A third scuff and now there was a second sound. A more organic sound, like a grunt. Not a middle-register grunt of a pig—there were no pigs on the Guthrie farm—but a deeper sound, almost a cough, or maybe a single short snort of laughter.
“Mark?” Connie asked again and started reaching for the door handle, but Val instinctively caught her wrist.
“No,” she said quietly, staring hard at the door, at that vertical line of darkness that showed a total lack of light inside. “Don’t.” She hadn’t liked that grunt, whether it was a cough or a snort, it just didn’t sound right. “Let’s go back to the house,” she said. She took Connie’s wrist in her free hand and then took a single backward step, drawing Connie with her. Connie resisted, her gaze lingering for a moment on the door before finally turning around to give Val an uncomprehending stare.
“But—it’s Mark,” she said, giving Val a frowning smile of confusion.
There was a second grunting sound and then a light slapping sound as if someone had placed their open hand flat on the inside of the door. The heavy door trembled and opened maybe half an inch, broadening the line of darkness. Val pulled Connie another step back. This time she was sure she had identified the kind of sound coming from behind that door. It was laughter. It just wasn’t Mark’s.
“Let’s go back to the house,” she whispered harshly. “Now.”
Connie tried to pull away and as she did so she turned toward the door and shouted Mark’s name.
“No!” Val yelled as the door suddenly swung open. She shined her light on the face of the man standing there. It wasn’t Mark.
It was Kenneth Boyd.
(2)
They struggled up the last few feet and collapsed onto the grass that fringed the Passion Pit. The sun was long down and the sky was bright with a billion stars. It was warmer up there and a rowdy gaggle of geese was waddling around the clearing, honking contentedly and poking into the grass for bits of stale hamburger buns and cold french fries. In the trees the last finches of the season were chatting noisily. There were even some elderly fireflies drifting lazily through the air. Newton, lying on his back, recorded these things. “Is this even the same planet?”
Crow shook his head. “Don’t ask me, son, I have long since lost the capacity for rational thought.” Crow struggled to sit up and reached over to pat Newton’s leg. “We’re going to have to talk about this. I mean we’ll have to think about it some, and then you and I are going to have to talk about this.”
“Well,” Newton said, “there’s one thing I can tell you now, and that’s you can pretty much go on the assumption that I am somewhat less skeptical about this town’s reputation for being haunted.”
“How much is ‘somewhat’?”
“Like maybe a hundred percent.”
“That’s all?” Crow tried on a smile, but it didn’t fit. Even the muscles of his face hurt from strain. He took a breath, exhaling as he forced himself to sit up, and after a moment stood up, reaching a hand down to haul Newton to his feet. Then he walked over and unlocked his car. He reached in for his cell. “Still no bars. I’ll have to call Val from the road. Come on, cowboy, let’s go.” He lingered by the open door, looking at the black edge of the pitch. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Crow fired up the engine, did a three-point backing turn, and then headed back up the bumpy dirt road, away from Dark Hollow. Neither of them spoke as the car bounced over the ruts, and when Crow reached the crossroads, he turned right toward town. Away from the Guthrie farm.
(3)
Boyd stood there in the doorway, framed by darkness, shadows behind him, his skin gray-white in the glare of Val’s flashlight, grinning at the two women. His eyes were sunken into desiccated sockets, his cheeks gaunt, his nose askew with splinters of cartilage and bone poking through the flesh like cactus needles. But it was his mouth—his awful mouth—that held them in an immobility born of total horror. Boyd’s lips were curled back from his teeth and those rows of teeth, top and bottom, were twisted and elongated, set crookedly in the gray meat of his gums, and each one ended in a wicked point. Those teeth gleamed wet and dark and red in the flash’s light. Blood dripped from his mouth onto the filthy tatters of his suit. He snorted again, a bestial grunt of laughter that caused a bubble of bloody mucus to form between his rows of fangs. It swelled and then burst with an audible pop, seeding the air with a mist of blood.
Val was frozen to the spot, unblinking, unable to process what she was seeing, but then Boyd stepped to one side and turned, allowing the light from her flash to slide off him and shine in through the open barn door. He turned his head and held out one hand, gesturing inside like a magician revealing a clever trick. Just inside the door, only a yard beyond where the last of the footprints had ended, was a body slumped in a shattered, rag-doll sprawl, with arms and legs flopped away from the torso, and a head thrown back, mouth wide as if caught in the midst of a great scream, tilting away from the red ruin of a savaged throat.
Connie Guthrie stared past Val, past Boyd, through the open door, and into the wide and sightless eyes of her husband. And screamed.
“MARK!”
That scream—a tearing screech that tore her throat and flecked her lips with her own blood—galvanized both Boyd and Val. With a howl of furious delight he flung himself at Val. The sound of both screams broke her paralysis of shock and she hurled the Maglite at Boyd and threw herself at Connie, knocking her sideways and down so that Boyd’s lunge missed them both. Connie fell hard and Val crashed down onto her and there was a loud snap! as Val’s hip landed on Connie’s ribs. Connie’s scream modulated upward into a shriek of agony; Val rolled off her just as Boyd came scrambling off the ground and she tried to dodge the swing of his open hand, but he clipped her as she moved—not a whole-hand blow, just the flats of his fingers, but it was hard enough to send her reeling against the side of the barn. She struck it with her forehead and the pain stabbed through the healing eye socket where Ruger had similarly struck her. Her right eye went black and the other exploded with white light and the whole barnyard spun around her in a sickening reel. She collapsed into an awkward heap as Connie’s screams continued to rip holes in the night.
Because of the blow to her head everything was suddenly muted, and Connie’s screams seemed to be coming from a hundred miles away. Val tried to crawl toward her, but she couldn’t see. She kept blinking, trying to clear her sight. The right eye stayed black and blind, but there were images now in her left one—fuzzy shapes cavorting in the indirect glare from the fallen flashlight. She saw a hulking shape—Boyd, it had to be Boyd—rising to his feet a half-dozen yards away, and he had something in his hands. Something smaller. Connie! Struggling, still screaming, kicking and flailing. Fighting back. Fighting back against Boyd the way Mark had said she hadn’t done against Ruger.
Mark! Oh God!
Darkness wanted to close around her, to smash her into nothingness, but she fought it with a snarl of heartbroken rage, fought it with hate for what this man had done. Val pulled herself to her hands and knees and supported herself on one palm while she reached behind her back and pulled out her father’s big .45 Colt Commander; she sagged back onto her heels, racking the slide with trembling hands. Her one eye was clearer, but it was like looking through oily glass, and as she raised the gun Boyd lunged his mouth toward Connie’s throat. The sound of his teeth tearing through the softness of her skin was lost in the cannon-loud explosion of the gun. The bullet took Boyd in the hip and the heavy slug’s impact spun Boyd around; he lost his grip on Connie. To Val it seemed like he fell to the ground in exaggerated slowness, trailing a thin arc of blood as he collapsed into the dirt.
“Connie!” Val yelled—or tried to, but her voice was a choked whisper of pain.
Boyd had been knocked off balance, down to one knee, but he turned, whipping his white face toward Val, baring those awful teeth that were smeared now with Connie’s blood as well as Mark’s. Val shot him again as he rose and this time th
e bullet punched through his stomach and burst out the other side. The impact barely made Boyd pause. He flinched, and that was all; then his snarl became a smile as he rose to his feet.
Val’s mouth formed the word No! as she fired again, taking Boyd in the meat of his thigh and she could see the pant leg puff and blood and bone splatter against the fence post beyond him, but he kept rising, getting to both feet now and starting to move toward her. She fired again, a chest shot that surely punched a hole through his lung.
All Boyd did was smile as he lunged toward her.
(4)
Crow drove the rutted twists of Dark Hollow road, his mind churning over everything that had happened down in Dark Hollow. The sensations as they had crossed the line, the swamp, the chains with their locks inside the house, the new boards, the roaches. Even for him it was all too weird, too…real. Not tainted childhood memories, not alcohol-induced DTs, not the result of repeated head trauma courtesy of Karl Ruger. This had just happened, and unlike when Ruger had said those enigmatic last few words there was a witness this time. He cut a glance at Newton, who had his arms wrapped around himself as if for warmth; the reporter’s head was bowed and he was shaking it slowly from side to side. Oh boy, thought Crow, there’s my credible witness going bye-bye on me.
He braked to a stop where the dirt road emptied out onto A-32, and for a moment he sat there. Turn right and head to town, drop off Newton, then come back here to Val; turn left and go see Val first. He pulled out his cell, got enough bars, and hit speed dial. Val’s phone rang five times and then went to voice mail. He tried her house, same deal.
Then all at once two things happened that changed everything forever.
First, his mind—still replaying everything that had happened that day—tripped over the buried memory of that bizarre thought he’d felt when he had been on Griswold’s porch, when he had touched the wood with his palm and felt the odd whispering tremble beneath his skin. A voice—maybe it was the voice of Griswold’s ghost, dead these thirty years, or maybe it was the voice of his own fears—hissed at him from the shadows.
She is going to die and there is nothing you can do to save her. Nothing!
Crow jerked upright in his seat and snapped his head around toward Val’s farm. At that moment he heard the gunshots. And the screams.
(5)
Boyd lunged at her and Val fired two more shots, catching him in the upper chest. It didn’t stop him, but the force of the two heavy-caliber bullets turned him while he was in mid-leap, spinning his mass so that he crashed beside her rather than on top of her. He landed with a hiss like a scalded cat and turned toward her, clawing at her with his white fingers, the black nails tearing at her sleeves and chest as she lay on her side, but she brought her feet up and kicked at him while trying to steady the gun with both hands.
“Val!”
Val and Boyd both turned as three men came pelting around the side of the barn. Diego was in the lead, with José Ramos and Tyrone Gibbs close behind. “We heard screams—” Diego was saying and then they took in the tableau. Connie writhing on the ground, her face and throat splashed with blood; Val on the ground with a pistol; and a crazy-looking man grabbing at her. All three men put it together at once—they had all seen the news stories; they’d lived through the aftermath of the murder of their boss and the savage killings of the two cops not eighty yards from where they now stood. They knew who this son of a bitch was, and in the space between one footfall and the next their faces changed from concern to fury.
“Get that son of a bitch!” Diego yelled, and the two younger men—a twenty-year-old heavy equipment mechanic with ropy muscles and a twenty-five-year-old farmhand who once played halfback for the Pinelands Scarecrows—rushed in with hate in their eyes. They were big men who had dealt with their own grief over Henry’s death, and loved Val like a sister, and they wanted a piece of this South Philly wiseguy white trash. Shoulder to shoulder they raced toward Boyd, who had stopped pawing at Val and was rising to meet them; and from ten feet away both younger men threw themselves at him, leaping high and low as if they had practiced the move a thousand times. José slammed his shoulder into Boyd’s thighs and Ty braced his forearms in front of him and took Boyd in the chest, and they crushed him back against the barn wall. Bones snapped, Boyd howled in rage and there was a huge muffled echo from inside the barn.
José clung to Boyd’s legs, trying to pull him down, but Ty landed on his feet with old football reflexes still in his muscles. He pressed Boyd back with one forearm and started hammering him with short overhand rights that pulped what was left of Boyd’s face, splintering his nose, cracking his sinuses, ripping skin along his eyebrows. The sound of his blows was like an ax hitting wet cordwood.
Boyd endured the hits and just shot out one hand to catch Ty’s throat, and with a jerk of his wrist tore the whole front of it away. There was a massive spray of blood that shot like a hose from Ty’s arteries, drenching Boyd, splattering the wall, splashing Val’s face as she struggled to her feet. Ty tottered back, clawing at a gaping red nothing of a throat; his eyes went wide with the impossibility of what was happening, awareness sinking in even as his mind went red and then black. He fell backward, blood geysering up for a second before settling down to a dribble as shock shut down his heart.
“¡Dios mío!” Diego cried, skidding to a stop, his own fist raised for a punch, unable to comprehend what he had just witnessed.
Boyd reached down and grabbed José by the hair and jerked his head up and back, and there was a sound like a rake-handle breaking. The young man flopped to the ground, his chest and shoulders jerking, his feet kicking spasmodically.
Screaming in horror, Val fired two more shots, catching Boyd in the side and staggering him away from where José lay. The young man was staring upward, eyes wide and bright, feeling nothing at all below his neckline but a fiery emptiness as if he had been separated from all of his nerve endings.
Boyd crouched and spun, hissing as he began to advance toward Val once more, but Diego snapped out of his shock and waded in to land a single wide haymaker on the side of Boyd’s jaw. It was a powerful punch, backed by all of the sturdy foreman’s mass and turn, and Boyd’s head snapped so far around that there was an audible snap somewhere in his neck, but he just twitched his shoulders and turned his head back toward Val, lashing out with one hand almost as an afterthought and catching Diego on the cheekbone. This was a far more powerful blow and the foreman spun like a dancer on the ball of one foot and landed facedown, his eyes rolling high and white.
Grinning with his bloody mouth, baring his jagged rows of teeth, Boyd lunged once more at Val and she fired again, standing in a shooter’s crouch now, the gun held in one hand, the other one clamped around her wrist to support its weight, one eye seeing nothing but black and the other staring right into Boyd’s hideous face. Her first bullet punched through his mouth, clipping the tips off several teeth, like a missile flying through a cave and snapping off stalactites and stalagmites. That slowed Boyd by no more than a half-step.
She put the next round through his right eye and the next through his forehead.
The force slammed him back against the barn, but this time he seemed to freeze in place. His one remaining red-within-black eye stared at her with such profound shock that Val didn’t pull the trigger again. Instead she watched as that dark eye lost its clarity and slowly rolled upward as Boyd slid down into the wall, toppled over into the bloody dirt, and lay still.
Val stood there, her muscles locked and trembling, pain continuing to detonate in her skull and in her bad shoulder, but she still held the gun tightly in both hands. She took a single step forward, barrel aimed at the killer’s head, but there was no movement. Another step, remembering how Ruger had fooled Crow that terrible night. She wouldn’t make the same mistake. She took another step, and risked a glance around her. Ty was definitely dead. José—she thought his neck must be broken, but she could hear him breathing…and crying. Diego was out, but didn’t
look that bad. And Connie. Dear God…Connie was alive, her hands clamped around her throat, her eyes open and glassy with shock. Inside the barn, Mark lay silent amid the shadows. She looked back at Boyd and took a final step until she was standing over him, the gun barrel pointing down. He had two black holes in his face. One where his right eye should be—which was now a dark mass of jelly—and another in the center of his forehead. He was definitely dead.
But she emptied the rest of the magazine into him anyway, each shot punching through his skull and into his brain.
The slide locked open, the magazine empty.
Val staggered back, lost her balance, and fell just as the first sob broke from her chest, and abruptly the whole yard—the house, the path, the barn, and all the bodies—were washed into a cartoon of harsh blacks and whites by headlights as Crow came tearing up the road toward her.
Chapter 30
(1)
Crow sat with Val, both of them wrapped in the blanket the paramedics had draped around her shoulders. The cartoon black and white of the scene had been repainted with the red and blue of police lights, and ambulance sirens were a constant wail. Diego, Connie, and José had all been taken away. Ty Gibbs still lay where he had fallen, his dead face still registering amazement; inside the barn, Mark was being photographed. Crow could see the white flashes of the camera as they documented the scene. Crow had done it himself once upon a time; he knew the drill. He looked up and saw Newton standing nearby talking into his cell phone, calling in the story, scooping everyone else. Crow almost hated him for it, but just couldn’t spare the energy.
Crow kissed Val’s face, her hair. “It’s over,” he murmured.
“He was dead,” she whispered.
“He’s dead, baby, it’s okay. You killed the bastard—”
“No!” she had snapped, pounding on his chest with her fist. “He was dead. I shot him over and over again. I didn’t miss once. Not once. He was dead.”
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