"I have a revelation to deliver," Harmon Smith said, as if he'd looked inside Sarah's head. He drew his ragged wool coat about him with gaunt fingers. "But we'll have to wait for the others."
"Others?" Odus said.
At that moment, Sarah heard a mechanical roar rising from the slopes below and echoing in the cup of the valley. Cars, at least three and maybe more, the rumble of a convoy as the engines whined against the climb. She wondered how many the Circuit Rider would summon tonight.
Harmon Smith sat on the rock in his yoga position, the snake of a smile bending into a deeper smirk. "My children," he said. "All my lovely children."
Jett figured her mom was taking some kind of heavy downer, because she seemed calm as she navigated the narrow, rutted road, looking freaky with her one bruised eye. A couple of times the Subaru had swerved over to the ledge and the valley opened up in a dizzying tableau below. In those moments of vertigo, Jett covered her eyes and imagined what her obituary would look like. She figured her obit would have the same problem as most people's: it would be way too short. Plus it would leave out the cool stuff, like her acid flashbacks and the ghost in the backseat.
Rebecca's ghost had a part in this whole cluster fuck called Solom, and Jett had come to accept that Gordon's goats were evil and the man in the black hat wanted her for some very special and creepy purpose. Solom was the biggest bad-acid trip of all time, and she and Mom couldn't escape until the drug wore off. She was aware that most people used the term supernatural to describe such occurrences, but to Jett they seemed completely natural. In a world gone crazy, why shouldn't the dead and the living occupy the same space? Why shouldn't a ghost guide them up a mountaintop in the dark of a Sunday night, even though Mom had been determined to flee this place for the comparative sanity of Florida's crime, congestion, and pollution?
The road leveled out and grew wider. Mom steered the car over a grassy area, though a path appeared to have been tattooed into the dirt. Tire tracks cut twin grooves in the open stretch of land, flattening the wet weeds. The tracks were recent.
Jett turned to Rebecca, still not quite used to the shock of that pale face, the hollow eyes that looked out as if from the bottom of a deep and drowning cave, the thin lips that were as insubstantial as mist. Jett realized that, if the ghost hadn't helped her, Gordon might have caught both Jett and Mom, and then they might have been trapped at the Smith house forever. This was some drug-addled scriptwriter's twisted version of a Scooby Doo episode, except nobody got doggie treats and the bad guy's mask didn't come off at the end.
"Somebody came here before we did," Jett said to Rebecca. "Do you know why?"
Jett didn't like the way the torn flesh around the woman's neck rippled as she spoke, as if unearthly air passed through her windpipe. "We're all on the same path," the ghost said.
"Yeah, but what does that mean?"
"It means we have to look," Mom said, turning her head for a moment. "We can't just go off and leave a mystery hanging."
"Sure we can, Mom. Remember the scarecrow? Remember the goats? What do I have to do, die or something to get your attention?"
"We can get through this together."
Jett almost choked on the Mom-ism, but decided to go with it this time. After all, she had no choice. Even if she jumped out of the car and survived, she'd still be facing a long hike down the mountain. And then what would she do? Call Dad and beg him to turn around and come back?
No, Dad was out of the picture for the moment. He hadn't believed a word she'd said this morning. A weary sadness had pressed itself over his face, and she knew he blamed himself for her problems, her delusions, her dark imagination. Some family she'd been born into; if either parent had spent half as much energy accepting responsibility as was invested in embracing guilt, they could have made a go of it.
As it was, she took her spiritual guidance where she found it. Even if the spirit in question had to keep adjusting its head atop its shoulders.
"Rebecca, tell Mom this is crazy." Jett recognized the inherent lunacy of her request.
"This is crazy," the ghost said, mouth parting to reveal darkness inside the translucent flesh.
"Yes, but we can't leave until we know what happened," Mom said.
"What happened?" Jett gripped the dashboard as the Subaru leaped a vicious rut. "You act like it's already too late to do anything about it."
"It's not too late," Mom said, applying the brakes. "Looks like the party's just started."
Through the windshield, Jett saw a scene that would have made Stephens both King and Spielberg wish they had thought of it first. The man in the black hat sat on a rock, surrounded by goats, while people came walking out of the woods to gather around the ridgetop clearing. Jett recognized some of them: there was Odus, who helped Gordon with farm chores, sitting astride a horse; Jerry Bennington, her math teacher, stood to one side, wearing his bow tie; the man who lived up the road from the Smith house and occasionally rumbled by in his battered pickup hunched at one edge of the clearing, holding some type of hunting bow-and-arrow. Jett saw the old woman who owned the general store, a shotgun across the crook of one knotty elbow. A Jeep bathed the group in light, and as Mom parked the Subaru, its lights joined in, giving the menagerie a strange, stark radiance.
"That's the guy I was telling you about," Jett said.
"It looks like he found us," Mom said.
"Mom, you're tripping."
"No, I'm pretty straight at the moment."
Jett turned to query Rebecca on this weird gathering, but Rebecca was gone. At least, most of her was. Her disembodied head hovered in the rear passenger area, slowly fading to thin air. The last thing to fade was those dark, hollow eyes, and they seemed to hold a challenge and a glimmer of triumph.
Chapter Thirty-four
Odus gripped the reins to steady Sister Mary as more people came out from the trees, vehicles groaned up the old logging roads of Lost Ridge, and a few stray goats staggered into the combined glare of a half dozen headlights. It was like some kind of bizarre revival service, with the Circuit Rider calling his flock. Odus suddenly didn't feel so special. He was ashamed to think that he would be the one to rid the world of the Circuit Rider. He was unworthy. He was just a drunk who couldn't hold down a steady job, a dirty horse thief, part of a bloodline that had squatted on these lands since Colonial times but had not really improved them.
The Eakins boy, the one who owned a piece of property above the Smith place, stood with his compound bow, unsure of which direction to aim. Loretta Whitley and her son Todd each held pitchforks, looking like frightened members of a mob storming Victor Frankenstein's castle. Amos Clayton sported a shotgun of a larger bore than Sarah's, though he seemed uncertain about using it. Odus wondered if they each had suffered the same delusion, of being called to kill the Circuit Rider and finally lay the preacher to rest, bringing peace to the valley. Or perhaps they had come because they each wanted to offer themselves on the altar of life.
Several more vehicles rolled into the clearing, and the smell of exhaust briefly muted the stench of the goats and the bright, metallic odor of human fear. Odus recognized Ray Tester's Ford pickup, and a sport utility vehicle pulled up beside it. A sheriff's department patrol car, a Crown Victoria, had been beaten up by the rough road, but the rear-wheel drive had dragged the car to the peak. The door on the patrol car opened and a deputy stepped out, half his face blotted by a red birthmark, one hand on his sidearm. Odus figured the deputy would try to take control and restore order, but he seemed as much under the Circuit Rider's sway as the rest of them.