The red church (39 page)

The shot exploded when he was in the middle of the church, and he couldn't help himself. He had to turn and look.

Archer, arms wide, palms up, eyebrows raised, mouth stunned open, a messiah on an invisible cross. A small red spot appeared on his white shirt, just to the left of his tie.

Shot in the heart.

Archer's lips moved, but no words came. The face shifted rapidly, to mud and mountain lion to Samuel and then to a dozen, no, a hundred, faces that Frank didn't recognize. Then it settled back into Archer's face.

"Jeez," whispered Ronnie.

Archer's eyes rolled heavenward, as if looking for some large, compassionate hand to come down and collect him. But above them was only the dark ceiling of the red church.

Then the bell rang, a belch of hellwind ripping the night.

"Mom," Ronnie called, struggling in Frank's grasp.

Linda looked from Ronnie to Archer, then back again, as if making a hard choice. The wound on Archer's chest blossomed wider, leaking a gray, gelatinous substance along with the blood. Frank thought he saw bits of stone and root in the seepage. Archer lurched toward Mama Bet as the bell rang a second time.

"Why hast thou forsaken me?" the preacher-thing said to its cowering mother. The words were as thun-derous as the tolling bell, but Archer was
smiling.
As if getting killed was all part of some perverted sacra-ment.

"Come
on,
Linda," Frank shouted.

"Ronnie," she called, holding her arms up and run-ning from the altar. This time they were a mother's loving arms, not the snatching arms of a conspirator.

Frank set Ronnie down, and the boy hugged his weeping mother.

"Let's get the hell out of here," Frank said, leading them down the aisle. He turned one last time, just before they went out the door. Mama Bet had stood and was meeting her son's embrace. Except her son, her savior, her hope for the world, was a glistening mass of clay. The mud-slide swept over her and suffocated her screams Frank's feet were in the graveyard grass when the bell rang for the third and final time.

This is it,
Ronnie thought.
The all-time, Whopper-with extra-cheese turning point, the
up-close-and-personal end of the world.

And the weirdest thing was, he was no longer afraid. No matter what happened from here on in he knew he wasn't alone. Because when Jesus came into your heart, He signed a lifetime contract with a no-trade clause. Ronnie wished someone had told him how simple it was, that you didn't need Preacher Staymore or an angel or even Dad to tell you that God was right there all the time. He gripped Mom's hand as they ran across the graveyard. A smattering of starlight and the half-faced moon threw the shadow of the dogwood tree over them. The black branches swayed in an unfelt breeze like fingers reaching to grab them.

"Are you okay?" Mom asked.

"Yeah," he said.

"I-I'm sorry," she said, but Ronnie barely heard her, because the bell rang for a third time and the ground trembled beneath his feet.

"Over here," someone shouted.

Dad!

Ronnie dashed for the trees at the edge of the woods. Dad stepped from the darkness and grabbed him, hugged him, and pulled him into the under-brush.

Tim squinted from behind a laurel.

"Timmy," Ronnie said, his heart lighter than it had ever been. Prayers
worked.
Prayers kicked ass.

"What happened?" Tim asked.

"Did the sheriff kill him?" Dad asked, before Ron-nie could answer Tim.

"She
did."

"She? The detective?"

"No, Mama Bet."

"Did they hurt you, son?"

"No," he said, wanting to tell Dad about his new discovery, that Jesus was a pal and an ally, and who cared about an old stupid Bell Monster when you had the top gun on your side?

But he forgot about Jesus.

Because Mom was standing in the graveyard, and so was the sheriff, and the grass stretched open and the ground cracked and tombstones shivered.

Archer appeared in the doorway of the red church, the hole in his chest miraculously healed, the shirt unstained. He was bathed in a strange light, a sick yellowish orange the color of a dying fire. His face was sad and peaceful, and once again Ronnie was reminded of Jesus' face in the Bible pictures. Ronnie swallowed hard. Because what if this
was
the Second Coming, only this time God did it in a roundabout way, the ultimate big-time test of faith?

"What's happening?" Tim said, nearly blind with-out his glasses.

"God only knows," David said.

Archer walked—no,
floated
—down the steps. Mama Bet was behind him, looking nearly the same as she had, the dried blood and dirt streaking her face. But her eyes were somehow
wrong,
looking past the seen and known world.

Then the ground quivered again. The dirt at the base of the grave markers roiled, and pale, wispy shapes slithered up into the night air.

Arms topped with clawing, grasping hands.

Arms followed by heads, whitish lumps that were half skull, half milkish vapor. Then more, rising up from the ground like heavy fog. A sound like a hurt breeze wended through the forest.

The shapes solidified, became translucent people. Some wore old clothes, long dresses and bonnets, some of the men in Confederate Civil War uniforms, their blanched faces stretched and sagging, mouths yawning mournfully as they moaned. Others wore clothes of more recent vintage, suits and cravats or ties, with or without shoes. Ronnie recognized some of the more freshly dead.

There, Willie Absher, who had been crushed to death while working on a truck last year. Jeannie Matheson, an old schoolteacher who had finally given in to cancer. And Grandma Gregg. The same Grandma who used to perch Ronnie on her knee and tell about the old ways and the old stories. Now she shook the dark dirt from her burial gown and moved forward, feet hovering above the ground, vacant eyes shadowed.

A dozen, a hundred dead, all rising up from the grave, answering the call of the bell. Summoned by Archer.

The preacher was beneath the dogwood now, reach-ing out with his luminous hands to rip the air in front of him. A separate entity shimmered into being.

"The Hung Preacher," whispered Ronnie.

"May the good Lord protect us and keep us," Dad prayed aloud.

"What about Mom?" Tim whimpered.

"She bargained with the devil. Now she's got to pay the price."

"No," Ronnie said. "She changed. When Archer got shot, she became one of
us
again. We can't give up on her now."

Ronnie couldn't explain. Mom was Mom. Mom be-longed to
them,
not Archer. And Archer wasn't the devil, anyway. For the first time ever, Dad was wrong.

Ronnie looked for her in the herd of haunted fig-ures. At first he saw only the aching dead collecting around Archer. Then he saw Mom, hiding behind Grandma Gregg's tombstone. The sheriff was with her.

"There she is," Ronnie said. "You got to save her."

"Only Jesus saves, son."

"But you
love
her. You can't let Archer have her."

"She was more than ready to give
you
up. She thought she was making
that
sacrifice for love."

"What's happening to Mommy?" Tim said.

"Please, Dad," Ronnie said. He was nearly ready to run out there himself, out in the middle of those dead creepy things, to help Mom. "Jesus will run with you. Archer can't touch you if you're carrying Jesus in your blood."

Dad said nothing. As they watched, the Hung Preacher materialized, his plump, bloated face beaming with joy. Archer embraced his ancestor, lifted him as three of the new congregation re-moved the noose. The sinuous threads that com-prised the Hung Preacher's revenance collapsed onto Archer, and the two coalesced into one body.

Then the crowd of corpses parted, and Archer headed across the corrupted cemetery. The others fell in line, a ghostly caravan.

The sheriff shouted and ran from his hiding place. He caught up to one of the figures, a young boy.

"Samuel," the sheriff screamed. "Don't go."

The sheriff grabbed at the apparition, tried to em-brace it, but he might as well have been harvesting the air. The boy didn't even turn, just kept marching in that solemn regiment. The sheriff fell to his knees, weeping.

When the last of the dead disappeared into the brush, Dad said to Ronnie, "Stay here with your brother. I'll get your mom."

Ronnie looked at the dark gaps in the bushes where the dead had gone, wondering where Archer was leading them. Then he looked at the belfry, at the unmoving shadows that filled its hollowness. The candles burned low in the red church, the eerie flick-ering making the building seem alive.

"I can't see nothing," Timmy said. "My glasses broke. Tell me what's happening."

"Exactly what you see," Ronnie answered.
"Nothing
is happening."

* * *

The sheriff crawled into the shrubs. Below him, the road and the valley lay spread beneath the grim moon. The congregation drifted down the embank-ment, and there, near the end of the speechless col-umn, was Samuel.

His dead brother, now and forever Archer's.

Frank watched as Archer reached the great stones bordering the river. The monstrosity stepped into the water. No, not into—
onto.
Because the preacher walked on water.

Archer turned and waited as his congregation fol-lowed, first Mama Bet, then others old and new, in-cluding Frank's grim parents, all entering the black river. The water swallowed them, took them under its frothy tongue and carried them back to the an-cient belly of the Earth.

Frank hoped Samuel would look back and wave, do anything to show that he remembered, that part of Samuel's human life would remain even in this bleak new eternity. But Samuel slipped beneath the currents as silently as the others had, and when the last ghost faded, Archer himself dissipated and sank into the water.

Only the river mist remained, like the shroud of a final burial. The water laughed as it carried Archer's people to the deadest sea.

TWENTY-FIVE

Frank returned to the red church three weeks later.

The cemetery was quiet, the grass thick from gen-tle rains, the earth undisturbed. Birds chirped in the nearby forest. Wildflowers erupted along the road, black-eyed Susans and Queen Anne's lace and wind-ing morning glories. At the feet of the giant slum-bering mountains, the river rolled on. They'd found Sheila's body two miles downstream. Hoyle said that sometimes fish or turtles nibbled on the flesh when it became softened by prolonged ex-posure. Frank tried to believe that. At the hard edge of midnight, as he convinced himself that haunted congregations didn't exist, Hoyle's little forensic tid-bit gave a tiny comfort.

But right now, he didn't need comfort.

He pulled the cord, and the chainsaw leaped to life, its racket drowning out nature's blissful stirrings. As he dug the spinning blade into the base of the dogwood, his teeth were clamped so tightly together that his jaw ached. The sawdust was bitter on his lips and in his nostrils as he sliced into the wood. Finally the deformed tree fell, and the sun bathed the red church with its cleansing rays. He'd filled out a missing-persons report on Mama Bet and Archer McFall, writing that he suspected they'd moved to California. He also postulated that Archer had murdered Boonie Houck, Zeb Potter, and Donna Gregg. Never mind that no solid evi-dence had ever been recovered, and that the state medical examiners were left as baffled as everybody else. Who cared if the FBI spent ten years tracking down a person who no longer existed, who may never have lived?

Frank sawed the dogwood into smaller lengths, then carried the brush to the edge of the forest. The work raised a good honest, sweat. Lester rode by on his tractor, gave a neighborly wave, and kept driving. The people of Whispering Pines were good at keeping things to themselves. Sonny Absher had tried to blab-ber, but everybody chalked it up to liquor-induced delusions.

When Frank was finished, he took off his gloves and went into the church. A pile of dry, gray dirt lay in the spot where Archer had been shot. Frank kicked at it, and dust spun in the air. The stain on the altar was gone.

He had thought about burning the church. Arson was a difficult crime to trace. But a church couldn't be good or evil— only people could. Or things that walked as people. Without people, and what they be-lieved, a church was just a bunch of wood and nails and stone and glass.

Maybe someday God would return to this church. Maybe pure-hearted people would take up psalms and hymns and prayers here. Maybe a preacher would come here as God's servant, not as a jealous rival. Maybe.

Frank went outside and gathered some wildflowers. He put some on the grave of his parents, then knelt before the stone that contained the engraving of a lamb.

If only God truly did keep and protect people.

If only.

Forgiveness.

That was something Jesus taught.

So Ronnie figured it was only right that he forgive Mom for trying to sacrifice him to Archer. Besides, Dad said that Jesus had already forgiven her. If Jesus, with all His problems and worries and duties, had room in His heart for Mom, then surely Ronnie had room, too. It helped that Mom and Dad had made up, and that Mom had joined the choir at Barkers-ville Baptist, and life was almost back to normal. His nose was healing nicely, though he suspected he'd have a small hump on the bridge. Gave it char-acter, Mom said. He looked forward to being able to smell flowers again. Because he'd also forgiven Melanie. They sat to-gether every day at lunch, and maybe in a week or two, he'd be able to smell that sweet little smell that her hair gave off. Melanie had asked him several times about what had happened at the church, but he'd never told her. At least, not yet. Every time she batted those long eyelashes and made his heart float, he weakened. Maybe someday he'd tell her, as soon as he figured it out for himself.