Drummer Boy: A Supernatural Thriller (6 page)

“Shh.”

The drumming had faded to a muted drone, the staccato beats blending together in the distance. A match
scritched
and as the yellow light flared, Vernon Ray glanced at the ceiling. Were symbols carved up there, or were the shapes just the flickering shadows cast by cracks in the stone?

“This is where the soldiers camped,” Bobby said, kicking at a rock.

“My dad said they did an archaeological survey,” Vernon Ray said. “No artifacts were found besides a few Cherokee tools and flint. If any troops were ever here, they must have been way down in the hole and got trapped.”

“Who are you going to believe, a bunch of pencil pushers like Cornwad or your bestest bud?”

“Who do you expect me to believe?”

“I saw one of them.”

“One of who?”

“Them. Why do you think I came in here?”

The second match went out and they stood in the dark, which pressed against Vernon Ray’s flesh like stagnant water. The space was silent except for their breathing and the soft rustle of wind through the trees outside. Vernon Ray’s heart was racing as fast as it did when he touched himself under the midnight covers of his bed, fueled by the same fearful anticipation of something that couldn’t be missed, no matter the consequences.

“Don’t dick with me, Bobby.”

“Serious. One of them called me. Well, actually, he said ‘Early,’ but you know.”

“I’ve heard of ghost whisperers, but I never heard of a ghost whispering back.”

“I heard it, plain as day,” Bobby said. “When I was running from the cops, he called again.”

“Who called?”

“Nobody. I mean, he was barely there.”

“Did you and Dex smoke a joint behind my back? Because you’re acting like a freakozoid.” Vernon Ray shivered. He didn’t like having this conversation in the dark, and the cave seemed to be sucking down the sunshine and digesting it, because now the entrance looked forty feet away even though they hadn’t moved.

“People say ghosts hide out in the Hole, but this person had flesh and bones,” Bobby said in a flat tone, as if reciting a line from a half-remembered movie. “It moved around and talked and smelled like chewing tobacco and coffee.”

“Hit another match.”

“Asked me if Stoneman had passed through yet. Asked me if the war was over. Asked if he could go home.”

Vernon Ray took another step closer, at the risk of being called a homo, until he bumped into Bobby. “Give me the matches.”

Vernon Ray found Bobby’s outstretched hand and took the matches, fired one up, and tore two more matches from the pack. Tiny twin flames reflected off Bobby’s eyes, giving his face the appearance of a hell-spawned demon. As the match burned low, Vernon Ray lit another and bent low, looking for tracks. Though the light didn’t penetrate much of the cave, the muddy floor appeared to show only their two sets of footprints.

“I don’t see nothing now,” Bobby said.

“Maybe you heard a fox or something. Or bats.”

“It was a soldier.”

“It’s dark in here. Easy for your imagination to run wild.”

I’m trying to talk you out of it because I want to believe it so bad.

Bobby turned away, toward the back of the cave. Vernon Ray looked over his shoulder, stepping closer, toward his friend’s comforting body heat. A solid wall of murk stood before them, and somewhere beyond it lay the bones of soldiers. Vernon Ray could picture the pale skeletons, bones picked clean by vermin, mold and moss sinking spores into the dried marrow. Whatever Bobby had seen, it was best to let it rest in peace in this stifling tomb.

“Let’s get out of here,” Vernon Ray said, lighting a third match and holding it until it nearly burned his fingers. Despite his academic assessment of Appalachian tectonics, the walls looked fragile, rock stacked on a whim, glistening with the moist sweat of the world. He could imagine primordial reptiles slithering in its crevices, the first furry creatures huddling for cover.

Bobby pointed toward a dark stain on the wall, a splotch of faintly fluorescent indigo. “That looks like dinosaur crap.”

The air was ripe with must and decomposition, as if the cave were in constant decay, the world rotting from the inside out. Stones were bones, after all, just dying at a different speed. It was all star stuff, and cosmic nonsense aside, the cave was a graveyard, a garbage hole, a place where light and life were sucked toward the inevitable. And maybe that consumption, the bottom of the hole, was the final resting place of all that walked and breathed and prayed.

Vernon Ray tossed the final match down, plunging them into darkness again, and glanced back at the entrance to the cave. He hadn’t taken a single step, but now daylight appeared
fifty
feet away. He closed his eyes and saw lime-green flashes where the flame had imprinted his retinas. When he blinked several seconds later, the cave seemed darker, as if the sun were going down outside. But it was probably only six o’clock, an hour before dusk.

“Come on, the cops are probably gone by now,” Vernon Ray said. The cops had become an abstraction. Even a jail cell would be better than the unseen but constricting walls of granite around them.

He was glad to feel Bobby’s hand on his arm, though the fingers were cold and moist. He only wished his friend hadn’t gone so silent. He could no longer hear Bobby’s breathing.

A faint ticking filled the air.
Ratta-tat, ratta-tat
.

The snare drum became audible in the same way it had faded out, swelling as if the invisible, impossible drummer were marching toward them from the depths.

“Come on, Bobby!” Vernon Ray tugged his friend’s hand, leading him toward the safety of the forest outside. But he lost traction in the mud and the air had grown heavy, and he fought against it as if wading through a receding tide. The mouth of the cave now appeared uphill and despite taking a dozen slow, straining steps he was no closer to safety. The drumming gained in volume, echoing off the wet walls.

The cave is sealed off. Nobody can come up from the dark
.

Especially not dead soldiers
.

Bobby’s hand slipped off his arm and Vernon Ray was unmoored, drifting in a morass that pressed against him on all sides, a sour molasses that clogged his nose and throat. The cave mouth not only looked farther away but smaller, as if he were looking down the fat end of a telescope. The forest beyond, suggested only by swathes of green and gold, had taken on the aspect of fantasy, as if this cloaked realm were the reality and all else a dream. The snare drum rattled, the reverberation booming like a cannonade.

Claustrophobia. Sure, that made sense
.

Anxiety was distorting his perception. The snare was nothing more than the pounding of his heart. The cave shut off all noise from outside, creating an isolation tank of almost total sensory deprivation.

“Bobby?” Vernon Ray took two steps toward the mouth of the cave, only he must have gotten turned around in the dark, because the mouth of the cave was now behind him. Had he gone deeper into the cave instead of leaving it?

He flailed his arms in the dark, reaching for Bobby. He didn’t care if his friend thought he was a faggot, he didn’t even care if he bumped into Bobby’s butt, all he wanted to do was hug the only anchor of sanity left in the black and smothering abyss. His hand made contact and he clawed at Bobby’s shirt.

Bobby clamped down on his wrist, squeezing hard, and Vernon Ray yelped. Bobby yanked him off balance-and
deeper
into the cave-and Vernon Ray tried to plant his feet, but the Earth beneath him was ebony butter and he skied forward, slapping and tearing at Bobby’s hand.
When had Bobby gotten so strong?

The ratta-tat rose and filled the cavity, penetrated Vernon Ray’s ears and rolled around the arc of his skull. The thunderous drumming was so loud that it would surely trigger an avalanche. And Vernon Ray would be trapped in this sepulcher of stone and slime, buried with the soldiers, doomed to forever march to the beat of a deceased drummer.

But he wouldn’t die alone. He would be with Bobby, and in the dark, with time against them and no one to ever find out, who knew what might happen?

Except Bobby’s grip was fierce, like thick and cold handcuffs girding his flesh, roping him deeper into the bowels of the world and closer to the drummer.

“Bobby, the
other
way.” Vernon Ray leaned back, throwing all his weight as resistance, but still Bobby dragged him forward into an unknown antechamber of hell. But the preachers said hell was hot, a place where sinners and homosexuals and liars and boys who had bad thoughts all burned for an eternity. If so, and surely plenty of others had been fed to the eternal flames over the centuries (he wasn’t alone in
that
, too, was he?), then why was the cave so cold?

The drumming became a cacophony, roaring in a mad range of tones and timbres. Or maybe it was the winds of the underworld rushing through some unseen open door. Vernon Ray twisted his neck, yearning for a last glimpse of the safe and sunlit world.

The silhouette of a man was framed in the cave mouth. A cop had found them. They’d be safe after all.

“Help!” Vernon Ray shouted, competing with the drums, yanking against Bobby, the pack of matches damp and crumpled in his palm. They could blame it all on Dex. The cops would fall for that easy. It would all be okay now, sane and normal and brightly lit.

But the man showed no sign of entering the cave and Bobby wasn’t letting loose. Vernon Ray slid another five feet deeper into darkness, digging his heels against the mud. Surely they’d reach the back of the cave soon, the place where the ceiling had collapsed and stacked the granite in an impossible jumble.

And then what would happen? Would Bobby continue dragging him down, through the narrow cracks in the rock, to the cavity where the bones of the soldiers lay?

Ratta-tatta-tat
. What if the percussion was made by bones, skeletal fingers beating an insane rhythm against rock?

Where was the cop? Weren’t they supposed to risk their lives to protect the innocent? Didn’t the cop watch “NYPD Blue” or “T.J. Hooker” or even “The Andy Griffith Show”?

Vernon Ray, the last kid picked in sandlot football games, the part-time right fielder on his Little League team, the reigning chess champ of eighth grade, couldn’t count on brute strength, and his brains were pummeled by the snare cadence. He was reduced to blubbering Bobby’s name over and over until it came out as “Buh-buh-buh,” and to his horror he found his syllables had fallen in synch with the snare.

In the fifth grade, Vernon Ray had gotten into a fight with Whizzer Buchanan, a goon from across the county. Well, it hadn’t really been a fight, more of a Close Encounter of the Turd Kind. Whizzer had set aside his skateboard to go behind a tree and live up to his nickname, and Vernon Ray had picked up the abandoned skateboard and spun its wheels. He wasn’t going to steal it or anything; he was too chicken to board even if he’d owned one.

Whizzer had snuck up behind him, grabbed him, and threatened to smack the skateboard across his lips. Vernon Ray had pretended to go slack for just an instant, in a sissy fainting spell, and when Whizzer relaxed his grip, Vernon Ray had wriggled and yanked at the same time. The movement had surprised the goon, whose strength-and-size advantage was not only negated but worked against him. As Vernon Ray pirouetted away, Whizzer fell to the ground, smacking his own face on the board. By the time Whizzer regained his wits (
both
of them, Vernon Ray had smirked in the aftermath), his quarry was long gone.

Vernon Ray tried the same maneuver now, flattening his feet so that he slid in the mud while simultaneously leaning forward, falling toward Bobby. It was like skating on owl grease. He lost his balance and slammed into the dank mud. Up close, the floor of the cave smelled like rainy-day dogs, black powder, and rotted canvas.

Bobby stayed right with him through the fall, the meat lasso tightening. Vernon Ray slapped at his friend’s hand, and then clawed at it, the flesh peeling away like peach skin beneath his fingernails. Bobby didn’t utter a peep, not that Vernon Ray could have heard him over the swelling
ratta-tatta-tat
.

When had Bobby gotten so goddamned
strong
?

Vernon Ray tried a variation of the Great-Whizzer-Escape, springing forward from his knees, but all he did was propel himself deeper in the cave, banging his shins against rocks. Bobby was playing him like a sport fish, reeling him not toward shore but into a drowning black lagoon.

Where was that Christ-forsaken robocop?

Whatever gleam of light had trickled down the kaleidoscopic tube of stone and dirt was now stifled, like a reptilian eye blinking shut. Had they turned a bend? Worked through the fallen stone of the cave-in? The drum line now roared to thunder, threatening another landslide.

And he’d be trapped in here with . . . .

Bobby? The dead troops, unsung heroes whose common grave bore no marker? Or the Little Drummer Boy from Hell, pounding pounding pounding until Vernon Ray’s skull exploded and his brains scattered like grapeshot.

He had one more trick up his well-gripped sleeve, and it was less a conscious flop than a mild seizure of panic. He wriggled his elbows as if he were doing the funky chicken, at the same time driving his palms together in one smack of sick applause. The skin lasso loosened, and Vernon Ray scrambled backwards, bumping into something unseen and mushy, and a bat brushed his face-
not another hand, certainly not a third hand
-but by then Vernon Ray was clawing his way toward the warmer air, and now light suffused him, a bruised balm at first and then a solid gob of yellow-white.

And there was the silhouette, the cop at the mouth of the cave, and Vernon Ray was ready to confess to every unsolved crime in the Pickett County log book, just as long as the bars were thick and the cot warm and he could see each wall.

He stumbled, staggered, headless-funky-chicken-strutted his way toward the light, and he reached out his arms like a punk rocker diving into the front row, going for the cop. Faggot or not, he was ready to hug the hell out of the man, cling to the cop until they had to scrape him off with a shovel. Because the cop was solid, warm meat, not like the cold, dead things behind him . . . .