Dead Man's Song pd-2

by Jonathan Maberry

  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.

  Chapter 15

  (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 walk
ie-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.”