Dead Man's Song

Chapter 14

(1)

He sat cross-legged on the roof of the farmhouse, his bony knees jutting out on each side of the corner. Above him the moon was a swollen pustule on the face of the bruise-black sky, and the stars with their cleaner light seemed to shrink back from it as it hung in bloated display above the swaying corn. Below him was an attic filled with old memories and dead spiders, and below that was Val’s room where she and Crow lay asleep. For hours both of them had been dreaming, and for hours the Bone Man had sat there playing the blues, doing what he could to chase away the monsters in their minds.

(2)

In his dream Little Scarecrow fled through a distorted landscape, running as hard as nine-year-old legs could run, his heart hammering in his chest, his mind numb with fear. Behind him it pursued. Little Scarecrow could not see what it was; he almost never saw it until the very last moment, but he knew it was there, could hear its shambling bulk as it smashed through the weirdly twisted hedges, could hear the click and scratch of its claws on the pavement as it chased him down the length of Corn Hill. The street was impossibly long and oddly narrow, all the buildings loomed tall and crooked above him as he ran. The ground glistened with rain that smelled of diesel oil and rotten eggs; the clouds above were backlit with odd purple-red lights as if the whole town was inside a swollen body and Little Scarecrow was seeing the light of the world outside through veins, blood, and muscle tissue.

The beast followed him, its claws tearing chunks out of the street as it ran, its breath like the cough of a steam engine. Little Scarecrow wanted to turn, to see it, to know the shape and form of the monster. Maybe that would help contain it, maybe that would dwindle it down to something that could be identified and understood instead of a formless, measureless, dark malevolence. He wanted to look, but he did not dare. He tried to dodge in and out of alleyways and other people’s front yards, and sometimes he thought he’d lost the thing, that he was safe, then he would hear the gruff snarl of its voice, hear the clickety-clack of its nails, feel the trembling echoes of its vast bulk as it ran after him. He thought he could feel the heat of its stare on his back, and sometimes he staggered under the weight of its hate and hunger.

In his dreams, even though it was always the same dream, he felt confused about which way to go, which direction to take. He wasted precious seconds in indecision at every turn, and each time the beast gained on him. Finally, inevitably, he would choose the back streets that led in a circuitous route toward his own yard. He would scamper through the hedges into the half-lighted quarter-acre behind his house, race past the long rows of unkempt rosebushes, weave in and out of the scattered lawn tools that his father had left to rust, past the lawn chair where his father sat and drank beer and watched with cold, drunken eyes as his youngest son fled for his life and the only thing he would do was lift the sweating can to his lips and drink. Little Scarecrow ignored his father, making sure even in his panic to steer out of the reach of any casual swipe or kick. He tore along toward the rickety old set of swings. As always his brother, Boppin’ Billy, would be there, and as always Little Scarecrow’s heart would leap in his chest. Billy was older, tougher, smarter. Billy knew how to wrestle and he could thread a needle with a football pass, and Billy knew everything that was important to know. With the last bits of his failing strength, Little Scarecrow ran toward Billy, calling his brother’s name, confident that if anyone in the world could save him, then Billy certainly would.

Billy turned, smiling, confident. His grin was lopsided, but his eyes were sharp and as hard as baseballs. Little Scarecrow ran to him and skidded to a stop, aware that the beast was dangerously close, that it was coming closer with horrible speed.

“Billy! He’ll get me!” Little Scarecrow wailed.

Billy gave him a confident wink and opened his mouth to say something, but from his mouth spewed a torrent of dark blood that was as black as oil in the moonlight. The blood splashed Little Scarecrow’s face and chest and hands.

“NOOOOO!” he screamed as Billy’s eyes rolled high and white and he sagged backward. His head lolled on a loose neck and then the flesh tore completely and fell away from his body before Billy’s corpse fell forward in a limp sprawl.

Little Scarecrow screamed and screamed. He felt the claws of the beast as it seized the shoulder of his jacket and spun him around. Little Scarecrow stared up in terror at the face—at that horrible, impossible face! Red eyes flared at him, eyes filled with hate, with hunger, and with triumph. A long muzzle wrinkled back to reveal rows of dripping teeth like racks of knives. Little Scarecrow stared into the black depths of the mouth, he felt the heat of its breath, smelled the carrion stink as the muscles of the beast bunched, tensed—and then it lunged at him…

…And he woke up, as he always did, just as he felt the claws tear through his flesh. Even a marginally kinder universe would have let him wake up a moment sooner.

Crow sat up in bed, clamping a hand over his mouth to stifle the scream that was bubbling there behind his tongue. He turned and shot a worried, desperate glance at Val, but she was still deep in sleep, her face slack and painted blue-white by the starlight.

He closed his eyes and exhaled through his nose, deflating the scream and calming the spasms in his chest. His heart was fluttering inside him like a baseball card stuck in bicycle spokes. Then with the soothing clarity of a breeze blowing over hot skin he heard another sound. It may have been another dream, or it might have been a peculiarity of the wind as it whistled through the drains and pipes that clung to the side of the hospital walls, but as he lay there Crow thought he heard—faintly, just a whisper—the sound of a guitar played far away. Soft, sad music. Mississippi blues played by a deft hand—one that knew how make the strings weep and moan. Like the way the Bone Man played all those years ago. The sound could not be there on the wind, it was so ghostly and thin that it was probably not there, even though when Crow strained to hear it he believed he actually did. The music—sad as it was—was a comfort to him. Listening to it, Crow drifted back into sleep. This time he didn’t dream at all, which was a blessing.

(3)

It was the dream about the Change. Terry lay there, aware that he was dreaming, which made it worse, because Sarah was really there beside him just as she was in the dream. In both worlds her warm reality was pressed up against him, back and buttocks and feet all snugged in, her breathing steady and deep, her vulnerability absolute.

He could feel her heat, smell the fragrance of her shampoo and the faintest traces of fabric softener from the pillow under her head. Terry drew in those smells and found that he was becoming aware of other smells, smaller ones, subtler ones. Smells he would never have noticed before or perhaps never have been able to detect before, but that were now distinct and unique. Perfumes in their bottles on the bureau across the room. He’d never noticed those before. Dust bunnies under the bed. A whiff of cedar from the closet. The Desenex in his gym shoes. Potpourri in a bowl in the hallway. The lingering smell of the salmon they’d had for dinner. The detergent from the dishwasher downstairs. He could smell everything, and not just smell it—he knew what each smell was. Each one was separate, distinct; he could catalog them all.

It was the same with sounds. Party Cat’s breathing was as loud as if he’d fallen asleep in front of a microphone, but he was in the twins’ room all the way down the hall, and though Terry’s own bedroom door was closed he could hear the kids breathing as they slept. He could hear dry leaves skittering along the shingles on the roof, and he could hear when the sound changed as the leaves fell into the rain gutter and slithered along the metal. He could hear cars on Corn Hill, but he could also hear the growl of a truck way out on A-32. Somewhere way out on the breeze he could hear the sound of someone playing blues on an acoustic guitar—something sad and sweet. He could hear the blood racing through the big veins in Sarah’s sweet, soft throat. Terry could hear all of these things, just as he could hear the slow grinding mumble of his bones as they began to shift and change under his skin. His skin moved with a sound like someone stretching wet leather. Why could Sarah not hear that? It was so loud.

Then the pain started. First it was a dull ache in his bones, an almost indefinable throb of the kind his Gram used to call growing pains. An ache that seemed to hover around each bone rather than actually be a part of them, a throbbing that made him want to move, to shift, to find a new position in which to lie, but he knew that he couldn’t shift away from what was happening in his bones and cartilage. Then his skin began to hurt as it stretched over the new bone-shapes. He’d felt an ache like that once before when he’d broken his ankle while hiking and the whole joint had swelled inside his boots, and then continued to swell when he’d managed to pull the boot off, swelling until it seemed like the skin itself would have to split. Back then the skin hadn’t split—though Terry had gone through long hours where he perversely wanted to take a pin and pop the swelling to see if his ankle would explode. Now that same feeling of swelling-to-bursting was blossoming in every joint, not just his ankles but his knees and hips, his elbows and wrists, each separate joint of his fingers. It was like someone was pouring gallons of hot blood into him, pumping it under his skin.

He wanted to scream, needed to scream, had to scream, but he bit it back—literally bit down, plunging his teeth into his lips, aware that the skin was tearing, aware—oh God how aware—of the delicious salty blood that was filling his mouth. His teeth, those biting teeth, felt huge and so, so wrong. He clenched his hands—swollen and misshapen as they had become—and dug his nails into his palms until there, too, blood welled hot and sweet-smelling.

Beside him Sarah stirred in her sleep and wriggled tighter against him. He almost did it then. Right then. He almost reached for her with hands and with mouth, with hunger and with teeth. Almost. After a moment Sarah drifted back into her dreams, sliding deeper beneath the surface and was unaware of anything but his warmth and nearness while Terry ate his screams.

The night boiled around him and gradually, with infinite and perverse slowness, the urge retreated, leaving Terry sweating and trembling, lips and palms slick red, breath hissing in and out of his flaring nostrils. Again the awareness of every sound, every smell came flooding back and Terry’s senses filled him with an animal keenness. He lay awake, terrified of that dream, of the nightmare he had just escaped, dreading the thought of going back to sleep for fear that the dream would start again and that this time he would not be able to shake himself awake from it.

Terry was very much mistaken about that. He had not been asleep for hours. He had not been dreaming at all.

(4)

Barney caught Weinstock just as the doctor was about to open his office door. “This just came,” he said and handed over a large envelope.

Weinstock looked at the label. The second set of lab reports on Cowan and Castle. Barney was still standing there, visibly fidgeting. “Is there a problem, Barney?”

“This is more about those cops,” the nurse said quietly, glancing around to make sure no one else was in earshot. “Isn’t it?”

Weinstock gave him a long, steady look. “I thought we had an agreement about this, Barney,” he said.

“I…”

“I’m doing some follow-up work,” Weinstock said evenly. “Do you feel that you need to say something about this matter?”

Barney stiffened. “No, Dr. Weinstock.” He opened his mouth to add something, thought better of it, and clamped his jaw shut.

“Have a good evening, Barney,” Weinstock said, and he kept his gaze steady as the nurse turned walked down the hall, back rigid. When Barney turned the corner, Weinstock quickly opened his office door, hurried inside, locked it, and began tearing at the envelope. His fingers trembled and fumbled as he tore it open and pulled out the sheaf of papers from the lab. For a slow five-count he closed his eyes, not wanting to see what was written there and bracing himself for the worst. If they matched the first report he didn’t know what he would do. Weinstock had checked the staff schedule to make sure that his request for new labs would not go to Don Ito—Ito had the day off and another and more junior tech had processed the samples. That was good because until he was sure what was going on he wanted to keep the whole thing off the radar. He opened his eyes and began to read, first the reports on Cowan’s blood and tissue work, and then Castle’s; then he read through them both again.

“Almighty God…” he breathed. The shadows in his office suddenly seemed to loom up around him and never in his life had Saul Weinstock been as deeply terrified as he was at that moment.

(5)

Mike Sweeney drifted between three dreams. First it was the nightmare of the burning town and the death of everyone he knew and that melted into the dream where the Wrecker chased him and ran him down, grinding him to red paste on the black highway. The third dream—the new one—that was the worst by far. It always started out okay, with him feeling immensely powerful, pedaling his bike faster than the wind, swooping down the long hill to the Hollow at the base of the mountains, skidding to a stop amid the flame and the hordes of murdering monsters. He would leap off, dragging his sword out of its sheath, the blade bright with mirrored flame, launching himself into a murderous attack. It was the kill that thrilled him most, and he was good at it. Naturally, easily, gleefully good at it. His sword would flick and dance, seeding the air with scarlet droplets of blood. He would dodge and twist, too fast to catch, too strong to overwhelm, too powerful to be stopped. His enemies would fall around him, unable to stand before his fury.

And yet still his friends would die. He would kill the monsters until they were stacked like cordwood ten deep around him. Or he would cut them, watching as they burst into flame. But always, always, always there were too many, and they would overwhelm his friends. Even while he survived. Even if he went on to kill every last one of the monsters, his friends—Crow, Val, Tyler—all of them would die.

Then he would hear the voice of the Beast—this time a beast he could see, and he would turn and there it was. Fifteen feet tall, with great bat wings spread wide and gnarled goat legs with hooves that split stones when he stamped. Curling horns arched up from his head and in his mouth his teeth were like daggers. A devil in flesh, the demon god of some new hell.

“LOOK AT ME!” it would roar in a voice that shook the world. Mike would begin to scream then. Even with all of the other monsters dead around him and his sword still in his hands, he would begin to scream. It was not an inarticulate howl of rage or pain or even terror. It was a word that he would scream, and the screaming of that single word would tear blood from his throat and rip him raw. The sound of it would shatter the cold steel of his sword and shatter the bones in his own legs, dropping him down onto his knees as agony exploded upward through his thighs and into his groin. He would scream that one word over and over again until the screaming of it burst him apart more surely than the wheels of the Wrecker, and in his dreams Mike would feel himself dying, would actually feel his skull splitting and his throat rupturing as his blood fought to escape his veins.

He would scream the word, “Father!” And then he would die.

Mike cried as he was wrenched out of the dream into the darkness of his room and the temporary shelter of the waking world. Misery stitched itself through every inch of his body and burst into his brain like a white-hot light. Fireflies seemed to dance in the shadows of his room. Mike’s heart was a creature scrambling to escape the trap of his chest; his lungs sought to breathe in an airless void. In his darkness he imagined he could still hear the sound of his own voice screaming, and the absurdity of what he was screaming did nothing to ameliorate the terror that it engendered. Mike clutched his blanket to his thin body, trying not to scream here in his room, afraid of what word would come out. Even so, as overwhelming as his terror was, it should have been worse, but Mike was too young, yet, to perceive the difference between nightmare and prophecy.

(6)

Weinstock pushed the morgue door open slowly and stood there for a long time, just looking into the room. There were just two small lights on and the place was filled with cold shadows. Weinstock shivered and almost—almost—turned to leave. Had there been the slightest distraction, just the ding of an elevator bell down the hall or the buzz of his pager, he would have seized the moment and gone to do anything but what he was planning to do. He waited…and waited…and all was silent, the shadows without an uninterrupted challenge. A thick bead of sweat was plowing a channel through the hair on his back and he kept licking his lips.

“God,” he murmured, “what am I doing?” He went inside. He didn’t want to do this in the dark and so he swiped a hand upward to turn on all the ceiling lights and then went around and switched on every table lamp, and even switched on the big examination lamp in its metal hood so that harsh white light bathed the empty stainless-steel dissecting table. Everything was clean and light sparkled from metal fittings and instruments. The brightness helped. It made what he was thinking seem even more absurd, and he needed it to be absurd. Saul Weinstock needed to be proven one hundred percent wrong.

Normally he would have turned on the microphone that hung down above the steel dissecting table so he could create an official record, but there was nothing normal about this. The autopsy had already been performed. What he was doing now was as far from standard hospital protocol as it was from the protocols of the county coroner’s office.

Instead he set up his own tape recorder and inserted a one-hundred-minute cassette. Next to this he set a good quality Sanyo Tapeless CameraCorder that could record everything he did with DVD quality. He was off the reservation with this, so if he got caught he wanted proof. If proof was to be had.

Next he wheeled over a metal cart on which were a complete set of tools, including a dissecting knife with a retractable four-inch blade, a foot-long brain knife, long-handled scissors, forceps, and other items. He switched on both machines, introduced himself, gave the date and time, and then pulled Jimmy Castle’s body out of its drawer. He took in a deep breath and let it out before slowly pulling back the sheet to reveal the body.

Castle’s skin should have been gray-white and flaccid, the tissues deflated by the loss of fluids, with cheeks and eye sockets sunken in. During the first autopsy he had attempted to take the standard 20-ml blood sample for testing but couldn’t find any, even in the lowest tissue areas where blood usually settles after the heart stops. He was able to take samples of urine and cerebrospinal fluid, but as far as blood went there was barely a drop to be found. That had been the beginning of this problem. During that autopsy Weinstock had made a big Y-incision starting at Castle’s neck and running down to the thighs, cutting in an arc around the navel, exposing the internal organs and then removing them for weighing and testing. After the autopsy the organs were placed in a large plastic bag, set into the empty stomach cavity, and the big incision sewed up. The samples were sent to the lab and the bodies returned to cold storage. The Castle and Cowan murders were still open cases, and their bodies might remain in the Pinelands morgue for weeks. Which gave Weinstock a chance to do what he had to do.

He looked at the Y-incision he had made, started to turn away to pick up a knife and then stopped, turned, and reached up to angle the overhead light differently, bending closer to peer at the incision. He blinked, bent closer still.

“No…” he said and reached for his dissecting knife. Steeling himself he drew it quickly along the line of sutures that held the flaps of the moistureless dead skin together, the steel edge cutting evenly through the surgical nylon. He finished his cut just at the navel and with nothing to hold them in place the flaps of skin should have sagged away. They did not. The long jagged line he’d cut in Jimmy Castle’s chest and stomach—which he had used to open him up and remove all of his internal organs—was stuck fast. Almost as if it had begun to heal. Which was, of course, quite impossible.

(7)

Across his thighs, the Bone Man’s guitar was laid strings-up; he was strumming it like a Dobro, sliding along the frets with the cut and sanded neck of an old Coke bottle. The music he played was so quiet that it might not have been there at all, and as he played, he could feel Crow and Val relax within the knotted fists of their dreams, could feel Griswold’s grip slacken on them, at least a bit. Mike, too. The music, the blues, could do that much at least. It wasn’t much, but he smiled, taking his victories where he could find them.

Midnight was poised to strike and the Bone Man kept playing as the darkness hammered the town. Stretching out with his awareness, using what he had, the Bone Man could feel each of the hearts in the town beating with the pulse of night. He heard whispers and cries, felt warm hearts and cold. It was hard for him to care about this town. About most of it, anyway. This town had hated him. Hell, this town had killed him. Beaten him, broken him, and hung him on a scarecrow’s cross like some mockery of Jesus. Worse even than that, these people had hung the reputation on him of killer, called him a monster, blamed him for the murders he had helped stop while at the same time whitewashing Griswold’s name. They had taken that nickname some kids had given him—the Bone Man, ’cause he was so skinny—and used it to build a nightmare boogeyman legend. Now he was the Bone Man to everyone here, and the Bone Man was a monster, a bad man. Something evil.

The Bone Man stared out from his rooftop perch, sneering at the town of Pine Deep as it slept its troubled sleep. “You don’t know what evil is,” he said aloud, aiming his words at the town like a gun, but his voice was a whisper more silent than the wind. For two pins he’d let Griswold, or the Devil Himself, take the whole damned town.

Except for a few.

He strummed his guitar as the wind blew past him and thought about those people, the ones who had liked him, who had cared about him. They were the only ones from Pine Deep he could remember without anger. Henry Guthrie and his wife, Henry’s brother and his cousin. His daughter, little Valerie, Li’l Bosslady. Boppin’ Billy Crow and his brother, Malcolm—Little Scarecrow. Terry “Wolfman” Wolfe and his little sister, Mandy. Big John Sweeney. Just a handful. Henry was dead now, his body on a cold slab in the bowels of the hospital. Henry’s wife was two years in her grave, and his cousin Roger had been killed during that slaughter thirty years ago. John Sweeney had gone off Shandy’s Curve in his Malibu. Everyone thought he’d fallen asleep at the wheel, but the Bone Man knew different. He knew that Vic Wingate had rigged that car. Done something to the steering. Vic had wanted John dead so he could get next to Lois Sweeney, and he’d managed it; and John Sweeney wasn’t dead a week before Vic had pumped Lois full of Ecstasy and Mescal and had fed her to Griswold. Not as a blood sacrifice like he’d done with so many others, but as something else; and that was nearly sixteen years ago, during one full moon when Griswold’s spirit had hijacked another man’s body so he could live for just a few days. He’d lived all right. He’d done things to Lois that had driven her into the bottle and she’d never dared peek out of it since, not even when she found out she was pregnant. Vic had stepped in and married her before the baby was born, grinning all the time at what he had stage-managed. That left Big John Sweeney’s boy, Mike, at the mercy of Vic Wingate—only Mike wasn’t Sweeney’s son. Anyone who really looked at the boy could see that. Big John had been black Irish, with brown eyes and black hair, but Mike had red hair and blue eyes. In another couple of years, if he lived long enough for that, Mike would look like his real father—the man whose body Griswold had hijacked for one ugly night—and then everyone would know for sure. But even that was complicated, because Mike actually had two fathers. Three if you count Big John. There was the father of his flesh, and the father of his spirit. Or, maybe that second one was the father of his nature. Mike Sweeney was one who would bear watching—and watching over. There was trouble there, sure enough, and no way in the world to know how those cards would fall.

The Bone Man strummed his guitar, seeding the air with sweetness while all around him the darkness twisted and writhed.