“…need…help…”
The Bone Man shook his head sadly. “No, Henry, no. It’s too late for that. I’m sorry.”
Guthrie closed his eyes for a moment, feeling the emptiness overwhelm him.
When he opened his eyes, he expected the man to be gone, a phantom conjured by his dying brain. The gray man sat there still.
“Val…?” Guthrie forced the word out past all weakness. He needed to know, but dreaded the answer.
“She’s alive.”
“Mark?”
“Mark, too. And Connie. All of them. Alive.”
“Thank…” Guthrie began, but it took him a long time to finish. “…God.”
The Bone Man had no response to that, but his face looked so much sadder. He pulled his guitar around and laid it across his thighs.
Guthrie tried to raise a hand, tried to touch this man. Seeing the feeble attempt, the gray man took his hand and held it. His long fingers were even colder than Guthrie’s numb and bloodless skin.
“Who…are…you…?” Guthrie asked. “Do I…do I know…you?”
A small sad smile drifted across the Bone Man’s lips. “You did. A long, long time ago,” he said in a distant voice. “You were kind to me once. You were kind to me when no one else was.”
“I…don’t remember…”
“Maybe you will. Soon. But right now, just rest, Henry.” The gray man’s face looked so sad, and a single silver tear gathered in the corner of his eyes. “It’s time to sleep now. Just let it all be. You’re done with it now. Just go to sleep, Henry. Just go to sleep.”
Guthrie’s eyes had been drifting shut and his hand sagged loosely in the Bone Man’s grip. Guthrie seemed to sigh and then he settled back against the ground, the tension of fighting for words and breath easing.
The Bone Man sat with him for a while, still holding the slack hand. Then he bent forward and kissed Henry Guthrie on the forehead. The tear that had gathered in his eye spilled and a single silvery drop splashed down on Guthrie’s face. The Bone Man touched the spot where the tear had landed and then he picked up his guitar and began to play softly.
“Good night, Henry,” he whispered as the long, cold wind of the void blew past them both and lifted the sound of the blues up to heaven.
Karl Ruger felt the darkness closing in, and he cursed it.
But this darkness wasn’t to be cursed; it was the answer to the curses his soul and his hate and his rage had invoked.
The darkness was not formless. It shambled out of the shadows and stood over him, looking down on him, immensely powerful against the distant moon.
Ruger gasped as he looked up at the thing, trying to calculate its outline, silhouetted against moon and stars. Arms, legs, the body of a man — but the head was all wrong. The head had nightmare proportions, and as the thing bent toward him, Ruger could see it had a long and crooked mouth, a mouth that smiled and smiled. It was the misshapen head of a jack-o’-lantern, carved with a wicked grin and burning eyes.
Ruger looked into the eyes that he could finally see: eyes that burned like coals, eyes that knew things. The creature reached for him, clamping iron fingers around Ruger’s arms and lifting him bodily off the ground. Pain shot through him, but Ruger didn’t care, didn’t even notice. His whole mind was fixed on the face of horror that leered at him out of the darkness, the face of horror that bent close to his own until he could feel the hot breath of hell blown sourly into his own mouth, up his nose. The thing’s body seemed to writhe and ripple, the clothes bulging and stirring. As Ruger watched, a few insects crept out from between folds of the old suit, and then scuttled back inside. The hands that held him did not feel like human fingers: they were strong, but something was wrong with them. They also rippled in a way Ruger could not understand, as if what was inside was not skin and bone but was instead composed of thousands of separate parts that writhed and scuttled under the cloth. Even he — dissipated, dying, and evil as he was — shuddered at the creature’s touch.
Yet Ruger did not fight against the thing that held him; wouldn’t, even if he had the power. This was not something he could fight, his rage told him that, but more importantly, this was not something he should fight. Not this thing.
Ruger, you are my left hand. Again he heard those words echo in his brain.
Perhaps it was in that moment that Ruger began to understand why he had delayed leaving the Guthrie farm, and why he had let Tony drive the car. Those choices had worked to bring him to Pine Deep, and to keep him here. As the tide of events had swept along tonight he had sensed that some stronger purpose was having its way with him, that some will — stronger even than his — was putting things in motion.
Ruger, you are my left hand.
Now Ruger thought he understood, and he accepted what was happening. Welcomed it. The thing that held him in the darkness bent to his accepting ear and whispered terrible secrets in his dying ear.
After a long time, the night birds were driven to startled flight by the sound of Karl Ruger’s wild laughter.
Part III
Dry Bone Shuffle
Black ghost is a picture, black ghost is a shadow, too.
Black ghost is a picture, black ghost is a shadow, too.
You just see him, but you can’t hear him talkin’,
Ain’t nothing’ else a black ghost can do.
Tombstone is my pillow, cold ground is my bed.
I got an axe-handled pistol on a graveyard frame that shoots tombstone bullets, wearin’ balls and chain. I’m drinking TNT, I’m smoking dynamite, I hope some screwball start a fight.
Chapter 20
Malcolm Crow was deep down in the darkness and for a long time he did not dream at all, not while they brought him into the E.R. and then up to surgery. He did not dream while they pumped him full of drugs and stitched and swabbed and bandaged his body. He did not dream while he lay in post-op, or for the first few hours after they brought him up to his room.
It was only later, as the last of the night was wearing thin and dawn was coloring the edges of the horizon, that his mind finally gave way and he dreamed…
…he was walking through the town and Pine Deep was burning. Many of the stores were blackened shells with their windows blown outward by the heat. Smoke curled upward from the open doorways. The pavement was littered with a smudged scattering of broken bricks, twisted metal awnings, and millions of shards of broken glass.
Crow walked down the center of Corn Hill. He was dressed in jeans and sneakers and a T-shirt and his clothes were torn and stained with grass and soot and blood. Some of the blood, he knew, was his own; most of it was not. Some of the blood was strangely dark and thick, and it smelled like rotting fish.
He carried a samurai sword in one hand; the blade was smeared with gore and bent in two places. The sword hung limply from his right hand, the blunted tip tracing a twisted line behind him in the ash that covered the street.
Above him the sky was as black and featureless as a tarp thrown across the top of the town, and yet he knew that above the black nothing of the clouds there was a moon as white and grim as a bleached skull.
As he walked down the street, weaving in and out between burning cars, Crow was drawn to the sweet sound of a blues guitar. He strained to hear the song and had to hum a few bars to lock it down. “Hellhound on My Trail.” The old Robert Johnson song but played with a different take on the refrain…less threatening, more wistful.