Dead Man's Song

Carby straightened and leaned over to try and see what had disturbed the dirt. Was it a gopher in there? A rabbit? He truly could not understand it. He leaned close and shined the flashlight into the hole created by the large clod. The weak yellow light of the flash illuminated the hole with a splash of light, glimmering on small pieces of smooth stone in the soil, glinting off a fragment of an old Coke bottle, reflected redly off the eyes of the face in the mound.



Carby let out a cry and jumped back. He backpedaled and fell down. It had been a face in there! The thought horrified him. Had someone…buried a body out here? The thought made him gag. Was that it? Boyd had murdered someone and carted their body out here, burying it in his fallow field. He looked around wildly and saw the other mounds.



“My God…” he whispered. Five of them. That cop-killing son of a bitch had come out here and buried five bodies in his field. “Jesus God Almighty.” He reached for the fallen flashlight and wiped the dirt off the lens, then swung the beam back to the mound, and all thinking abruptly stopped. His heart nearly stopped as well. He was aware only of sensation: the constriction in his chest, another hard lump in his throat, an iciness sweeping down his legs. His skin crawled. Carby had always heard that expression, but until that moment he had never actually experienced the grisly sensation of the muscles under his skin knotting and writhing as his body chemistry misfired. His glands discharged microfluids into his system, his nerve endings sent out signals triggered by shock, and the adrenaline discharge made the hair on his scalp ripple like wheat in a cold wind.



The dead body in the mound was struggling to sit up. It pushed dirt away from its mouth, pushed at the heavy clods, clawed at the soft soil for purchase until it sat erect. Then it turned a dirt-smeared white face at Carby and smiled. Carby screamed once, a shrill, tearing scream of absolute horror, and ran.



He had no idea when he got up, or how. He had no thought at all. He just ran, the shotgun in his hands as forgotten and useless as the flashlight that now lay in the dirt behind him. A quarter of a mile away the lights of his house beckoned with welcome and safety. In the house there were door locks and a telephone. Inside the house were his son and daughter. Inside his house was his wife, Lily. They were all farm people, they all knew how to handle guns and every gun in the house was loaded. In the house was one big, mean sonovabitching German shepherd. In the yard beside the house there was a car. The walls of the house, even in shadows, looked tall and strong and safe. If he could only get there, get inside. Gaither Carby ran as fast as his thick legs could carry him. He never once looked back; he never paused, never slowed, even when his bladder released and warm piss ran down his legs. He ran until that seized-up heart in his chest began to hammer again and he ran until lights burst in his eyes like fireworks. He ran as if his life depended on it.



But he didn’t run fast enough. A dark something came out of the shadows to his left and smashed into him, knocking him sideways with terrible force, tearing a strangled scream out of him before the weight of the thing slammed him down and drove all of the breath from his lungs. He hit hard and slid a few feet across the sandpaper roughness of the fallow field. He was blind from the shock but he could feel fingers bunching the cloth of his jacket, could feel the heat of breath on his cheek and something bent low over him. It was man-sized but it panted like a hungry dog and its weight was oppressive. Gasping a lungful of air, Carby swung a strong overhand right, aiming blindly, and he felt his knuckles crash into something that crunched like cartilage. A nose? An ear? He shook his vision clear and pounded his fists at the hands that held him down. Around him he could hear the pounding of feet as someone else ran up to join the fight. He heard other sounds, too.



He heard the low snigger of laughter. The figure on top of him was a dark silhouette but Carby knew it was a man, and he hooked punch after punch into the man’s ribs. He heard them go, felt them break under his punches, but the figure just crouched there, holding him down, not even grunting with the pain.



“Let me go, you shit-eating bastard!” he bellowed and swung his biggest punch yet, cracking right across the point of his attacker’s jaw. The blow snapped the man’s head around and he toppled sideways as Carby kicked and scrabbled out from under. He spun around onto all fours as the man that had brought him down rolled away. Carby looked left and right. There were four other people there. Five in all. Ringed around him. One on the ground, crouched like Carby, was on all fours; four were standing. Two of them were close enough for the starlight to cast their faces in cool blue-white light.



One was a man that Carby had never seen, dressed in khakis and what looked like a polo shirt. It was so weirdly incongruous to the situation that Carby just stared. The man was in his midthirties, with a handsome face and a trim little mustache. Carby turned to his left and looked at the other person whose face was starlit. A woman. A woman he knew. Eighty years old, with a dowager’s hump and a tangled mass of gray hair, dressed in her best church clothes. Carby definitely knew her, had known her all his life. Just yesterday he had sat drinking kitchen whiskey with her son, Bailey. Just hours after six men lowered her coffin into the ground at Pineview Cemetery. Andrea Frane.



Carby’s mouth hung open to scream, but there was no sound left in him. Andrea opened her mouth, too. More than once Carby had seen her without her dentures, her toothless mouth caved in on itself, but that mouth was not toothless any longer. Now it had brand-new teeth that gleamed white and wet in the starlight. She opened her mouth to show all of her new teeth to Carby as the others stepped up and took him by the arms and shoulders. The man with the polo shirt grabbed Carby by the hair and wrenched his head to one side, exposing the vulnerable flesh of his neck and throat as Andrea Frane stepped closer and then bent toward him with her gaping, toothsome mouth.



PART TWO



SEASON OF THE WOLF



Early morning, October 3rd, to sunset, October 7th



There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.



—Ernest Hemingway,] “On the Blue Water” Esquire, April 1935



Wolf comes hunting, pale moon overhead Big gray wolf comes hunting, blood moon overhead Better lock your doors, better say your prayers ’Cause the wolf’s come hunting…hunting for your child.



—Oren Morse, Bad Moon Blues



Chapter 10



(1)



In his dreams he was usually Iron Mike Sweeney, the Enemy of Evil, a planet-hopping, dimension-crossing super-hero with high-tech weapons and vast powers that made him invulnerable to harm. In one of his favorite dreams Mike was the squad leader of a team of interstellar commandoes and in those dreams he moved with the ruthless efficiency and eyes-on-the-prize clarity of focus of Jack Bauer—if Jack Bauer had been a spaceman. Frequently the villains in his dreams looked like Vic—and even in the deepest of his dreams Mike realized what that was all about—and in each of those dreams the Enemy of Evil would kick the ass of alien invader-Vic, or demon-Vic, or monster-from-beyond-Vic. Those were pretty good dreams because it felt good to blast Vic with a laser or cut his head off with a two-handed broadsword.



Sometimes—rarely over the years and then almost exclusively over the last few months—Mike’s dreams changed into very regular and specific nightmares. In those dreams he would be walking through a dark swampy hollow. The bushes and trees around him were on fire and there were people lying everywhere. Dead people, covered in blood, torn apart. In those dreams Mike always carried a samurai sword, a katana, in his hands, which was odd because in his adventure dreams Iron Mike Sweeney always used either a blaster or a big knight’s sword, never one of the slender Japanese blades, but in these new dreams it was always a katana, and its blade was always smeared with bright blood.



In these dreams the dead people were people Mike knew. Crow was there a lot, and he almost always wore a big tank on his back of the kind that exterminators or lawn-care guys wore, and the hose was clutched in Crow’s dead hand. The only part of him that wasn’t covered in blood was the front of his T-shirt, which showed the logo for band called Missing 84, which Mike had never heard of. Crow’s fiancée was usually alive, but she’d been beaten to her knees and was weeping over the body of her father, Henry Guthrie. There were other people: Dr. Weinstock from the hospital, sprawled with his throat torn out, and the chief of police sitting with his back propped against a tree and his legs spread, a piss stain spreading on his pants as he dribbled blood from his nose and mouth and ears. Others, too, like his mom. She wasn’t dead, but stood naked and covered in blood—and when he was awake Mike wondered how sick it was that he dreamed of his mother naked and tried to imagine how much of his life would be spent in therapy because of that image—and his mom was laughing as the forest burned and people died. There was a dark man standing next to her, also laughing, but he was hazy like an out-of-focus photograph and Mike could discern no details.



Last night Mike had been through that dream again, all of the familiar images of pain and loss and horror, all the way up to the point where a shadow passed over Mike and he turned to see what had cast it. He turned and looked up…and up and it stood there: impossibly huge, monstrous, towering above the flames, laughing in a voice that rumbled like thunder. A vast creature like something out of horror movies, with hairy goatlike legs, the muscular torso of a man, a whipping tail with a barbed point, and vast black wings. A mouth that was filled with teeth the size of daggers and horns that were splashed with gore. A monster Mike had seen on TV and in films and that he’d read about in books, but though this was the form of the devil in every aspect, Mike knew that even its shape and appearance were a lie. A special effect, or at least done for effect. Not that it made the creature any less terrifying. If anything, the deliberate choosing of this image—an aspect intended to be reviled and feared on a primal level—showed the subtlety and mockery of the beast. In these dreams the monster would spread its great arms as if to encompass the burning hollow, the forests, the town, and the world, and he would hiss “Mine!” just before reaching for Mike.