barely touching the strings, he began to play an old blues song. “Black Ghost Blues” by Lightnin’ Hopkins. He played it through while the thunder rumbled overhead and the lightning slashed at the sky.
When the song ended he was a quiet for a while, listening to the storm; then he began playing a different tune. It was a sad song, one his grandfather had written a long time ago and called “Ghost Road Blues.”
Not far away, close enough for the Bone Man to feel it, down the long hill at the bottom of the hollow, was another place, a place that was far darker even than its name, a place of mold and decay, where seething insectoid life thrived in twisted vitality around a swamp that lay always hidden by shadows. The tall trees were clustered over it like mourners bowed over a coffin, the twisted bracken and shrubs that were tangled along the lumpy ground as thick as moss on a wet stone, bathing it forever in darkness despite the brightest summer sun; and now, with the swelling dark of autumn and the fading of Indian summer’s last shreds of warmth, the place was a temple to lightlessness, bitter cold and a pestilential silence.
The gray man finished his song and for a while he just sat on his log and felt the roiling darkness of that shunned and malevolent place lapping like black waves around him. He remembered that place; remembered it and feared it. In his memories he saw that place splattered with blood and rent by violence. Long ago, the Bone Man had thought — foolishly, naively — that the evil of that place had perished with the evil man who’d used the swamp as a fortress. He’d believed that when the man died his evil would die with him. Now, looking back down the littered corridor of empty years, he finally understood what that cold and evil man had told him.
The man with graveyard dirt on his suit and the ragged night bird sat in their silence and watched the fire.
Chapter 7
The road swept around a tight bend and then settled down into a long stretch of flat, straight highway. Mike pedaled laboriously, trying not to breathe too hard, yet feeling his lungs begging him for more air. The night had grown quiet and close around him, a gelid mass that was hard to move through with any kind of speed. He didn’t dare look at his watch. Already it had been nearly an hour since the maniac in the wrecker had driven him off the road, and Vic wasn’t going to be pleased at all. Mike wondered if a broken rib would exempt him from the usual belting, and decided that it probably wouldn’t. He could almost imagine how Vic would put it: “Your ass ain’t broken, boy, just bend over the chair and try for once to take it like a man.”
The tears wanted to come again, but he actually snarled out loud to drive them back. He would not — he absolutely would not ever cry because of that bastard Vic. Not ever again! His anger sent energy to his legs and for a while he pedaled on in furious silence, ignoring, even savoring the pain.
He had gone almost three miles when a series of brilliant and lengthy lightning flashes drenched the road in revealing brilliance. Mike slowed his bike and stared. Just ahead of him, beginning a few inches beyond his front tire, were long black skid marks. They were so dark that Mike knew they were fresh, and they cut away to his right in a very tight arc, ending abruptly at the shoulder of the road. He gingerly got off his bike and walked the length of those skid marks, stopping on the verge with his heels on the blacktop and his sneakered toes hanging out over the deep ruts torn into the near edge of the big drainage ditch. He waited for the next lightning flash, and in its glow he could see where the ruts began again on the other side of the ditch; these ruts were deeper, more smashed in, and huge clods of mud had fallen away into the ditch. As bolt after bolt of lightning danced through the sky, he worked it out in pieces, seeing first the place where all four tires had cut furrows in the dirt as the car must have slewed sideways, then the gap-toothed hole in the otherwise orderly wall of cornstalks. The car must have plowed right into the field and kept on going. Mike crabbed sideways, trying to get a better angle of sight. One final flash of lightning was all he needed to see the gleam of metal many yards into the corn.
“Jeez!” he said aloud. Indecisively he looked back at his bike for a thoughtful second, and then into the corn again. He knew that the car crash must have happened only recently, because there hadn’t been any skid marks when he’d come out this way. Say two hours, tops.
The wrecker had come from this direction, he thought, and wondered if that crazy driver had driven this car off the road, too.
A horrible thought occurred to him.
Mike could feel his pulse racing. The thought of people trapped in a wrecked car was one of the truly terrifying images for him. When his own father had fallen asleep at the wheel of his car while driving home from his nighttime job, the ambulance men had told Mike’s mom that he had probably been alive for as much as half an hour. Half an hour before the gasoline leaking from the ruptured tank had somehow found a way to ignite. Mike shuddered at the thought of someone else being trapped like that, being alone and afraid. Dying the way his dad had died. That was the stuff of his nightmares.
Before he was even conscious of his decision, he had taken a step off the blacktop and onto the top of the steep slope of the drainage ditch.
Then something truly amazing happened.
A deer stepped quietly out of the woods right in front of him, coming right out of the opening that had been smashed in the cornstalks. It stepped out boldly just as a bolt of lightning seared the whole world to whiteness all around him. Mike gasped and jolted to a stop, mindful of the pain in his ribs, but too surprised even to wince.
The deer was a big buck, maybe a twelve-pointer, and normally that alone would have been enough to stop him in his tracks, but that was nothing compared to the color of the thing. It was pure white. Not just pale but an unnatural white, like milk or a freshly whitewashed fence. Hard muscles rippled beneath the smooth hide as it walked slowly out of the cornfield and stood facing him across the few yards of the drainage ditch.
Mike marveled at it, smiling at the majesty of the animal without even being aware of it. For a while he totally forgot about his broken rib and about Vic’s hard hands waiting at home, he forgot about the skid marks and the wreck. He was filled with the beauty of the magnificent creature. It was easily the biggest deer he had ever seen, at least two hundred pounds, and stood tall and proud in the road before him; and it stood so close!
The deer looked at him with that quiet nobility and innate wisdom that some animals seem to possess. Not one trace of fear flickered in those large, dark eyes and it kept its eyes on him as the creature turned and paced halfway around him, edging slightly away.
“Wow…” Mike breathed, his voice as soft as the light breeze.
The buck’s eyes seemed unnaturally expressive and unusually intense. Mike felt as if they projected some kind of force that struck him between his own eyes. He tried to breathe and found that it was difficult to fill his lungs. The buck turned its majestically antlered head and looked at the cornfield behind him, then turned again to face Mike. Mike instantly remembered the wrecked car, and he was torn between his awe of this animal and the thought that someone might need his help. He took a small step toward the edge of the road. The deer lowered its head and shook its massive rack of razor-sharp horns, then raised its head and stared at him. Mike swallowed something the size of a cantaloupe. He waited for maybe thirty seconds and then dared another step. Through the tangle of smashed corn he could see the gleam of metal shimmering with every new bolt of lightning. He took a third step.
With a flash of white the deer leaped at him.
Mike cried out and staggered back as the front hooves of the deer struck the ground barely a foot from his toes. He fell backward and upward, landing hard with his rump on the blacktop and legs skidding on the mud of the ditch, and the pain from his cracked rib stabbed through him like a spear. Mike cried out and the deer sprang again, and as Mike fell back he looked up in wonder as the deer passed over him, landing with a skittering of hooves on the highway beyond him. The buck wheeled toward him, standing tall and powerful, fire seeming to dance along its
