Dead Man's Song

Chapter 5

(1)

Crow tapped on the half-open door as he leaned into the room. “Can I come in?”

In a chair by the window, Mark Guthrie laid his newspaper in his lap and looked up. He was a few years younger than Val, handsome like their father, but softer, less rugged, and unlike his father Mark, was starting to lose his hair. He had a thick purple bruise on his right cheek that had already started to yellow around the edges. There was a thin band of bruising across the bridge of his nose, and deep pain vibrating in both of his eyes.

Mark didn’t say anything, which Crow took for as much of a welcome as he was going to get. He came in and sat on the edge of the bed.

“How’s it going, chief?” he said, pasting an amiable smile carefully on his mashed lips. When Mark said nothing, Crow went on. “Val and I might be getting out tomorrow. What about you and Connie?”

Mark said nothing, but a lump of cartilage began pulsing in his jaw.

Crow said, “I looked in on her, but she was sleeping.”

“Yes,” Mark said tightly, “she prefers to be asleep. They give her as many sedatives as she wants.”

Crow digested that for a moment. “What about you? I know this is going to sound like a stupid freaking question, but how are you handling this?”

Mark’s gaze held for a moment and then wavered and he turned and looked out the window. “How would you expect me to be handling it?”

That was a minefield question and Crow went through about forty replies in his head before he said, “Like a Guthrie, I suppose.”

Mark’s eyes snapped back and locked on Crow’s, searching for mockery. Crow kept his face neutral, trying to convey friendship. They held the contact for a long time and Crow could see Mark’s eyes begin to glisten with moisture, then Mark turned away again and went back to staring out the window. After several minutes of complete silence, Crow sighed and left.

(2)

Vic Wingate was a patient man. Over the last thirty years he had learned the art of waiting, and knew the benefits of thinking before acting. As a result he seldom made a mistake. This was both the greatest of the skills he’d learned from the Man, and the greatest skill he brought to the Man’s service. He was a tool, finely made, and one that worked as perfectly as planned. He was completely aware of this, and instead of feeling exploited he believed with every fiber of his being that he was being used in the best possible way and to his fullest potential. How many servants feel that? Or know it to be the truth?

All day long he’d sat on a canvas folding chair and stared at the slowly bubbling surface of the swamp at the bottom of Dark Hollow, a place forever shrouded in purple shadows by the towering pines and the height of the three mountains that formed it. There was a thermos of coffee by his right foot, and an Igloo cooler by his left in which Lois had packed three ham-and-cheese sandwiches, an apple, and two packs of Tastykake chocolate cupcakes. In his shirt pocket was half a pack of Kools. Vic smoked whatever brand was closest to hand; he didn’t care as long as it wasn’t some low-tar bullshit. He was smoking now, taking long slow drags, holding the mentholated smoke deep in his lungs until he could feel the muscles in his chest start to spasm and then he would exhale slowly, practicing the technique of showing no discomfort, even to the point of exerting control over the cough reflex. Vic knew a lot about control. Even his rages were preplanned and deliberate. He never did anything that wasn’t thought out first, not even smacking Lois around or kicking the shit out of his faggot stepson, Mike. Everything was planned out, and everything fit into a much larger blueprint. The Man’s blueprint. The Plan.

As he sat there, smoking, sometimes the Man would speak to him, whispering into his mind, and sometimes not. At the moment the swamp was quiet except for the buzzing of late season flies. There were almost always flies down here, he considered. Probably because there was always heat coming up from the swamp, and—here he smiled thinly through the smoke that leaked out between his clenched teeth—because down here there was almost always something dead.

Such as the young woman who lay with her head and shoulders submerged in the black muck. Vic reached into his shirt pocket and found the plastic cards he’d tucked behind his pack of smokes, pulled them out, looked at them. Amex card, Visa debit card. Once upon a time he’d have driven up to Easton and sell them to a guy he knew, but he didn’t really need the money now—not with the huge stash he had gotten from Boyd. He tucked them back in his shirt and looked at the third card, a driver’s license. Cecelia Goodchild. Bad photo of a pretty twenty-six-year-old brunette. He flipped the card into the bushes. There were at least forty other cards in there, mostly women. A few men. Some of them were completely faded now, impossible to read even if someone knew to look for them there. Cecelia Goodchild’s card would rot with the others before anyone saw it, and even if by some weird and wild chance it was found, no trace of Goodchild herself ever would be. He reached out with one booted foot and pushed against the heel of her shoe. With a stretch he could just reach it. Her body slid forward an inch. Not enough to sink it, just enough to stir the surface of the swamp. Ringing the dinner bell, he thought, and though he did not feel the Man inside his brain, he somehow knew that he would be amused by the gesture. The Man loved a good joke.

The surface of the swamp remained unmoved, the body untouched. No matter, Vic thought, when he’s hungry, he’ll eat. He sat back in his canvas chair and waited. Vic was very good at waiting.

(3)

“Mr. Crow,” said the nurse, “Dr. Weinstock approved you for a fifteen-minute visit with Ms. Guthrie and you’ve been in here three hours. Time to go back to your room!” The nurse was barely five feet tall, with curly blond hair and a sweet face and in any other circumstances Crow might have labeled her as “cute,” but Weinstock had warned him about Nurse Williams. Around the hospital she was known as the Half-Pint Horror and everyone went in fear of her. “Don’t believe that charming little smile, brother,” Weinstock had warned. “She’s about as cuddly as a scorpion and far less agreeable.”

Crow wasn’t up to another battle, so he kissed Val and hobbled back to his room with Polk in tow, and when he climbed weakly into bed Polk made no offer of assistance. They had never been friends, even when Crow had been a Pine Deep police officer. He had always taken Polk for a weasel and a suck-up, mostly to town lowlifes like Vic Wingate. He wasn’t sure why Polk disliked him, but had never felt interested enough to find out. Polk picked up Jerry Head’s copy of Maxim and tuned Crow out completely. Fine with him. Crow reached for the TV remote and surfed through the channels until he found the news. None of the towns in that part of Bucks County were big enough to have their own TV station, so he settled for CNN. The multiple murders in Pine Deep were still getting serious play, especially now that two police officers had been killed, but so far no one had made the connection to Cape May. Crow thought that was strange.

A couple of years ago a group of senior citizens who were visiting the famous lighthouse in Cape May, New Jersey, were attacked and slaughtered by person or persons unknown. The attack had been incredibly savage and the killers had literally torn the tourists to pieces. A total of eighteen dead, two of them the grandparents of the head of the Philadelphia mob. The murders at the Cape May Lighthouse had made the papers across the country and throughout much of the world. Books had been written about it, there had been documentaries on the History Channel and Court TV, and Jonathan Demme was already making a movie about it with Don Cheadle and Colin Farrell, but no one had ever been arrested for the crimes or even named in the press.

As of the other night—when everything was going to hell and Ruger was still on the loose—Crow knew only the local cops, the mayor, and Crow were privy to the truth that Ruger was the Cape May Killer. Now that Ruger was dead he didn’t understand why the story hadn’t broken. He turned to Polk and was on the verge of asking him about it, and decided against it. Instead he reached for his cell phone on the bedside table and speed-dialed Terry Wolfe’s cell number, but it went straight to voice mail. He clicked off and dialed Terry’s home number. Same thing. He tried Sarah Wolfe’s number, but her phone was apparently turned off. “Damn it,” he muttered.

Polk looked up. “You say something?” When Crow didn’t answer Polk gave a sour grunt and went back to his magazine.

(4)

Saul Weinstock was not performing the autopsy on Karl Ruger, or on either of the two murdered officers. Instead he was sitting in his office, wringing cold water out of his socks and seething with fury. He had scrubbed and dressed for the postmortems and had come breezing into the morgue only to slosh to a halt ankles-deep in icy water. Water geysered up from a broken pipe by the big stainless-steel autopsy table and the whole morgue was awash.

“Son of a bitch!” Weinstock yelled and then splashed over to the valve, but by the time he shut the water off he was completely drenched. Cursing sulfurously, he examined the pipe and saw that it was completely separated from the spigot set, not actually broken but clearly dislodged. How in blue hell had that happened? Could water pressure have done it? He doubted it, but there were no obvious signs of tampering. And who would do that anyway? Then he thought of some of the outrageous-verging-on-criminal “jokes” the first-year med students had pulled over the years. For one stunt they had broken in and dressed four corpses as the Beatles, complete with Sergeant Pepper costumes. Another time they had removed the heads from three anatomy cadavers and mounted them like hunting trophies over Weinstock’s desk. No one had ever been caught, and it was Gus’s disillusioned opinion that the first thing med students at Pinelands learned was how to bypass the hospital’s years-out-of-date surveillance equipment.

Weinstock slogged to the office, tore off his clothes, and climbed into a clean set of scrubs, but his socks and shoes were soaked and the paper booties wouldn’t do him any good. His feet were freezing. He snatched the phone off the hook and called maintenance and read some poor sap the complete riot act, slammed the phone down, waded barefoot through the pool—which was draining through the floor grille now that there was no torrent to feed the flood—and left a set of wet bare footprints all the way to the elevator, snarling at everyone he met along the way.

(5)

The Bone Man stood in the shadows of Dark Hollow, at the base of the slope that climbed up through darkness into the wan sunlight hundreds of yards above. Up there was the Passion Pit, where young lovers came to sweat and grunt, and it was where the police had paused in their search for Boyd. He sighed. It was also the place where, thirty years ago, a gang of local men had beaten him to death.

The Bone Man turned and looked back down the murky vine-choked path that lead through twists and turns to the bog where he had fought Ubel Griswold. He stroked the strap of his guitar, remembering how he had used the instrument to smash the man down, and then had stabbed him with the splintered spike of the wooden neck. Panicked, insane with terror, he had dragged the body deeper into the swampy bottom of the hills and shoved him down into the mud, burying him where—in the words of his Uncle Lester—“God can’t even find ’im.”

Yeah, he’d done that, and all things considered it was safe to say that God never did find him down there in Dark Hollow. But the devil did, sure as hell, and now Griswold was back.

But so was he, and how, why, and what for were questions he couldn’t begin to answer. His very existence seemed like the punchline to some kind of cruel cosmic joke. If he had been brought back to try and save the town as he did once before, then someone up there forgot to tell him how to do it. He was barely more than a shadow, more invisible and disregarded now than when he’d been a living black man in the white man’s world of the sixties and seventies. A ghost who can’t make himself be seen most the time, one who gets weaker every time he tries. A ghost who can’t even touch the people he wanted to help. A ghost who didn’t know how to be a ghost.

Yeah, he thought, that was smart. Tear me out of the damn grave and then leave me to figure this shit out on my own.

“You want me to save these folks,” he yelled, glaring up at heaven, “then you got to give me just a little help.” But his voice was empty. Even the chirping birds failed to hear him. He closed his eyes and shook his head, cursing God and all his white-bread dumbass angels. “You can’t be so damn cruel that you’d bring me back just to watch everyone I saved die, one by one.” He shook his head. “Not even you’re that cruel, Lord.”

The silence all around him seemed to mock that claim.

(6)

Val sat on the side of the bed and brushed a blond curl from her brow, but Connie did not even look at her. She just lay there, silent, lost inside of herself. “Sweetie? You okay?” Val said softly.

Connie said nothing. Did nothing. Val shifted her position carefully, hiding her own grimace of pain, trying to force some eye contact. Gently, but insistently, leaning over her, searching her sister-in-law’s eyes for any kind of reaction, for even the slightest connection, but it was like looking at the glass eyes of a doll. “Come on, honey, you can talk to me.” Nothing.

The nurse—Half-Pint Horror Williams—came in to do her routine with thermometer and blood-pressure cuff, and Val stood up and moved over to the guest chair, lowering herself carefully into it, favoring her bruised left shoulder. She watched as the nurse worked, saw that Connie allowed herself to be touched and moved and manipulated, that she never protested, never resisted, and never truly reacted. She just was.

Val knew that it was not catatonia, because Saul had related conversations he had had with Connie, as had the staff psychiatrist Dee Simonson, but this was the second time today Val had come into her room to speak with her, and both times Connie had shut down as soon as Val had walked through the door. The first time Val hadn’t seen the change happen, but this second time she had. Connie had been reading Ladies’ Home Journal and when Val had opened the door, Connie had just let the magazine spill out of her hand and slide to the floor. Then she turned her face away and when Val had walked around to look at her all she saw were empty doll’s eyes. It was definitely deliberate. Inexplicable and weird, but deliberate. Still, Val did not give up on it, and she sat with Connie for ten more minutes, speaking softly to her for a while, and then just holding her hand. It was like sitting with the dead.

When Val had finally given her a final good-night kiss and had scuffed her way slowly out of the room, Connie closed her eyes for a full minute, feeling the tears that wanted to rise to her eyes, feeling the stitch in her chest that wanted to break free as a sob, feeling the deep and utter contempt—the burning, fiery red furnace of contempt that burned in her heart. For herself. When the nurse came in to give her a pill, Connie was curled into a fetal position, a pillow held tightly over her head, her body spasming and jerking as she wept.

(7)

Terry Wolfe was only missing because he wanted to be. His cell phone was turned off, his house phones unplugged, and his wife Sarah was manning the fortress walls to make sure no one bothered him. He had not told Sarah everything that was going on, but she’d been there for enough. When he had come shambling in last night, she had held out her arms to him and he had clung to her, sinking to his knees, weeping against her breasts.

“I need to sleep,” he whispered brokenly. “Please, God, let me sleep.”

Sarah had led him upstairs, took him into the shower and soaped him from head to toe, then toweled him off and took him to bed. There in the silent darkness she had kissed him and loved him, and then held him while he drifted off.

He slept for twelve hours without dreaming and didn’t even wake when Sarah slid out of the bed to go and take care of the kids. When he did wake, he didn’t open his eyes, didn’t even move for another few hours; he just lay there and thought about how the last month had been for him a slow descent into hell and since Ruger had come to town the pace was picking up. Even without the manhunt and all of the hurt to the people he cared about Terry was reasonably sure that he would be insane or dead by Halloween.

The whole thing had begun to spin around him when the crop blight started back in July as Pine Deep’s first wave of corn crops came due for harvest. Hack Jeffers reported an outbreak of gray leaf blight on half his crop, and by the end of that week four other farmers had reported crop infestations. The following week it was eighteen, and from then on it was an accelerating downward spiral. Not just gray leaf, but a variety of blights ranging from Stewart’s bacterial leaf blight to northern corn leaf blight, and in the following weeks there were reported cases of stalk rot, gibberella, fusarium, and diplodia ear rot diseases. By the first week of September there were widespread cases of maize dwarf mosaic and maize chlorotic mosaic, as well as armies of weevils, root worms, and stalk borers of all kinds. One of the farmers who had been hit the hardest, Jacob Troutman, had said to him, “If I was a superstitious man, Terry, I’d think this town was cursed. We have more plagues than Egypt ever saw during Moses’ time.”

Teams of specialists were brought in from private and government agencies to try and salvage some of this year’s crop, or to prevent the diseases from returning next season, but the trend was downhill. As mayor of a town whose income is half based on farming, Terry knew that leaf blight diseases could be found in almost any field, but to have so many different kinds of diseases and so many aggressive species of crop-destroying insects present in one town was beyond his knowledge, and apparently beyond the experts that were brought in from all over the country. Nor was it just the corn crop that was dying—the pumpkins, peaches, apples, and tomatoes were equally spoiled. Only two major crops were untouched: garlic—which made up about 5 percent of the town’s agriculture—and the holly farms north of town. In a season of strangeness there were things that stood out as stranger still, such as the fact that a handful of farms, including Henry Guthrie’s place, showed no sign of the plague at all, and that made no sense; and if a solution could not be found, then most of the farms would fail. That meant bankruptcy and financial ruin for many of Terry’s friends. Every single farm in town was owned by a family that had worked the land for generations. No one was starting new farms in town, and the youngest farm in Pine Deep was over sixty years old. To destroy those farms would be to destroy the history of the town. To Terry it felt like murder.

As he was struggling with the blight on one hand he had to use the other to manage the town’s other major industry, Halloween. October put the nonagricultural half of Pine Deep into the black. The better restaurants—meaning the ones that the owners claimed were haunted—were all booked through November 1. Craft stores, like the Crow’s Nest, made a mint on costumes and spooky decorations. Terry himself owned the nation’s largest Haunted Hayride attraction, into which he’d sunk a half million dollars of expansion money just before the blight hit.

As mayor, Terry also had to be Mr. Cheerful because of all the celebrities the town attracted throughout the season, and this year the festival would be bigger than ever. Terry had to speak with managers and publicity people to assure them that the stars would each receive the royal treatment. Ken Foree, star of the original Dawn of the Dead, was going to emcee a marathon of all of the Living Dead films; horror special effects wizard Tom Savini was judging a monster makeup competition on the campus; and scream queen Brinke Stevens was appearing at another film marathon—this one leading off with her classic Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama, which would be shown in a gigantic tent on the Hayride grounds; and another scream queen, Debbie Rochon, was doing a signing in a tent at the Hayride. Good Morning America was going to do a Halloween morning broadcast from Town Hall, and Regis Philben was set to do a live presentation from the Hayride the Thursday before Halloween. Screenwriter Stephen Susco, whose latest film, The Grudge 2, was just about to be released, would be hosting a screening of both films in that series and giving a talk on American interpretations of Japanese horror films, and writer-director James Gunn was in town to promote the DVD release of his recent horror film, Slither. There were rumors some of the cast of that film might show up with him.

Plus this year there was going to be a Little Halloween celebration—a rare event for the town for years where there is a Friday the thirteenth in October. It allowed Pine Deep to have another day of celebration, parties, and events. All of these things meant tourist dollars, and they might have all gone off without a hitch except for the next nail that had been driven into Terry’s peace of mind. Karl Ruger. Now Henry Guthrie was dead, Terry’s best friend was in the hospital, and there were murderers loose in town.

Just at the point where a foolish man might have said “Well, at least nothing else can go wrong”—and Terry was far too superstitious to have even thought that—things continued to go wrong. The bad dreams Terry had been having for weeks had grown dramatically worse, so vividly real that Terry was in no way sure that they weren’t real. Each night he had a variation of the same terrible dream in which he saw himself sleeping next to Sarah and while they slept he changed. The transformation began deep beneath the skin and the dream-observer part of Terry saw rather than felt the muscles and bones subtly begin to change, to transform, as some new organic pattern fought to emerge. This change was terrible. His legs and arms twisted into muscular parodies of animal limbs; the flesh of his face stretched tight and then tore apart in bloody rags to reveal the long snout and fiery red-gold eyes of a monster. Clawed hands reached for Sarah as she slept, trusting and defenseless beside him, and on the nights where luck spared him a fragment of grace he woke up before those claws touched his wife’s naked skin. On other nights, it was like he was a passenger on some thrill ride in hell, strapped into the mind of the beast, looking out through the scarlet windows of its eyes, unable to intervene or even cry out as the monster rolled onto Sarah. On those nights he wanted to die.

His psychiatrist talked about stress, about overwork, about taking on too much responsibility, about the dangers of wearing his heart on his sleeve. Terry listened with diminishing patience, know that the man had no clue, no trace of insight into what was really happening. He waited, nodded, and thanked him, then hurried out to have the prescriptions filled. Antipsychotics, antianxiety drugs. They were slow to take effect, and what little good they did him just melted away two days ago when his little sister showed up. The fact that Mandy had been dead for thirty years did not deter her from appearing when only he could see her. She was still a child in her little dress, her red hair in tangles, her skin shredded. But her voice was old, weary and angry, as bitter as acid.

It was at that point that Terry realized that hope—real hope—was gone. It was only a matter of time, he knew, before he stroked out, or had a coronary. If he was lucky. If he was unlucky, and that seemed to be his pattern, then he would probably just crack and go howling into the night, running mad until they netted him and carted him off to Sicklerville State Hospital, where the men in the white coats would change his diapers and wipe his drool and let him rot.

Seeing Mandy might have been bearable—sort of—had she not been so adamant, so determined to get him to commit suicide, and in truth last night he was one heartbeat away from washing down a fistful of tranquilizer and antipsychotic meds with good whiskey; but then Sarah had called him. Fate, it seemed, was not a total coldhearted bitch. Standing there with his hand clenched around the pills, he listened to her voice on the phone, that soft and sweet voice that he loved so dearly, and she had asked him to come home. Home.

He stood on that knife-edge for a long time, and then he had washed the pills down the sink and gone home. To Sarah, to his kids, and to sleep. Now, as the day wore on he lay in bed and searched in his soul for one single reason to get up. He could find none except shame, and after a while that was enough. He let out the chestful of air that he’d been holding and slowly, cautiously, got out of bed, listening for sounds of Sarah and hearing her clattering pots downstairs. He tiptoed to the bathroom and closed the door before turning on the small light over the sink to search for signs of change in his face.

The face in the mirror had changed, that was sure enough—but not into the snarling mask of a monster. Instead Terry saw a face that looked forty years older than his thirty-nine years. Sunken cheeks, rheumy eyes with bruise-colored bags under them. Rubbery lips. Ashy skin. “Christ!” he breathed, and then stopped, aware that he had just uttered a profanity. Terry Wolfe never, ever cursed. He thought about it for a long time, examining his face and at the same time looking as far inward as he dared. “Shit on it,” he concluded, and he liked the sound of it.

There was a pair of sweats and a T-shirt hanging on the back of the bathroom door and he pulled these on and went through the bathroom’s connecting door into the twins’ room, and then out and downstairs, through the quiet house, and into the garage through the kitchen door. He opened the passenger car door and sat down as he fished his cell phone out of the glove compartment and saw that he had missed seventy-one calls. “Holy shit!” He said and again stopped to listen to the mental echo of the obscenity, and again he liked the sound of the obscenity. It felt…liberating.

Terry scrolled through the missed numbers: Gus, Crow, Saul Weinstock, Harry LeBeau, and Frank Ferro, that cop from Philly. Seventy-one calls. What the hell had been happening while he was asleep? Setting the phone down on his thigh, he flipped down the visor and opened the little panel that hid the mirror. He turned on the dome light and stared into his reflected eyes, searching, searching, for the monster. If it was there, he couldn’t see it.

“Thank God,” he said, and then picked up his cell phone again and stepped back into the world.