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Synopsis
From the powerful imagination of a horror master comes a bone-chilling tale set in a small town where good and evil are joined in a terrifying, deadly battle.
Evil endures...
Once an idyllic Pennsylvania village, Pine Deep awoke one morning to find itself bathed in a massive bloodletting. Twice in 30 years, the townsfolk have endured the savage hungers of a murderous madman — but if the residents think the death of serial killer Karl Ruger put an end to the carnage, they’re dead wrong.
The nightmare never ends...
Bodies mutilated beyond description, innocents driven to acts of vicious madness. A monstrous evil is preying on the living — and the dead — and turning the quiet little town into hell on earth. Their only hope is to find the source. But the secrets that lurk in the heart of Pine Deep are twisted into its very roots. This time the townspeople aren’t just fighting for their lives but for their very souls. Keep chilled: listen to more in the Pine Deep trilogy.
A Blackstone Audio production.
Release date: August 30, 2016
Publisher: Kensington Books
Print pages: 512
* BingeBooks earns revenue from qualifying purchases as an Amazon Associate as well as from other retail partners.
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Dead Man's Song
Jonathan Maberry
“I first met Jonathan when he was a teenager, and I predicted
great things then. And look, he has achieved great things.
Jonathan Maberry is a writer whose works will be read for
many, many years to come.”
—Ray Bradbury
“Maberry has the unique gift of spinning great stories in
any genre he chooses. His Pine Deep vampire novels are unique
and masterful.”
—Richard Matheson
“Jonathan Maberry rushes headlong toward the front of the
pack, proving that he has the chops to craft stories at once
intimate, epic, real, and horrific.”
—Bentley Little
“Reminiscent of Stephen King . . . Maberry supplies plenty
of chills in this atmospheric novel. . . . This is horror on
a grand scale.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Every so often, you discover an author whose writing is
so lyrical that it transcends mere storytelling. Jonathan Maberry
is just such an author.”
—Tess Gerritsen, New York Times bestsellingauthor
of The Mephisto Club
“It is hard to believe this is Jonathan Maberry’s debut novel
because his writing is of such a high caliber and his storyline
is comparable to that of a master writer of horror. Great
action scenes, a growing sense of foreboding and fine
characterizations make this a one-sitting reading experience.”
—Midwest Book Review
““Jonathan Maberry writes in the grand poetic horror
tradition of Poe and Robert McCammon. His novel is not
just a frightening tale but one in which the reader can truly
identify with both the characters. The language and descriptions
are vivid, threatening, and beautiful. Maberry
belongs with the big names including King and Koontz.”
—Stuart Kaminsky
“A chilling tale about the staying power of evil.
As lyrical, melodic, and dark as the music that provides
the imaginary soundtrack. Maberry breathes new life
into modern horror fiction.”
—Scott Nicholson
“Maberry knows that true horror lies in the dark, hidden places
in the human heart, and to take this journey with
him is genuinely chilling.”
—T. J. MacGregor
“If I were asked to select only one new voice in horror
fiction to read today, it would be Jonathan Maberry. Ghost
Road Blues jumps so easily out of his blend of words, images, and
characters that you hardly realize you’re reading
a novel rather than watching a movie.”
—Katherine Ramsland
“If you think that small-town horror has nothing new to offer
the reader, you have a surprise in store for you. Jonathan
Maberry’s Ghost Road Blues, first in a trilogy, demonstrates
that even the most haunted town in America is unprepared
for the full depth of evil, either human or inhuman. A fine blend
of authentic supernatural folklore and conventional
villainy in a fully realized contemporary setting.”
—Don D’Ammassa
“Ghost Road Blues is a superbly woven, chilling tale that
makes you wonder who the real monsters are—humans
or the undead.”
—L. A. Banks
“As effective an opening as I’ve ever read, and the jolts
just keep on coming.”
—Jeremiah Healy
“Stunning! A fierce and new talent!”
—Ken Bruen
“A fun, fun read and creepy as hell. Jonathan Maberry
serves up scares like pancakes at a church social.”
—Gregory Frost
“I read as much horror fiction as I can get my hands on,
and it’s been a long time since I’ve read anything that I’ve
enjoyed as much as Ghost Road Blues.”
—Stephen Susco
“Ghost Road Blues rocks. From the first page to the last, Jonathan
Maberry displays the sure hand of a master of
the craft. I can’t wait to see what this new king of horror
has in store for us next.”
—Bryan Smith
“Jonathan Maberry writes densely layered prose full of real characters
and plenty of eerie atmosphere. He’s in tune with both
the dark side of human nature and the simple goodness that can
redeem us all.”
—David Wellington
“Jonathan Maberry is the big guy you’d want to back you
up in a fight. Now he’s writing big scary books that feel just
right. Ghost Road Blues is dues paid in advance: read it now
so that you can say you were there at the beginning
of a blockbuster career.”
—Bill Kent
“With Ghost Road Blues, Jonathan Maberry lands solidly
on his feet in territory once dominated by Manly Wade
Wellman and Joe Citro; this haunting, complex, terrifying,
and deeply humane novel is a heady feast for those who’ve been
looking for something new and lyrical in horror.”
—Gary A. Braunbeck
“Ghost Road Blues reminded me why I’m afraid of the dark.”
—Charles Gramlich
“Maberry will scare the bejibbers out of you!”
—John Lutz
“Dark, scary, and so darn well written that one might think
this book something Stephen King wrote and forgot
about many years ago.”
—Michael Laimo
“Maberry takes his reader to new and chilling places. If you read
horror, you can’t miss this book.”
—H. R. Knight
“Ghost Road Blues is a hell of a book—complex, sprawling, and
spooky . . . with strong characters and a setting that’s pure
Americana Halloween hell. A satisfying chunk of creepy, visceral
horror storytelling—I’d recommend this to anyone who loves
the works of Stephen King.”
—Jemiah Jefferson
“Reading Maberry is like listening to the blues in a graveyard at
the stroke of midnight—the dead surround you, your pounding
heart keeps steady rhythm with the dark, melodic prose, and the
scares just keep coming. You find yourself
wondering if it’s the wind howling through the cold,
foreboding landscape of gray slate tombstones or whether
it’s Howlin’ Wolf ’s scratchy voice singing ‘Evil.’ ”
—Fred Wiehe
“Get ready to be totally hooked, because it’s all here:
incredible atmosphere, characters you truly care about,
and a level of pure suspense that gets higher with every
page. Jonathan Maberry is writing as well as anyone in
the business right now, and I’ll be counting the days
until his next book.”
—Steve Hamilton
“Maberry’s Ghost Road Blues leads with a hard left
hook and never lets up, full of good, strong writing and
complex characters who step right off the page and into
readers’ heads. It’s a lyrical, frightening, and often astonishing
read. Although Pine Deep is not a place you’d like to
call home, you’ll feel as if you’ve been there before. A
wonderful novel from a fresh new voice in the genre.”
—Nate Kenyon
“Maberry weaves words of mesmeric power. Gruesome,
scary, and bloody good fun.”
—Simon Clark
“A wild mélange of soulful blues music and gut-wrenching horror!
Through vivid characters and clever descriptions, Jonathan
Maberry carefully crafts a very special town that
any horror fan would love to live in—that is, until it starts
to get ugly . . . really ugly. He brings terror to life in a
uniquely contemporary way. I’ll be so excited to read the
second book in his trilogy!”
—Brinke Stevens
“Ghost Road Blues is epic horror that puts you in mind of
The Stand, It, Boys’ Life, and They Thirst, but beats its own
scary path. Nicely tied to the blues and the dark magic of
Halloween, it is the first of an impressive new trilogy by
Jonathan Maberry, whose vivid prose hits the right rhythms and
whose creeping horrors will feed your nightmares until
the next installment—and maybe forever. High-octane
storytelling meant for chilly, full-moon nights.”
—W. D. Gagliani
“Prepare to be scared. Maberry frightens, amuses, and
makes you think, often on the same page. The horror is
pervasive, but so is a deeply entrenched sense of fun.
Move over, Stephen King.”
—J. A. Konrath
“Jonathan Maberry writes with the assured hand of a
veteran wordsmith. His voice is a confident one, his stories possessed
of the kind of rhythmic, lyrical quality one might find in
the work of Cady, Conrad, or even Faulkner. And yet such comparisons,
though hard to avoid when sitting around Maberry’s
campfire and hearing his voice, are not entirely fair, for there is a
uniqueness here that is exciting to behold. Jonathan Maberry is
reaping a crop all his own, and I for one eagerly await the fruit
of future harvests.”
—Kealan Patrick Burke
“Maberry writes a vivid, fast-paced prose, creating
characters and events that are memorable and often
frightening. If you like your fiction compelling and
deliciously dark, this is an author you should get to know.”
—Bruce Boston
“Ghost Road Blues begins with more horror than one
can imagine and ends savagely beautiful, intricately and deftly
written. Don’t start this book unless you can finish it!”
—Jack Fisher
“Like Stephen King in ’Salem’s Lot, Jonathan Maberry creates
a small town where the everyday flesh-and-blood brutality
of the citizens seems to call forth a deeper, more supernatural
evil . . . The cliffhanger ending will make you impatient for
the next installment of this trilogy!”
—E. F. Watkins
“Terrifying. Maberry gets deep into the heads of his
troubled characters—and ours. The small-town horror feels
like it’s right next door.”
—Jim Fusilli
“Stunning, powerful . . . a complex, heart-pounding read. It
deserves the Stoker for Best First Novel.”
—Kim Paffenroth
“As a horror fan, I loved Ghost Road Blues with its great
storytelling and memorable cast of characters. As a music fan,
I loved Maberry’s references to classic blues and rock
recordings. There may very well have been hellhounds
on Robert Johnson’s trail.”
—Andrew Burns
“Riveting, bristling with scares, rich with atmosphere . . . brings
to mind early Stephen King. Highly recommended!”
—Jay Bonansinga
“Without a doubt this prolific author is the next Stephen King.
Maberry deserves more then a Bram Stoker Award
for this; he deserves Bram Stoker to rise from his grave
and shake his hand.”
—Chad Wendell
“A must for anyone who enjoys a literary roller-coaster
ride with a deliciously grotesque streak.”
—Litara Angeli, Dark Realms magazine
“Maberry takes us on another chilling roller-coaster ride
through the cursed town of Pine Deep. You might want to keep
the night-light on for this one. Really.”
—Laura Schrock
“A fabulously written novel that grips you from its first line
to its last. Jonathan Maberry’s writing runs from dark and beautiful
to sharp and thought-provoking, and his books should be
on everyone’s must-read list.”
—Yvonne Navarro
“One of the best supernatural thrillers of recent years.”
—John Connolly
A lot of my readers think of me as the “zombie guy.” I get that
a lot at conventions, in reviews, in the press, and when I make
public appearances. And to be fair, I have written quite a few stories
about my life-impaired fellow citizens. They include thrillers
like Patient Zero and Code Zero; mainstream apocalyptic novels,
Dead of Night and Fall of Night; young adult post-apocalyptic adventures,
The Rot & Ruin series; nonfiction, Zombie CSU: The
Forensics of the Living Dead; comics, Warrior Smart; and a slew of
short fiction.
But my heart belongs to another monster and always has.
Vampires.
Yeah, I’m a big fan of the bloodsuckers.
Not in a romantic I-want-them-to-make-me-immortal way. I
don’t view them as lonely and tragic demigods who are deserving
of our love and worship. Nope. Nor do I love vampires because
they’re role models. It’s not that at all. In fact, I’m often asked why
I write about monsters, and my stock answer is that I don’t—I
write about the people who fight monsters. That’s a big, big difference.
There’s some backstory to this, just as there’s backstory to everything.
I grew up in Philadelphia during the sixties and early seventies.
My neighborhood was very poor and very violent. Racism, drugs,
homophobia, misogyny, intolerance, and crime were common elements of day-to-day life where I lived, and it was as bad or worse
at home. I was born into an environment of domestic abuse and
violence. Some of my earliest memories were about monsters.
Iron Mike Sweeney and his stepfather, Vic Wingate, are not created
from whole cloth. Alas.
While books and the daydreams of a writer-to-be were my escape
hatch, the oasis of peace was my grandmother’s house. I mentioned
her in the introduction to the previous volume, Ghost Road
Blues, but there’s more to say.
Maude Blanche Tabb (née Flavell) was a wonderfully spooky
old lady who had been raised in Alsace-Lorraine before marrying
a Cockney cabinet maker and immigrating to America. She brought
with her the folktales of late-18th- and early-19th-century rural
Europe. Prewar Europe. Belief in supernatural monsters was common
when she was a little girl, and she never quite shook off
those beliefs. She had stacks of books about all sorts of strange
things, and I devoured everything in her library, reading the ones
in English and listening to her translations of the French and
German. Decades before Harry Potter introduced the world to
the more obscure creatures in the supernatural bestiary I was
learning about imps and sprites, church grims and redcaps,
revenants and selkies. I learned that there were many different
kinds of werewolves and ten times as many other types of shapeshifters.
And I learned about vampires. So many different kinds of
vampires.
That’s what fascinated me most: that vampires came in all shapes
and sizes. That they were often so dissimilar that the “vampire” label
seemed inadequate. Some of them were almost more werewolf
than vampire—or more zombie, or more witch, or more ghost.
Or combinations of several.
Vampires, I discovered, did not at all resemble the creatures in
any of the Hollywood movies I watched. They were not tragic
Eastern European noblemen in tuxedos and opera cloaks. They
were, generally speaking, not human at all. They were monsters. If
some of them were romantic it was because seduction was a trick
used to lure the unsuspecting into a trap, at which point the true
and much more horrific nature of the beast would be revealed.
Also, the powers and vulnerabilities of vampires in these old
folktales didn’t square with movie vampires. They did not, for example,
fear the cross. That was something concocted by Bram Stoker
who, apart from being a wonderful novelist, was also Irish Catholic
and so put elements of his faith into his novel Dracula.
Stoker also conjured the idea of a vampire not being allowed
into a house unless invited. That was probably because in the first
third of writing Dracula he made the Transylvanian count way too
strong and needed to limit his powers when the monster arrived
in England. Otherwise Dracula would have killed everyone in the
second act and the book would have been short and ended badly
for all involved.
And the sunlight thing . . . that wasn’t Stoker. When F.W. Murnau
was filming Nosferatu, which was a direct rip-off of Dracula,
he went over budget, half the crew walked off, and he couldn’t
shoot the big dramatic courtyard battle that he lifted from Stoker’s
novel. So he and the lighting guy cooked up a scheme to have the
purity of sunlight kill the monster they had, to that point, only
filmed as a parasite that hid in darkness. That got bonded to the
vampire legend somehow, and most people believe that it was always
there. Oddly, the Chinese vampire species, the jiangshi, does
fear sunlight, but it’s unlikely Murnau knew that when he was
shooting his movie. Funny old world.
One of the other elements about folkloric vampires that I
found fascinating was that not all of them drink blood. Actually it
comes to about a third. Others eat flesh or feed on more esoteric
things like life essence, sexual energy, breath, and even things like
hope and faith.
I wrote about these monsters—and many more besides—in
my various nonfiction books, including Vampire Universe, They
Bite (co-authored by David F. Kramer), and Wanted Undead or
Alive (with Janice Gable Bashman), and I wrote even more about
them in a column on supernatural predators that I had in Dark
Discoveries magazine.
But I had the most fun exploring these old-school monsters in
fiction. In the Pine Deep novels there is a collision of experience
in how characters react to the possibility and later the reality of vampires. Like most of us, their knowledge of vampires comes
largely from books and movies. From Dracula to Dark Shadows,
from ’Salem’s Lot to Interview with a Vampire, from Blade to Twilight,
from Tomb of Dracula to 30 Days of Night, our understanding of
vampires has been informed by pop culture. The people of Pine
Deep are no different. Crow has amassed a lot of knowledge about
werewolves (another longtime favorite monster of mine) and
ghosts, but he isn’t as savvy about vampires. Reporter Willard
Fowler Newton is a professional skeptic but a solid researcher. Dr.
Saul Weinstock is a scientist. And Jonathan Corbiel is a folklorist.
Each of them comes at this from a decidedly different angle, and
it is only through trial and error that any of them begin to understand
what they’re facing.
Which brings us to that very question: What are they facing?
Well, it’s certainly not the Hollywood vampire. Or the Hollywood
werewolf, for that matter. Or even the Hollywood ghost.
Pine Deep has them all, but I tapped folklore for source material.
And like Bram Stoker, Stephen King, Anne Rice, and everyone
else who writes vampire fiction, I tweaked the model to suit the
story I wanted to tell.
Mostly, though, I relied on the deep, deep well of monstrous
storytelling potential that is folklore. There are several different
kinds of vampires in this series, and in Dead Man’s Song I had some
wicked fun exploring the process rational people go through
when encountering the unbearable reality of the supernatural in
their lives.
I love all three of the Pine Deep books, and for different reasons.
There are characters and story elements that are important
to me in profound ways. Just as there are characters and elements
that seem to have touched the many readers of these books. We all
know something of the darkness. We all know a monster or two.
But we also all know that monsters don’t always win and that
darkness is not a universal constant.
Dead Man’s Song is one of my favorite books. I know that some
folks dread the middle book of a trilogy because they’re afraid
that it’s all backstory and no drama. Yeah, that’s not the reason to be afraid. This book contains several horror sequences that I feel
are the best I’ve ever written. Some hints without spoilers: Dark
Hollow, barn on the Guthrie farm, the thing in Wingate’s cellar,
and a shattered mirror. You’ll see what I mean.
Read on, my friends. Welcome back to Pine Deep.
Del Mar, CaliforniaDecember 2015
THE GUTHRIE FARM
And I think I’m gonna drown I believe I’m gonna drown I think I’m gonna drown Standing on my feet.
—Mem Shannon, Drowning on My Feet
Sing it like the midnight wind, Sing it like a prayer; Sing it on to the way to hell, Them blues’ll take you there.
—Oren Morse, Dead Man’s Song
(1)
It was October when it happened. It should always be October when these things happen. In October you expect things to die.
In October the sun shrinks away; it hides behind mountains and throws long shadows over small towns like Pine Deep. Especially towns like Pine Deep. The wind grows new teeth and it learns to bite. The colors fade from deep summer greens to the mournful browns and desiccated yellows of autumn. In October the harvest blades are honed to sharpness, and that’s when the sickles and scythes, the threshers and combines, maliciously attack the fields, leaving the long stalks of corn lying dead in haphazard piles along the beaten rows. Pumpkin growers come like headsmen to gather the gourds for the carvers’ knives. The insects, so alive during the long months of July, August, and September, die in their thousands, their withered carcasses crunching under the feet of children hurrying home from school, children racing to beat the fall of night. Children do not play out-of-doors in the nights of Pine Deep.
There are shadows everywhere—even in places they have no right to be. The shadows range from the purple haze of twilit streets to the utter, bottomless black in the gaping mouths of sewers. Some of the shadows are cold, featureless—just blocks of lightless air. Other shadows seem to possess an unnatural vitality; they seem to roil and writhe, especially as the young ones—the innocent ones—pass by. In those kinds of shadows something always seems to be waiting. Impatiently waiting. In those kinds of shadows something always seems to be watching. Hungrily watching. These are not the warm shadows of September, for in that month the darkness still remembers the warmth of summer suns; nor were they yet the utterly dead shadows of bleak November, to whom the sun’s warmth is only a wan memory. These were the shadows of October, and they were hungry shadows. When the dying sun cast those kinds of shadows, well…
This was Pine Deep, and it was October—a kind of October particular to Pine Deep. The spring and summer before had been lush; the autumn of the year before that had been bright and bountiful, yielding one of those rare and wonderful Golden Harvests that are written of in tourist books of the region; and though there had been shadows, there hadn’t been shadows as dark as these. No, these shadows belonged to an autumn whose harvest was going to be far darker—these were the shadows of a Black Harvest October in Pine Deep. So, it was October when it happened. It should always be October when these things happen.
In October you expect things to die.
(2)
“They said they’d send us some coffee and hot sandwiches in about half an hour,” called Jimmy Castle as he trudged back into the clearing a quarter mile from the Guthrie farmhouse. Yellow crime scene tape was strung from post to post along the rows of towering late season corn, the ends anchored to the wooden rails of the fence that marked the boundary of the big farm. Tarps were pegged down over the spot where Henry Guthrie had been gunned down just a few days ago, and the criminalists and other crime scene investigators would be back in the morning to finish up their comprehensive search of the area. Of the three gunmen who had come into town after fleeing a bloody shoot-out in Philadelphia, two were dead and one—Kenneth Boyd—was still on the loose. That meant that the scene had to be secured until the CSI team was completely done, and it also meant a long cold night for Castle—who was still on loan from Crestville to help with the manhunt—and his partner, Nels Cowan, who was local PD.
Castle had his hands jammed deep into the pockets of his blue Crestville PD jacket, fists balled tight in a losing battle to try and hold on to some warmth. He walked briskly, shoulders rounded to keep the wind off his ears, his straw-colored hair snapping in the stiff breeze. “I told them to send some of those pocket hand-warmers, too…getting pretty freakin’ cold out….”
His words trailed off to nothing as he entered the clearing and all thoughts of warmth were slammed out of his brain.
He stopped walking, stopped talking, stopped breathing. The world imploded down into one tiny quarter-acre of unreality; time and order and logic all were smashed into one chunk of madness. All sound in the world died; all movement failed; all that existed was the tableau that filled his eyes as Jimmy Castle saw the two things that occupied the clearing. His mouth sagged open as he stood there rooted to the spot, feeling all sensation and awareness evaporate into smoke as the seconds fell dead around him. All of his cop reflexes, all of his training in crisis management simply froze into stillness because nothing at the Academy, nothing he had seen on the streets of Pittsburgh, where he’d done his first years, and nothing since he’d moved to Crestville could have prepared him for what he saw there in the moonlight darkness of the Guthrie cornfield. His mind ground to a halt and he just stood there and stared.
Nels Cowan lay on the muddy ground, arms and legs spread in an ecstasy of agony, head thrown back and lolling on what little was left of his throat. Cowan’s mouth was open, but any scream he uttered echoed only in the dark vastness of death; his eyes were open as if beholding horror, but that look was frozen onto his face forever, like an expression carved onto a wax mask. Blood glistened as thick and black as oil in the moonlight. The ghastly wounds on Cowan’s throat were so savage that Castle could even see the taut gray cords of half-severed tendons and the sharp white edge of a cracked vertebra. The dark shape hunched over Nels Cowan raised its head and looked at him without expression for a long moment, and then the bloody mouth opened in a great smile full of immense darkness and hunger, lips parting to reveal hideous teeth that were grimed with pink-white tatters of flesh. The teeth gleamed white through the streaks of red as the smile broadened into a feral snarl; its features were a mask of lust and hate, the nose wrinkled like a dog’s, the black eyes became lost in pits of gristle. A tongue, impossibly long and purplish-gray, lolled from the mouth and licked drops of blood from the thing’s chin.
Jimmy Castle opened his mouth, mimicking the silent scream of Nels Cowan; however his scream escaped, ran shrieking out into the night air and soared disjointedly up into the night. The frozen moment of time melted and he sagged to his knees, still screaming as his fingers scrabbled at the butt of his gun, his fingernails making scratching sounds in the silence. He was only distantly aware that the gun was coming free of the holster. With no mindful awareness of his actions he racked the slide, flicked off the safety, held the gun out and up in both hands, pointed. Fired. Actions performed a thousand times in practice, performed now with absolutely no conscious control, machinelike and correct. The barrel of the heavy 9mm rose, sought its target, and screamed defiance at the man-shape that was rising, tensing, readying itself to spring.
He tried to say the word “Freeze!” and though his mouth worked at it he could not manage any sound. Then his hands, operating independently of his brain, squeezed the trigger.
Thunder boomed and lightning flashed in the clearing as Jimmy Castle tried to blast the thing back into nightmares.
He fired straight, aiming by instinct alone at the centerline of the creature’s body. He fired fast. He fired true. He fired nine times, each boom as loud as all the noise in the world, sending nine tumbling lead slugs directly into the thing, catching it as it rose, catching it in belly and groin and chest. He hit it every single time.
And it did him no damn good at all.
(1)
The morphine should have kept him out for hours, down there in the darkness where there was no pain, no terror. After the doctors had stitched up his mouth and lip and the nurses had inserted replacement IV needles in his hand and shot the narcotics into his blood, Malcolm Crow should have just gone into that dark nowhere where there are no memories, no dreams. But that didn’t happen.
He only slept for a few hours while Officer Jerry Head—on loan from the Philly PD and part of the combined task force that had been formed to hunt down Kenneth Boyd, Tony Macchio, and Karl Ruger—sat in a plastic visitor chair and watched.
In his dreams Crow walked through the cornfields of the Guthrie farm, looking for Val, searching for her everywhere but finding nothing. As he hunted through the dreamscape he could hear a whispering echo of music buried beneath the hiss and rustle of the moving cornstalks—faint, but definitely there. He knew it was blues because it was always blues in his dreams; he knew that if he could get closer to it, if he could find its source, then he would be able to tell the name of the song. Somehow that mattered, though he did not know why. The dreamer never questions the logic of the dream.
Crow pushed through the corn, wincing now and then as the sharp blades of the leaves nicked his face and palms. He was barefoot; his hospital gown flapped open and the cold stung his ass. The ground was hard, his feet were blistered and bleeding, but he did not stop, did not even look down. The breeze stilled and for just a second he could hear the song more clearly. Damn, he did know it, but he just couldn’t pull the name out of his head. Something about a road. Something about a prison. What the hell was it?
He turned, orienting himself, and looked back the way he’d come. Behind him the corn was smashed down and broken aside as if his passage through the field had been like a bulldozer’s. He could see the trail leading in a twisted line going back so far that it vanished into the distance. The music was stronger now and he moved off to his right, humming as he went. It was in his head, in his mouth, and then he knew it. It was an old prison blues song, something someone had taught him long ago, back when he was a kid; and this time it came to him: “Ghost Road Blues.” A song from down South, something to do with prisoners suffering in Louisiana’s Angola prison and praying for release—even if it was the Angel of Death who unlocked their chains.
Crow stopped and listened to it, one ear hearing the song drifting along the breeze and the other listening to the song play inside his head from a long time ago. That had been on a warm early autumn afternoon on Val Guthrie’s porch, with Val sitting on the swing next to Terry and Terry’s little sister, Mandy. Crow’s brother Billy—good ol’ Boppin’ Bill—had a haunch propped on the whitewashed rail, tossing a baseball up into the air and catching it in his outfielder’s glove. Val’s dad was there—old Henry—and Henry’s wife, Bess. There were others, too—farm folks and field hands, brothers and cousins of the Guthrie clan, all of them smiling, clapping hands or snapping fingers, tapping their toes as the man with the guitar played his songs. Crow could see the guitarist so clearly: a stick-thin guy with a nappy Afro and dark eyes that sparkled with equal measures sadness and humor. Dark skin and loose clothes, skinny legs crossed with one work-booted foot jiggling in the air along with his music. A dime with a hole in it hung from a string tied around his brown ankle. Scars on his hands and face, shadows in his eyes, laugh lines around his mouth. Crow remembered the nickname he, Val, and Terry had given him because he was so skinny: the Bone Man.
On some level Crow knew that he was dreaming all of this, just as he was aware that he had dreamed of the Bone Man many times. Standing motionless now, adrift in sea of waving corn, Crow closed his eyes and listened to the gentle voice of the singer. The song was a lament for the prisoners in the infamous Red Hat House at Angola Prison in Louisiana who were imprisoned more for their skin color than for any real crime; they were beaten and humiliated by the guards, tortured, degraded—yet enduring. Then at the end of their days in that hellish place they stood tall and proud as they strolled that last mile to where Ol’ Sparky waited—knowing the other prisoners loved them for it and the guards hated that they could never truly break their spirits.
The song ended and the last mournful notes were sewn like silver threads through the freshening breeze, leaving Crow feeling lost and abandoned out there in the field. He opened his eyes and looked around. It was darker now, the sun hidden behind storm clouds as long fingers of cold shadow reached from the mountains in the north across the fields toward him. He clutched the inadequate hospital johnnie around himself, trying to conserve its meager warmth.
“Are you there?” he said aloud, and he wasn’t sure if he was calling for Val or for the Bone Man. As if in answer the corn behind him rustled and Crow spun toward it, his heart suddenly hammering. The Bone Man pushed aside the dry stalks like a performer parting the curtains to come onstage. He had his old guitar slung across his back, the slender neck hanging down behind his right hip. His skin was no longer dark brown but had faded to an ashy gray, and his eyes had a milky film over them, making him look dead.
“I heard you playing…” Crow said, his voice as dry as the Bone Man’s eyes. The Bone Man opened his mouth and said something, but there was no sound at all, not even a whisper. He smiled ruefully and gave Crow an expectant look, obviously waiting for an answer. “I…can’t understand you,” Crow said. “I mean…I can’t hear you.”
The Bone Man licked dry lips with a gray tongue and tried again. Still no sound at all, but Crow could at least read the man’s lips well enough to make out two words. Little Scarecrow. He understood that. Little Scarecrow was what he had once been called, years ago—a nickname given him by a man he’d given a nickname to in turn. Tit for tat. The Bone Man and Little Scarecrow. What he was called when he was nine.
Thunder rumbled far away to the northeast, and they both turned to look. There was a flash of lightning beyond the fields, over past the lover’s lane by the drop-off that led down to Dark Hollow. Crow saw the Bone Man nod, apparently to himself, and when the gray man turned his milky eyes were filled with a fear so sharp that it bordered on panic.
“I knew someone who lived down there once,” said Crow, and he was amazed to hear that his own voice had changed. It was the voice of a child. Maybe nine or ten. “There was a bad man who lived down there a long time ago.”
Narrowing his eyes, the Bone Man peered at him. Apparently he, too, heard the change in Crow’s voice. Little Scarecrow’s voice.
“He killed my brother, you know. He killed Billy and ate him all up.”
Now even Crow’s body had changed. He was nine years old, wearing pajamas and holding a tattered stuffed monkey. The Bone Man towered over him and little Crow—Little Scarecrow—looked up at him. “He ate Billy all up. He did it to my best friend’s sister, too. He made her all dead and ate her up. He does that, he…eats people all up.”
A tear broke from the dust-dry eye of the Bone Man and cut a path down his cheek.
“The bad man wanted to eat me all up, too…and he was gonna, but you stopped him! You came and stopped him and he went running off.” Little Scarecrow shuffled his feet and hugged his monkey tight to his chest. “Val’s dad said that you killed that man. Did you? Did you kill the bad man?”
The Bone Man opened his mouth, tried to say something, but the thunder boomed overhead and both he and the boy jumped. Red lightning veined the clouds, souring the breeze with the stink of ozone. The storm was centered over the drop-off to Dark Hollow, but it was coming their way fast with thunder like an artillery barrage. Without thinking he reached out and took the Bone Man’s hand. It was dry and cold, but it was firm, and after staring down at the boy in apparent shock for a long minute, the gray man returned a reassuring squeeze. Little Scarecrow looked up at him—and deep within the morphine dreams the adult Crow felt the surreal quality of the moment as he saw a dead man through his own youthful eyes. It was like watching a movie and being a part of it at the same time.
Officer Jerry Head looked up from his copy of Maxim as Crow shifted uneasily, twisting the sheets around his legs. “Bad dreams,” he murmured, then grunted. “No surprise there.” He went back to the article he was reading. Outside the window, in a totally cloudless sky, there was a flicker of distant lightning that Head did not consciously notice, but as he read his right hand drifted down and he absently began running his thumbnail over the rubber ridges of his holstered pistol’s grip.
In the cornfield, Little Scarecrow and the Bone Man stood hand in hand, watching the storm; it was a big, angry thing—flecked with red and hot yellow and sizzling white, lumped with purple and black. A cold wind came hard out of the northeast, heavy with moisture and smelling of decay. Above them a cloud of black night birds flapped and cawed their way toward the southwest, racing to outrun the storm, but the lightning licked out and incinerated three of the birds. They fell, smoking and shapeless, into the corn.
Tugging the Bone Man’s hand, Little Scarecrow looked up at him, puzzled and frightened. “I thought you killed the bad man. That’s what Val’s dad said…that you killed the bad man.”
There was a final terrible explosion of thunder and a burst of lightning so bright that it stabbed into Little Scarecrow’s eyes like spikes and he spun away, clamping his hands over his face—
—and woke up with a cry of real pain and genuine terror.
“Griswold!” he screamed as he woke and then there was a big dark shape looming over him and hands on his shoulders. Crow was blind with sleep and morphine and he tried to see, tried to fight, but the hands were too strong.
“Whoa, man,” said the voice of the man standing over him. “You’re gonna pop your stitches you keep that shit up.”
Abruptly Crow stopped fighting, blinking his eyes clear to see the big cop standing there. Broad-shouldered with a shaved head and an easy grin. It took Crow a second to fish his name out of the dark. “Jerry…?”
“Yeah, man, it’s just me.” Head smiled at him, but there was concern in his eyes. “You were having one hell of a nightmare there.”
“Christ,” Crow muttered, “you don’t know the half of it.”
Head helped Crow settle himself and he arranged the sheets and plumped his pillow as tidily as any nurse, gave him a sip of water through a straw, and settled back in his chair, scooping his magazine from off the floor where it had fallen.
Crow rubbed his eyes. “What time is it?”
“Almost six. Sun’ll be up in a bit. You weren’t out more than a few hours, though. You want me to get the nurse to bring you something, help you sleep?”
“God, I don’t think I ever want to go to sleep again.” With the tip of his tongue he probed the stitches inside his mouth, wincing. He sighed and settled back against the pillow but there was no getting comfortable. Everything hurt. Even his hair felt like the ends of brittle pieces of straw stuck into his scalp. “You on shift all night?”
“One of the local blues is supposed to relieve me at six-thirty.” He hesitated. “I can stick around if you want, though—”
Crow waved it off. “Thanks, man, but it’s cool. Tell me, though, did, um, anything else happen last night? I mean, after…”
Last night had been the second chapter in a nightmare that had begun two days before, on September 30. The whole thing had started when a trio of Philadelphia mobsters had forced a drug deal to go sour so they could make off with both the money and the cocaine, and had left behind a warehouse littered with dead men—their own cronies, a posse of Jamaicans, and at least one cop. Karl Ruger led the crew, and if there was ever a sicker, more violent, more vicious son of a bitch on planet Earth, that Crow had never heard of him. Ruger had been the directing force behind the buy, and he had made it go south because he needed enough money to flee the country—not just to elude the police manhunt, but to escape the wrath of Little Nicky Menditto, the crime boss of Ruger’s own outfit. Rumor had it that Menditto had learned that Ruger was the man hunted nationwide as the Cape May Killer—a psychopath who had slaughtered a group of senior citizens at the lighthouse on the Jersey Shore. Little Nicky’s grandparents had been on that tour.
The slaughter had been a bizarre by-product of a mob war in Philly, but Ruger had gone way past his instructions of “doing something to hurt Little Nicky.” Ruger had committed atrocities that were being written about in books and made into movies. Ruger was the kind of real-world killer than made Ted Bundy look like a genial neighbor. His identity had remained hidden for years, but then the whisper stream had started and Ruger knew that he had to run or die. The mob was never known for understanding or forgiveness.
How or why Ruger’s crew had crashed their car was something neither Crow nor the interjurisdictional police task force had been able to determine, and the ensuing manhunt was massive. Unfortunately their car had crashed on a remote edge of the Guthrie family farm. Every time Crow thought about how Ruger invaded the Guthrie house, brutalized the family, and nearly killed Val—his Val!—Crow felt his guts turn to ice.
It burned Crow that he hadn’t been there in time to stop Ruger before he moved like a killer storm through the lives of Val and her family. Crow’s best friend, Terry Wolfe, mayor of Pine Deep and owner of the country’s largest Haunted Hayride, had begged Crow to drive out to the attraction and shut it down, fearing what would happen if Ruger and his men showed up there. Crow had wasted way too much time getting that job done, and not really taking the job all that seriously. Mobsters and police manhunts just didn’t seem real in Pine Deep, and violence on that scale was something safely buried in the town’s past, not its present. Not now.
So, while Crow was tooling around, taking his time, Karl Ruger was beating the hell out of Val, her father Henry, her brother Mark, and Mark’s wife, Connie. Ruger tied everyone up except for Val and Henry and forced them at gunpoint to go out into the fields to help him fetch one of his injured men, Kenneth Boyd. By the time they got back to where Ruger had left Boyd, there was no trace of him, the cash, or the drugs. Boyd had split and taken Ruger’s lifeline with him. Ruger went totally off his rocker at that point, and, as Val later told Crow, Henry had seen just one chance to save his family. He shoved Val away from him, urging her to run while he ran the other way to draw Ruger away from the house. Ruger, snapping out of rage and into cold efficiency, simply shot Henry in the back as he ran and left him to die out in the rainy darkness. It was so callous that Crow felt bile in his throat.
Ruger headed back to the farmhouse, but Val wasn’t there. So he vented his anger on Mark—beating him, knocking his teeth out, totally humiliating him—and then forcing him to lie there on the floor and watch as he set about raping Connie. If Val had been even two minutes later it would have been too late for Connie, but Ruger was just starting to tear at her clothes when Val snuck in and tackled him, then immediately fled, taking a cue from her father’s sacrifice by tricking Ruger into chasing her. She had hoped to outrun him, to lose him in the darkness of her farm and then circle back to the house and get one of her father’s guns, but Ruger was as fast as he was sly and he caught her before she had taken a hundred paces. He was strangling her, trying to crush her throat to satisfy his dark need to hurt, to destroy, when Crow finally arrived. Too late to save Henry, almost too late to save the others.
The only thing that had gone right that night was that Ruger had underestimated Crow. Ruger was a big man, two hundred pounds of sinewy muscle packed onto a wiry six-foot frame. He had incredibly fast hands and he had never lost a fight in his life because there was nothing in his psychological makeup that could accept any reality except one in which he dominated. When Crow stepped out of his car, what Ruger saw was a short, thin man who looked about as threatening as a shopkeeper, which what Crow currently was. What he did not see were the years upon years of jujutsu training; what he did not see were the years on the Pine Deep police force as one its most decorated officers—all of that in the past, but not long past. Ruger made one of the worst mistakes anyone can make in a fight: he underestimated his opponent, and it had cost him.
They fought in the rain and the mud and it was the most vicious fight of Crow’s life. No mercy, no rules, no hesitation. It was eye-gouging and groin-kicking and throat-crushing. It was a life-or-death back-alley brawl between two men who had to win. Quitting or surrender were impossible concepts for both of them because to lose the fight was to lose absolutely everything.
In the end, Crow had won the fight, though he looked like he’d been trampled by horses. He was bloodied, winded, nearly blind with pain, but he was on his feet and Ruger was down. Which is when Crow had made his mistake, and it was every bit as foolish and dangerous as Ruger’s. Crow had not finished Ruger off. He left him there, down and apparently unconscious, and had run straight to Val to see if she was okay. It was around that time that the first patrol car had arrived, with Jerry Head at the wheel and a young local cop, Rhoda Thomas, riding shotgun. Head had gone into the house to check on Mark and Connie, Rhoda stayed in the yard to help Crow and Val. No one paid enough attention to Ruger. No one saw him struggle to his knees, no one saw him fish in the mud for the gun Crow had dropped at the beginning of the fight, no one saw him wash it clean in the heavy downpour. Only luck, or perhaps a little bone thrown to them by providence, gave Crow just enough warning to react when Ruger opened fire. Rhoda went down with a bullet in her shoulder and Crow was grazed by two bullets, one on each side of his torso, as he scrambled to pull Rhoda’s sidearm. He returned fire and emptied the Glock’s entire magazine into Ruger, watching as the bullets knocked the man into a weird puppet dance. Head appeared on the porch and added his fire and Ruger went down in a storm of bullets.
Val went down a moment later, the damage to her throat blending with shock and dragging her down into darkness. Crow tried to stay con. . .
great things then. And look, he has achieved great things.
Jonathan Maberry is a writer whose works will be read for
many, many years to come.”
—Ray Bradbury
“Maberry has the unique gift of spinning great stories in
any genre he chooses. His Pine Deep vampire novels are unique
and masterful.”
—Richard Matheson
“Jonathan Maberry rushes headlong toward the front of the
pack, proving that he has the chops to craft stories at once
intimate, epic, real, and horrific.”
—Bentley Little
“Reminiscent of Stephen King . . . Maberry supplies plenty
of chills in this atmospheric novel. . . . This is horror on
a grand scale.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Every so often, you discover an author whose writing is
so lyrical that it transcends mere storytelling. Jonathan Maberry
is just such an author.”
—Tess Gerritsen, New York Times bestsellingauthor
of The Mephisto Club
“It is hard to believe this is Jonathan Maberry’s debut novel
because his writing is of such a high caliber and his storyline
is comparable to that of a master writer of horror. Great
action scenes, a growing sense of foreboding and fine
characterizations make this a one-sitting reading experience.”
—Midwest Book Review
““Jonathan Maberry writes in the grand poetic horror
tradition of Poe and Robert McCammon. His novel is not
just a frightening tale but one in which the reader can truly
identify with both the characters. The language and descriptions
are vivid, threatening, and beautiful. Maberry
belongs with the big names including King and Koontz.”
—Stuart Kaminsky
“A chilling tale about the staying power of evil.
As lyrical, melodic, and dark as the music that provides
the imaginary soundtrack. Maberry breathes new life
into modern horror fiction.”
—Scott Nicholson
“Maberry knows that true horror lies in the dark, hidden places
in the human heart, and to take this journey with
him is genuinely chilling.”
—T. J. MacGregor
“If I were asked to select only one new voice in horror
fiction to read today, it would be Jonathan Maberry. Ghost
Road Blues jumps so easily out of his blend of words, images, and
characters that you hardly realize you’re reading
a novel rather than watching a movie.”
—Katherine Ramsland
“If you think that small-town horror has nothing new to offer
the reader, you have a surprise in store for you. Jonathan
Maberry’s Ghost Road Blues, first in a trilogy, demonstrates
that even the most haunted town in America is unprepared
for the full depth of evil, either human or inhuman. A fine blend
of authentic supernatural folklore and conventional
villainy in a fully realized contemporary setting.”
—Don D’Ammassa
“Ghost Road Blues is a superbly woven, chilling tale that
makes you wonder who the real monsters are—humans
or the undead.”
—L. A. Banks
“As effective an opening as I’ve ever read, and the jolts
just keep on coming.”
—Jeremiah Healy
“Stunning! A fierce and new talent!”
—Ken Bruen
“A fun, fun read and creepy as hell. Jonathan Maberry
serves up scares like pancakes at a church social.”
—Gregory Frost
“I read as much horror fiction as I can get my hands on,
and it’s been a long time since I’ve read anything that I’ve
enjoyed as much as Ghost Road Blues.”
—Stephen Susco
“Ghost Road Blues rocks. From the first page to the last, Jonathan
Maberry displays the sure hand of a master of
the craft. I can’t wait to see what this new king of horror
has in store for us next.”
—Bryan Smith
“Jonathan Maberry writes densely layered prose full of real characters
and plenty of eerie atmosphere. He’s in tune with both
the dark side of human nature and the simple goodness that can
redeem us all.”
—David Wellington
“Jonathan Maberry is the big guy you’d want to back you
up in a fight. Now he’s writing big scary books that feel just
right. Ghost Road Blues is dues paid in advance: read it now
so that you can say you were there at the beginning
of a blockbuster career.”
—Bill Kent
“With Ghost Road Blues, Jonathan Maberry lands solidly
on his feet in territory once dominated by Manly Wade
Wellman and Joe Citro; this haunting, complex, terrifying,
and deeply humane novel is a heady feast for those who’ve been
looking for something new and lyrical in horror.”
—Gary A. Braunbeck
“Ghost Road Blues reminded me why I’m afraid of the dark.”
—Charles Gramlich
“Maberry will scare the bejibbers out of you!”
—John Lutz
“Dark, scary, and so darn well written that one might think
this book something Stephen King wrote and forgot
about many years ago.”
—Michael Laimo
“Maberry takes his reader to new and chilling places. If you read
horror, you can’t miss this book.”
—H. R. Knight
“Ghost Road Blues is a hell of a book—complex, sprawling, and
spooky . . . with strong characters and a setting that’s pure
Americana Halloween hell. A satisfying chunk of creepy, visceral
horror storytelling—I’d recommend this to anyone who loves
the works of Stephen King.”
—Jemiah Jefferson
“Reading Maberry is like listening to the blues in a graveyard at
the stroke of midnight—the dead surround you, your pounding
heart keeps steady rhythm with the dark, melodic prose, and the
scares just keep coming. You find yourself
wondering if it’s the wind howling through the cold,
foreboding landscape of gray slate tombstones or whether
it’s Howlin’ Wolf ’s scratchy voice singing ‘Evil.’ ”
—Fred Wiehe
“Get ready to be totally hooked, because it’s all here:
incredible atmosphere, characters you truly care about,
and a level of pure suspense that gets higher with every
page. Jonathan Maberry is writing as well as anyone in
the business right now, and I’ll be counting the days
until his next book.”
—Steve Hamilton
“Maberry’s Ghost Road Blues leads with a hard left
hook and never lets up, full of good, strong writing and
complex characters who step right off the page and into
readers’ heads. It’s a lyrical, frightening, and often astonishing
read. Although Pine Deep is not a place you’d like to
call home, you’ll feel as if you’ve been there before. A
wonderful novel from a fresh new voice in the genre.”
—Nate Kenyon
“Maberry weaves words of mesmeric power. Gruesome,
scary, and bloody good fun.”
—Simon Clark
“A wild mélange of soulful blues music and gut-wrenching horror!
Through vivid characters and clever descriptions, Jonathan
Maberry carefully crafts a very special town that
any horror fan would love to live in—that is, until it starts
to get ugly . . . really ugly. He brings terror to life in a
uniquely contemporary way. I’ll be so excited to read the
second book in his trilogy!”
—Brinke Stevens
“Ghost Road Blues is epic horror that puts you in mind of
The Stand, It, Boys’ Life, and They Thirst, but beats its own
scary path. Nicely tied to the blues and the dark magic of
Halloween, it is the first of an impressive new trilogy by
Jonathan Maberry, whose vivid prose hits the right rhythms and
whose creeping horrors will feed your nightmares until
the next installment—and maybe forever. High-octane
storytelling meant for chilly, full-moon nights.”
—W. D. Gagliani
“Prepare to be scared. Maberry frightens, amuses, and
makes you think, often on the same page. The horror is
pervasive, but so is a deeply entrenched sense of fun.
Move over, Stephen King.”
—J. A. Konrath
“Jonathan Maberry writes with the assured hand of a
veteran wordsmith. His voice is a confident one, his stories possessed
of the kind of rhythmic, lyrical quality one might find in
the work of Cady, Conrad, or even Faulkner. And yet such comparisons,
though hard to avoid when sitting around Maberry’s
campfire and hearing his voice, are not entirely fair, for there is a
uniqueness here that is exciting to behold. Jonathan Maberry is
reaping a crop all his own, and I for one eagerly await the fruit
of future harvests.”
—Kealan Patrick Burke
“Maberry writes a vivid, fast-paced prose, creating
characters and events that are memorable and often
frightening. If you like your fiction compelling and
deliciously dark, this is an author you should get to know.”
—Bruce Boston
“Ghost Road Blues begins with more horror than one
can imagine and ends savagely beautiful, intricately and deftly
written. Don’t start this book unless you can finish it!”
—Jack Fisher
“Like Stephen King in ’Salem’s Lot, Jonathan Maberry creates
a small town where the everyday flesh-and-blood brutality
of the citizens seems to call forth a deeper, more supernatural
evil . . . The cliffhanger ending will make you impatient for
the next installment of this trilogy!”
—E. F. Watkins
“Terrifying. Maberry gets deep into the heads of his
troubled characters—and ours. The small-town horror feels
like it’s right next door.”
—Jim Fusilli
“Stunning, powerful . . . a complex, heart-pounding read. It
deserves the Stoker for Best First Novel.”
—Kim Paffenroth
“As a horror fan, I loved Ghost Road Blues with its great
storytelling and memorable cast of characters. As a music fan,
I loved Maberry’s references to classic blues and rock
recordings. There may very well have been hellhounds
on Robert Johnson’s trail.”
—Andrew Burns
“Riveting, bristling with scares, rich with atmosphere . . . brings
to mind early Stephen King. Highly recommended!”
—Jay Bonansinga
“Without a doubt this prolific author is the next Stephen King.
Maberry deserves more then a Bram Stoker Award
for this; he deserves Bram Stoker to rise from his grave
and shake his hand.”
—Chad Wendell
“A must for anyone who enjoys a literary roller-coaster
ride with a deliciously grotesque streak.”
—Litara Angeli, Dark Realms magazine
“Maberry takes us on another chilling roller-coaster ride
through the cursed town of Pine Deep. You might want to keep
the night-light on for this one. Really.”
—Laura Schrock
“A fabulously written novel that grips you from its first line
to its last. Jonathan Maberry’s writing runs from dark and beautiful
to sharp and thought-provoking, and his books should be
on everyone’s must-read list.”
—Yvonne Navarro
“One of the best supernatural thrillers of recent years.”
—John Connolly
A lot of my readers think of me as the “zombie guy.” I get that
a lot at conventions, in reviews, in the press, and when I make
public appearances. And to be fair, I have written quite a few stories
about my life-impaired fellow citizens. They include thrillers
like Patient Zero and Code Zero; mainstream apocalyptic novels,
Dead of Night and Fall of Night; young adult post-apocalyptic adventures,
The Rot & Ruin series; nonfiction, Zombie CSU: The
Forensics of the Living Dead; comics, Warrior Smart; and a slew of
short fiction.
But my heart belongs to another monster and always has.
Vampires.
Yeah, I’m a big fan of the bloodsuckers.
Not in a romantic I-want-them-to-make-me-immortal way. I
don’t view them as lonely and tragic demigods who are deserving
of our love and worship. Nope. Nor do I love vampires because
they’re role models. It’s not that at all. In fact, I’m often asked why
I write about monsters, and my stock answer is that I don’t—I
write about the people who fight monsters. That’s a big, big difference.
There’s some backstory to this, just as there’s backstory to everything.
I grew up in Philadelphia during the sixties and early seventies.
My neighborhood was very poor and very violent. Racism, drugs,
homophobia, misogyny, intolerance, and crime were common elements of day-to-day life where I lived, and it was as bad or worse
at home. I was born into an environment of domestic abuse and
violence. Some of my earliest memories were about monsters.
Iron Mike Sweeney and his stepfather, Vic Wingate, are not created
from whole cloth. Alas.
While books and the daydreams of a writer-to-be were my escape
hatch, the oasis of peace was my grandmother’s house. I mentioned
her in the introduction to the previous volume, Ghost Road
Blues, but there’s more to say.
Maude Blanche Tabb (née Flavell) was a wonderfully spooky
old lady who had been raised in Alsace-Lorraine before marrying
a Cockney cabinet maker and immigrating to America. She brought
with her the folktales of late-18th- and early-19th-century rural
Europe. Prewar Europe. Belief in supernatural monsters was common
when she was a little girl, and she never quite shook off
those beliefs. She had stacks of books about all sorts of strange
things, and I devoured everything in her library, reading the ones
in English and listening to her translations of the French and
German. Decades before Harry Potter introduced the world to
the more obscure creatures in the supernatural bestiary I was
learning about imps and sprites, church grims and redcaps,
revenants and selkies. I learned that there were many different
kinds of werewolves and ten times as many other types of shapeshifters.
And I learned about vampires. So many different kinds of
vampires.
That’s what fascinated me most: that vampires came in all shapes
and sizes. That they were often so dissimilar that the “vampire” label
seemed inadequate. Some of them were almost more werewolf
than vampire—or more zombie, or more witch, or more ghost.
Or combinations of several.
Vampires, I discovered, did not at all resemble the creatures in
any of the Hollywood movies I watched. They were not tragic
Eastern European noblemen in tuxedos and opera cloaks. They
were, generally speaking, not human at all. They were monsters. If
some of them were romantic it was because seduction was a trick
used to lure the unsuspecting into a trap, at which point the true
and much more horrific nature of the beast would be revealed.
Also, the powers and vulnerabilities of vampires in these old
folktales didn’t square with movie vampires. They did not, for example,
fear the cross. That was something concocted by Bram Stoker
who, apart from being a wonderful novelist, was also Irish Catholic
and so put elements of his faith into his novel Dracula.
Stoker also conjured the idea of a vampire not being allowed
into a house unless invited. That was probably because in the first
third of writing Dracula he made the Transylvanian count way too
strong and needed to limit his powers when the monster arrived
in England. Otherwise Dracula would have killed everyone in the
second act and the book would have been short and ended badly
for all involved.
And the sunlight thing . . . that wasn’t Stoker. When F.W. Murnau
was filming Nosferatu, which was a direct rip-off of Dracula,
he went over budget, half the crew walked off, and he couldn’t
shoot the big dramatic courtyard battle that he lifted from Stoker’s
novel. So he and the lighting guy cooked up a scheme to have the
purity of sunlight kill the monster they had, to that point, only
filmed as a parasite that hid in darkness. That got bonded to the
vampire legend somehow, and most people believe that it was always
there. Oddly, the Chinese vampire species, the jiangshi, does
fear sunlight, but it’s unlikely Murnau knew that when he was
shooting his movie. Funny old world.
One of the other elements about folkloric vampires that I
found fascinating was that not all of them drink blood. Actually it
comes to about a third. Others eat flesh or feed on more esoteric
things like life essence, sexual energy, breath, and even things like
hope and faith.
I wrote about these monsters—and many more besides—in
my various nonfiction books, including Vampire Universe, They
Bite (co-authored by David F. Kramer), and Wanted Undead or
Alive (with Janice Gable Bashman), and I wrote even more about
them in a column on supernatural predators that I had in Dark
Discoveries magazine.
But I had the most fun exploring these old-school monsters in
fiction. In the Pine Deep novels there is a collision of experience
in how characters react to the possibility and later the reality of vampires. Like most of us, their knowledge of vampires comes
largely from books and movies. From Dracula to Dark Shadows,
from ’Salem’s Lot to Interview with a Vampire, from Blade to Twilight,
from Tomb of Dracula to 30 Days of Night, our understanding of
vampires has been informed by pop culture. The people of Pine
Deep are no different. Crow has amassed a lot of knowledge about
werewolves (another longtime favorite monster of mine) and
ghosts, but he isn’t as savvy about vampires. Reporter Willard
Fowler Newton is a professional skeptic but a solid researcher. Dr.
Saul Weinstock is a scientist. And Jonathan Corbiel is a folklorist.
Each of them comes at this from a decidedly different angle, and
it is only through trial and error that any of them begin to understand
what they’re facing.
Which brings us to that very question: What are they facing?
Well, it’s certainly not the Hollywood vampire. Or the Hollywood
werewolf, for that matter. Or even the Hollywood ghost.
Pine Deep has them all, but I tapped folklore for source material.
And like Bram Stoker, Stephen King, Anne Rice, and everyone
else who writes vampire fiction, I tweaked the model to suit the
story I wanted to tell.
Mostly, though, I relied on the deep, deep well of monstrous
storytelling potential that is folklore. There are several different
kinds of vampires in this series, and in Dead Man’s Song I had some
wicked fun exploring the process rational people go through
when encountering the unbearable reality of the supernatural in
their lives.
I love all three of the Pine Deep books, and for different reasons.
There are characters and story elements that are important
to me in profound ways. Just as there are characters and elements
that seem to have touched the many readers of these books. We all
know something of the darkness. We all know a monster or two.
But we also all know that monsters don’t always win and that
darkness is not a universal constant.
Dead Man’s Song is one of my favorite books. I know that some
folks dread the middle book of a trilogy because they’re afraid
that it’s all backstory and no drama. Yeah, that’s not the reason to be afraid. This book contains several horror sequences that I feel
are the best I’ve ever written. Some hints without spoilers: Dark
Hollow, barn on the Guthrie farm, the thing in Wingate’s cellar,
and a shattered mirror. You’ll see what I mean.
Read on, my friends. Welcome back to Pine Deep.
Del Mar, CaliforniaDecember 2015
THE GUTHRIE FARM
And I think I’m gonna drown I believe I’m gonna drown I think I’m gonna drown Standing on my feet.
—Mem Shannon, Drowning on My Feet
Sing it like the midnight wind, Sing it like a prayer; Sing it on to the way to hell, Them blues’ll take you there.
—Oren Morse, Dead Man’s Song
(1)
It was October when it happened. It should always be October when these things happen. In October you expect things to die.
In October the sun shrinks away; it hides behind mountains and throws long shadows over small towns like Pine Deep. Especially towns like Pine Deep. The wind grows new teeth and it learns to bite. The colors fade from deep summer greens to the mournful browns and desiccated yellows of autumn. In October the harvest blades are honed to sharpness, and that’s when the sickles and scythes, the threshers and combines, maliciously attack the fields, leaving the long stalks of corn lying dead in haphazard piles along the beaten rows. Pumpkin growers come like headsmen to gather the gourds for the carvers’ knives. The insects, so alive during the long months of July, August, and September, die in their thousands, their withered carcasses crunching under the feet of children hurrying home from school, children racing to beat the fall of night. Children do not play out-of-doors in the nights of Pine Deep.
There are shadows everywhere—even in places they have no right to be. The shadows range from the purple haze of twilit streets to the utter, bottomless black in the gaping mouths of sewers. Some of the shadows are cold, featureless—just blocks of lightless air. Other shadows seem to possess an unnatural vitality; they seem to roil and writhe, especially as the young ones—the innocent ones—pass by. In those kinds of shadows something always seems to be waiting. Impatiently waiting. In those kinds of shadows something always seems to be watching. Hungrily watching. These are not the warm shadows of September, for in that month the darkness still remembers the warmth of summer suns; nor were they yet the utterly dead shadows of bleak November, to whom the sun’s warmth is only a wan memory. These were the shadows of October, and they were hungry shadows. When the dying sun cast those kinds of shadows, well…
This was Pine Deep, and it was October—a kind of October particular to Pine Deep. The spring and summer before had been lush; the autumn of the year before that had been bright and bountiful, yielding one of those rare and wonderful Golden Harvests that are written of in tourist books of the region; and though there had been shadows, there hadn’t been shadows as dark as these. No, these shadows belonged to an autumn whose harvest was going to be far darker—these were the shadows of a Black Harvest October in Pine Deep. So, it was October when it happened. It should always be October when these things happen.
In October you expect things to die.
(2)
“They said they’d send us some coffee and hot sandwiches in about half an hour,” called Jimmy Castle as he trudged back into the clearing a quarter mile from the Guthrie farmhouse. Yellow crime scene tape was strung from post to post along the rows of towering late season corn, the ends anchored to the wooden rails of the fence that marked the boundary of the big farm. Tarps were pegged down over the spot where Henry Guthrie had been gunned down just a few days ago, and the criminalists and other crime scene investigators would be back in the morning to finish up their comprehensive search of the area. Of the three gunmen who had come into town after fleeing a bloody shoot-out in Philadelphia, two were dead and one—Kenneth Boyd—was still on the loose. That meant that the scene had to be secured until the CSI team was completely done, and it also meant a long cold night for Castle—who was still on loan from Crestville to help with the manhunt—and his partner, Nels Cowan, who was local PD.
Castle had his hands jammed deep into the pockets of his blue Crestville PD jacket, fists balled tight in a losing battle to try and hold on to some warmth. He walked briskly, shoulders rounded to keep the wind off his ears, his straw-colored hair snapping in the stiff breeze. “I told them to send some of those pocket hand-warmers, too…getting pretty freakin’ cold out….”
His words trailed off to nothing as he entered the clearing and all thoughts of warmth were slammed out of his brain.
He stopped walking, stopped talking, stopped breathing. The world imploded down into one tiny quarter-acre of unreality; time and order and logic all were smashed into one chunk of madness. All sound in the world died; all movement failed; all that existed was the tableau that filled his eyes as Jimmy Castle saw the two things that occupied the clearing. His mouth sagged open as he stood there rooted to the spot, feeling all sensation and awareness evaporate into smoke as the seconds fell dead around him. All of his cop reflexes, all of his training in crisis management simply froze into stillness because nothing at the Academy, nothing he had seen on the streets of Pittsburgh, where he’d done his first years, and nothing since he’d moved to Crestville could have prepared him for what he saw there in the moonlight darkness of the Guthrie cornfield. His mind ground to a halt and he just stood there and stared.
Nels Cowan lay on the muddy ground, arms and legs spread in an ecstasy of agony, head thrown back and lolling on what little was left of his throat. Cowan’s mouth was open, but any scream he uttered echoed only in the dark vastness of death; his eyes were open as if beholding horror, but that look was frozen onto his face forever, like an expression carved onto a wax mask. Blood glistened as thick and black as oil in the moonlight. The ghastly wounds on Cowan’s throat were so savage that Castle could even see the taut gray cords of half-severed tendons and the sharp white edge of a cracked vertebra. The dark shape hunched over Nels Cowan raised its head and looked at him without expression for a long moment, and then the bloody mouth opened in a great smile full of immense darkness and hunger, lips parting to reveal hideous teeth that were grimed with pink-white tatters of flesh. The teeth gleamed white through the streaks of red as the smile broadened into a feral snarl; its features were a mask of lust and hate, the nose wrinkled like a dog’s, the black eyes became lost in pits of gristle. A tongue, impossibly long and purplish-gray, lolled from the mouth and licked drops of blood from the thing’s chin.
Jimmy Castle opened his mouth, mimicking the silent scream of Nels Cowan; however his scream escaped, ran shrieking out into the night air and soared disjointedly up into the night. The frozen moment of time melted and he sagged to his knees, still screaming as his fingers scrabbled at the butt of his gun, his fingernails making scratching sounds in the silence. He was only distantly aware that the gun was coming free of the holster. With no mindful awareness of his actions he racked the slide, flicked off the safety, held the gun out and up in both hands, pointed. Fired. Actions performed a thousand times in practice, performed now with absolutely no conscious control, machinelike and correct. The barrel of the heavy 9mm rose, sought its target, and screamed defiance at the man-shape that was rising, tensing, readying itself to spring.
He tried to say the word “Freeze!” and though his mouth worked at it he could not manage any sound. Then his hands, operating independently of his brain, squeezed the trigger.
Thunder boomed and lightning flashed in the clearing as Jimmy Castle tried to blast the thing back into nightmares.
He fired straight, aiming by instinct alone at the centerline of the creature’s body. He fired fast. He fired true. He fired nine times, each boom as loud as all the noise in the world, sending nine tumbling lead slugs directly into the thing, catching it as it rose, catching it in belly and groin and chest. He hit it every single time.
And it did him no damn good at all.
(1)
The morphine should have kept him out for hours, down there in the darkness where there was no pain, no terror. After the doctors had stitched up his mouth and lip and the nurses had inserted replacement IV needles in his hand and shot the narcotics into his blood, Malcolm Crow should have just gone into that dark nowhere where there are no memories, no dreams. But that didn’t happen.
He only slept for a few hours while Officer Jerry Head—on loan from the Philly PD and part of the combined task force that had been formed to hunt down Kenneth Boyd, Tony Macchio, and Karl Ruger—sat in a plastic visitor chair and watched.
In his dreams Crow walked through the cornfields of the Guthrie farm, looking for Val, searching for her everywhere but finding nothing. As he hunted through the dreamscape he could hear a whispering echo of music buried beneath the hiss and rustle of the moving cornstalks—faint, but definitely there. He knew it was blues because it was always blues in his dreams; he knew that if he could get closer to it, if he could find its source, then he would be able to tell the name of the song. Somehow that mattered, though he did not know why. The dreamer never questions the logic of the dream.
Crow pushed through the corn, wincing now and then as the sharp blades of the leaves nicked his face and palms. He was barefoot; his hospital gown flapped open and the cold stung his ass. The ground was hard, his feet were blistered and bleeding, but he did not stop, did not even look down. The breeze stilled and for just a second he could hear the song more clearly. Damn, he did know it, but he just couldn’t pull the name out of his head. Something about a road. Something about a prison. What the hell was it?
He turned, orienting himself, and looked back the way he’d come. Behind him the corn was smashed down and broken aside as if his passage through the field had been like a bulldozer’s. He could see the trail leading in a twisted line going back so far that it vanished into the distance. The music was stronger now and he moved off to his right, humming as he went. It was in his head, in his mouth, and then he knew it. It was an old prison blues song, something someone had taught him long ago, back when he was a kid; and this time it came to him: “Ghost Road Blues.” A song from down South, something to do with prisoners suffering in Louisiana’s Angola prison and praying for release—even if it was the Angel of Death who unlocked their chains.
Crow stopped and listened to it, one ear hearing the song drifting along the breeze and the other listening to the song play inside his head from a long time ago. That had been on a warm early autumn afternoon on Val Guthrie’s porch, with Val sitting on the swing next to Terry and Terry’s little sister, Mandy. Crow’s brother Billy—good ol’ Boppin’ Bill—had a haunch propped on the whitewashed rail, tossing a baseball up into the air and catching it in his outfielder’s glove. Val’s dad was there—old Henry—and Henry’s wife, Bess. There were others, too—farm folks and field hands, brothers and cousins of the Guthrie clan, all of them smiling, clapping hands or snapping fingers, tapping their toes as the man with the guitar played his songs. Crow could see the guitarist so clearly: a stick-thin guy with a nappy Afro and dark eyes that sparkled with equal measures sadness and humor. Dark skin and loose clothes, skinny legs crossed with one work-booted foot jiggling in the air along with his music. A dime with a hole in it hung from a string tied around his brown ankle. Scars on his hands and face, shadows in his eyes, laugh lines around his mouth. Crow remembered the nickname he, Val, and Terry had given him because he was so skinny: the Bone Man.
On some level Crow knew that he was dreaming all of this, just as he was aware that he had dreamed of the Bone Man many times. Standing motionless now, adrift in sea of waving corn, Crow closed his eyes and listened to the gentle voice of the singer. The song was a lament for the prisoners in the infamous Red Hat House at Angola Prison in Louisiana who were imprisoned more for their skin color than for any real crime; they were beaten and humiliated by the guards, tortured, degraded—yet enduring. Then at the end of their days in that hellish place they stood tall and proud as they strolled that last mile to where Ol’ Sparky waited—knowing the other prisoners loved them for it and the guards hated that they could never truly break their spirits.
The song ended and the last mournful notes were sewn like silver threads through the freshening breeze, leaving Crow feeling lost and abandoned out there in the field. He opened his eyes and looked around. It was darker now, the sun hidden behind storm clouds as long fingers of cold shadow reached from the mountains in the north across the fields toward him. He clutched the inadequate hospital johnnie around himself, trying to conserve its meager warmth.
“Are you there?” he said aloud, and he wasn’t sure if he was calling for Val or for the Bone Man. As if in answer the corn behind him rustled and Crow spun toward it, his heart suddenly hammering. The Bone Man pushed aside the dry stalks like a performer parting the curtains to come onstage. He had his old guitar slung across his back, the slender neck hanging down behind his right hip. His skin was no longer dark brown but had faded to an ashy gray, and his eyes had a milky film over them, making him look dead.
“I heard you playing…” Crow said, his voice as dry as the Bone Man’s eyes. The Bone Man opened his mouth and said something, but there was no sound at all, not even a whisper. He smiled ruefully and gave Crow an expectant look, obviously waiting for an answer. “I…can’t understand you,” Crow said. “I mean…I can’t hear you.”
The Bone Man licked dry lips with a gray tongue and tried again. Still no sound at all, but Crow could at least read the man’s lips well enough to make out two words. Little Scarecrow. He understood that. Little Scarecrow was what he had once been called, years ago—a nickname given him by a man he’d given a nickname to in turn. Tit for tat. The Bone Man and Little Scarecrow. What he was called when he was nine.
Thunder rumbled far away to the northeast, and they both turned to look. There was a flash of lightning beyond the fields, over past the lover’s lane by the drop-off that led down to Dark Hollow. Crow saw the Bone Man nod, apparently to himself, and when the gray man turned his milky eyes were filled with a fear so sharp that it bordered on panic.
“I knew someone who lived down there once,” said Crow, and he was amazed to hear that his own voice had changed. It was the voice of a child. Maybe nine or ten. “There was a bad man who lived down there a long time ago.”
Narrowing his eyes, the Bone Man peered at him. Apparently he, too, heard the change in Crow’s voice. Little Scarecrow’s voice.
“He killed my brother, you know. He killed Billy and ate him all up.”
Now even Crow’s body had changed. He was nine years old, wearing pajamas and holding a tattered stuffed monkey. The Bone Man towered over him and little Crow—Little Scarecrow—looked up at him. “He ate Billy all up. He did it to my best friend’s sister, too. He made her all dead and ate her up. He does that, he…eats people all up.”
A tear broke from the dust-dry eye of the Bone Man and cut a path down his cheek.
“The bad man wanted to eat me all up, too…and he was gonna, but you stopped him! You came and stopped him and he went running off.” Little Scarecrow shuffled his feet and hugged his monkey tight to his chest. “Val’s dad said that you killed that man. Did you? Did you kill the bad man?”
The Bone Man opened his mouth, tried to say something, but the thunder boomed overhead and both he and the boy jumped. Red lightning veined the clouds, souring the breeze with the stink of ozone. The storm was centered over the drop-off to Dark Hollow, but it was coming their way fast with thunder like an artillery barrage. Without thinking he reached out and took the Bone Man’s hand. It was dry and cold, but it was firm, and after staring down at the boy in apparent shock for a long minute, the gray man returned a reassuring squeeze. Little Scarecrow looked up at him—and deep within the morphine dreams the adult Crow felt the surreal quality of the moment as he saw a dead man through his own youthful eyes. It was like watching a movie and being a part of it at the same time.
Officer Jerry Head looked up from his copy of Maxim as Crow shifted uneasily, twisting the sheets around his legs. “Bad dreams,” he murmured, then grunted. “No surprise there.” He went back to the article he was reading. Outside the window, in a totally cloudless sky, there was a flicker of distant lightning that Head did not consciously notice, but as he read his right hand drifted down and he absently began running his thumbnail over the rubber ridges of his holstered pistol’s grip.
In the cornfield, Little Scarecrow and the Bone Man stood hand in hand, watching the storm; it was a big, angry thing—flecked with red and hot yellow and sizzling white, lumped with purple and black. A cold wind came hard out of the northeast, heavy with moisture and smelling of decay. Above them a cloud of black night birds flapped and cawed their way toward the southwest, racing to outrun the storm, but the lightning licked out and incinerated three of the birds. They fell, smoking and shapeless, into the corn.
Tugging the Bone Man’s hand, Little Scarecrow looked up at him, puzzled and frightened. “I thought you killed the bad man. That’s what Val’s dad said…that you killed the bad man.”
There was a final terrible explosion of thunder and a burst of lightning so bright that it stabbed into Little Scarecrow’s eyes like spikes and he spun away, clamping his hands over his face—
—and woke up with a cry of real pain and genuine terror.
“Griswold!” he screamed as he woke and then there was a big dark shape looming over him and hands on his shoulders. Crow was blind with sleep and morphine and he tried to see, tried to fight, but the hands were too strong.
“Whoa, man,” said the voice of the man standing over him. “You’re gonna pop your stitches you keep that shit up.”
Abruptly Crow stopped fighting, blinking his eyes clear to see the big cop standing there. Broad-shouldered with a shaved head and an easy grin. It took Crow a second to fish his name out of the dark. “Jerry…?”
“Yeah, man, it’s just me.” Head smiled at him, but there was concern in his eyes. “You were having one hell of a nightmare there.”
“Christ,” Crow muttered, “you don’t know the half of it.”
Head helped Crow settle himself and he arranged the sheets and plumped his pillow as tidily as any nurse, gave him a sip of water through a straw, and settled back in his chair, scooping his magazine from off the floor where it had fallen.
Crow rubbed his eyes. “What time is it?”
“Almost six. Sun’ll be up in a bit. You weren’t out more than a few hours, though. You want me to get the nurse to bring you something, help you sleep?”
“God, I don’t think I ever want to go to sleep again.” With the tip of his tongue he probed the stitches inside his mouth, wincing. He sighed and settled back against the pillow but there was no getting comfortable. Everything hurt. Even his hair felt like the ends of brittle pieces of straw stuck into his scalp. “You on shift all night?”
“One of the local blues is supposed to relieve me at six-thirty.” He hesitated. “I can stick around if you want, though—”
Crow waved it off. “Thanks, man, but it’s cool. Tell me, though, did, um, anything else happen last night? I mean, after…”
Last night had been the second chapter in a nightmare that had begun two days before, on September 30. The whole thing had started when a trio of Philadelphia mobsters had forced a drug deal to go sour so they could make off with both the money and the cocaine, and had left behind a warehouse littered with dead men—their own cronies, a posse of Jamaicans, and at least one cop. Karl Ruger led the crew, and if there was ever a sicker, more violent, more vicious son of a bitch on planet Earth, that Crow had never heard of him. Ruger had been the directing force behind the buy, and he had made it go south because he needed enough money to flee the country—not just to elude the police manhunt, but to escape the wrath of Little Nicky Menditto, the crime boss of Ruger’s own outfit. Rumor had it that Menditto had learned that Ruger was the man hunted nationwide as the Cape May Killer—a psychopath who had slaughtered a group of senior citizens at the lighthouse on the Jersey Shore. Little Nicky’s grandparents had been on that tour.
The slaughter had been a bizarre by-product of a mob war in Philly, but Ruger had gone way past his instructions of “doing something to hurt Little Nicky.” Ruger had committed atrocities that were being written about in books and made into movies. Ruger was the kind of real-world killer than made Ted Bundy look like a genial neighbor. His identity had remained hidden for years, but then the whisper stream had started and Ruger knew that he had to run or die. The mob was never known for understanding or forgiveness.
How or why Ruger’s crew had crashed their car was something neither Crow nor the interjurisdictional police task force had been able to determine, and the ensuing manhunt was massive. Unfortunately their car had crashed on a remote edge of the Guthrie family farm. Every time Crow thought about how Ruger invaded the Guthrie house, brutalized the family, and nearly killed Val—his Val!—Crow felt his guts turn to ice.
It burned Crow that he hadn’t been there in time to stop Ruger before he moved like a killer storm through the lives of Val and her family. Crow’s best friend, Terry Wolfe, mayor of Pine Deep and owner of the country’s largest Haunted Hayride, had begged Crow to drive out to the attraction and shut it down, fearing what would happen if Ruger and his men showed up there. Crow had wasted way too much time getting that job done, and not really taking the job all that seriously. Mobsters and police manhunts just didn’t seem real in Pine Deep, and violence on that scale was something safely buried in the town’s past, not its present. Not now.
So, while Crow was tooling around, taking his time, Karl Ruger was beating the hell out of Val, her father Henry, her brother Mark, and Mark’s wife, Connie. Ruger tied everyone up except for Val and Henry and forced them at gunpoint to go out into the fields to help him fetch one of his injured men, Kenneth Boyd. By the time they got back to where Ruger had left Boyd, there was no trace of him, the cash, or the drugs. Boyd had split and taken Ruger’s lifeline with him. Ruger went totally off his rocker at that point, and, as Val later told Crow, Henry had seen just one chance to save his family. He shoved Val away from him, urging her to run while he ran the other way to draw Ruger away from the house. Ruger, snapping out of rage and into cold efficiency, simply shot Henry in the back as he ran and left him to die out in the rainy darkness. It was so callous that Crow felt bile in his throat.
Ruger headed back to the farmhouse, but Val wasn’t there. So he vented his anger on Mark—beating him, knocking his teeth out, totally humiliating him—and then forcing him to lie there on the floor and watch as he set about raping Connie. If Val had been even two minutes later it would have been too late for Connie, but Ruger was just starting to tear at her clothes when Val snuck in and tackled him, then immediately fled, taking a cue from her father’s sacrifice by tricking Ruger into chasing her. She had hoped to outrun him, to lose him in the darkness of her farm and then circle back to the house and get one of her father’s guns, but Ruger was as fast as he was sly and he caught her before she had taken a hundred paces. He was strangling her, trying to crush her throat to satisfy his dark need to hurt, to destroy, when Crow finally arrived. Too late to save Henry, almost too late to save the others.
The only thing that had gone right that night was that Ruger had underestimated Crow. Ruger was a big man, two hundred pounds of sinewy muscle packed onto a wiry six-foot frame. He had incredibly fast hands and he had never lost a fight in his life because there was nothing in his psychological makeup that could accept any reality except one in which he dominated. When Crow stepped out of his car, what Ruger saw was a short, thin man who looked about as threatening as a shopkeeper, which what Crow currently was. What he did not see were the years upon years of jujutsu training; what he did not see were the years on the Pine Deep police force as one its most decorated officers—all of that in the past, but not long past. Ruger made one of the worst mistakes anyone can make in a fight: he underestimated his opponent, and it had cost him.
They fought in the rain and the mud and it was the most vicious fight of Crow’s life. No mercy, no rules, no hesitation. It was eye-gouging and groin-kicking and throat-crushing. It was a life-or-death back-alley brawl between two men who had to win. Quitting or surrender were impossible concepts for both of them because to lose the fight was to lose absolutely everything.
In the end, Crow had won the fight, though he looked like he’d been trampled by horses. He was bloodied, winded, nearly blind with pain, but he was on his feet and Ruger was down. Which is when Crow had made his mistake, and it was every bit as foolish and dangerous as Ruger’s. Crow had not finished Ruger off. He left him there, down and apparently unconscious, and had run straight to Val to see if she was okay. It was around that time that the first patrol car had arrived, with Jerry Head at the wheel and a young local cop, Rhoda Thomas, riding shotgun. Head had gone into the house to check on Mark and Connie, Rhoda stayed in the yard to help Crow and Val. No one paid enough attention to Ruger. No one saw him struggle to his knees, no one saw him fish in the mud for the gun Crow had dropped at the beginning of the fight, no one saw him wash it clean in the heavy downpour. Only luck, or perhaps a little bone thrown to them by providence, gave Crow just enough warning to react when Ruger opened fire. Rhoda went down with a bullet in her shoulder and Crow was grazed by two bullets, one on each side of his torso, as he scrambled to pull Rhoda’s sidearm. He returned fire and emptied the Glock’s entire magazine into Ruger, watching as the bullets knocked the man into a weird puppet dance. Head appeared on the porch and added his fire and Ruger went down in a storm of bullets.
Val went down a moment later, the damage to her throat blending with shock and dragging her down into darkness. Crow tried to stay con. . .
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