Mike nodded at the hospital entrance. “I just want to go in.”
“To see whom?”
“Huh?”
“Increased security, kiddo. Haven’t you been watching the news?”
“Oh. Yeah. Uh, I’m here to see Mr. Crow. Malcolm Crow.”
“What’s your name?”
“Mike Sweeney.”
Golub consulted a clipboard and then shook his head. “Nope. Not on the list, kiddo.”
“List? What list?”
“The list of people who are allowed to see Mr. Crow. You, my battered young friend, are not on the list. So, kindly go buzz off.” His smile was pleasant but unyielding.
“This is stupid. I just want to visit him.”
“What part of ‘nope’ was beyond your grasp?”
Mike peered up at him. “Are all cops this weird?”
“So I am reliably informed.”
“Shit.”
“Hey! Watch your mouth, youngster.”
“It’s not fair that I can’t get to see Crow. Can’t you just let me in? I’m not going to bother him or anything.”
“Well, Mike Sweeney, do you know how many people today have asked to get in to see Mr. Crow?”
“Uh, no.”
“Lots. Do you know how many of them swore that they wouldn’t bother Mr. Crow?”
“No.”
“All of them. Now, here’s the bonus question. Do you know how many of them I have admitted into this Hippocratic establishment?”
“No.”
“Exactly none,” said Golub. “See that guy over there on the bench? He’s a reporter…and I didn’t let him in either. Now, you seem like a nice kid, so I want you to continue to be nice and nicely buzz off.”
Mike trudged dispiritedly toward his bike and trying not to wince, he gingerly bent down to open the lock and pull the plastic-coated chain through the spokes. He was just coiling it around the frame below the seat when a shadow blocked the sunlight, and he looked up to see the small dumpy man Officer Golub had mentioned standing over him. The man looked a little like George, the bald guy from those Seinfeld reruns. A red PRESS card was clipped to his jacket lapel.
“Say, kid, do you mind if I ask you a couple of questions?”
Mike slowly and carefully got to his feet, his defenses rising and snapping instantly into place. “What for?”
“I couldn’t help overhearing you talking with that Gestapo agent over there. My name’s Willard Fowler Newton, Black Marsh Sentinel.” He stuck out his hand, and Mike hesitated only for a second or two before accepting it. “I thought I heard you say your name was Mark Sweeney?”
“Mike Sweeney.”
“Mike, right, right. Well, listen, Mike, is it true that you know Malcolm Crow, the guy who was shot?”
“Sure. He’s a friend of mine. I go to his store all the time.”
“You mean the Crow’s Nest. Place that sells all that Halloween stuff? Well, the thing is, Mar…I mean Mike, I’m doing a story — well, I’m trying to do a story — on the shootings, and I need some background on Mr. Crow and the others. Do you think I could ask you a few questions?”
Mike hedged.
“I’ll buy dinner.”
Mike’s eyes narrowed suspiciously and he took a half step backward, flicking a glance over at the cop.
“Look, kid, I’m not a kidnapper or child molester. I really am a reporter.”
“Uh-huh.”
“If you don’t believe me, go and ask Officer Godzilla over there. He’ll tell you.”
“Look, I got to get home. It’s getting late.”
“Maybe I could drive you—”
“Yeah, right.”
“No! No, nothing like that,” Newton said quickly, holding his hands up, palms outward. He drew in a deep breath and tried again. “Look, kid, I need to get this story in by press time. So, whaddya say, Mike? Just fifteen minutes? We can sit right on that bench over there, in full view of the nice officer.”
Mike glanced over to the benches, three of which were unoccupied, and on the fourth, the town’s only homeless person, Mr. Pockets, was stretched out, asleep under tented newspapers. He still hedged. “I don’t know what more I can tell you than what the cops would have said. I mean, you already know who got shot and all that, and I guess that you already know that it was probably the Cape May Killer who did it, and—”
Newton’s hand suddenly closed on Mike’s bruised wrist with such force that Mike actually cried out in pain and jerked back. Officer Golub looked over at them, but Newton instantly let go and this time he backed up a step. While he was doing this his mouth went through a number of shapes and yet he wasn’t able to squeeze out a single word. He stopped, swallowed, licked his lips, and with a glaze in his eyes said, “Wait, wait, go back. What was that you said about the Cape May Killer?”
“Yeah,” Mike said, nodding, “I mean, I guess it was him. After what the mayor told Mr. Crow and all….”
Newton looked like he was about to cry. He placed both hands — lightly this time — on Mike’s shoulders. “Mike…has anyone ever told you that you were the greatest person to have ever walked the earth?”
Chapter 22
There are shunned places in this world where no one should ever go. Black places where the darkness clings to the sides of trees and the undersides of rocks, like lesions from some ancient disease.
These places are not consciously shunned; they don’t call enough attention to themselves for that. The oldest and most instinctive parts of our minds avoid them perhaps, just as the hummingbird abhors the dying flower and the bear eschews the diseased fish. Year after year, century after century, they endure. Sometimes they fade away to paleness like the dust on old bones, the malevolent fires banked, almost cold — but never, never going out. Sometimes that dark energy flares, stoked by the deliberately manufactured death of some innocent thing, or by the desire of some hateful heart.
Such a place can be infused with even greater darkness if enough deliberate evil is enacted there: the blood and tears, fear and malfeasance imprinting the soil and stone and trees, the corruption leaving a stain that no rain or hand can sponge away. There have been houses that have endured and witnessed such horrors that they have become like batteries storing up evil; some battlefields are like that, the blood-soaked soil still vibrating with the echoes of dying heartbeats, cold with the last pale breaths of fallen soldiers who lay and bled and begged for salvation and ultimately cursed God as they died. In a kinder world, such places would be locked away behind impenetrable forests, or buried unreachably deep beneath granite mountains, or lost in the sands of the most remote and forbidding desert. In a kinder world, such malignant places would be fewer and weaker and would not possess the power to reach out into the world of men and whisper the doctrine of darkness, to seduce minds hungry for some corrupt purpose, to inspire tainted hearts to apostolic devotion; but in this world the evidence that such things have happened time and again is all too clearly written in the book of human suffering. In a kinder world such places could be eradicated, made pure, washed clean. In a kinder world, but not this world. These shunned places endure, waiting, patient, and always hungry.
Black-hearted men who sense this are drawn to these places, and finding them is like coming home.
The town of Pine Deep lay nestled in the arms of the mountains, overlooking vast forestland and farmland, streams and brooks, the silvery thread of the river, hollows and marshes, and one dark, forgotten, shunned place. It lay southeast of the town, pushed down into the shadows of the three tall hills that stand over the narrow valley known as Dark Hollow.
There is a place, deep within the hollow, where the ground is always marshy with black mud, the air thick with blowflies and mosquitoes. The leaves and pine needles that lie like a blanket over the swampy ground turn black within seconds of landing there and they give off a stink like rotten eggs and spoiled meat. From beneath the carpet of leaves there is a darker ichor that bubbles up every once in a while and stains the banks of the marsh; the ichor smells like fresh blood but tastes like tears.