Ghost Road Blues pd-1

by Jonathan Maberry

  But this darkness wasn’t to be cursed; it was the answer to the curses his soul and his hate and his rage had invoked.

  The darkness was not formless. It shambled out of the shadows and stood over him, looking down on him, immensely powerful against the distant moon.

  Ruger gasped as he looked up at the thing, trying to calculate its outline, silhouetted against moon and stars. Arms, legs, the body of a man — but the head was all wrong. The head had nightmare proportions, and as the thing bent toward him, Ruger could see it had a long and crooked mouth, a mouth that smiled and smiled. It was the misshapen head of a jack-o’-lantern, carved with a wicked grin and burning eyes.

  Ruger looked into the eyes that he could finally see: eyes that burned like coals, eyes that knew things. The creature reached for him, clamping iron fingers around Ruger’s arms and lifting him bodily off the ground. Pain shot through him, but Ruger didn’t care, didn’t even notice. His whole mind was fixed on the face of horror that leered at him out of the darkness, the face of horror that bent close to his own until he could feel the hot breath of hell blown sourly into his own mouth, up his nose. The thing’s body seemed to writhe and ripple, the clothes bulging and stirring. As Ruger watched, a few insects crept out from between folds of the old suit, and then scuttled back inside. The hands that held him did not feel like human fingers: they were strong, but something was wrong with them. They also rippled in a way Ruger could not understand, as if what was inside was not skin and bone but was instead composed of thousands of separate parts that writhed and scuttled under the cloth. Even he — dissipated, dying, and evil as he was — shuddered at the creature’s touch.

  Yet Ruger did not fight against the thing that held him; wouldn’t, even if he had the power. This was not something he could fight, his rage told him that, but more importantly, this was not something he should fight. Not this thing.

  Ruger, you are my left hand. Again he heard those words echo in his brain.

  Perhaps it was in that moment that Ruger began to understand why he had delayed leaving the Guthrie farm, and why he had let Tony drive the car. Those choices had worked to bring him to Pine Deep, and to keep him here. As the tide of events had swept along tonight he had sensed that some stronger purpose was having its way with him, that some will — stronger even than his — was putting things in motion.

  Ruger, you are my left hand.

  Now Ruger thought he understood, and he accepted what was happening. Welcomed it. The thing that held him in the darkness bent to his accepting ear and whispered terrible secrets in his dying ear.

  After a long time, the night birds were driven to startled flight by the sound of Karl Ruger’s wild laughter.

  Part III

  Dry Bone Shuffle

  Black ghost is a picture, black ghost is a shadow, too.

  Black ghost is a picture, black ghost is a shadow, too.

  You just see him, but you can’t hear him talkin’,

  Ain’t nothing’ else a black ghost can do.

  Lightning Hopkins, “Black Ghost Blues”

  Tombstone is my pillow, cold ground is my bed.

  Blind Willie McTell

  I got an axe-handled pistol on a graveyard frame that shoots tombstone bullets, wearin’ balls and chain. I’m drinking TNT, I’m smoking dynamite, I hope some screwball start a fight.

  Muddy Waters (after Willie Dixon), “I’m Ready”

  Chapter 20

  (1)

  Malcolm Crow was deep down in the darkness and for a long time he did not dream at all, not while they brought him into the E.R. and then up to surgery. He did not dream while they pumped him full of drugs and stitched and swabbed and bandaged his body. He did not dream while he lay in post-op, or for the first few hours after they brought him up to his room.

  It was only later, as the last of the night was wearing thin and dawn was coloring the edges of the horizon, that his mind finally gave way and he dreamed…

  …he was walking through the town and Pine Deep was burning. Many of the stores were blackened shells with their windows blown outward by the heat. Smoke curled upward from the open doorways. The pavement was littered with a smudged scattering of broken bricks, twisted metal awnings, and millions of shards of broken glass.

  Crow walked down the center of Corn Hill. He was dressed in jeans and sneakers and a T-shirt and his clothes were torn and stained with grass and soot and blood. Some of the blood, he knew, was his own; most of it was not. Some of the blood was strangely dark and thick, and it smelled like rotting fish.

  He carried a samurai sword in one hand; the blade was smeared with gore and bent in two places. The sword hung limply from his right hand, the blunted tip tracing a twisted line behind him in the ash that covered the street.

  Above him the sky was as black and featureless as a tarp thrown across the top of the town, and yet he knew that above the black nothing of the clouds there was a moon as white and grim as a bleached skull.

  As he walked down the street, weaving in and out between burning cars, Crow was drawn to the sweet sound of a blues guitar. He strained to hear the song and had to hum a few bars to lock it down. “Hellhound on My Trail.” The old Robert Johnson song but played with a different take on the refrain…less threatening, more wistful.

  No, that wasn’t it. The sound wasn’t wistful, it was sad, like a lament, and as he walked Crow, sang the words.

  “Blues falling down like hail, blues falling down like hail.

  Mmm, blues falling down like hail, blues falling down like hail.

  And the day keeps on remindin’ me, there’s a hellhound on my trail.

  Hellhound on my trail, hellhound on my trail.”

  The music played on and on until the song ended, but then the same song started up again. Crow walked all the way up to the top of Corn Hill and finally stopped at the entrance to the Pinelands College Teaching Hospital. The hospital parking lot was a shambles. Cars were on fire and overturned. An ambulance leaned on two wheels against a police car, crushing the car down onto flat tires. There were hundreds of bodies everywhere.

  Crow looked at the bodies and his heart turned to stone in his chest.

  He knew them.

  He knew every one of them.

  Henry Guthrie sat with his back to a crushed Ford Bronco, his chest peppered with red bullet holes. A few feet away Terry Wolfe lay facedown on a massive and ornately framed mirror, its surface cracked and distorted; none of the images reflected in the shards were of Terry’s face. The image the broken mirror fragments showed was the face of some huge dog. Across the entranceway from where he stood, Mike Sweeney, the kid who delivered his paper, lay with a samurai sword through his chest. Crow looked down at his hand and saw that the sword he carried was now gone. There were so many others he recognized. Friends from town…other store owners…farmers…teachers from the college…staff from the hospital…cops. He knew them all. Or, almost all. There were four bodies he couldn’t put names to, though he felt he ought to know their names. One was a short, chubby young guy who lay in cruciform, his legs straight and arms out to each side. In one hand he held a tape recorder and in the other he held a gun, but the gun was fake. Near him was a very tall black woman who must have once been beautiful but not anymore. She had been savaged by someone. Something. There was so little of her left. Sickened and sad, Crow looked away. Two men lay propped against the wheels of a police car. One was middle-aged and black, the other was younger and white. Both of them had badges looped around their necks on cords and both had guns lying near them. The right hand of the black man and the left hand of the white man were stretched out toward each other and clasped. To Crow it didn’t look like a romantic grasp, but more like the way soldiers might grip each other in the last moments of a firefight gone bad. Crow felt he should know them, and felt sad that they were dead, but he could find no names for them, and so he moved on through the debris and through the dead.

  He looked around, looking for Val…needing to find her
, but needing not to find her like this.

  He walked to the entrance of the hospital and peered inside. There was blood everywhere, and bodies. The slaughter was too horrible to grasp and so Crow’s mind went a little numb and he stared through it, just needing to find Val.

  He was about to step across the threshold when a voice behind him said, “Don’t do it, little Scarecrow.”

  Crow turned, startled by the voice. No one had called him Scarecrow in years. Not since he’d been a little kid.

  There was a man there. He sat on the hood of a burned-out Saab, his bony legs crossed and a guitar lying across his thighs. His face was the color of coffee with just a small drip of milk in it — and Crow knew that this was how the man once described himself — and he wore his hair in a late 1970s style Afro. The man wore brown work pants and a white cotton shirt unbuttoned halfway down his thin chest. There were small pink scars on the man’s chest and on his hands. His hands were very large for so thin a man.

  Crow looked at him.

  “You don’t want to go in there, Scarecrow,” said the man. He was smiling, but his smile was sad.

  “I have to find Val,” Crow said.

  “Yeah, you do,” agreed the man. “But you don’t want to go into that hospital. Val ain’t in there…and you don’t want to meet what is in there. Believe me when I tell you.” The guitar player had a strong Mississippi drawl, and it was deep and soft and Crow liked the sound of it.

  “I know you, don’t I?” he said.

  “Yeah, boy, you did. An’ I’m sorry as all hell to tell you that you’re probably gonna have to get to know me again.”

  “Were we friends?” Crow said. His voice sounded dreamy and on some level he knew that meant that the dream was coming to an end.

  “Yeah, little Scarecrow…I guess we was at that.”

  “Do you know where Val is?”

  “Yeah, I know, but she ain’t here, man. You gonna have to keep looking for her. You gotta find her, man, ’cause these is evil times and she’s the heart. You may be the fist, but she’s the heart. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  Crow shook his head.

  “Do you remember…a long time ago I told you something about good and evil?”

  “I…don’t remember.”

  “Don’t worry, you will. Now, listen close, little man,” the man said and leaned forward over his guitar, his voice dropping to a whisper, “you gotta know this.”

  Crow leaned closer, too.

  “Evil…it don’t never die,” the bluesman said and looked left and right before adding. “Evil don’t die. It just waits.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Yeah, you do, but you don’t want to understand.” The man leaned back and laughed. “Hell’s a-coming, little Scarecrow. Hell’s a-coming and we all gotta learn to play the blues. ’Cause you know…it’s all the blues, man.” He grinned and strummed his strings. “Everything’s always about the blues.”

  Crow drifted on into another dreamless place, but the sound of the blues followed him.

  (2)

  Outside the hospital window the dawn had given way to brilliant sunshine and a warm breeze out of the southeast. The rain had scrubbed the air clean and standing in the window of Crow’s room, Terry could see for miles. He hardly remembered seeing a morning so clear. Birds were singing, the nurses who came and went were smiling, and everything had a veneer of freshness and vitality.

  Terry loathed it. He personally felt dirty and grubby and old. His clothes were a mess, his hands shook, and when he’d gone into the little bathroom to throw water on his face his reflection looked like a street person. He popped a Xanax and shambled back into Crow’s room and sank down into the chair.

  Crow had awakened around dawn and Terry had filled him in on most of the night’s events, but as he talked Crow’s eyes kept drifting shut and Terry had no idea how much of it his friend had absorbed. A nurse came in, woke Crow up, and then gave him a sedative — a hospital policy Terry had never quite grasped the logic of — and Terry sat by the bedside and watched Crow sleep, feeling wretchedly guilty.

  He felt that by sending Crow to the hayride he’d somehow been party to Ruger’s attack on the Guthries. Maybe if Crow had just gone out to Val’s as he’d planned Henry would still be alive and the rest of the Guthrie family—and Crow — would not be in various rooms in this hospital. On the surface he knew that such thinking was absurd, that no one could really ascribe any of the blame to him, but his deeper self refused to let go of the notion, and for that reason he could not bring himself to leave Crow’s side.

  As he sat there he wondered how long he would have to wait before he popped another Xanax. The first one was really not doing him much good and he was using every ounce of his willpower not to scream.

  (3)

  There was nothing rewarding about waking up, so Crow gave it up and passed out again. He slept for hours and dreamed that someone was sitting by his hospital bed, playing blues to him on a sweet-sounding old slide guitar.

  A couple of hours later he gave it another try and opened his eyes. This time the pain in his head wasn’t quite so sharp, and the nausea seemed to have ebbed — but every other part of his body hurt like hell, and his entire waist felt constricted and on fire.

  He jacked open one eye and peered around until he saw Terry Wolfe sprawled in an orange plastic chair a few feet away. Terry had his ankles crossed and propped up on a small table, thick arms folded across his chest. His tie hung limp, his red hair was badly combed, and he looked like he’d slept in his suit in an alleyway. He had a copy of the Black Marsh Sentinel folded on his lap. “Good morning,” he said.

  “Ug,” Crow said with a dry throat. “You’re a picture to wake up to.”

  Terry’s smile made him look old and thin and miserable. “How d’you feel?”

  “Like shit.”

  “That’s pretty much how you look.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Almost ten,” Terry said, then added, “In the morning.”

  “You been here all night?”

  “No,” Terry said, gesturing at his clothes, “as you see I went home and changed into my best dinner jacket.”

  Crow licked his dry lips and Terry took the cup of ice water off the bedside table and held the straw up to him. Crow sipped, sighed, sipped again, and then nodded.

  “Don’t get used to me waiting on you,” Terry said, replacing the cup. As he sat down again he peered assessingly at Crow. “You faded out on me earlier. Don’t know what you heard or didn’t hear.”

  “About what happened? I dunno.” His faced clouded as he tried to think through the cobwebs. He gave a sad sigh as the pieces fell back into place. “Ah, jeez,” he murmured. “I know Henry’s dead. And Val, Mark, and Connie are all here in the hospital. Remind me again…does Val know about her dad?”

  “Yeah,” Terry said. “I told her last night, but she was wired to the eyeballs with morphine, so I had to go through it again this morning. She took it as well as somebody can, but that isn’t saying much. She’s pretty torn up.”

  “When will they let me in to see her?”

  Terry shook his head. “I asked Saul Weinstock earlier, but he said that you shouldn’t get out of bed for at least a full day. Besides, they have her pretty heavily sedated. I think letting her rest would be a greater kindness, Crow.”

  Crow nodded, but he didn’t like it. “I can’t believe that son of a bitch got away. This is too weird for me, man. I feel like I dreamed all this shit. When I woke up this morning — I think I must have been coming out of the recovery room — I thought I was back in my drinking days and waking up after a bender. I still feel like I’m half in the bag.” And, God, could I use a drink right now! he thought, aching for a Jack Daniel’s neat and an icy schooner of Sam Adams.

  “Almost be nice if that’s all it was.”

  “How’s that officer? The one who was shot? Rhoda?”

  Terry frowned. “She’s alive, d
oing okay. They took a couple of slugs out of her, but she’s young and that’ll probably count for something.”

  “What about Val’s family?”

  Shadows drifted across Terry’s face and he rubbed his eyes. “Connie was roughed up pretty badly. Not raped, thank God, but smacked around and terrorized. They admitted her and she’s still under sedation. Mark’s here, too. He has a broken nose, lost two teeth, and is suffering from shock, but he’ll be fine.”

  “Jesus. No trace at all of Ruger?”

  Terry drew in a breath, held it, and then blew it out. He shook his head. “Nope. They didn’t find a single trace of him except some footprints that went nowhere and then vanished into some mud puddles and that was that. I mean, Val backed up your story that it was definitely Karl Ruger, which the cops are finding hard to take. They can’t wrap their minds around the idea that you were able to fight him, or that you shot him. As far as that goes, by the way, the general consensus is that either you missed, or that he was wearing a vest of some kind and all your shots did was bang him around a little and then drive him off.”

  “That son of a bitch,” he said in a soft hiss. “I should have killed him with my hands. I should have made sure. It’s my fault that kid Rhoda got shot, and it’s my fault Henry’s dead. If I’d killed him, then we might have gotten to Henry in time.”

  “Oh, give it a rest, Crow,” Terry said wearily. He rubbed his red-rimmed eyes. “Last night you did more than anyone else, so skip the what-ifs. Right now you have to focus on getting well and on being there for Val. She’s in pretty rocky shape.” He tried on a smile but it didn’t seem to fit. “Besides, you’ve survived two gunshots and lived to ride off into the sunset like a real hero.”

  “Oh, big deal. A graze on one love handle and a bullet graze on my hip. Even the recovery room nurse told me it was nothing. Five measly stitches and a bone bruise.”

  “For which you should thank your lucky stars. Couple inches over and it would have punched a big hole in your kidney. Plus you look like you’ve been mugged by a whole platoon of prizefighters.”