Drummer Boy: A Supernatural Thriller (7 page)

As he fell, he realized the
ratta-tatta-tat
had died, though its echo rolled around the curved bone of his skull like a metal ball on a roulette wheel.

“Dude, what were you doing in there?”

Didn’t sound like a cop. Vernon looked up from the grass, squinting against the red death of day. “Bobby?”

“Been waiting here five minutes. Didn’t you hear me yelling?”

“I was . . . .”

Vernon Ray looked at his hand. It clutched a scrap of ragged gray wool.

“What you boys doing on private property?” Hardy Eggers stepped from the concealment of the underbrush and tried to look like a crotchety bastard, the kind who would grab a nurse’s ass at the old folks’ home and pretend he had Alzheimer’s to get away with it. After the uphill hike, he had the heavy-breathing part down cold.

He didn’t recognize the boys, but they didn’t bolt when he challenged them. The runty one had the vacant-eyed stare of a videogame addict, or maybe he’d been snorting model airplane glue or sucking on wacky weed. The other boy was a little taller and better built, and his face pinched in a sullen expression as if he were used to getting his ass chewed. They were both blond and could pass for brothers.

“Nothing,” the tall one said.

“What’s your names?”

“I’m Bobby and this is Vernon Ray.”

“Don’t he talk?”

Vernon Ray gazed off into the woods as if naked elephants were parading among the trees. Bobby put a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “He just had a scare.”

Shit. They went into the goddamned hole. Stupid kids.

At least they made it back out.

But it looks like maybe the runt, like Donnie, left a little bit of himself in there.

“You boys hear the shots?” Hardy didn’t know how long he could pretend to be menacing. He wished he’d carried his shotgun, because the weapon would have added to the picture of the addled hillbilly, but he figured his white stubble and filthy long john shirt were enough of a prop if he played it right.

Bobby nodded. “The cops ran through the woods. We hid in the cave because we were afraid somebody would shoot us.”

“You look familiar. Who’s your daddy?”

“Elmer. Elmer Eldreth.”

“Eldreth, huh? He work in construction?”

“Plumbing contractor.” The boy’s face tightened. “We need to be getting home. Our moms are going to be worried.”

“I know your daddy,” Hardy said. “If I see you boys snooping around up here again, he’ll be hearing about it.”

Bobby didn’t blink. “Are you with the developers?”

“No. This land’s been in my family since King George. Got it in a land grant.”

“I heard some Florida dipwads bought it. You don’t look like you’re from Florida.”

Goddamned brats these days. Don’t they teach ‘em not to talk back to their elders?

Vernon Ray wasn’t doing any kind of talking, but for the first time he snapped out of his daze, looking at his hand. He was holding something Hardy couldn’t make out.

“Don’t get smart with me,” Hardy said, approaching the pair. “I’m friends with the sheriff.”

“You’re trespassing the same as we are.”

“You got no business messing around up here. You could break your necks and nobody would even hear you scream.”

“Don’t worry,” Bobby said. “We know all the spooky stories. It’s just a bunch of trees and rocks to me. I don’t give a crap if they bulldoze it flat and paint ‘Save Our Planet’ in mile-long letters. Come on, Vernon Ray. Let’s get out of here before this geezer has a stroke.”

As Bobby led Vernon Ray down to the hill toward the trail, Hardy went to the edge of the Hole and peered inside. Even from ten feet away, the odor of old sulfur and sin oozed out like the belch of a long black snake. Maybe the boys had seen something they would tell their friends, and hopefully it wouldn’t make the little turds dare each other to come back. Hardy felt an obligation to keep people away, sort of a self-appointed guardian of the gate. But the gate was about to be busted open by Bill Willard’s big-money investment team and Hardy couldn’t do a thing about it except pray.

Hardy cocked an ear. Sometimes it sounded like breathing, which he could chalk up to the wind slipping between cracks in the stone. Sometimes it sounded like a deep and faint heartbeat, like when the doctor put the stethoscope to Pearl’s swollen belly and let him listen to the life inside. Other times, it was the rumble of a nightmare train rolling up from the depths of Hell. Now it resembled the drone of an International Harvester reaping hay, chugging black air and chewing up whatever the ground had to offer.

Except the noise wasn’t coming from the Hole.

The kids were out of sight, so Hardy figured he’d put a little distance from himself and the oily throat of the cave. He’d been inside the place as a kid, several times, it was practically a rite of passage in these parts, but he’d never stayed for more than a minute and each time he’d emerged with the feeling that he’d donned a second skin, a black film that even a plunge in the creek couldn’t wash clean.

Anyone who stood too long looking into that place, or listening to the mad music of the Earth’s hidden secrets, would end up like Bennie Hartley, who’d been found lying half in the Hole, stone dead from a heart attack, his legs lying in the shadows as if he hadn’t quite reached the sunlight in time.

Hardy circled the rocky knob that housed the cave, expecting to meet up with the sheriff. The rumbling engine grew louder, a thing of the real world and not some confabulation of a superstitious mountaineer. A vehicle was droning up the path on the west side of the mountain, moving through the woods where construction crews had carved the first dark stretch of road into the slope. The vehicle was big and slow, cracking saplings, the engine hiccupping as it powered over stumps and rocks.

Hardy moved between the tangles of rhododendron. The sheriff must have already cleared the scene, meaning Hardy would have to hoof it all the way back home without benefit of a lift. That meant nobody had been shot; otherwise, the place would have been crawling with rescue personnel and sirens would fill the valley below.

Unless the monster climbing Mulatto Mountain is some newfangled kind of emergency vehicle, sucking down taxpayer diesel.

It rolled out of a stand of underbrush 100 feet below Hardy, its black crash grill pocked with broken branches. The customized silver Humvee rode five feet off the ground, sitting on tires that were fatter than a killing-season sow. The SUV was girded with roll bars, looking more like a cage designed to hold a rabid rhinoceros than a mode of conveyance. The windshield was tinted, but there was only one man in Titusville who would dare operate such a shitty and showy hunk of rubber and steel.

The Humvee roared into a stretch of grassland, a bald where the high winds kept trees from taking root. In the vehicle’s wake, the vegetation had been flattened and Hardy could see almost to the end of the newly graveled access road. Looked like Phase II of the Mulatto Mountain rehabilitation project was well underway.

Hardy raised a hand to the tinted driver’s-side window. It descended and Bill Willard’s round face broke into a grin. If his skin were shaded just a little more toward orange, he’d have made a dandy Halloween jack-o-lantern. As it was, he flashed jagged teeth that even the best in modern dental care couldn’t shape up and set square. Though the teeth were white, the eyes above them were every bit as black as the inside of a pumpkin, or the Jangling Hole for that matter.

“You Eggerses are all the same,” Bill said. “Can’t let it go. You’re all pissed because your property got chopped up and sold off over the years. But if your ancestors hadn’t liked screwing so much, there wouldn’t have been so many heirs.”

Hardy didn’t have an answer to that, because it was true. An Eggers male would stick his pecker into just about anything, as attested by his own Jewish-Cherokee bloodline. Some claimed it was a good thing that goats and sheep couldn’t take human seed, or there might be some little four-legged Eggerses running around. But Hardy had nothing to say on that subject, either.

“I heard about the ruckus,” Hardy said. “A man’s got an obligation to keep an eye on his neighbor’s property.”

Bill gunned the engine once, as if in defiance of high gas prices compliments of gutless politicians and endless war, and killed the ignition. “That’s more of Littlefield’s talk,” Bill said. “He’s as jumpy as a frog on a hotplate.”

Hardy nodded at Bill’s contrived colloquialism, the kind of backwoods buffoonery he considered folksy wisdom. Thought it made him one of the gang, but instead it only showed the man was trying way too hard. He’d buy Arveleta Perkins’s chow chow at the farmer’s market and pretend like he actually ate the mess, whereas only tourists and college hippies were dumb enough to buy the green mash of pickled onions, tomatillas, radishes, and cucumbers.

“The sheriff’s a good man,” Hardy said, keeping the defensiveness out of his voice. No use disputing Bill, because the baldheaded money-grabber never lost an argument. Like any man, he was wrong about half the time, but he mistook surrender for weakness, whereas any fool knew that sometimes it was better to run like hell and live to fight another day. Then again, Bill owned about five percent of Pickett County and it didn’t look like the bank was foreclosing anytime soon.

“Sheriff out to be enforcing these ‘No trespassing’ signs,” Bill said, the grin staying in place to add, “I’m just joking, but I don’t have to be.”

“Nobody wants any trouble up here.”

“Yeah, I know. We did that dance. The North Carolina Historical Society didn’t find one trace of Kirk’s Raiders, and all the do-gooders at Westridge University didn’t find a damned thing, either. Just some stories that make the rounds every Halloween when folks want to scare their kids into good behavior.”

“Them names had some basis in history.”

“There’s no record that Earley Eggers joined the raiders, but I know you’re little touchy about it.”

“You would be, too, if your family’s reputation was shot to hell.”

“That was a century and a half ago.”

“People bury the past, but some things stick around long after they ought to be forgot.”

Bill opened the Humvee door and rolled out of it. Economic prosperity had spread to his waistline. Standing, the top of his balding head barely reached the door handle, but his belly was as inflated as his tires. He smacked his lips as if chewing sunflower seeds. “I know you were the only heir that fought against selling the family property, but I also noticed you didn’t offer to give up your share after we cut the check.”

Hardy swallowed hard. “Turns out people keep buying up property around here and building big homes, driving up their neighbors’ taxes until they either have to sell out or go bust. I needed the money or I’d have lost my land.”

Bill’s grin widened, throwing wrinkles across his forehead and scrunching his bulbous nose. “Growth happens whether you’re ready or not.”

“Yeah, well, shit happens, too, but you don’t see me diving in headfirst and telling everybody the water’s fine.”

“Titusville’s not a secret anymore. It kept popping up on those national lists the magazines keep, the ‘Top 20 best places to retire,’ ‘50 best outdoor adventure towns,’ and all that. After Westridge upset Duke in basketball, you could make it a reasonable question on a geography test.”

“If I didn’t know better, I’d say your pictures might have made a difference.”

Pride made the grin shift into a smirk, the eyes growing even darker. Budget Bill swept his arm out to indicate the view of the mountains that rippled soft and blue-gray in the distance, evidence that the Earth was a work in progress, a shifting landscape that only appeared fixed and firm from a man’s temporary perspective. “I’ve got the eye, my friend. But I had great material.”

“I’m not your friend.”

“Neighbor, then.”

“Got your camera with you? Thought you might want to get a few shots of the knob before your bulldozers do their trick and knock it down forever.”

“It’s already well documented, neighbor.”

“Or maybe you want a picture of my rosy red asshole.” Hardy twisted his head and spat into the leaves, wishing he hadn’t given up chewing tobacco so he could squirt a strand on the man’s fancy and squeaky-clean Timberland hiking boots. “I don’t got no legal cause to stop you. Them ‘Save the Knob’ hippies couldn’t get anywhere with their long-haired Yankee lawyer, so what good could I do?”

“You sound just like them, making it ‘Good versus evil.’ But I’m providing a product and contributing to the community. Funny, in all the kiddie movies these days, developers are the bad guys. Why is that, Hardy?”

Hardy nodded toward the ridge that covered the cool, black tunnel of subterranean secrets. “I don’t know what ‘evil’ is, but I know when something ain’t right.”

Bill took a couple of brisk steps forward and slapped Hardy on the shoulder. Hardy looked down on the beaming cherub in the catalog-ordered flannel shirt.

“Take it easy,” Bill said. “I wouldn’t subject a stranger to the sinister mysteries of The Jangling Hole. It wouldn’t be neighborly. That’s why I’m putting my house right there on top. Once I clear the trees so I can get the view.”

“You mean, so everybody can see how big your house is.”

Bill gave a laugh that sounded too big to have come from his belly. “If there are any Civil War ghosts, restless Cherokee spirits, hillbilly horrors, or tap-dancing babies of Satan, then they’re welcome in my living room anytime. I might even rig up an infrared camera and see if I can get any of it on film. Those would fetch a pretty penny, don’t you think?”

“Enough for you to buy another mountain.”

“Hey, don’t take it too hard. We won’t have the road cut all the way to the top until next week. Plenty of time for all the wild turkey, rabbits, and deer to scamper off into the valley. Or maybe down to your pasture. You still hunt, don’t you?”

Hardy didn’t want to acknowledge that he’d given up hunting Mulatto Mountain one misty November morning after he’d gotten the feeling that something was hunting
him
. “Mountain’s been here since the Book of Genesis.”