Ghost Road Blues (Pine Deep 1)

Val Guthrie’s dry snort was eloquent. “Yeah. I’m having wild and crazy sex with my Stairmaster. ”

“You harlot. ”

“I think I climbed the equivalent of Mount Rainier. I’m all sweaty, but my buns are like steel. ”

“Whereas I get my strength through purity. ”

“Crow, if that’s the source of your strength you would be able to bench press a daffodil. ”

“So young to be so hardened. ” He clucked his tongue a few times.

“Are you coming over tonight, or are you going to stay there and increase the therapy bills of every teenager in four counties?”

“I’ll be over, baby,” he said. “But—you should have heard the screams. That last trap I built—the one with the living dead dragging the kid out of the cart? Man oh man, was that hot!”

There was a slight pause and Crow could imagine her sighing and shaking her head. “You are a very, very, very strange man. ”

“Your point being?”

“Oh, shut up and come over here so we can engage in something a bit more wholesome than blood and gore. ”

“Hmmmm,” he said, drawing it out.

“I’ll take a nice hot shower and I’ll be all pink and clean when you get here. ”

“I don’t know, I think I prefer you sweaty. ”

“I don’t mind getting sweaty all over again,” she said sweetly, and hung up.

Crow leaned back in his chair and pictured her—slim, strong, with black hair and a crooked nose, and the most intelligent eyes he’d ever seen. Eyes that went all smoky and out of focus when they made love.

Suddenly gore and ghouls had less immediate appeal.

He looked at his watch. Almost time to take out his last batch, and after that it would be off to Val’s farm, and maybe a long walk in the cornfield to a spot where they both liked—well away from the house—where they sometimes made love under the stars. Even on cold nights like this one.

Crow got up and shoved his cell back into his pocket as he walked through the barn to the field. The staff would be herding the next group of kids onto the flatbed, but Crow didn’t watch them. Instead he turned and looked east. Val’s farm was that way. Miles and miles away, across seas of waving corn and knobbed fields of pumpkins. There were no lights at all in that direction, and there would be no spray of stars tonight. The sky was a uniform and totally featureless black that stretched forever.

He felt wonderfully happy. The hayride was a success, even if it did push the limits—a fact he’d never openly admit—and Val Guthrie was the most wonderful woman on earth.

Then, without warning, he shuddered. A deep shudder that raised gooseflesh along his arms and made all the hair on his scalp twitch and tingle. Somewhere beyond the veil of black nothingness he heard the faintest growl of thunder. Just the hint of a coming storm. The thunder sounded a little like laughter. The deep kind, from far inside the chest. Mirthless.

He shivered again.

“Someone walked over my grave,” he said aloud.

In the distance the thunder laughed again and there was a single flash of lightning that scratched a deep red vein in the darkness.

Off to his right he could hear the screams of the kids as they encountered monsters. At that moment, Crow didn’t like the sound of it.

2

That night, after leaving the hayride and driving over to Val’s farm, and after taking a moonlight stroll and then making love, Crow drifted to sleep in her arms, the strangeness of the coming storm gone from his mind. But down there in the darkness, even with Val’s arms around him and the warm reality of her breath against the side of his throat, Crow sank down into a tangle of an old dream. Not a dream that was so old that he hadn’t dreamt it in a while, but a dream that was worn into the fabric of his mind like calluses on a grave digger’s hands. Part of the dream was actual memory—the latter parts—but most of the dream was a patchwork of things he had guessed, or pieced together over the years, or intuited. The dream was as ugly and as compelling as the morbid fascination of watching a neighbor’s house burn down, and on some level Crow knew that he had to pass all the way through it, relive every bit of memory and supposition, before the dream would leave him alone. Asleep, he set his jaw and ground his teeth and floated helpless on the current that took him back thirty years….

3

Autumn of 1976

The Bone Man killed the devil with a guitar.