The Farm

'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 be hind 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 dissi pated 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 sin gle, 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 in vader 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 rec ognized 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.

'God, if you're up there, now would be a great time to lend a lit tle hand here,' Odus said the prayer sounding stupid even as it left his lips. Why should God listen to a man who hadn't stepped foot in a church in two decades, who hadn't cracked a Bible since Sunday school in Free Will Baptist Church, who hadn't felt a single spiritual twitch since the day Preacher Blackburn had dipped his head into the chilling waters of Rush Branch and pronounced him washed free of sin?

However, his prayer may have been answered, or at least coin cided with an earthly event, which amounted to the same thing when you dropped the fancy cloth and got down to brass tacks.

Needles of light broke through the branches ahead. This light was filtered by the leaves but was a solid force, pushing at the suf focating darkness and promising hope. Odus worked toward it, his footing more sure now as he could make out the black lines of trees and didn't have to feel his way through the vegetative maze. He heard voices as the light grew stronger and recognized one of them: Sarah from the general store. What business did a seventy-year-old woman have on top of Lost Ridge at this time of night? Of course, Odus could ask himself the same question, and maybe the same answer would serve for both of them.

'Hello,' he shouted through the trees.

'Who's there?' Sarah said, her voice snapping like a soggy twig.

'Odus.'

'Well, come on out of there and count your blessings that I did n't let loose with some buckshot first. It ain't wise to go sneaking up on a lady in the dark.'

'I wasn't sneaking, I was walking,' he said.

'Is this your horse, then?' came another voice, and Odus placed it as belonging to Sue Norwood, the young woman who'd been at the meeting at the general store last night.

Guided by their voices and the intensifying glare of car head lights, Odus threaded through the edge of the laurel thicket and stood in a little clearing at the end of a logging road. He stepped into the comforting cone of light and shielded his eyes. Sister Mary stood by the Jeep, snorting, head twitching up and down, and Odus couldn't shake the feeling that Sister Mary was laughing at him.

'Well, she's not rightly mine,' Odus said. 'I kind of appropri ated her for a holy mission.'

'See?' Sarah said to Sue, who was holding Sister Mary's reins. 'I'm not the only one who's been touched in the head. The whole blamed place goes crazy whenever Harmon Smith rides into town.'

'It seemed like the thing to do at the time,' Odus said. 'I mean, when you hear a calling, do you stop and ask questions, or do you just follow that voice?'

'You follow it,' Sue said, and Odus could see the pickax in her hand, brandished like a Crusader's sword.

'That little pig-sticker won't do a thing against the Circuit Rider,' Odus said, then noted the shotgun cradled across Sarah's arm. 'I reckon a twenty-gauge won't, either.'

'Oh yeah?' Sarah asked. 'And what exactly do you have in your bag of tricks there that's supposed to kill a dead preacher? A Mason jar of holy water? A slingshot and a silver dime? An empty liquor bottle?'

Odus's face flushed. He'd tossed the Old Crow bottle into the hollow of a rotted-out stump, but first he'd briefly considered its potential as a spiritual battle-ax. Now the idea seemed as silly as Sue's and Sarah's weapons of choice.

'Okay, own up to it, we're poking in the dark with a limp stick,' he said. 'What now?'

'Wait, I reckon,' Sarah said. 'Harmon crashed our party last night, but I think tonight he's playing host.'

'The air feels strange,' Sue said. 'Like it's carrying a mild elec trical charge.'

Odus had been so wired with tension his senses had been honed and focused down to the tight ache in his gut. Having found com pany, and his horse, he was able to relax enough to draw in the moist night air. The inhalation carried the fragrance of balsam and wet leaves, rich loam and moss, the safe, healing aromas of the high forest. But beneath mat, like a corpse's smell oozing from be neath the undertaker's applied mask of perfume, was a corruption of sulfur and ozone, of decay and a pervasive stink of something that didn't belong in this world. The smell almost had a physical pres ence, as if it was lightly stroking his skin, coaxing him into vile acts and thoughts.

'I expect the others will be joining us,' Sarah said.

'He's leading us here?' Sue said.

'Jesus had his Sermon on the Mount,' Odus said. 'Maybe Harmon's ready for his turn.'

'You don't think... he's the devil, do you?' Sue said this with the tone of one who'd