The Bone Man was grinning about that when he reached the edge of the swamp. He stopped there and the crows flocked around him, settling in the trees, fluttering their oily wings, clicking their beaks in expectation. Despite the chill of mid-October, the swamp was always warm and wet. Flies as big as bees flew low and heavy across the rippled surface, sometimes getting caught in the pop of a bubble of sulfur or methane. There were snakes in the brown grass and worms as thick a child’s finger wriggling in the tangles of rotting vegetation that choked the edges of the slough. Even to a dead man the place was unnatural and vile, and the Bone Man winced at the stink of it.
He moved slowly to the edge of the mire and looked at it. Thirty years ago he and Griswold had fought here. Right here, down deep in the shadows of Dark Hollow, while beyond the mountains the moon was clawing its way into the sky. The Bone Man had gone hunting for the man, knowing—if no one else in town did—that Griswold was the murdering bastard behind the killings that had torn the heart out of Pine Deep. The Bone Man had stabbed him with the broken neck of his guitar and then dragged his body into that mud and pushed it down with a stick until Ubel Griswold had vanished forever beneath the sludge. After thirty years in that kind of muck there would be nothing left but some fragments of bones. The mud of that swamp was filled with worms and every other kind of thing that eats. Griswold was worm food long ago.
So where was he now? Why was there no sense of him around?
The Bone Man stood there, smiling darkly down at the swamp. “Maybe you’re off sulking, you cowardly piece of shit,” he shouted. The birds squawked their support like Baptists in a revival tent. “Val Guthrie handed your boy Boyd his ass. How d’you like that? You wanted her dead—something new for your collection. You already got Billy and you got Mandy. You probably got Terry Wolfe, ’cause he’s sinking low and maybe that’s where you are…down in the dark waiting for Terry to let go and stop fighting so you can take him. You tried to get Val and you tried to get Crow, but you ain’t got shit!” The Bone Man tried to summon up moisture so he could spit on the swampy grave, but there was just dust in his throat. He’d have loved to piss on the mud, but he couldn’t do that, either. He could laugh, though, and there was no bluesman who ever lived who didn’t know how to laugh at the craziness of life.
Now he was laughing at the foolishness of the dead.
“We quite a pair, ain’t we, Mr. Man? A ghost who don’t know how to be a ghost, and a bloodsucker with no teeth who can’t bite what he wants to bite. Must really piss you off. After being the cock of the walk all them years ago it must really bite your ass to be just a shadow in the back of sick minds like Wingate and Ruger’s.” He chuckled. “And they’re a half-step shy of being too stupid to wipe they own asses…couldn’t even kill Val Guthrie. Hell, much as it pains me to say it…you, at least, were dangerous. Now you got no teeth, no claws, and no dick, and you gotta watch these clowns try and do your screwin’ for you. That just makes me laugh!”
The Bone Man was bent over laughing, slapping his knees, shaking with it as if he really had a body, his eyes shut and his head shaking back and forth as he howled. The birds in the trees cackled with him.
Far beneath the surface of the swamp, lost in an infinity of verminous earth and polluted rainwater, Ubel Griswold listened to the sound of the Bone Man’s mocking laughter. His rage was terrible.
Chapter 8
(1)
Eddie Oswald sat in the front seat of his patrol car and stared numbly through the windshield, listening to the absolute silence in his head. His bandaged hands lay like broken birds in his lap, his lower lip drooped slack and rubbery. The windows were rolled up, the radio turned off, the engine silent. He’d sat like that for twenty minutes.
When he first left the Crow’s Nest he was confused. He had been so sure that Mike Sweeney worked there at the store. Positive. Days ago God Himself had told him where he would find the child. What could be more certain? Yet every time he drove by the store all he saw through the window was Crow, and sometimes another boy, but the face was never clear. There was always something blocking his view. Sunlight, a smear on the glass, shadows. So, today, with the deafening silence of his Father’s disdain hammering at the inside of his head, Eddie had gone straight into the store, had confronted the boy, ready to do what was necessary, ready to complete his Holy Mission. The Sword of God had been drawn, ready to cut down the Beast.
Then something had happened. The lighting in the store must have been bad, or maybe it was that annoying wailing music that made it so hard to concentrate, but try as he might Eddie never seemed to be able to get a clear look at the kid. Even when he saw him somewhat better there was a veil of doubt. This couldn’t have been the Beast; this could not have been the false suit of skin the Beast had used into order to work his evil magic here in Pine Deep. This child, this boy in the store…there was no reek of evil about him; there was no crackle of demonic energy that Eddie believed must be present in the Beast. He’d felt it, even at a distance, out there on A-32 last night. The dark energies had burned his fingertips as he reached for the boy there on the road; it was like an ozone stink in the air as he chased him in his truck and on foot.
Not today, though. This boy—why couldn’t he see the kid’s face?—was just an ordinary child. He said he went to church. He was a good kid. Eddie sensed that, as surely as he sensed the evil power of the Beast last night on the road.
He needed clarity. He needed his Father’s voice speaking to him from within the infinite universe of his mind. He needed direction.
Eddie sat in his car as the minutes ticked past, and gradually his mind shut down, like someone clicking off lights by flicking one switch after another, dropping more and more of his awareness into soft, untroubled, uncomplicated shadows.
It was then, as an armada of clouds sailed across the sky and blotted out the sun, that something happened. It was then that his Father…spoke.
It was not in language. It was a single, guttural, howling scream of absolute rage that shrieked into his mind like the explosion of a thousand tons of TNT. Instant, immediate, impossibly loud—a hoarse cry of such unimaginable fury that every muscle in Eddie’s body locked into a spasm of agonized awareness. His sinews contracted, muscle fibers clenched, his nerve endings seemed to ignite with the sheer intensity of it as Eddie convulsed in pain so intense, so white-hot that it was even beyond his body’s ability to scream it out. Blood sprayed from his nose and ears and he vomited black ichor, bile, and blood all over the inside of his car.
His Father’s rage struck him down with all the wrath of a furious and disappointed God. Eddie’s eyes glazed over and he toppled sideways into blackness.
(2)
Ruger had gotten up to take another book down from Vic’s shelf when his body suddenly snapped straight as if he were coming to attention. His arms and legs twitched and jerked like a million volts of electricity were being channeled through him. A terrible scream ripped loose from his throat—dry and searing and then wet as blood spewed out of him. Tears of blood sprang into his eyes and rolled down over his cheeks, his eardrums nearly burst, his head felt like it was being smashed by an iron mallet. He could not speak, could not move, could do nothing in that moment but scream as pain beyond anything he had ever endured, beyond anything he had ever imagined, burned through every cell. He was not even aware that fifteen feet away Vic Wingate had collapsed onto the floor, howling with his own agony. The air was stained with foulness as Vic’s bladder and sphincter let loose; the fecund stink mixed with the sheared-copper smell of blood to create a perfume of shame.