“No!” After the scream Mike’s voice was a frayed whisper. Overhead the crows circled and circled in terrible silence.
The Raggedy Man raised his left hand as if to reach for Mike. It was not a threatening movement, but everything about it was dark with wrongness. Mike screamed again, weakly this time, a croak in a torn throat. “Help me!”
Instantly the sky around him was filled with whispery noise as the flocks of circling crows hurtled down toward him. The leading rank of night birds struck with such force that several of the birds died, their necks snapped on impact, but the sheer mass of them surged forward…not at Mike, but at the Raggedy Man. The birds slammed into him and drove him backward, the beaks of the birds slashing and stabbing at the old clothes, their cries tearing the air. The Raggedy Man staggered and for just a moment he seemed to catch his footing, to hold his ground, but the night birds hit him in wave after implacable wave, and then the Raggedy Man exploded, losing whatever power it had to retain the man shape, and the hundreds of thousands of insects that made up its hand, its arm, its shoulder, burst apart into their separate selves and showered Mike, landing on his chest, his face, crawling on him, crawling into his nose and mouth and…
FUGUE.
Mike’s mind burned out like a cinder.
Above him the clouds overhead paled from rose red to gray as the dawn took hold on the day. The crows swarmed over Mike, beaks darting here and there, snatching at the bugs, tearing through carapace and shell in a savage frenzy of killing and eating. They fed and fed and fed. As the sun rose it bored a single hole through the clouds and punched a hard beam of cold yellow light down onto the field. Then another, and another until the morning sky stretched into a blue forever that was clean and hard.
Soon a stillness settled over the place where Mike lay, silent and unmoving. Sunlight sparkled on the dewy tips of the dying grass and turned the morning mist to a ghostly blue-white opacity. The light gleamed on the blue tubing of the bicycle lying by the side of the road. It caressed the freckled cheek of the boy who lay sprawled among the dry autumn leaves. And it glittered on the edges of the broken shells and cracked antennae of ten thousand insects whose corpses lay scattered across fifty yards in all directions from where the boy lay. In the center of this slaughter, the ground around the boy was completely empty except for the tatters of some old torn clothing as all the birds flew away into the trees.
All but one, a single crow that stood on the boy’s sternum.
Everything was as still as death. There was not the slightest tremble under the bird’s feet. The crow tilted its head, angling one black-within-black eye to stare at the boy’s slack face. The smell of blood was everywhere. The music rode the breeze, a little stronger now, the blues melody plaintive. The mist retreated all the way to the road.
The boy took a breath, and the crow cawed quietly.
A full minute passed. The boy took another breath. Then another. The crow hopped down from his chest and walked away, angling to keep an eye on the boy.
FUGUE.
From a blackened cinder Mike’s mind coalesced into living awareness once again.
Minutes floated past on the breeze and gradually sense returned to him along with awareness of his body. He no longer felt helpless and wrecked. It took a while and it took a hell of a lot of effort, but Mike gradually sat up. He shook his head like a drunk, lips slack and rubbery, nose running, eyes going in and out of focus as he stared at the withered grass between his knees. Awareness came back with slow reluctance. His body hurt in a dozen places, his head worst of all. Mike probed his scalp, found lumps. He explored his mouth with his tongue and tasted old blood, but found no cuts. Memory was sluggish and it hurt to try and pull it out of the junk closet of his mind. He looked around, saw that he was in a field, saw his bike lying nearby. He vaguely remembered racing down the road, remembered hitting something in the dark and then falling. But after that…nothing.
He had no idea what time it was. It looked like morning, but that was ridiculous. His last clear memory was biking toward the hospital to visit Val, but…had he gotten there? Mike wasn’t sure. Everything was weird, and his head felt like it had been ransacked, all the drawers pulled out and dumped, everything just thrown onto the floor.
He plucked at his shirt, saw that it was crusted with dried blood, but he couldn’t find any cuts on his body. Some bruises, sure, but not even a scrape on his arms or legs or body. Could that much blood have come from a nosebleed? He doubted it, but when he touched his nose it felt eggshell fragile and sore. Some blood caked around the nostrils, though not as much as he expected to find. More blood on his chin and throat. He flexed his hands, pressed his fingers against bones and ribs. There was pain just about everywhere, but nothing seemed broken. Except maybe his head, because that pounded like a psychopath doing a drum solo.
Mike climbed carefully to his feet, swaying a bit, watching the field tilt and whirl like a carnival ride; but after a moment it slowed, steadied, stopped. There was a rustle behind him and he turned to see a crow standing in the grass a dozen feet away. Without knowing why Mike smiled at it. The crow cawed softly. Mike thought he heard music on the breeze, but ignored it. He always heard music. He figured it was just part of being crazy.
On unsteady feet, Mike trudged over to his bike, picked it up, spun the wheels to make sure they were true, and walked it back to the road. He stood there for a moment, looking up and down A-32. There were no cars this early and in the dips and hollows of the road there was the faintness of a dwindling fog. He swung one leg over, wincing with the effort, then turned and looked back to the field. He felt—on some level knew—that he should be more worried about all this than he was, but he couldn’t make himself care about it. His head hurt too much. The strangeness of it all made it hard to think.
“Vic will kill me,” he said, and the crow cawed again.
Vic’s house rules didn’t allow him to be late, let alone out all night, but that wasn’t something he could control. It would mean a beating, but that was okay. He’d had plenty of beatings; he could handle another. He pushed off and began his slow, creaking way back to town. With each mile it became less and less important to try and remember what happened.
(5)
The Bone Man sat on the wooden rail of the farm fence and watched Mike ride by. He wasn’t sure if the boy was able to see him now. The boy probably could, the Bone Man considered, because from what little he knew of ghosts from his days down in the superstitious South the dying were supposed to be able to see the dead. Death was a window, his aunt had told him. He was pretty sure Val Guthrie had seen him that night in the rain, but not since; maybe she’d had one foot on the ghost road and then stepped off. He knew for certain Henry Guthrie had as he lay dying in the rain.
The kid looked bad as he biked by. Sick and thin, bloody and gaunt. He looked mostly dead now, but he never even turned his head toward the Bone Man, so the point was moot.