Ghost Road Blues

Ruger’s mouth moved to form the name “Griswold” and the shape of it felt familiar on his lips and tongue.



The ghostly figure spoke. “Vic Wingate has been my John the Baptist…he has paved the way. But you, Karl…you will be my Peter, my rock, and on this rock I will build my church.” The voice echoing in Ruger’s head was heavy with mockery, but he liked the sound of it.



All at once time caught up to Ruger and the car hurtled at the man too fast to stop or even veer. Tony screamed again and the instant of contact (or had it been a hallucination brought on by stress?) was gone. Tony’s hands were moving all over the wheel and instantly Ruger knew what was about to happen. Tony swung the wheel to the right, trying to swerve around the apparition, but he was ham-​fisted with blood loss and overdid the turn. The car lurched away from the man, missing him by less than a foot, and rocketed off the road out of all control. Ruger grabbed the wheel with both hands, shoving Tony against the door. He fought the wild turn, swerving into it with a gentle angularity, preventing it from becoming a tumble. The car jolted as the front wheels hit the edge of the drainage ditch forming a border between road and field. The car almost nose-​dived into the ditch, but Ruger jerked hard on the wheel to correct the angle, and a microsecond later the back wheels slammed into the edge of the ditch. The impact slackened some of the car’s momentum, but Tony’s foot was still on the accelerator and the sedan plowed into the cornfield like a runaway train. Cornstalks whipped at the windows and died beneath the wheels in sharp crunches of agony.



“Get your fucking foot off the pedal!” Ruger hissed. When Tony didn’t, or couldn’t, Ruger cocked his arm and drove his elbow into Tony’s nose once, twice. The brittle cartilage in Tony’s nose crunched and blood exploded from his lacerated skin, pouring down over his mouth. Tony sagged against the door and his foot slid from the pedal. Thoroughly enjoying himself, Ruger grinned, shifted his hips, then reached over with his own left foot and stamped on the brakes. The car jerked and jolted, throwing Ruger against the dashboard and Boyd against the back of Tony’s seat. Tony’s seat buckled forward, and Tony’s right temple struck the steering wheel with a sharp crack.



A moment later there was a much louder crack! and then the car swayed drunkenly to the right, slowed abruptly, then stopped altogether.



The engine growled in confusion as it wound itself down.



Pushing himself away from the dashboard, Ruger reached over and shoved the automatic transmission into park, then switched off the engine. A tarpaulin of silence dropped over the car, broken only by small tinkling sounds from the now still engine and the far-​off rumble of thunder.



Chapter 4



1



Long black lines of burned rubber marked where the car had gone off the road into the corn. The tall man with the blond hair stood at the outer curve of the skid mark and stared into the field for a long time, his mouth cut into a cruel smile of triumph. Despite the total cloud cover his skin and blond hair seemed to glimmer with a luminescence like cold moonlight.



He reached out his left hand, fingers splayed so that from his perspective his hand encompassed the whole of the car; then he closed his hand slowly, forming a knotted fist. A wind seemed to blow past him and into the cornfield.



Then his smile changed as he felt a presence behind him. He slowly lowered his arm and turned, his eyes both bright and dark in the strange light. Across the road, standing just at the edge of the forest, was a second man. His skin was gray as dust and he wore a black suit smeared with dirt. The blond man’s face twisted into a sneer.



The man in the black suit opened his mouth to speak, but though his lips formed words, there was no sound. His face registered alarm and then frustration. He tried again and the strain of his effort was clear on his face.



The blond man shook his head and laughed. “Pathetic,” he said in a voice that was the sound of icy wind blowing through the limbs of blighted trees.



Straining, the other man forced out two words—“…stop…you…”—but the effort drained him and his shoulders slumped. He mouthed bastard, but it had no sound and carried no force.



“You thought you had won, didn’t you?”



The other man could not make himself heard, his lips writhed without sound. Finally he stopped trying to talk and just stood there looking stricken.



“You have no idea what you did. You have no concept of how powerful you’ve made me.” He took another step closer and was now only a few feet away from the gray man. “So now…every drop of blood that falls will be on your head. Every. Single. Drop.”



Then his eyes flared from pale blue to a fiery red as hot and intense as the furnaces of hell.



In terror, the man in the dark suit fled into the shadows and was gone.



Lightning flashed in the sky, bathing the road with harsh white light; when the shadows returned, the road was empty.



2



Malcolm Crow held the severed arm in both of his hands and wondered what to do with it. Put it with the others? Or maybe hang it in the window.



He opted for the window.



Tossing it playfully up and down as he walked, he went to the long counter that formed the floor of the display window and peered at the tangle of skulls, rats, spiderwebs, tombstones, and necrobilia that lay strewn with artistic abandon in front of the thick plate glass. He pursed his lips, made a thoughtful decision, and then bent down to lay the severed arm in front of the largest tombstone, the one that read:



COUNT DRACULA



Born 1472



Died 1865



Died 1900



Died 1923



Died 1988



Died 2007



He checked to make sure the price tag was showing.



Whistling “Cemetery Blues” along with the CD player, he strolled back to his worktable and began opening a second box of gruesome goodies. Both cartons were stamped with the distinctive death’s-​head label of Yorick’s Skull: Repulsive Replicas, Inc. He removed four more identical severed arms, tagged them with his price gun, and set them on a shelf next to the severed hands, human hearts, and glow-​in-​the-​dark skulls. When the bell above the door tinkled he glanced over his shoulder to see a familiar burly, bearded figure amble in.



“Hey! Wolfman!” Crow said playfully, waving a rubber arm.



Terry Wolfe smiled back, his grin splitting the red beard with a flash of white. He was a big man, nearly six-​five, with logger’s forearms and a huge barrel chest, but dressed with expensive good taste in a Giampaolo Desanti suit in dark blue wool with faint pinstripes, a pale blue shirt, and a tie that matched his suit. His shoes were buffed to a polished-​coal sheen, and his red beard and curly hair were clipped short, though Crow noticed that Terry needed a haircut—he usually got one every week—and that his beard was a little uneven. Pretending not to look, Crow saw that Terry’s smile went no deeper than the surface of his face and that his eyes were bloodshot.



“Whatcha got there?” Terry asked as he stepped up and peered into the box. “Oh, yuck!” He reached in and fished out a huge black rat that lay crushed and sprawled in a congealed puddle of blood and gore.



“Cute, huh?” Crow said with a happy grin.



“Good God, what on earth are you going to do with this?”



“With ‘these,’” Crow corrected. “I have six of them.”



“Why, for God’s sake?”



“To sell ’em.”



“To whom?”



“Kids. I already sold out of the first lot. Roadkill Ratz are this year’s ‘thing.’” When you step on them they squeal. Kids snap them right up. And split skulls, severed limbs, popped-​out eyes, eviscerated dogs, and even bug-​eyed monster babies with bloody fangs.”



“When we were kids we used to have rubber chickens.”



“Dude, we grew up with Freddy, Jason, and Michael Myers.”



“Sounds like a law firm in hell.”



“The difference is that you never went to monster movies when we were kids, Wolfman, so you don’t remember all the good horror stuff from the seventies and eighties. Zombie flicks and slasher pics and the kids loved it all. But all that changed and now every couple of years they have to amp it up to keep kids interested. It’s harder to spook them, harder to gross them out. They want to push the envelope of nastiness.”



“To reiterate,” Terry sniffed with disdain, “‘yuck!’” He rubbed his tired eyes.



“Rough day at the office? Tired from sitting up all night counting all your millions?”



Terry yawned. “Don’t I wish? Do you want me to tell you what kind of week I’ve had so far?”



“Not really—”



“Since you ask—mostly it’s this bloody crop blight that is very likely going to put ten or fifteen farms out of business, and most of the rest of them will be mortgaged to the eyebrows to Pinelands Farm Bank. Gil Sanders told me just yesterday that his entire corn crop was diseased, all of it. They’re calling it Scandinavian leaf blight because they don’t know what else to call it. That’s twenty tons of corn that’ll have to be burned. He’s already talking of selling his farm to developers and getting out. A few others, too.”



“Like thirty years ago,” Crow murmured. “Like the Black Harvest.”



“God, don’t even say that!” Terry rubbed his face with both hands. “Hopefully this won’t be anywhere near as bad. We have two EPA guys here and the guy who teaches agriculture science at Pinelands College is taking samples all over. Maybe they’ll come up with something. And—” Terry began, then waved it off.



“What?”



Terry gave him a bleak smile. “I know it’s just stress and all that,” he said, “but I haven’t been able to sleep much. Can’t get to sleep for hours, and then when I do I have the weirdest dreams. I dunno, I guess you could even call them nightmares—if guys my age actually get nightmares.”



I sure as hell do , Crow thought, and was about to say it when a customer came in and Terry watched as Crow sold the kid a pair of vampire teeth and two tubes of fake blood. He gave the kid some advice on how to make the blood trickles on either side of his mouth look real rather than fake and the kid left happy. The intrusion broke the stream of their conversation.