The Dead Man: Ring of Knives

by James Daniels

  The second before it hit him, Mr. Dark split into two Mr. Darks, and the knife sailed harmlessly between them.

  "Asexual reproduction, Matt. Highly underrated."

  "Get the fuck out of here."

  "What'sa matter, handsome? Three's a crowd?"

  Three. Matt flashed a look back to Annica. She was still standing there, arms crossed against her chest. He couldn't see her expression in the fog.

  Mr. Dark's four eyes followed his. "Nice little morsel you've got there." He slid the flashlight farther under his chin, so that everything disappeared but his cruel, clown-slit mouth and the hook of his nose. He looked like the skull of Mr. Punch. "Tell you what," he whispered. "I know a nice little culvert near here. Lots of atmosphere. Whatta ya say we show her a night on the town, then split her fifty-fifty? Heads for me, tails for you." He gave Matt a whoremaster's grin. "Deal?"

  "The only deal I'll make with you is this," Matt said. "Listen carefully: if you divide yourself into a cop and a construction worker and an Indian chief, and do the YMCA? I will give you fifty dollars, cash."

  Mr. Dark's red eyes got redder.

  "You're pretty funny for a dead man, Matt."

  "And you're pretty skinny for a windigo, or whatever the fuck you are." Matt took in Mr. Dark's hollow cheeks and his tight, white skin. Remembered Dindren saying, The Otherworld, Matt, has rules like ours. Under special circumstances, its citizens are required to answer truthfully.

  Mr. Dark stared at him, the twin fires in his eyes glittering patiently. Like he's waiting for me to ask him something, Matt realized. But what?

  The answer came to him immediately. Matt had to know if he was Mr. Dark's locus or his host. Had to. Dindren may have been batshit crazy, but if there was even one chance in a million that he was right, and there was a way to stop this carnage from happening, Matt had to take that chance—whatever the cost.

  So . . . What was the question Dindren said should have been posed to the Grail? The one he'd have only one chance to ask?

  Matt racked his brains. Jesus, of all the things to forget.

  "I'm waiting." Mr. Dark's tongue flickered out. It was flat, black, and pointed. Matt glimpsed the back of his throat, which was lined with row upon row of sharp teeth, like a great white's.

  Christ.

  Suddenly it came to him, the Grail question: Whom do you serve?

  He licked his lips.

  "Got a question?" Mr. Dark asked.

  "As a matter of fact, I do." Matt took a breath. "Who . . . ?"

  Matt paused a moment. Was he the locus or the host? A lot was riding on the answer. If locus, then he'd be condemned to a lifetime of wandering alone, trying to avert havoc in order to starve a parasitic demon that he couldn't ever hope to understand. If host . . .

  "Who . . . ?" he said.

  If host, he'd have to kill himself. As soon as possible. Go find that carving knife, put it to his throat, and lose everything he knew, or would know, of the world. Including Janey. Because beat-up and crazy and frightened as he was, he was all that was left of her.

  Feeling weaker now. The impossibility of not being weighing down his tongue.

  "Who . . . ?"

  Mr. Dark raised a skeptical eyebrow. Lifted his hand and mimed knocking. In a deep purr: "Knock, knock, Matty-boy?" When Matt didn't answer, Mr. Dark answered for him, in a high, childish voice: "Who's there, Mr. Dark?"

  One more chance. Matt, shaking, forced it out. "Who . . . ?"

  Mr. Dark, with a wide-eyed, exaggerated wink: "Who who?"

  Hoo-ooh, OOH-HOOH!

  Hoo-ooh, OOH-HOOH!

  Matt looked up. High above him: an owl in a tree, with glowing red eyes. It spread its black wings and took flight.

  Matt looked back down. Mr. Dark was gone.

  He turned slowly in a circle, staring into the foggy dark.

  Nothing.

  Dindren's words came to mind: Ask the right question . . . You will not get a second chance.

  Matt's jaw tightened as he stared into the black void around him, and the highway that ran endlessly through it.

  "All right, you fucker," he said. "We do it the hard way."

  # # # # # #

  "Who were you talking to?" Annica asked when he crossed back over the highway.

  "You mean the trooper?"

  "What trooper?"

  He looked at her, then looked away. "Do me a favor, kid: just stick out your thumb."

  # # # # # #

  An eighteen-wheeler filled with Borden milk squealed to a stop five minutes later. The driver was delighted to see Annica waving him down. He was less delighted to see Matt trudge up behind her, looking like something that had crawled out of a crypt. But when Annica made it clear that they were a package deal, he finally relented.

  "Wet as hell tonight," he pointed out grumpily as Matt followed the blonde up onto the big vinyl seats and slammed the door.

  Matt grunted as he scanned the driver quickly. He looked like a skinny Santa: blue eyes, white beard, wire-rim glasses. The comparison ended with his sinewy frame and Jimmy Page T-shirt, which said "Ramble On." But no lesions, wounds, swellings. He smelled of Old Spice, wore no sunglasses: behind wire-rims, his blue eyes were guileless—and unbeetled.

  Matt settled in, reached for the seat belt.

  The big engine rumbled as the driver threw it into gear and leaned on the pedal.

  "How far you goin', missy?" he asked the girl.

  "As far as he does," she said, nodding towards Matt. "I'm with him."

  "Huh-uh," Matt said. "We're dropping her off at the next town."

  Annica leaned close to him, touched his arm. "We make a good team, Matt," she said in a voice almost inaudible over the rumble of the engine. "Freaks like us, with no one else in the world . . ."

  Matt pressed his forehead against the window. The cool glass felt good against his hot brow. After a night of battles, this was one too many. He'd find somewhere safe to leave her, someone sane to take her in. He may have failed to unlock the secret of Mr. Dark's nature, but he could at least do that much.

  A silence followed, filled with nothing but the hum of eighteen wheels on wet macadam. Then the skinny Santa spoke up. "S'pose it's not too much to ask how ya bloodied yourself up like that?"

  Matt sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. "Fight over a girl," he said.

  "Same old story," the driver snorted, shaking his head. "Girl comes along on a Friday night, and everybody thinks he's a hero."

  "Buddy," Matt said quietly, "you don't know how right you are." And he stared through the window at his reflection and, beyond it, amid a break in the ghostly black pines, the unblinking eyes of a white stag.

  THE END . . .

  UNTIL THE NEXT ADVENTURE OF THE DEAD MAN

  Here's an excerpt from HELL IN HEAVEN, book #3 in the DEAD MAN saga

  CHAPTER ONE

  Heaven.

  That's what the sign at the exit said. Heaven, Washington, elevation 5100 feet, population 136. Except that the last digit had been crossed out, and replaced with a seven, followed by an exclamation point in black spray paint.

  Matt hadn't intended to stop this morning. His plan was to ride straight on through the day, stopping only for gas when he saw a station, keep going until he was too tired to stay on the bike. These mountains were beautiful, but he wasn't here for the scenery. He was on a mission.

  He'd started out hitchhiking, but quickly got frustrated at how much time he was spending standing on the sides of empty roads. So he used three quarters of his cash to buy a slightly dented ten year old Buell Blast motorcycle from the widow of its last owner and headed out Route 20 on two wheels. That took him across the Cascades in the northern part of the state and kept him away from the big cities. He didn't know where he would find Mr. Dark, but he was pretty sure that a man – if that was what Mr. Dark was – who thrived on evil would find himself more comfortable in a major metropolitan area than Matt, whose one foray to Seattle for his 21st birthday had left him st
unned by the number of people who could be packed into one small place.

  At first, the freedom had been exhilarating. It was just him, the bike, and the open road. He'd spent his entire life – and his entire death – in a small town in a small corner of a small state. Now the world spread out in front of him.

  Trouble was, it kept spreading. Matt rode his entire first day without seeing another person, except for the long-haulers way up in the cabs of their logging trucks. The second day wasn't any different, except that his muscles were stiffer. By the end of the third he could barely bring himself to set up his small tent.

  None of this would have mattered if things had been going more as he'd assumed. He'd figured that as soon as he hit the road he'd see signs of evil everywhere and they'd lead him directly to Mr. Dark.

  But if Mr. Dark was out there, he was doing a good job of hiding himself.

  He'd already used his only lead, and he hadn't come across anything that looked like a second. The bike might have been faster than trying to hitch rides, but it still wasn't getting him anywhere. When he set out that morning, he decided to give this one more day, and if nothing happened spend some quality time working on plan C.

  Matt had been going for a little more than an hour when he saw the sign. Heaven, next exit, five miles ahead.

  It almost made him break out laughing. What better place for a dead man to pass a little time than Heaven? If nothing else, it would be a break in the monotony.

  Matt took the hard right turn off the highway and found himself on a one-lane road that wound even higher into the mountains. It twisted and turned for what felt like hours, and Matt began to think he'd made a mistake taking the exit.

  Then the road straightened out. He crested a small hill, and then gasped in shock as he saw the tiny town spread out in front of him.

  It wasn't the place itself that took his breath away, although Heaven wasn't exactly what he'd expected. He'd been through enough of these tiny Cascades towns to anticipate the mix of tumble-down shotgun shacks and sagging double wides, the second-tier fast food franchise next to the shuttered video rental outlet and the not-quite-super-store with its bargain prices across the street from the struggling local market, the one that still carried animal feed and replacement parts for wood-burning stoves and all those other bits and pieces that no one could be bothered to mass produce in China.

  Heaven seemed to have skipped the commercial revolution of the late 20th century. There was a general store that, from its hand-painted and weathered signs advertising feed and tack, tackle and firewood, seemed to be strictly local. If Dairy Queen or Foster's Freeze had ever established a beachhead here, they had been driven out by Mabel's Eat Fresh Diner Café, which looked like it had stood on its corner for a century.

  As Matt glanced up the short main street he realized that there wasn't anything here that didn't look like it had been built before the invention of modern construction materials and techniques. None of the pre-fab structures that had polluted the main street of even so insignificant a town as the one he'd grown up in. The storefronts were all wood and peeling paint. Matt couldn't see much down the few dirt roads that extended off the main drag, but what he did see was mostly small bungalows, well-maintained but tiny, with metal chimneys for the wood stoves and nothing that suggested indoor plumbing.

  That was only slightly strange. There were probably dozens of similar little villages scattered all through the Cascades, logging towns that had thrived briefly during one boom or another, then faded away over the years. If there was anything weird about this town it was only that the state had bothered to put up a sign at the highway exit.

  And it was no real surprise that the main street was deserted. For all he could tell, Heaven might have been abandoned decades ago. Or maybe it had been built as a set for some movie that had come and gone while he'd been dead, and these buildings were nothing but facades left to melt away in the rain and snow.

  What took Matt's breath away, what hit him with such force it nearly threw him back over the end of the motorcycle, was the banner that hung over main street, stretched between the grocery store and the bank.

  The banner that read: WELCOME HOME MATT.

  CHAPTER TWO

  As Matt's bike moved closer to the banner, he began to realize that this town wasn't deserted. There were people in all the windows.

  Not that he saw any of them. Not directly, anyway. They seemed to be hiding behind doors and curtains and blinds. But every time he turned his head, he saw faint traces of movement, as if someone had just ducked out of sight.

  Not much of a welcome, Matt thought. String a banner, then hide.

  He was just about to gun the engine and lean into the u-turn that would take him back to the highway when he heard a bell ding behind him. He looked back over his shoulder and saw the door of the general store swing open.

  A young girl took one hesitant step onto the sidewalk. She looked like she was about twelve, with long black pigtails hanging down over a blue calico dress and black boots on her feet. She stared at him intensely, then took another step closer.

  A hand reached out from inside the store, but the girl shrugged it off. "It's him," she said. "It's Matt."

  The girl moved out of the doorway. It was like popping the cork of a champagne bottle. People flooded out of the store and into the street. And it wasn't just the store – people were emerging cautiously from the diner and the doctor's office and the mechanic's garage.

  They came out into the street, but they wouldn't come close to him. They all stayed what Matt realized would have been a "safe distance" if he'd been a wild animal that had wandered into town. That gave him a chance to study them as they did him.

  Once again Matt had the sensation of wandering into a time warp or a movie set, although at first he couldn't figure out why. It wasn't that there was anything particularly odd about the people of Heaven, Washington. They looked like the same worn-down, hard-working people you'd find in any small town in America. There were old men with the cracked and calloused hands that come from a long lifetime doing manual labor. There were young women, barely out of girlhood, cradling babies in their arms. There were husbands and wives whose stress-lined faces made their ages impossible to read. And of course there were the children peeking out from behind their parents' legs to get a glimpse of the stranger, then ducking back again, giggling.

  The people of Heaven looked just like the ones Matt had left behind – burdened with care and determined to press on, even though they knew things would never get better. And yet there was something wrong here. He just couldn't put his finger on exactly what it was.

  Then he saw. The men who were spreading out into the street all wore jeans and work shirts and heavy leather boots. Some of the women were dressed the same way, but most were in dresses of gingham or calico over their high black boots. The boys were mostly wearing overalls; the girls, jumpers. The clothes were solid and sturdy and were probably worn until they dissolved into threads.

  This was how dirt farmers dressed in the Depression. It wasn't what people wore in small towns today – not the small towns Matt knew, anyway. There were no logos. No T-shirts claiming that beer isn't just for breakfast anymore, or that life is too short to dance with fat chicks or even announcing that some relative went to some tourist attraction and all the bearer got was a stupid shirt. There were no baseball hats with corporate names across the front. And what really stood out for Matt, there were no Nikes. No Adidas or Asics or New Balance or even Keds. There were no athletic shoes at all. Every place he'd ever been, that's what people wore. Except at the saw mill where steel toes were required, and even then all the workers couldn't wait to change back into their Pumas or whatever.

  That told Matt all he needed to know about Heaven, Washington. He couldn't say if these people were neo-hippies turning their backs on the corporate, Wal-Mart culture or some weird religious group like the fundamentalist Mormons who despised all of modernity, but it didn't matter. He d
idn't want anything to do with any strange sect, religious or secular. Because it never really mattered where they started from; they all ended up the same way. He'd read enough about Jonestown and Waco and Heaven's Gate out in San Diego to know that.

  Matt glanced back over his shoulder and saw that the street behind him had filled up with people. If he needed to get away fast, the only way out would be to gun the gas and hope they jumped away in time.

  But maybe he didn't have to. Matt scanned the faces of the people who'd come out to greet him. There wasn't a trace of rot on any of them, not a sign of the evil Mr. Dark could spread with one touch.

  Maybe they weren't some insane cult. Could it be they were the opposite? That these people really did know who he was? Maybe they'd been expecting him all along. Expecting him for years.

  The town was called Heaven, after all.

  Maybe this is where he was meant to be.

  He'd chosen the eastward road without understanding why. Was it possible that he had been sent this way? That Heaven, Washington was where he'd finally learn why he had been brought back from the dead, and what he was supposed to do next?

  Matt shut off the engine and put down the kickstand. The townspeople crowded around him, faces filled with longing, hands outstretched to touch him.

  Like he was their messiah.

  He climbed off the bike and took a step forward. The people closed in around him. He could see joy in the eyes of the little girl with the pigtails, the one who'd led the rest of them out onto the street

  Matt reached up and lifted off his helmet.

  When Matt had been little, his mother had taken him to stay with her sister for a few weeks. The only thing he remembered about the trip was that his aunt had cable, and he'd flipped channels for hours on end, astonished that one television could hold so many programs. One afternoon he came across a scene that had stayed with him ever since. A bunch of soldiers and scientists were assembled on a beach as a life raft brought a trio of astronauts from their sinking space capsule. The soldiers all saluted as the astronauts stepped onto the sand. Then their happy smiles turned to expressions of shock as the astronauts take off their space helmets, revealing themselves to be giant monkeys.