Sister Mary let loose with a wet snort.
"All right, don't get your neck hairs in a tangle," Odus said. He went back to the horse, unhitched her, and mounted. His rump was a little sore from the jostling ride, but it wasn't sore enough to complain. He pulled the Old Crow from the knapsack and gargled on a two-finger slug. He was slipping the bottle back into the pack when a twig snapped in the thicket behind him.
"Who's mere?" Odus said, and despite all his high-spirited notions about not needing a weapon, he wouldn't have minded a rifle right about then. Not that there were any wild animals left in the mountains big enough to threaten a man or a horse. The occasional bobcat was about as predatory as it got these days.
Whatever was thrashing around in the brush didn't answer. Not that Odus expected a reply. He eased Sister Mary down the path a little, wanting to put some distance between them and the cliff edge. Sister Mary seemed to notice her passenger's unease, because her ears pricked up. Odus gave her a pat on the side of the neck to calm her.
He was twenty feet down the path when the goat emerged from the stand of laurels. Odus almost laughed in relief. Except the goat's head was tilted sideways, the way a man might look at a car he was thinking of buying. Or maybe which steak from the butcher's counter he craved for that night's supper. Sister Mary drew up short without Odus having to pull back on the reins.
"Get on," Odus said to the goat. The goat was nearly a quarter the size of the horse, fat and white, a string of dirty fur trailing from its belly to the ground. Its eyes were rheumy, the corners full of yellow pus. It stank of piss and the musk of its rutting scent. The horns spread wide, with just the slightest bend to them. Its lower jaw dropped the worn and stained teeth showing in a corrupt grin. Odus recognized the animal now, from Gordon Smith's flock.
What was it doing loose up here? Gordon had walked the Smith fence lines in early August, just before the second cutting of the hay. The wire was in good shape, and locust posts took decades to rot. Goats had a reputation for breaking boundaries and getting into where they weren't wanted, but it didn't make sense for the goat to climb up into the laurel thicket. Laurel leaves were poisonous, and not much else was green this time of year except balsam and jack pine.
The goat didn't look like it cared for green. The strange, glittering pupils fixed on Odus as if the two were gunfighters squaring off in the Old West.
The goat lowered its head, the scruff of beard pressed against the shaggy chest, showing the serrated grooves of the two brown horns. The animal pawed at the ground with one hoof, like a Spanish bull preparing to charge a red cape. A goat was far more dangerous than most people thought, because its neck was strong and horns hard and sharp. If the horns tore into the horse's abdominal cavity, the goat would likely pull away with intestines entwined like spaghetti around a twirled fork. The laurels on each side were too thick and tangled to allow escape.
Odus peeked over his shoulder to see if a path led down the side of the cliff, and that's when the goat charged. It came in low, at Sister Mary's knees. The horse shrieked and bucked, flailing its front legs in the air. Odus clung to the reins and hunched over the horse's neck, one boot flying out of its stirrup. For a moment he was weightless, and then he crashed back down into the saddle, slamming his testicles against the hard leather. Sister Mary reared again, this time catching the goat in the forehead with one steel-shod hoof. The goat let out a gurgling bleat and drew back, a gash opening just above its eerie eyes, blood flowing down the snout. The goat retreated a few unsteady steps and wobbled a moment as Sister Mary hopped forward, not giving Odus a chance to regain control.
The goat fell to its knees, lapping at its blood with a grayish pink tongue. Sister Mary took a long couple of strides and leaped over the goat, once again lifting Odus out of the saddle, with gravity doing its work and plunging him right back down.
Sister Mary galloped along the path, branches slapping at Odus's hands and face. He glanced back and saw the goat was still lapping at its own leaking fluids. They had gone perhaps a hundred yards when Odus pressed his knees against the mare's flanks and urged her to slow down. At last she came to a stop, panting from the effort. Odus reached into the knapsack and treated himself to a shot of bourbon, his hands shaking. Somehow the encounter with the goat was creepier than the Circuit Rider's uninvited stop at the general store the night before.
One thing was for sure, the Circuit Rider appeared to have a few friends on his side. All Odus had was a pinto horse, a half pint of eighty-proof, and a stubborn streak. He guided Sister Mary higher into the forest, where the tributary springs that fed Rush Branch squeezed from cracks in the gray, worn granite. In the world's oldest mountains, where the headwaters of one of the oldest rivers leaked like the tears of a tired widow, Odus figured this was as good a place as any to serve as a cradle of evil.
And Odus planned on rocking that cradle.
Mark Draper checked into the cabin at four in the afternoon. He'd driven around Solom to get a feel for his daughter's new home. She hadn't exaggerated when she'd called it a "one-horse shit bag of a town," and though he'd chastened her on the use of the expletive, he'd had to grin around the straw of his 7-Up. He hadn't grinned as much as he'd wanted because Jett's story was way too disturbing. As fantasy, it suggested dementia. As truth, it suggested the need for escape.
He couldn't just drive down to Charlotte and hope everything would work out for the best. Mark wasn't an optimist by nature, and that was probably wise, given his penchant for fucking up his life.
He wouldn't fuck this up, wouldn't let Jett down. He paid for the room with a credit card, shocked at the $150 fee for one night. Reading his expression, the Happy Hollow clerk explained that it was the fall tourist season, and with the leaf-lookers who would soon be swarming the highways, he was lucky to find a room at all. Mark thought of driving back to Titusville where a Holiday Inn, Comfort Suites, and other chain hotels feasted on the college. But he felt a need to be near Jett. And Katy, too, as much as he tried not to let his mind wander down that road.
He hadn't packed any clothes, but he always carried a shaving kit in his trunk. He sometimes traveled in his job, and more than once had been caught out of town and having to make a trip to the drugstore for shampoo and toothpaste. The cabin was dark and cramped, the sort of place that was just uncomfortable enough to let flatlanders feel they were "roughing it." However, an eighteen-inch television stood on the kitchenette counter, and the bed's mattress was thick and soft.
Mark pulled out his cell phone and sat on the bed. Should he call Jett and tell her he was hanging around? Probably. Katy or Gordon might answer the phone, but he could bluff them, pretend he was calling on his way down the mountain. He thumbed the button. No bars. The valley must be dead. He hadn't noticed any towers on the ridgetops. Perhaps the telecommunications and cell phone companies had yet to mark this end of nowhere.
The cabin didn't have a phone. He'd have to walk down to the check-in desk and borrow one. He'd also noticed a pay phone down at the general store, the old-fashioned kind that still took coins. The store was only about three hundred yards down the road, a nice hike that would let him get a feel for the little community.
First things first. He pulled the slender glass vial from his shaving kit and shook it. A fine, white powder lay in the bottom. Fine Peruvian flake, at least 30 percent pure. The kind that would blow most street crud away, devoid of the milk sugar and strychnine that polluted most cocaine. Mark had his connections. After all, he'd spent a great deal of energy making them, at the same time he was losing touch with his wife and daughter.