Ghost Road Blues pd-1

by Jonathan Maberry

  “No!” he snapped, immediately angry with himself. With a grunt of self-disgust he rolled out of bed and went over to the closet, yanked the doors open, and stared inside. The clothes were all neatly folded and precisely stacked. He selected a pair of black sweats and pulled them on, hiding his nakedness, his hands jerking the clothes into place with ferocious shame. After he was dressed, he stood for a while and made himself calm down. The warmth of the cotton sweats changed the tightness of his skin, chasing away the gooseflesh and the shameful erection. He stood with his eyes closed, focusing inward on the events of last night. A smile slowly dawned on his face as the image of the dying man, the Baptizer as Eddie now thought of him, floated with bloody clarity in his mind. It steadied him to think of the Baptizer lying there, covered in blood, broken into all the ritual pieces, arranged in the correct way. Tow-Truck Eddie knew he had done it just right, had gone through the rite in exactly the correct way, and the knowledge of that chased away the baser thoughts of the flesh, of his own flesh.

  He turned around and looked at the shrine that stood framed by shafts of rich golden sunlight. It was as if God had cast a spotlight on it, and it lifted Tow-Truck Eddie’s heart and made his soul soar with joy.

  He crossed the room and knelt in front of the shrine, bowed his head, and prayed for a long time. His prayers were unformed, just random thoughts and images from deep within his being that he offered up to his Father. Outside, birds sang in the dogwood trees and Tow-Truck Eddie thought it was the sweetest thing he had ever heard, like the singing of angels.

  He crossed himself and then reached down for the little mallet and struck the tiny Sanctus bell seven times, because seven was God’s number. The bell, though small, had a clear, high ring and the reverberations wandered gently around the room. Then he reached forward to the small ambry he’d made late last night. It was made from the knotty pine that had formerly been his entertainment center, but Tow-Truck Eddie’s skillful hands — the hands of a carpenter, he reminded himself — had taken that wood and reshaped it from something of pointless value to an object that was most holy. He pulled the doors open, reached inside, and removed the vessels of the Eucharist and placed them on the credence built onto the side of the ambry. He closed the doors and addressed the elements, again crossing himself. He took the paten and placed it on the top of the ambry, which was to be his altar. He had not had time to procure official vessels, and so his paten was a heavy white porcelain dinner plate that he had washed seven times before consecrating it with many prayers. His chalice was a thick pewter boxing trophy he’d won nearly twenty-five years ago. Into it he poured pure water from a bottle of Evian he’d bought at the Wawa for just this purpose; Tow-Truck Eddie did not believe in alcoholic spirits of any kind, not even wine. Finally he lifted the ciborium. It was only a Tupperware container, but it would have to do until he could obtain the real thing. He pried the lid off and removed the Eucharist, holding it in his hands, feeling its weight. He raised it to his nose and filled his nostrils with the scent. It was extraordinary.

  He set it down on the paten and took the knife he had prepared specially for this moment. “When first I came among you,” he said aloud, addressing the whole world, “my blood was shed and my body broken by mine enemies. My blood became your wine and my body became your bread and each of you fed upon me to keep alive the New Covenant. Now I make with you a Final Covenant. No longer shall you drink of my blood or eat of my flesh, but of your blood shall I drink, and of your flesh shall I eat. In this way, the Son of Glory shall know his place, and in this way shall the righteous know their Lord. Today, in your hearing, I declare myself the Son of man, the Son of Heaven’s King, the righteous and unyielding Sword of God. Today, I accept the offering of this man who was beast and man, who was unholy and holy. Today is the first Holy Communion of the Final Covenant. All glory to God the most high!”

  Tow-Truck Eddie carved a thin slice of the Eucharist and held it up even as he lowered his eyes in humility before his Father. He prayed for many long minutes, and then he raised his head and put the Eucharist into his mouth and ate it. When he had eaten, he took the cup, and after he had blessed it, he drank.

  Instantly the power within him seemed to grow, to swell, to explode with the light of a thousand suns in his brain, and he cried out in sheer joy and wonder. Tears ran down his face and his face crumbled into a mask of sobs. He bent down and beat his head against the floor, thanking God.

  It took a long time until he could even raise his head, so great was his joy, so overwhelming was the moment. When he did, he sat for a while and made himself calm down, breathing slowly in and out, sniffing back tears. Then he took a freshly laundered white towel and began cleaning the communion vessels. Last of all, he lifted the Eucharist and returned it to the container. Tow-Truck Eddie was surprised at how large it was, and how heavy, though it was a bit lighter since he had washed all of the Baptizer’s blood off it. He sealed the human heart in the container and returned it to the ambry, satisfied that there would be enough of it to last him for many days. He was not worried about it spoiling; if it came to that he would simply find another. There were always sinners out there.

  After a while Tow-Truck Eddie got up and dressed for his part-time job.

  (6)

  The big cop looked mildly down at him, and then frowned when he saw the bruises on Mike’s face. “Did you get the number of the truck?”

  Mike blinked. “What?”

  “The Mack truck that did that to your face, kid.”

  “Oh,” said Mike, and he forced a fake grin, “I, uh, fell off my bike. Rolled down a hill over some rocks.”

  “And then what? A Mack truck fall on you?”

  “It looks a lot worse than it feels,” Mike lied. “Hardly feel it.”

  “Okay,” said the cop, a knowing skepticism in his eyes. He wore a glossy black nameplate that read GOLUB. “So what can I do for you?”

  Mike nodded at the hospital entrance. “I just want to go in.”

  “To see whom?”

  “Huh?”

  “Increased security, kiddo. Haven’t you been watching the news?”

  “Oh. Yeah. Uh, I’m here to see Mr. Crow. Malcolm Crow.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Mike Sweeney.”

  Golub consulted a clipboard and then shook his head. “Nope. Not on the list, kiddo.”

  “List? What list?”

  “The list of people who are allowed to see Mr. Crow. You, my battered young friend, are not on the list. So, kindly go buzz off.” His smile was pleasant but unyielding.

  “This is stupid. I just want to visit him.”

  “What part of ‘nope’ was beyond your grasp?”

  Mike peered up at him. “Are all cops this weird?”

  “So I am reliably informed.”

  “Shit.”

  “Hey! Watch your mouth, youngster.”

  “It’s not fair that I can’t get to see Crow. Can’t you just let me in? I’m not going to bother him or anything.”

  “Well, Mike Sweeney, do you know how many people today have asked to get in to see Mr. Crow?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “Lots. Do you know how many of them swore that they wouldn’t bother Mr. Crow?”

  “No.”

  “All of them. Now, here’s the bonus question. Do you know how many of them I have admitted into this Hippocratic establishment?”

  “No.”

  “Exactly none,” said Golub. “See that guy over there on the bench? He’s a reporter…and I didn’t let him in either. Now, you seem like a nice kid, so I want you to continue to be nice and nicely buzz off.”

  Mike trudged dispiritedly toward his bike and trying not to wince, he gingerly bent down to open the lock and pull the plastic-coated chain through the spokes. He was just coiling it around the frame below the seat when a shadow blocked the sunlight, and he looked up to see the small dumpy man Officer Golub had mentioned standing over him. The man looked a little l
ike George, the bald guy from those Seinfeld reruns. A red PRESS card was clipped to his jacket lapel.

  “Say, kid, do you mind if I ask you a couple of questions?”

  Mike slowly and carefully got to his feet, his defenses rising and snapping instantly into place. “What for?”

  “I couldn’t help overhearing you talking with that Gestapo agent over there. My name’s Willard Fowler Newton, Black Marsh Sentinel.” He stuck out his hand, and Mike hesitated only for a second or two before accepting it. “I thought I heard you say your name was Mark Sweeney?”

  “Mike Sweeney.”

  “Mike, right, right. Well, listen, Mike, is it true that you know Malcolm Crow, the guy who was shot?”

  “Sure. He’s a friend of mine. I go to his store all the time.”

  “You mean the Crow’s Nest. Place that sells all that Halloween stuff? Well, the thing is, Mar…I mean Mike, I’m doing a story — well, I’m trying to do a story — on the shootings, and I need some background on Mr. Crow and the others. Do you think I could ask you a few questions?”

  Mike hedged.

  “I’ll buy dinner.”

  Mike’s eyes narrowed suspiciously and he took a half step backward, flicking a glance over at the cop.

  “Look, kid, I’m not a kidnapper or child molester. I really am a reporter.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “If you don’t believe me, go and ask Officer Godzilla over there. He’ll tell you.”

  “Look, I got to get home. It’s getting late.”

  “Maybe I could drive you—”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “No! No, nothing like that,” Newton said quickly, holding his hands up, palms outward. He drew in a deep breath and tried again. “Look, kid, I need to get this story in by press time. So, whaddya say, Mike? Just fifteen minutes? We can sit right on that bench over there, in full view of the nice officer.”

  Mike glanced over to the benches, three of which were unoccupied, and on the fourth, the town’s only homeless person, Mr. Pockets, was stretched out, asleep under tented newspapers. He still hedged. “I don’t know what more I can tell you than what the cops would have said. I mean, you already know who got shot and all that, and I guess that you already know that it was probably the Cape May Killer who did it, and—”

  Newton’s hand suddenly closed on Mike’s bruised wrist with such force that Mike actually cried out in pain and jerked back. Officer Golub looked over at them, but Newton instantly let go and this time he backed up a step. While he was doing this his mouth went through a number of shapes and yet he wasn’t able to squeeze out a single word. He stopped, swallowed, licked his lips, and with a glaze in his eyes said, “Wait, wait, go back. What was that you said about the Cape May Killer?”

  “Yeah,” Mike said, nodding, “I mean, I guess it was him. After what the mayor told Mr. Crow and all….”

  Newton looked like he was about to cry. He placed both hands — lightly this time — on Mike’s shoulders. “Mike…has anyone ever told you that you were the greatest person to have ever walked the earth?”

  Chapter 22

  There are shunned places in this world where no one should ever go. Black places where the darkness clings to the sides of trees and the undersides of rocks, like lesions from some ancient disease.

  These places are not consciously shunned; they don’t call enough attention to themselves for that. The oldest and most instinctive parts of our minds avoid them perhaps, just as the hummingbird abhors the dying flower and the bear eschews the diseased fish. Year after year, century after century, they endure. Sometimes they fade away to paleness like the dust on old bones, the malevolent fires banked, almost cold — but never, never going out. Sometimes that dark energy flares, stoked by the deliberately manufactured death of some innocent thing, or by the desire of some hateful heart.

  Such a place can be infused with even greater darkness if enough deliberate evil is enacted there: the blood and tears, fear and malfeasance imprinting the soil and stone and trees, the corruption leaving a stain that no rain or hand can sponge away. There have been houses that have endured and witnessed such horrors that they have become like batteries storing up evil; some battlefields are like that, the blood-soaked soil still vibrating with the echoes of dying heartbeats, cold with the last pale breaths of fallen soldiers who lay and bled and begged for salvation and ultimately cursed God as they died. In a kinder world, such places would be locked away behind impenetrable forests, or buried unreachably deep beneath granite mountains, or lost in the sands of the most remote and forbidding desert. In a kinder world, such malignant places would be fewer and weaker and would not possess the power to reach out into the world of men and whisper the doctrine of darkness, to seduce minds hungry for some corrupt purpose, to inspire tainted hearts to apostolic devotion; but in this world the evidence that such things have happened time and again is all too clearly written in the book of human suffering. In a kinder world such places could be eradicated, made pure, washed clean. In a kinder world, but not this world. These shunned places endure, waiting, patient, and always hungry.

  Black-hearted men who sense this are drawn to these places, and finding them is like coming home.

  The town of Pine Deep lay nestled in the arms of the mountains, overlooking vast forestland and farmland, streams and brooks, the silvery thread of the river, hollows and marshes, and one dark, forgotten, shunned place. It lay southeast of the town, pushed down into the shadows of the three tall hills that stand over the narrow valley known as Dark Hollow.

  There is a place, deep within the hollow, where the ground is always marshy with black mud, the air thick with blowflies and mosquitoes. The leaves and pine needles that lie like a blanket over the swampy ground turn black within seconds of landing there and they give off a stink like rotten eggs and spoiled meat. From beneath the carpet of leaves there is a darker ichor that bubbles up every once in a while and stains the banks of the marsh; the ichor smells like fresh blood but tastes like tears.

  Thirty years ago there was a murder there at the edge of the swamp. A thin black man from the Mississippi Delta and a big white man from Germany, both of whom had traveled long and strange roads to get to that spot, and fought as night fell and the moon rose, and the black man had killed the white man. He beat him down and stabbed him with a stake made from the shattered neck of a blues guitar. The black man buried the white man in the swamp and an hour later he himself was dead, beaten to death by rednecks who thought he was the devil himself and not the man who had saved the whole town from a monster. It was the kind of thing that should have ended up in a song, maybe even a blues song, but no one ever knew about it and no song was ever written to tell about how the Bone Man killed the devil with a guitar.

  For thirty years that swamp lay like a secret, its reality becoming something akin to rumor as the years passed. It was too difficult to get to except by intrepid hikers, and for some reason hikers never went that way. Only one person ever came there, but he came there not as a hiker but as a supplicant, kneeling to worship at the edge of the Dark Hollow swamp.

  Vic Wingate’s soul and mind were as dark and rancid as the muck beneath the leafy covering of that swamp, and he had appointed himself to be the caretaker of that terrible grave. He knew its secrets — had known them since he’d coerced those other men into beating the Bone Man to death. At first he’d thought killing the Bone Man was just revenge, but now he knew that it was part of a master plan so comprehensive that it rolled forward like destiny. He was caught up in it, and he loved it.

  Vic had been part of it even then. Even as a teenager he had belonged heart and soul to the fallen devil at whose graveside he worshiped. When Ubel Griswold had still lived in Pine Deep, Vic had become something between apprentice and lapdog, just as now he had become something between priest and general. As those long years had passed, Vic had labored to keep his secret safe and to prepare the way for those events that were foretold by the dark whispers of the buried dead
; and for his labors the ancient voice of shadows told him many secrets, forcing Vic’s inner eyes to open wide and behold things that were only possible when love and compassion and restraint were abandoned. It spoke to him of a time when even the dreaming dead would awaken and then the whole world — not just the town of Pine Deep — would drown in a tidal wave of blood. In the unsanctified shadows of Dark Hollow the ghost of Ubel Griswold converted Vic Wingate into a believer in the glory of the Red Wave.

  Vic had waited patiently as the years had passed, but over the last few days his heart beat faster, his breath came in short excited gasps because he knew that the waiting was almost over. It was Thursday the thirtieth of September, just one full day since Karl Ruger had come into town like a bad storm, bringing violence and death. In a few hours it would be October, and that was his month. The month of the sleeper beneath the swamp. By the end of October, Vic knew, for the people in Pine Deep, perhaps for all the people in the world, the sands of time would have run out. The first time he’d thought of that it sounded grandiose, but now he understood how it was going to work, and he believed—knew—that it would work. He would be at the Man’s right hand when it happened, a general with more power than kings.

  During the days Vic worked on his cars in Shanahan’s Garage and he thought about that dark, shadowy place, about him who slept there, but who came awake now every night. He could feel the calls the Man sent out every night, the call to other darkly beating hearts, hearts like Vic’s own. Like Karl Ruger’s. Vic knew now that Ruger had been drawn to Pine Deep somehow; the Man had done that by some means that even Vic didn’t understand. Probably Boyd, too; after all, the Man had wanted him and had sent the construct out to fetch him from Guthrie’s farm. Vic knew that every night the dead thing in the swamp burdened the earth with its prophets, and they went forth through the forests and the fertile fields, spreading a perverted gospel to the damned. Vic loved it all, and he loved him — the Man—the sleeper on the threshold of awakening.