Ghost Road Blues

Prologue

The last thing Billy said was, “Oh, come on…there’s nothing out there.”

And then two sets of bone-white hands arched over the slat rails on the wagon and seized him by the shoulders and the collar and dragged him screaming into the darkness. He tried to fight them, but they had him and as he rasped along the rail, feet flailing and hands scrabbling for some desperate purchase, other white figures closed in and he was dragged away.

Claire screamed at the top of her lungs. Everyone else screamed too. Even the guy driving the tractor screamed.

Billy screamed louder than all of them.

Claire launched herself forward from the hay bale on which she’d been sitting just a moment ago holding Billy’s hand; she leaned out into the darkness beyond the rails, her fingers clawing the air as if that could somehow bring him back. Thirty feet away six figures had forced Billy down to the ground and were hunched over him, their white hands reaching down to tear at him with hooked fingers, their black mouths wide with slack-jawed hunger, their bottomless dead eyes as vacant as the eyes of dolls.

“Billy!” she screamed, and then grabbed at the others around her, pulling at their sleeves, slapping at the hands that tried to pull her back. She wheeled on them — on eighteen other kids, most of them from her own high school, all cringing back against the wooden rails of the flatbed, or trying to hide behind bales of hay — she begged them to help. A few shook their heads. Most just screamed. One boy — a big kid who looked like he might be a jock — made a halfhearted attempt to move forward, but his girlfriend and his buddies dragged him back.

Claire spat at them and spun back, screams still ripping from her throat as she watched Billy’s thrashing arms and legs. She looked up at the man driving the tractor, but he was white-faced with shock and was frozen in a posture of near flight, half out of his seat.

Then one of the white-faced things bent low toward him and because of the angle Claire could not see what he was doing, but Billy gave a single high, piercing shriek of absolute agony and then his legs and arms flopped to the ground and lay still.

The moment froze.

Slowly, the creature raised its head from Billy’s body and turned toward the tractor with its towed flatbed of schoolkids. It snarled at them — a low, menacing growl, the kind a dog would give when another animal came close to its food. The creature’s white skin peeled back from its teeth and there, caught between those yellow teeth, was a drooping tube of purple meat that trailed back to the red ruin that was Billy’s stomach.

Claire’s scream rose up above the darkened road, above the vast seas of whispering corn on either side, far up into the swirling blackness that spread like a shroud from horizon to horizon. Flocks of nightbirds cried out and took to the air. The driver stamped down on the gas and the tractor’s engines made a guttural roar as the flatbed was jerked forward.

Three of the creatures rose at the sound and turned to face the tractor, their faces painted with crimson, their jaws working as they chewed. As the tractor inched forward, the wheels still churning in the mud that had stalled it there a few minutes ago, the creatures began moving toward the smell of fresh meat. Of living flesh.

Everyone screamed again and they shouted and cursed at the driver to move, move, move! The man at the wheel kicked down harder and with a great sucking sound the wheels tore free of the mud and the whole mass — tractor, flatbed, and kids — lurched forward, picking up speed with every second. The white-faced ghouls staggered out into the road and began to follow. Slowly, awkwardly at first, and then faster as they saw their prey gaining ground.

“Move!” the jock roared, and others shouted with him.

The ghouls were trotting now, their awkward gait becoming more orderly as they gained momentum. They were gaining.

Up ahead, the road bent around past a stand of old weeping willows and the driver shifted gears and kept kicking the gas pedal.

“They’re coming!” Claire shrieked.

The tractor was moving faster and faster now, the cold air whipping past the faces of the kids. The ghouls were thirty yards back. Twenty-five.

Twenty.

The jock was mumbling, “This isn’t happening…this isn’t happening…” over and over again as he clung to his girlfriend.

The tractor took the curve as fast as the driver could manage it, with the flatbed canting sharply to one side and all the kids screaming again as they were pushed one against the other.

It cleared the curve and there in the distance were the lights of the main building. Everyone was still screaming as the tractor roared down the last hundred yards toward the big barn where scores of people stood, each of them caught in a posture of surprise, turned toward the sound of the big engine and the constant screams.

Claire turned and looked back, but the shadows along the road had closed over the leading ghoul. It was gone. Maybe…maybe it had given up.

She sank back against the nearest person, clutching the stranger’s sleeve and weeping brokenly. “Billy!” she kept saying. “Billy…”

The tractor jerked to a stop by the barn and the crowd surrounded the flatbed. The driver stood up, turned around to the kids on the flatbed, and then gave them a bright grin that stretched from ear to ear.

“And that, kids, concludes our ride,” he said, giving everyone a little bow.

The kids on the flatbed stared at him in total, comprehensive shock.

Claire was the first one to stand up. She turned to the other kids, smiled sweetly, took a bow of her own, and let one of the crowd help her down to the ground.

The kids on the flatbed were still stunned to silence.

The driver — a small man named Malcolm Crow who had dark hair, dark eyes, and a wicked grin — plucked his hat off his head and waved it toward the barn. “There’s refreshments at the concession stand. And if you haven’t had enough for one night, visit our haunted house. Only five bucks and it’ll scare the bejesus out of you.”

He winked at the shocked-white faces, and then hopped down to the ground.

Two older teens in jeans and black staff sweatshirts that had Pine Deep Haunted Hayride: the Biggest, the Best — the Scariest! emblazoned in glow-in-the-dark orange letters stepped up to help the customers down.

The kids on the hayride still didn’t move.

The taller of the two staffers turned to the other. “I don’t know about you, dude, but I think Crow kinda overdid it with this one.”

They glanced at Crow, who was now helping another set of kids climb onto a second flatbed that stood at the far corner of the barn; a third tractor and flatbed was already vanishing into the far distance where the complex maze through the cornfields began. Claire was with him, sipping a Diet Pepsi that someone had given her, and chatting airily to Crow, sharing the highlights.

The shorter staffer said, “Oh, ya think?”

It took them a couple more minutes to convince the huddled teens on the flatbed that everything was all right. It was the jock who broke the spell. He forced a laugh that was supposed to sound like he knew it all the time. “It’s all planned,” he said. “Those two — the girl, the kid that got killed — all part of the show.” He patted his girlfriend’s arm. “I knew it all along. It’s more fun if you play along.”

She looked up at him with a measure of contempt on her face. “Tommy…you screamed like a girl.”

She hopped down and trotted off to the bathroom on wobbly legs, leaving the jock to try and paste on a look of cool indifference. His expression would have been more convincing if his face weren’t gleaming with sweat despite the forty-six-degree temperature.

Over at the barn, Malcolm Crow handed the tractor keys to an older man who wore an ancient Pine Deep Scarecrows ball cap over a perpetually sour face.

“Coop,” Crow said, still grinning, “you should’ve seen the looks on their faces. Jee-sus!” He laughed bent over, hands on his knees, ribs convulsing, shaking his head back and forth like a dog. “Claire and Billy — I’m telling you, Coop, we’re not paying those kids enough. I’m talking Academy Award performances. Damn near had me going.”

Coop just smiled and nodded, but his mouth had a sour twist to it. He wasn’t a bright guy at the best of times and generally didn’t like extremes. Like some of the other staffers, he thought Crow’s latest addition to the Haunted Hayride was a little over the top. He remembered days when the hayride just had kids in fright masks jumping out and going Boo! Simple stuff. Not this weird blood and guts nonsense. It meant adding a bunch of new staffers, including three sets of kids from the Theater Department of Pinelands College to play the doomed couple, one for each of the attraction’s three tractor-pulled flatbeds.

Coop didn’t think the owner, Terry Wolfe, would approve either, but the problem there was that Mr. Wolfe was also the town mayor and he never—ever—came out to the hayride. To him it was just a seasonal cash cow, and he gave Crow a free hand to do with it as he pleased.

Lately Crow seemed pleased only when the kids came back half a tic away from a genuine coronary. Coop watched Crow laugh it out and when he saw that Crow was looking at him, he measured out half a spoonful of smile.

He said, “What are you going to do if we get some kid from Philadelphia or Trenton who’s got a gun tucked down the back of his pants? Half the kids these days have guns. Bang! There’s Billy or maybe one of the ghouls shot and killed. That might not be so funny.”

Crow rolled his eyes and shook his head. “Never happen. Everyone knows this is a haunted hayride. Things are supposed to jump out at you.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

Crow checked his watch. “I’m probably going to do the nine-fifteen tour and then I’m out of here. Think you can handle it the rest of the night?”

“Have so far,” Coop said, trying to convey through his tone that having run the attraction for fourteen years before the owner had made Crow the general manager, he could somehow find it in himself to slog through another night.

If he caught the sarcasm, Crow made no sign. Instead he clapped Coop on the shoulder and went through the barn into the office.

In the office, Malcolm Crow settled into the leather swivel chair behind the desk, propped his crossed heels on the edge of a stack of boxed T-shirts, and tugged his cell phone out of his jeans pocket. He hit a speed-dial number with a thumbnail and held it to his ear.

She picked up on the third ring. “Hey,” she said, her voice husky and breathless.

“Mmm,” he said, “sounds like I interrupted you in the middle of some sordid sexual adventure.”

Val Guthrie’s dry snort was eloquent. “Yeah. I’m having wild and crazy sex with my Stairmaster.”

“You harlot.”

“I think I climbed the equivalent of Mount Rainier. I’m all sweaty, but my buns are like steel.”

“Whereas I get my strength through purity.”

“Crow, if that’s the source of your strength you would be able to bench press a daffodil.”

“So young to be so hardened.” He clucked his tongue a few times.

“Are you coming over tonight, or are you going to stay there and increase the therapy bills of every teenager in four counties?”

“I’ll be over, baby,” he said. “But — you should have heard the screams. That last trap I built — the one with the living dead dragging the kid out of the cart? Man oh man, was that hot!”

There was a slight pause and Crow could imagine her sighing and shaking her head. “You are a very, very, very strange man.”

“Your point being?”

“Oh, shut up and come over here so we can engage in something a bit more wholesome than blood and gore.”

“Hmmmm,” he said, drawing it out.

“I’ll take a nice hot shower and I’ll be all pink and clean when you get here.”

“I don’t know, I think I prefer you sweaty.”

“I don’t mind getting sweaty all over again,” she said sweetly, and hung up.

Crow leaned back in his chair and pictured her — slim, strong, with black hair and a crooked nose, and the most intelligent eyes he’d ever seen. Eyes that went all smoky and out of focus when they made love.

Suddenly gore and ghouls had less immediate appeal.

He looked at his watch. Almost time to take out his last batch, and after that it would be off to Val’s farm, and maybe a long walk in the cornfield to a spot where they both liked — well away from the house — where they sometimes made love under the stars. Even on cold nights like this one.

Crow got up and shoved his cell back into his pocket as he walked through the barn to the field. The staff would be herding the next group of kids onto the flatbed, but Crow didn’t watch them. Instead he turned and looked east. Val’s farm was that way. Miles and miles away, across seas of waving corn and knobbed fields of pumpkins. There were no lights at all in that direction, and there would be no spray of stars tonight. The sky was a uniform and totally featureless black that stretched forever.

He felt wonderfully happy. The hayride was a success, even if it did push the limits — a fact he’d never openly admit — and Val Guthrie was the most wonderful woman on earth.

Then, without warning, he shuddered. A deep shudder that raised gooseflesh along his arms and made all the hair on his scalp twitch and tingle. Somewhere beyond the veil of black nothingness he heard the faintest growl of thunder. Just the hint of a coming storm. The thunder sounded a little like laughter. The deep kind, from far inside the chest. Mirthless.

He shivered again.

“Someone walked over my grave,” he said aloud.

In the distance the thunder laughed again and there was a single flash of lightning that scratched a deep red vein in the darkness.

Off to his right he could hear the screams of the kids as they encountered monsters. At that moment, Crow didn’t like the sound of it.

That night, after leaving the hayride and driving over to Val’s farm, and after taking a moonlight stroll and then making love, Crow drifted to sleep in her arms, the strangeness of the coming storm gone from his mind. But down there in the darkness, even with Val’s arms around him and the warm reality of her breath against the side of his throat, Crow sank down into a tangle of an old dream. Not a dream that was so old that he hadn’t dreamt it in a while, but a dream that was worn into the fabric of his mind like calluses on a grave digger’s hands. Part of the dream was actual memory — the latter parts — but most of the dream was a patchwork of things he had guessed, or pieced together over the years, or intuited. The dream was as ugly and as compelling as the morbid fascination of watching a neighbor’s house burn down, and on some level Crow knew that he had to pass all the way through it, relive every bit of memory and supposition, before the dream would leave him alone. Asleep, he set his jaw and ground his teeth and floated helpless on the current that took him back thirty years….

The Bone Man killed the devil with a guitar.

He chased the devil past the crossroads and chased the devil through the corn, and he caught the devil in the hollow between the mountains where the deep shadows live. It was a swamp down there with mosquitoes as fierce as hurt dogs and snakes the color of mud.

Truth is, they chased each other. Sometimes the devil had the upper hand and he hunted the Bone Man, first with a German Luger he’d been issued a long time ago, and then when he ran out of bullets he chased the Bone Man with a skinning knife. Though the Bone Man was skinny and looked sick, he was a strong man with twenty years of fieldwork in his hard hands and a back made of iron slats and old rope. They’d grappled at the top of the hill, down at the Passion Pit where the kids go to neck. They were both filled with blood and rage, but the moon was still down and the devil was still only a man; on equal ground the Bone Man was stronger. The skinning knife went spinning off into a tangle of wild rose and the devil lost his footing there at the edge. He fell and rolled and tumbled and finally overturned back onto his feet and went running the rest of the way down that steep slope into the shadows of Dark Hollow.

The Bone Man stood panting at the top of the hill for just a second, looking west to see the sun dropping toward the tree line and gauging how much day he had left to do this thing. The amount of day was the same as the amount of time he’d had left to live if he didn’t catch the devil right now. Once the moon was up, the tide of events would turn, and turn red.

His guitar was still strapped across his bony shoulders — it had jiggled and jounced throughout the chase and the fight but it was still there. Clear beads of cold sweat ran in steaks down his brown face and glistened like splinters of broken glass in his Afro.

Then he jumped over the edge of the hill, dropping eight feet onto the slope, running so fast that he beat the pull of gravity and kept from falling. He wore no socks and around his ankle was a dime with a hole through it strung on a piece of twine. The dime flashed in the dying sunlight with each step, and then he reached the line of shadows created by the angle of the farthest mountain, and the twinkling dime winked out. His aunt in Baton Rouge had given him that, and even though the Bone Man didn’t do vodoun, he was smart enough to keep any charm against evil. The slope was three hundred yards and almost as steep as the inside of a pilsner glass. The Bone Man could hear the devil crashing through the brush in the shadows a dozen yards below.

The Bone Man raced faster, not caring at all when tree branches whipped his face or briars tugged at his ankles. He had to catch the devil before moonrise.

He hit the bottom of the hollow hard enough to jolt him down to his knees and he cried out in pain, but he hauled himself right back up because crying about it don’t get it done. Setting his teeth against the pain and setting his heart against the fear, he ran into the shadows, his eyes adjusting to the bad light, searching for the devil and finding him almost at once. The devil had stopped to wrestle with a tree branch, trying to break it off, but the wood was green and didn’t want to die.

The Bone Man had no Luger, no skinning knife. All he had was his guitar and without even thinking about it he plucked the strap from his chest and hauled the instrument over his head just as the devil broke off the green branch. As the devil turned to face him, the Bone Man could see the man’s eyes change from blue to yellow to red. Just like that. The pupils contracted to slits and the devil suddenly laughed, his mouth opening wet and wide, and there were a lot of teeth in there. The devil looked at the stick in his hands and as his hands began to change he snarled with contempt and threw the stick away.

The Bone Man didn’t stop, didn’t flinch though his heart was turning to ice in his chest. He gripped the guitar by the neck and as he raced the last few yards he swung it. The devil was arrogant. He was into the change now and he knew what he would become. He was prideful, was the devil; and pride is a dangerous thing, even to the devil.

The guitar whistled through the air and the strings hummed with dark music as it cut around in a tight arc, powered by every ounce of strength the Bone Man possessed. The body of the guitar hit the grinning devil in the face and exploded into a million fragments of swamp ash and maple. The strings broke and twanged, singing chords of anger; the rosewood fingerboard split in two pieces. In the microsecond before the impact sent the devil crashing to the ground his face changed from a sneer of hungry triumph to a look of pure human amazement. He spun away, crying out in shock and pain, spit and blood erupting from his mouth as he fell. He wasn’t far enough into the change to be able to shrug that off with a sneer. He was still more man than wolf.

The devil crashed to the muddy floor of the hollow, his red eyes flickering like candles, his distorted face a dripping red mask of hate and pain.

The Bone Man stood over him with only the broken neck of the guitar in his hands. In the darkness of Dark Hollow there was no trace of God’s sunlight, and somewhere over the mountains the moon was rising. Above them the tips of the pine trees were turning to silver as the death-mask face of the moon climbed into the night.

Even now, beaten down and bloody, the devil was about a heartbeat away from winning. He needed only the kiss of moonlight and the night would be his.

The Bone Man’s face was streaming sweat and his eyes were streaming tears. He was a gentle man, but gentle wouldn’t get this done, and he tried to make his heart turn to stone as he took the guitar neck in both hands and raised it over his head. The strings of the guitar and all the tuning pegs touched the moonlight and turned to silver fire.

“You go back to hell!” he screamed and then slammed the broken and jagged end of the guitar neck down onto the devil’s back. The Bone Man’s body arched back and then bent forward as he convulsed to use every ounce of strength he had to drive the wooden spike like a stake through hair and flesh and muscle and bone; drive it deep, seeking the devil’s black heart.

The devil screamed so loud all the crows fled the trees, and the echo of it slammed off the walls of the three mountains that formed the hollow. The scream burst through the Bone Man’s ears and he let go of the stake and grabbed his own head and staggered back. The scream was so loud that in the swamps of the hollow frogs died and worms turned white and sulfur gas erupted from the mud. Pinecones rained down and caught fire as they fell. The Bone Man coughed and blood sprayed from his mouth and nose.

The devil tried to rise, tried to reach behind him and claw the stake out of his body, but his arms wouldn’t reach. He screamed again, and again, but now the screams were man screams, and they were weaker. The red in his eyes drained away and then the yellow faded and the eyes were an icy blue, but still they were without any trace of humanity. No love, no fear, just a cold and enduring hatred that burned into the Bone Man even as the eyes began to glaze and empty of all light.

The devil collapsed back onto the muddy ground near the swamp. His mouth opened one more time, but instead of a scream a dark pint of blood splashed heavily onto the damp leaves.

The Bone Man sank down onto his knees and then toppled forward onto his palms. Blood dripped from his mouth and nose and fireflies danced in his brain. He stared at the devil for a long time, stared at him…and watched him die.

Above them the moonlight shone cold and hard on the devil, but now it was only light and it did no harm.

The Bone Man went through the devil’s pockets. There was some cash, but he left that. He flipped open his wallet and looked at the driver’s license. The devil’s face stared at him, a small cruel smile caught by the camera. The name on the card was Ubel Griswold, but the Bone Man suspected that it wasn’t the devil’s real name. He found nothing else that was personal enough, so he just tore out some of the devil’s hair, wrapped it in a leaf that had a few spots of blood, and put it in his shirt pocket. When he got back to his sleeping bag, he’d take the hair and blood and mix it in a bowl with some herbs and then bury it in a churchyard. Evil, he knew, is hard to kill, and he wanted to kill the devil on the spirit plane as well as the physical. Else it’d come back.

He dragged the corpse of Ubel Griswold toward the swamp and pushed it down into the steaming mud. He found the green stick the devil had broken off and used it to push the body down into the hungry mud. It took a long time, but eventually the body was completely submerged in the black goo. Now no one would find it except the bugs and the vermin, and the Bone Man thought that was fair enough.

He spat on the stick and threw it into the woods, then wiped his hands on the seat of his work pants.

Then he gathered up the pieces of his guitar — all except the neck, which was still buried in Griswold’s back — and dug a fresh hole and buried them. He wept for his guitar. It had been his father’s and then his great-uncle’s before that. That guitar had played a lot of sweet blues music, from Mississippi and all over the country. Once Charley Patton had borrowed the guitar from his great-uncle and had played “Mississippi Boweavil Blues” on it at a church picnic in Bentonia, laying it on his lap like a Hawaiian guitar and singing in that loud gospel voice of his. Another time the Bone Man’s father, old Virgil Morse, had played backup on a couple of Sun Records sides by Mose Vinson. That guitar had history, and even the Bone Man himself — or Oren Morse to those back home — had played it in a hundred clubs and coffeehouses from Pocahontas, Mississippi, to the Village in New York to the smoky black clubs in Philadelphia. Now it was splinters and all its music and magic had fled out.

Still, it had held enough magic to kill the devil, and what more can you ask of a guitar than that?

He covered over the pieces and stood up. The moonlight showed him the way up the hill and he started climbing, his legs aching from all of the running and his heart still hammering with the greasy residue of terror.

He climbed and climbed and almost the only thought that ran through his head was It’s over.

A dozen times he caught his trouser cuffs on thornbushes and had to pull hard to free himself. He never noticed that one time when he pulled he tore loose the dime on its twine. The old charm fell into the brown grass and was lost to him forever.

He reached the top of the hill just as a flat black cloud cover from the south was being pulled like a tarp over the moon and stars. Even so he could see his way. There was a dirt road that led from the Passion Pit back out to the main road of the A-32 Extension; or he could just cut through the corn to the Guthrie place. All of the corn, far as the eye could see, was Henry Guthrie’s, and way over past the fields was the barn and in the barn was the Bone Man’s bedroll.

“It’s over,” he said to the night as he set out toward the corn.

Then the lights came on.

Four sets of car headlights and one set of blue and red police dome lights. All at once he was caught in a circle of light. He stopped, frozen in the moment, as he heard the sounds of car doors opening and shoes crunching down on gravel.

“Hold it right there, boy.”

Boy. There it was again. Suddenly he felt as if he was down South again. He knew this was trouble.

He stood there, arms long and heavy at his sides, as seven men walked toward him from all sides, forming a loose ring. Big men, some of them. None of them were strangers. The man with the badge was Officer Bernhardt, a stocky young man with a hound-dog face and little pig eyes. He had his right hand on the walnut grips of his holstered.38, and his left thumb and index finger circled around the handle of his baton where it jutted above the belt ring. He was the only cop.

The others were townsmen. All of them were young, with Vic Wingate at seventeen being the youngest, though he had the meanest face. Vic always called him Nigger Joe whenever they chanced to meet. The Bone Man had always tried never to meet him. The oldest was Jimmy Crow — and that was almost funny, Jim Crow—but there was nothing funny about the cold humor in Crow’s eyes. Next to him was the biggest of the men, Tow-Truck Eddie. The Bone Man didn’t know his last name, but the kid was about twenty and had to be six and a half feet tall. Tow-Truck Eddie never sassed him with race names, though; he was a polite kid, and the Bone Man was a little heartened to see him here because he knew the kid was a regular churchgoer and was often seen in Apple Park, sitting on the bench reading a Bible. The other three were just young guys from town, Jim Polk, who had just started at Pinelands College, and Phil and Stosh, but the Bone Man didn’t know their last names.

Seven men with seven hard faces, ringed around him.

The Bone Man had been rousted by cops from every jurisdiction from here to Benoit, so he knew it was always better to wait and find out what the game was.

“You that boy Morse, aintchu?” said Officer Bernhardt. Again the “boy” rankled, coming as it was from a kid ten years younger than the Bone Man.

“Yessir.” When he was scared his accent became more that of a southern farm kid. It came out like “Yahsuh.”

“Whatchu doin’ way out here, Nigger Joe?” said Vic Wingate.

The Bone Man wanted to toss them all down the hill. He also wanted to run. He said, “I was jus’ taking a walk.”

“Taking a walk?” Jimmy Crow echoed. “Taking a fuckin’ walk?”

“Maybe he came out here to peep into some cars and see white kids making out,” suggested Polk. “See some white titty.” As he laughed he touched his genitals.

“No, sir,” said the Bone Man, trying to force the Delta drawl out of his voice. He wasn’t going to be Amos or Andy to this pack of shit kickers. “I’m not a Peeping Tom. ’Sides, there’s no one out here tonight. Ain’t nobody been out here for weeks, ya’ll knows that.” He heard the slip again and almost winced.

“How the hell you know that?” growled Crow.

“’Cause everybody knows that. Since them killings started nobody comes out here to neck. Nobody hardly comes out at all.”

Vic stepped half a pace forward. “But you go out for evening strolls.”

The Bone Man said nothing.

“This is bullshit,” said Crow. His face was set and hard. His oldest boy, Billy, had been the third victim of the killer and the hurt of it was in his eyes.

“Why’s that, boy?” asked Bernhardt.

Morse tried not to let the rage and humiliation show in his face. Boy? What did that fat ass think this was, 1956? It constantly amazed him how much more redneck Pennsylvania was than most of the South.

“I’m not afraid to go walkin’,” was what he managed to get past his clenched teeth.

“That’s really strange,” Vic said. “Everyone else is afraid of the dark, afraid that the killer might get them…but you’re not. Now, why is that?”

The Bone Man said nothing.

“C’mon, Morse…why is that? Why is it that a skinny nigger like you is the only person in this whole town who ain’t scared to go out in the dark when there’s a killer running round loose?”

Polk snickered. “Maybe he ain’t afraid ’cause the killer can’t see him in the dark, black as he is!”

A few of the other guys laughed, but Vic didn’t and neither did Tow-Truck Eddie. The big man’s face was almost thoughtful, but he didn’t say a word. Vic on the other hand flapped an arm at the others to shut them up.

“Bullshit, Jimmy. This motherfucker ain’t afraid of what might be out here in the dark because he’s what’s out here in the dark.”

It took Polk and the others a couple of seconds to sort that out. Tow-Truck Eddie just inhaled and exhaled, slowly and deeply, through his nose.

“What kind of shit is this?” the Bone Man said, staring Vic right in the eye. “That’s jus’ bullshit and you know it.”

“Is it?” barked Crow, and Vic snapped, “Then why you got blood on your shirt?”

The Bone Man glanced involuntarily down at his shirt. It was speckled with blood, though in the darkness it just looked black and wet.

“What’d you do?” Polk sneered. “Cut yourself shaving?”

“Holy shit,” murmured Stosh, who had apparently not noticed it until now.

The Bone Man shook his head. “No, man, this is bullshit. I—”

“Is it your blood?” asked Tow-Truck Eddie. He had a soft, deep voice. In other circumstances it would have sounded kind.

“No, but—”

“Then whose blood is it?” Bernhardt asked.

Overhead, there was thunder. The Bone Man looked from face to face and then licked his dry lips. “Look…you gotta believe me….”

“What is it you want us to believe?” the big man asked, his voice still mild.

“It’s about the killer…I found out who it was been cutting those people up.” He licked his lips again. “I figured it out.”

“You figured it out,” Bernhardt said. “You? A corn-picking nigger migrant worker figured it out when the whole police department hasn’t been able to find a single fucking clue?” He laughed. “Yeah, I’m ready to believe that shit.”

Vic stepped closer, his fists balled at his sides and his eyes suddenly intense. In a tight whisper he said, “And just who do you think it is?”

The Bone Man started to say Ubel Griswold. It got as far as his tongue, his lips had just started to form the first sound when Vic hit him with such shocking speed and force that the Bone Man flew backward against Tow-Truck Eddie’s chest. It was like hitting a brick wall.

“Fuck you!” screamed Vic. “Whose blood is on your shirt? What the hell did you do?” He was screaming, totally out of control, as if someone had jabbed him with a hot wire. He stepped into the Bone Man and struck him again, and again.

“Is that the piece of shit killed my boy?” Crow yelled, his expression of cruel delight giving way to real rage. “Give him to me, Vic…” But Vic was raining down blows on the Bone Man with an insane ferocity.

“Stop!” the Bone Man screamed back, his mouth filling with blood. “Jesus, please make him stop!” He tried to cover his face with both arms the way a boxer does, tried to turn and twist to roll with blows, but even flipped out with rage, Vic Wingate was a good fighter. He used short hooks to claw the Bone Man’s arms away and fired straight jabs and crosses to the chest and face and throat. Vic’s hands were iron hammers and under the rain of blows the Bone Man could feel his face break and split.

Tow-Truck Eddie wrapped his arms around the Bone Man and spun him away from Vic. The other men, shocked by Vic’s sudden rage, felt their own anger dampening down. They milled, confused and embarrassed. Vic threw one more punch and it just bounced off Eddie’s huge shoulder.

The Bone Man felt his legs buckle, but he didn’t fall. Tow-Truck Eddie took bunched handfuls of the front of his shirt and held him up. He leaned in close, his pale eyes burning with a weird light.

“Mr. Morse,” he said softly — so softly that only he, the Bone Man, and Vic could hear him. The Bone Man’s head lolled on a loose neck and sunbursts were exploding in his eyes. His ears rang like church bells. “Mr. Morse, tell me what you did tonight. Tell me whose blood this is.”

The Bone Man stared through the fireworks and tried to focus on the big man’s kind eyes. He looked deep into those eyes, searching for hope, or maybe an ally. “Don’t hurt me,” he whispered and was immediately ashamed of his cowardice. An hour ago he’d chased a monster down and killed him, and now he was pleading for his life from a group of Pennsylvania rednecks.

“Tell me, Mr. Morse.”

“Damn it, Eddie, let me have him!” Vic snarled and tried to reach around the big man. Eddie turned again, blocking Vic’s reach with his broad back. He pushed the Bone Man up against the side of Vic’s pickup truck and leaned his face close.

“Tell me and I’ll stop all of this, Mr. Morse,” whispered Eddie.

The Bone Man thought he saw some kindly lights in the big man’s eyes. He turned his head and spat blood onto the gravel and then through a tight throat said, “It was Griswold.”

The big man’s face didn’t change.

“What’d he say?” shouted Bernhardt and Crow together.

“It was Ubel Griswold!” the Bone Man said, his voice a faint babble of desperation and pain. “It was him, man, swear to God. That farmer who owns the beef ranch down on the other side of the hollow.” The Bone Man licked his pulped lips. “He’s the one been killing all them kids.”

His voice was only a whisper, and only Tow-Truck Eddie heard it. He stared into the Bone Man’s eyes for a long time, his face thoughtful. Hope soared in the Bone Man’s chest. Then the big man shook his head.

“No,” he said.

“Wh…what?”

“I said no. That isn’t possible. Mr. Griswold goes to my church. He’s a righteous man. He believes in God.” His eyes searched the broken landscape of the Bone Man’s face. “I’ve never seen you at church, Mr. Morse. Tell me…what is it that you believe in?”

“Please…”

“Satan is the Father of Lies.” Tow-Truck Eddie’s eyes were as pale as ice, and looking into them the Bone Man saw that in thinking that salvation lay in the big man’s hands he had been terribly wrong. Eddie’s face almost looked sad as he said, “Vic’s right, it must be you did all those things.”

“But I—”

“You’re the devil, Mr. Morse, you are the Beast,” he whispered. “God have mercy on you.”

Tow-Truck Eddie hit him. He let go with his right hand, drew it back just eight inches, and punched the Bone Man in the face, turning into the punch with all the massive power of muscle and speed and torque.

The blow exploded in the Bone Man’s brain and everything went white as a big bell broke in his mind. His limbs turned to jelly and Eddie let him fall. The Bone Man collapsed onto the gravel by the side of the truck. He flopped there, dazed, unable to speak. His nose was broken, and so was his jaw. The punch had herniated three disks in his neck and upper back, and his throat was filling with blood.

Tow-Truck Eddie turned to Vic and the others. Vic was the closest one and their eyes met and held.

Vic licked his lips in much the same way as the Bone Man had. “Eddie…what did he say?”

Their eyes held for a long time. Finally Tow-Truck Eddie’s softened and he gave Vic a sad smile. “Only lies, Vic. All he had to say were the devil’s own lies.”

There was a strange flush of relief in Vic’s eyes and he took a second to set his features before he turned to the others. He looked at Jimmy Crow.

“Jimmy,” he said, pitching his voice to sound grave, “I hate to tell you this, man, but…he’s the one killed your Billy. He just told me.”

Eddie flicked a glance at Vic and almost said something, but then closed his mouth and stepped away. The eyes of every other man fell on the Bone Man. Eyes that had been confused a minute ago now hardened with purpose. They stared at the bleeding man for nearly fifteen seconds in silence, and then there was the cold rasp as Gus Bernhardt slid the hickory baton from its metal ring.

As Tow-Truck Eddie stepped out of their way, they suddenly rushed past him. After that, it was just a matter of doing the killing.

No one ever took either blame or credit for the murder of Oren Morse. His body was found tied to a scarecrow post at the crossroads of A-32 and Dark Hollow Road with a piece of paper stuffed in his shirt pocket that had the names of the sixteen people who had been killed that autumn. It was the end of the Black Harvest of 1976, and nearly everyone accepted the fiction that the Bone Man had been the killer. After all, who was he? A migrant farm worker who had told more than one person that he had been dodging the law since he’d dodged the draft in 1970. That made him a criminal already, and few of the farmers saw it as a far leap from being un-American enough to flee from his responsibilities to the war effort to being a killer. Logical progression of thought didn’t seem to enter into it.

The body of Ubel Griswold, a farmer and landowner who had settled in Pine Deep eight years before, was never found and was generally believed to have been the last victim of the Reaper, the lurid nickname given to the mass-murderer by one of the local papers.

Henry Guthrie — who owned the farm on whose outermost corner the grisly scarecrow was placed, and who had employed Morse as a migrant field worker — took the body down. He was one of the few who did not believe that Oren Morse was the Reaper. Guthrie kept it to himself, though. He had lost a cousin during the massacre, but he didn’t believe for a moment that Morse had done the killings.

He and his brother, George, took the body to the old Presbyterian cemetery out by the canal bridge and buried it. The church had burned down forty years ago and no new Presbyterians had moved in to care for the graveyard. No one would know or care if there was a new grave there. The Guthrie brothers didn’t tell anyone about it, though; nor would the two children who stood by the brothers during the unbeneficed service. Guthrie’s ten-year-old daughter, Val, and her best friend, Malcolm Crow. Malcolm’s brother, Billy, had been one of the first townies killed, and though the boy would never know it, his father, Jimmy Crow, had helped stomp Morse to death. Malcolm, of everyone in town, knew for sure that the Reaper hadn’t been the bluesman, but his voice had been silenced forever. Weeks later, Morse — or “the Bone Man” as the kids had called him because he was so skinny — had saved Malcolm’s life in an incident that had revealed to just those two who the real killer had been.

The kids had loved the Bone Man. They’d worked alongside him in the fields, had learned about the blues from him, and had begged Guthrie to let them go with him to the lonely funeral, promising to keep the secret always.

There had been a lot of evenings during that long summer and longer autumn when the Bone Man had sat on the porch steps and played acoustic blues to keep back the night and the night terrors. The young man had told tall tales of the road, and of unlikely meetings with legendary bluesmen such as Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. Guthrie hadn’t known or cared if the stories were true, but the music he played was beautiful and sad and somehow it helped everyone get through the worst season they’d ever had. The Black Harvest, which had started out with a vicious crop blight that had turned half the crops into bug-infested garbage, and then with the series of brutal murders. Somehow the blues and the magic of that guitar were a charm against evil. Now the man was dead and God only knew where his guitar was.

Guthrie bought a stone in another town and set it on the grave, and he read a prayer over the young man’s grave, and then he left and never returned. Years later Malcolm Crow would try to find that grave, but he never could remember just where it was.

The blight ended but the sky turned dark and bruised and they had months of heavy rains.

The next year’s harvest was normal and the corn was tall and green and the blight was lifted. In time the Reaper faded from everyday conversation; though when the stories were told about it over the following years, the name of “Bone Man” came to replace that of “Reaper,” and all of the evil was ascribed to him.

Down in Dark Hollow, the devil’s bones lay in the earth like seeds of hate, waiting for another year’s harvest.