“We can keep this shit up all day,” the Bone Man said. “I’m a ghost, you dumbass.”
Then Boyd froze, head cocked in an attitude of listening, but the Bone Man heard nothing. Boyd sniffed the air with his broken nose, paused and sniffed again. Then as if some unseen hand had reached into his mind and dialed down a rheostat the predatory light went out his eyes and his snarling mouth drooped again into the slack-jawed hang of emptiness. It took two aimless steps backward, turned first to the right and then to the left, both motions apparently without purpose, and after swaying in the sunlight for a full minute, he tottered off across the road back toward the cornfields. The Bone Man watched him go and stood quietly for a long time until even the faintest sounds of his lumbering passage through the corn had faded. He sighed and then sat slowly down on the rotted log, pulling his guitar around so that as he sat it lay across his bony thighs. His long fingers stroked the strings, and as the breeze returned to stir the tips of the tall corn he began to play and sing. It was the old prison blues song, “Ghost Road Blues.” The air above and around him seemed heavy and oppressive as it loomed above the farms and forests of Pine Deep. In the clearing near the cornfields where four people had now died, the Bone Man played blues to lament the dead and to preach the gospel of the dark times. Not times coming at the End of Days, but of the darkness here at hand—an October darkness, abroad and hungry.
(4)
It was a Sunday morning and Mike Sweeney slept late, lost in a dream that played and replayed. In his dream the wrecker that had chased him on Route A-32 didn’t miss him; in his dream the huge black truck with its demonic driver and the ugly gleaming hook caught up with him as he raced along the asphalt. The driver wore Vic’s sneering face, though even in the dream Mike didn’t think Vic was truly at the wheel. He pedaled his bike faster and faster, his legs pumping insanely, the rubber of the thin tires screaming in a high-pitched wail, the cold wind slicing at him as he fled, but the wrecker kept getting closer and closer. Mike risked a look, daring to glance over one shoulder and there—right
“No!” he cried and the sound of his own voice was whipped out of his mouth and blown past him to be gobbled up by the teeth of that gleaming grille. He leaned forward over the bars, his butt up in the air, trying to add more weight and power to his pumping legs and at the same time cut the wind resistance. He flicked another glance over his shoulder and saw that he was pulling away. Inches…feet…yards. He kept it up, trying to make it to the entrance of the farm just down the road. If he could make that…just a few hundred yards now…he would be safe. It was Val Guthrie’s place. Crow would be there. He’d be safe with Crow and Val.
His chest was an oven that burned up the air as soon as he gasped it in and then set to burning the flesh of his lungs, and still he raced on. Sweat burst from his pores and ran down his face and chest before freezing against his skin, and still he raced on. The growl of the wrecker’s engine diminished ever so slightly as he pulled ahead, and still he raced on. Pinwheels of fire exploded in his eyes, and still he raced on. His heart was slamming against the walls of his chest and felt like it was ready to burst, and still he raced on.
Less than a hundred yards now and he began angling wide so that he could make a fast, hard turn left and shoot onto the entrance road. Suddenly there were people lining the side of the road. Silently watching the race as they stood in the shadows. Even in the dark, even at that speed, he could see their faces and read their expressions.
First he passed Terry Wolfe, the mayor, who smiled at him with kindly blue eyes and then reached up to rip his own face off in a sudden splash of blood, revealing beneath the mask of flesh a monster’s face, with bloody fangs and blazing eyes.
Mike raced on.
Then he sped by a tall, stick-thin black man in a dirty black suit that was streaked with mud and rainwater. The black man’s smile was genuine, and he played a few notes on a beautiful old guitar, picking the notes with the fingers of one hand and stretching those notes out with a gliding touch of a bottleneck slide. The black man said something but his voice made no sound.
Mike raced on.
