Ghost Road Blues

“Oh, I’m quite sure.” Terry snorted. “You’re way too far into this stuff, man. I mean, do you even get mail from the real world?”

“Not often.”

Most of the year, the Crow’s Nest Craft Shoppe was a respectable, upscale arts and crafts store that sold everything from make-your-own birdhouse kits to Elmer’s School Glue, but with the advent of cooler weather a darkness crept over the store, or at least so it seemed to Terry. The basic craft supplies were exiled to the racks in the back room, while the large main showroom of the shop became a place where monsters ruled. Row upon row of rubber horror masks lined the walls, and Terry was always amazed at the horrific detail of these masks. He would have expected the witches and werewolves and ghouls, but these were overshadowed by grinning freaks with bulging eyes and insanely smiling mouths; demons with flaring red eyes and open, running sores; sadomasochistic cenobites that sprouted grids of pins or exposed gray matter; serial killers with thin, loveless mouths and chiseled features; distorted ghost faces from the Scream trilogy; alien invaders with multifaceted bug eyes and whiplike antennae; huge dragon heads with horns and saurian scales and plates; leprous fiends with leering faces; undead zombies riddled with bullets holes; mummies whose bandages slipped to reveal monstrously deformed verminous eyes; and many more, each more horrific than the last.

Then there were the monster model kits, stacks and stacks of them, and apple barrels filled with nasty little trinkets: eyeball key chains and human thumb erasers, plastic vampire teeth and stick-on bullet holes, and scores of assorted insects and vermin. Costumes hung on hangers by a makeshift dressing room and accessories were lined up neatly on Peg-Boards. For a few dollars the local kids could walk away with plastic butcher knives, meat cleavers, Freddy Kruger gloves, Jason hockey masks, pitchforks, witches’ brooms, ball-and-chains, pirate hooks, headbands that made it look as if there were an arrow through their skull, and a variety of makeup in black and orange tubes, guaranteed to transform any ten-year-old into a demon from the outer darkness or a newly risen corpse. Crow loved it. The kids in town loved it. Terry Wolfe, however, hated all of it.

One small counter — Terry’s only haven in the store — was incongruously stocked with rows of beepers and cell phones. Being the local Cingular distributor paid the bills the rest of the year, Crow insisted. The business had its frustrations, though, because the cellular relay tower was on the blink as often as it was working, and no one could understand why; plus more than half the places around town were cell phone dead zones.

“Hey, that reminds me,” Terry said, drumming his fingers on a case of colorful cell phone covers, “while I’m here can I recharge?” He pulled his cell from its belt holster. “I’ve been on this thing all day and it’s dead as a doornail.” Crow took it and plugged it into a charger behind the counter and then went back to stocking the shelves, glancing covertly at Terry as he did so. He didn’t like the way Terry looked and wondered if he was having troubles with Sarah. That, on top of the town’s crop and financial problems, would be almost too much.

That, and the coming of Halloween. Terry never liked Halloween, as Crow knew all too well. It had always scared him dry-mouthed and spitless ever since he was ten. Back in the autumn of the Black Harvest when Terry had been so cruelly injured. That had been the worst time for all of them. Crow’s own brother, Billy, had been murdered by the same man who had killed Terry’s sister, Mandy, and had nearly killed Terry.

Terry and Crow were the only ones in town who had seen the face of the killer and survived — and both of them knew for damn sure it hadn’t been that migrant worker, Oren Morse. The one they’d nicknamed the Bone Man. The bluesman that the town had accused of committing the murders, and had killed.

Terry and Crow knew different, but not once in thirty years had they spoken to each other — or to anyone for that matter — about it, and that had been Terry’s choice. He’d taken his memories of that autumn and had boxed them up and stored them in a back closet of his mind, never to be opened. Crow, on the other hand, thought about that autumn almost every day of his life, and he’d taken the other routes to defuse the ticking time bombs of memories. First he tried to pickle the memories in bourbon, but that hadn’t really done the job, and had nearly ruined his life. Then he went the other route and made a joke out of them. He indulged them, made them a farce by selling monster masks and designing spooky traps for the hayride. Crow thought that doing that had more or less exorcised the demons of memory, but he couldn’t bring himself to talk it over with a shrink to find out.

The upshot was that Terry was afraid of the dark, and Crow was afraid of the light. If they could have compared notes, it might have been both funny and comforting to them.

Yet, despite their private terror, both Crow and Terry took a wry amusement at Terry’s being afraid of Halloween and at the same time being mayor of the town Time magazine had once dubbed “the Most Haunted Town in America.” Pine Deep was one of those peculiar little towns that seemed to foster a common belief in ghosts and ghostly happenings; not just among the town’s eccentrics, but in everyone from crossing guards to town selectmen. The haunted history stretched back to Colonial times when ghosts of slaughtered Lenni-Lenape were said to haunt the new European settlements, and the legends hadn’t dwindled with time but seemed to gather steam with each passing year. It was on this rather spooky foundation that the entire financial structure of the town was built.

Ever since the Black Harvest of thirty years ago when blight destroyed half the farms in the region, the town had begun to change. Developers had bought up the farms and built expensive houses and estates. Money moved in, as the town saying went, and with it came artists, writers, and craftspeople who bought stores and began shoveling in the tourist dollars. The writers wrote horror or gothic novels that made the best-seller lists, the artists painted moody pieces that became popular spooky posters, and the craftspeople made everything from miniature hand-sewn scarecrows to fabulously expensive jewelry like the Vampire’s Tears, a pair of bloodred ruby earrings that Anne Rice wore on the cover of Publisher’s Weekly. The mood and the history of the town seemed to inspire the darker thoughts of the artists, and the tourists loved everything they made.

Terry, always business smart, joined in with the group that capitalized on the haunted history of the town, and used that as gimmicks for advertising. Soon everyone up and down the eastern seaboard came to Pine Deep for the scary fun and games: the Halloween Parade, the Monster Mash dance-concert — once, years ago featuring, appropriately enough, The Smashing Pumpkins — and the seasonal shopping that attracted the most astute and discerning antiquarians. The whole town came totally alive at Halloween and the accounting ledgers of nearly every store went quickly and happily from red to black between September and Christmas, with the definite peak being the weeks leading up to trick-or-treat. Chills and shivers helped Pine Deep prosper as an increasingly upscale community. The fact that Terry Wolfe, with his secret fears, was mayor of “Spooksville,” as the Philadelphia Daily News recently called it, was truly ironic.

The topper of the whole strange pie was that, despite everything, Terry owned the Haunted Hayride.

Crow’s reverie was broken by the ringing of the phone and he leaned across the counter and picked it up. “Yeah…sure, he’s right here.” Smiling, he tossed the portable handset to Terry. “For you. Chief’s office.”

“Uh-oh!” Terry said in mock alarm as he reached out a hand to take the phone. Crow strolled a few paces away and began idly poking in his box of rubber vermin and body parts.

“Yeah, Gus, what is it?” Terry listened for a moment, then said, “No, my cell’s out of energy. What’s the hurry?” He listened for a while and then started saying “Jeez!” every couple of seconds. Terry was a man incapable of profanity and “Jeez” was about as close as he ever got to an expletive. Crow gave Terry an inquisitive look, but the mayor held up a finger and mouthed the word wait. Terry listened for over a minute, then said, “Jeez!” again. “Okay…what about the three gunmen?”

Crow arched his eyebrows and silently mouthed the word gunmen, and again Terry held up his hand. “Jeez-oh-man!” Terry said with feeling, and that was him at his most profane. “Okay, Gus, I’ll be there in a minute. Yeah. Bye.” He punched the Off button on the portable and stood there, chewing his lower lip and tapping the phone against his thigh. Crow cleared his throat; Terry looked sharply at him. “Man, the manure has really hit the fan now.”

“Why? What’s up?”

“You are not going to believe this one, man, but Gus got a call from the Philadelphia Police Department. They red-flagged all the jurisdictions from Philly to the state line because apparently three psychos shot a bunch of holes in some Jamaican druggies and made off with a bunch of drugs and money.”

“Cool!” Crow grinned in spite of himself.

“Yeah, well, the kicker is that they’ve been spotted a few times and for some reason I cannot even fathom, they’ve been heading this way. According to what Gus told me, they probably came through here half an hour ago. There were roadblocks set up. Gus had already been working with Crestville and Black Marsh since late this afternoon. Philly is sending a bunch of their ‘advisers’ up here to take over from Gus. He said he tried to beep me to let me know, but he couldn’t reach me and figured I’d wind up here. Anyway, Gus and the other chiefs arranged