engine, and leaped out and sprinted toward the kid.
The boy had barely moved, only turning to watch the car soar by.
“Jesus Christ, kid!” Crow yelled as he sprinted up. “That was the stupidest goddamn thing,” he bellowed, “that I’ve ever done!”
The kid blinked at him, half ready to stand up for himself when the words registered. He said, “Huh?”
“Christ, I’m sorry, kid,” Crow gasped. “Are you all right? Jesus, that was stupid! Damn, I’m sorry! What the hell was I thinking?”
“You…uh, what?” was all the kid could manage to get out.
Crow gripped the kid’s upper arms and peered at him. Both of them were shadows in the darkness, featureless in the blackness. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, kid, tell me you’re all right.”
“Uh, yeah,” the kid said. “Sure.”
“Oh, thank God!” Relief flooded up through Crow, nearly matching the towering level of his complete embarrassment and shame. He gave the kid a kind of reassuring shake and froze as the kid winced in real and obvious pain.
“Jeez…what’s wrong? Did I hurt you? Did the car—”
“No,” the kid hissed, gritting his teeth. “It wasn’t you. It was the tow-truck.”
Crow just looked at the boy’s shadow-shrouded face, trying to understand why the kid’s statement didn’t make any sense. Crow blinked a couple of times. “The, um…tow-truck?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Ah…and which tow-truck might that be, son?” Crow said, looking around briefly, assuring himself that no tow-truck loomed nearby.
“The one that tried to kill me,” said the boy.
“Oh,” Crow said with a vague smile, “that one. I see.”
They looked at each other’s silhouette for a moment, the conversation stalled by the complete lack of understanding on both parts. Above them, the moon peered out from behind a fence of clouds, bathing the kid’s face in a clear, revealing brightness.
“Mike!” Crow said with real astonishment.
“Crow…?”
“Well…shit!” Crow said, half smiling.
“Yeah,” agreed Iron Mike Sweeney.
The Bone Man walked out of Dark Hollow and stepped onto a hill on A-32, not three miles from where Crow and Mike stood. Walking slowly with a lanky gait that made his body look as if it were all bones and rags with no meat at all, he strolled to the center of the road and then stopped, turning to lift his face to the brilliant moonlight. Moonlight glittered on the strings and keys of his guitar. A cloud of bats whirled and danced above him, their tiny bodies looking like torn scraps of shadow in the flickering light from the distant storm. The Bone Man stood and watched them, absently reaching up a thin hand as if anxious to join their carefree gavotte. The bats knew him and did not fly away; all the things that moved in the night knew him, knew the pale shadow of a man who cast no shadow of his own.
All of them knew the Bone Man, the sad-eyed wanderer, the boneyard refugee. After a while the bats flitted off into the night and he stood alone in a cold wind.
Then a night bird with a bloody beak came flapping out of the east and circled him once, twice, three times before wheeling and flapping off into the west, where a lonely farmhouse stood amid a sea of corn. From where he stood on the hill, the Bone Man could see the tiny squares of yellow light dotting two sides of the distant house.
He considered the house, looking far and long and into it, reading its fortune in the call of the crickets and the rustle of the corn. He smelled blood on the wind, and some of it, he knew, was not yet spilled. There was still so much of this night left.
The Bone Man turned his rake-handle-thin body to the east and listened to the wind. There were sounds on it. Laughter, the cries and gasps of young lovers, the screech of tires, the lonely and distant drone of a tractor- trailer whining along the back stretch of the highway, the call of owls, the deep barking of a dog. The high, sharp wail of a man in absolute terror and unbearable pain, a sound that faded and then abruptly stopped with a wet, guttural gurgle.
Long and dark blew the night wind around and past and through the Bone Man.
His eyes glistened with anger and fear and frustration. The tide of the night was already strong, moving the flotsam around faster than he could keep up. The gray man felt a hopeless surge of sickness in his empty stomach as he sensed the
Such power…
The Bone Man stood for a long time in indecision. The calls of the night birds told him much that he needed to know, told him too much. Now he didn’t know which way to turn. Whose life mattered more? Which of the innocent ones needed him more than the others? Which innocents ones would he have to sacrifice to save the rest?
Thunder sniggered in the east.
The Bone Man turned north and began walking toward Pine Deep, his stick legs swishing, his stick arms swinging, and his white face gleaming like polished marble. In his eyes, cold storms raged.
“I thought you were making supper for Crow.”
Val didn’t look up from her crossword puzzle. Her father lifted the lid and stuck his whole face into the aromatic vapors and took a deep breath. “Smells pretty good.”
“Don’t sound so surprised. I can cook, you know.”
Guthrie didn’t choose to reply to that; instead he sniffed the soup again, amazed that it really smelled like soup and not sewage. Val’s previous attempts at cooking were spectacular disasters. Maybe she’d had a culinary epiphany. He found his mouth watering despite all of the warning klaxons ringing in his head.
“Leave it be,” Val said. “You had your dinner.”
“What is it?”
“Turkey soup and get your nose out of it, thank you very much.”
Henry Guthrie sighed and set the lid back on the pot. “There seems to be an awful lot of it for one skinny little fella like Crow.”
“I made enough for his lunch tomorrow.” Val finished a clue and then looked up. Her father was still loitering by the pot, trying to look earnest and hungry. She shook her head but she was smiling. “Pop, if you’re really that hungry, just take some. You go wandering all around a thing hoping it’ll jump at you.”
“Well,” Guthrie said with a smile, his curiosity getting the better of him, “maybe just a little. I wouldn’t want to steal food out of Crow’s mouth, you understand.”
“Uh-huh.”
He fetched a dish and a ladle and scooped a brimming bowlful, an amount that scarcely dipped the level in the heavy spotted black pot.
“There’s crackers in the cupboard.”
“No dumplings?”
“Pop…”
“Crackers it is, then.” Guthrie took down a box of saltines, rummaged in the fridge for a bottle of spring water, and sat down at the table across from his daughter. A discerning eye could see the kinship between them. She had his strong bones and dark hair, but her coloring and her laughing mouth were from her mother’s Irish stock, not her father’s brooding Scottish blood. The elder Guthrie had heavier features and his once jet-black hair had gone silver since Val’s mother had died two years before. His nose was hawked and beaky and he had a thick mustache that dipped into his spoonful of soup as he blew on it and sipped.
“How is it then?”
“Just like your mama’s.”
