The Farm

Jett had been reluctant to get back in the car after Rebecca had shared her story. But Katy's determination had convinced Jett they had a duty to obey. It was a little like a stray kitten that comes yowling in hunger around your doorstep. Never mind that this par ticular feline could remove its head and was built of see-through supernatural stuffing.

'Just hang on, honey,' Katy said. She glanced in the rearview. Rebecca was gone but her words came as if she were leaning over the seat: up the mountain.

Up, an ascension, as if the journey had a spiritual as well as physical element. But didn't all journeys? If you thought of life as a road that must be traveled, then you had all kinds of exit ramps, signal lights, pit stops, and, eventually, a vehicle breakdown. Each fork was an opportunity, as the poet Robert Frost had pointed out, but no one had ever figured out if each road taken was a choice or an obligation. If you took the road less traveled was it because you wanted to, or because you were compelled?

Katy decided this road was definitely the one less traveled be cause the Subaru bottomed out in the ruts, the arcs of the headlights bouncing ahead like light sabers cutting a path through the wilderness. The car was all- wheel drive, which gave it enough trac tion to navigate the roughest parts of the old road but it groaned in protest as it leaped and jittered like a two-ton electrified frog.

'Mom, what are we supposed to do when we get there?'

'I don't think we're supposed to know,' Katy said.

'You just have to get there,' Rebecca said suddenly whole again, or the closest she could come to that state.

Jett jerked away, sitting forward in her seat, fighting the tension of the seat belt. 'Hey! Don't do that. You're freaking me out enough already without popping out of thin air.'

'I'm a ghost,' Rebecca said. 'What else do you expect me to do?'

'I see years of therapy ahead' Jett said.

'Just imagine the stories you'll have to tell your grandkids,' Katy said wrestling the steering wheel as the car lurched over a

f

en sapling. 'If I live that long. Let's not take that for granted yet. We're on a place called 'Lost Ridge' with a headless woman in the backseat.' 'They're waiting,' Rebecca said. 'They?' Katy asked. 'The ones who are supposed to be there.' 'What's with the riddles?' Jett said. 'If you know what's going to happen, why don't you tell us?'

David sat in the pickup truck's passenger seat, wiping his face with Ray's orange hunting vest. The interior light was on, and in its weak light David's cheeks were pale and bloodless. Ray's pipe wrench lay in the seat between them.

'You seen him, didn't you?' Ray said. They were brothers. They had fished together, fought together, lost their virginity to Mary Lou Slater together, were baptized together. They hadn't kept any secrets, not until the day the congregation went for style over substance eight years ago.

'Yeah,' David said. 'I looked in his grave.'

'But he wasn't there.'

'No, but he came up while I was digging.'

'Dumb-ass. I could have told you that. When they looked in Jesus' tomb, it was empty, too.'

'I wasn't good enough, Ray-Ray.' David had fallen back to using a childhood nickname, proof that he'd been shaken like a rat in a terrier's jaws. 'I had the chance to defeat him, or at least give myself and save others, but I wasn't worthy.'

Ray bit back bis grin of pleasure. Maybe God hadn't blown this thing yet Maybe the Big Guy had set up the domino chits so the real favorite son could knock them down.

He patted David on the shoulder and gave him the kind of manly squeeze that said, Yeah, that's some rotten possum you got served, but eat it for your own good.

'I've got this feeling,' Ray said. 'A feeling (hat maybe God has other business for you. That's how you got to look at it. Maybe you're the fish he threw back in so you could grow up big and strong and feed the multitudes.'

David nodded, shivering a little. Mist rose off his damp clothes as the night chill settled around them.

'Maybe it's my turn,' Ray continued. 'God passed me over the first time because he had this job for me. That explains the scare crow and the headless goats. Those were signs, and I was too red- eyed blind to see them. I'm the one, Davey Boy. I'm the one'

David was drawn up and beaten, the way he'd been after wetting the bed at age five. David had to sleep on the bottom bunk, not be cause Ray was older and therefore deserved a higher station, but because there was the real risk that urine would dribble off his plastic sheet to the bed below if he'd been on top. David was in an agreeable mood, Ray noted, because he'd seen the light of truth. David wasn't worthy, and that meant Ray was in the driver's seat again. He could hardly wait until next Sunday's service, when David announced his resignation and Ray stepped up to win their vote as the new elder.

Elder. As if that name for the church leader weren't self-evi dent. It probably wouldn't hurt the congregation to eat a little crow for going with style over substance, as if practically every lesson in the Bible didn't warn against arrogance, pride, and hypocrisy.

Looking through the windshield, Ray saw a faint glow at the top of the ridge, less than a half mile from the church. He'd hunted that ridge for wild turkey, one of the most elusive creatures ever set loose on God's green earth. The glow was more than just a col lected pool of moonlight against the granite boulders. It was a spotlight shone down from heaven, marking a center stage where Ray would meet his destiny. With David serving as witness.

'The path has been marked,' Ray said. 'Narrow is the gate and hard is the road, but the logging road to Lost Ridge is as wide open as Mary Lou Slater's legs.' He punched his brother on the shoulder. 'And you get to ride shotgun, just like you did that day we busted our cherries. Whaddaya think about that, Davey Boy?'

David may have answered, but Ray couldn't have heard him over the roar of the engine's kicking to life.

Sarah leveled the shotgun at the Circuit Rider, who sat on the flat boulder with his legs crossed like one of those fat Asian bud- dhas. Four dozen goats knelt before the dead preacher, still and waiting under the glare of the Jeep headlights. That might have been the creepiest part of the whole scene: the Circuit Rider's eyes burned yellow in the light, his waxen face and gaunt cheeks visible under the wide brim of his black hat, and his smile was like a bro ken snake under his long, thin nose, but goats were never still. They usually twitched and nattered and stomped and kicked, and most of all, they were usually chewing on something. But these an imals folded up before Harmon Smith as if they were dosed with tranquilizers and headed for a long drowse. Even the kids among them were motionless and relaxed scarcely wiggling an ear.

Old Saint was tied to a tree at the edge of the clearing, and it was the first time Sarah had ever seen the fabled creature. He was an admirable hunk of horseflesh, if 'flesh' was the right word. He might have been a couple of centuries up from the grave, but he looked as solid as the oak that served as his hitching post. The horse nibbled at a patch of moss on the tree, as if he'd already heard the sermon that Harmon Smith appeared about to deliver.

Sue sat behind the wheel of the Jeep, frozen by the sight that had greeted them upon pushing into the clearing. Odus, who had regained Sister Mary's good graces, sat astride the paint pony to the left of the Jeep. The young man who held some sort of bow- and-arrow stood on the opposite side of the clearing, as if he'd found another route to the top of the ridge. Sarah recognized him from a couple of his shopping trips to the store, where he bought only cheap staples like rice and dried beans. She figured it was no coincidence that the man had shown up here at the same time as her little trio, and had no doubt that the reason for their mutual summoning was buried in the skull space beneath mat ragged- rimmed black hat.

If the Circuit Rider even had a brain, that was. Sarah suspected if that skull was laid open with a shotgun blast, it would ooze a stinky, sticky tar. The juice of madness and evil, the sort of stuff that might pump through Satan's icy-hot veins. She was tempted to give Harmon Smith a load of bird shot, just to test the waters, so to speak, but she had a sense that the stage wasn't completely set yet. Harmon had a few other pieces to move into the picture, and he seemed in no particular hurry, as if a full-moon Sunday night were just the right time for a nice, peaceful gathering of good company.

'Shoot him, Sarah,' Sue said from the Jeep's cab. Young folks were so impatient.