Ghost Road Blues (Pine Deep 1)

He went into his bedroom, jerked open the closet door, and fished around on the top shelf until he f

ound a heavy object wrapped in a towel. This he carried over to the bed and carefully unrolled it. Inside the towel was a second cloth smelling faintly of gun oil, and inside this was a Beretta 92F 9mm automatic pistol and several clips. Crow sat down on the side of the bed for a few moments, holding the gun in his right hand, turning it over, weighing it, considering it. He hadn’t worn the gun since he’d quit the department, and even though he’d gotten off the sauce long before he’d turned in his badge, just the sight of the pistol was a link to unhappier times. His drinking had been so bad that Val had broken up with him for two years and wouldn’t start dating him again until after he’d been well into his first year of sobriety. Crow wasn’t one to take a lot of pride in being sober—instead he remembered what it felt like to be a pathetic figure in the eyes of the town, and in Val’s eyes. He never wanted to let her down again, not in any way big or small, no matter how much he really wanted a drink.

Sighing, he hefted the gun and worked the slide, making sure the breech was clear. He located his box of shells in the closet and methodically loaded the clip. He never kept the clips loaded as the constant stress on the clip’s springs could fatigue the metal, and it had been a long time since he’d fired the thing. He slapped the clip into the grip and double-?checked to make sure the safety was on.

“Yippee-?yi-?yo,” he said out loud as he stood and jammed the pistol into his waistband, then danced a little jig as the cold steel burned his skin like a block of ice. “Yikes!”

He pulled off his shirt, put on a T-?shirt with an R. Crumb painting of Son House on it and tucked it in, then put the gun back into the waistband of his pants and pulled his flannel shirt over it.

At the door he paused and glanced at the three cats that were now performing their post-?dinner ablutions, licking their paws and using them to wash their faces.

“Don’t stay up too late…and no more cable porn. ” He wagged a finger.

Pinetop was the only one who looked at him, and his expression was pitying. Crow pulled the door closed and locked it.

2

Terry hurried up Corn Hill toward the chief’s office, which shared the first floor of the township building with the county court. As he walked briskly through each patch of brightness his shadow seemed to lunge and pounce, springing with lupine speed at his own heels and then vanishing as he moved into a different alignment of light and reflection.

Cars swept up and down the hill, gleaming with polished chrome and tinted glass, complicated antennae sprouting expensively as the cars braked and swept along the immaculate street. Terry glanced at a few of them, once or twice giving the driver a curt wave and nodding to others. He was usually expansive, ready to stop and talk, to shake hands and swap familiar jokes and discuss the day’s business, doing his mayor shtick with élan and a natural affability, but lately his good mood had begun to slip and any trace of good humor seen on his face was put there by effort and held in place by sheer will.

He felt as though the walls of his life were starting to crack and he was terrified of what would pour through once the cracks split wide enough. His depression and stress had begun at the end of summer, when the first traces of the crop blight had turned the summer wheat into rancid weeds that had to be burned. That hadn’t been too bad because wheat was not the town’s staple crop, and for a week or so everyone breathed sighs of relief when the corn crop had looked pretty healthy. Then the blight struck nine corn farms in two days, and since then more than half of the town’s corn crop was infected. The pumpkins were next to go, and they were hit even harder. Cabbages, apples, and berries, too.

That’s about when the dreams started.

Terry had always been prone to nightmares—ever since age ten, when he’d been in a coma for weeks following the death of his sister—but these dreams were new and they were maddeningly persistent. They took two forms, though there was one theme that overlapped them both. In the first set of dreams he was wandering through Pine Deep as it burned—moving past heaps of dead bodies, hearing explosions rip the night apart. Everywhere there was death and pain. Everyone he knew and loved lay strewn about, their throats savaged and bloody, their dead eyes staring accusingly at him, and as he staggered along he would occasionally catch glimpses of his own reflection in cracked store windows. The reflections always showed him not as himself—but as something twisted and bestial. When his dreaming self would try and look closer, as the image became clearer, Terry would come yelping out of the dream, sweating and panting and utterly terrified.

The second type of dream—and by far the most persistent—involved Terry lying in bed next to Sarah and feeling his body begin to change, to reshape, into something horrifying, but horrifying in a way that was not clear to Terry, and no matter how hard he tried he just couldn’t get any sense of what the dreams meant.

Sometimes he had the dreams two or three times a night, and he was feeling the drain on his system. He had told his psychiatrist about them, but the doctor had passed them off as stress-?dreams inspired by the local ambience of spookiness and exacerbated by the growing financial troubles of the farmers. The psychiatrist also told Terry that, as mayor, he was taking on too much responsibility for things over which he had no control. Added to it were the constant demands on him by the business owners as the town geared up for its annual Halloween celebration, the biggest event in the year for Pine Deep. Terry was averaging fourteen-?hour days at work, and cruising on about four or five good hours of sleep a night. Terry had listened to what the doctor had to say, and all the advice to find some way of calming down—meditation, yoga, anything—nodded his understanding, and then held his hand out for his prescriptions: antipsychotics and antidepressants and antiaxiomatics. The three staples of his current diet.

And now there was the phone call from Gus Bernhardt. That call had jolted him into an entirely different frame of mind.

Criminals?

In Pine Deep?

Half of him wanted to laugh out loud at the very thought, and the other half of him was already feeling moths fluttering in his stomach. Halloween less than a month away. Already a third of the stores in town had their windows done up for the coming season, and all of the plans for the costume parade had long ago been finalized. There were still a million details to see to. Terry had managed a magnificent coup of signing David Boreanez and James Marsters to be co–grand marshals of the parade for a lot less money than he was prepared to pay, and Good Morning America was going to do a Halloween morning broadcast from Town Hall. He was talking with Regis Philben’s people about doing a spot at the hayride. School buses were bringing hundreds of kids to the farms each week to visit with the pumpkin growers (though some of the farmers had actually had to import clean and nondiseased pumpkins from Crestville and Black Marsh to keep up appearances), and the Pine Deep Authentic Candy Corn was going to be dropped in half the trick-?or-?treaters’ bags from New York to Baltimore.

Despite the crop blight it was a busier year than most, and Terry was already feeling the pressure weighing him down as he balanced the financial crisis of the farmers with the amazing boom for the in-?town businesses. Now this: a carload of big-?city criminals with guns was something Terry Wolfe and his haunted little town did not need, thank you very much. The very thought of how this craziness might affect business had Terry grinding his teeth and sweating bullets at the same time. The more he thought about it, the faster he walked. His big fists were white-?knuckled tight as he climbed the hill.

He crossed Wolfe Lane, glancing by reflex down the winding path to where his family had lived since Colonial times. Nearly one hundred and twenty years ago, Mordechai Wolfowitz had laid the cobbles on which the heels of Terry’s expensive Italian shoes clicked as he hurried to the chief’s office. Mordechai’s great-?grandson, Aaron—the one who changed the family name to Wolfe—had planted the long line of brooding oaks that stood like dour sentinels along the south side of the street. As he stepped up on the far curb, Terry slowed his pace just a fraction, imagining as he often did that he could see his little sister, Mandy, running up the lane to meet him, her red curls bouncing as she ran, her green eyes alive with humor and mischief and laughter on her lips.

The memory was brief, as it always was; and it hurt, as it always did.

There were only empty shadows on Wolfe Lane, broken here and there by the glow drooping from antique lampposts and the lights of his house at the far end. Still, he could almost hear the small and gentle sound of Mandy’s laughter….

Then the edge of the first store on the next block obscured his vision, and the display window full of the confections of AHHHH—FUDGE! filled his awareness. His frown became a brief smile and then an acknowledging murmur as the owner waved a fudge-?smeared spatula at him. Terry moved on up the hill, whisking through light and shadow, heading for the chief’s office. Behind him, the now forgotten darkness at the mouth of Wolfe Lane seemed to swirl and roil, becoming vaguely thicker. Nearby, Terry’s marmalade tabby, Party Cat, crouched by the roots of the lane’s first towering oak hunkered down over a dead starling; he pawed at the broken wings playfully and bent forward to bite—and abruptly froze, eyes snapping wide, hairs springing up straight along his spine. Party Cat stared at the boiling darkness, arching his back and laying his chest low to the ground as something slowly emerged from the blackness of the shadows. The cat’s throat vibrated with a feral growl, half of defiance and half of fear.

The shape seemed to be part of the shadows rather than merely in them, but as it moved it became defined, seeking form and structure as it stepped into the spill of pale streetlight. Party Cat hissed, baring his fangs, glaring up at the form with intense yellow eyes. The shape turned toward him, eyes meeting eyes. The cat’s wrinkled and snarling lips trembled, the intensity of the challenge ebbing, mouth becoming gradually relaxed, the furry lips sagging down over the fangs slowly a

nd with uncertainty. The shape just stood there, green eyes watching the cat, making no move. Party Cat sniffed the air, searching for a scent, then meowed plaintively at the odor he smelled: staleness, an earthiness mixed with a sharp coppery tang.

The figure stirred, turned away from the cat, and stepped farther out of the shadows into the lamplight. It was a small shape, not even four feet tall. The chilly wind stirred the tatters of dark green cotton that hung vaguely in dress-?shape disarray on the tiny form, and the wind teased and tossed the red curls that framed the pale, pale face. Pale except where streaks of dark red cut slashes through the purity of the flesh.

The figure watched Terry’s broad back retreating up the hill.

After a moment, it followed.