The Farm

'You don't just up and shoot a man without giving him a chance to explain himself,' Sarah said, keeping the fright out of her voice. 'Otherwise the gender would have been wiped out years ago. Besides, sometimes it's fun to hear a man open his mouth just to hear what kind of lie comes out.'

'I bring only the truth,'' Harmon shouted, though he was too far away to have heard Sarah, just at the edge of effective shotgun range. But he looked to be in range of the man with the cocked arrow, who raised his own weapon. Sarah saw the man had other weapons slung over his shoulder, and wore a sidearm in a belt hol ster. He was equipped like a secret agent in a movie that couldn't keep its time period right.

'Do these shit-bag animals belong to you?' the man asked, voice quivering with either fear or anger.

Harmon swept out a casual hand to indicate the ridge and the valley below. 'All this belongs to me,' the preacher answered. 'And other places as well. My road is long and my service is never done.'

'Drop the double talk, Weird Dude,' the man said. 'If these are yours, you've got reparations to pay. Because you trespassed against me.'

'Fences are for the living. I go where I want because Solom be longs to me.'

Sarah thought the man's release finger on the bow-and-arrow looked a little itchy. 'My deed is registered at the courthouse,' he said.

'And mine is recorded in the Book of Knowledge.'

'Are you with the government?'

'I answer to one law.'

'What's with the riddles, man?' He raised his voice, addressing Sarah, Sue, and Odus. 'What are you guys doing up here?'

'We're here for the same reason you are,' Sarah said.

'To kill some damned goats?'

'They came because of me,' the Circuit Rider said. 'As do all my creatures.'

'Hey, dude, I saw those goats eating you.'

'I provide nourishment to my flock.'

Sarah figured Harmon Smith, back when he was alive, had been touched in the head somewhere along the line, about the time he traded in his Methodist leanings for a belief in fleshly sacrifice. After a couple hundred years roaming the backwoods to visit vari ous Appalachian communities, killing somebody here and there along the way, he'd probably made peace with his madness. The miles were long and the path dusty, but a mission of that kind would require a man to embrace solitude. Even with a horse for company, the Circuit Rider worked alone, abandoned by both God and the devil and shunned by every mortal creature. Then why were those creatures gathering around him like moths drawn to a porch light?

'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 fig ured 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, con gestion, 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 atten tion?'

'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 be lieved 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 any thing 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.'