“Jeez…what’s wrong? Did I hurt you? Did the car—”
“No,” the kid hissed, gritting his teeth. “It wasn’t you. It was the tow-?truck. ”
Crow just looked at the boy’s shadow-?shrouded face, trying to understand why the kid’s statement didn’t make any sense. Crow blinked a couple of times. “The, um…tow-?truck?”
“Uh-?huh. ”
“Ah…and which tow-?truck might that be, son?” Crow said, looking around briefly, assuring himself that no tow-?truck loomed nearby.
“The one that tried to kill me,” said the boy.
“Oh,” Crow said with a vague smile, “that one. I see. ” Kid’s in shock, he thought. Poor bugger.
They looked at each other’s silhouette for a moment, the conversation stalled by the complete lack of understanding on both parts. Abo
ve them, the moon peered out from behind a fence of clouds, bathing the kid’s face in a clear, revealing brightness.
“Mike!” Crow said with real astonishment.
“Crow…?”
“Well…shit!” Crow said, half smiling.
“Yeah,” agreed Iron Mike Sweeney.
2
The Bone Man walked out of Dark Hollow and stepped onto a hill on A-32, not three miles from where Crow and Mike stood. Walking slowly with a lanky gait that made his body look as if it were all bones and rags with no meat at all, he strolled to the center of the road and then stopped, turning to lift his face to the brilliant moonlight. Moonlight glittered on the strings and keys of his guitar. A cloud of bats whirled and danced above him, their tiny bodies looking like torn scraps of shadow in the flickering light from the distant storm. The Bone Man stood and watched them, absently reaching up a thin hand as if anxious to join their carefree gavotte. The bats knew him and did not fly away; all the things that moved in the night knew him, knew the pale shadow of a man who cast no shadow of his own.
All of them knew the Bone Man, the sad-?eyed wanderer, the boneyard refugee. After a while the bats flitted off into the night and he stood alone in a cold wind.
Then a night bird with a bloody beak came flapping out of the east and circled him once, twice, three times before wheeling and flapping off into the west, where a lonely farmhouse stood amid a sea of corn. From where he stood on the hill, the Bone Man could see the tiny squares of yellow light dotting two sides of the distant house.
He considered the house, looking far and long and into it, reading its fortune in the call of the crickets and the rustle of the corn. He smelled blood on the wind, and some of it, he knew, was not yet spilled. There was still so much of this night left.
The Bone Man turned his rake-?handle-?thin body to the east and listened to the wind. There were sounds on it. Laughter, the cries and gasps of young lovers, the screech of tires, the lonely and distant drone of a tractor-?trailer whining along the back stretch of the highway, the call of owls, the deep barking of a dog. The high, sharp wail of a man in absolute terror and unbearable pain, a sound that faded and then abruptly stopped with a wet, guttural gurgle.
Long and dark blew the night wind around and past and through the Bone Man.
His eyes glistened with anger and fear and frustration. The tide of the night was already strong, moving the flotsam around faster than he could keep up. The gray man felt a hopeless surge of sickness in his empty stomach as he sensed the thing in the swamp, the evil presence that he had slaughtered with his own hands and buried thirty years ago, stir and flex its power.
Such power…
The Bone Man stood for a long time in indecision. The calls of the night birds told him much that he needed to know, told him too much. Now he didn’t know which way to turn. Whose life mattered more? Which of the innocent ones needed him more than the others? Which innocents ones would he have to sacrifice to save the rest?
Thunder sniggered in the east.
The Bone Man turned north and began walking toward Pine Deep, his stick legs swishing, his stick arms swinging, and his white face gleaming like polished marble. In his eyes, cold storms raged.
3
“I thought you were making supper for Crow. ”
Val didn’t look up from her crossword puzzle. Her father lifted the lid and stuck his whole face into the aromatic vapors and took a deep breath. “Smells pretty good. ”
“Don’t sound so surprised. I can cook, you know. ”
Guthrie didn’t choose to reply to that; instead he sniffed the soup again, amazed that it really smelled like soup and not sewage. Val’s previous attempts at cooking were spectacular disasters. Maybe she’d had a culinary epiphany. He found his mouth watering despite all of the warning klaxons ringing in his head.