Dead Man's Song

“I need to sleep,” he whispered brokenly. “Please, God, let me sleep.”



Sarah had led him upstairs, took him into the shower and soaped him from head to toe, then toweled him off and took him to bed. There in the silent darkness she had kissed him and loved him, and then held him while he drifted off.



He slept for twelve hours without dreaming and didn’t even wake when Sarah slid out of the bed to go and take care of the kids. When he did wake, he didn’t open his eyes, didn’t even move for another few hours; he just lay there and thought about how the last month had been for him a slow descent into hell and since Ruger had come to town the pace was picking up. Even without the manhunt and all of the hurt to the people he cared about Terry was reasonably sure that he would be insane or dead by Halloween.



The whole thing had begun to spin around him when the crop blight started back in July as Pine Deep’s first wave of corn crops came due for harvest. Hack Jeffers reported an outbreak of gray leaf blight on half his crop, and by the end of that week four other farmers had reported crop infestations. The following week it was eighteen, and from then on it was an accelerating downward spiral. Not just gray leaf, but a variety of blights ranging from Stewart’s bacterial leaf blight to northern corn leaf blight, and in the following weeks there were reported cases of stalk rot, gibberella, fusarium, and diplodia ear rot diseases. By the first week of September there were widespread cases of maize dwarf mosaic and maize chlorotic mosaic, as well as armies of weevils, root worms, and stalk borers of all kinds. One of the farmers who had been hit the hardest, Jacob Troutman, had said to him, “If I was a superstitious man, Terry, I’d think this town was cursed. We have more plagues than Egypt ever saw during Moses’ time.”



Teams of specialists were brought in from private and government agencies to try and salvage some of this year’s crop, or to prevent the diseases from returning next season, but the trend was downhill. As mayor of a town whose income is half based on farming, Terry knew that leaf blight diseases could be found in almost any field, but to have so many different kinds of diseases and so many aggressive species of crop-destroying insects present in one town was beyond his knowledge, and apparently beyond the experts that were brought in from all over the country. Nor was it just the corn crop that was dying—the pumpkins, peaches, apples, and tomatoes were equally spoiled. Only two major crops were untouched: garlic—which made up about 5 percent of the town’s agriculture—and the holly farms north of town. In a season of strangeness there were things that stood out as stranger still, such as the fact that a handful of farms, including Henry Guthrie’s place, showed no sign of the plague at all, and that made no sense; and if a solution could not be found, then most of the farms would fail. That meant bankruptcy and financial ruin for many of Terry’s friends. Every single farm in town was owned by a family that had worked the land for generations. No one was starting new farms in town, and the youngest farm in Pine Deep was over sixty years old. To destroy those farms would be to destroy the history of the town. To Terry it felt like murder.



As he was struggling with the blight on one hand he had to use the other to manage the town’s other major industry, Halloween. October put the nonagricultural half of Pine Deep into the black. The better restaurants—meaning the ones that the owners claimed were haunted—were all booked through November 1. Craft stores, like the Crow’s Nest, made a mint on costumes and spooky decorations. Terry himself owned the nation’s largest Haunted Hayride attraction, into which he’d sunk a half million dollars of expansion money just before the blight hit.



As mayor, Terry also had to be Mr. Cheerful because of all the celebrities the town attracted throughout the season, and this year the festival would be bigger than ever. Terry had to speak with managers and publicity people to assure them that the stars would each receive the royal treatment. Ken Foree, star of the original Dawn of the Dead, was going to emcee a marathon of all of the Living Dead films; horror special effects wizard Tom Savini was judging a monster makeup competition on the campus; and scream queen Brinke Stevens was appearing at another film marathon—this one leading off with her classic Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama, which would be shown in a gigantic tent on the Hayride grounds; and another scream queen, Debbie Rochon, was doing a signing in a tent at the Hayride. Good Morning America was going to do a Halloween morning broadcast from Town Hall, and Regis Philben was set to do a live presentation from the Hayride the Thursday before Halloween. Screenwriter Stephen Susco, whose latest film, The Grudge 2, was just about to be released, would be hosting a screening of both films in that series and giving a talk on American interpretations of Japanese horror films, and writer-director James Gunn was in town to promote the DVD release of his recent horror film, Slither. There were rumors some of the cast of that film might show up with him.



Plus this year there was going to be a Little Halloween celebration—a rare event for the town for years where there is a Friday the thirteenth in October. It allowed Pine Deep to have another day of celebration, parties, and events. All of these things meant tourist dollars, and they might have all gone off without a hitch except for the next nail that had been driven into Terry’s peace of mind. Karl Ruger. Now Henry Guthrie was dead, Terry’s best friend was in the hospital, and there were murderers loose in town.



Just at the point where a foolish man might have said “Well, at least nothing else can go wrong”—and Terry was far too superstitious to have even thought that—things continued to go wrong. The bad dreams Terry had been having for weeks had grown dramatically worse, so vividly real that Terry was in no way sure that they weren’t real. Each night he had a variation of the same terrible dream in which he saw himself sleeping next to Sarah and while they slept he changed. The transformation began deep beneath the skin and the dream-observer part of Terry saw rather than felt the muscles and bones subtly begin to change, to transform, as some new organic pattern fought to emerge. This change was terrible. His legs and arms twisted into muscular parodies of animal limbs; the flesh of his face stretched tight and then tore apart in bloody rags to reveal the long snout and fiery red-gold eyes of a monster. Clawed hands reached for Sarah as she slept, trusting and defenseless beside him, and on the nights where luck spared him a fragment of grace he woke up before those claws touched his wife’s naked skin. On other nights, it was like he was a passenger on some thrill ride in hell, strapped into the mind of the beast, looking out through the scarlet windows of its eyes, unable to intervene or even cry out as the monster rolled onto Sarah. On those nights he wanted to die.



His psychiatrist talked about stress, about overwork, about taking on too much responsibility, about the dangers of wearing his heart on his sleeve. Terry listened with diminishing patience, know that the man had no clue, no trace of insight into what was really happening. He waited, nodded, and thanked him, then hurried out to have the prescriptions filled. Antipsychotics, antianxiety drugs. They were slow to take effect, and what little good they did him just melted away two days ago when his little sister showed up. The fact that Mandy had been dead for thirty years did not deter her from appearing when only he could see her. She was still a child in her little dress, her red hair in tangles, her skin shredded. But her voice was old, weary and angry, as bitter as acid.



It was at that point that Terry realized that hope—real hope—was gone. It was only a matter of time, he knew, before he stroked out, or had a coronary. If he was lucky. If he was unlucky, and that seemed to be his pattern, then he would probably just crack and go howling into the night, running mad until they netted him and carted him off to Sicklerville State Hospital, where the men in the white coats would change his diapers and wipe his drool and let him rot.



Seeing Mandy might have been bearable—sort of—had she not been so adamant, so determined to get him to commit suicide, and in truth last night he was one heartbeat away from washing down a fistful of tranquilizer and antipsychotic meds with good whiskey; but then Sarah had called him. Fate, it seemed, was not a total coldhearted bitch. Standing there with his hand clenched around the pills, he listened to her voice on the phone, that soft and sweet voice that he loved so dearly, and she had asked him to come home. Home.



He stood on that knife-edge for a long time, and then he had washed the pills down the sink and gone home. To Sarah, to his kids, and to sleep. Now, as the day wore on he lay in bed and searched in his soul for one single reason to get up. He could find none except shame, and after a while that was enough. He let out the chestful of air that he’d been holding and slowly, cautiously, got out of bed, listening for sounds of Sarah and hearing her clattering pots downstairs. He tiptoed to the bathroom and closed the door before turning on the small light over the sink to search for signs of change in his face.



The face in the mirror had changed, that was sure enough—but not into the snarling mask of a monster. Instead Terry saw a face that looked forty years older than his thirty-nine years. Sunken cheeks, rheumy eyes with bruise-colored bags under them. Rubbery lips. Ashy skin. “Christ!” he breathed, and then stopped, aware that he had just uttered a profanity. Terry Wolfe never, ever cursed. He thought about it for a long time, examining his face and at the same time looking as far inward as he dared. “Shit on it,” he concluded, and he liked the sound of it.



There was a pair of sweats and a T-shirt hanging on the back of the bathroom door and he pulled these on and went through the bathroom’s connecting door into the twins’ room, and then out and downstairs, through the quiet house, and into the garage through the kitchen door. He opened the passenger car door and sat down as he fished his cell phone out of the glove compartment and saw that he had missed seventy-one calls. “Holy shit!” He said and again stopped to listen to the mental echo of the obscenity, and again he liked the sound of the obscenity. It felt…liberating.



Terry scrolled through the missed numbers: Gus, Crow, Saul Weinstock, Harry LeBeau, and Frank Ferro, that cop from Philly. Seventy-one calls. What the hell had been happening while he was asleep? Setting the phone down on his thigh, he flipped down the visor and opened the little panel that hid the mirror. He turned on the dome light and stared into his reflected eyes, searching, searching, for the monster. If it was there, he couldn’t see it.