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Authors: Jonathan Maberry

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

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

(7)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 6

(1)

Late that afternoon Ferro advised Gus to impose a curfew on the town. The chief looked at him as if he’s just suggested that they should all dance naked down Corn Hill. “With Boyd still out there it’s the safest thing,” Ferro insisted.

“The town selectmen will have my balls if I do that. This is October!”

LaMastra looked from him to his partner. “See, Frank, I told you he’d go all
Jaws
on us.” In a mocking tone of voice he said, “We can’t close the beaches…it’s Fourth of July weekend!”

“Vince, please,” Ferro said.

Gus went as red as a tomato, his body swelling as if it was about to burst. “This is hardly something to joke about—”

“We apologize, Chief,” Ferro said, shooting a harsh look at LaMastra. “Vince and I are both tired and frustrated.”

The chief grunted. They were sitting in Gus’s office on Corn Hill. There was a lot of bustle as off-duty officers were coming in to replace the working shift. Everyone looked angry and there was a lot of harsh chatter about what they’d do if they found the bastard who had killed two of their own.

“But,” Ferro pushed on, “a curfew does seem to be the best course of action. Boyd is still out there, and—”

“Don’t patronize me, Frank. I’m not stupid. I know how dangerous the situation is, but you have to appreciate my position. Pine Deep is a tourist town and decisions that affect the tourism industry are not made by me. Terry makes the principal decisions—”

“The mayor’s off the radar, Chief,” LaMastra observed.

“Which means that Harry LeBeau has authority,” Gus said stubbornly, “and even then he has to get a majority vote from the selectmen, even in a police emergency.” When he saw the looks on their faces he added defensively, “I didn’t set it up, but it’s more than my job is worth to issue a curfew without permission.” He paused, realizing how that sounded, and added, “Even if I do agree.”

“Well, can you at least give LeBeau a call and set things in motion? The sun is already down.”

Gus stared at him for a long five count, then abruptly stood up and walked into his private office and slammed the door. Through the glass Ferro could see him snatch up the phone. He turned to LaMastra, dropped his voice, and snapped, “Jesus, Vince, do you have to make smartass comments to everyone? What is it with you?”

Unmoved, LaMastra quietly said, “I guess my bullshit tolerance has bottomed out over the last couple of days. Working with that guy is maybe a short step up from working with a sock puppet.”

“It’s his town.”

“Oh, screw that, Frank. People are dying—
cops
are dying. I just don’t see why we should be even asking him. I thought the mayor put us in charge.”

“Of the manhunt, yes, but this is a town policy issue. We push too hard on this and the mayor makes a call to our boss and we’re both writing parking tickets in West Philly.”

“Don’t tell me you’re going to play politics here.”

Ferro shrugged. “The chief’s making the call, isn’t he?”

Through the glass they could see Gus, his face even redder, gesturing emphatically as he shouted into the phone. They shared a look, eyebrows raised, then settled down at desks to update their reports on their laptops. Ten minutes later Gus’s door banged open and he stalked across the room toward them, face dark, a thick vein popping on his forehead. He stopped in front of Ferro’s desk and glared down at him. “Well, I pitched the curfew idea to LeBeau and eight of the selectmen one at a time and got my ass handed to me by every single one of them.”

Ferro flicked a warning look at LaMastra, who only mouthed the word “
Jaws
.”

“Best I might get from them was permission to issue an advisory.”

“‘An advisory,’” Ferro echoed.

“We can broadcast a suggestion that ‘everyone stay indoors until the current criminal investigation is over.’” He said it with the intonation of someone repeating a quote. “Since almost every business in town subscribes to the township listserv, we can send out an e-mail with the same suggestion, and that is as far as they are going to budge until they hear from Terry.”

Ferro stared up at the pocked surface of the drop-ceiling panels. “Okay, then that will have to do.”

The e-mail was drafted and sent, with the request that each store owner forward it to his local client list—a suggestion Gus thought would be universally ignored—and a copy of it was faxed to the local radio station, WHWN, the “Voice of the Pennsylvania Pinelands,” which was broadcast out of Pinelands College. Word had already spread about the murders that morning at Guthrie Farm, and the whisper-stream spread the news about the “advisory.” The overwhelming reaction from both townsfolk and tourists was to pour into the streets. Within a couple of hours Pine Deep became one huge party, with impromptu bonfires flaring up in the farmers’ fields closest to the town proper, and tailgate parties sparking to life in parking lots of a dozen stores. More than half of the shops on Main Street and Corn Hill decided to stay open past the usual closing hour, and all the bars and restaurants were packed with chattering crowds. When Ferro and LaMastra left the chief’s office to walk back to the Harvestman to turn in, they encountered huge crowds of people, laughter, blaring music, and a pandemic of celebration. As they passed the open door of Jacko’s Pub, a drunk girl in a very tight T-shirt staggered out of the door, her forehead painted with a lipstick jack-o’-lantern, a drink in either hand. “Here fellas, these’ll just kill ya!” She tried to hand them the drinks, but Ferro gave her his stony face and pushed past. LaMastra paused for a moment, took the drink and downed it in a single gulp, winked at the girl, and then hurried to catch up with Ferro, his throat burning with whatever was in the drink.

(2)

Val and Crow sat side by side on his cramped bed, Crow’s good arm around her. Both of them were now free of the IV bottles and Weinstock had said that they would be released the following day. Polk sat by the door staring at the news, and Toombes was slumped in a chair by the window reading a Walter Mosley novel, but she also kept glancing up at the TV, which showed the burgeoning party in Pine Deep.

“Gotta love this town,” Crow said, giving Val a gentle squeeze, mindful of her wrenched shoulder.

“This is crazy,” Val said sourly. “People have no respect. No common sense, either. Don’t they know what’s out there?” Her voice was fierce enough to make both cops turn and look at her, but she was unabashed. “People can be so damn
stupid
sometimes.”

“I heard that,” Toombes murmured, and then bowed her head over her novel again.

Crow’s cell rang and he disentangled himself from Val and reached for it, checked the display, and said to Val, “It’s Terry!”

He flipped the phone open. “Hey, Wolfman…where the hell you been?”

“Hi, Crow. How are you? How’s Val?”

“Able to sit up and take nourishment.”

“Good, good,” Terry said in a vague way that made Crow think he hadn’t even registered the answer. “Look, I just got off the phone with Harry and he more or less brought me up to speed.” He cleared his throat and when he spoke again his voice was a bit more human. “Jesus, I can’t believe that Ruger actually attacked you at the hospital. I’m glad you killed the bastard.” It took Crow a second to register what Terry had just said. Jesus? Bastard?
Wow,
Crow thought.

“I doubt anyone’ll shed tears at his funeral,” Crow muttered.

“And…I heard about Nels Cowan and Jimmy Castle. It’s horrible but…I’m off-balance with the timetable here. Are they sure Ruger didn’t do that?’

“Ruger was DOA when that went down. Apparently his buddy Boyd did it.”

“Boyd? That doesn’t make any sense. Those Philly cops told me he was harmless.”

“I guess they were wrong.”

“God
damn
it!” There it was again.

“Have you been watching the news?”

“I’m watching it now. Place is going to hell, and I’ve got to get back on top of this situation. I’m heading over to Gus’s. Talk to you later.”

“Hey, wait a min—” But Terry had hung up. Crow slowly closed his phone and turned to Val.

“What was that all about?” she asked. He told her, emphasizing the startling changes in Terry’s vocabulary. She arched an eyebrow. “Terry? Cursing? Oh, come on….”

“Hand to God, sweetie.”

“Must be strain,” she said.

“Must be something.”

(3)

Vic spun around, whipping a pistol out of his belt and dropping into a shooter’s crouch as Kenneth Boyd stepped heavily out from between two maples. Vic’s scowl melted away and he smiled as he straightened, easing the hammer down and shoving the gun back into the shoulder rig he wore under his windbreaker. He’d been waiting for over an hour, seated cross-legged on the tailgate of his pickup, chain-smoking and working things through in his head, waiting for Boyd, who took his sweet time getting there.

Boyd stood in the darkness under an elm, staring hungrily at him. The forest and the field were both cast in shadows thrown by the mountains, but Boyd stood in the heart of the darkness, shying away from even the wan daylight.

Vic stretched his legs and stood, affecting a yawn, then he turned and as he started walking toward the forest he slapped his thigh and whistled. “Here, boy!”

With red hatred in his eyes, Boyd followed, his lips curling back to reveal a row of jagged teeth that looked more like they should belong in the mouth of a barracuda rather than a man. Together they went deep into the woods.

 

Vic always kept a small canvas folding chair in a zippered vinyl bag stowed behind one of the rhododendrons by the edge of the swamp. He unzipped it casually, pointedly not looking at Boyd, showing both his lack of fear and total disregard for the creature, especially here in the presence of the Man. He took his time setting up the chair, pushing the legs down into the mossy earth until they held firm against roots or stones, and then he sat down, facing the muddy pool. Bubbles were constantly rising to the surface of the pool, popping with a mingled smell of sulfur, methane, and rotting meat. Vic had long since grown used to the smell, but he took a lucifer match from his shirt pocket, popped it alight with a thumbnail, and held the flame to a fresh cigarette, then flicked the still burning match at Boyd. It bounced off the creature’s cheek and save for a tiny flaring of eyes and nostrils Boyd did not react. Those eyes never left Vic’s throat, however, and after a few minutes, as Vic sat there and smoked—his own eyes fixed on the black pool—cold spittle gathered in Boyd’s mouth and dripped in fat drops to his chest.

As he finished his cigarette, Vic said aloud, “Einstein over there nearly screwed the pooch, Boss.” His words were directed to the rippling surface of the pool, and he cocked his head to one side as if listening to an answer. “Yeah, I think we can turn it around. Worst case is that everyone’ll think Boyd here just went off his nut. I can make that work for us.” He listened again. “Sure, but it’s all based on whether Boyd will do what we say. He should have stayed out of town, should have gone to ground, but here he is, big as life and twice as ugly. If it was me, I’d cap him right now. Got those
special
rounds in your old Luger—they’d take Shitbag here down quick as you please, then I could leave him where he can be found and then let things go quiet for a while. Halloween’s coming fast, and cops crawling up everyone’s ass could slow things down.” He listened again, sighed, and nodded reluctantly. “Okay, I can see that…but I still think we should dump this one and just work on the other one. Well…the other
three
now. Maybe they won’t be brain damaged like this useless turd.” Vic leaned forward, his face, his eyes, his entire being focused on the center of the swamp. “You know I will, Boss. One thing in all the world you never need to do is doubt that. But if Boyd here steps out of line one more time—if he endangers the
plan
one more time—useful or not I’m going to put him down like a broke-dick dog. I won’t let anything stop the Red Wave. Not anything, and not anyone living or dead.”

He listened again and his face slowly registered surprise, eyebrows arching, and he looked from the swamp to Boyd and back again. “You can do that? You can—what word am I looking for here, boss?—you can
dial up
the brainpower on this moron?” He grinned like a kid. “That’s just too cool! But let’s not overdo it. Just enough to make him toe the line and maybe help with some fetch-and-carry nigger work I got to get done.”

Beside him, Boyd dropped down onto hands and knees and then leaned forward until he was able to dip his whole face into the swamp. He lay there for ten minutes, buried head and shoulders in the black bubbling ichor of Griswold’s grave. When he eventually pulled back a green-black slime oozed from his ears and nose and mouth. Boyd got slowly to his feet and staggered back to the treeline, watching Vic with eyes that were a shade less milky and bland. Not intelligent eyes, but eyes that showed the dawning of an animal cunning that had not been there before.

Vic bent and ground out his cigarette, then slid off the chair onto his knees and also fell forward onto his palms, leaning out over the edge of the swamp and craning his neck out and down until his face was nearly touching the mud. He did not immerse his face in the mud, but instead closed his eyes and bent further still and kissed the roiling surface of the swamp. “With all my soul and all my hated, I am for thee,” he said, and it was the closing line of a ritual that he had acted out many hundreds of times, and which others had acted out many tens of thousands of times before him. Boyd, watching, tried to understand and, just for a moment, felt a stab of jealousy spear him through the heart.

(4)

Every reporter in the region had the story of the killing of Jimmy Castle and Nels Cowan, and it was front-page news from D.C. to Boston, riding as it was on the coattails of the hostage-murder drama at the Guthrie farm. Locally it was big enough to earn program interruptions for news bulletins. Nationally it was above the fold in the morning editions and below the fold by the evening press. By morning it would have faded into inside stories everywhere except in eastern Pennsylvania and parts of New Jersey. Then the October 2 morning edition of the
Black Marsh Sentinel
came out with an exclusive by reporter Willard Fowler Newton. The headline said it all:

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