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Overview
“IN A LIFE FULL OF LIES, HE FINALLY SETTLED FOR THE TRUTH.”
No one in Mattingly ever believed Bobby Barnes would live to see old age. Drink would either rot Bobby from the inside out or dull his senses just enough to send his truck off the mountain on one of his nightly rides. Although Bobby believes such an end possible—and even likely—it doesn’t stop him from taking his twin sons Matthew and Mark into the mountains one Saturday night. A sharp curve, blinding headlights, metal on metal, his sons’ screams. Bobby’s final thought as he sinks into blackness is a curious one—There will be stars.
Yet it is not death that greets him beyond the veil. Instead, he returns to the day he has just lived and finds he is not alone in this strange new world. Six others are trapped with him.
Bobby soon discovers that this supposed place of peace is actually a place of secrets and hidden dangers. Along with three others, he seeks to escape, even as the world around him begins to crumble. The escape will lead some to greater life, others to endless death . . . and Bobby Barnes to understand the deepest nature of love.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780718026844 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins Christian Publishing |
| Publication date: | 12/19/2023 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 409 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
There Will Be Stars
By Billy Coffey
Thomas Nelson
Copyright © 2016 Billy CoffeyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7180-2684-4
CHAPTER 1
Part I
Heaven
-1-
Sometimes, if he was not so drunk or the twins so loud, Bobby Barnes would consider how those rides to the mountain had become an echo of his life. Night would fill the gaps between the trees with a black so thick and hard the world itself seemed to end beyond the headlights' reach. No future. No past. Only the illusion of this single moment, stretched taut and endless. He loved the lonely feeling, the nothingness, even if the road upon which he sought escape from town was the very road that would return him to it. All living was a circle. Something of Bobby had come to understand that, though its truth remained a mystery too deep for his heart to plumb. Life was a circle and the road a loop, and both flowed but seldom forward. They instead wound back upon themselves, the past leaching into the present and the present shrouding the future, reminding him that all could flee from their troubles, but only toward and never away.
One of the boys said something. Matthew or Mark, Bobby couldn't tell. The pale orange light off the radio made the twins appear even more identical, just as the music made them sound even more the same. Carbon copies, those boys. When they'd been born — back when Carla still wore her wedding ring and the only future she and Bobby envisioned was one they would face together — Bobby had joked they would have to write the boys' names on the bottoms of their feet to tell them apart. Now Matthew and Mark were eight. Still the same, but only on the outside.
The other boy joined in, something about a movie or a cartoon, Bobby couldn't hear. The deejay had put on "Highway to Hell" and Mark asked Bobby to turn that up, he liked it, though not enough to keep from fighting with his brother. He felt the seat move as one twin shouldered the other, heard the sharp battle cry of "Stupid!" Bobby pursed his lips and said nothing. Being a good father involved knowing when to step in and when to let things ride. He relaxed his grip on the wheel and gulped the beer in his hand.
Night whisked by as the truck climbed the high road above town, the engine purring. No vehicle in Mattingly ran so fine as Bobby Barnes's old Dodge. Let the town speak what lies they wished, no one could deny that truth. He eased his foot down on the gas, felt the growl beneath him and the smile creeping over his face. His ears popped, followed by the come-and-gone sound of a lone cricket. The headlights caught flashes of reds and yellows on the October trees and the glowing eyes of deer along the road, standing like silent monsters in the dark.
"Tell'm, Daddy," Matthew said beside him. "He's so stupid."
"Am not," Mark yelled. "You're stupid. You're double stupid."
Another shove, maybe a slap, Bobby couldn't know. He did know if things got out of hand and one of those boys spilled his beer, he'd have to get the belt out when they got home.
"Ain't nobody stupid," he said. "Matthew, you got what you think, Mark's got what he does. Don't mean either one's right or wrong. That's called an opinion. Y'all know what opinions are like?"
"Butts," Mark said.
"'Cause everybody's got one," said Matthew.
Both snickered. Bobby toasted his parental wisdom with another swallow. He finished the can and tossed it through the open slot in the window behind them, where it rattled against the other empties in the bed. The sound echoed back and mixed with the boys' laughter and the guitar solo over the radio, Angus Young hammering on the ax as Bobby's eyes widened against a heaviness that fell over him, a chill that formed a straight line from the middle of his forehead to his nonexistent gut, settling in the bottoms of his feet. It was as if he had been struck by some pale lightning, pulled apart and pieced back together in the same breath.
"Whatsa matter, Daddy?" Matthew asked.
Bobby reached for the last of the six-pack on the dash. "Dunno," he said. "Think a rabbit run over my grave. Like you get a funny feeling? Like you done before what you're doing now."
"That's 'cause we take a ride every night," Matthew said.
"Ain't that. Know that. 'Member this morning when we was going out to Timmy's and we seen Laura Beth sashaying like she always does down the walk? 'Member I whistled to her and said I knew she'd be there?"
Mark said, "You always whistle at Laura Beth."
"I'll have you know I ain't never whistled to Laura Beth Gowdy before in my life, boy. Why'd I ever wanna do such a thing? Little Miss Priss. Been that way since high school." He took a sip. "Didn't whistle 'cause she's comely, I whistled because I knew. Felt that rabbit and I knew. Like Jake? I knew he'd be at Timmy's, too, wanting one a his words. And that woman preacher."
"You said you bet she'd be outside the church," Mark said, "but she weren't."
"No, but I said Andy would be pushing a broom when we went to get gas."
"Mr. Sommerville always pushing a broom," Matthew said.
"But Junior ain't always been there. And I knew he would be. Remember? And your mom called this afternoon."
Mark rolled down the window and let his hand play with the cool mountain air. "Momma's way finer than Laura Beth Gowdy. Daddy? Laura Beth paints her hair. Momma's looks like that on purpose."
That sense (Bobby couldn't name it, something besides a rabbit, French or what he sometimes called Hi-talian) had left the soles of his feet. The worse feeling of his son's stare took its place. He kept his eyes to the road. He'd never say so out loud and risk hurting Mark's feelings, but sometimes the boy got to him. Mark could nudge his daddy in directions best not traveled.
"Your momma found somebody else to love on her, for what grief that cost us all and what good that does her now. Pondering Carla's fineness does me no good service."
For a while there were only the sounds of the big tires and the songs crackling over the radio, the classic rock station out of Stanley. Bobby felt the truck drift past the center line and corrected. Matthew leaned his head against his daddy's shoulder, drifting to sleep. Mark hummed along with Axl Rose about patience. Bobby fell into old thoughts of things lost that could never be gained again.
"Maybe we should get up here and go Camden way," he said. "All these rabbits could mean Lady Luck's on my side. Could go up to that 7-and-Eleven, get us a scratcher. What y'all say?"
Mark looked Bobby's way. "You won't."
* * *
Ahead loomed a T in the road, a marker that read 237 and an arrow pointing right and left just ahead of the stop sign. Bobby intended to roll right through — few traveled those mountaintops in the night, which was why he chose that road to ride with his sons — but then he felt his foot pressing harder on the brake. A chill rushed through him again. The truck stopped along a line of newer pavement and the cracked asphalt of what everyone in Mattingly called the Ridge Road.
He looked down and saw the left blinker winking. Left, on through the mountains and then down again, back to the valley and the shop.
His hands, though, gripped the wheel as if to turn right for Camden.
Matthew's head was still pressed against Bobby's shoulder. "'Nother rabbit get you, Daddy?"
Bobby reached for a beer not there. "Guess it did."
Mark stuck a skinny arm through his window and pointed. "Let's go this-a-way," he said. "Daddy? Let's get us a scratcher."
Bobby opened his mouth to say sure and heard himself say, "Guess we won't. Can't be wasting money on fanciful wishes. Ain't like old Laura Beth Gowdy's husband is calling up saying he's gotta build onto the bank 'cause of all the money I got there. We'll just take our ride."
Mark's finger still pointed. "You said that last time."
Bobby chuckled — he always did when he didn't understand a word Mark said — and turned left. Farther into the mountains, higher, higher, because up here it was the three of them and no one else, no one to call Bobby "pervert" and "drunk" and "rooned." Because up here in the dark of road and forest, Bobby Barnes possessed all the world he needed.
He turned left as Mark's pallid face kept toward the empty stretch of road to Camden and brake lights flashed far ahead. Bobby leaned forward, wondering if those were from a car or from the six-pack he'd drunk since leaving the shop.
"Ain't nobody should be up here."
Matthew yawned. "We up here, Daddy."
The radio popped and hissed and then went clear as the truck crested the ridge. Barren trees let in a view of the valleys below — Mattingly's few lights on one side, Stanley's crowded ones on the other.
"I love this song," Matthew said. "Crank it, Daddy."
Bobby didn't. A war had broken out inside him, one part sloshing from the beer and the other bearing up under that heavy feeling once more. Two parts becoming a whole. He fixed his eyes ahead, where that flicker of lights had been, and wondered who that could be and why he felt like him and the boys were no longer on a ride. He let off the gas and fumbled with the radio dial.
Matthew began to sing, a pale imitation of John Fogerty's voice, a bad moon a-rising and trouble on the way.
The car ahead. Brake lights disappearing around the sharp S in the road. Matthew singing, his voice high, almost warning that they shouldn't go around tonight because it's bound to take their lives, that bad moon on the rise. Mark saying something Bobby couldn't hear.
The truck thundered forward as though pulled by an unseen force toward the curve in the road, and now that feeling again, that French word Bobby couldn't remember, seizing him. He took the middle part of the S and found empty road on the other side. Matthew strummed at a guitar that existed only in his mind. The moon shone down over the broken outline of the trees. Shadows danced through dying leaves. Bobby looked at Mark and smiled. He winked even if he thought Mark couldn't see, because Mark Barnes might be too smart for his own good but he was Bobby's boy and so was Matthew, and Bobby would be nothing without them.
The truck took the bottom part of the curve. Bobby opened his mouth. "It's —" was all that came out. The rest became swallowed by the terror on Mark's face.
Matthew screamed.
Bobby turned to headlights in front of them. He stood up on the brake, mashing it to the floor, but time was all that slowed. The truck continued on. He heard the sharp screech of tires locking and felt the waving motion of the back end loosing. One arm shot out for Matthew's chest, but Bobby had nothing to hold Mark in place. His youngest (youngest by thirty seconds) doubled in on himself. Mark flew in a soundless gasp: one leg pinwheeling out of the open window, a bit of thick brown hair standing on end, the fingers of a tiny hand. And those headlights, blinding him and blinding Matthew, glimmering off the unbuckled seat belt none of them ever used.
Metal scraped metal, a crunching that folded the truck's hood like a wave. Matthew floated toward the windshield. Bobby felt himself thrown forward. He lamented that of all the things he needed to say, his last word had been so meaningless. And in his last moment, Bobby understood that he had been in this place times beyond counting and would be here again uncountable times still. He heard glass shatter and felt the steering wheel press into his chest. He heard himself scream and scream again. There was pain and loss and a fear beyond all he had ever known, and as blackness deep and unending took him, a single thought slipped through his life's final breath:
There will be stars.
-2-
Even as a child, Bobby greeted the day in pieces. One sense would rouse enough to nudge the next and that one another, brittle links forming a chain of sound and smell and touch and taste and sight, pulling him back to a life he no longer wanted. Yet that morning arrived unlike all those before. The plink of water dripping from the gutter above; the sour smell of garbage; his throat, sore from screaming; gravel needling the back of his bare head; the sticky, bitter taste on his tongue. These came to Bobby not separate but as one, a chain thick and heavy that lashed him with a power more suited to raise from deep death than drunken sleep.
Something scurried over his palm. Bobby jerked the hand away and forced a deep breath that caught midway in his chest, where it bloomed into a stab of pain. He barked a cough and opened his eyes. Shadows rose in narrowing lines. And there — there were the stars, winking in a jagged sky of black night and blue morning. Dozens of them, hundreds, and how had he known there would be stars?
He rose to his elbows, looking for Matthew and Mark. All Bobby saw was his cap and a pink tail that disappeared into the mound of white trash bags against the far wall. His boots scattered the beer cans lying close; red, white, and blue pinwheels tumbling on into the alley. On either side, bricked back walls of the shops lining this part of downtown lay bare but for a thin layer of brown grime. The line ended at the turn-in off Second Street, where a puddle of muddy water flashed yellow against the blinker.
It was not the first time Bobby had woken in a strange place with no memory of how or when he'd gotten there. This time, at least, he woke close to home. He eased to his feet, fighting against the pain in his chest and the swaying alley, plucking his cap from the ground. The wood door into the shop stood four feet away; eight steps reached it. As Bobby turned the handle, that same deep sense struck him once more. A sense of heaviness buckled his legs. For one wheezing breath, Bobby's mind quickened to a single impenetrable truth — he had done this before. Been here before.
"Déjà vu."
A rabbit running over your grave is how he'd learned it as a boy. That felt right. Bobby had the gooseflesh on his arms and the back of his neck to prove it, yet the feeling passed through and was gone as the door shut behind him. The air carried thick smells of oil and grease, and Bobby knew he was safe. He was home.
"Matthew? Mark?" he called. His throat seized from dryness, making him wince. "Where y'all at?"
A single yellow bulb buzzed over the workbench against the far wall, its surface clean but for black dust packed into the scratches. Much of the light ended near the front of the second bay door, where sat Bea Campbell's little rust bucket of a car. Outside, day lightened with soft bars that slanted through three Plexiglas windows. The glow settled onto the giant rolling toolbox against the wall, stickers that read Pennzoil and Quaker State and Mary should have aborted Jesus. Bobby yawned and staggered. His right boot skirted the edge of the service pit dug out of the concrete. He lifted his cap and bent over, peering inside.
No one there.
He pushed on a bathroom door with Employee Only written in black Sharpie across a peeling strip of duct tape. The loud click of the switch on the inside wall brought a light that made Bobby wince. He moaned and felt his way to the toilet, mumbling those two words again — "Déjà vu." By the time he emptied himself, Bobby decided that hadn't been what he'd felt at all. He remembered a story, Stephen King or maybe Neil Gaiman, about a man who got hold of a tainted batch of beer that turned him into a monster. Maybe that was what happened. Carla had warned him it would, before she'd left and after. Maybe Timmy had sold him some bad beer and it had gotten into Bobby's brain. He rubbed the spot in his chest and decided he'd look that story up. It was a good one.
Beyond the door, the clock tower in town tolled six.
Cold water from the tap. He washed his neck and face, rubbing the soap in hard. One brush went through a mop of hair, which was then hidden by the cap, another brush went over yellowing teeth. Only then did Bobby ponder his reflection in the filthy mirror above the sink.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from There Will Be Stars by Billy Coffey. Copyright © 2016 Billy Coffey. Excerpted by permission of Thomas Nelson.
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