No, that wasn’t it. The sound wasn’t wistful, it was sad, like a lament, and as he walked Crow, sang the words.
“Blues falling down like hail, blues falling down like hail.
Mmm, blues falling down like hail, blues falling down like hail.
And the day keeps on remindin’ me, there’s a hellhound on my trail.
Hellhound on my trail, hellhound on my trail.”
The music played on and on until the song ended, but then the same song started up again. Crow walked all the way up to the top of Corn Hill and finally stopped at the entrance to the Pinelands College Teaching Hospital. The hospital parking lot was a shambles. Cars were on fire and overturned. An ambulance leaned on two wheels against a police car, crushing the car down onto flat tires. There were hundreds of bodies everywhere.
Crow looked at the bodies and his heart turned to stone in his chest.
He knew them.
He knew every one of them.
Henry Guthrie sat with his back to a crushed Ford Bronco, his chest peppered with red bullet holes. A few feet away Terry Wolfe lay facedown on a massive and ornately framed mirror, its surface cracked and distorted; none of the images reflected in the shards were of Terry’s face. The image the broken mirror fragments showed was the face of some huge dog. Across the entranceway from where he stood, Mike Sweeney, the kid who delivered his paper, lay with a samurai sword through his chest. Crow looked down at his hand and saw that the sword he carried was now gone. There were so many others he recognized. Friends from town…other store owners…farmers…teachers from the college…staff from the hospital…cops. He knew them all. Or, almost all. There were four bodies he couldn’t put names to, though he felt he ought to know their names. One was a short, chubby young guy who lay in cruciform, his legs straight and arms out to each side. In one hand he held a tape recorder and in the other he held a gun, but the gun was fake. Near him was a very tall black woman who must have once been beautiful but not anymore. She had been savaged by someone. Something. There was so little of her left. Sickened and sad, Crow looked away. Two men lay propped against the wheels of a police car. One was middle-aged and black, the other was younger and white. Both of them had badges looped around their necks on cords and both had guns lying near them. The right hand of the black man and the left hand of the white man were stretched out toward each other and clasped. To Crow it didn’t look like a romantic grasp, but more like the way soldiers might grip each other in the last moments of a firefight gone bad. Crow felt he should know them, and felt sad that they were dead, but he could find no names for them, and so he moved on through the debris and through the dead.
He looked around, looking for Val…needing to find her, but needing not to find her like this.
He walked to the entrance of the hospital and peered inside. There was blood everywhere, and bodies. The slaughter was too horrible to grasp and so Crow’s mind went a little numb and he stared through it, just needing to find Val.
He was about to step across the threshold when a voice behind him said, “Don’t do it, little Scarecrow.”
Crow turned, startled by the voice. No one had called him Scarecrow in years. Not since he’d been a little kid.
There was a man there. He sat on the hood of a burned-out Saab, his bony legs crossed and a guitar lying across his thighs. His face was the color of coffee with just a small drip of milk in it — and Crow knew that this was how the man once described himself — and he wore his hair in a late 1970s style Afro. The man wore brown work pants and a white cotton shirt unbuttoned halfway down his thin chest. There were small pink scars on the man’s chest and on his hands. His hands were very large for so thin a man.
Crow looked at him.
“You don’t want to go in there, Scarecrow,” said the man. He was smiling, but his smile was sad.
“I have to find Val,” Crow said.
“Yeah, you do,” agreed the man. “But you don’t want to go into that hospital. Val ain’t in there…and you don’t want to meet what is in there. Believe me when I tell you.” The guitar player had a strong Mississippi drawl, and it was deep and soft and Crow liked the sound of it.
“I know you, don’t I?” he said.
“Yeah, boy, you did. An’ I’m sorry as all hell to tell you that you’re probably gonna have to get to know me again.”
“Were we friends?” Crow said. His voice sounded dreamy and on some level he knew that meant that the dream was coming to an end.
“Yeah, little Scarecrow…I guess we was at that.”
“Do you know where Val is?”
“Yeah, I know, but she ain’t here, man. You gonna have to keep looking for her. You gotta find her, man, ’cause these is evil times and she’s the heart. You may be the fist, but she’s the heart. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Crow shook his head.
“Do you remember…a long time ago I told you something about good and evil?”
“I…don’t remember.”
“Don’t worry, you will. Now, listen close, little man,” the man said and leaned forward over his guitar, his voice dropping to a whisper, “you gotta know this.”
Crow leaned closer, too.
“Evil…it don’t never die,” the bluesman said and looked left and right before adding. “Evil don’t die. It just waits.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Yeah, you do, but you don’t want to understand.” The man leaned back and laughed. “Hell’s a-coming, little Scarecrow. Hell’s a-coming and we all gotta learn to play the blues. ’Cause you know…it’s all the blues, man.” He grinned and strummed his strings. “Everything’s always about the blues.”
Crow drifted on into another dreamless place, but the sound of the blues followed him.
Outside the hospital window the dawn had given way to brilliant sunshine and a warm breeze out of the southeast. The rain had scrubbed the air clean and standing in the window of Crow’s room, Terry could see for miles. He hardly remembered seeing a morning so clear. Birds were singing, the nurses who came and went were smiling, and everything had a veneer of freshness and vitality.
Terry loathed it. He personally felt dirty and grubby and old. His clothes were a mess, his hands shook, and when he’d gone into the little bathroom to throw water on his face his reflection looked like a street person. He popped a Xanax and shambled back into Crow’s room and sank down into the chair.
Crow had awakened around dawn and Terry had filled him in on most of the night’s events, but as he talked Crow’s eyes kept drifting shut and Terry had no idea how much of it his friend had absorbed. A nurse came in, woke Crow up, and then gave him a sedative — a hospital policy Terry had never quite grasped the logic of — and Terry sat by the bedside and watched Crow sleep, feeling wretchedly guilty.
He felt that by sending Crow to the hayride he’d somehow been party to Ruger’s attack on the Guthries. Maybe if Crow had just gone out to Val’s as he’d planned Henry would still be alive and the rest of the Guthrie family—and Crow — would not be in various rooms in this hospital. On the surface he knew that such thinking was absurd, that no one could really ascribe any of the blame to him, but his deeper self refused to let go of the notion, and for that reason he could not bring himself to leave Crow’s side.
As he sat there he wondered how long he would have to wait before he popped another Xanax. The first one was really not doing him much good and he was using every ounce of his willpower not to scream.