Authors: Jonathan Maberry
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.
(1)
LaMastra burst into the conference room with a walkie-talkie in one hand. “Frank! Boyd’s been spotted.” He hurried over to hand off the unit. “It’s Jim Polk”
Ferro grabbed the walkie-talkie. “Polk, Ferro here. Tell me.”
“Sir,” Polk’s voice said with a crackle, “We got a call from Gaither Carby, he’s a local farmer who was driving back to Pine Deep across the Black Marsh Bridge when a guy cuts across his path. Carby damn near runs him down ’cause the guy was limping pretty bad. Carby slows down to see if maybe the guy’s hurt and the guy takes a couple of shots at him. Carby floors it and gets out of there. He called it in and from his description it seems pretty likely that it was your boy.”
“How long ago was this?”
“Fifteen minutes. Carby doesn’t have a cell phone, so he had to drive to a neighbor’s house and use their phone. I took the call here and rolled some units.”
“Good work,” Ferro snapped. “I’ll head out there right now.”
Ferro tossed the walkie-talkie to LaMastra as they raced to the door. “’bout goddamn time we caught a break,” he growled.
Jim Polk switched off the walkie-talkie and motioned for Ginny to cover the phones while he went out back for a smoke. As soon as he shut the alley door he pulled out his cell and punched in a number that was answered on the first ring.
“How’d it go?” Vic asked.
“Like you said. Carby has his story straight. The jerkoffs from Philly are heading out to the bridge now. How is it at your end?”
“Neat and tidy. Boyd tramped footprints all over the bridge and they should be able to find his shell-casings, too.”
“That’s great. Is he really gone this time?”
“He’s as gone as I need him to be,” Vic said. “He’ll be seen at least three times over the next week, and each time he’ll be farther from here. By the time they lose his trail completely he’ll have been spotted up in Trenton. After that, nobody’s going to see him again until trick or treat night. At that point—well, it won’t matter who sees him.” Vic was laughing as he disconnected.
Polk leaned back against the door. “God save my soul…” he breathed, but his Catholic rituals were thirty years out of practice and as dry as his mouth.
(2)
“Excuse me…are you Malcolm Crow?”
Crow’s hand was just getting ready to fit his key into the door lock of his store when he heard the voice and it startled him enough to make him drop his keyring. Crow turned and saw a dumpy little man with a diffident smile standing by the open door of a battered old Honda Civic, a folded leather notebook in one hand.
“Who’s asking?” Crow asked as he carefully squatted down to retrieve his keys, though he thought he already knew who this guy was. His face had been all over the TV.
“Willard Fowler Newton,
Black Marsh Sentinel
.”
“Nice to meet you,” Crow said. “Now get lost.”
“What?”
“No interview, no questions, no answers, no nothing. Go before I set the hounds on you.”
“I haven’t even asked yet.”
Crow unlocked the door but didn’t pull it open. “No, but you were gonna, and the answer would have been no.” He jangled the keys in his hand and instead of making eye contact with the stranger he looked up and down the street for some sign of Mike.
“It would just be a few questions?”
“Nope.”
“It won’t take long. Just a few—”
“No squared. No to the fifth power.” Crow reached for the handle.
“I could beg.”
Crow blinked. “What?”
“I’d be happy to beg,” Newton said. “Or grovel. I grovel nicely.” Newton got down on his knees and clasped his hands in front of him. “How’s this?”
“Impressive,” Crow said, laughing quietly. “Now get the hell up, Newbury.”
“Newton.”
“Whatever. Get up, you look like an idiot.” As Newton rose, Crow cocked his head to one side and thought for a moment, then snapped his fingers. “I know you…you’re the joker who broke the story about Ruger. You look taller on TV.”
Newton’s throat went red. “I stood on a box.”
Crow cracked up, then immediately pressed a hand quickly to his side. “Ow!”
“Are you all right?”
“No I’m not all right, you friggin’ cheesehead. I got shot the other day, or don’t you read the papers?” His love handles burned under the bandages, but the pain passed quickly. Crow blew out cooked air through pursed lips and cocked an eye at Newton. “You’re still here?”
“I’d like to ask you a few questions…and just so you know, it’s not about the Karl Ruger thing.” Crow opened his mouth but before he could say anything Newton plowed ahead. “I’ve been assigned to write a feature on the haunted history of Pine Deep. It’s for the Sunday edition that’ll be out the week before Halloween. I’m researching the whole thing, starting way back and going up to the Pine Deep Massacre of thirty years ago.”
Crow narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “Yeah? Just what do you think you know about that?”
“Not enough,” Newton said honestly. “Mostly just what everyone seems to know, which is more urban legend than historical fact. Apparently, thirty years ago some guy named Oren Morse killed a bunch of people and—”
“Well, there’s where you’re wrong, Mr. Newton,” Crow snapped, jabbing the air with a stiffened finger. “The Bone Man never killed any of those people. He was not the Reaper, and anyone who says different is a frigging liar!” His face went scarlet as he took a threatening step forward.
“Whoa, Mr. Crow, I didn’t mean to offend—”
Crow glared at him, but the moment passed and he backed up a step. “Look,” he said with less venom, “I know a lot of people think the Bone Man was the Reaper, but I know for a fact that he wasn’t.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Because I was
there
when it all happened.”
“But that was thirty years ago. You couldn’t have been more than—”
“I was nine, but I remember it all. Every charming detail like it was yesterday, so don’t go telling me who killed who.”
“Mr. Crow,” Newton said, holding his hands up, palms out. “Look, I’m just trying to find out what happened, okay? I’m not the one who’s saying Oren Morse did the killings. That’s the local legend. To me it’s just a starting point, but I wanted to interview you so I could get your take on it. The people I asked so far say you’re an expert on local folklore. I can’t count the number of articles I saw on the Net that quote you about one ghost story or another. So don’t get me wrong—if I don’t have the full story it’s only because I haven’t
gotten
the full story yet.”
Crow chewed on that for a moment and saw, far up the hill, a tiny figure on a bike. Mike heading to the shop to start his first day. “Look, tell you what, Newt—can I call you Newt?”
“If it gets me an interview you can call me Kermit the Frog.”
“Fine. If you want to interview me, Kermit, then meet me at the Guthrie farm tomorrow afternoon. You know where that is, I’m sure. Be there at four. No other reporters, no cameras, just you. Bring a tape recorder if you want, but I get to decide what gets said and what gets printed. That’s the deal I always make with reporters, and I won’t say word one without an agreement. Don’t worry, you’ll get better value for your time if you play it my way than if you don’t.”
“Okay then. But, tell me something, Mr. Crow…”
“Just call me Crow.”
“Okay. Tell me, Crow, why is it you’re so sure that Oren Morse didn’t commit all those murders.”
Crow’s eyes drilled holes through Newt. “Because the Bone Man saved my life, that’s why.” He paused. “Come around four tomorrow and I’ll tell you all about it.”
He ambled away into his store as Newton stared after him. “Goddamned
right
I’ll be there,” he said to himself.
(3)
Ferro and LaMastra arrived at the crime scene in less than ten minutes. The bridge was blocked off on both sides of the river by cruisers with their lights flashing. They had to wait for a criminalist, but that was routine because a blind man could read the scene, even with the dense cloud cover that cast the whole landscape in a false twilight gloom.
“Boyd must have been trying to cross the river,” LaMastra said, working it out as they carefully picked their way up the slope to the bridge, careful not to smudge any of Boyd’s muddy footprints. “You can see where he approached from upstream keeping down at the bank so as not to be seen from the road.” He pointed. “Prints come up here and he must have been trying to make a dash for the Jersey side when that farmer—what’s his name?”
Ferro looked at his notepad. “Carby. Gaither Carby.”
“When Carby comes over and nearly hits him. Boyd takes some potshots at him and then hauls ass across the bridge.”
Ferro nodded and they walked the length of the bridge, watching as step-by-step the muddy prints faded to nothingness as Boyd’s shoes were scraped clean by the rough timbers. Even with the trail gone the evidence was clear enough.
“I got brass!” called Coralita Toombes, who was squatting by the steelwork on the left side of the bridge. She set up a few little markers that looked like tiny sandwich signs, each one sequentially numbered. “Three of ’em.”
As other officers arrived Ferro had them fan out and search on both sides of the river, and a BOLO was issued for all adjoining New Jersey jurisdictions. Ferro chewed a stick of gum and looked slowly back and forth from one side of the bridge to the other, frowning. LaMastra saw the look and came over. “Problem?”
“No…not really. Just, doesn’t this all seem like a bit of a rerun?”
“Yeah, but let’s face it, the guy absolutely had to get out of town. With any luck the next time we hear from him he’ll be getting picked up at either the Canadian or Mexican border.”
Ferro nodded, but he didn’t look convinced. Yet after three more hours of searching they found nothing to contradict the indications that Kenneth Boyd had left Pine Deep.
(4)
Crow had time to get inside, switch on the lights, and slide a Coldplay CD into the box before the little bell above the door jangled and Mike Sweeney came in. Crow had been smiling while he waited for Mike to show up their first workday together, but his smile dimmed when he saw the vicious bruises that darkened the boy’s face. By main force of will he dialed his smile back up to an acceptable brightness and said, “Welcome to the dungeon, Igor.”
Mike grinned back, and though his smile looked happy there was just a trace of a wince there. Crow thought about he’d like to take a quick road trip over to Vic Wingate’s place and beat him to within an inch of his miserable life.
No jury would touch me
, he thought.
“How are you feelin’, Crow?” Mike asked, taking Crow’s proffered hand.
“Like dookey. How ’bout you?”
“Good.” It had been pretty clear to Crow that even walking across the floor had caused Mike some pain. Riding that bike must have been a bitch.
“Which falls under my personal definition of ‘bullshit,’” he said.
“No, really.”
“Bing! Bing! Bing! We’re hitting a solid eight on the bullshit meter.”
“Crow…don’t, okay?” Mike eyes slid away from Crow’s and his smile leaked away. In profile and with the bruises, Mike looked like an old man instead of a kid. Old and sick. Crow leaned on the counter that separated them and forced eye contact with the boy. “Look, kid, I’m not hideously stupid. If you’re in pain, you’re allowed to say, ‘Gosh, Crow, I hurt like a complete sumbitch.’ This is an acceptable response to inquiries about your current state of well-being.”
It was clear that Mike couldn’t decide whether to laugh or flee. His eyes had a shifty, uncertain look. Even so, he said, “Gosh, Crow, I hurt like a complete son of a bitch.”
“‘Sumbitch,’ son. This is a hick town, the correct term is ‘sumbitch.’”
“I hurt like a complete sumbitch.”
“Good. Now watch your language, you juvenile delinquent.”
This time Mike did laugh. A bit. “How’s your…uh, I mean, Val?”
“My ‘uh, I mean Val’ is doing pretty good; and fiancée is the word you’re fumbling for. She’s home sleeping right now, and Sarah Wolfe is keeping her company. You know her? The mayor’s wife?”
“I deliver their paper,” Mike said, nodding. “Well…did. I guess I’m going to quit now that I’m working here.”
“Val sends her best, by the way. She said that you’re a sweetheart for helping me out here.”
Mike flushed red.
“But enough of this banter, today we’re going to explore the exciting world of retail sales. First step—inventory.” He gave a stage wink. “Takes your breath away, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah. I’m like…tingling.”
For the next two hours Crow took Mike through the steps of checking the shelves against what was stored in the tiny stockroom and then filling out order sheets. Crow let Mike make the next ten calls while Crow tried not to backseat drive; by the fifth call it was easier to block the urge. They worked together to stock the shelves—a job Crow had left half finished when Terry Wolfe had talked him into going out to shut down the Haunted Hayride a few days ago, though it seemed like months to Crow. As they worked, Crow saw the boy try to disguise his many winces as he bent and stretched to fill the bins of costumes, baskets of rubber severed hands and other body parts, trays of goggly eyeballs, racks of Gummi centipedes and faux Cockroach Clusters, and tables filled with everything from smoking cauldrons to marked-down Freddy Krueger gloves (because, as Crow explained it Mike,
Nightmare on Elm Street
was soooo five minutes ago). At one point Mike was stretching his arm up to hang a half dozen Aslan the Lion costumes on a high peg when he gave a small sudden cry and dropped them. He pressed a hand to his ribs for a moment and stood there, wincing and making hissing-pipe noises.
“How’s that rib treatin’ you?” Crow asked with fake disaffection.
“Hurts,” Mike said tightly, then added, “like a sumbitch.”
“All of this happened when you fell off your bike, right? That your story?”