Dead Man's Song

Chapter 28

(1)

Val and Connie strolled quietly down the lanes between the corn as stars blossomed and wheeled overhead. It was dark, but Val had the pistol snug in the back of her waistband and Diego and two of the hands were still on the property, working one field away on a tractor that had broken down. The glow of lanterns and the hum of a portable generator where the men worked was a comfort to both women.

Mostly they didn’t talk, and when they did it wasn’t about Mark or the recent violence. The safest subject for Connie was a discussion of Val’s wedding plans. Connie warmed to that subject immediately and was filled with ideas for making the event the talk of the season. Most of Connie’s suggestions were frou-frou nonsense that would have had Val in too many layers of Italian lace with her hair in curlicues, but Val let her ramble. It was refreshing to hear Connie enthused about something.

Several times, however, she stole covert glances at her watch, wondering why Crow wasn’t back by now. If he’s fallen down the mountain and broken his damn leg I’ll break the other one for him, she decided. When her cell phone rang she looked at it, expecting it to be him, but frowned at the number on the LCD display. She flipped it open.

“Hello…Terry?”

“Val? I’ve been trying to call Crow all day but he’s not answering and I need to speak to him but he doesn’t pick up the—”

“Whoa, Terry, slow down. What’s wrong? Are you okay? Is something wrong with Sarah, the kids?”

Terry’s tirade ground to a halt and he barked out a dry, totally humorless laugh. “Wrong? Shit. What isn’t wrong?”

Val blinked, still surprised by Terry’s recent vocabulary shift. Back when they had dated he would never have used a vulgarity. “Terry? Jesus, what is it? Tell me what’s going on.” Connie raised her eyebrows to ask what was up but Val held up a hand for her to wait. “Terry, tell me what’s happening? Is it something with you and Sarah?”

“No, no, not that. Thank God, it’s not that, too.”

“Then what? Are you sick?”

There was that dry laugh again. “Sick? Yeah, I guess you could say that.”

“Are you hurt? Do you need a doctor?”

“I’ve been to doctors. I’ve been to a dozen doctors. Frigging quacks, all of them, Val…you just don’t know…. Nobody knows.”

“What, Terry? What don’t I know? Tell me.”

“Val,” Terry breathed huskily and Val realized with a start that Terry was crying. Softly, but wretchedly. “I think I’m over the edge, Val,” Terry said in a tortured voice. “I think I’m gone.”

“Hey…hey, now…,” she said.

Terry’s voice broke into pieces and collapsed into ruin, and Val thought she knew the shape of this. Crow had told her about Terry’s dreams and delusions. They must be intensifying, ganging up on him. Val stood there for a long time, just listening to the big man cry like a lost child. She tried to say soothing things, but felt hamstrung. She opened her mouth to speak and then abruptly there was the sound of fingers fumbling on the receiver. A voice said tentatively, “Who is this, please?”

“Sarah?”

“Val? Oh, thank God!”

“Sarah, what the hell is happening? What’s wrong with Terry?”

“He’s in the bathroom now. Oh, Val—I just don’t know what to do.”

“What’s wrong?”

“He’s…well, he’s not well.” Sarah lowered her voice. “Remember what I told you—the dreams and all? It’s gotten so much worse lately. I have a call into his doctor.”

“Oh, sweetie, I’m so sorry. Is this because of the blight and all? Or the older stuff? From…when we were kids?” She didn’t want to say much more with Connie standing close by, but Sarah caught the drift.

“I—think so.” She paused. “He’s told me this morning Mandy has been following him around.”

Val echoed softly. “I know…Crow told me a little, but—”

“He said that she’s been trying to get him to kill himself. The medication’s not helping. I’m so scared, Val. I’ve…sent for an ambulance.” Sarah was starting to cry now. “He’s falling apart. I can see it happening but I can’t do anything for him.”

“Hey! Listen to me, Sarah,” Val said, putting some steel in her voice. “Believe me when I tell you that you don’t want to break down right now. Later, but not right now. This is going to sound really harsh, but suck it up because you can’t let him see you fall apart. Not now, not until he’s under care. You hear me?”

Val could almost hear Sarah take a steadying breath. “Right. Right…but…shit!”

“Sure, get mad, honey, that’s good, it’ll help—but stay focused.”

Sarah gave a funny little laugh. “God, I wish I had your strength, Val.”

“Honey, I don’t even have my strength. It’s all smoke and mirrors.”

“Bullshit,” Sarah said, but she sounded like she was standing on firmer ground.

“Should I come over? I can be there in fifteen minutes.” Then she caught sight of the look on Connie’s face. “Connie’s with me. We can both come. Get some girl power going.”

“No,” she said sharply, “but if they want him to check into the hospital could you come over there later, sit with me for a bit? Can I ask that?”

“Sure. Call me once you know what’s happening and I’ll scoot on over. Me and Connie. Crow should be back soon, too. We’ll all come over.”

“He keeps asking for Crow.”

“Yeah, I know, but Crow’s out of touch right now, but he should be back soon. Look, you get him ready and we’ll all see you later. And…Sarah? I love you. Both of you. Tell Terry that he’s not alone.”

“Thanks, Val, I’ll tell him,” Sarah said, and hung up.

Val closed her phone and looked at Connie, then told her the bones of the conversation.

“That poor man,” Connie said in a motherly way, but her eyes were nearly vacant. After a moment they started walking again, taking the long way around that would bring them up past the barn and then back to the house.

I think I’m over the edge, Val, I think I’m gone. There had been such pain, such terrible fear in Terry’s voice as he said it. Such awful conviction that the observation was true. “Damn…” she said softly.

(2)

Just as Sarah set down the phone there was the sound of a blow and shattering glass from upstairs. “Terry!” She tore out of the kitchen, raced up the stairs, and burst into the bedroom just as Terry Wolfe brought the golf club down on the glass of a framed Warhol litho. The head of the sand wedge chopped noisily through glass and matboard and took the top of John Lennon’s head clean off. Sarah skidded to a halt by the edge of the bed, turning away to dodge the spray of little glass needles.

Terry turned a face toward her that was a snarling mask of animal rage.

(3)

Mike Sweeney got home just before seven, well before his curfew. He walked his bike around back and chained it up by the garage door, then went inside.

“That you, Mikey? You’re home early. Want some dinner?” Her voice floated from the living room, which was dark except for the blue flicker of the TV. There was already a gin slur to her speech.

Mike stood in the hallway, not wanting to go into the living room, not wanting to see his mother drunk, though nowadays she almost always was. He turned toward the stairs, calling over his shoulder. “I’m not hungry. I’m gonna go study.”

“It’s Friday!”

“Big test on Monday.”

“Oh. Okay.” She sounded more relieved than disappointed that he didn’t want her to cook anything. “If you want something later, we can order. I have some coupons for Pizza Palace.”

“Yeah. Sure. Whatever.” He pounded up the stairs and into his room, where he locked his door. He was no longer sweating, but his clothes were damp; his skin still felt feverish and strange, so he stripped the clothes off and headed into the bathroom. He was in the shower for a long time, first just standing under the spray, eyes closed, running and rerunning what had just happened out on the road. It was all so weird, so unreal.

Tow-Truck Eddie tried to kill me, he thought. Twice now. And tonight he had caused the guy to crash his wrecker in a ditch. As the water pounded him he replayed each moment—the way the truck was lying in wait for him, the way the big driver had let him get just far enough ahead so that it would be a good chase. The way the bastard had nearly caught him when Mike had gone back to look. The way he had howled after his truck had been wrecked. It was all so unreal. He took the soap and washed himself and shampooed his hair and used a nailbrush to scrub his fingers. He wanted to be clean, needed to be clean, as if by washing so hard he could sponge away the unreality of what had happened. Of nearly dying. The water was as hot as he could stand it and he lingered under it, loving the feel of the thousands of tiny impacts, feeling his muscles become gradually looser, feeling the tension go, letting his mind drift…

Fugue.

The water rained down on him but Mike Sweeney no longer felt it. He stood there, eyes closed, his skin red from the heat.

Inside the chrysalis the pupa undergoes slow change.

On his face the last of the bruises faded to green and then to yellow and then vanished as if the water had washed them away. The cartilage in his knees that had suffered microtears while he raced uphill away from the wrecker mended itself. Internal bruises from cramps deep within his calf muscles relaxed and the tissues mended.

Transformation continues along predetermined pathways following a biological imperative.

The water pounds down on him, but Mike Sweeney has stepped out. No trace of him exists within the chrysalis of young flesh.

Transformation is inevitable now.

When he opens his eyelids Mike Sweeney does not look out through those blue eyes, and indeed those eyes are not quite blue. Not pure blue. They are blue flecked with red and the irises are rimmed with gold. Mike Sweeney does not see the water, or the steam, or the shower walls through those eyes. They are not his eyes. Mike Sweeney, as he has been, is almost completely gone now.

It is the dhampyr who sees through those eyes.

(4)

Terry bellowed in rage and lifted the golf club like an ax, standing with legs braced wide, his naked body bathed in sweat, his muscles rigid with tension as the club reached the apex of its lift, and then with a ferocious convulsion that carved definition into every muscular inch of his body he smashed the club down on the largest remaining piece. Splinters leapt up around him, adding to the dozen small cuts that bled sluggishly on his calves and feet and thighs. The glass settled quickly into stillness on the carpet, not only adding to the litter but substantially increasing the number of mocking glass surfaces. He raised the wedge again, not even remotely aware that Sarah was standing in the doorway, her face white with shock. All he saw were the thousands of splinters of that picture glass spread out in a fan-pattern on the thick blue bedroom carpet, each polished surface dispassionately reflecting his face and body. Each little sliver was a fun-house mirror, distorting blue eyes and red hair and strong limbs into feral yellow eyes, stiff reddish-brown fur, and the twisted, hulking musculature of something impossible. When his mouth opened to yell in protest, the muzzles of the myriad mirror-image mouths wrinkled to show dripping fangs. If his hand wiped angrily at the tears on his face, the reflected mockery swiped at its bestial face with a furred paw that ended in black talons. A thousand tacit accusations glared at him from the glittering debris.

“Terry! For God’s sake!”

He spun, the club still raised, glaring at her with mad eyes. “Get out!” he roared.

“You’re going to hurt yourself,” she pleaded. “Look at you. You’re bleeding!”

“Get out! Get away from me!”

She took a tentative step into the bedroom; her movements slowed by fear for him and fear of him. Until now Sarah never would have believed Terry would ever hurt her, but the closer she got to him the more she doubted. At that moment there was nothing in him that was not polluted by torment—and she did not trust that he really knew who she was. “Terry, come on now,” she soothed, holding her hands out in a gesture of nonhostility, empty palms turned toward him, half to calm, half to plead, the way you would calm a dog.

He stumbled a step back, his big feet crunching on the glass. There were smears of blood on the carpet. He pointed the club at her. “You stay away! You don’t understand!”

“I’m trying to understand, Terry! Let me help, Terry.” She kept deliberately using his name, calmly, soothingly, hoping that it would in some way anchor him, bring him back to himself.

He jabbed the head of the club at her. It was less a threatening gesture than it was a barrier for him to hide behind. Then he spun and pointed at an old armoire across the room. “It’s all her goddamned fault! She won’t leave me alone. She’s been driving me out of my goddamn mind for a month. Every day…every goddamned day!”

Sarah turned to look. The japanned armoire stood silent and alone between the twin doors to their clothes closets. Slowly, she turned back to Terry. “Who, Terry? Who is she?” She knew he was talking about Mandy, but did not know how to approach that concept.

“Her!” he snapped. “She’s blamed me all these years…all these years. But—damn it to hell, I did what I could. I was just a kid! What else could I do have done? It all happened so…fast! What could I do?” He glared with anger and hurt at the wall. “Why can’t you get that through your head?” He paused, as if listening and then picked up the conversation as if he was replying to a statement. “Well, if you don’t blame me for what happened, then why are you doing this to me? Why do you keep making me see that!” He pointed the club at the broken picture glass.

There was a looking pause and then, “Bullshit!” he snarled, but there was an ocean of doubt in his trembling voice. “He’s as dead as you are!”

Terry stood there and listened just as naturally as if someone were really speaking. Sarah watched in awed fascination, seeing his expression undergo a series of slow changes: at first his face held a challenging look, then his features went slowly blank as if he was hearing new information that was taking some thought to digest; then it was indignant disbelief that curled his lips to tight thinness; then a slowly dawning look of profound horror; and finally a sad despair that made his fall into sickness. “No,” he said, and his voice was a hoarse whisper.

“T-Terry?” Sarah ventured.

“But I’m nothing like that!” he cried, arguing with empty space. “I’m nothing like that.” Tears fell coursed down his cheeks. “I can’t be like that….”

“Terry, talk to me!” She might as well have been a million miles away.

“It’s not fair,” he mumbled. “Not fair, not fair, not fair…” Each time he repeated it his voice diminished, sounding further and further away as if somehow inside his own head Terry was moving farther away from Sarah, from the room, and from himself. It was utterly chilling to watch.

There was the faint cry of a siren in the distance.

“Not fair, not fair, not—” Abruptly he lifted his bowed head and looked again at the empty wall by the armoire. “What can I do?” A pause. “I don’t want to do that. I can keep control of it. I never gave in, you know that. I’m a good person! I’ll never be like him. I can stop it!”

Sarah took a small step forward, close enough to touch him if she dared, but she did not. Part of her mind was suddenly screaming at her to run, to get away from Terry before…Before…what? She had no idea what her instincts were trying to tell her, so she slammed the lid down on them. She watched as he reached down and picked up the largest remaining piece of glass from the Warhol lithograph, a triangular spike four inches wide at one end and tapering along eleven inches to a dagger-sharp point. Sarah’s heart seemed to freeze midbeat, but Terry held it between his fingers gingerly, not like a weapon but truly like a mirror, angling it to increase the reflective surface. Just for this moment all he seemed interested in was his reflection—the twisted reflection he apparently saw and she did not. His face was filled with a dreadful fascination, as if he no longer doubted that what he saw was completely real to him and could now, in at least a marginal way, bear to examine it, as if he now understood some of the awful answers.

A chill, like a brief icy breeze, brushed along Sarah’s side, and she turned to look, but the room was still empty, still desolate. Terry turned, too, looking in the same direction as if he, too, had felt the chill; then Sarah felt her stomach turn to ice as he addressed that spot of air from which the coldness seemed to radiate. He no longer addressed the wall by the armoire. “Is it real, then?” he asked with such crippling hurt in his voice that the sound of it broke Sarah’s heart. “Is it true?”

“Oh my God…,” she whispered, and for the first time wondered if what he was seeing was really in the room with them.

“God…no,” he pleaded, letting the glass fall from his hand. “Don’t let it be. Please God, don’t let it be like this!” More tears fell from his blueberry-colored eyes.

Sarah was weeping now, too. She reached out to touch him, but he saw her hand and jerked away from her as if she had come at him with a knife.

“Don’t touch me!” he hissed, falling over onto his hip, scrabbling and crawling desperately away from her. Red blood blossomed from several long gashes that opened as he scrambled away through the jagged litter. “Don’t touch me! Can’t you see?”

His rejection of her stabbed into her with terrible force, producing not more despair but an anger that leapt up from her broken heart and escaped through her mouth.

“Goddamn it, Terry! There’s nothing to see!”

“Yes! Look! For Christ’s sake—are you blind?” He held up another piece of glass, turning it to show her.

“No!” she snapped. “No more of that!” She stepped forward and slapped the glass out of his hand, but her angle was bad and immediately she felt a burn across her palm and looked down to see blood flood outward from her palm. She stared at it and then held her hand out angrily to Terry. “Now see, damn it! Do you want to keep this up until we cut ourselves to piece…” Her voice died abruptly in her throat, choked to silence by the look that had appeared suddenly and intensely on Terry’s face as he stared at her welling blood. It was a look of total, naked hunger. A horrible, lustful hunger. He leered at her blood and his mouth began working, lips and jaws moving as if tasting the air, as if tasting her blood.

With a cry of horror, Sarah reeled back, whipping her hand away and hiding it behind her back like a starving child hiding a scrap from a scrounging dog. Terry leaned forward as if to follow her, his weight dropping down onto his palms. When she moved back another step, and then another, he moved forward, walking on knees and hands in a mockery of a dog, and with each step forward his body movement changed, becoming comfortable with the posture, moving with a strange grace that was so much at odds with his naked, bleeding state.

Sarah’s back struck hard against the edge of the door frame. Terry advanced again, then darted forward in a lunge that brought him to within a yard of her. His eyes glared up at her, and in them Sarah saw no trace of Terry. The eyes that looked at her were the hungry eyes of an animal.

The strange wave of coldness that had touched her earlier swept past again, passing between her and Terry. Sarah shivered involuntarily, but Terry turned suddenly, lunging at the cold air as it passed, actually snarling at it and biting the empty air. Sarah wanted to run, to scream—but a stronger urge kept her there, in that room, with Terry. Not this Terry, but the one she loved, however much he might be damaged, might be submerged beneath all of his sickness.

Terry slowly turned back toward her. The muscles in his arms and back began to ripple with an unnatural spasm, and pain danced in Terry’s eyes. He tore at the carpet with his fingernails, and a line of drool slipped from between his lips to hang pendulously below his chin.

Sarah could have run, could have been out the bedroom door, down the steps, gone from the house in seconds. The ambulance wail was closer now and she could run toward it, toward safety, but she stood her ground for love of him. The twisted, snarling knot of muscle and bone that inched toward her had madness in its eyes and enough physical power to easily break her apart. She knew that if he attacked her she could not—and would not—fight him. She held her ground as he stalked to within inches of her, his face wrinkled in a grotesque parody of an animal’s silent scream, like a tiger’s face before it kills, like a wolf as it leaps. Sarah believed it, knew the threat, felt that her life was measured now in seconds. Slowly, slowly, she lowered herself down to her knees in front of him, bending until she sat on her calves, her head level with his, feeling the sharp bit of glass into her knees but not caring, not reacting to that—pain and blood were nothing to her at that moment.

His eyes watched her, alight with hunger. Sarah reached out with her hands and touched both sides of his face. At first he jerked away, growling low in his throat, but she tried again, saying a single word, “No.” Just that one word, said softly.

The places where her palms touched seemed to crackle with energy, though whether it was real or not, she couldn’t tell. She knelt there, touching his face, and said it again, “No.”

The moment was unreal. He was there on all fours, transformed in a broken moment from a gentle man who had held her and loved her to a damaged and incomplete imitation of some predatory thing—a beast of indefinable nature. She was there, kneeling on a glass-strewn and blood-splattered carpet, touching madness and denying its power with a single word. “No.”

He looked at her with the eyes of madness. In the uncertain light by the open bedroom doorway, his eyes no longer seemed blue at all, but appeared to glow with a bizarre red-gold glow. Animal eyes. He turned his face toward her bleeding palm, sniffed at it.

“No, Terry.” He leaned closer toward the flowing blood. An inch away, less. The smell of salt and copper filled his nostrils. Sweat burst from his forehead. He was shaking all over as if he had a raging fever. His tongue wormed from between his lips, reaching, needing, almost touching the blood, almost tasting it.

“NO!”

This time it was Terry himself who said it. Yelled it. Screamed it—and the words were ripped out of him, bellowed with horrible and inhuman force as he reared up and shoved at her, knocking her into the hallway, knocking himself back against the bed.

“NO!” he screamed again and the red-gold glow of his eyes burned with incandescent fury. Sarah fell heavily, her head rapping hard against the banister. Dazed, she watched as Terry rose up from the floor, first to his knees and then slowly, with terrible struggling jerks and spasms to a crouch, and finally all the way to his full height. Naked, crisscrossed with bleeding slashes, bathed in sweat, he was an awesome sight. Every muscle in his body was locked in battle, one against another, evidence of some titanic internal struggle.

“NO!” he roared, and he wept, too, his tears burning bright in his eyes. “No, you can’t take that away from me, too! You can’t make me, you bastard! You lose, Griswold, you fucking lose!” He laughed with weird triumph, though his laugh became a sob.

He wrenched himself around to face Sarah, his mouth working as he tried to speak, but only choked sounds came out of his constricted throat.

“Sarah!” was all he could manage, and then he spun around, ran straight across the room, and threw himself headfirst out of the window with Sarah’s horrified, despairing scream following him all the way down to the garden flagstones.