when they were kids. The clearing was the spot where Val and Crow had first kissed, and the spot where they’d first touched each other with trembling and uninitiated hands. Crow had brought a blanket, draping it over one shoulder, and last night, as he had on so many nights over the years, he’d spread it on the ground. Above them the stars painted them with pale silver light as they kissed and undressed each other and then lay down on the blanket. Some nights were slow and tender and patient, and some nights were all about urgency. Last night it was a hammering need in their blood and they dropped their clothes rather than hang them on the fence rails. Crow lay down and pulled her down onto him. She stretched out on him, nearly his match in height and certainly his match in heat and need. Their kisses were hot and breathless and there was no time for words. She reached down to find him hard and familiar and she took him and guided him into her body and they both gasped as he entered and found her very wet and ready.
A few minutes later she cried out as she came — a sound echoed strangely by a startled crow deep in the field — and then a few minutes after her he cried out as he rose to that crest where there is nowhere to go but over, and over he went, sailing into the golden intensity of his orgasm, and Val caught up and she came again.
After that it had been time for tenderness and softness and slow kisses and the dream faded out like a love scene in a movie, dimming to black and then silence, and for a while she just floated in the darkness of sleep.
Then she had
The other one, the one she had been having for weeks now. In her dreams the pale man was always there. Val had dreamed about him for years, but now he was always there, waiting at the edge of sleep. Sometimes this dream was just a collection of quick flash images like unexpected lightning between longer and less frightening dreams; sometimes the dream was longer and complex, and when it was one of those kinds of dreams she felt panic because she didn’t think she would ever find her way out. On nights like that, waking up was like a reprieve from the electric chair.
Now, as evening settled over the farm, she had one of those darker and more complex dreams and its intensity washed away the happiness and tenderness of the previous dream.
First she dreamed of the tall man with black hair and pale skin and no features at all that she could make out, as if his face were a blur, as if someone had tried to take his picture and he’d turned away too fast, but as he moved through her dreams his face remained smeared like that. The only part of his face that she could see clearly was his mouth.
He had a red, smiling mouth and lots of jagged white teeth.
In that first dream she walked through the darkened rooms and hallways of her family’s big, rambling farmhouse. She was not fleeing through the rooms — not at first — but there was some indefinable sense of urgency. Every once in a while she’d look behind her and she’d see the tall pale man step back out of sight.
Then suddenly the dream changed and she was running through the cornfields as cold rain hammered down on her. She was naked and streaked with blood and mud and icy rainwater. In one hand she held a sodden fistful of twenty-dollar bills wrapped in bank tape. In her other hand she held a gun. The gun stank of cordite, the barrel still smoking.
She ran through the fields, vulnerable, helpless, and afraid. And the tall pale man followed her.
It was like one of those chase scenes in the old horror movies: she ran fast and ran well and the pale man walked with slow deliberate steps as if in time with a metronome, but somehow he still managed to keep up with her…and whenever she cast a terrified look over her shoulder he seemed to be catching up.
She ran and ran.
Once she stopped, spun around, and fired the gun at the man, squeezing the trigger and feeling the shock as the bullet exploded from the gun and her gun hand was jerked into the air. The bullets all hit the pale man.
She might as well have been throwing stones at a statue for all the good they did. The pale smiling man never slowed and he never stopped, and each time a bullet struck him — and passed straight through — his smile grew. It grew and grew until it was an alligator’s smile, huge and full of sharp teeth. The smiling mouth was absurd and too big for the rest of the face.
He came on through the rain and Val turned and ran on.
The smiling man kept walking but he got closer and closer and closer, and just as he was reaching out to close his bone-white fingers around her naked shoulder…
…Val woke up.
She shuddered and shook her head and crawled up until the knobs of her spine were pressed against the wooden headboard. Her face and throat and breasts were wet with sweat and for just a moment the sweat smelled like rainwater.
Chapter 6
“
The cry clawed its way out of the car and fled away across the tops of the corn. A few crows stirred and flapped uneasily, casting lifeless black eyes suspiciously around. They sat on the crossbar of a scarecrow perch, but there was no scarecrow here, just the faded old wood of the perch. The birds waited, listening.
There was silence, except for the swaying of the corn.
“Oh…Jesus…” A whisper now: pale and bloodless, too weak to even rustle the feathers of the crows.
Silence again. Longer this time. The birds fidgeted.
Then a new sound. A creak and then a mild protest of metal. The birds hopped and turned to look. The broken car squatted below them, half buried in toppled stalks of corn. The crumpled metal skin of the car looked like cloth thrown over a pile of rocks; there was no moon and no starlight to give it a metallic sheen. The car simply hunched there on its crippled wheel, abandoned and desolate.
The crows waited. They were hungry crows. They knew.
With ancient black eyes they watched as the door of the car was pushed slowly, heavily open. Its hinges squealed with piglike protest, but the door finally opened.
There was more of the expectant silence again. Nearly ten minutes passed before there were any further movements from within the car. The crows rustled their feathers and tried not to think about their empty bellies. One crow opened its beak as if to utter a loud cry, but closed it again without making a sound.
It was a hand that first appeared. Dark with blood, it reached out of the car and hooked trembling fingers over the frame. The fingers slipped on the smooth metal, but finally the tips caught in the depression of the rain gutter above the door. The hand curled, tensed, tried to be strong. Tendons stood taut on the back of the hand and in the wrist, the forearm muscles swelled with effort as the bloody hand tried to haul its body out of the car. It was a problem in physics, and it should have be an insoluble one; the arm should never have been able to collect enough strength to pull the body from its seat, there wasn’t enough blood or life in its veins to carry strength to its muscles. Even adrenaline should not have been enough to allow that engineering feat to come to fruition. But as the crows watched, Tony Macchio pulled himself slowly, carefully, and painfully out of the car.
The nearest crow squawked very quietly as if ironically cheering the performance. The other crows watched with more evident annoyance. Death was sometimes too slow, slowest when the belly was empty.
It took Tony all of five minutes to get himself into a reasonably upright position, but then he sagged into the V formed by the car and the open door. His legs refused to be part of this mad venture and simply buckled, but his arms spread and he hung in bleeding cruciform on the apex of the doorway. He coughed once, sharply, and then again more softly. His ruined nose was swollen and purple. Blood dottled his lips and dripped onto his chest, but each drop was lost against the immensity of the stain that drenched him from sternum to crotch. The two bullet holes in his gut leaked sluggishly, the flow diminishing from a simple lack of hydrostatic pressure. He was bled white and should by all accounts have been dead, but even though his body was dying it lingered at the point of death and life, sustained by a single thread. That thread was the wire of hatred sewn through Tony’s soul.
His bloody lips formed a single word.
“Karl!” He said it without sound, but it had all the force of a curse screamed at the top of furious lungs. Just saying the name funneled power into his dying muscles. It wasn’t a lot of power, but it was a cold and determined power. It made his legs assume the abandoned duty of supporting him, and with slow deliberation he pushed
