"I'm not hungry. I think I'll go check the babies and meditate."

He got up from the table and went outside. He had a small green house, but he didn't grow his dope in it. The surveillance planes might see it and that would be the first place the snooper troopers would train their little spy cameras. His marijuana was in a little shed by the garden. He used a wind turbine and water wheel to generate electricity for the full-spectrum lights, because one of the ways cops got a warrant was by checking the electric company's records for a jump in kilowatt hours. The jump was "evidence" that a citizen might be using grow lights. Since he was off-grid, he was outside the system, in more ways than one.

He unlocked the shed, checked the sky for bogies, then went in. The main room was filled with a blue glow thrown off by the bank of grow lights. Marijuana plants, spawned from Kona Gold seeds a friend had mailed from Hawaii, stood as tall as Alex, and the room was sweet with the fully flowering buds. The three dozen plants were grown in five-gallon buckets, and the soil was ripe with the best compost Mother Nature could produce. Alex sat cross-legged before the plants in a yoga position. He was at peace in this place, this shrine to the sacred buzz.

Too bad he had to hide it away. In a righteous world, he could grow it out there in the garden, right in front of God and every body. Even Weird Dude Walking. If grass were legal, maybe the country's farmers wouldn't need crop subsidies. Get them off welfare and stifle the feds' war on drugs at the same time. Damn, why couldn't the Libertarians come up with any good candidates?

He let his anger at social injustices slip away as he breathed deeply of the Cannabis sativa. A spider had spun a web at the base of one of the plants. The spider was yellow with black streaks across its back, and it worked its way toward the center of the web where a struggling fly was tangled in the silken threads. Alex realized it was life in a microcosm, a symbolic play. You buzz around minding your own business, and then suddenly your ass is snared and along comes Reality to suck out your juices.

Just like the goats had sucked the life out of the man in the black hat.

Heavy.

Too heavy to contemplate with a straight head, despite what he'd told Meredith. He just didn't want to smoke with her, because then he'd have to either talk or silence her in bed. The only way to shut up a woman was to stick part of yourself in her. He needed to be alone. He pulled a joint out of his sock and fired it up, not shifting from his yoga seating as he puffed. He began a game of situa tion-problem-solution.

Situation: You had a vision. Nobody else will believe you, be cause you don't belong to any religion of the masses. Well, Meredith will probably believe you, but she believes in Atlantis and UFOs and even Dun/tin 'Fucking Donuts.

Problem: You either keep it to yourself and forget it, or you have to admit that miracles happen.

Solution: Smoke more dope.

He took a deep draw off the joint and held the smoke in his lungs. In his mind's eye, the blue smoke seeped into his blood stream and sent its tendrils into his brain. The drug stimulated him and relaxed him at the same time, one of its contradictions that ap pealed to him and suited his worldview.

Been a long time since you were in Methodist Bible school, but miracles in the Bible sort of had a point to them. Like Jesus with the loaves and fishes so everybody could eat, and Jesus turning water into wine so everybody could get wasted. Far as I can remember, nowhere in the Bible did some dude feed his own ass to the goats.

Alex took another puff. The spider had reached the fly, which must have worn itself out, because it had stopped struggling. Or maybe the fly had sensed the jig was up and could see two dozen copies of the approaching spider through its compound eyes. Alex considered rescuing the fly, playing God, releasing it to go off and eat shit and hatch maggots. But it wasn't right to fuck with Nature. Besides, that would have meant standing up, and his legs had a nice tingle going.

Situation: Weird Dude Walking had to come from somewhere. Miracles don't just crawl down off the top of the mountain in the middle of the Blue Ridge, half a world away from the Red Sea and Egypt and Jerusalem.

Problem: That means Weird Dude was an emissary of some sort. Sent by God or the devil or what the movie trailers call the "dark imagination of M. Night Shyamalan." An emissary sent specifically for you, Alexander Lane Eakins, and for you alone.

Solution: Just because an emissary drags ass to your castle door doesn't mean you have to open up and let him in. Pretend it never happened. Denial is a Good Thing.

The joint was down to an orange roach, and Alex hot-boxed it until it burned his fingertips. He exhaled the smoke so that a blue cloud swept over the spider and the fly. One could get the munchies and the other could die with a shit-eating grin. Seemed to be some sort of circular cosmic justice in that.

He sat until the sparkling edges of his buzz wore off; then he went into the house to ignore Meredith.

Chapter Twenty.

Katy's back ached. She'd ended up sleeping on the couch, unable to face Gordon, much less lie in the same bed. She'd cooked oatmeal for Jett, men walked to the end of the road and waited for the bus with her. Gordon must have arrived late and headed out early. He hadn't even made his usual pot of coffee.

After Jett rode away on the bus, sitting at a rear window and refusing to wave, Katy went back up the gravel drive. As she passed the neighbor's house, she hurried, afraid that Betsy Ward would come out on the porch and try to engage her in conversation. She'd always picked up on a distinct coldness emanating from the woman, as if Katy's big-city accent were somehow alien and even infectious. Plus the Smiths appeared to have a bit of a bad reputation, and Gordon's distant and antisocial manner certainly didn't help. Gordon had warned her that Solom was a little clannish, at least among the families that had owned land here for generations. He assured her attitudes were changing as more outsiders moved in, but she sensed resentment rather than acceptance was the more common response.

No one seemed home at the Wards', so she continued up the long gravel road to the Smith house. As she mounted the steps, she realized with alarm that she still thought of it as the "Smith house," even though by legal rights it was half hers. She put away the blan kets from the couch, cleaned the bedroom, then found herself in the kitchen. It was only ten o'clock, too early for lunch. Besides, with no one else to cook for, she often resorted to an alfalfa-sprout- and-cheese sandwich or a can of vegetable soup. She was digging for a can opener in one of the drawers when she found a handwritten recipe on a dog-eared index card. She recognized the writing; it was done in the same elegant penmanship of the other recipes shed found tucked in books, on the pantry shelves, or amid stacks of dishes. Rebecca's recipe for sweet potato pie.

It sounded like a nice treat to draw the family together over the dinner table. She checked off the items she would need. She had cinnamon, nutmeg, brown sugar, and even whipped cream, but she had no evaporated milk. She could call Gordon at his office and ask him to stop by the grocery store, but she wasn't in the mood to ask a favor, even if the favor was for his benefit too. She would pick it up herself at the general store. That meant she had a four- mile round trip. Might be a nice day to walk, because the weather was clear and fortyish, with the barest whisper of wind. Besides, the house had started to become oppressive. She thought she'd get used to being a housewife again, the way she had been the first two years of Jett's life. But back then, she'd been busy with an infant. With the house to herself all day, she'd become increasingly bored, despite her newly discovered culinary adventures.

She changed into stone-washed jeans, blouse, jacket, and tennis shoes. At the last minute, she decided on a scarf in case the weather changed suddenly, and rummaged around upstairs until she found a green silk scarf that happened to match her eyes. She couldn't re member buying it; perhaps someone had given it to her as a gift and it had been packed away and forgotten. Outside, she made a cursory check of the hens' nests, spying several eggs she would collect for the pie when she got back, assuming she was brave enough. The goats weren't around the barn. They must have been up in the forest, working the underbrush.

She passed the Wards' house again, and this time Arvel's pickup truck was in the driveway. The man himself was checking the fluids in his tractor, which was parked by the barn up behind the house. She waved in what she considered a neighborly fashion. Arvel flipped a grease rag at her, then motioned for her to come to him.

He met her in the driveway. "How ya doing, Mrs. Smith?"

"It's Logan. Katy Logan."

"Oh yeah, that's right." He gave her a one-eyed squint. "Things going good?"

"Fine. A lovely day."

"Sure enough. Taking a walk, are you?"

"Yes. I'm going to the general store."

Arvel rubbed his hands on the grease rag. "Shame Gordon won't set you up with a better car. Him being a professor and all, he's bound to have the money."

"We decided we'd save up for a while and wait for things to set- tie down a little." She didn't want to tell her neighbor that Gordon was turning out to be a control freak. She'd always kept her per sonal life to herself, which might have contributed to the failure of her first marriage. Katy recognized the irony of requiring Jett to undergo drug counseling while she and Mark had never sought marriage counseling. "How's Mrs. Ward?"

"She's in the hospital."

From his tone, he could have been talking about a leaky radia tor. "What's wrong?" Katy asked, hoping she didn't sound snoopy.

"Slipped in the kitchen yesterday and busted her skull. Had a few stitches and a concussion, but the doc said she ought to be home in a few days." He gave an uneven grin. "I always said she was a hardheaded woman."

"I didn't hear any sirens."

"You're a good piece up the road, and there's a stand of pines between our houses. Most neighbors in these parts are kind of on their own."

"I'll have some flowers sent to her room."

"She'd like that. Except no Queen Anne's lace. Betsy's allergic to that."

"Is there anything I can do to help?"

"Nothing can mend her but time. And I'll get along fine myself. I learned to cook on camping trips, and the laundry will keep until she's back on her feet."

"Okay. But come knocking if you need anything."

"I'll do that. Say, I'm driving the tractor up the river road. I have a job tilling up an old burley tobacco field. Want to catch a ride?"

She smiled despite herself. "It might be faster to walk."

"No, really, just climb up here and straddle the P.T.O. box. If you're going to be a mountain woman, you might as well learn the basics. Plus the goats are riled."

"Riled?"

Arvel hesitated, then looked out across the pastures that ran alongside the gravel road. "Uppity. They usually rut in the spring, but for some reason they're tangling here on the front door to winter. They get mighty strange when they're in the fever."

Katy started to chuckle, but something about the man's expres sion stopped her. She remembered her own encounter with Gordon's goat. "Mighty strange" seemed like a good catchall phrase for the odd occurrences that had plagued her over the past few weeks. "Maybe a ride wouldn't be so bad after all," she said.

David Tester sought to live his life according to the words of the Bible. Primitive Baptists didn't hold with the cross, the crucifix, or even pictorial representations of the Lord. Such things were graven images, and therefore false idols. It was God's decision alone to decide which souls were taken to Glory, and God might choose all or none. To leave that choice up to the sinner was an insult to God's power over all things. The best course of a sinner was to live ac cording to the gospel here in this life and assume God had ample room in the next. As the church elder, David served as an example, and even though he avoided temptation when possible, he knew he suffered the sin of pride.

Primitives chose their elders from among the congregation. The position required no formal training. Basically, anyone who heard the call of the Lord would stand up and give it a go, and sometimes would preach for years before being officially selected to lead the church. In the meantime, other elders sought the same position, de pending upon the passion in their hearts. David's own brother Ray had delivered a few sermons, but Ray didn't have the gift of oration that his older brother did. David's biggest regret was that Ray had subsequently left the church, and David's biggest failure was the pride he had felt at being named elder. Ray's chances of reaching heaven were just the same as they had been before, but David sometimes wondered if weakness ran in the Tester blood.

Because Harmon Smith was back, and the only way that could have happened was if the Lord so willed it. David had no magic spells he could invoke, no special dust he could sprinkle, no prayers for strength against enemies. The plain, bald truth of it was God had brought Harmon to Solom for a reason. He almost wished he were a Southern Baptist, so he could believe Harmon was of the devil and therefore had arrived to work against the Lord's purpose. The only comfort David could draw was that God's ways were known to God and should be accepted. Even if you didn't have such faith, God was going to do as he pleased anyway, so it was best to be prepared for the worst.

The question now was whether or not David should try to do anything about Harmon. If the answer was no, then David would go about his business, keep his head down, and let his congrega tion deal with the situation as the Lord so chose. If the answer was yes, then maybe the little valley community of Solom had been chosen as the final showdown, the battleground depicted by the apostle John in the book of Revelation. Maybe the signs had already shown themselves, the seven seals broken, the red dragon risen up from the sea, and all that, and the farmers of Solom had been just plain too busy to notice. The charismatic Baptist sects had made a lot of hay over the signs, and it seemed like, growing up, David had heard almost daily that the end was nigh and the Lord's return was just around the corner. What David could never understand was the fear in the voices of the doomsayers. The Lord's return was a thing to be welcomed, no matter if it rode in on fire, famine, and spilled blood.

But what if the Lord had sent Harmon Smith back as some kind of test? The Old Testament was practically one long test, what with Abraham being ordered to offer up his son on the altar and Job un dergoing terrible trials. Even Jesus Christ had to stand on a plateau and turn down the devil's offer of a shining city laid out before Him, and if God couldn't trust His very own Son to do the right thing, then what chance did David have?

David paused in his work forking mulch over Lillian Rominger's strawberry bed. After the killing frosts, David's landscaping business slowed down, and besides some tree pruning and a side busi ness growing poinsettas in a small greenhouse, he would be scraping by the next few months. Lillian was one of his best customers and kept him busy through November doing odd jobs. She was a Methodist widow, stocky and brusque, but for all that she was attractive and only a decade or so older than David. During the summer, whenever the heat drove him to remove his shirt, she always seemed to pop up with a glass of iced tea. In the autumn, she often worked alongside him, not afraid to get her knees dirty.

Today she was busy feeding the two goats she kept in a pen on her two-acre property. Her place was bordered by two large stretches of pasture but couldn't rightly be considered a farm, though she had numerous flower gardens, with strawberries, blueberries, gooseberries, and a couple of dozen apple trees. She was a postal carrier in the next county and had to work most Saturdays, though she claimed the federal holidays made up for the aggravation. David rested against his pitchfork and watched her sprinkling hay into the pen.

The animals mashed their faces against the wire fencing, greedy for food. One of the goats reared up on its hind legs and nipped her hand.

"Ouch," Lillian said yanking her hand back. David could see the blood even from fifty feet away. He jammed his pitchfork into the remaining heap of mulch in his truck bed and jogged to her side. Lillian's blue eyes were wide and startled.

"You okay?" David asked. He pulled a bandanna from his pocket, thinking he would wrap her wound, but the cloth was sweaty and stiff.

"Blamed creature about took my whole hand off," she said. The skin was broken on three of her knuckles, blood dripping onto her canvas sneakers.

"We'd better get that inside and washed," David said. The goat that had bitten Lillian stood by the fence, chewing hay with a twist of its bearded jaw.

"I'll be okay," she said. "I think he's just worked up because he knows I'm going to geld him."

"Geld him?"

She pulled a circular iron band from her back pocket. There was a clip at one end of the hinged band that allowed it to be opened and closed. "You reach under the billy boy and grab that sack and yank down like this"a"Lillian gave a demonstration that looked as if she was plucking grapes from an ornery vinea""and snap this little puppy up above the twins. The sack rots off in a few weeks, and that musky odor gets a lot more bearable."

David blanched at the thought of having that band clamped on his own testicles. He'd been raised in the ways of farm life, but somehow castration seemed far crueler than slaughtering for meat. Back in his youth, there had been few goats in Solom. It seemed the past few years either the goats had been breeding like rabbits or everyone had simultaneously developed an affinity for the stub born creatures.

"Well, I can see why he got a little testy," David said.

"Odus Hampton told me you can't trust goats this time of year."

David wondered what else Odus had told her and if he should mention his own encounter on the trail above the Smith place. "They've been acting strange lately. Tell me, why did you get yours?"

The goats pressed against the sides of the pen, stomping the dirt with their hooves, as if they were trying to bust out. Lillian wiped her hand on her jeans, then inspected the ragged skin. "Gordon Smith gave them to me. Said I could eat them, milk them, or breed them. Said goats made good pets and that everybody in Solom should have some."

"I don't guess they carry rabies."

"Probably could, if they got bit by a bat or bobcat that was in fected."

The goats retreated to the center of the pen, where Lillian had constructed a makeshift shelter. The billy that Lillian planned to geld lowered its head and ran full-tilt at the fence, denting the wire and jiggling the fence posts. The other goat, the female, which looked pregnant with its swollen belly and dangling teats, bleated frantically. The billy backed up a few steps and hurled itself at the fence again.

"Jesus," Lillian said. "He's gone crazy."

David put an arm around her and pulled her away from the pen. David felt silly fleeing a goat, but something about the mad shine of its eldritch eyes gave him the creeps. Lillian's house was two hundred feet away, so they retreated to David's pickup as the goat continued to batter the fence. They slid into the cab just as the fence gave way and the billy came staggering over the tangled mesh. David expected it to make a direct line to the truck and ram its horns into the sheet metal. Instead, it stopped where Lillian's blood had dripped and began licking at the ground.

"It wanted my blood?" Lillian said, examining the gash on her hand. "What the hell's going on here, David?"

"I've been wondering that myself." He looked in the rearview mirror. He could probably grab the pitchfork before the goat reached him. But then what would he do? Stick it in the creature's ribs? The billy lifted its head from the ground and sniffed the air, then looked directly at David.

"David?" Lillian's tone chilled him.

"He's staying where he is."

"That's not what I mean." She nudged his elbow and he looked through the front windshield. A dozen goats from the neighboring pasture had come down to the barbed-wire boundary and were watching the encounter. David wondered if they had smelled the blood, too, and thought of sharks in the water being thrown into a frenzy.

But these were goats, for God's sake. Livestock. Food. They were technically herbivores but had a reputation for eating tin cans, wool blankets, newsprint, anything they could squeeze down their gullets. As far as David knew, they had never been carnivorous. Then why was he so afraid that the goats would break through the barbed wire and surround the truck?

"Do you have a gun?" he asked Lillian.

"In the house. A little twenty-two pistol to scare off burglars."

"I suggest we head for the house, then."

He turned the ignition key, half expecting the engine to grind over and over without firing, like a scene in a B-grade horror movie. Instead the engine roared to life, he jammed the gearshift into first, and peeled up two strips of mud as he popped out the clutch and spun the rear wheels. David fought an urge to plow over the billy, which stared at him with those oblate pupils boring holes in David's face, as if marking him for later revenge. David brought the truck to a halt beside the porch, and then he and Lillian scram bled inside and slammed the door.

David peeked through the curtains while Lillian retrieved the pistol from her bedroom. The goats in the neighboring pasture had lost interest and scattered across the grass, grazing as before. The billy took a tentative nibble at an apple sapling, then went back to the pen where its mate waited by the shelter. They lay together in the afternoon sunlight, shaking their ears to drive away flies.

"Did what I think happened really happen, or am I going crazy?" Lillian said.

David suddenly felt foolish. Looking out, he found the scene al most pastoral, with the dark green grass, the beds of plants and hi bernating flowers, the far mountains stippled with gray trees. He imagined himself picking up the phone and calling the sheriff's de partment to report a wild animal attack. He could almost hear the dispatcher's voice: "What kind of animal? Bear? Dog? Treed rac- coottf" Ha would bet his truck that "goat" wouldn't make the list.

"Let's get your hand patched up," he said, dropping the curtain on the bizarre world outside, wondering what the book of Revelation had to say about the role of goats in the Apocalypse.

Jett managed to stay straight most of the day. She didn't like stoning at school, especially alone. She wasn't close to any of the other kids, and getting totally roped wasn't as much fun with no body else in class giggling along. But home had gotten so weird, she couldn't imagine trying to get through the evenings without sneak ing a puff or two. Gordon must have had an argument with Mom, because she had slept on the couch. When Mom and Dad were to gether, Dad was always the one who got thrown out of the bed room. That must mean Gordon had some sort of power over Mom.

When Jett got off the bus and walked the quarter mile up the gravel road, neither Mom nor Gordon was home. That was strange, because Mom had been practically glued to the kitchen for the past couple of weeks. But having the house to herself meant she could light up without worrying about getting caught. She went to her room, put her books away, and took a couple of tokes. Then she put on some tunesa"Tommy Keene, Songs from the Film, from her mother's eighties collectiona"and lay back on her bed, grooving to Keene's harmonious and jangling guitar pop. At school, she was all about hard-core Goth glam, but secretly she'd decided songs that basically said "Let's fuck and die" could only get you so far. In fact, the whole Goth thing was getting a little old, and she would probably have outgrown it already if they were still in Charlotte. Here in Solom, though, the look was still an aberration that drew sidelong glances consigning her to an eternity in hell. Plus, it really rammed sand up Gordon's ass, and that was worth a little extra time applying black eyeliner.

Keene was just reaching one of Jett's favorites, "My Mother Looked Like Marilyn Monroe," and her stoned mind adapted it into "My Mother Looked Like Marilyn Manson." Maybe Weird Al Yankovich could do that one sometime.

She reached over to turn the CD player up a notch when she saw the man in the black hat through her window, standing by the barn. He motioned to her, his waxy fingers stiff. The hat shaded his face, but the lower part of his chin showed over the collar of his wool jacket. His skin was the color of clabbered milk.

Jett thought the best plan of action was to get in bed and hide her head under the pillows. If Gordon were here, she could point out the man and say, "See, I told you I wasn't losing it." Except part of her was afraid mat Gordon, like the kids in her class, wouldn't be able to see him. That would serve as proof to Gordon that Jett needed a good, long stretch in the nutter wing of Faith Hospital in Boone. Lockdown wouldn't keep away the man in the black hat, though; hallucinations had a way of ignoring doors and windows.

Jett was about to turn away when the man tilted his head to look up at the window. More of the face was revealed, a dark line of lips, sunken cheeks. The fingers moved again, beckoning. Jett shook her head.

The man began walking toward the house, moving with brittle steps. The grass wilted where his shadow fell. When he reached the fence, he didn't climb over or slow down. Instead, he seemed to pass through the wire, though at no time did he appear transparent.

Jett turned over her racing thoughts, trying to find something important. She hadn't locked the front door. But who was she kidding? If it passed through wire, a door would be no problem. She could dial 911, but then what would she say? A cheese-faced dude in creepy clothes was breaking into the house?