"All I know is the billy goats don't like it when you talk about gelding them," Lillian said, holding up her injured hand.

"Hold on a minute, folks," Sue said. "I can accept that the Circuit Rider is real. After all, every legend has a basis in fact. And I'll even buy that goats are evil. I mean, with those creepy eyes and cloven hooves, how could anybody think otherwise? And let's assume 'its hour come round,' as the Yeats poem goes, and Solom is our backwoods Bethlehem. After all, the battle of Armageddon has to start somewhere. The question is, what do we do about it?"

They all looked at each other, except Lillian, who was staring into the bottom of her coffee cup as if the answer were spelled out there. "I reckon we have to find a way to take down the Circuit Rider," Odus said. "We have to figure out what he wants, then give it to him and make him go away."

"What if he wants us all to suffer like starving dogs on a slow trip to hell?" Ray said.

"Revenge," David said. "He might hold the people of Solom re sponsible for his death, and his spirit can't rest in peace."

"Maybe he's looking for his horse," Lillian offered.

"What I think," Odus said, "and I can't blame him because I kind of feel the same way, and I've only been here thirty-eight years instead of two hundred, is he's come to clean house. If he's really been around all this time, he's probably sick of flatlanders coming up here and building on our ridgetops, crowding the valley with their SUVs and bluegrass festivals, flushing their shit in the river. I'd bet he's just homesick, and since it looks like God won't let him into heaven and the devil doesn't have the room to spare, old Harmon's stuck here and decided to take on Solom as a fixer- upper."

"And he's doing it by killing tourists?" Sue said.

"Well, he's been killing us for years and years," Odus said. "Maybe he's decided he needs to hurry things along now, because of all the growth. So he goes after the rest of us, probably trimming back to the handful of families that were around when he first came to Solom."

"The only problem with that theory is he's a tourist just like the rest of us," David said. "You can't turn back the clock."

"You can't come back from the dead, either."

Sarah suddenly felt all alone, even in the presence of company. She imagined the general store under the great, crushing weight of night. Despite the ticking woodstove, a chill settled into her brittle bones. Darkness pressed against the window, and the porch light did little to scare it off. Black was every color rolled into one, they said and when everything bled together it made just the one color, the absence of light. And it looked like there was going to be plenty of bleeding going on.

A clatter arose from the front of the store, near the register. She'd turned off the lights as she usually did at closing time, and the corners of the store were cloaked in shadows.

"Who's there?" she said. Nobody could have broken in without her hearing. But somehow the goat had passed through these walls, and a man who could command goats and defy the grave probably wouldn't be considerate enough to knock. Besides, he'd already paid her a visit once.

The Circuit Rider stepped into the light. He held a pack of Beechnut chewing tobacco in his hand, and as they watched, he slowly peeled the foil pack open and shoved a moist wad into his mouth, shreds of the dark tobacco dribbling down his chin to the floor. The brim of his hat was turned low, but the bottom half of his face was waxen and milk-colored, not as ghostly as when Sarah had first seen him. His mouth was filled with broad, blunt teeth, like those of a grazing animal.

"Put it on my tab, Sarah," he said grinding the tobacco with his jaws, his voice cob-rough and deep.

"What business you got here in Solom?" said Odus, the first of them to recover.

"No business, just pleasure," he said.

A whinny came from outside, near the front of the store. The Circuit Rider plucked a Macintosh apple out of a bushel basket. He polished it against the sleeve of his black wool jacket. "There's pleasure in the fruits of your labors."

Lillian spilled her coffee and Odus backed up until he bumped into the woodstove. David had risen half out of his chair and stood there, bent over as if he'd been flash-frozen. Sarah thought about the shotgun under the cash register, but it was still covered by newspapers.

"Nice of you folks to hold this little get-together for my sake," he said.

"We don't want nothing from you," Odus said. "We just want to be left alone. We're willing to let you rest in peace."

"Love your enemies, right, Elder David? Bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you." The Circuit Rider gave a laugh that held no humor, with just the hint of a hell wind behind it. He shot a thick stream of tobacco onto the pine floorboards, causing Sarah to wince. Touching the brim of his hat, he dipped his head slightly, as if nodding to the ladies.

"Sorry to rush off, but I have work waiting in the orchards of life," he said. He went to the door, his boots loud on the wood, then opened it and went outside, merging into the darkness from which he'd come. From which they all had come, and to which they were inevitably bound.

Hooves thundered down the asphalt road, and the six people sat in silence, afraid to give words to their fear. Eventually, Sarah went to get a rag and mop up the tobacco juice. By the time she reached the spot by the register, the dark stain had vanished, as elusive as the creature that had left its mark.

Chapter Twenty-three.

Katy was elbow-deep in dirty dishes when the back door swung open. Gordon must have forgotten to lock it, and the wind was picking up, skating leaves against the side of the house, sending cold air against her bare legs. She realized with a start that she wasn't wearing panties, and she must have changed into the autum nal-print dress sometime after dinner. She put a soapy hand to her forehead. What was happening to her memory?

The wind skirled the pantry curtains. The pantry. What about it? Something had happened in there. Not just broken pickle jars and hidden recipes, but a secret as old as the Smiths.

Yeah, sure, sounds pretty melodramatic.

But she was attuned to melodrama. After all, she'd married a man on what amounted to a whim, she'd tossed away her past and her career and settled for a housewife role in a mountain commu nity where the women were valued as good cooks and compliant bed partners. Not that the bed part had been much of a challenge, with Gordon content to fall asleep reading research books while she waited for him to doze so she could masturbate. Something was wrong, a deep part of herself knew, but she was caught up in the small rhythms of daily life and had surrendered herself to them. Surrender was good, surrender was easy. A man to provide, leaving her free to focus on raising a family...

Jett.

She flung the suds from her fingers and went to the back door. Jett should be upstairs studying. Had Gordon sent her out to do chores? Surely not on a night like this, not when Jett was acting so strangely.

She stepped out on the back porch and looked around the farm. The barn made black angles against the purple sunset. A white shape moved beyond the fence, then another. Goats. Gordon's damned goats. She shuddered and stepped inside, drawing me door tight and fastening the dead bolt.

"Katy."

She spun, looking toward the foyer, which was the only other entrance to the kitchen. "Gordon?"

But it couldn't have been Gordon. This was a female. And the voice was near.

Coming from the pantry.

Katy yanked the curtains, nearly pulling down me bar that held the checkered fabric. The smell of crushed lilacs overwhelmed her, intoxicating enough to make her head spin. "Who's mere?"

"Come inside." The whisper was an Arctic breeze, a frozen scalpel, a long, cold fingernail down the nape of her neck.

The pantry was empty. Katy wasn't sure whether she was imagining voices or whether a ghost lived in her kitchen. The imaginary voice sounded like a more practical, though possibly more unnerv ing, option. Because how would a ghost know her name?

A pint jar of stewed tomatoes fell on its side on one of the waist-high shelves, rolling with gritty purpose. Katy reached to catch it, but it slipped between her fingers, shattering on the floor, throwing me seasoned smell of basil and oregano in the air to join the lilac. The sprayed viscera of tomato pulp glistened against the broken glass. Among the wreckage was a metal object, smeared red by the juice.

Katy knelt, careful not to cut herself on the glass, and fished out me object. It was a bronze key, pocked by the acid from the tomato juice. She could imagine a ring, or perhaps a measuring spoon, being accidentally dropped into a jar during high-pressure canning, but a key?

"Katy?" This time the voice was Gordon's, booming from the living room. For some reason, Katy felt the key held a secret meant only for her. It was such an obvious metaphor, and she had come to think of the pantry as her domain, part of the kitchen she'd come to love.

"Yes?" She clutched the key in her fist so that it was hidden.

"Where's that daughter of yours?"

"Isn't she upstairs in her room?"

"I didn't hear her come in from feeding the goats. She's proba bly out there shooting up heroin."

God, how long had it been? She tried to remember Jett going out the front door, but her mind was blank. Considering the stack of dirty dishes and the leftovers being put away, Jett must have been gone at least half an hour. "Will you go check on her?"

"I've got a faculty report to get to the dean tomorrow. Departmental politics."

Katy wiped her hands, opened the odds-and-ends drawer, and slid the key into an envelope of pumpkin seeds. She pulled out a penlight and went out the back door, the wind chilling her bare legs. The goats were gathered at the back side of the barn, probably eating the hay Jett had thrown down from above.

Passing through the gate, she called Jett's name, but the wind and the low murmuring of the goats smothered her voice. The pen light did little against the darkness, and she dreaded climbing the narrow wooden stairs into the loft. The hens clucked uneasily, dis turbed in their nests.

"Just like last time," came the voice she'd heard in the pantry. Or it might have been the breeze whistling under the eaves of the tin roof.

Just like which last time? Katy thought.

"The time Jett freaked out, and you found her in the barrel."

Maybe she was imagining a voice, but this voice was insistent, and the words tugged at her memory. The door was open, which probably meant Jett was inside. Gordon was a stickler for closing gates and doors, and hammered his point home at every chance. Jett wouldn't have left the door open despite her rebellious streak, because the bitterness of the punishment more than offset the plea sure of the crime.

Though the inside of the barn shielded the bulk of the wind, the open room was cold. She ran the penlight over the wall. The scare crow hung on its nail, grinning in sleep. The back door was open as well, and the cluster of goats gave off a strong, musky odor. She hesitated afraid of them, the moon shining on their curled horns.

"Get the fuck away from me, Fred," Jett yelled. She was among the goats, and must have risen to her knees because the top of her head was on level with those of the goats.

Katy ran among the goats, flailing the penlight as if it were a weapon. "Shoo, damn it," she said, pushing at the animals, careful of the flashing horns as the animals bucked and started. There were so many of them. It seemed as if the flock had swelled dramatically in just the last few days. She finally reached Jett and pulled her to her feet, and they backed away from the goats.

The animals fell quiet and still, all eyes on Katy and Jett as they retreated into the barn. The goats stared with interest (hunger, thought Katy) until Katy threw her weight against the barn door and it began its groaning path along its track. The goats hesitated then moved forward as one, not in a rush but with purpose. Katy slammed the door home and took Jett's arm.

"Are you okay, honey? What happened?"

"I fell. I don't know. I saw something up mere." Jett's gaping, tear-flooded eyes rolled toward me loft. "The scarecrow..."

"The scarecrow's hanging on me wall, honey. See?" Katy di rected me light toward me spot near the stairs. The scarecrow was gone.

"Let's get out of here, before the goats come around front."

They linked arms and jogged out of me barn, not stopping to close the door. Let Gordon be pissed. He could come outside and deal with it himself. They were his damned goats, after all.

They reached the gate, and Katy fumbled with me latch. The goats had come around me barn but were not in pursuit. They stood in that mocking, silent way, working their hooves back and forth under the moonlight.

"Jeez, mere's so many of them," Jett said.

"I shouldn't have let you come out here alone."

"Mom, I'm freaking out."

"I know, baby. We'll get you tucked in and everything will be all right. We'll get through this together."

"What about the scarecrow? He was walking around, he smiled at me, hea""

"There's no scarecrow, honey."

They headed to the porch, the scent of manure and brown oak leaves riding the wind. Katy looked back at the barn. The goats still watched, their dark noses lifted and ears twitching as if they were awaiting some unspoken command. Katy shivered and led Jett into the house. As soon as the door closed, she was overcome by the scent of lilacs and tomatoes and forgot all about the goats.

Alex surveyed the perimeter from the small glass windows along the front of his house. All clear for now, and Meredith was waiting the night shift at the Ruby Tuesday in Titusville. He finally had time to ponder his encounter of the day before, not distracted by her silly needs.

Goats as government conspiracy. It finally made sense to Alex. That's just how they would do it, come at him in the most unpre dictable way possible. If only he had an Internet connection, he could go into some of the freedom organization chat rooms and learn from the fighters on the front lines. But he had no doubt the government was tapped into every Web server in the country, and that in big underground caverns near Washington, D.C., FBI agents sat before banks of computers, monitoring every e-mail.

If the government was behind the whole thing, then the man in the black suit must be some sort of genetic freak, the result of a se cret experiment gone wrong. The fact that he was prowling near the Eakins compound meant only one thing: they were on to him. Four years of tax evasion wasn't that serious of a crime, not when Congress was stealing billions, but it was the principle of the thing. They didn't care about the money, they just didn't want word to get out that the government could be cheated and was therefore vulnerable. What better way to catch your enemy off guard than to come disguised as a backwoods preacher?

Except this preacher had been eaten alive. Even if he was an FBI agent in disguise, such a stunt took some effort. Maybe they had used some sort of hologram. Classic brainwashing technique involved challenging the subject's notion of reality and eventually replacing reality with the desired set of beliefs. Alex nodded to himself, finished twisting a pinkie-sized joint, and lit up. He liked that answer better. Sure, he was paranoid, and like any freethinking man, he had good reason. But he wasn't crazy.

With the joint hanging from lips a la Bogart in Casablanca, he made his way to the back room, a space barely larger than a walk- in closet. He unlocked the two Case dead bolts and entered, search ing for the candles he kept on an overhead shelf. Lighting one, he stood before his shrine: a wall covered with small arms firepower. His pride and joy was an AKR submachine gun, a favorite deadly toy of the Russian Special Forces that held 160 rounds. Alex had traded four pounds of seedless buds for the short-barreled gun, worth about eight grand on the street. The lethal and compact grace of the gun appealed to him as much as its country of origin. Not that the Russians could be trusted either, but at least they were more sincere in their oppression.

Then there was the Swiss SIG 510 assault rifle. The good old Swiss claimed neutrality, but during every war of note, the country served as a clearinghouse for whatever loot happened to be pil laged by the victor. The Swiss made their weapons with all the love and precision they invested in their watches and chocolate. With bayonet, the rifle made a nasty but sleek package.

A row of well-polished handguns lay spread across a velvet- covered shelf. A Mauser C-96 was the centerpiece. No hidden arse nal was complete without a piece of German hardware. It was an older model, manufactured between the two World Wars, but it had a heft and sheen that justified its place in the collection, though he'd only been able to procure two ten-round clips for it. The Germans were arguably the most militaristic people in modern history, ex cept perhaps for the Japanese, Montana freedom fighters, and Republican presidents.

He owned an Austrian-made Glock, a weapon currently in favor with police officers, though he preferred the proven accuracy of the Colt Python. Occasionally, Americans mustered up some pride in their craftsmanship, and the Colt had pedigree. The Beretta resuited from a sense of romanticism only, because he'd never bet his life on something Italian, unless it was manicotti or a young Sophia Loren. He owned a few other sidearms, a couple of M-l practice grenades a staff sergeant had smuggled out of Ft. Bragg, and a Mossberg twenty-gauge shotgun. The collection also included the Pearson Freedom bow, which retailed at around six hundred dollars, unless you happened to be swapping grass for it. As for arrows, he went with Easton, mostly because he'd known a kid named Easton growing up in Chapel Hill. An array of knives completed the collection, though they were mostly for show. Alex wouldn't have invested in all that hardware if he was interested in hand-to-hand combat.

The other walls of the room held posters, antiestablishment stuff, an Abbie Hoffman portrait, psychedelic posters of nothing in particular, an art print of Che Guevara, the Cuban revolutionary who was as famous for his beret as for his celebrity death photos. Richard Nixon, the patron saint of all latter-day paranoiacs, glowered down with his sharp nose and sinister eyebrows.

As he had done in the well-lighted shed where his marijuana grew, Alex sat cross-legged before the wall that held his weapons. He sucked the joint down until it burned his lower lip; then he pinched it out and swallowed the roach. You couldn't leave evi dence lying around not when they might be closing in. He shut his eyes and enjoyed the silence, the Python cool in his lap. When the government agents came, he'd be ready.

Chapter Twenty-four.

Mose Eldreth turned on the lights in the church, wanting to fin ish his carpentry work before tomorrow's service. He planned to stain the woodwork he'd installed, then coat it with polyurethane, but didn't want the congregation swooning from the fumes. If there was any swooning going on, he wanted it to be because of the ser mon. He had a good one mapped out, based on the book of Revelation. Harmon Smith's return had served as inspiration.

Mose wasn't afraid to be in the church alone at night. The House of the Lord was the best sanctuary a man could hope for, even in uncertain times. Especially in uncertain times. Solom Free Will Baptist Church had ended up with a chunk of the Circuit Rider's legacy, in the form of one of the preacher's three graves. Mose didn't know what fate had befallen the Circuit Rider, but legend said preachers from three different congregations had conspired to slay old Harmon out in the woods. Sort of like Brutus and the gang teaming up on Julius Caesar. Like the Bible said, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, even if it happens to be the business end of a back-stabbing knife.

Odus had tried to lure Mose into meeting with a handful of other people at the general store. Mose didn't see any sense in it. Especially when he found out the Tester brothers would be there. David Tester's Primitive Baptist beliefs were sending a good two dozen people to hell, because they refused to get on their knees and do what it took to earn salvation. Sure, they'd get down there and wash each other's feet, then think themselves all humble and pure, but they believed it was up to the Lord to determine who was saved from eternal hellfire. By their reckoning, all folks were hopeless of their own accord. Damnedest thing. At least the congregation of the True Light Tabernacle, as slick as they were with their modern Good News Bible and electric organ, knew there was only one path to Glory, and that way was strait and the gate was narrow.

Mose flexed his back. After Odus had left, Mose had run another thirty feet of baseboard. He had a touch of rheumatism, but he wouldn't complain, not in the house of he who had suffered the agonies of the cross. Later, in his own bed, he could dwell on mortal discomforts. For now, he was in sacred service, and his hammer was a tool of the Lord.

As he set the last two nails on a corner piece, the hammer blows reverberated in the rafters. Mose went into the vestry to get the broom and dustpan. He couldn't have the congregation tracking sawdust everywhere, nor sneezing through the sermon. Mose was leaving the vestry when the church's front door banged open. A breeze skirled the sawdust, filling the air with the scent of pine and the night forest outside.

"Odus?" Maybe the man had forgotten a tool or had stopped by to see if Mose needed any more help. Or, more likely, to report on the meeting. Mose didn't want to know what those people thought. The Circuit Rider was beyond any of them. The Circuit Rider had a purpose, just like all of God's creations.

Something stirred outside, low sounds arising from the small cemetery. Mose leaned the broom against the lectern and picked up the hammer, comforted by its weight in his hand. He wasn't exactly afraid of Harmon Smith, but the Lord helped those who helped themselves.

The preacher walked down the aisle, as slow as a reluctant groom. He could use this fear in his sermon tomorrow, drum up some dread and paint an image of the everlasting lake of fire, where those who didn't accept the Lord as savior were doomed to be cast forever. Yes, fear was important, but bravery was a key part of the whole deal, too. The "valley of the shadow" and all that.

"Do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil," he said. Beyond the open door, the night was clear, stars winking on the horizon, those higher up fixed like holes in a black curtain. The trees that crowded the cemetery stood against the wind, leaves scratching at bark. In the gaps of the forest, lesser patches of shadow moved among the trunks. A low fog had arisen, laying a moist gray wreath along the tops of the gravestones.

The mist had a peculiar quality and was different from the usual autumn fogs. Each fall, mountain folks counted the number of late fogs and used them to predict the number of snows due in the com ing winter. But fog was supposed to be gray white, and this one had coils of black smut in it. The air stank of rotten eggs.

The fog appeared to be confined to the cemetery, as if laying down a cover so bad business could take place. It was thickest over the spot where pieces of Harmon Smith were buried, the Free Will congregation's share of its long-ago shame and triumph. Except Harmon's murder had been a triumph for the Lord, and worthy of rejoicing over. Why, then, was foul smoke seeping up from the crazy old preacher's grave?