Dead Man's Song
A chill, like a brief icy breeze, brushed along Sarah’s side, and she turned to look, but the room was still empty, still desolate. Terry turned, too, looking in the same direction as if he, too, had felt the chill; then Sarah felt her stomach turn to ice as he addressed that spot of air from which the coldness seemed to radiate. He no longer addressed the wall by the armoire. “Is it real, then?” he asked with such crippling hurt in his voice that the sound of it broke Sarah’s heart. “Is it true?”
“Oh my God…,” she whispered, and for the first time wondered if what he was seeing was really in the room with them.
“God…no,” he pleaded, letting the glass fall from his hand. “Don’t let it be. Please God, don’t let it be like this!” More tears fell from his blueberry-colored eyes.
Sarah was weeping now, too. She reached out to touch him, but he saw her hand and jerked away from her as if she had come at him with a knife.
“Don’t touch me!” he hissed, falling over onto his hip, scrabbling and crawling desperately away from her. Red blood blossomed from several long gashes that opened as he scrambled away through the jagged litter. “Don’t touch me! Can’t you see?”
His rejection of her stabbed into her with terrible force, producing not more despair but an anger that leapt up from her broken heart and escaped through her mouth.
“Goddamn it, Terry! There’s nothing to see!”
“Yes! Look! For Christ’s sake—are you blind?” He held up another piece of glass, turning it to show her.
“No!” she snapped. “No more of that!” She stepped forward and slapped the glass out of his hand, but her angle was bad and immediately she felt a burn across her palm and looked down to see blood flood outward from her palm. She stared at it and then held her hand out angrily to Terry. “Now see, damn it! Do you want to keep this up until we cut ourselves to piece…” Her voice died abruptly in her throat, choked to silence by the look that had appeared suddenly and intensely on Terry’s face as he stared at her welling blood. It was a look of total, naked hunger. A horrible, lustful hunger. He leered at her blood and his mouth began working, lips and jaws moving as if tasting the air, as if tasting her blood.
With a cry of horror, Sarah reeled back, whipping her hand away and hiding it behind her back like a starving child hiding a scrap from a scrounging dog. Terry leaned forward as if to follow her, his weight dropping down onto his palms. When she moved back another step, and then another, he moved forward, walking on knees and hands in a mockery of a dog, and with each step forward his body movement changed, becoming comfortable with the posture, moving with a strange grace that was so much at odds with his naked, bleeding state.
Sarah’s back struck hard against the edge of the door frame. Terry advanced again, then darted forward in a lunge that brought him to within a yard of her. His eyes glared up at her, and in them Sarah saw no trace of Terry. The eyes that looked at her were the hungry eyes of an animal.
The strange wave of coldness that had touched her earlier swept past again, passing between her and Terry. Sarah shivered involuntarily, but Terry turned suddenly, lunging at the cold air as it passed, actually snarling at it and biting the empty air. Sarah wanted to run, to scream—but a stronger urge kept her there, in that room, with Terry. Not this Terry, but the one she loved, however much he might be damaged, might be submerged beneath all of his sickness.
Terry slowly turned back toward her. The muscles in his arms and back began to ripple with an unnatural spasm, and pain danced in Terry’s eyes. He tore at the carpet with his fingernails, and a line of drool slipped from between his lips to hang pendulously below his chin.
Sarah could have run, could have been out the bedroom door, down the steps, gone from the house in seconds. The ambulance wail was closer now and she could run toward it, toward safety, but she stood her ground for love of him. The twisted, snarling knot of muscle and bone that inched toward her had madness in its eyes and enough physical power to easily break her apart. She knew that if he attacked her she could not—and would not—fight him. She held her ground as he stalked to within inches of her, his face wrinkled in a grotesque parody of an animal’s silent scream, like a tiger’s face before it kills, like a wolf as it leaps. Sarah believed it, knew the threat, felt that her life was measured now in seconds. Slowly, slowly, she lowered herself down to her knees in front of him, bending until she sat on her calves, her head level with his, feeling the sharp bit of glass into her knees but not caring, not reacting to that—pain and blood were nothing to her at that moment.
His eyes watched her, alight with hunger. Sarah reached out with her hands and touched both sides of his face. At first he jerked away, growling low in his throat, but she tried again, saying a single word, “No.” Just that one word, said softly.
The places where her palms touched seemed to crackle with energy, though whether it was real or not, she couldn’t tell. She knelt there, touching his face, and said it again, “No.”
The moment was unreal. He was there on all fours, transformed in a broken moment from a gentle man who had held her and loved her to a damaged and incomplete imitation of some predatory thing—a beast of indefinable nature. She was there, kneeling on a glass-strewn and blood-splattered carpet, touching madness and denying its power with a single word. “No.”
He looked at her with the eyes of madness. In the uncertain light by the open bedroom doorway, his eyes no longer seemed blue at all, but appeared to glow with a bizarre red-gold glow. Animal eyes. He turned his face toward her bleeding palm, sniffed at it.
“No, Terry.” He leaned closer toward the flowing blood. An inch away, less. The smell of salt and copper filled his nostrils. Sweat burst from his forehead. He was shaking all over as if he had a raging fever. His tongue wormed from between his lips, reaching, needing, almost touching the blood, almost tasting it.
“NO!”
This time it was Terry himself who said it. Yelled it. Screamed it—and the words were ripped out of him, bellowed with horrible and inhuman force as he reared up and shoved at her, knocking her into the hallway, knocking himself back against the bed.
“NO!” he screamed again and the red-gold glow of his eyes burned with incandescent fury. Sarah fell heavily, her head rapping hard against the banister. Dazed, she watched as Terry rose up from the floor, first to his knees and then slowly, with terrible struggling jerks and spasms to a crouch, and finally all the way to his full height. Naked, crisscrossed with bleeding slashes, bathed in sweat, he was an awesome sight. Every muscle in his body was locked in battle, one against another, evidence of some titanic internal struggle.
“NO!” he roared, and he wept, too, his tears burning bright in his eyes. “No, you can’t take that away from me, too! You can’t make me, you bastard! You lose, Griswold, you fucking lose!” He laughed with weird triumph, though his laugh became a sob.
He wrenched himself around to face Sarah, his mouth working as he tried to speak, but only choked sounds came out of his constricted throat.
“Sarah!” was all he could manage, and then he spun around, ran straight across the room, and threw himself headfirst out of the window with Sarah’s horrified, despairing scream following him all the way down to the garden flagstones.
Chapter 29
(1)
Diego saw them walking along the back road and cut through the rows of corn to intercept them, pushing his John Deere cap back on his forehead and smiling. “Little dark out here for a stroll, ladies, dontcha think?”
Val shrugged affably. “Taking the shortcut back to the house. How’s the tractor?”
“Axle’s shot, but we’re going to tow it in back to the shed and José and Ty can fix it tomorrow.”
“Okay. I have to go into town for a bit. You guys should knock off for today.”
Diego grinned, his teeth very white against the deep black of his mustache. “Okay, we’ll wrap it up as soon as the tractor’s moved. Besides, it’s Little Halloween and there’s a keg party at the campus. Ty and the others were planning on heading out there.”
“Not you?”
“Too old for that crap. Gonna order a pizza, watch Dawn of the Dead on cable, and fall asleep in my La-Z-Boy. At my age that’s partying.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“Hey,” he said, “if you two are going to be out prowling around you should take this.” He tugged a Maglite from his back pocket, turned it on, and handed it over.
“We’re just heading back to the house. I need to get my purse and leave a note for Crow in case he comes out, and then we’re taking off. Thanks, Dee.”
He sketched a salute and headed back across the fields to where José and Ty were hooking the tractor up to the tow-rig on Diego’s big Tundra. The moment he was out of sight Connie’s mental focus seemed to snap back on as if someone had thrown a switch. “I know!” she said brightly. “Maybe before we go see Sarah we can bake her a pumpkin pie.” Like most of her recent remarks it was as much of a non sequitur as if she’d suggested they set themselves on fire and jump off the roof. Val was learning to roll with them, but it took effort.
“Sure, honey,” she said, “but let’s do that later. C’mon.”
As they walked the strong white beam of the Maglite picked out their path through the corn on one side and the harvested field on the other, and then caught a splash of dark red as the barn loomed out of the darkness in front of them. In the field they could hear the Tundra’s engine growl to life as Diego and his men began hauling the tractor back to the shed that was down the road from the barn. Val and Connie walked without hurry, and Val figured that if an ambulance was coming to take Terry in to Pinelands, then Sarah would be busy for a while getting him settled. No need to be there for that; it was those long hours of waiting and fretting in the lounge while the doctors ran their tests when Sarah would need allies.
“Maybe we should put together some fruits and things and take a basket,” Connie rattled on and on. “I have a lovely basket in the pantry and we could use some of that ribbon that—”