This morning his head had barely touched the cool wood when God’s voice thundered in his brain.
Today, my child! it said. The Voice of God was almost too loud to bear and Eddie’s head rang with it.
“Yes, my Lord. I am thy instrument. Command me to the holy purpose.”
You are my faithful servant, God said, and you are my holy instrument on earth. Do you know this?
“Yes, my Lord.”
You are the enemy of the Beast. Do you know this?
“Yes, my Lord.”
You are the Hand of Righteousness. Do you know this?
“Yes, my Lord.”
You are the Sword of God. Do you know this?
“Oh, yes, my Lord!”
When the Hand of Righteousness beholds the Beast, what is thy holy purpose?
“To destroy him, my Lord! I am the servant of God!”
And if the Beast should take another form?
“Satan is the Father of Lies. The Beast is the Father of Lies. With God as my Lord I shall see through his disguise and know the Beast — and knowing him I will destroy him, for such is the will of God.”
And if the Beast were to appear as an ordinary man?
“I would destroy him, for the Beast is the Father of Lies. Such is the will of God.”
And if the Beast were to appear as a woman?
“I would destroy him, for the Beast is the Father of Lies. Such is the will of God.”
And if the Beast were to appear as a child?
“I would destroy him, for the Beast is the Father of Lies. Such is the will of God.” This was an old litany between them, and only once, in the very beginning, had Tow-Truck Eddie hesitated — just for a moment — at this point, but not today. Now his voice was strong, filled with clarity and purpose.
And to this holy purpose do you dedicate yourself?
“I am the instrument of the Lord and his will is as my own. With my body, my heart, and my immortal soul shall I serve the will of the Lord.”
In my servant I am well pleased.
Gratitude flooded through Eddie and he wept, his head still pressed to the floor.
See this face. This is the face of the Beast that was.
A man’s face appeared in Eddie’s mind — a thin black man with blood on his clothes. Eddie knew him at once. This was the face that the Beast had worn thirty years ago — the face he’d worn when he had cut a bloody swatch through the town. Eddie knew that face, had confronted him and had given him a chance to confess his evils, but the man had lied again—the Beast is the Father of Lies—and Eddie had struck him down. Other men had been there to help, but Eddie had struck the most telling blow. The killing blow.
The Beast has returned and wears a new face.
Eddie jumped. Always before the litany had ended at this point, but this was new and his flush of gratitude changed, becoming an immediate charge of thrilling electricity. God’s voice was filled with rage and Eddie trembled.
This then is the new face of the Beast. Look upon the face of the Beast and behold his deceptions.
Tow-Truck Eddie raised his face an inch, two inches, then a foot, and stared into the empty air. Instantly there was an image there — not floating in the air or described in the grain of the boards — but burning in his mind. A figure, slight and shabby, in jeans and a baggy windbreaker. It was a young person, a boy of no more than thirteen or fourteen, with curly red hair and pale skin and dark blue eyes. He was riding a bicycle along the black wavering length of a road that Eddie knew only too well. A-32.
Behold the Beast! roared the voice of God with such thunder that Eddie’s nose began to bleed.
Eddie pawed the blood away, wiping it on his thigh as he stared at the image in his mind.
“I am the Sword of God,” he croaked through the agony in his skull. “I am the instrument of the Lord and his will is as my own. With my body, my heart, and my immortal soul shall I serve the will of the Lord.”
This is your holy task…this is the mission for which you were born unto the earth.”
Blood flowed freely now from both nostrils but Eddie didn’t care. Through a throat choked with blood and while tears streamed down his face, he said, “I am the Sword of God…thy will be done!”
(6)
“How was last night’s take?” Crow asked as he gassed up one of the hayride’s utility ATVs. Coop was sitting on the top step of the porch out in front of the souvenir shop. “Terry told me they were supposed to bus in some kids from Doylestown.”
“Yeah, they brought the whole senior class from the high school,” Coop said. He was Terry’s brother-in-law and though he was hardly the sharpest nail in the tool kit, Crow liked him. “We were up about eight percent of the daily average, which is what Terry’ll like to hear. Though I guess you’d be happy to know that three of the girls came close to getting hysterical from screaming.”
Crow grinned as he screwed on the cap. “We aim to please.”
“You think Terry’s ever gonna come out here and see what you’ve done to the place?”
The Pine Deep Haunted Hayride was the largest and most profitable such attraction in the country. Terry had a staff of over a hundred teenagers and adults, he charged a frightening fee for tickets, had an amazing concession stand that sold everything from pumpkin-flavored milkshakes to Ghoul Burgers, and he carted the cash to the bank more or less in a wheelbarrow. Every year the place made newspapers all up and down the East Coast, and every year the major TV stations from Philly, Harrisburg, and New York did special segments on it. Yet, he never went to his own hayride, not even to inspect it in daylight hours.
“Not a chance. You know Terry.”
Five years ago he’d paid Crow a fat piece of change to design it and had kept him on the payroll as a consultant. Except for counting the receipts and signing the paychecks of the staff, Terry otherwise ignored the hayride. Weird, Crow mused, then thought with wry amusement that Pine Deep was probably the only town in America where a healthy dis-interest in the macabre was considered strange. Very, very weird.
“I was over there for dinner the other night,” Coop mused, “and I asked him about it. Want to take a guess at what he said?”
“Shit, I can tell you his exact words. He dropped into an approximation of Terry’s voice and said, “That hayride’s just a cash cow for me.”
“Yep.”
“He says that about fifty times a season.”
“Yep.”
“I’m heading out to the Zombie graveyard,” Crow said, straddling the ATV. “I wanted to boost the smoke machine a bit and maybe repaint the blood on the crypt walls.”
“Well, don’t make it too real,” Coop said. “You’ll be giving these kids heart attacks.”
Crow shook his head. “My idea of the absolutely perfect version of this hayride is one where the tourists have to take out insurance beforehand and get CPR afterward. Then I’ll be happy.” He started the ATV and gunned the engine.
“Hell, you’re more’n halfway there now.”
“Not good enough!” Crow yelled, and headed out into the vast tract of corn and pumpkin fields that was home to his hayride. As he rode, even though it was drowned out by the roar of the engine, he started humming “Black Ghost Blues” again, totally unaware that he was doing it.
Chapter 2
(1)
That year the monsters came to town a whole month before Halloween. The monsters didn’t wear costumes. No Shreks or Jedi Knights, no Harry Potters or Orc Warriors, no Aragorns or Captain Jack Sparrows. These monsters weren’t white-sheeted ghosts peering hopefully out of eyeholes cut in old percale; they weren’t hockey-masked slaughterers of young virgins; they weren’t four-foot-high tottering Frankensteins with Kmart plastic faces. They didn’t caper from house to house with pumpkin-headed flashlights or ghostly green glow-sticks. None of them carried paper sacks filled with ghoulish gatherings of Snicker’s bars, sandwich bags full of pennies, apples, and snack-sized Three Musketeers.
Th
ey were monsters all the same.
They blew into town on a Halloween wind, coming into Pine Deep along the black length of Extension Route A-32, whisking over Black Marsh Bridge and through the cornfields. They came in a black car that had bloodstains on the door handles and the single unblinking black eye of a bullet hole on the driver’s door. The monsters came rushing into town like a storm wind, pushing cold air before them and dragging darkness behind.
There were three monsters in the car. Two of them sat in the front, a third crouched in the back. They all had their monster faces hunched low into the collars of their coats, hidden by the shadows of their hat brims. They were silently snarling, these three monsters. The monster in the backseat bared his teeth in desperation and fear; the monster behind the wheel bared his teeth in pain and hopelessness; but the monster in the front passenger seat bared his teeth in a grin of pernicious delight.
The black car flew with a raven’s speed along the dark road, but it did not fly with a raven’s precision: it veered and swayed and staggered from one side of the road to the other as if the monster who drove did not know how to control the machine. Yet it continued to drive fast for all its careening and swerving. In it the three silent, hungry monsters rolled into Pine Deep as night closed around the town like a fist.
But there were other monsters in Pine Deep that night. It was that kind of town.
These others did not need to come to town in a bloodstained black car; they were already there, had always been there. One drove through town every day in his own machine, a monstrous wrecker with a gleaming hook; another one labored all day repairing expensive cars and trucks, and labored all night to destroy precious hearts and souls; one walked around town and smiled at everyone and he never knew that a monster looked out of his laughing blue eyes, waiting, waiting…
One monster, the worst of all, waited in darkness under wormy dirt, awake now after a long, long sleep.
There were many other monsters in Pine Deep.
Waiting. All of them, waiting.
(2)
Lightning singed the edges of the dark thunderheads, but no rain fell; thunder rumbled distantly, shaking the trees and shaking thousands of soot-colored night birds into startled flight. They swarmed like locusts and then flew back toward the trees, believing themselves safe when the lightning flashed.
One night bird peeled off from the flock and soared through the raw air until it leveled off just above the tips of the corn, skimming along on the breeze, flapping its dark wings only occasionally. It was a ragged bird, its shape defined more by shadows than substance. The fields whisked along beneath it and when it reached the end of one farmer’s lot it veered left, drifting across the knobbed expanse of a pumpkin patch. All of the best pumpkins were already gone, picked and sold to supermarkets in Philadelphia and Doylestown, awaiting the jack-o’-lantern surgeons and the bakers of autumn pies. Only the ugly pumpkins remained, the pumpkins too gnarled and deformed for sale as decorations, too diseased to be welcome on any table.
This year there had been more diseased ones than the good kind; this year all across the township and its outlying farmlands hundreds of tons of pumpkins lay rotting, along with truckloads of fetid corn and wormy apples. It was a blighted year for Pine Deep, what the old folks called a Black Harvest, and they unearthed all the tales — short or tall — about the pestilential harvest of thirty years ago, of bad times come again.
The ugly pumpkins squatted in row after hideous row, or stood in huge mounds like heads piled high after a great battle. The night bird circled the biggest mound once, twice, and then veered off again, rediscovering the black road and following it up and over a series of small hills. More cornfields stretched away on either side of the road, and here and there darkened farmhouses began the ritual of turning on lights to combat the invasion of night shadows. The lights did not make the houses look safe and homey: they made them seem impossibly lonely, as if each house were the only house in the whole world, alone and lost in the eternal sea of dryly whispering corn.
The night bird uttered a strange, high shriek; not a caw, but a sound more like the wail of an abandoned and terrified child. The shrill sound floated through the night air, and the people inside the farmhouses, the ones who allowed themselves to hear it or could not block it out, shivered as if some dark and shambling thing were breathing its damp breath on their naked skin. None of them would forget to lock their doors that night, even if they were unaware of the subliminal dread that wail had sown in the soil of their hearts.
One farmhouse, older than the others, more battered by time and cold winds and disinterest, stood at the edge of a vast cornfield and overlooked a couple of acres of flat ground enclosed by a low stone wall. The ivy-covered stone wall embowered a small and disheveled cemetery in which the rows of shadow-painted tombstones stood in snarls of bracken and pernicious weeds. Wailing again, the night bird flew low over the cracked and wind-sanded headstones, circling and circling. No lights shone in the window of the old house. No lights had shone there in months, nor might ever show there again. Only shadows lived there, stirred now and again by the frigid breath of old ghosts. The night bird wailed yet again and flapped noisily toward a tree where it settled on a twisted and gnarled branch that reached out toward the tombstones. In daylight the fading colors of the leaves would have made the promise of beauty, but by starless night the leaves were a uniform and featureless black, forming nothing more than an amorphous bulk against which the night bird disappeared entirely.
The night bird turned a single black eye toward one headstone that leaned drunkenly just below the tree. It had been pushed off-balance by the roots of the tree but was held fast to the ground by one sunken corner and its own ponderous weight. It was a simple tombstone, blocky and gray and cheap, thirty years old and unkindly worn by each of those thirty winters. Chiseled into its face was a name: OREN MORSE.
Below that, a single word had been cut into the lifeless stone: REST. No date, no other inscription. The wind blew brambles and fallen leaves across the grave and one dry leaf, propelled by the vagaries of the breeze, skittered upward to the top of the gravestone and then tumbled over and off into the shadows beyond. Except for the murmuring wind and the whisper of the cornstalks, there was no sound. Even the night bird held its tongue.
Then a man was there.
He stepped out of a shadow and was abruptly there. The night bird let out a startled cry and fluttered its wings, but did not fly away. The man stood quietly looking down at the headstone, his gray lips moving as he read the name. He was scarecrow thin and dressed in a cheap black suit that was smeared with dirt. He wore no topcoat, no hat. His skin was as gray as the gravestones around him, but there was no moon now to shine on it. Still, that pale skin seemed to cast its own weird light. He held his hands loosely at his sides, and every once in a while those long fingers twitched and clutched as if grasping something, or desiring to.
Then he reached down into the shadows behind the tombstone and when he straightened he held the long neck of a battered old blues guitar in his hand. He looped the strap over his shoulder and drew his slender fingers along the silver strings. The friction made a sound like old door hinges creaking open.
Abruptly the whole graveyard was caught in the harsh white glare of headlights as a car crested one of the small hills and rushed down the other side toward the graveyard. The lights shimmered through the trees and danced along the tips of the corn, casting weird capering shadows. The gray man turned, watching as the car drew near, passed, and drove on. The car was moving very fast and swerving as if the driver was drunk. Three shadowy figures hunched in the car’s seats, two in the front, one in the back. Tires squealed as the car careered along the road, sashaying from one lane to the other and back, and then finally settling on a course dead center, as if the grill were devouring the single yellow line. The machine roared past a large billboard that read:
THREE MILES TO PINE DEEP, THE MOST HAUNTED TOWN IN AMERICA…WE’LL SCARE YOU
SILLY!
If the men in the car noticed the sign, they gave no indication. Their shadowed heads didn’t turn as they passed the sign, the engine never slowed. The car clawed its way up the far hill, and in a few minutes the taillights were gone, fading first to tiny red dots, like rat’s eyes, and then vanishing altogether. A minute later the sound of the engine was gone as well.
The man in the graveyard stared into the distance, his eyes squinting as if he could still distantly see the car, though it was impossible in those deep shadows. His eyes lingered briefly on the billboard and the irony was not lost on him.
Again lightning flickered behind the clouds. In the tree, the night bird shivered its wings and uttered its strange wailing cry.
With a final lingering glance at the tombstone, the thin man tugged on the strap so that the guitar hung behind him, with the neck hanging down low behind his right hip; then he turned and began walking. He walked slowly and without haste, his long legs maintaining a steady, deliberate pace, like that of a pallbearer. He stepped onto the road and began walking in the direction taken by the car and its three passengers. His shoes made no sound on the blacktop. Lightning flashed again and again, a deception of a storm, but the storm was elsewhere. The lightning cast brief but bold shadows across the road, the wall of the graveyard, the gnarled tree, the night bird…everything starkly cast its shadow onto the blacktop. Everything except the man who walked without making a sound.
With slow and measured steps, he climbed the long hill and was soon lost in darkness. The night, and the night bird, followed after.
(3)
“Jesus Christ, Tony!” Boyd yelped, gripping the back of the driver’s seat with his one good hand. “Watch it!”
Tony Macchio wrestled the wheel and pulled the car back into the right-hand lane, missing the oncoming milk truck by inches. The car swayed drunkenly on its springs as Tony fought to steady it with clumsy hands. His fingers were caked with dried blood, and they felt cold and weak. He could barely even feel the knobbed arc of the steering wheel.
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