The Influence (25 page)

She hadn’t told Don what had happened—he just would’ve gotten himself worked up and that wouldn’t have done anybody any good—but now every time she came by, she worried that Cameron was going to be out there again. 

She’d always hated that man, and now she was afraid of him, too.  

As impossible as it might seem today, she knew that at one time Cameron Holt had been someone’s baby, someone’s cute little boy. He’d probably watched cartoons and played with toys, and maybe when he’d had a nightmare, his mommy had gone into his bedroom to reassure him. “I started out as a child,” Bill Cosby had said on one of her mom’s old records that Jeri had listened to as a kid, and that was the truth of it.
Everyone
started out as a child, and it was only on the way to adulthood that paths diverged, that some turned out to be saints, some turned out to be assholes and the vast majority of people ended up somewhere in-between. 

She navigated by landmark and knew she had reached the eastern end of Cameron’s vast holdings when she saw the familiar water tank and adjacent rusted tractor. But there was something new here today, and she slowed down, peering through the windshield.  

What the hell was that? 

She stopped the car. Scarecrows had been put up in Cameron Holt’s field.  

Even at a casual glance, there seemed something disturbing about them. That field had been fallow for as long as she could remember—Cameron was a rancher not a farmer—and the figures were not spaced throughout the pasture but were lined up in a row along the edge of the fence, facing the highway. They were not uniform, but were of different shapes and sizes, wearing different types of clothes. 

They looked real. 

Jeri didn’t want to think about that. 

She rolled the car forward slowly, until she was even with the first of the figures.  

She remembered, years ago, when she was in high school, renting a video with a couple of her friends, a horror movie about a deranged farmer who killed people and installed their bodies in his cornfield as scarecrows.  

Why was that even in her head? That obviously wasn’t what was going on here. 

Was it? 

The scarecrows, she could see now, were made of clay or mud. She looked out the window at the one nearest her. This close, the detail of the face was clearly visible, so meticulously wrought that it resembled an actual person. The hands, too, she noticed, were realistically shaped from the mud, like a sculpture. She got out of the car for a closer look. She could even see an expression on the brown grainy face: anger.  

How could mud be posted on a pole? Jeri wondered. The figures couldn’t be nailed there, and she saw no ropes or twine. What was holding them up? 

She stepped up to the fence, staring over it at the raised figure. She still didn’t understand the purpose of these scarecrows. There weren’t any crops to protect, and there weren’t even many birds to scare away. What was the point? Why had Cameron put them up? She glanced down the row, and a chill passed through her. 

Had the second one been facing straight ahead a moment ago, looking toward the road? 

Because its head was now turned in her direction. 

They were
all
turned toward her, she noticed, and, heart pounding, she backed slowly toward the car, keeping her eyes on the row of scarecrows, alert for any sign of movement. Her rear bumped against the car door, and she quickly fumbled for the handle, opening the door, hurrying inside and locking it. 

She knew about the thing in Cameron’s smokehouse, the
angel,
as everyone called it, and she wondered if it was in any way connected with these eerie effigies. People told her that the angel had great power, even though it was dead, and several individuals on her route had been the victims of mysterious circumstance. It hadn’t affected her or Don, but then again she was afraid to look at things too closely. It was said that the angel turned good luck bad and bad luck good, and it was true that weird things along those lines had been happening since New Year’s eve. Roscoe Evanrude’s celebrated mineral spring had run dry overnight, while Jackass McDaniels’ ridiculous mine had yielded gold. Dave and Lita’s hens had stopped laying, while Mary Mitchum’s long-dead apple tree was suddenly full of blossoms.  

Jeri started the car, put it into gear. Ahead, a man was walking toward her down the road, a man holding a large bunch of balloons that were sagging above his head, half-deflated. An odd sight at any time, it was downright creepy under the circumstances.
Where had he come from?
she wondered.  

The man, she saw as she approached, was Paul Coburn, that rich nerd with the bimbo wife who’d decided to slum it in Magdalena for some strange reason. He was filthy, wearing torn raggedly clothes, but he was smiling at her. On the satellite radio, Johnny Cash was singing about “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” Jeri maneuvered around the balloon man, not making eye contact, speeding up as soon as she passed him. 

Glancing in her rearview mirror, she saw a gap in the line of scarecrows. 

One of them had come off its pole. 

She floored the gas pedal, fishtailing for a second before the tires caught, and sped away, topping seventy on the narrow dirt road as she hauled ass toward town. She flew past Cameron’s drive and the dented mailbox at its head without stopping. 

New rule,
she decided. She was no longer going to deliver the ranch route. If Cameron and the other ranchers wanted to pick up their mail, they could come to her house. She’d set up afternoon hours for them. If the postal service didn’t like it, they could find someone else to do her job. But she was
not
driving out here again. 

She did not look any more in her rearview mirror, and she did not slow down until she reached Margo Hynde’s place at the edge of town.  

**** 

The setting sun was already half-hidden behind a hill, and Tax Stuart glanced nervously toward the east. He still had another forty minutes until the landfill closed, and by that time it would be dark. 

He didn’t like working here when it was dark. 

He turned up the CD player in the weigh-station booth. Long shadows were forming between the piles of refuse and in the pit, and while the brush pile had been burned and the fire was out, smoke still hung heavy over that section of the dump, making the area even gloomier. 

He was thinking of changing the landfill’s hours so he wouldn’t have to be here when the sun went down. He knew it was childish and irrational, but though this fear had only started recently, it had become a growing concern, and for the past week he’d dreaded coming to work each morning, knowing what awaited him at the end of the day. If he could afford to do so, he’d hire another worker, have
him
close up, but unless the population around here drastically increased, that wasn’t going to happen. 

Tax looked to the left, hoping to spot the telltale dust cloud that meant someone else was coming to dump trash or yard waste at the landfill.  

Nothing.  

Looking to the right, he saw that the shadows had grown and lengthened from even a few moments previously. The entire far side of the pit was now so engulfed in murk that he could barely see it. Closer in, near the mounds of rubbish that had been dumped this week, shadows within the shadows moved. They had to be rats, but not all of them
looked
like rats, and he was afraid to go out and check for fear of what he might find. 

The CD ended. From somewhere nearby, there was a high birdlike whistle, and for the first few seconds, he thought it
was
a bird. But the phrase went on too long, a song not a fragment, and it actually seemed to have a tune. There was no one here but him, and, frowning, he peered through the sliding window to see if he could determine the source. He saw nothing, and he opened the door behind him to peer out the back but saw nothing unusual there, either. The whistling continued, the sound becoming increasingly disconcerting. 

He thought of that thing they’d accidentally shot out of the sky on New Year’s Eve, shivering at the recollection of it. He knew what Father Ramos and everyone said it was, but he’d helped carry it into the smokehouse, and if that thing was an angel, it was an angel from Hell. He’d always been one to laugh at those liberal pansies in places like New York and Los Angeles, where politicians passed laws against shooting off guns to ring in the new year, but he wished now that there’d been such a law on the books here in Cochise County. Maybe not everyone would’ve abided by it, but some of them would have, and one might have been the guy who shot the fatal bullet. 

It was that angel creature that was the reason he was so spooked out here now when it started to get dark. He’d
dreamed
about that thing, and those nightmares had left him feeling like a five-year-old boy coming out of an R-rated horror movie. He’d been going to mass every Sunday morning and Wednesday evening since it happened, praying for his soul the way Father Ramos told him he should, but God wasn’t giving him much strength these days. 

Tax saw movement out of the corner of his eye and turned back toward the window. 

Where a small shriveled hand was reaching up and placing a dirty coin on the narrow shelf in front of the sliding glass. 

He cried out in surprise and fear, immediately backing up, his heart hammering crazily in his chest. The whistling was louder now, and it was obviously coming from the thing in front of the booth. Whatever it was, it was too short to reach the window, and he was glad that the shelf was there to block it from his sight. That shriveled little hand was creepy enough by itself, and he did
not
want to see what it was attached to. 

The hand withdrew, leaving the coin, and the whistling lessened in volume as whatever it was moved away. Tax was breathing hard, and he quickly turned around, realizing he had not locked the door behind him. Leaning over quickly, he did so, just as there was a faint knock on the thin wood. 

He held his breath as though trying to fool the thing into believing he wasn’t there. He had never been so scared in his life. 

The knock came again, slightly stronger this time, and with it, the whistling, muffled by the closed door. 

Had he heard that tune before? It seemed to him that he had. 

Tax took out his cell phone, but it had been acting up lately, and of course this was one of those times when it was on the blink. In fact, it didn’t even turn on at all; the battery appeared to be dead. 

He heard a new noise, and was surprised to find that it was coming from his own mouth as he hummed along to the whistled tune. He stopped humming and clapped a hand over his mouth the way a cartoon character would.
It knows I’m here,
he thought wildly.  

Obviously.  

That’s why it was trying to get in
. 

There was a fusillade of pounding on the door, and a small fist broke through the cheap wood—the same shriveled little hand that had left the coin on the shelf. Thinking fast, Tax kicked the door open and made a run for it, dashing out even as the creature connected to that horrible hand tried to disengage itself from the door. He didn’t look back, not wanting to see, but made a beeline for his Jeep, only a few yards away on the side of the shack. 

The whistling was loud, filling the air around him, and if he hadn’t had to get to his vehicle so quickly, he would have plugged his ears with his fingers. But there was no time for wasted movement or extraneous thought, and he reached the Jeep, pulled the key out of his pocket, jumped in and started that mother up. 

He wished he’d driven his pickup today—he’d feel a hell of a lot safer locked inside a cab than out in the open air—but this provided easy access and quick maneuverability, and he backed up, spun the car around— 

—and saw what was after him. 

It was a creature of the dump, with discarded wig hair and torn mismatched clothes. The size of a small child, it appeared to be female and was holding a tattered purse by its frayed strap. Beneath the castoff trappings, the face and body were brown and wrinkled with the dehydrated look of beef jerky. It pointed at him. 

And the Jeep’s engine died. 

Tax tried frantically to restart the vehicle, turning the key in the ignition, as the little creature waddled toward him on unsteady legs, still pointing. 

Could there be more of them?
He didn’t know, didn’t even have any idea what it
was,
but judging by the way it moved, he was pretty sure he could outrun it, and rather than continue trying to start the Jeep as the monster continued to approach, he decided to make a run for it. Pulling out the key, he leapt out and sped toward the road as fast as his feet would carry him.  

From overhead, a crow swooped down, whistling the tune that was still issuing from the wrinkled mouth of the waddling creature. Other birds charged out of the sky, coming from nowhere, all of them whistling that maddening melody. One of them clawed the top of his head, another pecked the back of his neck, still others attacked his back. Crying out in pain, he tried to keep going but was engulfed in a whirling fury of feather and wing, talon and beak. Attempting to bat the birds away, he tripped over an unseen rock or piece of refuse and fell hard on his side, still trying to fend off the avian attack. Pecked and clawed relentlessly, it was all he could do to protect his face. He rolled over, turtling up duck-and-cover style. 

And then the birds were gone. 

He pulled his hands off his head, looked up to make sure it was safe— 

And stared into the shriveled face of his whistling pursuer. This close, he could see the deepset empty eyesockets, the snakelike holes where a nose should be, the grim line of the lipless mouth. The wig was gone, and so was the purse, but he recognized the raggedy clothes as belonging to one of Linda Ferber’s kids. It lent the monster the appearance of an evil dwarf, and for all he knew, that’s exactly what it was. He tried to get up and run away, but that skinny arm reached out to hold him down, and the same tiny hand that had left the coin on the shelf grabbed a hank of his hair.