Dead Man's Song (Pine Deep 2)

“Such as?”

Crow cut away a thick vine, putting arm and shoulder into it so that the heavy machete blade sheared cleanly through it. His wrist and ribs had healed nicely and the exercise felt good. “For lack of a better term,” he said, “call it a primal need. ”

“Primal need? That’s a weird choice of words. ”

“It seems to fit. ”

“Why? What makes you so sure, so certain of all this? You seem bound and determined to pin all that horror and all that crime on Griswold. Why?”

“For the same reason I already told you. When he dragged me out of the bushes, I saw his face. ”

“Yeah, and you thought he looked like a monster. Come on, Crow, you were a terrified kid! Your brother had just been killed in a horrible and terrifying way. You almost certainly had nightmares the night before, and here it was, nighttime again. You were sitting in your yard, daydreaming, rocked by the loss of Billy, horrified by the other killings, too young to make any kind of sense of it all. Mix all that together and you have the perfect brew to warp a child’s perceptions of what he sees. Then someone tosses you into a bush and before you know it strong hands are pulling at you. You say that the face you saw was a monster’s face? Crow, with all that going on, how could you not have seen a monster?”

Newton sighed. “Look, I’m not trying to badger you, man, but try to see it objectively. All the evidence points to Oren Morse—none of it points to Griswold, except the cattle thing, and I could work up twenty good reasons for that. You were a little kid. Terrified, in shock, confused. What you saw was a man’s face, his features probably distorted by shadows and moonlight and the leaves of the bush. There are no monsters, man. Truth to tell, there are enough rotten, bloodthirsty sons-a-bitches in the human race without us needing any help from things that go bump in the night. That’s one of the reasons I don’t believe in the devil. If there’s a devil making people do it, or if there are demons possessing innocent folk and making them hurt other people, then it takes the culpability away from man himself. We have to be responsible for our own actions. ”

He gave Crow a reassuring nod. “When you were nine, you couldn’t understand that any man, any human being, was capable of committing the horrors that were happening in town. You couldn’t accept that a man had done those things to your brother. For a kid, it’s much easier to believe in monsters—after all, monsters are supposed to do bad things, they’re evil by their nature, so there is no betrayal of human morality. Crow, you needed it to be a monster, and so it was. ”

“You’re wrong,” Crow said simply. He stopped and slid the machete into its flat sheath and looked at Newton with humorless eyes. “There are monsters. I saw one. You make a really good argument, Newt, I’ll give you that. Very persuasive, eminently logical, but you are wrong. I know what I saw. ”

“But—”

“It was pretty bright, despite being nighttime. It was two days past the peak of the full moon, there was a lot of light. I saw his face. ”

“Griswold’s face?”

“Uh huh. Almost his face. Maybe in another couple of nights it would have been even more like his face. Maybe two days earlier it had been a lot less like his face—but on that night, it was somewhere between. ”

“Between…what and what? You’re not making sense. ”

Crow’s dark eyes glittered. “Between the face of a man,” he said softly, “and the face of a wolf. ”

Newton opened his mouth to speak. Words utterly failed him.

Crow nodded. “Yep, that’s exactly what I’ve been trying to tell you. There were two sets of murders, each spread out over a handful of days, separated by just less than a month. Both sets began just two days before the full moon and ended two days after. ”

Newton still couldn’t manage the words.

“I think Ubel Griswold was a werewolf,” said Crow.

Chapter 24

(1)

“Please tell me that you’re just having a mental breakdown,” Newton said, “and that you don’t really believe that Griswold was a werewolf. ”

They had stopped walking and stood together in a natural clearing surrounded by wild rhododendrons and holly. A few crows were gossiping back and forth above them in the trees. Crow met the reporter’s skeptical stare with his own flat and level one. “I know what I saw. ”

“You were nine!” Newton yelled.

“Yeah, I was nine!” Crow yelled back, “and at age nine I saw a fucking werewolf! I don’t care if you don’t believe it. ”

“I don’t believe it. ”

“Well I damn well do!” Crow bellowed those words and they seemed to hang in the air around them like ozone.

Newton made a dismissing hand gesture and turned away, walking ten steps down the path they had come, saying, “This is nuts. How the hell I ever got talked into coming down here…”

“You can go back if you want to. ”