Henry Guthrie was at the stove using a spatula to stack slices of French toast onto a metal serving tray. Plates of bacon and sausage and a dish of scrambled eggs were already on the table.
“If you’re quite through being a bother and a burden to my daughter,” Guthrie said sternly, “then see if you have enough strength left to take this over to the table.”
“My strength comes from purity,” Crow said, hefting the plate. “As well you know.”
“Then you must be as weak as a kitten.”
“Ouch.” Crow thumped down the plate and slid onto one end of a hardwood bench at the far end of the massive oak table. There were enough plates and cups scattered around to show that several people had already eaten and left. Crow knew from long experience that the Guthrie kitchen was in nearly constant use by field foremen and supervisors, the Guthries themselves, and various other people who happened to be passing, from the seed merchant to the milkman. Despite Guthrie’s threat of giving the breakfast to the cows, they didn’t actually own any.
Guthrie poured coffee for Crow and then for himself and sat down in the big captain’s chair at the other end of the table.
“So, what’s on your agenda?” Guthrie asked. He checked the hall to make sure Val wasn’t looking before adding real sugar and half-and-half to his coffee instead of Splenda and skim milk.
With a mouthful of French toast, Crow said, “Got to go over to the hayride and do some work. Couple of the traps need some repairs.” Pine Deep boasted the largest Haunted Hayride in the country. It was owned by Crow’s friend, Terry Wolfe, but Crow was the one who designed it and kept it in top shape. He personally devised each of the “traps”—the spots where the monsters jumped out at the customers and scared the living hell out of them. Each of Crow’s traps was very elaborate. “After that,” he said, swallowing and reaching for the bacon, “I guess I’ll head into town to open up the shop.”
“Business okay?”
“Doing great.” Crow’s other concern was a small arts and crafts store on Main Street, where he sold art supplies, fancy paper for scrapbookers, even knitting yarn, but which turned into Halloween central this time of year. Even with the crop blight that was hitting the local farms, and the resulting economic slump, Halloween was still the number-one business in Pine Deep.
Munching bacon, Crow assessed Henry Guthrie. Val’s dad was getting up there now, and high-tech farming or not the fields took their toll. He looked every one of his sixty-four years, and perhaps a bit more. His bushy black eyebrows had become wilder and shot with silver, and since Val’s mother died two years ago, Guthrie’s head of hair had gone completely gray. Even so, his blueberry-blue eyes sparkled with youth and mischief.
“I’m thinking of taking Val to New Hope next weekend. Just to get away for a day or so. Can you spare her?”
“Well,” Guthrie said, considering, “without her the farm will collapse, I’ll be financially ruined and will have to live in a cardboard box under the overpass, but other than that I don’t see why you two shouldn’t have some time.”
“Cool.”
“Oh, I ran into your buddy — His Honor, I mean.”
“Terry? Where’d you trip over him?”
Guthrie almost said that they’d met in the waiting room of the psychiatrist they both shared — Henry for grief management and Terry for who knew what? — but shifted into a different lane when he realized he didn’t know if Crow knew that Terry Wolfe was in therapy at all. He said, “In town. I had a few errands to run.”
Crow grunted, eating more bacon.
“He doesn’t look too good these days,” Guthrie said.
“Yeah. He says he’s been having trouble sleeping. Nightmares, that sort of thing.” Crow wasn’t looking at Guthrie while he spoke. He was having some nightmares as well, and didn’t want Val’s very sharp and perceptive dad to see anything in his eyes.
“Well, I hope he takes care of himself. Terry always was a little high-strung.”
The batwing saloon doors that separated the kitchen from the main dining room creaked as Mark Guthrie, Val’s brother, pushed through. He was a few years younger than Val but was beefy and out of shape, and unlike his father Mark was starting to lose his hair. He wore a gray wool business suit and was reading the headlines of the Black Marsh Sentinel.
“Morning, Dad, morning, Crow.”
“Hey,” Crow said, waving at him with a forkful of sausage.
“It’s all on the table,” Guthrie said. “Sit down and let me pour you a cup.”
They sat there and ate, and Mark gently shifted the conversation to local business, discussing the financial crisis in town without actually mentioning the phrase “crop blight.” So far it hadn’t hit the Guthrie farm, but some of their neighbors had been devastated by it. Mark, who was a nice but rather pedantic guy, offered his views on how to solve everyone’s financial woes by the right investments. Guthrie nodded as if he agreed, which he didn’t, and Crow ate his way through a lot of the food. Val’s brother ran the student aid department of Pinelands College and therefore held himself up as an expert on anything dealing with finances.
Crow let him talk, grunting and nodding whenever there was a pause, and when there was an opening, he jumped in and said, “Well, fellas, much as I hate to eat and run…I’m going to anyway. Mark, see you around. Henry, I’ll probably see you later. Val said she’s going to make dinner for me tonight.”
Both of the Guthrie men stared at him as if he’d just said that blue ferrets were going to pop out of his ears.
“Val?” Guthrie said.
“Cook?” Mark said.
And they burst out laughing.
“If she hears you she will so kick both your asses,” said Crow, but they were right. In all the years Crow and Val had known each other she’d only cooked for him a few times and it had always ended badly.
They were still laughing as Crow jogged upstairs, gently pushed aside the hair dryer, kissed Val in a way that made them both tingle, and then ran downstairs again. Now Henry and Mark were exchanging horror stories about some of Val’s previous attempts at cooking. Mark was as red as a beet and slapping his palm on the table as they guffawed about something dealing with a pumpkin pie and a case of dysentery.
Whistling to himself, Crow strolled across the broad gravel driveway to where his old Chevy squatted under a beech tree. The song he was whistling was “Black Ghost Blues,” though he wasn’t consciously aware of it.
(2)
Terry Wolfe rolled over onto his side as if in sleep he was trying to turn away from his dream. It didn’t work. The dream pursued him, as determined this morning as it had been for the last ten nights. As cruelly persistent as it had been, off and on, since the season had begun. Since the blight had started.
His face and throat were slick with sweat. Beside him, Sarah moaned softly in her sleep, her dreams also troubled, but in a less specific way, as if the content of hidden dreams tainted hers, but somehow in her sleep she was only aware of a sense of threat rather than of the nature of it.
Terry’s hands gripped his pillow with ferocious force, his fingernails clawing at the thick cool cotton as he dreamed….
In dreams Terry was not Terry. In dreams, Terry was something else.
Some.
Thing.
Else.
In dreams, Terry did not lie sleeping next to his wife. In dreams, Terry always woke up and turned to Sarah and…
The part of Terry that was aware that he was dreaming cringed as he watched what the dreaming thing did. That part of Terry cringed and cried out and wept as he watched the thing pull back the covers from Sarah’s sleeping form and bend over her, dark eyes flashing as they drank in her curves and her softness and her vulnerability. The watching Terry tried to scream as the thing opened its mouth — and the sleeping body of Terry Wolfe actually opened his mouth, too — and leaned closer still to Sarah, teeth bared, mouth watering with an awful hunger.
No! the watching Terry screame
d — but the scream only took the form of a choked growl.
It was enough, though. The tightening of his throat and the desperation of his need to cry out snapped the line that tethered him to the nightmare and he popped awake. He lay there, chest heaving, throat raw from the strangled cry, sweat soaking him.
Somewhere behind the curtains morning birds absurdly argued that it was a sunny, wonderful day and all was right with the world. Terry would gladly have taken a shotgun to them.
He sat up, his muscles aching from the long hours of dreaming tension. Sarah was still asleep, curled into a ball, her face buried in a spill of black hair and crumpled pillows. Standing, Terry looked down at her, at her lovely lines, smelling the faintness of her perfume in the bedroom air. He loved her so much that tears burned in his eyes and he wondered — not for the first time — if he should kill himself.
Every morning the idea had more appeal, and every morning it seemed like it would be the best thing he could ever do for her.
Terry wrenched himself away from staring at her and lumbered into the bathroom. He leaned both hands on the cool rim of the sink and stared at his reflection. Every day there was just a moment of dread when he brought his face to the mirror — wondering if today was the day he would see the beast and not the man, if today he would wear the face he wore in his dreams.
It was just his own face. Broad, square, with curly red hair, a short beard that was not as precisely trimmed as it once was. Bloodshot blue eyes that looked back at him, shifty and full of guilt for something he just could not name. He was five weeks shy of forty and normally looked five years younger than that. Now he looked fifty, or even sixty.
He opened the medicine cabinet and selected from among a dozen orange-brown prescription bottles until he found the clozapine, tipped one into his mouth, and washed it down with four glasses of water. The antipsychotic gave him terrible dry mouth. He put another of the pills into a small plastic pill case along with half a dozen Xanax and snapped it shut, feeling edgy and strangely guilty as he did so. He glanced up at the mirror again.
“Good morning, Mr. Mayor,” he said, hating the face he saw, and then he set about washing and brushing and constructing the face he needed everyone else in town to see.
(3)
Crow pulled out of the long Guthrie driveway and turned northeast along Interstate Extension A-32, heading to Old Mill Road and the Haunted Hayride that was nestled back in between the Pinelands College campus and the sprawling southern reach of the great Pine Deep State Forest. He had stopped whistling to himself and was now singing along badly to a Nick Cave CD. As his battered old Chevy, Missy, rolled up between corn farms and berry farms, Crow sang his way through the Bad Seeds’ raucous and obscene version of “Stagger Lee,” a song he could never play in anything like polite company. To Crow, there was nothing particularly strange about starting a lovely late September morning off with a ballad about mass murder and pederasty.
He sang badly and loud and the miles rolled away as the car took the hills and jags and twists of A-32 with practiced ease.
A busload of migrant day workers passed, heading for the Guthrie farm, and Crow tooted to Toby, the driver and crew boss. A few of the workers waved at him and he waved back. Most of them were Haitians and there were half a dozen among them that Henry Guthrie was considering taking on full-time.
Behind the bus were two cars — both with people Crow knew — and beyond them the first of the day’s school buses. It was just hitting 7:00 a.m. and already the town was up and about. Nobody sleeps late in farm country.
Crow’s cell phone beeped — the tune was “I Got My Mojo Working”—and he flipped it open. “Hello, Miss Beechum’s Country Dayschool,” he said.
“Hey there,” Val said. “I just had a very, very nice flashback.”
He turned down the CD player. “Yeah, baby…me too. You are the most delicious woman in the world, you know that?”
“Mmm,” she purred. “You may be a goofball, Mr. Crow, but the things you do to me. Wow.”
“Gotta say that it’s pretty darned mutual. Three times between eleven-thirty last night and six this morning. My oh my. It’s like being eighteen again.”
“I wanted you to know that I’ll be thinking of this morning for the rest of the day. Bye-bye,” she said, and disconnected.
As he drove, Crow’s grin was brighter than the sun that now shone above the distant waving fields of corn.
(4)
In his dreams he was always Iron Mike Sweeney, the Enemy of Evil. In dreams he wasn’t fourteen — he was fully grown and packed with muscle head to toe. No one could possibly stand up to him, and no one dared attack him. He was the agent of Order pitted eternally against the nefarious forces of Chaos. He was the quiet stranger who came to troubled towns and brought rough justice with his lightning fists, flashing feet, and cleverly disguised array of ultra-high-tech weaponry. He was the immortal Soldier of Light who carried the torch of reason and understanding through the growing and malevolent shadows of night. Demons fled before him; vampires would wither into noxious clouds of dust as he turned his Solar Gaze on them. The androids of the Dark Order, powerful as they were, could never match the thunderstorm power in his hard-knuckled hands. Iron Mike was the single most powerful warrior this old world had ever seen.
Even now the Enemy of Evil was holding the Bridge of Gelderhaus against the forces of Prince Viktor and his slavering band of genetic freaks, each of them armed with laser swords and shock-rods.
The battle had raged all night but Iron Mike Sweeney was not tired. His sword arm was as strong and steady as it had been when he drew his titanium rune-blade and braced himself, legs wide, at the mouth of the bridge while behind him the citizens of Gelderhaus cowered. Wave after wave of the genetic Warhounds had come charging him, but time and again Iron Mike’s unbreakable sword had smashed them down and beaten them back. The gorge far below the bridge was choked with their corpses and the river ran red with their radioactive blood.
Now the Warhounds had fallen back and Prince Viktor himself was striding across the bridge, his sword Deathpall in his gauntleted hand. He stopped, just out of sword’s reach, his eyes blazing with hatred, his mouth trembling with frustrated rage.
“You shall not pass!” roared Iron Mike Sweeney in a voice that echoed from the walls on both sides of the gorge.
Hissing with fury, Prince Viktor raised his sword and cried—
“—get the fuck out of bed now or do you want me to come up there?”
The roar jolted Mike out of the dream and his body was obeying before his mind could even process what was going on.
“Do you fucking hear me?”
Mike was on his feet and he hurried to his bedroom door and pulled it open, crying, “I’m up, I’m up!”
At the foot of the stairs Vic Wingate — Mike’s stepfather — stood with a foot on the first step, his hard right hand gripping the banister. “You deaf or something? I have to call you three times before you even bother to acknowledge my existence? What am I — the fucking maid?”
Mike had to head this off at the pass before Vic really got worked up. Though morning beatings weren’t usually Vic’s thing, it didn’t take a whole lot to set him off.
“Sorry, Vic, I was on the toilet with the door closed.”
Vic looked up at him for a moment and the anger gradually turned to a nasty smirk. “Yeah, that figures…I always figured you were full of shit. Well, get your ass down here and have your breakfast. I don’t want to hear about you being late for school.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You have papers after school?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, get them done and get home. Don’t be late.” He leaned on those last three words.
“I won’t.”
Vic gave him a last perfunctory glare and marched off. Relieved, Mike sagged back against his door frame, exhaling the stale air that was pent up in his chest.
Downstairs he heard Vic yelling someth
ing at Mike’s mother, and then the door slamming as he left for work. Vic was the chief mechanic at Shanahan’s Garage in town and he was never later for work even though it didn’t matter what time he got there. Like most people, Shanahan was afraid of Vic and wouldn’t have dared risk pissing him off any more than Mike would.
“Eat shit and die,” Mike whispered to the closed door downstairs.
“Honey?” his mother’s voice called. It wasn’t seven o’clock yet and she already sounded half in the bag. Or maybe she hadn’t sobered up from last night. “Breakfast is on the table.”
“Yeah, I’m coming.” Breakfast would be a box of cereal and some orange juice. Mike went and sat down on the edge of the bed, fingers knotted together, shoulders hunched, staring at the patterns of sunlight on the gray indoor-outdoor carpet on his floor. He tried to remember his dream — something about a bridge — but it was gone. “Just another day,” he said aloud. He said it nearly every morning, usually in the same way, with the same total lack of enthusiasm.
This time, however, he was wrong.
(5)
Tow-Truck Eddie always started his day on his knees. As soon as he got out of bed, even if he had to go to the bathroom, he first dropped onto his knees, right on the cold wood floor, and prayed. He had a number of required prayers he had to say before he could start speaking directly to God, and he recited the Lord’s Prayer precisely fourteen times, which was twice seven — the number of God that was superior to six, the number of the Beast — and then said a rosary, a dozen Hail Marys. He crossed himself seven times, and then laid his head on the floor, his heavy brow pressed against the floorboards, until he heard the voice of God in his head.
Sometimes it would take an hour or more before God spoke to him, and by then his bladder would be screaming at him, but lately — just in the last few weeks — God spoke to him more quickly. Tow-Truck Eddie knew that this was a very good sign, and he suspected that it meant that God would soon be revealing his Holy Mission to him.
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