Drummer Boy: A Supernatural Thriller (29 page)

The eyes were almost kind. Almost fatherly.

But Vernon Ray shook that illusion away-this man had killed, captured, and maimed, he’d carved a red swath through these mountains, and the old settling families still used “Kirked” as a verb for wrongdoing. Sin could burn and embers cool to ash, and the dead could be forgiven but never forgotten.

Vernon Ray swallowed corncob dust and, with a trembling hand, placed the kepi on his head. It had been made for a boy and fit perfectly.

The colonel floated forward, looming over Vernon Ray, whose head tilted down to stare at dusty, stained boots. Then the cold fingers were on his chin, lifting his face, and Vernon Ray wondered wildly if the colonel wanted what Bobby hadn’t, if the cold company of the Jangling Hole had left Kirk as lost and alone on the other side as Vernon Ray was on the side of the living.

But the bearded mouth and wedge of cheeks and forehead visible beneath the broad hat’s brim showed no hunger or passion. The fingers, as soft and cool as salamanders in a muddy spring, slid along the curve of Vernon Ray’s jaw and stroked his hair. Then the hand gripped his shoulder with a strength that could have crushed granite and clawed its way out of any cave-in.

Words wended through the air, or maybe it was only the creak of rafters, or language leaking into him from the medium of necromantic connection:

We don’t belong together.

The words made no sense, but Vernon Ray wasn’t sure if they’d fallen properly in the carousel of his thoughts.

The hand lifted Vernon Ray, peculiar electricity shooting through the boy’s chest, and he thought again of battery charges and energy transformation. Vernon Ray now stood chest-high to the dead man, legs weak and quavering

He’s draining my juice, just like the reporter said . . . .

It was almost like an obscene dance of dust and air, Vernon Ray’s partner literally light on his feet, swaying to an invisible music.

Then Vernon Ray heard it: the distant cadence of the snare drum, rolling over the ghost hills, insinuating itself in the currents of shiftless air, riding the dying autumn sky as if marching an exhausted battalion home.

The colonel’s head lifted. heeding a call to arms, then his frigid fingers fell from Vernon Ray’s body, going to mist, and the juice flowed backwards, the connection severed. Strength and vitality surged through Vernon Ray’s limbs in a rush of warm blood.

Then the colonel paled, giving up the ghost yet again, the threads of his illusive form fading. The officer’s saber, sheath, and uniform with its dull brass insignia disappeared along with him, but the kepi remained, solid as the shed walls.

Vernon Ray reached up and adjusted the cap until the brim was perched over his forehead, shading his eyes against the death of day. The snare’s soft rattle fell away to silence, and only the wind remained, pushing October on past so winter could bare its icy teeth and feed.

When twilight came, Vernon Ray left the shed, picking through trees, careful not to snag the kepi on any low-hanging branches.

The uneasiness crept in like a rooster on crippled drumsticks.

Hardy stirred in bed under the heavy quilts. Pearl’s snores were like the bleating of a lamb. She’d popped one of those blue pills Doc Sanderson had prescribed for her nerves, and those usually knocked her out pretty good.

The onions she’d cooked with the fried potatoes had tainted the room with oily air, but Hardy was nearly used to it by now. He couldn’t blame the odor for his restlessness. After all, his old flannel longhandles were nearly stiff enough to stand in his boots and walk to the door by themselves.

The wind was flapping under the eaves, rattling the wooden shutters and causing the old farmhouse to shift and creak. The moon was up, its sick light sliding between the curtains and painting a green rectangle on the floorboards. Hardy strained his ears against the groaning of wood, listening for sounds from Donnie’s room. As he rolled over, a quill poked through his feather pillow and stuck his cheek.

The thin hands of the dial clock on the night stand were pushing past twelve and beginning their slow drop into the wee hours. Hardy sat up with a creak of bedsprings. He could almost feel the sloping weight of Mulatto Mountain, its ancient swell of rock and soil crawling into the valley.

The mountain and its damnable inhabitants could fall into the sea, for all Hardy cared. Even without the ghosts, the mountain would soon be wrecked by security lights, vacation homes for rich folks, and paved highways winding across its face.

Just like when the Yankee raiders rolled through in 1864, the invasion was inevitable, and guns would do little to change the outcome. When the Yanks had done their dirty business and moved on, their lawyers sailed in on the wake and got themselves elected to local office, then proceeded to develop land-use ordinances that favored them and their friends.

The Eggers family had been lucky because their property was so steep and hard to farm that its value on the deed books was low. But the new breed of Yankee invaders put a premium on mountain views, so the steepest terrain had become the most expensive. Never mind that the wind hammered at those high houses and the well drillers had to go a quarter-mile deep in some places; the rich idiots were only there for a few weeks in the summer anyway.

Hardy moved to the window, his joints burning with arthritis. Since the incident in the barn, he’d kept to the house, and he wondered how long it would be before the whole mess blew over.

In his youth, back when Mulatto Mountain was in the hands of the Eggers family, the ghosts had been spotted here and there on occasion. Hardy had even glimpsed them a few times himself, faint wisps of mist cavorting through the trees. But he’d never seen them so up-close-and-personal-and as
real
-as he’d seen them when Earley had danced to the music of the colonel’s sword.

As he peeked through the curtains, Pearl’s snoring stopped. He half expected to see campfires on the mountain, as if the dead had decided to bivouac in the woods instead of the eternal dampness of the Hole. But the woods were dark and still, even near the turnaround where Budget Bill’s bulldozers and trucks were parked. The air carried a cold weight, as if the killing frost was ready to descend from the North.

“You see anything strange?” Pearl said, her voice creaky with sleep.

He’d not told her about the incident in the barn. Lately, he’d kept a lot of things to himself, and he wondered if that was how marriages faded away until they went bust. “Nah,” he said. “Just a mountain.”

She got out of bed and Hardy heard the soft rustle of her slippers. “I’ll go check on Donnie.”

“He’s all right,” Hardy said without turning.

The shuffle of footsteps stopped. “You just keep watch and let me take care of my son.”

Hardy nodded in the dark until the door closed. He switched on the bedside lamp and got his black-powder musket out of the closet. He’d seen an old episode of “The Twilight Zone” where a priest had killed a vampire by putting a silver cross on his bullets and shooting the creature through the heart.

Hardy didn’t hold with the existence of vampires, but he figured if he was going to put his faith anywhere, it would be the Lord. That evening, he’d crept to the basement and melted down Pearl’s silver chain and cross and fashioned the metal into three balls of shot. Three wouldn’t be near enough, even if the silver had any effect on the dead, but their weight gave him comfort.

He opened the Eggers family bible, which had been passed down through four generations. Preachers had talked of the Holy Ghost, and Hardy wasn’t sure how he’d feel about Jesus Christ’s spirit drifting through the wall at any moment. But if the Good Book acknowledged the existence of ghosts, and resurrection was one of the juiciest parts of the entire tale, then maybe its pages packed a little bit of magical punch.

Hardy tilted his powder horn to sift some of the explosive substance into the barrel, then rolled in one of the silver balls. He ripped out a page from the Book of Acts and used his brass rod to pack it down for wadding to hold the shot in place.

“God, make me an instrument of your peace,” he said.

The door squeaked open and Pearl padded into the room. “Is that thing loaded?”

“Just getting ready for trespassers.”

“You ought not keep loaded guns where Donnie might get at them.”

“Our son died ten years ago. He ain’t nothing now but your 195-pound baby doll.”

“Talk like that and you’ll be sleeping in the wood shed.”

“Fine way to talk to the man who put this roof over your head.”

Pearl moved behind him, her reflection distorted in the glass. Her face was aged and sad, the lines deepened by the late hour and too-little sleep. He tried hard to see his young bride in those bloodshot blue eyes, but only pain looked back at him.

“What’s happened to us?” she whispered.

Hardy laid the musket over his lap and waved toward the mountain. “The Jangling Hole happened.”

She put her trembling hands on his shoulders. “Hardy, our problem is in here, not out there. Our house has become a worse hell than anything a legend could stir up.”

“I seen them. And look what they done to Donnie.”

“Whatever it was Sunday-
if
there was anything-Donnie didn’t get hurt.”

“They didn’t need to hurt him. They already took everything that mattered when they got ahold of him last time. They took his soul.”

“And you call yourself a Christian. Donnie’s soul was bound for heaven since he got saved and baptized. Ever since he was 6, his soul was set.”

“Even if he don’t know no better? At that age, you don’t know what death’s like. All you’re doing is mocking back the words somebody put in your ear.”

“Saved is saved. The Good Lord wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“I took many a comfort from the Bible,” Hardy said, tapping the book. “But now I got to go with what I see with my own eyes and feel in my gut.”

“Don’t go turning your-”

Ratta tatta tat
.

They stared at each other.

“Possum must have got in the attic,” Pearl said, her hushed words barely audible even in the sudden silence.

Tatta tatta
.

“Yep,” Hardy said. “And it learned to carry a beat. Reckon we ought to catch it and put it in a circus.”

“They’re coming for him, aren’t they?” Pearl pulled her bed robe tighter over her chest and held it with one trembling hand, as if somehow that would ward off invading spirits.

“They’ll come sooner or later. But this time they ain’t getting him without a fight.”

The drumming rose from across the pasture, its origin difficult to pinpoint. Hardy peered out the window, expecting to see flickering campfires or a line of marching white wisps. Instead there was only darkness and the distant trees fighting off the autumn wind.

“How can you fight them, Hardy? You already turned your back on the one power in all the world that might beat them.”

“There’s two ways to look at it. Either the Lord has a reason for them to be here, meaning it’s some kind of test, or the Lord has no power over them and we got to draw on what we can muster. Jesus is sitting on the sidelines for this one.”

“It don’t hurt none to pray.”

Ratta tatta tat
.

The drumming was closer now, between the house and the barn, and its percussion trailed off in an eerie reverberation. It was joined by another pounding, a deeper, hollow, less-rhythmic pulse. Coming from across the hall.

Pearl moved first but Hardy, his arthritis screaming like salty lime in an open sore, reached the door before she did. As he stepped in the hall, the door to Donnie’s room shook in its frame.

“Donnie!” Hardy yelled, leaning the musket against the wall. His son threw himself against the door again, the wood around the hinges splintering with the force of the blow. Another meaty thud sounded as the snare drumming grew louder.

They’re on the porch.

“Open the door before he hurts himself,” Pearl yelled.

Hardy touched the sliding bolt that would allow the door to swing open. He hesitated just long enough for Pearl to push past him. She reached for the hardware and froze.

RATTA TATTA TATTA TATTA
.

The drumming was beneath them now, coming from the kitchen, headed for the stairs. Donnie had stopped throwing himself against the door and now answered the snare drum with his own cadence, hammering the wood with what sounded like the balls of his fists.

The percussion rose up the stairwell, accompanied by the footfalls of boots. Hardy wondered why floaty things made of air and nightmares would need to march, but figured dead folks had no reason to follow sensible rules. When the dead got on a mission, they would hoof it through hell and back if that’s what the job required. That was as true of Kirk’s lost raiders as it was with Jesus of Nazareth.

When the time came for action, you dragged your ass off the cross and did your duty.

“They’re coming, whatever they are,” Pearl said, pressed against the door as if motherly love alone could turn back the tide. Donnie kept on with his rhythmic pounding, and the wind had risen so that the house creaked and shook on its stacked-stone foundation.

Hardy swayed on aching, bowed legs, flush with the fever of fear, his heart threatening to gallop off into a painful stretch run toward the finish line.

But he was still a man, despite his 63 hard years and his bad eyes, and he was the last line of defense between his son and the things that wanted a new recruit.

No, they didn’t want tired, used-up old men-or else the colonel would have taken him the other day at the fence line or out in the barn-but Hardy had no doubt that some fresh meat would soothe them on their long vigil of darkness, make that crack in the mountain known as the Jangling Hole a little less lonesome for a while.

They’d take the rest of his son. And Hardy would live out his days at the foot of the mountain, feeling the weight of helplessness and the guilt of failure pressing on him until it finally collapsed his chest.