Drummer Boy: A Supernatural Thriller
Read Drummer Boy: A Supernatural Thriller Online
Authors: Scott Nicholson
“Keep both hands on your pants, because Nicholson is about to scare them off.”-J.A. Konrath, Origin and Serial
“Always surprises and always entertains.”-Jonathan Maberry, The Dragon Factory
“Scott Nicholson knows the territory. Follow him at your own risk.”-Stewart O’Nan, Boston Noir
“A wonderful storyteller.”-Sharyn McCrumb, author of The Ballad novels
A misfit kid is all that stands between a small Blue Ridge Mountain town and its own buried past.
Drummer Boy
By Scott Nicholson
Copyright © 2010 Scott Nicholson
Published by Haunted Computer Books
http://www.hauntedcomputer.com
This is a work of fiction. All people, incidents, and places are solely the products of the author’s imagination. The writer begins the journey, but the reader completes it. . . .
Ebook Creation by Dellaster Design
The Red Church
Speed Dating with the Dead
The Skull Ring
As I Die Lying
Disintegration
Burial To Follow
Ashes
Flowers
Murdermouth: Zombie Bits
The First
Gateway Drug
Forever Never Ends
The Home
The Manor
The Farm
They Hunger
For Robert, Chris, Randy, and Barry, and all us misfit kids everywhere
The Jangling Hole glared back at Bobby Eldreth like the cold eye of the mountain, sleepy and wary and stone silent in the October smoke.
“Th’ow it.”
Bobby ignored Dex’s taunt as he squeezed the rock and peered into the darkness, imagining the throbbing heartbeat that had drummed its slow rumble across the ages. The air that oozed from the Blue Ridge Mountain cave smelled like mushrooms and salamanders. He could have sworn he heard something back there in the slimy, hidden belly of the world, maybe a whisper or a tinkle or the scraping of claws on granite.
“Th’ow it, doof.”
Bobby glanced back at his heckler, who sat on a sodden stump among the dark green ferns. Dex McCallister had a speech impediment that occasionally cut the “r” out of his words. Dex was so intent on pestering Bobby that he failed to note the defect. Good thing. When Dex made a mistake, everybody paid.
“I hear something,” Bobby said.
“Probably one of them dead Rebels zipping down his pants to take a leak,” Dex shouted. “Do it.”
Vernon Ray Davis, who stood in the hardwood trees behind Dex, said, “They didn’t have zippers back then. Nothing but bone buttons.”
Dex sneered at the skinny kid in the X-Men T-shirt and too-tight, thrift-store jeans that revealed his pale ankles. “What book did you get that out of, V-Ray? You’re starting to sound like Cornwad,” Dex said, using the class nickname for Mr. Corningwald, their eighth-grade history teacher at Titusville Middle School.
Bobby hefted the rock in his hand. Though it was the size of a lopsided baseball, it weighed as much as the planet Krypton. Probably even Superman couldn’t lift it, but Superman wouldn’t be dumb enough to stand in front of a haunted hole in the ground, not while he could be boning Lois Lane or beating up Lex Luthor.
Dex and Vernon Ray were thirty yards down the slope from Bobby, in a clearing safely away from the mouth of the cave. Not that any distance was safe, if what they said was true. The late-afternoon sun coated the canopy of red oak and maple with soft, golden light, yet Bobby shivered, due as much to the chill emanating from the cave as from his fear.
“I’ve been to the camps,” Vernon Ray said. “My daddy’s got all that stuff.”
“That’s just a bunch of guys playing dress-up,” Dex said.
“It’s authentic. 26th North Carolina Troops. Wool pants, breech loaders, wooden canteens-”
“Okay, Cornwad,” Dex said. “So they didn’t have no goddamn zippers.”
“Daddy said-”
“Your daddy goes to those re-enactments to get away from you and your mom,” Dex said. “My old man drags me along, but you always get left behind with the girls. What ya think of that, Cornwad?”
During Dex’s bully act, Bobby took the opportunity to ease a couple of steps away from the mouth of the cave. The noise inside it was steady and persistent, like a prisoner’s desolate scratching of a spoon against a concrete wall. The Hole seemed to be daring him to come closer. Bobby considered dropping the stone and pretending he had thrown it while Dex wasn’t looking. But Dex had a way of knowing things.
“Bobby’s chicken crap,” Vernon Ray said, changing the subject away from his dad and deflecting Dex’s attention. “He won’t throw it.”
Good one, V-Ray. I thought we were on the same side here.
Dex tapped a cigarette from a fresh pack, then pushed it between his lips and let it dangle. “Ah, hell with it,” he said. “You can believe the stories if you want. I got better things to worry about.”
Relieved, Bobby took a step downhill but froze when he heard the whisper.
“Uhr-lee.”
It was the wind. Had to be. The same wind that tumbled a gray pillar of smoke from the end of Dex’s cigarette, that quivered the bony trees, that pushed dead autumn leaves against his sneakers.
Still, his throat felt as if he’d swallowed the rock in his hand. Because the whisper came again, low, personal, and husked with menace.
“Uhrrrr-leeee.”
A resonant echo freighted the name. If Bobby had to imagine the mouth from which the word had issued-and at the moment Bobby was plenty busy
not
imagining-it would belong to a dirty-faced, gaunt old geezer two hundred years dead. But like Dex said, you could believe the stories if you wanted, which implied a choice.
When in doubt, go with the safe bet
.
Put your money on ignorance.
“To hell with it,” Bobby said, throwing extra air behind the words to hide any potential cracks. “I want me one of those smokes.”
He flung the rock-
away
from the cave, lest he wake any more of those skeletal men inside-and hurried down the slope, nearly slipping as he hustled while feigning nonchalance. One more whisper might have wended from the inky depths, but Bobby’s feet scuffed leaves and Dex laughed and Vernon Ray hacked from a too-deep draw and the music of the forest swarmed in: whistling birds, creaking branches, tinkling creek water, and the brittle cawing of a lonely crow.
Bobby joined his friends and sat on a flat slab of granite beside the stump. From there, the Hole looked less menacing, a gouge in the dirt. Gray boulders, pocked with lichen and worn smooth by the centuries, framed the opening, and stunted, deformed jack pines clung to the dark soil above the cave.
A couple of dented beer cans lay half-buried in a patch of purple monkshood, and a rubber dangled like a stubby rattlesnake skin from a nearby laurel branch. Mulatto Mountain rose another hundred feet in altitude above the cave, where it topped off with sycamore and buckeye trees that had been sheared trim by the winter winds.
He took a cancer stick from Dex and fired it up, inhaling hard enough to send an inch of glowing orange along its tip. The smoke bit his lungs but he choked it down and then wheezed it out in small tufts.
The first buzz of nicotine numbed his fingers and floated him from his body. Relishing the punishment, he went back to mouth-smoking the way he usually did, rolling the smoke with his tongue instead of huffing it down. His head reeled but he grinned toward the sky in case Dex or Vernon Ray was looking.
“We ought to camp here sometime,” Dex said, smoking with the ease of the addicted. He played dress-up as much as the Civil War re-enactors did, though his uniform of choice was upscale hoodlum-white T-shirt and a windbreaker that had “McCallister Alley” stitched over the left breast pocket. Three leaning bowling pins, punctured by a yellow starburst indicating a clean strike, were sewn beneath the label. Dex’s old man owned the only alley within 80 miles of Titusville, and about once a month Mac McCallister was lubed enough from Scotch to let the boys roll a few free games.
“It’ll be too cold to camp soon,” Vernon Ray said, constantly flicking ash from his cigarette like a sissy. Bobby was almost embarrassed for him, but at the moment he had other concerns besides his best friend maybe being queer.
Concerns like the Jangling Hole, and whoever-or whatever-had spoken to him.
The wind, nothing but the wind
.
“Best time of year for camping,” Dex said. “I can get my old man’s tent, swipe a couple six-packs, bring some fishing poles. Maybe tote my .410 and bag us a couple squirrels for dinner.”
“There’s a level place down by the creek,” Bobby said.
“Right here’s fine,” Dex said, sweeping one arm out in the expansive gesture of someone giving away something that wasn’t his. “Put the tent between the roots of that oak yonder. Already got a fireplace.” He booted one of the rocks that ringed a hump of charred wood.
“I don’t know if my folks will let me,” Vernon Ray said.
“Your dad’s doing Stoneman’s, ain’t he?” Dex dangled his cigarette from his lower lip. “Since he’s the big captain and all.”
Stoneman’s Raid was an annual Civil War re-enactment that commemorated the Yankee incursion suffered by Titusville in 1864. The modern weekend warriors marked it by sleeping on the ground, drinking whiskey from dented canteens, and logging time in the saddle on rumps grown soft from too many hours in the armchair.
If they were like Bobby’s dad, they spent their free time thumbing the remote between “Dancing With The Stars” and “The History Channel,” unless it was football season when the Carolina Panthers jerseys came out of the bottom drawer.
“Sure,” Vernon Ray said, voice hoarse from the cigarette. He flicked his smoke twice, but no ash fell. “Mom will probably go to Myrtle Beach like usual.”
“The beach,” Dex said. “Wouldn’t mind eyeing some bikini babes myself.”
There was a test in Dex’s tone, maybe a taunt. Perhaps Dex, like Bobby, had been wondering about Vernon Ray. “What ya think, Bobby? A little sand in the honey sounds a lot better than watching a bunch of old farts in uniform, don’t it?”
Bobby’s gaze had wandered to the Hole again and he scanned the crisp line where the dappled sunlight met the black wall of hidden space that burrowed deep into Mulatto Mountain. As Dex called his name, Bobby blinked and took a deep, stinging puff. He spoke around the exhaled smoke, borrowing a line from his dad’s secret stash of magazines in the tool shed. “Yeah, wouldn’t mind some sweet tang myself.”
Dex reached out and gave Vernon Ray a chummy slap on the back that was loud enough to echo off the rocks. “Beats pounding the old pud, huh?”
Vernon Ray nodded and took a quick hit. He even held his cigarette like a sissy, his pinky lifted in the air as if communicating in some sort of delicate sign language. Vernon Ray, unlike most of the kids at Titusville Middle School, already had a hair style, a soft, wavy curl flopping over his forehead.
Bobby wished he could protect his best friend, change him, rip that precious blonde curl out by the roots and turn him into a regular guy before Dex launched into asshole mode. When Dex got rolling, things went mean quick, and Vernon Ray’s eyes already welled with water, either from the smoke or the teasing.
“I heard something at the Hole,” Bobby said, not realizing he was speaking until the sentence escaped.
