“Val…honey…we need to talk about some stuff. I need to tell you some things, but first I need you tell me what happened last night. Are you up to this?”
In the space of a heartbeat the look in Val’s eye changed from wretched pain to an almost reptilian coldness. “It’s long past time that we talked about this. All night I’ve been thinking about this, Crow, needing to talk to you. God knows I had nothing else to do while they fussed around me. I’m pregnant, so they couldn’t give me sedatives. They wouldn’t let me see you, and that jackass Polk kept trying to ask me questions, so I just tuned him out and thought about what I saw.” Her grip was tightened like a vise on his wrist. “I wanted it to be straight in my head. I wanted to try and make some kind of sense out of what happened, put it together in my mind, try to be cold and clinical about it. I had time to think it through.” She took a breath and studied him. “You know I don’t believe most of that supernatural crap—zombies and hobgoblins and all. You’re into it, but you know that I never…I mean, I don’t—”
“It doesn’t matter, baby. I don’t believe most of it myself. A lot of this is just for fun. Spooky movies and Halloween dollars in America’s Haunted Holidayland.”
“Maybe…but what if it’s true?” She gave his arm a final squeeze and then let go, giving his wrist a defiant push as she did so. “What if a lot of it is true?”
There was such coldness in Val’s voice that it made Crow flinch.
“The papers always joke about Pine Deep being the most haunted town in America. It’s on all of our tourist pamphlets. We bank on it. So, you tell me…what if it’s true? What if we really are the most haunted town? There’s no other explanation for what we both saw here in the hospital two weeks ago, and what I saw last night. And no one is going to tell me I imagined it. Not unless they want their asses kicked, ’cause I’m not going to take any of that crap from anyone. I know what I saw. I know what happened.”
“I saw some things, too, baby,” he said, and told her about what happened down in Dark Hollow. As Val listened her face went paler, but the hunting hawk glare in her eye intensified.
“God,” she said. “So, we’re now looking at something that started when we were kids. You always believed it, and now I do, too. I’d say I’m sorry for doubting you, but I don’t think that really matters now, does it?”
“No, baby, it sure as hell doesn’t.”
“So where does it leave us? Vampires…and whatever the hell it was down in the Hollow. Would you call it a ghost? Griswold’s ghost?”
“I think so,” Crow said tentatively.
“I’m fighting so hard right now to stay solid, to not break apart, and I have to keep this as logical as possible because if I take one little step off the intellectual facts-and-figures plane I’m going to totally lose it.”
“Hey…Val…it’s okay. It’s over now, no one expects you to be a rock all the time.”
“No, it’s not okay, damn it! I can’t break down. Not until I know where this is all going, not until I understand what really happened to Mark and Connie and what it might mean. I have to hold it together.”
But those last words punched a hole in the dam and the pent-up tons of grief finally smashed through. From one second to the next Val’s face went from stern control to shattered grief and the tears burst from her and the sobs tore her from the inside out. She cried out her brother’s name and clawed Crow to her in her need to be sheltered, weeping brokenly against his chest as he held her.
Chapter 5
(1)
Mike Sweeney biked down to the Crow’s Nest and used his key to let himself in. The store wasn’t scheduled to open until nine-thirty, but he had nowhere else to go. He was only half aware of the process of locking up his bike, opening the shop, counting the money in the till, restocking the shelves, and sweeping the floor. On some level he was aware that he was doing these things, but it was more process than deliberate action, and even though he’d only worked at the shop for two weeks he did everything right, made no errors, felt no hesitation. Autopilot with just the occasional glance from the person behind the wheel.
Then Mike went into the small employees-only bathroom to get the dustpan and peripherally caught sight of himself in the mirror. What he saw jolted him out of the unconscious rhythm and he froze for a discordant moment because the face there in the glass was not his own.
It was…and then again it wasn’t. Déjà vu flared and he knew that he had seen this other face, this other version of his own face somewhere else. Recently. He straightened slowly, afraid to move too fast in case it somehow changed what he was seeing in the mirror. Carefully, like he was trying not to spook a skittish deer, he moved toward the mirror and looked at the face, watched as it moved with him, normal in the seamless way it mimicked his every movement but totally unnatural in what it showed. The face that looked back at him was older, with a stronger jaw and skin that was gaunt and stretched over a sharply etched brow and cheekbones. The lips of this stranger’s mouth were thin and hard as if he was fighting a grimace of pain, and the upper lip was cut by a thick white scar. The eyes were the most compelling, though. They were blue, flecked with blood-colored drops of red and totally ringed with gold. Strange eyes. Alien. If there was anything human about those eyes, Mike Sweeney could not find it. There was no way Mike could have known it, but those were the eyes his mother had seen that morning in the kitchen. Mike hadn’t looked at his own reflection that morning in the bathroom; he’d just stumbled in, washed his mouth with Scope, and used the toilet. Had he looked then he would have seen the same eyes that stared out of the mirror at him now.
Hard eyes, cold, without remorse, without pity. Without hope.
“Dead eyes,” he murmured, and the sound of his own voice was equally unfamiliar. It had grown deeper, sadder, more harsh. There was a cynical sneer in the sound of it.
The face in the mirror stared at him, hard as fists, cold as night.
Mike blinked to clear his eyes—and that fast the spell was broken. In the microsecond of the blink the face was there—and then it was gone. He blinked again, but all he saw was his own face. Fourteen going on never grow up. That’s how he thought of himself, and that’s what he now saw. Just his own face. Tired and pale, splashed with freckles, smoother bones in brow and cheeks, hair more garishly red, chin still childlike, lips unscarred. He leaned closer, letting the light above the mirror fall on his face. He searched the mirror for any trace of what he had seen, and all he saw—and that only for a moment—was the alien color of his eyes. Fiery gold rings around blue ice, flecked with blood. He blinked again…and his eyes were ordinary blue. No trace of fire or blood—merely a cold and hopeless blue.
He stood there, peering at himself for several minutes, then he closed his eyes and stared at the darkness behind his lids for a slow count of thirty. When he opened his eyes, they were still ordinary eyes.
Mike straightened, turned, picked up the dustpan, and walked out of the bathroom. By the time he’d swept the floor the whole incident was gone from his conscious mind. Secretly and quietly shoved down by some unknown hand into a darker and less accessible place inside. He did not even remember that he couldn’t remember. He finished his chores by eight-thirty, picked a magazine off the rack, and sat down on the stool behind the counter to wait for the day to start.