Supernatural: The Unholy Cause (7 page)

“Pleased to meet you,” the boy said formally.

Sam shook their hands, smiling faintly at the gravity with which the boy shuffled his load of books around so that he could offer his own small palm.

“You work for the Historical Society?” Sam asked.

“We
are
the Historical Society,” Tommy said wryly. “Old Pop Meechum used to run the place, but since his stroke laid him out, it’s just been me and Nate taking care of things.” He squinted a little. “You got a name, or should I just call you the Phantom Stranger?”

Sam smiled again.

“I’m Sam.”

“Sam it is.” Tommy McClane glanced down at his son. “Nate, why don’t you go put those in the library, see if there’s anything else we need to pick up in there. Meet us back in the museum.”

“Yessir.”

Tommy watched him go, then nodded back in the other direction.

“Come on back, why don’t you.” Picking up the toolbox, he sauntered down the corridor, then stopped again as something occurred to him. “You’re not from around here, I’m guessing.”

“No.”

“So are you in town for this whole re-enactment bugaboo out by the creek?”

“You might say that.”

“Bunch of crazy rednecks running around the woods with toy guns, acting the fool,” he said, watching for Sam’s reaction. “Am I right?”

“Actually,” Sam said, “I think it’s pretty impressive, their commitment to authenticity. They’re like living historians.”

Tommy squinted at him a moment, then grinned.

“You’re all right, you know that.”

“Excuse me?”

“Y’see, you’re talking to one of those fools right now.” Tommy held up a hand, showing Sam a tarnished ring. “Confederate States of America. My great-grandfather wore this ring out on that very battlefield. Not that I support everything the South was fighting for, mind you. There wasn’t anybody happier than me to see an African-American in the White House. About damn time, I say. Nate and I drove up to DC for his Inauguration.

“But I’m still proud as hell of those men that laid down their lives in the line of duty, just the same.” He turned again and continued down the corridor.

Sam nodded and followed him, not entirely sure what to make of this man and his peculiar mix of backwoods erudition and self-effacement. Whatever the case, though, he’d already decided that he liked Tommy McClane. And at the moment he wasn’t exactly in the position to be picky about his allies.

“Well, listen,” Tommy said, opening a closet and putting his toolbox away, “I been running my gums a mile a minute, so tell me—what can I do for you?”

“I was hoping you could tell me about a Confederate soldier named Jubal Beauchamp.”

“Beauchamp?” Tommy glanced up, making no effort to hide his surprise. “What do you want to know about
him
for?”

“Well, I’m sure you heard about what happened yesterday with Dave Wolverton. He was playing the role of Beauchamp. I want to know if you have any information about him. The original soldier, I mean.”

Tommy peered at him for a long time, his expression impossible to read. He cocked his head slightly to one side.

“You’re not a cop, are you?”

“No.”

“Federal Agent?”

Sam took in a breath, meeting Tommy’s deep gray eyes. He knew this was probably his last chance to lie. Going on instinct, he shook his head.

“No.”

“Didn’t think so. So what’s your interest?”

“I...” Sam started, and realized he’d left himself without any options. “Let’s just say that what happened on that battlefield yesterday doesn’t have a reasonable explanation. And those are the kind of events that tend to get my attention.”

Tommy stared at him again for a moment, then burst out laughing.

“You’re a
hunter
,” he said, and slapped Sam on the shoulder. “Now it all makes sense.”

Sam stepped back, stunned.

“I’ve never heard your name before,” he said. “I haven’t heard about anyone working in this area.”

“I was expecting Rufus,” McClane said. “What happened to him?”

“Something came up. My brother and I stepped in.” Sam shook his head, still processing the information that the other man had given him. “So you’ve hunted with Rufus Turner?”

“Not actively. Hunting’s not exactly a life you want to share with a young kid, if you know what I mean.”

Sam nodded.

“I do.”

“Nate’s mom died four years ago. Car accident, couple of teenagers out on a first date, everybody stone-cold sober—just about as accidental as those things can be. Nobody to blame and no survivors. It was hard on both of us, especially the boy. Getting through it, I realized how important it was to be around for him.” McClane shook his head. “Doesn’t mean I can’t keep my eyes and ears open, though, give a shout out to the hunters when things start looking nasty.”

“Is it nasty here?”

McClane gave a dark nod.

“See for yourself.”

Tommy led Sam through a warren of tidy, interconnected rooms, deeper into the building. Walking past rows of glass display cases, Sam caught glimpses of old pistols and muskets, yellowed documents, boots and uniforms, all carefully mounted and labeled beneath the track lighting. Every time he thought he’d reached Tommy, the man had moved on to the next exhibit.

Turning another corner, he finally caught up with him. Tommy had stopped in front of a display showing the first, second, and third National Flags of the wartime South.

“What kind of activity have you noticed around the town?” he asked the historian. “Was there anything unusual before the incident?”

“For starters?” McClane said. “Place is crawling with ghosts.”

“Metaphorically?”

McClane gave him a look.

“Do I look like the kind of guy who would say that metaphorically?”

“I just meant—”

“You see those train tracks running through town? Once upon a time the Confederacy had a train running right through Main Street and out to the battlefield. Had themselves a flatcar with a Gatling gun mounted on it, blasted the first wave of Union soldiers all to hell.” He nodded. “Train’s tucked away in the railway shed, but the tracks are still there. You listen at night, folks say you can still hear the whistle crying out.”

Sam cocked an eyebrow.

“Really.”

“There’s plenty more.” Tommy stopped and pointed around the corner. “Right through here.”

Sam followed him into a room and saw Nate waiting for them there. The library was a bright place with high ceilings and wooden bookcases lining the walls, a stepladder on rails, stretching up to the top. Oak reading tables and individual study carrels gleamed under rows of swan-necked lamps. Off to the left sat another desk full of neatly arranged computer equipment and a monitor. He saw several framed diplomas and certificates hanging on the wall.

“This is impressive,” Sam said. “Does the town pay for all this?”

“Folks around here take their history seriously,” Tommy said. And then, with a slight note of pride, “Me and Nate did a lot of the carpentry ourselves.” He reached out and tousled Nate’s hair. “Do me a favor, son, and pull down those folios up in the far right corner there, see ‘em? May 1863. Letters A to C.”

The boy nodded and scurried up the ladder, gathering a stack of volumes that looked as if they’d been bound in animal-hide and hauling them over to the table. Tommy lifted the cover and flipped through stiff pages so old that they crackled as he turned them.

“Jubal Beauchamp was a son of a bitch,” Tommy began. “Excuse me for saying so, but there’s no other word for it. He came up from Hattiesburg, about twenty miles from here, the only son of a Tennessee preacher who’d moved here on account of some kind of hijinks with his flock. Don’t know the particulars, but I can guess ‘em well enough, I suppose.

“Anyhow, Jubal was being groomed for the pulpit like his daddy, but just after seminary school, something happened to him that changed his way of looking at things.”

“You seem to know a lot about him,” Sam said.

“Let’s just say you aren’t the first hunter to come around asking about him. Dollar for dollar, it doesn’t get much spookier than Beauchamp. Lookit.”

Tommy pointed down at a smaller leather-bound diary that appeared to have been stitched directly into the spine of the larger volume.

“See this?” he asked. “Beauchamp’s private journal. Bought it off a collector in Louisiana back in ‘05.” Tommy opened it, and the smell that came out was even more like dead animal skin with a tincture of something more feral and pungent.

His tone became reverent.

“Want to see something
really
scary?”

Sam bent down to examine the lines of tight, neat handwriting that crawled over the pages. It was full of Scripture—lines that appeared to have been copied directly from the Bible, and what he could make out in between seemed almost mundane. There were notes Beauchamp had made to himself, lists of books and annotations of sermons and lectures.

“Now,” Tommy pointed, “look at this. May 1862. He leaves the seminary and joins up with the Confederate army.”

“The pages are blank,” Sam said.

“Only a couple of them.” Tommy turned further into the diary. “Here’s where it gets good.”

The difference was unmistakable. Beauchamp’s neat, tidy penmanship had become a shaky, almost violent scrawl, as if written while he was on horseback, or under the influence of some profoundly deranging psychotropic cocktail. Mixed in between were drawings, pentagrams and demonic insignias, that covered almost the entire page.

Almighty one, Lord

of the Flies, Immortal

Black Father, keeper of

goats, receive my offering

and bestow upon me the

full mantle of thy wrath.

Thine is the kingdom

and the power to come,

forever and ever.

Sam blinked, and looked up at his host.

“It’s a desecration of the Lord’s Prayer.”

McClane stared at him.

“How do you know that?”

“These words here, they...” Sam began, and then he stopped. Looking down at the page, he realized that the text he’d been reading was written not only in an entirely different language, but in letters that didn’t remotely resemble the Roman alphabet.

Yet to his eyes they had automatically translated themselves.

Sam blinked again, feeling his pulse beating harder in his throat, until he could hear the blood thumping in his ears. Closing his eyes and opening them again, he looked down at the letters on the page and saw only an impenetrable forest of symbols.

“I don’t...” he managed, “I don’t even know how I read that. I don’t even know what language that is.”

“It’s Coptic,” McClane said, his voice sounding hollow with surprise. “It’s an extinct Egyptian language.
Nobody
speaks it—not anymore.”

“Well...” Sam swallowed, getting his bearings, “things have been a little different for me lately.”

“Sounds like it,” Tommy said warily. He regarded Sam silently for a moment, then seemed to come to a decision. “And speaking of different, check this out.” He dug deeper into the diary and pulled out a thick, stiff square of daguerreotype, holding it by the edges as he passed it to Sam. “This is the only known photograph of old Jubal.”

Sam looked at it. The photo showed a gaunt, hatchet-faced soldier in a dirty, ill-fitting uniform. His eyes were lost in the shadow of the slouch cap, though there was no mistaking the dark grin that had twisted its way across his face. Beauchamp looked like a man with a secret locked in his heart—one so black and eager with promise that, once released, there would be no stopping it.

Around his neck, he wore an old rope tied into a noose.

“Do you have a magnifying glass?” Sam asked, and then he glanced back at the computer. “Or better yet, a scanner. I need to see this close up.”

“Sure,” Nate piped up, and then he glanced up at his father. “Can I, Dad?”

“You know how to use it,” Tommy said, and the boy ran off with the old photograph, headed over to one of the computers that Sam had seen on his way into the library.

Once Nate was out of earshot, McClane bent closer to Sam.

“Listen,” he said. “There’re some more entries in that journal, stuff I haven’t been able to translate. Considering what you just did with that Coptic writing, maybe you want to take a look at it? See if you can make heads or tails of it.”

Sam flipped the next page of Beauchamp’s diary. By now the handwriting was so different that it had to have come from a different person entirely. The letters were twisted and sharp, freely intermingled with symbols and characters along the page, and yet—

Sam stared, he saw the lines transforming themselves, swimming a little across the stained pages, the letters themselves becoming somehow familiar.

“Someone else wrote this part,” he explained. “It says that Jubal Beauchamp was killed and brought back to life... through the powers of the noose...” He paused, wanting to get it right. “The man who did it was a Civil War doctor named Percy. When the doctor finished experimenting on him, he buried Beauchamp’s remains in an iron coffin, his spirit held fast by a spell from which it could not escape.”

When he looked up, Tommy was staring at him.

“You’re not just an ordinary hunter, are you?” the man asked.

“I—” Sam considered a variety of answers, then just shook his head. “No.”

“Didn’t think so.”

There was a long silence between them, not quite awkward, but not comfortable either. Finally Sam spoke.

“I appreciate all your help with this.”

Tommy didn’t reply right away. Instead he scraped back his chair, turned and nodded around behind him at the doorway where they’d come in. Above it, Sam saw a small dark object not much bigger than a man’s hand attached directly to the wall above the entryway. He got up and looked more closely.

It was a bundle of what looked like hair or fur, wrapped carefully around an arrangement of roots and chicken bones.