Dead Man's Song (Pine Deep 2)

(5)

The Bone Man was sitting on the hood of the Impala, his heels resting on the bumper, the guitar snugged against his belly. He had been playing some old songs, hoping Little Scarecrow would hear him, and not at all expecting him to. He’d heard Crow singing “I’m Ready,” that great old Willie Dixon song that Muddy Waters had cut way back in 1956, and hearing those lyrics had made him want to play the tune. He’d picked out just a few notes when that reporter fellow pricked up his ears and rubbernecked so fast it looked like his head was going to unscrew itself.

He had heard the music! Had actually heard it. The Bone Man sat there on the Impala’s hood and stared in total shocked amazement at the empty edge of the pitch.

(6)

Climbing down from the pitch was no picnic and within a dozen yards Newton was sweating badly and his brea

th was coming in gasps. The slope started at a forty-five-degree angle but went sheer to the point of a straight drop several times, and Newton was glad for the rope. His walking stick hung slantwise across his back, lashed in place, and was totally useless for the downhill journey. For the first fifty yards the incline was littered with discarded beer bottles and manfully crushed beer cans, dozens of old shriveled condoms and wrinkled condom wrappers, and scattered debris that was now so ancient and sun-faded that it was impossible to tell what it had originally been. Birds sang noisily in the trees and the last lumbering flies of the season floated heavily by seeking quiet places to die.

The side of the Hollow was composed of slate, sandstone, schist, chunks of granite, and lots of loose dirt and stone. A glacial mishmash of rock of every kind, most of it hardwired into the landscape by roots or packed in with hardened clay. No part of it was safe, even the stones that jutted out like sturdy steps, as Newton found out the first time he tried to stand on one to catch his breath. The stone was undercut and the loose soil gave way and Newton plunged down fifteen feet, the rope hissing and smoking through his hand and his limbs pinwheeling until Crow snaked out a strong hand and caught him under the armpit and then slammed him belly-flat against the pitch. Crow swung over and straddled Newton, the balls of his booted feet steadying him and his other hand wrapped turn-and-around with his own line.

“You okay there, Newt?” Crow asked, and Newton just flapped a hand. His heart was beating so loud he wondered it didn’t echo off the walls. “Catch your breath. We’ll go again when you’re ready. ”

In a minute they started down again, going more slowly now with caution learned from the fall. Newton was not nearly as fit as Crow, not even as fit as a wounded and recovering Crow, and he had to stop several times. Once, he looked over his shoulder and down just as his rope swayed and he got a sickening rush of vertigo and had to close his eyes and clench his jaws to keep from gagging. When he had his gag reflex under control and the world had stopped spinning with such abandon, Newton braced his feet against a big rock and used his free hand to dust himself off. As he did he saw something in the dirt by his knee glint dully, and he bent picked it up, thumbing away the clots of dirt.

“What’s that?” Crow called from ten feet lower on the slope.

“Nothing. Just an old dime. ” The dime was dated 1966 and had a crude hole punched through it.

“Let’s keep moving,” Crow said. “It’s not a treasure hunt. ”

Newton nodded and made as if to throw the dime away but without realizing that he was doing it put it in his pocket instead. Later on he would remember that dime and for the rest of his life he would wear it on a string around his ankle as a reminder of why he survived the autumn of the Black Harvest. Why he had survived while so many others died.

Dark Hollow was a deep depression formed at the base of one medium-size mountain and two huge sidehills and their steep sides kept most of the hollow in shadows except at noon. Farther southwest the land flattened out and even opened up in spots so that a rare beam of sunlight could reach down to the floor of the hollow, but there were also spots that never saw the light and it was toward one of these spots that Crow and Newton descended yard by yard. There was a clear division line where the mountain crest blocked the sun from reaching any farther down into the valley. It took the climbers twenty careful minutes to reach that point, and as they crossed that division line from sunshine into shadow, Newton felt a chill pass through him. Certainly the air was colder without the touch of the sun, but to him it felt as if he had stepped into a freezer unit. He blew out his breath and was surprised to find that it did not steam the air; it felt cold enough by far. He glanced at Crow, to see if he felt it, too, but Crow was reacting in a starkly different way to the shadows of Dark Hollow. Despite his jaunty baseball cap and grunge-crowd sunglasses, despite the affected spring in his muscular step, he was sweating bullets. Perspiration beaded his face and trickled in icy threads down his face. Unnerved by the sight, Newton said nothing and they kept moving, heading deeper into the valley.

They climbed down without conversation, silent and alert to the deceptive irregularities of the slanting landscape. Newton became more and more aware of the ambience of Dark Hollow.

Crow removed his sunglasses and stowed them away in a pocket. “Black as pitch down here,” he said vaguely. “Come on. ”

Ten minutes later they reached the floor of Dark Hollow.

At the bottom they stopped and stepped away from the slope, their legs wobbly, and when they pulled off their gloves, their hands were pink and puffy. Crow took both pairs of gloves, then wrapped several turns of both climbing ropes around them and tied it all off so that nothing would be lost, weighting the ends with rocks to mark the spot. As he did this, Newton unslung his walking stick and shrugged out of his backpack so he could get to his canteen. He took a long pull and handed it to Crow. Then Crow fished a PowerBar out of his pocket and split it between them. They stood in the gloom, chewing, looking around them. The place was a bleak nothing, cold and damp and utterly still.

Crow consulted his compass and pointed northeast. “Griswold’s farm is that way,” he said. “I think,”

“You…think?”

Crow shrugged as he put the last piece of the PowerBar into his mouth. “It’s not like I’ve been there before, dude. I found it on the county surveyor’s map. Its location is mentioned in some old borough zoning records. ”

The way ahead looked choked with brush and stumpy scrub pines and Newton gave it a dubious stare. “Is there a path?”

Crow shook his head. “I doubt it. Come on. ”

If there had ever been a path it was thirty years overgrown and as they went northeast they simply picked their way through the path of least resistance, and for an hour they crept forward with no feeling of having made any real progress. They clambered over rocks, crawled through coarse shrubs, slithered under fallen trees, and leapt gullies, feeling like they were running an obstacle course with no breaks in it at all. Newton’s legs felt leaden as he lumbered along behind Crow, and he struggled to draw chestfuls of air. He wanted to blame his breathlessness and tiredness on the sedentary life of a writer, or the arduous terrain, or the weight of his pack, but he was unable to manufacture any real belief in those fictions and tried to work it out logically, tried to pick apart his own nervous reactions and explain them away, using weather, lack of sleep, bad coffee, and cold air as culprits for each individual emotion. He tried, in short, to be a reporter and slant the story in a way that would favor a totally rational explanation for everything. For most of the trek he was happy with that, but as the shadows got deeper and the air got colder the farther into the Hollow they went he kept having to remind himself of his own logic. He really didn’t want to openly acknowledge the grim and oppressive atmosphere of Dark Hollow, because to allow it to be a fact, or even a possibility, would be to accept that the place itself possessed some kind of negative energy, and to him that was preposterous. Crow was the one who believed in this freaky shit, not him.

Eventually even Crow’s pace faltered and he stopped and leaned his back against a hemlock tree; he dragged his forearm across his face and examined the dark stains of perspiration on the sleeve. His chest was heaving, though he looked less like someone who was exhausted from exertion than someone from whom breath had been robbed by illness. His skin color was bad and his dark eyes looked faintly feverish as he sucked at the air like a gaffed fish.

“Jesus,” he breathed raggedly as he unclipped his canteen and took a long pull, “this is like fighting your way through a jungle. Never seen such dense brush. ” Crow wiped his face again. “Man, I’m sweating like a pig. ”

“Pigs don’t sweat,” said Newton distractedly as he looked around at the high walls of shadow that climbed the steep sides of the hill.

Crow shrugged. “They would if they were down here. ”

There was a squawk from the branches of the hemlock and Crow looked up to be a half-dozen ragged black birds clutching to the bare branches. Mostly female crows with their blue, green, and purple iridescent wings, and one fat albino male that was a sickly ash-gray. The jury of birds watched them with black intelligent eyes, and the albino squawked again, softly.

“Tell me something,” said Newton, finally reaching for the canteen. “How come you never tried to come down here before? I mean…why now?”