Dead Man's Song pd-2

by Jonathan Maberry

  Newton wheeled and marched right back and, when he was close enough, jabbed Crow in the chest with a stiffened finger. “Tell me what you saw. Exactly, every detail. Put me in the scene if you want me to believe this bullshit.”

  Crow’s face went suddenly scarlet and in a movement too fast for Newton to see he grabbed the reporter by the front of the shirt and spun him completely around and slammed him up against a pine tree and held him there, fists knotted in the cloth of his jacket front. Newton’s hiking stick went clattering to the ground between them and Crow kicked it angrily aside. He leaned in close and his voice was a feral whisper. “Listen, asshole, this thing killed my brother and it damn near killed me. I was not hallucinating, and what I’m telling you right now is not me flashing back to the DTs. I saw its face, man, I looked right into Griswold’s face and I saw it change. I saw bones moving, Newt, I saw his eyes turn from blue to yellow to red. I saw that snout and saw the teeth tearing through the gums, dripping blood, getting longer. I smelled its breath on his face. I saw Ubel Griswold change. I saw it. Not a man, not some jerkoff in a fright mask. I saw the change.”

  He took a breath and exhaled sharply, and then pushed himself away from Newton. “I saw it.” He turned away, flapping an angry hand at Newton. “Val was right. You’re really are an asshole and I should never have trusted you.” He kicked a stone and it went skittering through the brush, startling the crows, who leapt into the air to find higher branches.

  Then he turned back to face the reporter. “If you want to go back, then go back. You know the way. But I’m going on and I’m going to find his house. I want to look inside…I need to look inside. Maybe I’ll find nothing but raccoon shit and thirty years of dead termites…but maybe I’ll find some evidence of who he was, and what he was.” He stopped and pointed to the northeast. “Did you even bother to look up Griswold’s name on the Internet?”

  Newton nodded, unable to speak.

  “Did you look up what his name means?”

  A shake of the head this time.

  Crow laughed. “I told you that it probably wasn’t even his real name. I told you that on Val’s porch; well the other day I did a translation on it on Google and guess what I found out. You know what it means? You know what ‘Ubel Griswold’ means?” He didn’t wait for an answer but stepped closer. “It’s German for ‘Wolf from the Gray Forest.’” He spat on the ground. “Don’t you get it? He was screwing with us back then. It was a nickname, a stupid in-joke for him and that goon squad that hung around him. Wolf from the Gray Forest. This is the gray forest, you moron!” Crow shouted. “Look around you.” Indeed the forest was perpetually gray, always in shadows. “And he was the wolf that lived here.” He closed his eyes and shook his head. “He was telling us all along and we were just stupid yokels who didn’t have a clue. God!” Once again he turned and stalked a few feet away, swiping angrily at the air and cursing.

  Newton stood stock still, his back pressed against the gnarled bark of the pine tree, his face burning. He licked his lips and swallowed a dry throat, then slowly straightened and smoothed down the front of his clothes. He looked around at the forest—the gray forest—and felt very cold and small. “Crow…,” he began, but Crow waved him off. Newton pushed himself off the tree and walked tentatively forward. “Look, Crow…I’m sorry I mouthed off the way I did…but put yourself in my place for a minute.”

  Crow turned to look at him.

  “Granted, I wasn’t there thirty years ago,” Newton said, “but I have a pretty open mind. Yesterday I didn’t so much as believe in the tooth fairy and today you want me to believe that there are such things as werewolves. I mean…werewolves for Christ’s sake. How should I even react to something like that?”

  “You could try a little trust.”

  “Crow—coming down that hill with you, coming out here with you—that’s showing more than just a little trust, but believing in werewolves…at the risk of you slamming me into another tree, that’s going to take a bit more than simple trust.”

  They stared at each other for a while and then Crow sighed heavily and nodded. “Yeah, goddamn it.” A rueful grin twitched up one corner of his mouth and he bent and picked up the hiking stick and held it out. “Sorry about the whole slamming into a tree thing.”

  “Sure,” Newton said snippily and snatched the stick out of Crow’s hands and held it defensively in front of his chest. “Don’t worry about it, but please don’t do it again.”

  “Scout’s honor,” Crow said and held up three fingers.

  A little breeze swept through the clearing and stirred some leaves. “So now what?” Newton asked.

  “It’s your call. I’m going that way,” he said, nodding to the northeast. “If you want to head back, no harm, no foul.”

  “I should go back,” Newton said. “I really should. But…what the hell.”

  A big grin broke out on Crow’s face and he stuck out his hand; after only a moment’s hesitation, Newton took it and they shook. “But,” Newton said, not letting go immediately, “this doesn’t mean I believe in werewolves, witches, goblins, or honest Republicans. All it means is that I’ll go to his house and we’ll see what we see. Fair enough?”

  Crow pursed his lips, then nodded. “Fair enough.”

  They started walking again, heading farther up the road, and in a loud stage whisper that was meant to be heard, Newton said, “Werewolves, my ass.” Then suddenly a memory kicked its way out of the shadows in the back of Newton’s mind and he jerked to a stop and grabbed Crow’s sleeve. “Holy shit!”

  Crow wheeled. “What’s wrong?”

  “Ubel Griswold…” Newton stammered. “Werewolf!”

  Crow blinked. “Um…yeah. We covered that.”

  “No, Jesus Christ, I just remembered something that you absolutely have to know. About Griswold.”

  “Newt—if you’re going to reveal that you’re his long-lost son or some B-movie shit like that I’m going to hurt you. A lot.”

  “No, shut up and listen. The other day when I was doing a Net search for my feature I searched on Griswold’s name and—jeez, how the hell could I have forgotten this?—I found a reference to Ubel Griswold and werewolves. I totally forgot about it.”

  “And you’re just telling me now?”

  Crow whapped him on the top of the head with his open fingers. “You friggin’ cheesehead. How the hell could you not remember something about Griswold and werewolves when we are in Dark-frickin’-Hollow arguing about werewolves while going to Griswold’s frickin’ house? Explain to me how that is possible.”

  “I don’t know…I just forgot. I guess I just didn’t pay much attention to it at the time. I’m sorry, okay? But at least let me tell you what I read.”

  “Yeah, useful information might be—oh, I don’t know—useful?”

  “Stop shouting. It was just a quick reference, and I guess it didn’t really register at the time because it referred to something that happened in the late fifteen hundreds, maybe early sixteen hundreds. Something about a guy put on trial for being a werewolf. Peter something or other. Can’t remember his last name. Point is, he was point on trial for being a werewolf and later executed.”

  “You lost me. Guy named Peter gets killed four hundred years ago, what’s that got to do with—”

  “They gave a bunch of aliases for him. One of them was Ubel Griswold.”

  Crow stood there and stared at him for quite a while after that. “Oh, that’s just swell,” he said.

  “Maybe it’s an ancestor of his,” Newton offered. “If Griswold was descended from someone who was accused of being a werewolf—and a pretty famous one if the transcripts of his trial are on the Internet four hundred some years later—then maybe he played on that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Figure it out. He took the werewolf thing from his ancestor as a gimmick to disguise the fact that it was just an ordinary man—albeit a serial killer—behind the Reaper murders. Or, maybe he was really nuts and tho
ught he was channeling his ancestor. Didn’t Son of Sam get messages from a dog or something?”

  “I think that was something he made up to try and prove to the cops that he was insane.”

  “Well, he was a mass murderer…how sane could he have been?” Newton said. “But the point is that if you’re a homicidal maniac and you discover that your ancestor was tried and convicted of being a werewolf, wouldn’t you play on that? Use it to increase the terror and thereby increase whatever psychosexual pleasure these guys get from killing? Isn’t that like a given here?”

  “It would be,” agreed Crow, “except for one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “During the Pine Deep Massacre no one even floated the word ‘werewolf.’ Not even me. I don’t think I’ve even said that word aloud in conjunction with Griswold until today. I didn’t even tell Val that’s what I thought Griswold was.”

  “Balls.”

  “Yeah, so any connection Griswold had with the four-hundred-year-old werewolf trial was kept pretty well hidden until you found it on the Net. I never even made that connection, and believe me I have looked.”

  “Well, regardless of that…the original Peter what’s-his-name is dead, and the Griswold of the 1970s is dead, so as spooky as this is it’s all kind of academic.”

  Crow turned away and looked down the tangled path. “Maybe,” he said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Crow turned back. “What if they’re the same werewolf?”

  “Oh, come on now, that’s going too far. First you want me to believe you met a werewolf, now it’s an immortal werewolf? Next thing you’ll tell me that his real name is Dracula.”

  “Dracula was a vampire.”

  “Well, Crow, you want me to believe in ghosts and werewolves. Why not vampires, too?” Crow walked away from him and started down the path. Newton called, “Hey, while we’re at it we can see if we can find a crop circle and maybe a leprechaun.”

  Crow held up one hand, forefinger raised.

  (2)

  Mark stood on the porch, leaning his shoulder against the pillar, the neck of a Sam Adams hooked between his index and forefingers. The sun was up but storm clouds were rising in a solid ring from every point on the horizon; they were closing like a camera aperture, shutting out the blue of the sky. In another half an hour it would be black as night. Weird weather patterns lately, he thought. When he heard the screen door open and then bang shut he knew it would be Val and not Connie following him out of the living room battleground.

  He didn’t turn to look, just said, “Don’t start.”

  “I’m not going to say a damn thing.” Val’s voice was ice cold. Mark had heard his mother sound like that on those rare times when she and Dad were fighting.

  “It’s not your business anyway,” he said.

  “You’re right, it’s not.”

  “It’s between Connie and me. So, butt out.”

  Val did not reply. He heard the boards of the slat bench creak as she sat down. Over beyond the barn an owl hooted, probably confused by the coming darkness, and there was the sound of some traffic on the road. Truck, by the sound of it.

  The day had started okay, with Connie acting more like her old self, even to the point of doing a bit of gardening, but when Mark had come up behind her and wrapped his arms around her, pressing his loins up against her rump, she had screamed. Actually screamed, and then started struggling to get away from him like he was some kind of damn rapist. It made Mark sick and it scared him, and it also made him mad. He hadn’t seen her struggle like that when Ruger was running his hands all over her that night, but when her husband wanted to cop a feel—her frigging husband who had rights—then she was all piss and vinegar, fighting for her maidenly honor. Well screw that. Then, of course, she had burst into tears and gone running off to cry on Val’s shoulder. She cried all the damn time. There were times that he wanted to shake her, slap her, tell her to just get over it. It had been like that since they’d gotten home. Connie spent most of her time either crying or staring off into space like a zombie, and now they were sleeping in separate bedrooms.

  Val was being a pain in the ass about it, too, always siding with Connie and treating him like he was Jack the Ripper.

  “Mark?” He tried to ignore her. “Mark,” she repeated, putting a finer edge to it.

  “What?” he snapped, still looking out into the big dark. There was the sound of another vehicle out on A-32. A car this time.

  “You need to get help, Mark.”

  Now he did turn and pointed at her with the half-empty beer bottle. “Yeah? Well you need to mind your own bloody business, Val.”

  Val sat almost primly on the bench, her legs crossed, hands folded in her lap, head cocked slightly to one side, appraising him. “I’m serious here, Mark. Connie’s in therapy, and I think you need to see someone, too.”

  “Bullshit. The only one around here with a goddamn problem is my goddamn wife.”

  There was such a look of naked contempt in Val’s face that even in the heat of his anger Mark couldn’t look at it. He turned back to the gathering darkness, drank down the rest of his beer, and with a snarl of rage threw the bottle far out into the yard where it shattered against a stone.

  “Mark,” Val said, her voice softer as she got up and came to stand right behind him. “I understand that you’re hurting because of what happened, but denial isn’t going to—”

  “Spare me the psychobabble,” he hissed. Then he spun on his heel and shouldered past her into the house, letting the screen door slam emptily behind him.

  (3)

  Crow stopped with a barrier-arm across Newton’s chest. Since their last tête-à-tête they had walked for another hour, following a series of hills that appeared to be descending lower and lower into the roots of the mountains. Their path, such as it was, spilled out at the bottom of one of the longer hills and they stood completely shrouded in cloying shadows. Across from them, perhaps forty feet away, the other hill lifted tiredly on its long journey upward to find the hidden sunlight far above—sunlight that looked weaker now as clouds thickened overhead. To their right the valley between the hills wormed through some ancient glacial boulders and then widened into a thicket of gray and sickly trees. The undergrowth glistened wetly, as if covered in grease.

  Slowly, Crow raised a finger. “Listen,” he whispered.

  Newton listened to the woods, to the air. It was like watching a movie with the sound turned down. “There’s nothing,” he murmured.

  “Right,” Crow said softly. “Absolutely nothing. No birds, no wind. Nothing. It’s dead.”

  Crow nodded slowly. “Yeah. Good word for it.”

  They moved toward the thicket, entering a natural archway made from the laced fingers of empty branches. They took two paces into the corridor of black trees and then stopped, as still and silent as the forest around them. Both men blinked in surprise and alarm, both opened their mouths to speak; neither said a thing. If moving from sunlight into shadow on the hillside had jarred them, then entering the thicket positively struck them over their hearts. Both of them had stopped as if they had walked into some invisible barrier.

  “Jesus Christ!” Crow gasped.

  “Damn!” hissed Newton. They exchanged looks of shock.

  “What just happened?” asked Newton in a hushed voice.

  Crow just shook his head. He took a tentative step forward. His foot moved easily, there was no actual barrier, no specific tangible thing barring their way. He took a few steps, and then stopped and looked back to Newton, who seemed wholly unwilling to go any farther.

  “Come on, Newt,” said Crow in a hushed voice. “In for a penny….”

  Newton looked up, and the intertwining branches of the skeletal trees made him feel as if he were inside some vast and monstrous rib cage. He followed slowly.

  The archway of trees stretched on for nearly 150 yards, at times so narrow that they had to walk in single file while branches pl
ucked at their coat sleeves, and sometimes wider, so they could stand side by side to leech confidence from the visible presence of the other. As they reached the end of the archway, they stopped again. Crow was still sweating profusely and he was breathing as heavily as he had during the long climb down the hill. Newton noticed, as he had before, that Crow’s hands automatically and unthinkingly touched the butt of the pistol and the handle of the machete over and over again, like a pilgrim touching his talismans while in the land of the pagans.

  Crow blotted his face with his sleeve and then froze, staring at the ground. He took two short steps and then squatted down. “Look at this.” When Newton came over Crow pointed at a part of the dirt pathway visible through the fallen debris.

  “Is that a footprint?”

  “Yeah. Not too old, either. See, there’s more of them. Someone’s been down here, since it rained last.” He brushed away some of the debris. “Couple of people. See? That set is all over the place. Looks like work shoes. But over here, smoother soles. Dress shoes.”

  “Could have been the cops. They were supposed to have come down to the Hollow, weren’t they?” Newton asked.

  “Maybe. Don’t know if they came this far in, though.” Crow shook his head as he rose. “Let’s go.”

  They moved on for another ten minutes and once again Crow stopped. “That’s it,” he said, nodding toward the place beyond the archway, his voice low and as deflated as a flat tire. “I think we’re here.” He pointed to a spot just ahead where the path widened but was littered with grubby, stunted trees. Some of the trees were middle-aged, twenty-four years old or more, but not one of them looked healthy. Thick, hairy vines were wrapped like tentacles around nearly every trunk and sloped from one tree to its neighbor, and everywhere there were smaller vines with mottled gray-green leaves. Between the trees were fierce tangles of rough-looking shrubs and bushes, which combined with the vines to form wall after unfriendly wall between them and their destination. Along the ground moss ran like a poorly laid carpet, the dark green broken frequently by the bone-white caps of toadstools. Drifting sluggishly through the air was a sickroom smell of rotting vegetation and mold.