ropes and lose on his feet and Betsy appeared down for the count.

She was still drawing air, but her eyes were hollow and sunken. He lifted one eyelid, just the way Henrietta would do. Betsy's pupil was as tight as a BB. Her long skirt bunched around her knees, showing the purple road map of her varicose veins. Arvel felt the back of her head and found a raised place the size of a banty egg.

"You just got a little concussion, is all," Henrietta would say. She spoke in that slow, reassuring way even when the patients were unconscious. Once Arvel had heard her waltz a car crash victim through death's door with that same kind of talk.

Arvel didn't think he could pretend to be Henrietta anymore, because he wondered what would happen if his wife stopped breathing. "Don't die on me, now," he said, a line Henrietta would never use in a hundred years.

He went for the phone and dialed 911 with no problem, then found himself talking to the communications officer in Henrietta's words. "Is this Francine?" Of course it was Francine, because Arvel knew all the commu-nications folks from the scanner he kept in his truck. When Francine said "Yes, go ahead" Arvel took a deep breath and said "Sorry to bother you, but I was wondering if you could have the squad come down to 12 Hogwood Road in Solom. I've got a pa-tient down."

"What's the emergency, sir?"

"I'm not no sir. I'm Henrietta. I mean, this is Arvel Ward." Somewhere in his glove box, he had a sheet with all the emergency response codes, but since his job was putting out fires or occasion-ally directing traffic, he'd never bothered to memorize the list. All he knew was that, in car wrecks, "PI" meant

"personal injury" and "PD" meant "property damage," and you hurried with the red light and siren for the first but not the second. So he said "We got a PI here, weak pulse, possible head injury. Plus something's burning in the oven."

"Hold on, Arvel, we'll get somebody right there. Are you with the patient?"

"Not right now. I'm on the phone."

"I meant, is the patient in the house with you?"

"Yeah. She lives here."

"Okay, stay on the phone and let me give you some instruc-tions."

"I can't leave her alone, and the cord won't reach. Tell them to hurry, and send Henrietta." Arvel hung up. When he got back to the kitchen, he knelt over her again to check her pulse. The hand he placed on the opposite side of her body touched a wet place on the floor. He lifted his hand and saw it was blood leaking from somewhere just above her waist.

Arvel wondered if maybe Betsy had landed on a butcher knife when she fell, because it surely wasn't her head giving off that much blood. He tried to roll her over but she was too heavy. Finally, he lifted her enough to see a rip in her dress and the bur-gundy maw of a wound in her side, a few inches below her rib cage. It looked like some kind of bite mark, because the edges of the wound were stringy and jagged. He looked once more at the back door, wondering what kind of beast had wandered in and taken a chunk out of his wife. And won-dering why Digger hadn't raised holy hell, and if Henrietta would know how to handle something like this. Because, right now, with Henrietta's voice in his head or not, he couldn't think of a single comforting thing to say.

Jett dropped her book bag on the floor and dove onto her bed. Her heart was racing, as it always did when she was stoned. Pot was a stimulant, and the textbooks classified it somewhere between a narcotic and a hallucinogenic. It didn't make you hallucinate like acid did, but she'd never known acid to trick you into thinking you'd had a battle of wits with a goat. She swore to herself she wouldn't get stoned ever again. At least not until after Mom and Gordon went to sleep.

She was just kicking off her shoes when she heard the pounding on her door. "Jett?" Great. It was Gordon. Just the thing to kill a good buzz. "Yeah?" The door handle turned. Gordon must have decided to treat her with some respect, though, because he let go of the handle and said, "Can I come in?"

"Just a sec. Let me get dressed." She got up, threw a book and some paper on her desk, and slouched into her chair. She hooked headphones around her neck and punched up some Nine Inch Nails, just to piss off Gordon, though she preferred Robyn Hitchcock when she was stoned. No time for the Visine in her desk drawer. She'd just have to bluff it out.

"Come on in, it's unlocked" she said, deciding not to call him on his turning of the knob before she'd invited him in.

Gordon walked in as if he were a professor and Jett's bedroom were the classroom. Lecture time.

"Why aren't you helping your mom with supper?"

"I have homework." She nodded at the book on her desk.

"Oh." He looked around, as if he'd never seen the room before. His eyes stopped on the movie poster of a gaunt and pale Brandon Lee from The Crow. "We haven't had time to get to know each other, Jett. It's important for me that we get along. Important for both of us, I think. It will make things easier on your mother."

"Mom's been kind of weird lately."

"She's trying hard to make this work." Gordon acted like he wanted to sit down, but her bed was the only suitable surface in the room besides the floor, and Jett couldn't picture him sitting on ei-ther of those. He fingered the knot of his tie. "I think we ought to have a father-to-daughter talk." She opened her mouth but he held up his hand to cut her off. "I meant that as a figure of speech. I don't want to replace your real father. But we do live under the same roof and we need to lay out some ground rules."

"Besides the 'no drugs' thing."

"That's for everybody's peace of mind especially yours. We have high aspirations for you, Jett. I never thought I'd have some-body to carry on the Smith tradition."

"But I'm not a Smith." Jett wondered if Gordon was stoned on something himself, because he was making less sense than she was. From the way he hovered over her, she could see straight up his nose to the black, wiry hairs inside.

"We're still a family. I know things have been a little rough on you, having to make new friends and acclimate yourself to this old farmhouse. It's a major transition from Charlotte to Solom."

"Yeah, they don't have no goats grazing along Independence Boulevard." Gordon's lips quavered as if he were trying to smile and failing. "That's 'any' goats."

"Any goats. Like, what's their deal?"

"Deal?"

"Your goats act like they own the place. I know they're sup-posed to be stubborn, but they're kind of creepy."

"They're more pets than anything. They won't hurt you."

Maybe they won't hurt you. But you're part of this place. Maybe they think I'm some kind of alien freak, come in from the outside world to threaten their way of life. As soon as the thought arose, Jett dismissed it as silly. The goats were weird, that was for sure, but they were just shaggy, cloven-hoofed, goofy-eyed animals when you got right down to it. Nothing to be afraid of. Even if they ate your dope and looked at you as if you were a germ under a microscope.

"Your eyes are bloodshot," Gordon said, sniffing the air and causing his nostril hairs to quiver.

"Yeah. I'm not sleeping very well."

"I thought you'd be settled in by now."

"Bad dreams. There's this man in a black hat who—"

Gordon took an abrupt step backward and accidentally kicked her backpack with his heel. The zippered section was open, reveal-ing the dull glint of her pot Baggie. She expected Gordon to give it a once-over, but he regained his balance and said in a near whisper, "A man in a black hat?"

"Yeah, and an old-timey suit that's all black and worn out, like it had been picked over. I can't really see his face, it's like the brim of the hat throws a shadow over it." Jett didn't mention that she'd seen him three times: in the barn loft, in English class, and in the boiler room at school. If the man was Teal, then Gordon might know something about him. But if Jett's acid trips had eaten a permanent hole in her brain, she didn't want to arouse any suspicions or she might end up in lockdown at a psychiatric ward. Not that a vaca-tion would be all bad, but Mom was already a basket case and that might send her over the edge. And good old Dad would probably drop his job and his new girlfriend and make a beeline to Solom to straighten things out, fucking everything up in his usual bumbling way.

"I won't lecture you on the chemical changes caused by sub-stance abuse," Gordon said. "Drugs can do permanent damage. Hallucinations, confusion, memory loss."

Jett nodded absently, focusing on the brittle grind of Trent Reznor's voice leaking from the headphones. And don't forget that good old side effect of 'fun. So quit fucking lecturing already.

"Okay, Gordon. I promised you and Mom I'd stay clean. No sweat." Gordon reached out and put a hand on her shoulder, as if he'd been studying parental techniques in a textbook. "Hang in there, Jett. We'll make this family work."

"I know. But I'd better get back to this homework."

"The satisfaction of academic achievement is the best drug of all." Whatever.

He paused at the door. "Dinner in fifteen minutes."

After he left the room, Jett locked the door and popped the Nine Inch Nails out of the Walkman. Hitchcock's "Element of Light" was the ticket now. She retrieved the Baggie from her backpack, sprin-kled a pinch of grass in her aluminum-foil pipe, and carried it with the lighter to her window. She eased the window up and the evening chill sliced its way into the room. If she took small puffs and exhaled through the gap, then even Gordon's big hairy nose couldn't detect the scent. Beyond the glass, the world was dark and still. Even the insects were tucked away, as if hungry predators roamed the night. The stars were scattered like grains of salt on a blue blanket, the quarter moon sharp as a scythe. The mountains made sweeping black waves along the horizon. She had to give it to Solom on that count: it had Charlotte beat all to hell on scenery.

She was about to thumb her lighter when she saw movement out in the cornfield. The tops of the dead stalks stirred. She expected a wayward goat to walk out from the rows. The animals were renowned for breaking through their fences. The Fred-faced fuck-ers never seemed to get enough to eat. They probably chewed in their sleep.

But it wasn't a goat. It was a man. In the scant moonlight, she could just make out the brim of bis hat. The brim lifted in her di-rection, as if the man were staring at the window. She looked down at the dried leaves in the curled bowl of the pipe. "Hallucination, my ass," she said. Jett sparked the lighter and touched the flame to the weed, in-haling deeply. She planned on losing her mind, at least for a little while. Because if her mind was gone, then she wouldn't have to re-member. And if she didn't remember, then the man in the black hat didn't exist.

Drug problem.

Oxymoron.

Drug problem equals no problem.

She closed her eyes and let the smoke seep out her mouth into the Solom sky. 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 bot-de from the hip pocket of his overalls, though 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. They sat side by side in a front pew of the church, staring straight ahead as if expecting a ser-mon from the silent pulpit.

"Now do you believe me?" Odus asked.

"I believe in the Lord and just at the moment, that's the only thing I believe in."

"That was him. 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."

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 heart-beats, 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 turned up one palm, like a beggar seeking alms. Neither Mose nor Odus had spoken, and the man finally lowered his hand and stepped out of the church without turning.

Or moving his feet, Odus thought. Except now he couldn't be sure what he'd seen or 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. Despite his poor church attendance and his fondness for illicit activities, Odus was true to his word, which was why his reputation was good among the peo-ple who hired him for odd jobs.

"What are you going to do about it?" Odus asked.

"Do? Why does anything have to be done?"

"You know the stories."

"That's just a folktale, 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 bour-bon again as if he'd been giving the matter a great deal of thought over the course of many pints.

"Okay, then," Mose said. "Just supposing—and I'm doing this like maybe I was writing a spooky movie or something—suppos-ing Harmon Smith did come back to life after two hundred years? 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."

"What's that?"

"Revenge."

"The church records say he died in an accident. He had no rea-son not to rest in peace."

"What else would you expect them to say, Preacher? That he got conked on the head and thrown in the river because he was doing missionary work?"

"A folktale, I told you."

"The Primitive Baptists didn't cotton to Harmon Smith's ideas. Neither did the Free Willers."

"We believe in salvation. Why would our people want to kill him?"

"Ask Gordon Smith. He'll tell you all about it."

Mose ran his thumb over the head of the hammer and stared at the wooden cross that hung on the wall behind the pulpit. "If I told you something, would you think I was crazy?"

"No crazier than you think I am."

"I saw the Circuit Rider when I was a kid. He snuck up behind me like a shadow one afternoon while I was skipping stones down at the trout pond. I thought he was going to grab me, but he just shook those long fingers at me. I ran all the way home and didn't go outside for a week. That was about the time that Janie Bessemer took infection from a cut foot and died from blood poisoning. I al-ways thought it was the Circuit Rider's doing."

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 services tomorrow."

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." Before Odus could answer, the air of the church sanctuary stirred. A crow 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 fruits, Preacher Mose," Odus said tilting the bottle once more. "You never know which one of them's going to turn rotten."

Chapter Seventeen

Sue Norwood turned around the sign in her window to inform any late-night cyclists mat she was closed—gone fishing. Not that she'd ever cared for sportfishing, even though she sold Orvis rods and reels, hip waders, hand-tied flies, coolers, Henry Fonda hats, and everything the genteel fisherman needed except for alco-hol. Solom was unincorporated which precluded a vote on local alcohol sales, and Sue figured in maybe five years the seasonal home owners from Florida would own enough property to push for a referendum. For now, she was content to bide her time on that front. The pickings were easy enough as it was.

In 1995, Sue had purchased a small outbuilding that had be-longed to me Little Tennessee Railroad one of the few structures in Solom to survive the 1940 flood. It sat within spitting distance of the Blackburn River, but was on ground just high enough to sur-vive the calamities that Solom seemed to call down upon itself. Ice storms and blizzards were biannual events, high water hit every spring and fall, hellacious thunderstorms rumbled in from March through July, and the winter wind rattled the siding boards as if they were the bones of a scarecrow. But all the outbuilding needed was a green coat of paint, a twenty-thousand-dollar commercial loan at Clinton-era rates, and sixty hours of Sue's time each week to hang in there despite Solom's lack of a true business climate.

Sue had converted an upstairs storage room into an apartment, and it was to this space she retired after closing. She passed the racks of kayaks that stood like whales' ribs on each side of the aisle, making sure the back door was locked. As an all-season out-fitter, she'd packed the place with every profitable item she could order, from North Face sleeping bags to compasses to Coleman gas stoves. Ten-speed bicycles were lined against the front wall, with rentals bringing in more than enough to keep her wheels greased. Ever since Lance Armstrong had trained along the old river road before his third run at the Tour de France (a little factoid that Sue always managed to slip into her advertising copy, when she could-n't get the local media to mention it for free), out-of-shape ama-teurs had been flocking to the area to rest their sweaty cracks on her bicycle seats. At twenty dollars a day, they could hump it all they wanted. She was even willing to sponsor a community fund-raising ride for the Red Cross each summer, a nice little tax write-off that paid back in spades.

Sue counted the bikes before she went upstairs, her last official chore for the day. Two were still out. She checked her registration records at the desk and found the bikes were rented by a Mr. and Mrs. Elliott Everhart of White Plains, New York. Fellow Yankees. Sue was from Connecticut herself, but she'd graduated from the University of Georgia with a degree in exercise science, spent three extra years in Athens as an assistant coach for the women's field hockey team, pretty much flattening her vowels and slowing down her speech enough to pass for southern if she was drunk. At the age of twenty-five, she had written down the names of all her favorite rock-climbing spots, clipped them apart with scissors, and randomly pulled one out of a hat. Solom wasn't on the list, but it had been the closest to the Pisgah National Forest, which featured Table Rock and Wiseman's View. Since Solom was near a river, and rock climbing wasn't exactly a major source of commercial recreation income, as it required little more than a rock and an atti-tude, she'd launched Back2Nature Outfitters and had been expand-ing ever since. Funny thing was, she'd been so busy these past few years with her business that she rarely was outdoors herself.

The Everharts. Sue could remember them because the husband, Elliott, had detected her up-coast accent and made conversation about it. Sue couldn't remember the wife's name, but she was a quiet, willowy blonde who spoke little and didn't seem all that thrilled with the idea of human-powered transportation. They had rented the bikes at 2:00 p.m. and had estimated their return at 6:00 p.m. Elliott told her they had rented a cabin on the hill above Solom General Store and had walked down so as not to take up a parking space in the small gravel lot. Sue had said, "Thank you kindly," an artificial southern response that had come more and more easily over the years, then sent the couple on their way with bottled min-eral water (two dollars a pint) and a map free with any purchase. Sue now checked the clock above the front door, the one that elicited native birdcalls with each stroke of the hour. It was ten minutes away from Verio, nearly two hours later than the Everharts' anticipated return. People who rented bicycles sometimes got flats. That was rare, because she kept the equipment in good condition. All those who Tented equipment, whether it was a propane lantern or a kayak or a ten-speed, were required to sign release forms absolving Back2Nature Outfitters of any responsibility. That didn't mean that people didn't screw up, especially the types of deep-pocketed but shallow-skulled clients to which Sue usually catered. Even if the Everharts had gotten lost or had a breakdown, they most likely could have walked back to Solom, flagged a ride, or called for as-sistance on their cell phones. Except Sue could see three problems with that scenario, be-cause she'd experienced each of them. Sometimes bikers got lost when they tried to walk back, because the going was so much slower that the maps became deceptive. Flagging a ride was no guarantee because there simply wasn't that much traffic after sun-down in Solom, and outsiders were loathe to pick up anyone wear-ing fluorescent spandex and alien-looking crash helmets. And cell phones were almost universally useless in Solom because the val-leys were deep and the old families owning the high mountains had yet to lease space for transmitting towers.

Sue considered a fourth alternative. The Everharts appeared to be in their thirties and were presumably childless, at least for the length of their vacation. Maybe good old Elliott had gotten a boner for nature and coaxed his wife into the weeds for a little of the world's oldest and greatest recreational sport. Or maybe the wil-lowy blonde had been the one to turn into a ravening maw of wild lust. Either way, Sue couldn't blame them. Some of the locals had whispered that she was a lesbian, and, sure, like many girls she'd sampled that particular ware in college, but she was pretty much married to her business these days.

As far as Sue could tell, there was no reason to call out the search-and-rescue team just yet. Besides, she earned an extra thirty dollars for late fees and the Everharts had put a five-hundred-dollar deposit on their credit cards to cover much of the value of the bikes. With depreciation, subsequent tax write-off, and the tip they'd probably give when they rolled in red-faced tomorrow morning, Sue figured the old saying "Better late than never" wasn't quite as good as "Better late and then never." She left on a small light above the desk, went up the stairs at the back of the store, and made herself a dinner of canned salmon, creamed rice, and fresh collard greens, all heated over a Coleman gas stove. The stove was a legitimate business expense. She'd checked with her accountant boyfriend, Walter, whom she'd met on a white-water rafting expedition.

Though the relationship had launched on class-four rapids, it had drifted into shallow eddies by summer's end. That was okay, too. The money she'd spent on condoms and Korbel champagne was a valid tax write-off. Sue had a warm meal ahead and a vibrator waiting under her pillow, the famous Wascally Wabbit that was never too "hare-triggered" and didn't lie or cheat. If the Everharts came knocking in the middle of the night, she planned to sleep right through it. Odus had first heard about the Circuit Rider when he was eight years old. His grandmother, a thick, dough-faced woman who sur-vived the Great Depression and hoarded canned foods because of it, would often gather the grandkids around the front porch on Saturday nights. The older kids complained because they would rather watch television, but, to Odus, it was a way to stay up after bedtime without getting in trouble. He knew even then that stories were a way of passing along the truth, even when they walked on the legs of lies.

Granny Hampton was the matriarch of a half dozen kids, and three of those had seen fit to breed. Odus was an only child, but he had five cousins, and that was before they all moved away from Solom, so Granny's front porch was a lively and crowded place during the summer. Granny would settle in her rocker, the smaller kids gathered on the cool boards at her feet, the bigger ones slouched against the railing. A Mason jar at Granny's feet served as her spitoon, and she wouldn't talk before she'd placed a large pinch of Scotch-colored snuff behind her lower lip. As if on cue, the dusk grew a shade darker, the crickets launched their brittle screams, and fireflies blanketed the black silhouettes of the trees. The stars twin-kled over the bowl of the valley, and the rest of the world may as well have broken off and drifted past the moon for all it mattered. It was as if Granny were a witch who conjured up a magical stage for her tales and Solom were the only solid ground in the universe.

"The Circuit Rider was one of the first horseback preachers to come through these parts," Granny said on mat July night of 1966. "There had been a couple of Methodists and an Episcopalian, but Harmon Smith was a converted Primitive Baptist. The Baptists weren't all over the place like they are now, and most of the white settlers kept their religion to themselves. The thing about Primitives is they don't believe in salvation—"

Lonnie, who was a year older than Odus, cut in and said, "Does that mean they don't believe in Jesus?"

"They believe in Jesus, but he ain't the only way to heaven. Primitives believe you're bora saved."

"I don't want to hear no sermon," said Walter Buck, Odus's old-est cousin and the one probably most in need of a sermon. "Get on to the ghost."

Granny paused to let a tawny strand of saliva leak into the Mason jar, her eyes like onyx marbles in the weak light of the porch's bare bulb. "I'll get to the ghost soon enough, but if I was you, I'd make sure the ghost don't get on to you"

Walter Buck snickered, but there was a little catch in his breath when he finished.

"Harmon Smith decided he liked the look of the land because it reminded him of his homeland in the Pennsylvania high country. He aimed to settle down and build a little church here. Problem was, a couple of other preachers had been riding through the re-gion, and they were all hell-bent for saving souls in those days. The Methodists were the worst, or the best, depending on how you looked at it. They would ride themselves ragged, cross mountains in the dead of winter, sleep on hard ground, and generally run themselves to the bone in order to bring a single person into the fold. They tended to wear down and get ill, and it was common for them to die before the age of thirty. This all happened two hundred years ago, so people didn't live all that long back then anyway."

"Was Daniel Boone here then?" Lonnie asked.

"Boone never was here, much. He'd come up and hunt, maybe spend a few weeks in the winter. He kept a little cabin over on Kettle Knob, but he never had much claim on this place. Besides, this story ain't about Daniel Boone, it's about Harmon Smith."

All the cousins had watched Fess Parker wearing his coonskin cap on television, starring as Daniel Boone, the fightin'est man the frontier ever knew. But Odus was more interested in the Circuit Rider, and

looked at the Three Top Mountain range, imagining Harmon Smith guiding his horse along the rocky trails.

"Harmon Smith was based in Roanoke, Virginia, at the time, and his territory went into Tennessee and Kentucky. He had used up three horses by the time he first set eyes on Solom. In them days, there was probably two dozen families in the valley, and most of them are still here."

"Was there any Hamptons?" Lonnie asked.

"Quit interrupting or we'll never get through," Walter said.

Granny lowered one eyelid and gave Walter a stare that shut him up for the rest of the story. The bugs had found the porch light by that time, and a mosquito bite on Odus's ear had swollen up and begun to itch, but he could put up with a hundred bites to learn about the Circuit Rider.

"The Hamptons were here, Robert and Dolly, they'd be your great, let me see, great-great-great-grandparents, if I'm figuring right. They were one of the first to invite Harmon Smith in for a bite of supper, which is why I know so much about him. The story's been passed down all these years, but I'm sure there's some parts that have been beefed up a bit along the way. Wouldn't be a good folktale otherwise.

"Harmon Smith told Robert and Dolly that he wanted to buy some land up here. Preachers in those days never had any money, figuring they'd get their reward in heaven, not like them slick-haired weasels you'll find behind a pulpit these days. But Harmon had a young coon dog with him, and one of the Hicks boys took a cotton to the hound and ended up trading ten acres for it. By that time, Harmon had persuaded Dolly and Robert to join the Primitives, mostly because joining didn't seem to require any kind of obligation. You didn't have to give up dancing or corn liquor, not that any Hamptons ever liked to take a drink."

Odus knew that was one family trait that hadn't made it into his branch, because his dad rarely went through a day without a drink. But Odus didn't think liquor was bad, because it made his dad sleepy and talkative. When he wasn't drinking, he was prone to cussing and stomping around, so Odus's gut always unclenched when his dad twisted the cap on a pint bottle.

"Harmon ended up building his church, but it took him five long years. In the meantime, he was still making his circuit on his horse, Old Saint, taking collections where he could, preaching the Primitive line as he went. Harmon took a wife but she must have wandered off and left him, because she was never heard from again. The preacher turned peculiar after that. He took up farming, but his soil was too thin and rocky. One autumn, Harmon stacked up some stones and covered them with dead locust branches. He knelt before them and prayed, then took one of his chickens and chopped" —here spit flew from Granny's mouth as she made a chopping motion with her hand and Lonnie jumped a foot in the air even though he was sitting on his rump—"and its head flew off and dribbled blood all over the wood. He set the branches on fire and tossed the chicken on it, like the way they used to offer up lambs in the Old Testament. People whispered about that, but figured Harmon knew how such things were done. The next year, Harmon's crops were busting open they were so thick, corn and cabbage and squash and even things that don't take hold too well here like melons and strawberries. In his church he said God had smiled down on a humble servant, but that October he sacrificed a goat on his stack of killing stones. Garden got even better, so the autumn after that it was a cow, and the wood had to be stacked as high as man's head in order to do the job proper."

"Didn't anybody think he was crazy?" Debbie asked, who was the weird cousin who had once tried to show Odus her panties. The night had settled down more heavily than ever, a thick, black blan-ket held in place by the glittering nail heads of the stars.

"Sure, some did, but they figured if burnt offerings was good enough for Abraham, it was good enough for Harmon Smith. Other horseback preachers came through, though, and talk went around that they weren't happy with the way old Harmon had set up shop. These were 'enlightened minds,' and they didn't hold with old-fashioned ways. The Methodist man in particular felt the strong hand of God pushing him into this territory as if there was only one right way to put us mountain people on the path to Glory." Granny Hampton paused on that word "glory," and let them chew it over as she relieved her mouth of brown saliva. The way she said it, getting to heaven sounded almost like a scary thing, be-cause you'd find a cavalry of nasty horseback preachers guarding the Pearly Gates.

"One November Sunday morning, when Harmon was due back for a service, Old Saint came clopping down Snakeberry Trail with an empty saddle." Here Granny Hampton gave a vague wave to Three Top, and Odus could almost hear those iron horseshoes knocking off of granite and maple roots. "Some of the menfolk went up to hunt for him, and they saw what looked like signs of a struggle near the creek. Never found his body. Your ancestor Robert figured he got took by a mountain lion. Some said Harmon went in the water and got tugged down into a sinkhole and turned to soap."

"Yuck," Lonnie said.

"Others said he never did die. They say he still comes back every decade or so to toss a body on his killing stones. And it ain't animals no more."

"What is it, then?" Walter Buck said and his voice was low and reverent and maybe just a little bit spooked.

"Now nothing will do for Harmon Smith's garden but a bad lit-tle young'un." Granny Hampton lifted herself up with a groan of both breath and chair wood, took up her cane, and headed for the screen door. She paused and looked out at the mountains once more and said, "Praise the Lord, I'm mighty glad I'm old. Not much left to be scared of anymore." She went inside, her chair still rocking, the runners whispering against the night like a language two hundred years lost.

Odus never forgot that story, and more than once he'd found himself alone at night on a dark trail or stretch of pasture and recall that image of Old Saint prancing down off Three Top. Except, in the image, a soapy, pale figure was perched on the horse's back, the head beneath the black hat swaying back and forth with the horse's motion. For those who had ever heard Granny Hampton tell the story, it was easy to believe Harmon Smith was still riding the cir-cuit.

"Do you want to talk about it?" Katy asked.

"What?"

"The thing you don't want to talk about."

Katy turned her back to him and shimmied out of the dress with the autumnal print. She hung it in the closet, though she'd spilled some butter sauce on it during dinner. She felt oddly exposed in front of her husband, though she was in her bra and panties and he'd certainly viewed the marital merchandise on at least one occa-sion.

Gordon was in his pajamas, in bed, pretending to be engrossed in a Dostoyevsky novel. He had changed in the bathroom, locking the door so she couldn't enter while he was taking a shower and brushing his teeth.

"You mean Jett?"

That wasn't what she meant, and she approached the dresser for the sole purpose of glancing in the mirror to see if he was looking at her body. His gaze never left the book. "What about Jett?" she asked.

"I know a counselor. He teaches part-time at Westridge, and I'm sure he'll give me a discount if insurance doesn't cover it."

She removed her earrings, a set of sterling silver crescent moons, and put mem in the cedar jewelry box on the dresser. Only after she closed the lid did she realize she'd never seen either the earrings or the box before. "What?" she said, too loudly for bed-time.

"For her problems. The drugs, the wild stories, the way she dresses to intentionally offend. She's making a classic ploy for at-tention."

Like mother, like daughter.

Katy removed her bra and let it slip to the floor, still looking into the mirror. Her freckled breasts were high and firm, even though she had breast-fed Jett. Katy picked up the silver-handled brush on the dresser and began running it through her red hair, flip-ping her head so the sheen would reflect in the bedside lamplight. Gordon was reading the Dostoyevsky.

"Do you think I'm prettier than Rebecca?" she asked.

Gordon closed the novel with a slap of pulp. "That's a hell of a thing to ask a man. It's like asking if I think you're fat."

"I've seen her picture. She's not like me at all. Brown hair, dark eyes, fuller lips. They say some men have a 'type' and go for it time after time, even when it's bad for them."

"We were talking about Jett."

She turned to face him, her nipples hard in the cool September air. "You keep changing the subject."

"The subject is us. All of us." His eyes stayed fixed on hers, re-sisting any temptation he might have had to let his gaze crawl over her figure. Perhaps he had no desire and nothing to hide. Maybe this morning's sex had been his version of a personality warp. Jett might not be the only one in the house who had hallucinations. Then again, Katy had been the one to wear a dead woman's dress without a moment's consideration of how strange that was, espe-cially when the dress belonged to Gordon's first wife. Even stranger, Gordon had not commented on it.

Were they all going insane? What if Jett was spiking their food slipping LSD or some other brain-scrambling substance into the recipes she'd found scattered about the kitchen? No. Jett was off drugs. She had promised.

"We're trying, Gordon," she said. "You knew we came with strings attached."

"You look cold. Why don't you put on a robe?"

"I'm fine."

"I'm worried about you."

"Maybe you should save your worry for what's happening be-tween us. We screwed each other's brains out this morning, and it was the first time you ever touched me in any way that mattered. I thought I'd finally broken through. Now you act like nothing hap-pened."

Gordon never looked embarrassed but his cheeks turned a shade rosier. "It's complicated."

"Not really. Either I'm prettier than Rebecca or I'm not. Either you want to screw me or you don't. Either we're married or just people who sleep in the same bed. Sounds pretty damned simple to me.

"You're not from Solom."

"I am now. I moved here, remember. I said 'I do' and I gave up my stable if unspectacular career in Charlotte and yanked my daughter's roots out of the Piedmont dirt and dragged both of us up here because I thought we had a future with you. Only it turns out I'm second on your 'honey-do' list behind your dead wife."

Gordon exploded out of the blankets, rising from the bed with an angry squeak of springs. His pajamas were askew, one tail of his shirt dangling across his groin. "Leave Rebecca out of this."

"How can I? I thought you wanted me to be her."

"You'll never be Rebecca."

Katy stormed out of the room, tears blurring her vision. She slammed the bedroom door as punctuation to her unspoken come-back. Her curled right fist ached and she looked down to see the silver-handled hairbrush with the initials R.L.S.

Rebecca Leigh Smith.

Katy flung the hairbrush down the hall and ran to the top of the stairs. The air coming up from the landing was cool and drafty, moving around her flesh like soft hands. The smell of lilacs wrapped her, carrying a faintly sweet undercurrent of corruption. She leaned against the top post, the landing spread below her like still and dark water.

Maybe if she died, Gordon would love her as well.

"Do you love him?"

The words crawled from the hidden corners of the kitchen, out from the cluttered pantry shelves, beneath the plush leather couch, off the mantel with its dusty pictures and Gordon's collection of re-ligious relics, up from the dank swell of the crawl space. Katy thought she had imagined the words, that the voice was the whisk of a late autumn wind, or the settling of a centuries-old farmhouse. Better that than to accept she was losing her mind. Because, how-ever briefly and innocently, she had just contemplated suicide.

The realization brought fresh tears, and behind them, a surge of anger. She had always thought herself strong. After her divorce, she had maintained a household, provided for her daughter, and re-sisted any temptation to reconcile with Mark, who would occasion-ally make overtures that seemed more like the pat chatter of a horny male than the sincere revelations of a man suffering regrets. She had moved on, moved up, and though this new marriage had-n't been the stuff of dreams, she was determined—

"DO YOU LOVE HIM?"

This time the breeze was staccato, deep, the sounds rounded off into syllables. The voice was female, as frigid and calm and dead as the lost echo from a forgotten grave.

"Who's there?" Katy said, not really thinking anyone was there. The house was locked. Only crazy people heard voices when no one was there. And she wasn't crazy.

"Mom?"

The voice was behind her now. Younger, higher...

"Jett?" She turned. Her daughter stood in the shadows of the hall, her silhouette visible against the slice of light leaking from her room. Katy was aware of her exposed body and wrapped her arms around her chest.

"Are you okay, Mom?"

"Sure, honey. I was just checking on something in the kitchen."

"I thought I heard you talking to somebody."

Had Katy spoken? She couldn't be sure. A horrified part of herself wondered if she had actually answered the Voice's bare and bald question. But the Voice wasn't real and the house was quiet and it was always easy to lie to yourself when you didn't like the truth. What she couldn't avoid was her daughter's stare. Katy had never been a prude about nakedness, but there was an unwritten rule that you didn't go starkers around your kids once they passed the toddler stage.

"It's okay, sweetie," Katy said. "Go on back to bed. You have school tomorrow."

"It's not even ten yet, Mom. That's pretty lame even for Solom."

"Well, go read or study or something. Listen to some music."

"Are you sure you're okay?"

"I'm fine."

Jett stepped back into the light of her doorway. Her dyed-black hair was tied back in a ponytail, her face bare of makeup, braces glinting silver. A sweet, round-eyed child. Not a drugged-out po-tential menace to society, as Gordon saw her, and not a disruption to learning, as her teachers claimed. Just a sweet little girl. Her baby.

"Whatever," Jett said. "It's not like we get through problems to-gether or anything. That's just a line we use for the counselors, right?"

Jett was about to close the door, but men stuck her head back out and said, "By the way, what's that smell? Like somebody farted flowers or something."

The door closed with a click and the hallway went black and Katy slid down the newel post and sat on the top stair until her tears had dried.

Chapter Eighteen

Elliott was being a total dick. Carolyn Everhart didn't like to think of her husband in such bald, crude terms, but he'd taken the whole vacation as a measure of his testosterone levels. From book-ing the rental car ("Let's go with the guys who try harder") to de-ciding on restaurant stops on the trip down, Elliott always had a snappy answer for her every question, and a good reason why he knew best. As they'd followed the Appalachian foothills south, Elliott seemed to have grown wax in his ears and a fur pelt that hadn't graced humans since they'd started shaking their Neanderthal origins. Solom had been picked almost at random. Elliott worked at PAMCO Engineering with a guy who'd attended Westridge University and said the North Carolina mountains were relatively unspoiled ("A perfect place to get away from it all while still hav-ing it all"). An Internet search and credit card reservation later, and they were booked in the Happy Hollow retreat for a week, and since September was leaf season, the cabins cost a premium. A two-day drive from White Plains, with a Holiday Inn Express lay-over ("Complete with a 'lay,' what do you think, honey?") in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and they had arrived with not a single ar-gument over road maps.

But here in the failing light, she couldn't get Elliott to even look at the map, much less admit they were lost. The pocket map they'd picked up from the outfitters' had been fine as long as they stuck to the river road, which was flat and gently curving. But Elliott had insisted on what he called "a little off-roading," though after two hours her legs had begun to cramp and the air temperature dipped into the low forties. Instead of complaining, she pointed out that the bikes were geared for road racing and not mountain climbing. Too late. The name "Switchback Trail" had intrigued him. Besides, he'd complimented her on how the biking shorts snugged her ass, and that had bought him a little slack. Elliott chased down a forest trail barely wide enough for a fox run, and that trail branched off twice, crossed a narrow creek, and cut around a cluster of granite boulders that had risen like a backwoods Stonehenge from the swells of the earth. Two forks later ("The road less traveled or the road not taken, what do you say, you liberal arts major, you?") and he'd juddered over a root in the gathering darkness and been thrown over the handlebars. No bones broken, but some serious scrapes that would require antibiotic ointment. Now they stood in a cluster of hardwood trees whose branches were nearly devoid of foliage. If any houses were around, their lights didn't show. Small, unseen animals skirled up leaves around them and darkness was falling harder and faster than a Democratic presidential hopeful's poll numbers. Carolyn, a homemaker, Humane Society volunteer, member of the Sands Creek subdivi-sion bridge club, and devout Republican, resisted the urge to say, "Well, we really got away from it all, didn't we?" Elliott pulled a penlight from his fanny pack and played it over the bicycle. "I think the front wheel's warped. We'll have to pay for the damage when we get back."

"You mean 'if we get back."

"I know exactly where we are."

"Show me, then." She pulled out her copy of the fourfold pocket map. It was bordered with ads for area tourist attractions, fine dining establishments, and investment Realtors. The river road was marked by a series of arrows, and the Solom General Store and Back2Nature Outfitters were marked with red X marks. State Highway 292 leading from Windshake was clearly delineated in thick black ink. Tester Community Park, about five miles from the outfitters' judging from the scale of the map, was the last recogniz-able landmark they'd passed.

"We're right about here," Elliott said, running the beam of the penlight over a printed area that represented two square miles.

"There aren't any lines there," Carolyn pointed out.

"Sure. But we were headed east, remember? The sun was sink-ing behind us." Actually, Carolyn recalled only vague glimpses of the sun once they'd left the relatively familiar flatness of the pavement. What bits of scattered light did break through the gnarled and scaly branches seemed to originate from a different position with each new slope or fork. When the sun had settled on the rim of the mountains, the entire sky had taken on the shade of a bruised plum, and Carolyn was thinking by then that even a trail of bread crumbs out of "Hansel and Gretel" wouldn't have led them home before midnight.

"Can the bike roll?" she asked.

"Sure, honey." Elliott lifted the bike by its handlebars and spun the wheel with one hand. The wheel made three revolutions, the rubber sloughing erratically against the tines, before it came to a complete stop. "Well, it can work in an emergency."

"At what point does this become an emergency?"

'Take it easy, Carolyn. We can walk out of here in no time. Once we find the river, we'll be home free."

"Do you know where the river is?"

"Sure, honey." He took the map from her, and fixed the penlight on the place he'd decided as their present location. With the beam, he traced a line to Blackburn River on the map, which was conve-niently marked with a sinuous swath of blue. "We're here and the river's there. A half-hour's hike, tops."

"I see the river on the map, but where's the river out here?" Her voice took on the tiniest bit of sarcasm despite her best efforts.

"Water runs downhill. Ergo, we walk downhill, and there will be the river."

"Ergo" was one of those annoying, know-it-all, engineering-type words Elliott occasionally sprang on her when he was feeling de-fensive.

"I'm glad we wore athletic shoes and not moccasins," Carolyn said. Elliott had stopped at a little souvenir stand when they crossed the North Carolina border, one with a fake moonshine still by the front door and a wooden bear that had been sculpted with a chain saw. She'd talked him out of buying the Rebel flag window decal and the Aunt Jemima figurine-and-syrup decanter ("Just wait till the guys at PAMCO get a load of these!"), but he'd gone for the jen-u-wine hand-stitched leather Cherokee mocs at

$29.95 a pair.

"Do you have any water left?" He'd used up the last of his water rinsing his wounds.

"A little," she said. Though she was under no illusions that they'd be back in the comfort of their rental cabin within the hour, she didn't think they were at the point where they'd need to con-serve water to survive. She handed him her bottle and he dashed some in his mouth and swallowed.

"Okay, let's rock and roll," he said, walking his bike back down the bill. There was just enough daylight left to see the darker cut of the trail against the thick tangles of low-lying rhododendron. She tucked the map in the tight pocket of her biking shorts and fol-lowed, the bike leaning against her hip. They had gone fifteen minutes before the invisible sun slipped down whatever horizon led to morning on another side of the world. Elliott switched on the penlight and its weak glimmer barely made a dent against the walls of the forest.

"Remember those big rocks we passed?" Carolyn asked, the first time she'd spoken since they'd started their descent.

"Yeah."

"We should have come to them by now."

"They're probably uphill from us. We're at a lower elevation now."

"'Probably'?"

He flicked the beam vaguely to his right. "Sure, honey. Up there. We'll come to that creek soon, and then we can decide whether to follow it down to the river or stick with the trail." It was the first time he'd hinted that any decision would be mu-tual. That should have given her a cheap glow of victory, but it ac-tually made her more nervous than she wanted to admit. She looked behind her, hoping to recognize the trail from their earlier passage, but all she could see were hickory and oak trees, which stood like witches with multiple deranged arms.

"Let's hurry," she said. "I'm getting cold."

The colorful nylon biking outfits gave a pleasant squeeze to the physique, but they were designed to let the skin breathe so sweat could dry. Breathing worked both ways, though, and the soft wind that came on with dusk made intimate entry through the material.

"I think I remember this stand of pines," her husband said. He gripped the penlight against one of the handlebars as he walked so the circle of light bobbed ahead of them like on one of those "fol-low the bouncing ball" sing-along songs on television. Carolyn thought the perfect tune for their situation would be AC/DC's "Highway to Hell."

It was maybe a minute later, though time was rapidly losing its meaning during the interminable trek, that Carolyn heard the sounds behind her. At first she assumed they were the echo of her own footsteps, or maybe a whisper generated from the bike's sprockets. She breathed lightly through her mouth, or as lightly as she could given the fact that she was bone tired, a little bit pissed, and more than a little scared. Leaves rustled. Something was mov-ing, larger than squirrel-sized, churning up dead loam and break-ing branches.

She edged her bike closer to Elliott's, until her front tire hit his rear.

"Jesus, Carolyn. Are you trying to run me down?"

"I heard something."

"I hear lots of somethings. Didn't you read the guidebook? The Southern Appalachians are home to a number of nocturnal crea-tures. Don't worry, all of the large predators are extinct, thanks to European settlers. Ergo, nothing to fear."

"Can we stop and listen for a minute?"

"Every minute we stop is another minute we're lost."

"I thought we weren't lost."

"We're not. We're just reorienting with our intended destina-tion."

'Try the cell phone again?"

"No bars. Signal's deader than a mule's dick."

Ten minutes later and they reached the creek. The gurgling of the water and the cold, moist air alerted them to its presence before they blundered into it, because the penlight's beam had begun to fade. Carolyn welcomed the discovery not because it was the first definite landmark (if, in fact, it was the same creek they had crossed earlier), but because the white noise of the rushing water masked the sounds of the footsteps that followed their tracks a short distance behind.

"The creek, just like 1 said." Elliott pointed the light into Carolyn's face. It was barely bright enough to make her squint. "The question is, do we follow the water or stick with the trail?" Carolyn was tempted to remark that he was finally asking her opinion, now that the situation had reached the south side of hope-less. Instead, she allowed him to retain a sliver of his pride. After all, there would be a later, and the politics of marriage, just like the politics of a republic, were constantly swinging from one party to another. And the pendulum was going to be weighted to her side big time for the rest of the vacation.

People didn't wander off and die in the Appalachian Mountains. There was just too much development. Maybe in Yellowstone, where grizzly bears still roamed, or the Arctic Wildlife Refuge with its sudden snowstorms and subzero temperatures. Here, the worst mat could happen was a miserable night in the woods, with granola bars for supper and a surly husband.

Except something had been following them. No matter what Elliott said.

"We shouldn't follow the creek," she said. "It looks like the rhododendron get thick down there, and all those rocks are proba-bly slippery. One of us might fall and break an ankle. Then we'd be in real trouble."

"Good point."

Another blow for girl power, but Carolyn didn't think the creek was that dangerous. She was afraid she wouldn't be able to hear the footsteps over the rushing water. "Why don't we leave the bikes here? We can't ride them, and they're slowing us down."

"We paid a deposit."

"We can come back and get them tomorrow, once we figure out where we are."

"I know where we are. I'm an engineer, remember?"

"Ergo." Carolyn didn't mean for the response to sound so bitter, but she was cold, her rump was sore from the ten-speed's narrow seat, her calves ached, and branches had scratched at her face and arms.

"In case you haven't noticed, this isn't a goddamned circuit board or something you can solve with quadratic equations."

Elliott's widened eyes doubly reflected the penlight, as if she had slapped his face. She savored the victory for a mere second, then decided to finish the coup. She grabbed the light from his hand and swept the beam against the surrounding trees and under-brush, like Luke Skywalker slashing down Empire storm troopers.

"I heard something out there following us, and I'm good and goddamned scared." She hadn't used two expletives in the same conversation since her days at Brown, and it gave her a sense of what the feminists called "empowerment." It was frightening. She would give up power for security any day. But she had a feeling she needed the adrenaline and anger if she was going to get them out of this mess.

"Okay, okay, calm down," Elliott said, and the patronizing tone was suppressed but audible. "You're right. We should leave the bikes and stick with the trail. Let's cross here and hide the bikes in that thicket, then keep walking."

"Fine." She trembled, and she didn't know whether it was from the chill mist of the creek or her anxiety. She held the light while Elliott guided his damaged bike through the water, carefully choosing his steps on the mossy stones so his shoes would stay dry. He slogged through the mushy black mud of the opposite bank and stood above her, lost in the dark web of wood and vines.

"Come on, Carolyn. I can't see anything."

She took one look behind her, half expecting to see a crazed black bear or a red wolf or even a mountain lion, then navigated the rocks and headed up the embankment. She slipped once, going to her knee in the lizard-smelling mud, but Elliott grabbed her upper arm and tugged her to solid ground. Then he dragged the bike up and wheeled it into the bushes.

"Do you want to have a snack?" he asked. "An energy bar or something?"

"I want to get out of here."

"Let's look at the map one more time."

Carolyn nodded and gave the penlight back to her husband. She recognized that she had literally and figuratively passed the torch, but she didn't care. Truth be told, she was nearly in tears. So much for her run as Margaret Thatcher or the Republican Hillary Clinton.

They moved a little away from the water and gathered around the penlight as if it were a battery-powered campfire. Somewhere above them, the moon had risen, but its reassuring glow was fil-tered into a teasing gauze by the treetops. Elliott was studying the map when Carolyn heard the scrape and rustle of leaves.

"Did you hear that?" she asked, her heart a wooden knot in her chest

"Just the wind. Or maybe a raccoon."

"The wind's not blowing. And raccoons don't get that big." Carolyn was struck by the image of a mutant, man-sized raccoon, reared up on its hind legs, crazed yellow eyes blazing from a bandit mask. The image should have made her chuckle, at least on the in-side. Instead, the tension increased its grip on her internal organs. And, goddamn, she suddenly had to pee.

She didn't relish peeling down her nylon shorts and squatting in the darkness, further exposing herself to whatever was out mere.

"Okay, if we're right here, and can make three miles an hour, we should make it to the main road by eleven o'clock. Then we can find a house and call for a cab or something." The idea of walking up on a stranger's porch and knocking was almost as scary as the filing that was or wasn't following them. "I don't think they have cabs out here."

"Maybe the police. Or the Happy Hollow office."

Elliott must be scared, too. Otherwise, he'd never admit to oth-ers that he'd made a mistake. Carolyn's knowledge of his failure was one thing, he could gloss that over in the coming week and eventually have her believe getting lost had somehow been her fault. But here he was, ready to tell the local sheriff's department or the rental cabin management that he'd wandered off with no re-spect for the wilderness, that his modern-day James Fenimore Cooper act had gone bust, that a Yankee engineer with a wristwatch calculator couldn't navigate the ancient hills. Carolyn could-n't wait, even if it meant he'd be surly until they made it back to White Plains.

Mostly, she couldn't wait to see a streetlight.

Because the noise was back, closer, to the right now.

"You heard that?"

"No." He said it so firmly that it sounded like self-denial.

"It's closer."

His face contorted in the dying orange orb of light. "Listen, Carolyn. This is the twenty-first century, not the goddamned Blair Witch Project. In real life, people don't get stalked by cannibalistic hillbillies or eaten by wild animals. And, last I heard, aliens don't have secret landing sites in the Appalachians. That's the Southwest desert, remember? Ergo, there is nothing following us and I'm try-ing to solve this little problem you created and get us safely back to civilization."

Leaves rustled ten feet ahead of them, behind a gnarled ever-green. Despite herself, Carolyn moved closer to Elliott and clung to his arm. He stiffened and smirked.

"I'll get us out of here," he said. "Have I ever let you—" The penlight died and darkness rushed in like water flooding a ruptured bathysphere. It was almost as if the light had warded off the other sounds of the night, because the still air was filled with chirring, scratching, and creaking. Beneath those came the ragged whisper of breathing. Caroyln's eyes adjusted to the dim moonlight just in time to see a large black shadow hover beyond Elliott, and then her husband was ripped from her grasp. He gave a wet gurgle, as if a freshet had erupted between the granite stones of his face. One of his legs flailed out and struck her kneecap, and he gave a bleat of pain. Drops of liquid spattered on Carolyn and she screamed. The air stirred above her head and she looked up to see a curved and drip-ping grin of metal catch the distant eye of the moon. The grin de-scended and bit with a meaty thunk, and all Carolyn could think was that the meat must have been her husband, that arrogant engi-neer with a fondness for college football, the Bush clan, plasma television, and pharmaceutical stocks.

The scream jumped the wires from her brain to the ganglia low in her spinal cord, a place encoded during the Paleozoic Era when flight meant survival and the higher thinking processes shut their useless yammerings. She ran blindly, branches tearing at her hair, heedless of the trail's direction. The moist hacking continued behind her, but she scarcely heard, because her eardrums protected her high-order brain. She was an animal, scrambling through the leaves, guided by instinct as she ducked under branches and dodged between scaly oaks and beech. She couldn't see but she didn't need to see, be-cause her eyes were jiggling orbs of deadweight in her skull and a more primitive sight led her onward. All knowledge was in her skin, mind given over to flesh, she was aware of nothing but the roar of wind through her throat and the pulse in her temples and the dark sharp thing at her back and—

She didn't see the maple with the low branch, because her eyes had shut down, but she did see the bright yellow and green sparks that exploded like fireworks on the movie screen of her forehead. Carolyn was unconscious as the goats gathered around her, and her useless, high-order brain stayed mercifully absent as her true-blue Republican blood leaked into the land of legends.

Chapter Nineteen

The general store was crowded with a mix of locals and tourists. Odus, his ball cap tipped low and a toothpick between his teeth, stood by the sandwich counter and waited as Sarah rang up the purchases of a chubby boy in too-tight nylon biking shorts and tank top. The customer's shoulders were pink and peeling, the sign of a spoiled city boy getting too much sun on vacation. The boy's dad stood beside him in a red sweatsuit that was meant to portray athleticism but instead gave the impression of a sausage that was about to bust out of its skin. Sarah bagged the boy's mound of candy bars, pork rinds, and lollipops. A bluegrass band was tuning up in the park across the road. A Solom community group had bought four acres along the river that were now cleared and grassed, with a band shell at one end. From early summer until the end of October, weekly shows were held in the park. The music was either bluegrass or traditional old-timey, though the general store hosted occasional debates about the dif-ference between the two labels. Odus picked some mandolin him-self and even sat in on some local recording sessions, but he didn't like performing in front of people.

Sarah looked away from the register and frowned at him. He gave a small nod that said, "We need to talk after you take care of business."

Sarah paid rapt attention to the customers, smiling as if she ap-preciated them for more than just their money. A six-pack of Mountain Dew, two cups of overpriced coffee, a microwave burrito, a honey bun, a bottle of sunblock, a rustic birdhouse, a basket made of entwined jack vine, a stack of Doc Watson CDs, and two bags of Twizzlers changed hands before Sarah got a break. She picked up a dusting cloth, came to the sandwich counter, and began wiping down the dewy glass.

"You had me worried," he said.

"Don't waste a good worry on me."

Normally Odus wouldn't. Sarah Jeffers was tougher than beef jerky and had the backbone of a mountain lion. But toughness and spine didn't matter when you were standing up against something that ought not be. Odus ground the end of his toothpick to splinters as he spoke around it. "I seen him."

"Seen who?" Sarah said suddenly taking a great interest in the chub of gray liverwurst. Odus didn't see how anybody could eat that stuff. Bologna was okay, but he preferred good and honest meat, like ham, that looked the way it did when it came from the animal.

"We both know who," he said.

A tan, Florida-thin blonde approached the cash register, pigtails tied with pink ribbons. She wore a T-shirt that read This dog don't hunt. In her hands were a gaudy dried flower arrangement and a miniature wooden church, no doubt decorations for a seasonal sec-ond home. Sarah's face uncreased in relief as she went to ring up the sale.

"Are you the storyteller?" a voice behind him asked.

He turned and faced a man wearing sunglasses who held a cas-sette tape as if filming a commercial. Odus was on the cover, dressed in his folksy garb of denim overalls and checked flannel shirt. He'd even borrowed a ragged-edged straw hat for the photo because the university woman who had recorded it said the pack-age needed what she called a "hook." Odus didn't know a damned thing about marketing, but he knew stories from eight generations back.

The Hampton family had passed along the Jack tales, in which Jack usually put one over on the old King. "Jack and the Beanstalk" was the best-known of the stories, but that one didn't have a king in it. The university woman said they were parables in which the Scots-Irish who settled the Southern Appalachians were able to get proxy revenge on their English oppressors. Odus didn't feel partic-ularly oppressed by anybody in England, except maybe when Princess Diana got all that attention for getting killed, but he fig-ured the university woman was a lot smarter than he was about such things.

"I did some telling on that one," Odus said. The tape was called The Mouth of the Mountain.

"So you're a celebrity." The man was eating a Nutty Buddy ice-cream cone, and a string of white melt rolled down the back of his hand. He licked it up.

"Not really. I just talked. The woman who made the tape did all the work." Odus looked over at Sarah, who was busy taking money for a gee haw whimmy-diddle, a folk toy that basically consisted of three sticks and a tiny nail. Retail value: $6.99 plus tax.

"Do you tell them in public? We're going to be up for two weeks and would love to hear some authentic Appalachian stories."

"They ain't authentic," Odus said. "They're all lies." The man laughed ejecting a tiny peanut crumble that arced to the floor at Odus's feet. "That's good. I'm buying this one, and I'm sure I'll be pleased. If you're not holding any performances, can I hire you to come down and tell some stories around the campfire in our backyard?" Sweat pooled in Odus's armpits. He didn't mind telling the sto-ries to family or his few close friends, and he could even put up with talking them into a microphone, but the idea of spinning out some Jack yarns while a bunch of tourists yucked it up and sipped martinis was more than he could stand. "I don't do tellings in a crowd" Odus said.

"This won't be a crowd. Just us and the neighbors. Maybe ten people."

"Ten's a crowd."

The man looked at the tape. "Fifteen dollars for this, huh? I'll pay a hundred dollars for one hour." Odus thought of the wallet in his back pocket, the leather folds so bare a fiddleback spider wouldn't hide in them. A hundred bucks would buy a case of decent whiskey, and decent whiskey would maybe drown out those dreams of the cheese-faced man in the black hat. From the park, the sounds of the string band blared from the PA speakers. "Fox on the Run," complete with three-part harmony. The man was mouthing the waffle cone now, running his thick, pink tongue around the cone's rim.

"I'll have to think on it a spell."

The sunglasses hid the man's expression, which could have been disbelief or impatience. Odus didn't much care. It wasn't like losing a steady job or anything. If he'd even wanted a steady job, that was.

"I'll listen to the tape and get back to you," the man said. "What's the best way to reach you?" Odus took the toothpick from his mouth and pressed the tip into his callused thumb. "I don't have no phone. Usually you can find me here at the store or around."

The man smiled, vanilla cream on his upper lip. "Okay, 'Mouth of the Mountain.' Have it your way." He went to pay for the tape. He left the store, and Odus watched through the screen door as the man made his way to the park.

"Sold a tape," Sarah said. "There's another buck-fifty for you."

"Except I don't get it for six more months," Odus said. "That royalty thing." Sarah took a five out of the cash register and held it out to him. "I'll report that one as damaged. Call it an advance."

Odus swallowed hard and went to the counter. The Store was quiet. An elderly couple was browsing in the knickknacks, and a kid faced tough choices at the candy rack. Odus reached out and took the bill, but as he pulled his hand away, Sarah grabbed his wrist with all the strength of a possum's jaws.

"Take it and buy you a bottle, and forget about it," Sarah said. "You ain't seen nothing, and I ain't seen nothing."

Their eyes met. Odus, at six feet two and 240, somehow seemed to be looking up at Sarah, who stood all of five feet and weighed in at a hundred soaking wet. "He's back, and getting drunk won't change that."

"Getting drunk never changed anything, but that never stopped you before." Sarah let go of his wrist.

"Don't go blabbing it or peo-ple will think your brain finally pickled and they'll throw you in Crazeville to dry out."

"The people I tell it to will believe me, because they'll know." "I heard what you told that man. Your stories ain't authentic, they're lies." Sarah began fussing with the cigarette packs and cans of smokeless tobacco behind the counter.

"The biggest lies are the easiest to swallow," Odus said. "But they burn like hell when you puke them back up."

He went out into the sunshine and the last chorus of "Fox on the Run." Jett stood by the pay phone in the school lobby, fumbling in her pocket-sized purse. Many of her classmates, especially the girls, had their own cell phones, but Gordon thought they were a "distrac-tion to learning." As if she couldn't get Brittany to text-message her the answer to a quiz question. Phones were tools and were here to stay, so why couldn't Gordon get with the future already?

Because he was lame, that's why. She pulled out the phone card her dad had given her as a present when she and Mom left Charlotte. "Five hundred minutes, call any time," he'd said. Actually, he prob-ably didn't mean any time, since he'd started dating the blond librar-ian. Mandy, Mindy, Bambi, something like that. Lots of checking out going on there, probably.

Noise leaked from me lunch room, typical middle-school jokes, flirting, me rattle of silverware on hard vinyl trays. She pressed her ear to the phone and punched in her card digits, waded through the operator's asking if she wanted to donate minutes to the troops, then entered the numbers for Dad's work.

"Draper Woodworking and Design," the female voice said.

"Could I get Mark Draper, please?"

"May I ask who is calling?"

"Jett. Jett Draper."

"Oh." Uttered with a tone of sympathy.

After thirty seconds, Dad came on the line, bluff and hearty and probably stoned. "What's up, pumpkin? Aren't you in school?"

"Yeah. It's lunchtime. I have five minutes before the bell rings."

"How's it going? Did you get my letter?"

"Yeah. Thanks for the money. It really saved my sanity."

"I'll send some more soon."

"No, I'm fine. Really."

"Are you liking Solom any better now that you've had some time to get settled?"

"It's all right. A little slow, but you get used to it."

"Made any friends?"

She thought of her drug connection, the goats, the man in the black suit, the kids on the bus, creepy old Betsy Ward. "Yeah. I'm fitting right in."

Her dad's tone turned serious. "And your mom? Is she okay?"

"Actually, that's what I called about."

'Talk to me, sweetheart."

"I'm afraid she's starting to lose it."

"Lose it?"

"Yeah. She's, like, not Mom. Like some alien came down and took over her brain. She's changed so much in the last few weeks. Sometimes I can't believe it's the same person who told me that life sends messages in invisible balloons."

"She's going through an adjustment period. She'll be fine once—"

"Don't give me that counselor babble horseshit, Dad."

"Jett."

"Sorry. It just blurted out."

"I can tell you're upset. Calm down and tell me what she's up to."

"She stares off into space. I'll walk into a room and it's like she's forgotten what she was doing, or like she'd been in the middle of a daydream and I woke her up. She's totally changed her wardrobe and—this might be weirdest of all—she's started cooking. And I don't mean beanie weenies and frozen waffles. I'm talking honest-to-God recipes."

"Well, if you'll forgive the counselor babble, I'd guess she's try-ing hard to make things work with her new husband."

"You sound sad about it, Dad."

"We had our chance and blew it. Things just didn't work out. But—"

"I know, I know, it's not my fault and it had nothing to do with me."

"I know it's tough on you, honey. Getting along with Gordon okay?" She didn't know whether to lie or not. Dad shouldn't have asked, or maybe it was his way of showing he cared about her. It was an uncomfortable subject. Gordon had wanted her to take the Smith name, but she'd balked. Mom had sided with her, of course, but not too vocally. "He's been a hard case but Mom says he just wants what's best for me. But I don't think him and Mom are get-ting along too well."

"I'm sorry to hear that."

She could tell he wasn't. She didn't understand much about boy-girl stuff, except she was smart enough to know that you wanted to forever own the one you loved, even if it was bad for both of you. "He's not mean or anything, just cold. Not to get too personal, but he never kisses her."

"They'll work it out. I'm more worried about you. I hate to ask, but how are things going with the drugs?"

"Fine." She realized she'd snapped at him, and that was the worst possible thing to do, because it would make him suspicious. "They haven't even invented drugs up here yet. It's like the 1800s. Plowing with mules, no electricity, a church down every dirt road. Nothing but clean air and sunshine."

"Good for you, pumpkin. I don't mean to pry, but I'm your dad. It's still my job, even if we're two hundred miles apart."

The bell rang, its brittle, metallic echo bouncing off the con-crete block walls. The traffic in the hall picked up, a few of the guys giving her the eye, no doubt because of her black lipstick. "Got to go to math," she said.

"Love you. Keep in touch, and tell your mom I said hello."

For a moment, Jett almost told about the man in the black hat, but Dad would think she was either cracking up or in serious need of some counselor babble horseshit. Ditto with the menacing goats. Just thinking of them made her a little light-headed, as if such things were never real unless you spoke of them. Better to just ignore them, pen them up behind the walls of Stoner City. "I love you, too, Dad. 'Bye." She wiped her eyes, careful not to smudge the liner, and waded into the hallway crowd. Carnivorous goats.

Sounded the fuck like a cheesy zombie movie to Alex Eakins. He could dig zombies, even cheer for them in a way, because when you got down to it, those gut-munching things from beyond the grave were about the most libertarian creatures around. Talk about your free-market economies. But goats were another matter.

Alex was smart enough to be aware of his eccentric nature. His parents were afraid he was turning into a survivalist who would one day construct an armed bunker and have a standoff with fed-eral agents. But the true survivalist didn't want to be noticed by the government, much less stage a confrontation. And a true survival-ist didn't go around ranting about man-eating goats, because that was a surefire way to get noticed.

So Alex would have to figure out how to handle this on his own. The first order of business was a trip to the general store to get a few reels of barbed wire. He could add another couple of runs around the perimeter of his property as a first line of defense. His gun rack held a .30-30, a sixteen-gauge Remington shotgun, and a .22 so his girlfriends could participate in target practice. He had his bow and arrows, a slingshot, and a couple of sticks of dynamite he'd bought under the table at the last Great Tennessee Border Gun Show. Plus there was the contraband arsenal in his secret room. So goats, even a herd of them, were not something to lose sleep over.

Weird Dude Walking was another story altogether.

Because Alex had returned to the scene of the slaughter yester-day afternoon, and not even a stitch of clothing remained. No blood on the ground, either, and not a goat in sight (Alex had the Remington with him just in case). Goats would eat any old thing, especially natural-fiber clothing, but surely a few scraps would be scattered around, or a bone button from the coat. Strangest of all, though the ground was pocked with cloven hoofprints, there was not a single mark from the boots the man had been wearing. Which meant Weird Dude Walking must have risen up and floated away like Christ gone to heaven. Even if Alex wanted to report what he'd witnessed, he had no evidence. He never doubted his sanity, though his own family had called him "crazy" any number of times. But only a crazy person would witness a man feeding himself alive to a bunch of goats.

Maybe not crazy, though.

Maybe special.

If a thing like that happened in the old days, the people called you a prophet and let you boss them around.

"Alex?"

Alex looked up, not realizing he'd been staring at his palms as if expecting them to start bleeding. "I thought you were at work."

"It's my day off."

"Oh yeah."

"Something wrong?"

"No, babe. Just thinking about the state of the world. It's a guy thing."

"I've got a guy thing for you." Meredith nuzzled her breasts against his back and put her arms around his chest.

"Not now. I've got some things to work out."

"Don't you want to smoke some?"

"I need to keep a clear head. Dope is the opium of the masses."

"Huh?"

"Hemingway. He said dope is the opium of the masses. But that's pretty fried, because opium is what they make heroin out of, and not many people can hook up with some H. I guess they didn't smoke much weed back in Hemingway's time."

"I thought he said religion was the opium of the masses. Or was that Karl Marx?"

"Same thing. Religion is for dopes, so it all works out." He gave a stoned snicker, though he'd not had any marijuana since the night before.

"You want some lunch? I could cook one of your acorn squashes and some wild rice."

"I'm not hungry. I think I'll go check the babies and meditate." He got up from the table and went outside. He had a small green-house, but he didn't grow his dope in it. The surveillance planes might see it and that would be the first place the snooper troopers would train their little spy cameras. His marijuana was in a little shed by the garden. He used a wind turbine and water wheel to generate electricity for the full-spectrum lights, because one of the ways cops got a warrant was by checking the electric company's records for a jump in kilowatt hours. The jump was

"evidence" that a citizen might be using grow lights. Since he was off-grid, he was outside the system, in more ways than one.

He unlocked the shed, checked the sky for bogies, then went in. The main room was filled with a blue glow thrown off by the bank of grow lights. Marijuana plants, spawned from Kona Gold seeds a friend had mailed from Hawaii, stood as tall as Alex, and the room was sweet with the fully flowering buds. The three dozen plants were grown in five-gallon buckets, and the soil was ripe with the best compost Mother Nature could produce. Alex sat cross-legged before the plants in a yoga position. He was at peace in this place, this shrine to the sacred buzz.

Too bad he had to hide it away. In a righteous world, he could grow it out there in the garden, right in front of God and every-body. Even Weird Dude Walking. If grass were legal, maybe the country's farmers wouldn't need crop subsidies. Get them off wel-fare and stifle the feds' war on drugs at the same time. Damn, why couldn't the Libertarians come up with any good candidates?

He let his anger at social injustices slip away as he breathed deeply of the Cannabis sativa. A spider had spun a web at the base of one of the plants. The spider was yellow with black streaks across its back, and it worked its way toward the center of the web where a struggling fly was tangled in the silken threads. Alex real-ized it was life in a microcosm, a symbolic play. You buzz around minding your own business, and then suddenly your ass is snared and along comes Reality to suck out your juices. Just like the goats had sucked the life out of the man in the black hat. Heavy.

Too heavy to contemplate with a straight head, despite what he'd told Meredith. He just didn't want to smoke with her, because then he'd have to either talk or silence her in bed. The only way to shut up a woman was to stick part of yourself in her. He needed to be alone. He pulled a joint out of his sock and fired it up, not shift-ing from his yoga seating as he puffed. He began a game of situa-tion-problem-solution.

Situation: You had a vision. Nobody else will believe you, be-cause you don't belong to any religion of the masses. Well, Meredith will probably believe you, but she believes in Atlantis and UFOs and even Dun/tin 'Fucking Donuts.

Problem: You either keep it to yourself and forget it, or you have to admit that miracles happen. Solution: Smoke more dope.

He took a deep draw off the joint and held the smoke in his lungs. In his mind's eye, the blue smoke seeped into his blood-stream and sent its tendrils into his brain. The drug stimulated him and relaxed him at the same time, one of its contradictions that ap-pealed to him and suited his worldview. Been a long time since you were in Methodist Bible school, but miracles in the Bible sort of had a point to them. Like Jesus with the loaves and fishes so everybody could eat, and Jesus turning water into wine so everybody could get wasted. Far as I can re-member, nowhere in the Bible did some dude feed his own ass to the goats.

Alex took another puff. The spider had reached the fly, which must have worn itself out, because it had stopped struggling. Or maybe the fly had sensed the jig was up and could see two dozen copies of the approaching spider through its compound eyes. Alex considered rescuing the fly, playing God, releasing it to go off and eat shit and hatch maggots. But it wasn't right to fuck with Nature. Besides, that would have meant standing up, and his legs had a nice tingle going.

Situation: Weird Dude Walking had to come from somewhere. Miracles don't just crawl down off the top of the mountain in the middle of the Blue Ridge, half a world away from the Red Sea and Egypt and Jerusalem.

Problem: That means Weird Dude was an emissary of some sort. Sent by God or the devil or what the movie trailers call the "dark imagination of M. Night Shyamalan." An emissary sent specifically for you, Alexander Lane Eakins, and for you alone. Solution: Just because an emissary drags ass to your castle door doesn't mean you have to open up and let him in. Pretend it never happened. Denial is a Good Thing. The joint was down to an orange roach, and Alex hot-boxed it until it burned his fingertips. He exhaled the smoke so that a blue cloud swept over the spider and the fly. One could get the munchies and the other could die with a shit-eating grin. Seemed to be some sort of circular cosmic justice in that. He sat until the sparkling edges of his buzz wore off; then he went into the house to ignore Meredith.