The Farm

to her head.

The Circuit Rider stroked Old Saint's mane, and the revenant horse chuckled softly in response. 'I guess your friend there just exercised her free will, huh?'

Odus took two steps backward, toward the rocky ledge that led to one of the logging roads. It was a thirty-foot drop. He could try to climb down, but he pictured his fingers gripping the granite ledge and Old Saint bringing a heavy, scarred hoof down on them. He could follow Sister Mary and blaze a trail through the tangles, or he could stand his ground and see what God had in store for him.

None of the options settled the squirming in his chest and gut. The courage that had surged through him since this morning now seemed foolish and silly. He had no special gifts or weapons to bring to bear against a supernatural creature. He'd fallen back onto a sort of crippled faith, believing God would provide in Odus's hour of need. But Odus didn't consider that he'd never been a deeply religious man, and that faith couldn't be turned off and on like tap water.

'You fear me, but only because you don't understand me,' the Circuit Rider said, over the increasing roar of the engine. 'If the shepherd has one hundred sheep, and one of them goes astray, does he not leave the other ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray?'

The Circuit Rider wheeled his mount and trotted back through the laurel thicket. The branches shook from his passage as if horse and rider were as solid and real as any living creature. But the smell of decay lingered, a smell that hinted of grave dirt and spent fires and blood dried black.

Chapter Thirty-one

Jett opened the door to her room to find Gordon standing there.

'Where do you think you're going, Jessica?' he said, hands on his hips, blocking the hallway.

'Um, out for a drive with Mom.'

Gordon grinned, and it looked like the expression of a cartoon possum, eyes narrow behind his thick lenses. 'Mrs. Smith isn't driving anywhere. She told me so.'

'Where is she?'

'In the attic.'

Jett leaned to the side and looked past Gordon. The linen closet door was shut tight. The closet was too small for the attic ladder to unfold without the door open. Either Gordon was lying or else he'd shut the access door with Mom up there. But why would Mom go up there, especially after the ghost had scared her silly?

Jett decided Gordon was lying, and figured that deserved a lie in return. 'I was smoking pot that time in the barn,' she said. 'When I saw—I mean, thought I saw—the scarecrow the first time. I guess I just freaked out.'

Gordon's eyes narrowed. 'You know the rules. No drugs in this house.'

'Well, technically the drags weren't in the house.'

'I'll have no sass from you, young lady. You're a member of this family now and I'm your stepfather.'

Jett's cheeks flared red in defiance. 'You'll never be my dad, no matter how hard you try.'

Gordon reached out as if to grab her arm, but she ducked past, slinging the backpack around. She tried to crawl between his legs but he brought his knees together, clamping her like an oversize vise grip. Her sides ached from the pressure, but she wiggled while he reached down to her. Gordon was shouting, his voice scarcely recognizable. Some of his words sounded like Latin, intoned like the traditional liturgy of a Catholic priest. Like something out of The Exorcist or some Goth band's hokey attempt at demonic incan tations.

Gordon had one of her boots, but they were recently polished and he lost his grip. She kicked free and crawled on her hands and knees down the hall, her mind blank except for the unbidden thought, How could Mom have been dumb enough to fall for this idiot?

Then she regained her footing and sprang forward launching herself down the stairs three steps at a time, clutching Captain Boo. She toyed with the idea of sliding down the railing, but there was a large wooden sculpture on the bottom newel post, and Jett pictured herself breaking a leg, lying there flopping and moaning on the landing while Gordon loomed over her.

What would he do to her? Even if he knew they were running out on him, which wasn't likely, considering what a wet mop Mom had been lately, surely he wouldn't do anything worse than scream and yell. Yet he had tried to physically restrain her upstairs, and she'd heard some guys went into possessive rages when a woman ditched them. His heavy shoes punished the stairs behind her.

When she reached the first floor, she dared a backward glance and suffered an acid flashback.

At least, she hoped that's what it was, because a woman was floating— -floating!—behind Gordon.

She was thin as threads, almost invisible, and she was pulled forward as if riding in Gordon's back draft. Her lack of flesh was almost as startling as the fact that she had no head.

Jett hadn't seen anything that bizarre on her actual acid trip, and couldn't imagine how a flashback could be so intense and disturb ing. But accepting it as a drug-induced hallucination made it some how easier to assimilate.

Of course there's a ghost in this house. Why wouldn't there be, when creepy scarecrows live in the attic and the barn, when god damned goats scarf your dope and try to eat your ass, when a man in a black hat peeps in your windows?

Jett was nearly out of breath when she reached the door, but she had twenty feet on Gordon (and thirty feet on the headless ghost). She threw open the door and was racing across the porch when she saw them.

Goats, dozens of them, a veritable army of horned stink facto ries, staring at her with their weird, glittering eyes. They blocked Jett's path to the driveway and surrounded the car. Mom sat in the driver's seat, clawing her cheeks in anxiety. One of the goats low ered its head and gave the driver's side door a solid thwack with its horns and forehead.

'Going somewhere?' Gordon said behind her, and she could hear the smile in his voice.

Alex had a passing knowledge of tracking and hunting, and though he was mostly a vegetarian, he figured being able to round up meat for the dinner table might be a handy survival skill when the Republicans and Democrats finally toppled the Statue of Liberty. So he'd learned the basics and had even killed some small game with his bow and arrows. Of course, he was a crack marksman. That was required of any member of the antigovernment militia, even if you were only an army of one.

So Alex had no trouble following the goats' hoofprints through the woods. Even his sister, a Boston lawyer, could have followed this trail—the fuzzy beasts had practically trampled a superhigh way through the underbrush. The carpet of leaves on the forest floor was scuffled, branches hung broken and nibbled, and of course there was the occasional pile of plum-sized goat turds. In his haste, Alex hadn't paid close attention to the ammunition he'd loaded into his shoulder bag, but he figured he had at least six rounds for each of the goats. Plenty enough lead to teach the Satan-faced little fucks not to mess with his property.

The trail followed the ridge. Wherever they were going, they were making a beeline for high ground. Alex understood the chem ical processes by which marijuana played with the synapses. Marijuana required heat before the cannaboids were activated, so you had to smoke it or cook it in brownies or oil for the pot to do its stuff. But maybe goat neurology was different. Maybe goats could get stoned just from the raw green leaves. That seemed to be the only reason they would break into his shed and gobble up good bud that would net twenty grand on the street.

Unless they were smart enough to know what the pot meant to him.

Maybe they were part of some secret government experiment, too. He'd read about how the spooks trained dolphins to carry ex plosives toward enemy ships and trained chimpanzees to infiltrate bunkers. No doubt the same government that publicly frowned on genetic research was going gangbusters in their underground labs, splicing all kinds of stuff together, putting microchips in the heads of animals, developing entire battalions of remote- controlled killers.