Valley of the Scarecrow (11 page)

Wednesday morning came knocking long before any of the young campers hoped it would. It arrived without the need of any modern electronic alarm clocks or tape-recorded wake-up calls, instead choosing to use the high-pitched screeching caws of 250 black birds launching into the dawn sky to announce that it was time for the group of young men and women to get their lazy butts out of bed. The noise of the crows was deafening for ten or fifteen seconds—like a multilayered air raid siren stuck on top volume—but eventually the birds climbed higher into the air and sped away from the church to presumably hunt for their breakfast in and around the nearby fields.

“Fucking nasty-assed buggers!” Rich yelled to the sky as he stumbled out of his tent, shooting his middle finger at the crows flying overhead. “Bloody hell!”

Dan, Pat, and Kim also came outside to see what was going on, with Kelly and Liz content to just stick there heads outside their respective tent flaps. With their hearts still beating a mile a minute, no one in the group looked overly cheery to have been woken up the way they had but there wasn’t much any of them could do about it. Once the majority of the crows had flown off, it was quiet enough that the campers could have fallen back asleep if they’d wanted to but since they’d been so rudely
jolted awake, none of them wanted to lie back down. Besides, they had a lot of work to do.

And they all knew the first order of business was getting inside the church.

Originally they were going to gather some wood and have a hot cup of coffee with their breakfast, but everyone was far too excited to wait around so instead they just drank water. They grabbed an apple each and passed around a can of mixed nuts, quick and easy and more than enough to keep them going until lunch. When everyone was ready, they grabbed a handful of flashlights and met over by the stairs leading up to the double front doors of the church. Having no real plan in mind, the front door seemed like the logical best place to try first. Dan was the only one of them carrying a tool. It was a small steel hatchet—the only equipment they’d brought that might help them get inside.

“Too bad we didn’t bring along a few big crowbars,” Dan said, looking up at the thick planks nailed over the doorway, then distastefully down at his tiny ax. “Sure would have made this job a whole lot easier.”

Rich nodded, but they all knew this had been thoroughly discussed before they’d even left home, the fact that there was no way they would be able to carry along a bunch of heavy tools on their hike. It was the same with packing a big cooler. Their packs had been more than heavy enough, just with their clothes, food, sleeping bags, and a few luxury items like flashlights and disposable lighters. Dan’s wooden-handled hatchet was the only tool included, and the only reason it had made the cut was simply because they figured they might need to chop down a few sticks and branches to eventually build their fires with. Maybe it could also help them chop their way into the decrepit church? Certainly worth a try, at least.

The girls stood watching, and Pat—as usual—was documenting everything from behind his camera lens. That left Dan and Rich to do the slug work, heading up the stairs to get to work. The stairs sagged with every step, rotted from years out in the elements and feeling like they were stepping on rubber mats.

“This wood gonna hold us?” Rich asked. “I got a bad feeling.”

“It’ll hold,” Dan said. “It’s lasted this long, surely it’ll last another few days.” There was a big creak under Dan’s foot on his next step. “I hope.”

Rich laughed and they both gingerly climbed their way to the top and across the platform to the sealed doors. “Look at that, man. That say what I think it does?”

Dan followed Rich’s finger up above the doorway and felt a tiny shudder travel down his spine, not that he’d admit that to his longtime friend. Above the door in large faded red letters several messages had been written but there was only one that could still be made out. Barely legible, someone had written a blasphemous message in a shaky scrawl. It said:

GOD DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE

“Creepy, huh?” Dan said. “Can you imagine what it must have been like here on that night it all went down?”

“Well, we don’t know that anything went down yet. Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. We won’t know squat until we can get these boards off. Let’s get to work.”

“After you then,” Dan said, handing his friend the hatchet. “I’m the brains…you’re the brawn, remember?”

“Why change a good thing, right?”

“Exactly. Get hacking!”

Fifteen minutes of hard labor later, Rich had managed to chop his way through three of the thick oak planks barricading the front doors. The good news was that it was a decent effort, what with the inadequate tool he had to work with and the thickness of the hardwood he was trying to get through. Even after all these years, the wood was putting up a hell of a fight. The bad news was there were still nine more boards to go. Sweaty and tired but never one to bitch and complain about a job, Rich was about to start working on the next plank when Dan tapped him on the shoulder.

“Take a break, my friend. Let me show you how a
real
man does it.”

“Oh…okay. And fuck you too! I guess I could use a rest. I’ll just grab a quick drink of water and come right back.”

“Sounds good. Take your time.”

“Don’t worry, I will.”

Rich handed over the hatchet and started back toward the staircase but on his third step the boards beneath his feet gave out and he fell through. One second he was there, and then he was gone, disappearing out of sight down into the area beneath the front porch of the church.

“Heeeey!” Rich screamed as he fell, trying to reach out for anything that might help stop his descent, but there was nothing to grab. He landed hard on a dirt floor about ten feet below, knocking the wind out of his lungs and scuffing his left knee a little but otherwise he was luckily okay. He was surrounded by darkness, the only light in the small chamber coming from the jagged opening above his head. Dan’s head appeared in the space.

“Jesus, Rich. You okay?”

Rich could hear the girls screaming outside, wondering the same thing. “Yeah, I’m fine,” he said. “Just bruised my
ego. Fuck, what an idiot. I knew the floor was rotted in spots. Serves me bloody right.” Rich stood up and dusted himself off. Reaching up, his fingertips were only about two feet below the floorboards. Dan reached down and they could shake hands but when he tried to yank Rich up toward the hole, the entire porch started to creak and moan as if the entire platform might collapse. Dan dropped Rich back to the ground, not wanting to chance it.

“No worries, Rich. We’ll get you out. Just need a rope or something. What’s down there anyway? Can you see anything?”

“Not much. It’s pretty dark down here. Toss me down a flashlight.”

“Okay. Just a sec…”

Dan looked up and spoke to the nearby girls, who by the sounds of it were running to the foot of the stairs. “He’s fine, Lizzy. Relax. We’re gonna need a light here though. Can one of you go get it…or get Pat to move his lazy butt and help out?”

A few minutes later, Dan handed down a long metal flashlight and Rich immediately clicked it on to take a better look at his surroundings. He’d dropped into a long, narrow space beneath the stairs that could have easily been used for storage but for the most part was empty. There were a couple of thick oak planks under the slope of the stairs that looked like extra wood from when they’d originally built the church, but that wasn’t what caught Rich’s attention. “Wow!” he said. “Look at that!”

“What is it?” Dan said, trying to peek in the hole from above.

“I can get inside the church from down here. There’s a door built into the foundation wall that should lead into the basement.”

“Really? Probably locked from the inside though.”

“Doesn’t matter. The foundation wall has crumbled a bit around it. There’s a gap in the wall right by the door frame. It’s not huge, but it looks big enough to get inside. Maybe I can find the stairs up the main floor and try to help get the doors open from the inside?”

“Great idea. Solves the problem of getting you out of this hole anyway. You okay going inside alone?”

“Sure. Why wouldn’t I be? The boogeyman gonna get me? I’ll be on the other side of the front door in a few minutes. Keep the peace.”

“Okay. I’ll keep hacking away from up here. Be careful, all right?”

“Will do, boss. Here, grab these first.” Rich handed up the pair of oak planks lying under the stairs. “Lay those across the hole to reinforce the platform. We don’t want anyone else falling through. I’ll see you soon.”

Rich moved to the wooden door but just as Dan had suspected, it was locked tight from within. Moving over to the gap in the fieldstone foundation he shone his light back and forth around the basement. It smelled musty beneath the church, but not in a damp, rotted way. It was more of a stale, stagnant smell like dried flowers and dead leaves. Cornstalks grew up from the dirt floor and filled half of the basement, monstrously large and growing right up through the floorboards above on the main level. There wasn’t a whole lot else to see other than a large room with several doorways opening up into other presumably smaller rooms. On the east wall, a staircase headed up to the main floor. Covered in a thick layer of dust were several half-constructed church pews and maybe a dozen wooden crates lined up against the far wall but from here there was no way of knowing what might be inside of them.

He had to hold his breath to wiggle into the tight
opening, but Rich squeezed through and was soon standing on the dirt floor. He moved quickly to the crates, hoping for a miracle he’d find Reverend Miller’s treasure as easily as that but deep down knowing nothing was
that
easy, especially something so valuable.

He was right. Inside the crates were full of junk, crammed with broken carpentry tools, balls of twine, sacks of rusty nails, jars of dried-up glue, and two crates full of ratty covered old hymn books and King James Bibles. Disappointed, but expecting as much, Rich moved on and quickly checked some of the smaller rooms off this main chamber. Some were empty, but most were being used for some type of storage, the most interesting of which had shelves and baskets full of what had once been vegetables, bread, dried fruit, and some hanging smoked meat. There would be time to hunt through all these rooms more closely later, but right now Rich knew he should stop investigating and get his butt upstairs to help Dan open those front doors.

Heading for the stairs, Rich noticed one more door directly under the wooden steps. It was a little smaller than the other doorways, but what really caught his attention was that this door was made of metal while nearly everything else inside the church was made of wood. On closer inspection, it was just a wooden door coated in a layer of metal sheeting, but there was also a big sliding steel dead bolt attached to the door frame with the bolt firmly set directly into the fieldstone wall. Curious, and also thinking this door looked fortified and a little like the opening of a homemade bank vault, Rich moved under the stairs to have a closer look. The sliding dead bolt was rusty and hadn’t been moved in decades but Rich leaned on it hard and shoved it to the side. Adrenaline pumping through his veins, he yanked on the handle and
the door opened toward him, its ancient hinges screeching their protest all the way.

The smell of death enveloped him, and Rich backed up a few steps, gagging. Not the coppery smell of fresh blood or the evacuated juices and excrement of the recently dead; this was more a sulfurous gas, a dry, cloying stench of meat left to rot and spoil for many years. It was more the memory of death than the smell of death itself, the air inside the small room trapped, festering for decades and becoming nearly toxic like the air within an excavated Egyptian tomb. Rich let the air clear for a minute, then moved in closer to have a look inside.

That was when he screamed.

Inside the small chamber were three long-dead corpses, and although it was difficult to tell by the state of their bodies, the way they were dressed told him he was looking at two men and one woman. They were all chained to the walls through steel loops set into the stone, and by the frozen screams permanently etched onto their leathery faces, their deaths had been horrible and the trio had suffered for a long time. Rich shone his light over the dead men and woman and was amazed at how well preserved they were. Their hair was long and scraggly, and they were dehydrated from the dry heat inside the church, but essentially they still looked human. Much older and desiccated than they had looked at the times of their death, Rich was sure; mere husks of the young men and woman they probably had once been.

“Fuck me!” Rich whispered, his voice echoing inside the room of death. “They’re like mummies! Juices sucked right out of them!”

For a moment, Rich couldn’t fathom what he was looking at here, or how something horrendous like this could have taken place inside a place of worship, but then he
remembered Kelly’s story and realized he was probably looking at Joshua Miller’s followers—the last of the reverend’s faithful flock who’d stood with him on the night the village elders had come to put an end to Joshua’s wicked ways.

Cool!
he thought.
Weird and freakin’ crazy, but definitely cool!

Closing the door to the makeshift crypt again, Rich returned the dead bodies to darkness and ran up the stairs to try and locate the front door. He could hear the faint
whack
of Dan using his hatchet and wondered if anyone outside had heard him scream like a little girl downstairs. He hoped not, but in the end didn’t really care. Seeing three dead bodies wasn’t exactly a common event for anyone and Dan and Pat would have reacted the exact same way.

At the top of the stairs, a door opened into a large room with benches lining both sides. There were windows on the west wall, all boarded up tightly but a few slivers of light were sneaking in the cracks and making it easier to see up here than downstairs. From the setup of the room, it appeared to be a reception room or a common area where the villagers probably gathered before and after sermons. There was another secondary room that was long and narrow and was likely a coatroom. Making his way toward the sound of Dan working, Rich passed a set of double doors leading into the sanctuary but he didn’t want to go inside there yet. He had a pretty good idea what he was going to find inside that room and after seeing the bodies of Reverend Miller’s followers he had no desire to rush in and see what was left of Joshua. Not yet anyway. That was a treat best saved for when he had some company.