Black Valley

From Jim Brown, author of the celebrated24/7, comes a spine-tingling tale of a small town haunted by dark secrets. When the citizens of Black Valley, a remote Oregon town, are terrorized by vicious, sadistic "Whitey" Dobbsnicknamed for his shock of bone-white hairfive teenagers concoct a shiver-inducing act of revenge. But their plans to eliminate Whitey go terrifyingly awry, sending him on a rampage that plunges Black Valley into doom for generations to come. . . .

CHAPTER 1

Whitey Dobbs giggled as dirt struck the top of his coffin. Not a giggler by nature, he was surprised by his reaction but continued to snicker in reply to each flat, dull thump. The coffin shook at first, then settled in as the sound began to recede, dirt on wood, dirt on dirt, becoming fainter, farther, until—nothing.

Quiet as a grave.

He laughed aloud, shattering the new silence, the sound of his own voice rushing back to him, a reminder of his close confines. Whitey put his hands over his mouth to stifle a snicker, chiding himself for his lack of control.

Get a grip. Don’t waste oxygen.

Tentatively, like a newborn, the teenager explored the parameters of his world. His head rested on a thin pillow; his bone-white hair touched one end of the coffin, his feet just two inches shy of the other. The sides, padded and laced, pressed against his shoulders. Add in the extras and there was barely enough room for a body . . . his body.

How did the dead tolerate it? Nicely, he supposed. No one had ever complained.

Maybe he should suggest that as a motto for Perkins Funeral Home: Eight hundred buried—no complaints. The laughter came like vomit, swelling in his throat, rising up and rushing out. He fought to hold it back but feared he would choke.

Get control, get control.

He blinked to see if his eyes were open. Nothing. It was the blackest dark he had ever seen. Could you see the dark? He touched the lid of the coffin. It was just inches from his face, yet completely invisible . . . so close, so oppressively close. No, since I can’t see it, it ain’t there, he decided. It’s easy to fool yourself in the dark.

Or go crazy.

Snicker.

Get control.

Despite the restrictions he managed to work his right hand into the pocket of his jeans. His fingers touched the smooth wood exterior of the knife. With the touch came control. This wasn’t so bad, not bad at all. He was only seventeen, but he had already seen real horror. He’d looked right into its bloodshot eyes, smelled the liquor on its fetid breath, and fed it to the blade.

Nah, this wasn’t bad at all.

He eased the knife out of his pocket, his fingers caressing its contours like a man touching a woman’s breast. In his mind he traced his movements, seeing the knife’s cherry-wood handle, painted a glossy ruptured-blood-vessel red, balanced by chrome caps on each end. On one side was a small, flat button—the switch.

He pressed it.

Click.

Flip.

Click.

Flip.

Not the smartest thing to do when you’re as blind as the dead and confined to a coffin, but he wasn’t worried. He knew this blade.

Like a teenage boy knows his dick, his father would say. Only his father couldn’t say that, seeing how he was dead and buried in a coffin all his own.

Snicker.

This switchblade was his friend, protector, collaborator. It would never hurt him. And maybe when this was all over, he would feed it, give it a special treat, a taste of a sassy, spoiled little rich kid. There was a prissy bitch down at the college; he’d had his eye on her for some time. Maybe she should be next? Yeah, definitely the next.

He giggled aloud.

Where were they now? he wondered. Where were his four new friends? Had they finished? No, it was a very deep hole, six feet under. They were still up there. He just couldn’t hear them anymore. Must be working up quite a sweat, shoveling all that dirt. The thought of them—four strapping rich kids in expensive shoes and sporting five-dollar haircuts—actually breaking a sweat appealed to him.

And what was he doing while they worked, while they performed physical labor for perhaps the first time in their pampered little lives? Nothing.

Just lying here, me and the worms; as still and quiet as a dead man, while you boys . . . alive.

He couldn’t hold it back; the laughter came in waves.

John Evans dumped the last shovelful of dirt onto the fresh grave, then patted it down with the back of the shovel. The other three watched silently. Even trading off among the four of them, they were bone tired. John took a handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped sweat out of his eyes as the last red fingers of sunlight clawed at a purpling sky.

His cousin Mason took a beer from the cooler and opened it. “Hell of a deal,” he said, taking a long, deep drink. He belched. “Hell of a deal.”

“Damn. I can’t believe we did it,” Clyde Watkins said. “We really, really did it.” Thick locks of auburn hair fell across his forehead. He pushed them back with his fingers.

“We?” Mason snorted. “Fuck that. Me and John did most of the work.”

“Hey, I helped,” Clyde said, brushing dirt off his trousers.

“You couldn’t do shit for bitching.”

“So? I don’t like rutting around in the dirt like a pig. Shoot me.” He straightened up, smoothed his shirt with the back of his hand, and smiled. “I have to save myself for the ladies.”

“Fuck you,” Mason said. He looked at the grave and laughed nervously. “Fuck you.”

Nathan Perkins sat on the tailgate of the truck, kneading his hands. His eyes, magnified by thick glasses, seemed tethered to the fresh mound of earth.

“You okay?” John asked.

Nathan nodded, then pushed his glasses up the slope of his nose. His hand shook.

“Did we have to . . . to—you know, bury him so deep?”

“Six feet. No more, no less,” John said, rolling his shoulders and rubbing the back of his neck. His muscles ached and burned. At six two, with a chest that could be rented out as a billboard, John Evans was an imposing figure. Still, standing on the crown of Hawkins Hill, with the town of Black Valley, Oregon, spread out before him like ruined stars banished from heaven, he felt positively tiny.

John stomped on the grave, his heavy boots packing the dark brown earth.

“Jeez, I can’t believe the son of a bitch is down there,” Na- than said.

Mason Evans grinned, his teeth iridescent in the twilight. “He’s down there, all right. You can bet your sweet ass on that.” He cupped a hand to his mouth. “How’s it going down there?” he yelled to the grave.

“Shhhh . . . ,” Nathan said, casting a cautionary glance at the mound of earth.

“What?” Mason challenged. “You think the son of a bitch can hear us?” Beer and saliva escaped with the words. “You worried big, bad Whitey Dobbs is going to dig his way out and get you?”

He laughed, then looked at the others to join him. But John was too tired, his thoughts coiled in a knot of confusion and anger. Clyde just shrugged and smiled.

John watched the encroaching night, the slow, subtle saturation of dark, the elongating of shadows and pools of indigo and purple expanding languidly.

“Maybe this isn’t such a good idea,” Nathan said, running his finger between the collar of his shirt and his neck. He licked his dry lips. “I mean, what good can come of it? What’s the best we can hope for?”

“Hey, we talked about this, and you agreed,” Mason said, pointing with his beer bottle for emphasis. “You agreed. We all did.”

“I know, I know, it’s just, well . . . if Dad finds out I’m the one who took the coffin, he’ll kill me.”

“He’ll never know,” Clyde assured him, speaking with a confidence that always gave added weight to whatever he said, even when it was bullshit. He put an arm around Nathan’s shoulder. “Besides, if he does kill you, I bet he would do the embalming for free.”

Mason laughed too loudly. Nathan simpered.

John Evans said nothing, crossing his pylonlike arms across his broad chest. There was little that worried John, less that scared him. Still . . . He looked around the crest of Hawkins Hill. The darkness beneath the Douglas firs was slowly but aggressively crawling toward them.

John took a beer from the cooler. He put the cold bottle on the back of his neck and rolled it with the palm of his hand, letting it cool his tired muscles. A fresh wind moaned in the night, bringing an unexpected chill.

He shuddered. A chill? Why did it always seem colder on Hawkins Hill? Dean would have known.

He looked down on Black Valley. Not much of a town, John thought, but it suited him. He liked the sameness, the continuity. Besides, when outsiders came . . .

He looked at the mound of earth. Anger flashed anew. He closed his eyes to let it pass. He opened them and looked at the sky. Thick clouds blotted the ambient light, cicadas sang their one-note song, and Whitey Dobbs remained buried in the loamy earth on Hawkins Hill.

“Let’s ride,” John said, hazarding one final look at the grave.

John and Nathan climbed into the old primer-gray truck they had used to haul the coffin. Nathan slid into the driver’s seat as Mason and Clyde piled into Mason’s ’65 Chevy. The engine turned over on the first try. John looked back at the crown of Hawkins Hill; it was circled by healthy Douglas firs, but nothing grew in the center except a few faded weeds. No one knew why. Some said the place was spoiled, just bad land; others said it was haunted, that spirits killed whatever was planted.

“Jesus,” Nathan cried, standing on the brakes, truck and passengers pitching forward then rocking to a stop. In the spray of the headlights a black leather jacket hung suspended in the air.

It swayed in the breeze and John saw the thin tree limb.

“Dobbs hung it on a sapling before we put him in the ground,” John said.

“It looked like it was floating, you know?” Nathan said, then laughed nervously.

John glanced back at the hill.

Spoiled land . . . haunted . . . spirits kill whatever is planted.

Well, Whitey Dobbs was planted there now.

Dean Truman cleaned the tabletops with a damp cloth and thought of Judy Pinbrow. He refilled the napkin dispensers, restocked the straw boxes, checked the salt and pepper shakers, and thought of Judy Pinbrow. He collected two stacks of mud-brown plastic trays from the top of strategically placed trash cans, passed them over the counter to the manager of the diner, then bagged and carried out three sacks of garbage, and thought of Judy Pinbrow.

Seven forty-five p.m.

She would get off work in fifteen minutes, be here in sixteen. He threw the garbage into the Dumpster, then walked back to the restaurant. He paused before going inside and took a deep, deliberate breath. The night air was damp and invigorating. Stay calm, stay focused, he told himself. This time there would be no wimping out, no distractions, no excuses.

“Judy, would you like to go out with me sometime?” That’s all he had to say. It was simple, easy, but time dependent.

In two weeks Dean Truman would graduate from high school; then it was goodbye, Hooterville and goodbye, Judy Pinbrow— unless he screwed up his courage to at least ask her for a date. Judy was the stepsister of his best friend, John Evans. He had known her all his life and loved her, to some degree, just as long.

But Dean had never said a word. Can’t be rejected if you don’t take a chance. Can’t win either.

I can do this, he told himself. I can do this.

He went back inside. The lights flickered. A second later thunder shook the store. The cash register pinged.

“Damn,” Mr. Dwyer, the shift manager, cursed. He slapped the cash register on the side, then looked sheepishly at his customer. “Damn thing’s froze up again.”

“It’s the storm,” said the customer in a voice too big for his body. “Damn thing came out of nowhere.”

Larry Pepperdine was a disc jockey at the local radio station and as close as you could get to a celebrity in Black Valley. Dean had met him through Clyde Watkins, who worked at the station on weekends.

The lights flickered again. The cash register pinged. “Doggone. Sorry, Larry, it’s going to take at least five minutes for this to unfreeze. You can wait or—hey, Dean. I got a Buster Burger with cheese, fries, large Coke, and an apple pie.”

“What size fries?”

“Extra large.”

“Comes to five dollars and forty-nine cents.”

Mr. Dwyer gave Larry an is-that-okay? look.

Larry smiled. “Sounds good to me. I’ve got a twenty.”

“Change is fourteen dollars and fifty-one cents,” Dean said before being asked.

Mr. Dwyer paid the customer out of his pocket, then scratched a note to himself to ring up the order later.

“How does he do that?” Larry asked.

The manager beamed. “That’s nothing: watch this. Dean, what time is it?”

Five minutes until Judy Pinbrow arrives.

“Seven fifty-six,” he said.

Larry checked his watch. “Bingo. And he didn’t look at a clock?”

The manager puffed out his chest as if the trick had been his own. “Not even a glance.” He sacked up the goods. “I’ve tested him, tried to trick him. Doesn’t work. Dean Truman always knows what time it is. Always.”

“Jeez, kid, are you psychic or something?” Larry asked. “Is it some kind of magic?”

The manager made a face. “Don’t say that.”

“Magic?” Dean said, his voice several decibels higher. “Magic? There is no magic.”

“Now you’ve done it,” the manager said, rolling his eyes.

“Magic is the sanctuary of the ignorant. Everything, I mean everything, can be explained with science—if not today, then tomorrow, but eventually and with certainty. This is the most superstitious little town I’ve ever seen.”

“It comes from living beneath the Hill,” Larry said.

“Hawkins Hill?”

“Here we go,” the manager said, shaking his head and chuckling to himself.

“More poppycock. Ghost stories, designed to scare children, that have somehow wormed their way into our collective conscience. The Hill is a fraud, a joke, and we’re fools to be intimidated by it.”

“Told you,” said the manager.

“Is he always like this?” Larry asked.

“Only about science and spooky stuff. A side effect of being a brain, I guess.”

Dean looked down at his feet, suddenly self-conscious. He picked up a cloth and began wiping the counter. “Sorry. I get carried away sometimes.”

Larry Pepperdine laughed. “Hey, I’m with you, buddy. The only magic I believe in is the magic I make with the ladies. Know what I mean?”

He winked and Dean blushed.

The disc jockey took his sack and was about to leave but stopped. “Have you heard from Clyde Watkins and John Evans yet? I’m curious how it went.”

“How what went?”

Larry frowned. “You don’t know? I thought, since you were friends and all . . .” He shook his head. “Never mind. Catch you later.”

Dean nodded and went back to cleaning the countertop.

Seven fifty-eight p.m.

Judy Pinbrow worked next door at Helen’s Cards and Gifts, and her Saturday-night shift ended promptly at eight. In recent weeks it had become her custom to stop by the restaurant after work and order a strawberry sundae with extra nuts, then sit near the front counter swinging her legs and talking to whoever was in the store. Dean would always make idle chitchat—ask her about movies she had seen, books she had read—but nothing more.

He envied her stepbrother. John the fearless. Nothing scared John, nothing intimidated him. John Evans could do anything. Talk to a strange girl—no problem. Fix a busted clutch—give him a wrench and get out of his way. Set a broken bone—he had done it for himself. John could mend, cut, saw, hammer, paste, plaster, or punch any problem into submission.

All Dean could do was math in his head and tell you what time it was without looking at his watch.

“Just ask her out,” John had told him. “I know she likes you. Besides, what’s the worst that could happen?”

She could laugh at me, call her friends over and have them laugh at me, put my picture on a light pole so everyone in town could laugh at me, and then, the worst of the worst, she could say no.

Nevertheless, the Saturday before last Dean had almost done it, had almost summoned his courage. But the words had hung on his tongue like dew on a flower petal: “Judy, would you like to go out with me sometime?”

Then Whitey Dobbs had entered the diner.

“How’s it hanging, Jimmy Dean?” he had asked, then laughed, a sound that caused Dean’s flesh to crawl.

The moment was gone, lost like a child’s balloon released from a sticky grip.

How’s it hanging, Jimmy Dean? Always the same inane joke. But Dean had laughed, as he always did. Whitey Dobbs was the kind of person you went along with and hoped would leave without hurting you.

Judy wasn’t in school the following Monday or Tuesday. And when he saw her in the cafeteria on Wednesday, she had been uncommonly quiet, avoiding eye contact. Now Dean had the sinking feeling that he had missed his best chance. Hopelessness caught him by the throat.

Last Saturday she hadn’t shown up at all.

His best chance blown because of a distraction, because of Whitey Dobbs.

How’s it hanging, Jimmy Dean?

Whitey Dobbs. It wasn’t just the knife, or the rumors, or even the white hair. It was the way he walked, the way he carried himself, the way he looked at you with those dark, deep eyes, like twin tunnels to hell.

Scary.

He had been particularly scary that night, though Dean would be hard-pressed to pinpoint why.

How’s it hanging, Jimmy Dean?

Eight p.m.

Judy’s shift was over, Dean thought.

The cash register pinged.

“Aha,” the manager cried in victory. “Working again.”

Now that he thought about it, there was something else strange about that Saturday. Dobbs had hung around for a long time, almost to closing. When he left, Dean had spoken the customary farewell: “See you later, alligator.”

But Dobbs hadn’t replied with his usual “After a while, crocodile.” Instead his face split into a bone-numbing grin. He leaned across the counter, so close that Dean could smell alcohol on his breath, and in a whispered sneer replied, “Ninety-nine Einstein.”

Ninety-nine Einstein?

What the hell did that mean?

Then Dobbs had laughed, that god-awful, high-pitched cackle that put Dean in mind of angry crows on a tombstone.

Ninety-nine Einstein?

Odd. Whitey Dobbs was still laughing when he walked out the door.

Three minutes after eight.

Judy was late. The heavens rumbled. The lights flickered, holding on to darkness a second longer than the time before. The cash register pinged. The manager cursed.

Dean Truman frowned.

Ninety-nine Einstein?

Suck air.

In the box under the earth Whitey Dobbs inhaled from a stiff plastic mask. The air tank was a comfort and a burden, increasing the time he could safely spend buried, decreasing the space he had to spend it in. To make room for the tank, he had to double up his legs and change positions to keep the blood circulating.

What if the preppy boys were wrong about how much oxygen he had? What if he ran out of air, or worse? Oxygen tanks were tricky things. Turn the knob too much, a spark, and—kaboom—he’d be applesauce.

In addition to the oxygen tank, Mason Evans had mounted a small transistor radio to the interior side of the coffin. The radio, as much as the oxygen tank, was Dobbs’s lifeline, keeping him informed of the time, allowing him to calculate how long he had left. He had been underground for thirty-eight minutes.

Twenty-two minutes to go. Piece of cake.

With six feet of earth above him, Whitey was surprised the radio worked at all. Still, it could pick up only one station: KDLY—“All country . . . all the time.” In some ways that was worse than being buried alive.

Buried alive.

“I can do this.” Twenty-two minutes. Nothing to it. Nothing. Hell, was this the harshest thing they could come up with?

“We’ve seen you around. You’re not like the rest of the wussies in this piss-ass town. You’ve got an edge. I like people with an edge,” John Evans had told him. “We’re sort of making our own fraternity, want to know if you’re interested.”

Ordinarily Whitey Dobbs couldn’t care less what anyone thought. But John Evans was different. He was the only person in this butthole town who might actually hold his own in a fight, and as a result, the only person Dobbs really respected.

“So, what’s the catch?” he had asked. Dobbs had never had friends before, and he was surprised how much the idea appealed to him.

“There’s an initiation. We’ve got to know if you have the stones or not.”

That had pissed Dobbs off. He had almost pulled his knife on the big guy, but something in John Evans’s eyes caused him to pause, some innate animal sense that told him if they fought, one of them would die.

“Give it your best shot,” Dobbs had answered.

John nodded, then in a flat, even voice asked, “Are you afraid of the dark?”

Suck air.

The Dobbs family, or what was left of it, had moved to Black Valley eleven months ago, shortly after Whitey’s father died.

For Whitey, Black Valley had one and only one attraction—Aunt Gerty, his mother’s timeworn older sister. While working in the sawmill, her husband had sliced his arm off at the elbow and bled to death before his coworkers could get him to the hospital. It was his own fault—everybody said so, even Aunt Gerty. But the plant had paid up nicely, leaving Gerty set for life with enough left over to take care of the poor baby sister and her vagabond family.

Whitey’s older sister, Mary Jean, the bitch, ran off with a trucker less than a month after they arrived. The last anyone had heard from her, she was living in sunny fucking Florida.

So long, loser.

Soon after that, Whitey’s mother discovered the comfort contained in a quart of Jack Daniel’s. She moved into the bottle, and Whitey Dobbs was on his own.

“Just the way I like it,” he said, grinning in the dark.

If the hicks in this dinky-ass town had seen him in Baltimore, they wouldn’t have known him. Back then everyone knew him by his real name: Melvin. He was just another teenager, with moss-brown hair, acne, wet dreams, and a father who occasionally mistook him for a punching bag.

A good beating will make you a man, his piece-of-shit father used to say. Apparently, he was also trying to make a man out of Whitey’s mother; she wore black eyes like other women wore new dresses. But Mary Jean, the bitch, got off without a swat. No, that wasn’t true, not entirely. Whitey had heard the sounds coming from her bedroom whenever his father declared it was time to “feed the snake.”

And she had been doing just that since she was twelve years old.

But not Tandy. Whitey’s ten-year-old sister had always been special: smart, attractive, self-confident—a fluke, a unique splash in the Dobbs family gene pool.

“When I grow up, you and me are going to move to California,” she would say to Whitey.

“California? Why California?”

“ ’Cause that’s where all the magic lives. I’ve seen it on TV. They’ve got palm trees, the Pacific Ocean, and sunshine, always sunshine. It never rains in California. That’s a fact—they even wrote a song about it.”

You and me. You and me.

Poor, sweet little Tandy.

Seemed like she had been fighting off the old man’s advances from the crib. As a result, it was Tandy who received the harshest beatings—worse than Mama, worse than Whitey.

Worse.

But she never gave in. Never.

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Excerpted from Black Valley by Jim Brown
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.