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

face the appearance of a hell-spawned demon. As the match burned low, Vernon Ray lit another and bent low, looking for tracks. Though the light didn’t penetrate much of the cave, the muddy floor appeared to show only their two sets of footprints.
    “I don’t see nothing now,” Bobby said.
    “Maybe you heard a fox or something. Or bats.”
    “It was a soldier.”
    “It’s dark in here. Easy for your imagination to run wild.”
    I’m trying to talk you out of it because I want to believe it so bad.
    Bobby turned away, toward the back of the cave. Vernon Ray looked over his shoulder, stepping closer, toward his friend’s comforting body heat. A solid wall of murk stood before them, and somewhere beyond it lay the bones of soldiers. Vernon Ray could picture the pale skeletons, bones picked clean by vermin, mold and moss sinking spores into the dried marrow. Whatever Bobby had seen, it was best to let it rest in peace in this stifling tomb.
    “Let’s get out of here,” Vernon Ray said, lighting a third match and holding it until it nearly burned his fingers. Despite his academic assessment of Appalachian tectonics, the walls looked fragile, rock stacked on a whim, glistening with the moist sweat of the world. He could imagine primordial reptiles slithering in its crevices, the first furry creatures huddling for cover.
    Bobby pointed toward a dark stain on the wall, a splotch of faintly fluorescent indigo. “That looks like dinosaur crap.”
    The air was ripe with must and decomposition, as if the cave were in constant decay, the world rotting from the inside out. Stones were bones, after all, just dying at a different speed. It was all star stuff, and cosmic nonsense aside, the cave was a graveyard, a garbage hole, a place where light and life were sucked toward the inevitable. And maybe that consumption, the bottom of the hole, was the final resting place of all that walked and breathed and prayed.
    Vernon Ray tossed the final match down, plunging them into darkness again, and glanced back at the entrance to the cave. He hadn’t taken a single step, but now daylight appeared
fifty
feet away. He closed his eyes and saw lime-green flashes where the flame had imprinted his retinas. When he blinked several seconds later, the cave seemed darker, as if the sun were going down outside. But it was probably only six o’clock, an hour before dusk.
    “Come on, the cops are probably gone by now,” Vernon Ray said. The cops had become an abstraction. Even a jail cell would be better than the unseen but constricting walls of granite around them.
    He was glad to feel Bobby’s hand on his arm, though the fingers were cold and moist. He only wished his friend hadn’t gone so silent. He could no longer hear Bobby’s breathing.
    A faint ticking filled the air.
Ratta-tat, ratta-tat
.
    The snare drum became audible in the same way it had faded out, swelling as if the invisible, impossible drummer were marching toward them from the depths.
    “Come on, Bobby!” Vernon Ray tugged his friend’s hand, leading him toward the safety of the forest outside. But he lost traction in the mud and the air had grown heavy, and he fought against it as if wading through a receding tide. The mouth of the cave now appeared uphill and despite taking a dozen slow, straining steps he was no closer to safety. The drumming gained in volume, echoing off the wet walls.
    The cave is sealed off. Nobody can come up from the dark
.
    Especially not dead soldiers
.
    Bobby’s hand slipped off his arm and Vernon Ray was unmoored, drifting in a morass that pressed against him on all sides, a sour molasses that clogged his nose and throat. The cave mouth not only looked farther away but smaller, as if he were looking down the fat end of a telescope. The forest beyond, suggested only by swathes of green and gold, had taken on the aspect of fantasy, as if this cloaked realm were the reality and all else a dream. The snare drum rattled, the reverberation booming