Read Online Drummer Boy: A Supernatural Thriller by Scott Nicholson - Free Book Online

couldn’t do a thing about it except pray.
    Hardy cocked an ear. Sometimes it sounded like breathing, which he could chalk up to the wind slipping between cracks in the stone. Sometimes it sounded like a deep and faint heartbeat, like when the doctor put the stethoscope to Pearl’s swollen belly and let him listen to the life inside. Other times, it was the rumble of a nightmare train rolling up from the depths of Hell. Now it resembled the drone of an International Harvester reaping hay, chugging black air and chewing up whatever the ground had to offer.
    Except the noise wasn’t coming from the Hole.
    The kids were out of sight, so Hardy figured he’d put a little distance from himself and the oily throat of the cave. He’d been inside the place as a kid, several times, it was practically a rite of passage in these parts, but he’d never stayed for more than a minute and each time he’d emerged with the feeling that he’d donned a second skin, a black film that even a plunge in the creek couldn’t wash clean.
    Anyone who stood too long looking into that place, or listening to the mad music of the Earth’s hidden secrets, would end up like Bennie Hartley, who’d been found lying half in the Hole, stone dead from a heart attack, his legs lying in the shadows as if he hadn’t quite reached the sunlight in time.
    Hardy circled the rocky knob that housed the cave, expecting to meet up with the sheriff. The rumbling engine grew louder, a thing of the real world and not some confabulation of a superstitious mountaineer. A vehicle was droning up the path on the west side of the mountain, moving through the woods where construction crews had carved the first dark stretch of road into the slope. The vehicle was big and slow, cracking saplings, the engine hiccupping as it powered over stumps and rocks.
    Hardy moved between the tangles of rhododendron. The sheriff must have already cleared the scene, meaning Hardy would have to hoof it all the way back home without benefit of a lift. That meant nobody had been shot; otherwise, the place would have been crawling with rescue personnel and sirens would fill the valley below.
    Unless the monster climbing Mulatto Mountain is some newfangled kind of emergency vehicle, sucking down taxpayer diesel.
    It rolled out of a stand of underbrush 100 feet below Hardy, its black crash grill pocked with broken branches. The customized silver Humvee rode five feet off the ground, sitting on tires that were fatter than a killing-season sow. The SUV was girded with roll bars, looking more like a cage designed to hold a rabid rhinoceros than a mode of conveyance. The windshield was tinted, but there was only one man in Titusville who would dare operate such a shitty and showy hunk of rubber and steel.
    The Humvee roared into a stretch of grassland, a bald where the high winds kept trees from taking root. In the vehicle’s wake, the vegetation had been flattened and Hardy could see almost to the end of the newly graveled access road. Looked like Phase II of the Mulatto Mountain rehabilitation project was well underway.
    Hardy raised a hand to the tinted driver’s-side window. It descended and Bill Willard’s round face broke into a grin. If his skin were shaded just a little more toward orange, he’d have made a dandy Halloween jack-o-lantern. As it was, he flashed jagged teeth that even the best in modern dental care couldn’t shape up and set square. Though the teeth were white, the eyes above them were every bit as black as the inside of a pumpkin, or the Jangling Hole for that matter.
    “You Eggerses are all the same,” Bill said. “Can’t let it go. You’re all pissed because your property got chopped up and sold off over the years. But if your ancestors hadn’t liked screwing so much, there wouldn’t have been so many heirs.”
    Hardy didn’t have an answer to that, because it was true. An Eggers male would stick his pecker into just about anything, as attested by his own