Dead Man's Song (Pine Deep 2)

The creature bounded forward again, claws tearing the air, and again he passed through the Bone Man as if he were smoke. The monster tumbled to the ground and once more scuttled around to face him again, mouth wrinkled like a dog’s muzzle, eyes blazing with hate. Boyd rose slowly to its feet, standing in a hunchbacked crouch, glaring at him.

“We can keep this shit up all day,” the Bone Man said. “I’m a ghost, you dumbass. ”

Then Boyd froze, head cocked in an attitude of listening, but the Bone Man heard nothing. Boyd sniffed the air with his broken nose, paused and sniffed again. Then as if some unseen hand had reached into his mind and dialed down a rheostat the predatory light went out his eyes and his snarling mouth drooped again into the slack-jawed hang of emptiness. It took two aimless steps backward, turned first to the right and then to the left, both motions apparently without purpose, and after swaying in the sunlight for a full minute, he tottered off across the road back toward the cornfields. The Bone Man watched him go and stood quietly for a long time until even the faintest sounds of his lumbering passage through the corn had faded. He sighed and then sat slowly down on the rotted log, pulling his guitar around so that as he sat it lay across his bony thighs. His long fingers stroked the strings, and as the breeze returned to stir the tips of the tall corn he began to play and sing. It was the old prison blues song, “Ghost Road Blues. ” The air above and around him seemed heavy and oppressive as it loomed above the farms and forests of Pine Deep. In the clearing near the cornfields where four people had now died, the Bone Man played blues to lament the dead and to preach the gospel of the dark times. Not times coming at the End of Days, but of the darkness here at hand—an October darkness, abroad and hungry.

(4)

It was a Sunday morning and Mike Sweeney slept late, lost in a dream that played and replayed. In his dream the wrecker that had chased him on Route A-32 didn’t miss him; in his dream the huge black truck with its demonic driver and the ugly gleaming hook caught up with him as he raced along the asphalt. The driver wore Vic’s sneering face, though even in the dream Mike didn’t think Vic was truly at the wheel. He pedaled his bike faster and faster, his legs pumping insanely, the rubber of the thin tires screaming in a high-pitched wail, the cold wind slicing at him as he fled, but the wrecker kept getting closer and closer. Mike risked a look, daring to glance over one shoulder and there—right there!—was the huge silver grille of the truck. He could hear the roar of the engine as it chased him. No, not a roar—it was a growl. Deep, angry, hungry—not at all the sound of a machine but the hunting snarl of a beast. A monster.

“No!” he cried and the sound of his own voice was whipped out of his mouth and blown past him to be gobbled up by the teeth of that gleaming grille. He leaned forward over the bars, his butt up in the air, trying to add more weight and power to his pumping legs and at the same time cut the wind resistance. He flicked another glance over his shoulder and saw that he was pulling away. Inches…feet…yards. He kept it up, trying to make it to the entrance of the farm just down the road. If he could make that…just a few hundred yards now…he would be safe. It was Val Guthrie’s place. Crow would be there. He’d be safe with Crow and Val.

His chest was an oven that burned up the air as soon as he gasped it in and then set to burning the flesh of his lungs, and still he raced on. Sweat burst from his pores and ran down his face and chest before freezing against his skin, and still he raced on. The growl of the wrecker’s engine diminished ever so slightly as he pulled ahead, and still he raced on. Pinwheels of fire exploded in his eyes, and still he raced on. His heart was slamming against the walls of his chest and felt like it was ready to burst, and still he raced on.

Less than a hundred yards now and he began angling wide so that he could make a fast, hard turn left and shoot onto the entrance road. Suddenly there were people lining the side of the road. Silently watching the race as they stood in the shadows. Even in the dark, even at that speed, he could see their faces and read their expressions.

First he passed Terry Wolfe, the mayor, who smiled at him with kindly blue eyes and then reached up to rip his own face off in a sudden splash of blood, revealing beneath the mask of flesh a monster’s face, with bloody fangs and blazing eyes.

Mike raced on.

Then he sped by a tall, stick-thin black man in a dirty black suit that was streaked with mud and rainwater. The black man’s smile was genuine, and he played a few notes on a beautiful old guitar, picking the notes with the fingers of one hand and stretching those notes out with a gliding touch of a bottleneck slide. The black man said something but his voice made no sound.

Mike raced on.

At the end, as he was about to make his turn, he saw a tall blond man with heavy features and furious eyes step out into the road and grab at his handlebars with both hands. Mike tried to twist free, tried to veer around him, but one powerful hand clamped around the fork tube just below the handles and the bike stopped as su

rely as if he’d slammed into a wall, and his own momentum sent him flying over the handlebars. He rolled in midair, trying to land on his feet, needing to land running, but he kept turning and slammed onto his back with so much force that he could hear bones break all along his back. He skidded along the blacktop, his hooded jacket shredding, and then his shirt…and then his skin. By the time he stopped the long slide, there was a ten-foot smear of red painted on the blacktop. Mike cried out in agony and raised his head to see where the truck was and how much time he had, trying at the same time to read his body to see how badly he was hurt. He raised his head and looked down the length of his body and there, framed between the upturned toes of his sneakers, was the wrecker.

Three feet away.

It would have been some small comfort to Mike if that had been the point at which he woke up from the dream, but it wasn’t. He felt the wheels all the way up his body; he felt and heard each bone splinter and snap, felt the searing pain as his groin and stomach were ground flat under the immense weight of the wrecker, tasted the coppery blood as it burst in a torrent from his screaming mouth, felt every part of him explode into bloody fragments until the rolling wheels smashed his awareness into utter black agony.

Then he woke up, covered in sweat, his body still screaming from every pore, from every nerve ending. His curly red hair hung in seaweed twists down from his bowed head, and his freckles were as dark as bullet holes against his pale skin. His heart was beating so hard in his chest that it hurt, lances of pain shot down his left arm, numbing his fingers. Fiery lights danced in his blue eyes and he bent forward, gagging, almost vomiting. Then…it eased. Like a great wave the pain reached its peak and then slid back into the vast sea of his dreams, leaving him awake and alive. Even so, he trembled and shuddered. Mike had once read that the body had no memory for pain, but he knew that wasn’t true.

As the dream—and the ghost pain—eventually faded and he settled back against the sweat-soaked sheets, he feared to return to sleep, just as much as he feared being awake in this house. Vic Wingate here in the real world, the wrecker lurking on the black roads of his dreams. At fourteen, Mike Sweeney had cultivated a precise understanding of the nature of hell and an absolute belief in its reality. It was called “his life. ”

(5)

When the door opened, Crow expected it to be Terry Wolfe, but it was Saul Weinstock. The doctor wasn’t smiling, which was rare for him, and his face showed the same haggard look everyone involved in the Ruger affair seemed to be wearing. A team moroseness tinted by extreme exhaustion. He held a clipboard in one hand and had a folded newspaper under his arm. Tow-Truck Eddie looked up from his reading as Weinstock slouched in.

“Can I have a couple of minutes, Eddie?”

Using a finger to bookmark his place in Revelations, the officer stood, towering head and shoulders above Weinstock, and left without a word. When the door was closed, Weinstock dragged the guest chair nearer the bed and sprawled in it, looking over his shoulder at the closed door. “He’s an odd duck,” he observed.

Crow grunted agreement. “Always has been. ”

“Ever have a real conversation with him?”

“I don’t know if anyone has. Maybe God. He was on the cops full time when I was, but aside from work-related stuff I doubt we ever said ten words to one another. No, that’s a lie. He once asked me if I’d accepted Jesus as my personal savior. ”

Weinstock looked amused. His features were a dead ringer for Hal Linden in his Barney Miller days, a show that Crow remembered watching and Weinstock didn’t. “What’d you tell him?”

“Told him I’d think about it, and left it there. He never asked again. ”

“I’m shocked. I can’t imagine you missing the chance for a smartass comment. ”

“Uh, Saul, have you looked at the size of that sumbitch? He could bench-press Iowa. Guess he never asked you about JC?”

Saul snorted. “Haven’t you heard? We Jews are all going to hell. We have a special section, a gated community. Right next door to the Buddhists, the Hindus, and the pro-choice lobby. It’ll be a party town. ” He glanced back at the closed door. “Seriously, though, that guy spooks me a little. I’ve never met anyone with less of a sense of…. ” He groped for the word.