"Up ahead is where Gordon's wife wrecked" Jett said pointing to a steep cut of bank that led down to the river. Hard trees danced just beyond the headlight beams. "The kids at school said the car flew off the road and flipped. She wasn't wearing her seat belt and-"
"Her head was cut off."
"I saw her, Mom. You weren't lying."
"I never lie to you."
"Bullshit. You lied about lots of things."
"Only to myself." Katy found her foot going from the accelerator to the brake.
"Mom? What are you doing?"
"She needs to stop," came the voice from the backseat. Even with Westerberg singing over a tortured blues guitar lick, the voice carried and filled the interior of the car, as if it was coming from the speakers.
Katy swerved the steering wheel, bouncing to the narrow shoulder as the tires grabbed for traction. Jett jerked forward straining against the seat belt. "What the fuck?" she said her voice reverting to a prepubescent screech.
Rebecca, or what there was of her, leaned over the front seat. The milk-white threads of her ghostly flesh caught the sick glow of the dash lights. Her head was on, her face nearly blank, though her black lips held the hint of a smile in the mirror. Even ethereal and dead with a gruesome wound around her neck and the shadows of her bruises on her face, Katy noted that she was beautiful. The first wife whom Katy could never replace.
Jett wriggled from her seat belt and flung the passenger door open. "Get the hell out, Mom!"
Katy's fingers hesitated on the seat belt latch. Westerberg was singing about the dice behind somebody's shades. The soft, eternal whisper of the river blended with the music, and the night air carried the smell of mud that had spent eons working its way down from the high granite peaks. Rebecca had died here, and hadn't been allowed to haunt this place. She had been banned from moving to some greater reward or perhaps a greater punishment than any cruelty this world could administer.
Weren't ghosts supposed to haunt their place of dying? But Rebecca had been bound to the Smith house, perhaps the place of greatest happiness or sorrow in her life. Not here, by a cold and remorseless river.
Katy could hop in a car and run away, but Rebecca was destined to stay with Gordon.
Their gazes locked in the mirror, and Rebecca gave a slight nod as if she understood Katy's thoughts.
"They found me here," Rebecca said.
Jett pounded on the hood with her fist. "Mom, get the fuck out"
Katy released her seat belt, but didn't get out. Instead, she killed the engine, taking the headlights with it. In the vacuum of silence, the night sounds filled the car, surrounded her: a breeze rustling the dried weeds along the river, bullfrogs croaking in a symphony, a short spill of water churning against the rocks, the engine ticking as it cooled.
"But you didn't die here," Katy said, the deeper, less calm part of her mind screaming: you 're talking to a ghost!
"No."
Jett ran to Katy's side of the car, pulled open the door, and pulled Katy's arm. "Get out, Mom. Get away."
"It's okay. She's not going to hurt us." Something made Katy add, "She can't hurt us. She's dead."
Jett kicked the side of the car in frustration. "I don't think she's nearly dead enough."
"Look at her. She's trying to tell us something."
Rebecca's smile widened in the mirror, and though it was still a creepy, elusive, unnatural thing, Katy turned to face her. She expected a corpse smell, a graveyard wind of what passed for breath among the dead, but there was none. Ragged flesh circled Rebecca's neck. However she had lost her head, it had not been by a clean stroke. Something, perhaps a piece of dull, jagged metal, had worked and rasped and gnawed at the meat. Rebecca was wearing the dress from the closet, the one with the autumnal print, though the dress was as translucent as the woman wearing it. The bustline would have been flattering if not for the wound.
"I died at the Smith house," Rebecca said, her dark eyes far away, as if staring into the cold waters of the river Styx.
"But what about the car wreck?" Katy said.
"Gordon brought me here."
"Did the Circuit Rider kill you?"
"No. I'm a sacrifice."
"A what?"
"Sacrifice."
"Who killed you?"
"I'm a sacrifice."
"That's just great," Jett said, still standing by the open door. "Out of all the dead people in the world we get the only one with a defective voice chip."
"Shh," Katy said. Distant headlights flickered in the valley behind them, then disappeared as the vehicle rounded a curve. A dog barked from a distant hillside, the sound lost and lonely under the full moon.
"Who killed you?" Katy repeated. She felt a strange affinity for the woman, now that she had accepted that dead people were just like the living, only less afraid. She and Rebecca had shared the same kitchen and the same husband. Now they were sitting in a car together, talking about Rebecca's death as if they were discussing cosmetics.
"I'm a sacrifice," Rebecca said. "For his goats."
"Goats? Gordon killed you?"
The morose eyes blinked momentarily shielding Katy from their dark sorrow and pain.
"I knew that fucker had a screw loose," Jett said.
"Try the phone," Katy said, handing her the cell unit.
"Who do you want me to call? Ghostbusters? The FBI? Scully and Mulder?"
"Nine-one-one for a start."
"And what am I supposed to tell them, assuming we've found the one little patch in the valley where there's a signal?"
'Tell them we have to report a murder."
"And you're going to take her word for it?"
"Shh. Go on, so I can talk to Rebecca."
"Great. You're as nutty as the rest of them."
"I love you, too, dear." Katy turned her attention back to the dead woman in the backseat. "Well, what do we do now? Are you coming with us, or are you like the 'vanishing hitchhiker' in that urban legend and are going to disappear the moment we get where we're going?"
Rebecca's answer, rising from the pipes of an ethereal hollow inside, was neither of the two options Katy had offered.
Odus thrashed through the laurels, calling for Sister Mary. He was mostly sober now, the braving effects of the Old Crow dissipated and leaving in its place a painful veil of fog. Some shining knight he'd made, some hero. His image of a tin-star stud riding into a dirty town with six-guns blazing had been reduced to a hung-over cowpoke who'd lost his ride.
The September darkness had not settled over the sky so much as it seeped up from the cool, ancient mountains. The black stuff of night had crawled around the rude and rounded chunks of granite, out from between the roots of old-growth ash and beech and hickory, up from the hidden holes in the world. Now it knitted its single, all-consuming color in a smothering straitjacket, there at every turn, ready to match every breath, flowing into Odus's lungs and claiming its rightful space. Odus had never felt so much like an invader on this planet as he did now. In fact, he'd never given it any thought at all.
He'd hunted these peaks, had sought squirrels and wild turkey and the occasional black bear, but he'd always come here as a conqueror. Now, entangled in its inky depths, his bearings lost, he recognized the futility of laying claim to something as old as the Appalachians. No human owned these mountains. If anything held deed to these stony and storied lands, it was creatures like the Circuit Rider, those not bound by time and space and the sad, small worries of the mortal.
Unseen branches tore Odus's hands, and waxy leaves slapped his face. He rested for a moment, squinting through the canopy to the scattered stars and the comforting cast of moonlight above.