Dead Man's Song полностью

He laughed in triumph as his blade flicked out and cut one monster’s head from its shoulders. The creature instantly turned to a pillar of flaming ash and then exploded into dust. Mike landed in front of the crowd of people—and even Crow looked helpless and weak—and the creatures all hesitated. Mike’s sword flashed through the air and then he swept it down and slashed a line in the ground in front of his feet. The line burned as if the tip of the sword was filled with kerosene.

“Let’s do this!” he said aloud in a line cribbed from the movie Blade.

The monsters snarled and in a single mass of teeth and claws they closed in on Mike and his friends, but Mike’s sword became a blur of bloodstained silver as he leapt to meet them, slashing and twisting, skewering and then whipping the sword free and using the same motion to kill a creature lunging at him from behind. The monsters died by the dozens, they died by the score. Flames ignited everywhere as they died, and Mike never stopped laughing as he whirled and lunged and killed and killed and—

The scream behind him made his freeze in place and when he snapped his head around he saw that indeed all of the monsters had closed in at once. Not one at a time the way they did in the movies, but all at once. More than a hundred of them. Maybe two or three hundred. All at once. Mike’s flashing sword had killed fifty, sixty of them…and the rest had fallen on Crow and Val and Dr. Weinstock and the others and had torn them to bloody shreds. Mike stared as the last of his friends—Tyler Carby, from his homeroom class—was dropped to the ground, head lolling on a neck that was no more than raw meat and strings. Everyone was dead. Everyone. Crow and Val lay in a tangle of broken limbs and burst flesh and the only part of them that was not streaked with blood was her left hand where the diamond engagement ring glittered in the firelight, sparkling like an accusing eye.

“No…” Mike said—and the dreaming Mike and the watching Mike said it as one. One pale voice that caught fire and vanished into silent smoke. The ring of monsters all leered at him with looks that were almost comical what-did-you-expect looks. Mike tried to lift his sword, but it was too heavy for him. Around him the ring of monsters closed like a fist.

Mike Sweeney woke up with the sound of his own death scream in his mouth. He almost screamed out loud, but even in the worst moment of panic he still remembered Vic and so he snatched his pillow and pressed it to his face and screamed into that. It was three in the morning, and Mike did not go back to sleep at all that night. He didn’t dare.

(2)

On the pitched eave above Mike’s window, the Bone Man sat cross-legged in the cold wind of 3:00 A.M., his guitar across his thighs and night birds perched on both shoulders. He heard Mike’s scream as loudly as if the boy had shrieked it in his ear. He stared up at the moon, whose arc was cutting itself into the horizon over past the hospital.

“Damn, boy” he said to the wind, and shook his head. “Damn…you almost had it.”

One of the night birds shifted and cawed softly. The Bone Man nodded, as if the bird had said something profound. The wind that blew through him was cold, and he could feel it. He always felt cold, and now he felt colder still.

“Damn,” he said, and then he said, “Dhampyr.” The night-bird cawed more loudly this time and the Bone Man started to play one of the old songs, trying to work what magic he could to soothe the mind and the soul of the thing below that was no longer exactly a human boy.

(3)

In the basement two floors below, Vic lit a cigarette and settled back in his Barcalounger, drawing in a deep lungful as he scrutinized the face of his guest. The menthol felt good in his throat and chest. The chair was comfortable, too, a Frasier model—real leather in a nice chocolate brown. The other thing that felt good was the pistol laying on his thigh, the trigger guard resting on his crotch, the barrel more or less pointed in the other man’s direction. Not an overt threat but more than a suggestion. Behind him were shelves of books, floor to ceiling, wall to wall, many of them stolen, some purchased through second, third, and fourth intermediaries. A lot of them banned by the church for hundreds of years. Nothing you could find on eBay.

Vic exhaled and the smoke joined the blue cloud that had formed over his head. He’d smoked a lot of cigarettes this evening. “You stink,” he said, which was true enough. The other man smelled of dirt, old blood, shit, and Christ knew what else.

The man seated in the other chair—a straight-backed wooden chair with knobbed legs—just stared at him, his eyes flat and without expression, his face wax-white, the skin of his cheeks sucked in and moistureless, his mouth nothing more than a red slit.

“I feel…strange,” Karl Ruger said, and his voice was a dry whisper in his throat.

“No kidding.” Vic took another drag. “I’m curious…does any of this shit hurt?”

“Hurt?”