Ghost Road Blues

ankles. He had to catch the devil before moonrise.

He hit the bottom of the hollow hard enough to jolt him down to his knees and he cried out in pain, but he hauled himself right back up because crying about it don’t get it done. Setting his teeth against the pain and setting his heart against the fear, he ran into the shadows, his eyes adjusting to the bad light, searching for the devil and finding him almost at once. The devil had stopped to wrestle with a tree branch, trying to break it off, but the wood was green and didn’t want to die.

The Bone Man had no Luger, no skinning knife. All he had was his guitar and without even thinking about it he plucked the strap from his chest and hauled the instrument over his head just as the devil broke off the green branch. As the devil turned to face him, the Bone Man could see the man’s eyes change from blue to yellow to red. Just like that. The pupils contracted to slits and the devil suddenly laughed, his mouth opening wet and wide, and there were a lot of teeth in there. The devil looked at the stick in his hands and as his hands began to change he snarled with contempt and threw the stick away.

The Bone Man didn’t stop, didn’t flinch though his heart was turning to ice in his chest. He gripped the guitar by the neck and as he raced the last few yards he swung it. The devil was arrogant. He was into the change now and he knew what he would become. He was prideful, was the devil; and pride is a dangerous thing, even to the devil.

The guitar whistled through the air and the strings hummed with dark music as it cut around in a tight arc, powered by every ounce of strength the Bone Man possessed. The body of the guitar hit the grinning devil in the face and exploded into a million fragments of swamp ash and maple. The strings broke and twanged, singing chords of anger; the rosewood fingerboard split in two pieces. In the microsecond before the impact sent the devil crashing to the ground his face changed from a sneer of hungry triumph to a look of pure human amazement. He spun away, crying out in shock and pain, spit and blood erupting from his mouth as he fell. He wasn’t far enough into the change to be able to shrug that off with a sneer. He was still more man than wolf.

The devil crashed to the muddy floor of the hollow, his red eyes flickering like candles, his distorted face a dripping red mask of hate and pain.

The Bone Man stood over him with only the broken neck of the guitar in his hands. In the darkness of Dark Hollow there was no trace of God’s sunlight, and somewhere over the mountains the moon was rising. Above them the tips of the pine trees were turning to silver as the death-mask face of the moon climbed into the night.

Even now, beaten down and bloody, the devil was about a heartbeat away from winning. He needed only the kiss of moonlight and the night would be his.

The Bone Man’s face was streaming sweat and his eyes were streaming tears. He was a gentle man, but gentle wouldn’t get this done, and he tried to make his heart turn to stone as he took the guitar neck in both hands and raised it over his head. The strings of the guitar and all the tuning pegs touched the moonlight and turned to silver fire.

“You go back to hell!” he screamed and then slammed the broken and jagged end of the guitar neck down onto the devil’s back. The Bone Man’s body arched back and then bent forward as he convulsed to use every ounce of strength he had to drive the wooden spike like a stake through hair and flesh and muscle and bone; drive it deep, seeking the devil’s black heart.

The devil screamed so loud all the crows fled the trees, and the echo of it slammed off the walls of the three mountains that formed the hollow. The scream burst through the Bone Man’s ears and he let go of the stake and grabbed his own head and staggered back. The scream was so loud that in the swamps of the hollow frogs died and worms turned white and sulfur gas erupted from the mud. Pinecones rained down and caught fire as they fell. The Bone Man coughed and blood sprayed from his mouth and nose.

The devil tried to rise, tried to reach behind him and claw the stake out of his body, but his arms wouldn’t reach. He screamed again, and again, but now the screams were man screams, and they were weaker. The red in his eyes drained away and then the yellow faded and the eyes were an icy blue, but still they were without any trace of humanity. No love, no fear, just a cold and enduring hatred that burned into the Bone Man even as the eyes began to glaze and empty of all light.

The devil collapsed back onto the muddy ground near the swamp. His mouth opened one more time, but instead of a scream a dark pint of blood splashed heavily onto the damp leaves.

The Bone Man sank down onto his knees and then toppled forward onto his palms. Blood dripped from his mouth and nose and fireflies danced in his brain. He stared at the devil for a long time, stared at him…and watched him die.

Above them the moonlight shone cold and hard on the devil, but now it was only light and it did no harm.

(4)

The Bone Man went through the devil’s pockets. There was some cash, but he left that. He flipped open his wallet and looked at the driver’s license. The devil’s face stared at him, a small cruel smile caught by the camera. The name on the card was Ubel Griswold, but the Bone Man suspected that it wasn’t the devil’s real name. He found nothing else that was personal enough, so he just tore out some of the devil’s hair, wrapped it in a leaf that had a few spots of blood, and put it in his shirt pocket. When he got back to his sleeping bag, he’d take the hair and blood and mix it in a bowl with some herbs and then bury it in a churchyard. Evil, he knew, is hard to kill, and he wanted to kill the devil on the spirit plane as well as the physical. Else it’d come back.

He dragged the corpse of Ubel Griswold toward the swamp and pushed it down into the steaming mud. He found the green stick the devil had broken off and used it to push the body down into the hungry mud. It took a long time, but eventually the body was completely submerged in the black goo. Now no one would find it except the bugs and the vermin, and the Bone Man thought that was fair enough.

He spat on the stick and threw it into the woods, then wiped his hands on the seat of his work pants.

Then he gathered up the pieces of his guitar — all except the neck, which was still buried in Griswold’s back — and dug a fresh hole and buried them. He wept for his guitar. It had been his father’s and then his great-uncle’s before that. That guitar had played a lot of sweet blues music, from Mississippi and all over the country. Once Charley Patton had borrowed the guitar from his great-uncle and had played “Mississippi Boweavil Blues” on it at a church picnic in Bentonia, laying it on his lap like a Hawaiian guitar and singing in that loud gospel voice of his. Another time the Bone Man’s father, old Virgil Morse, had played backup on a couple of Sun Records sides by Mose Vinson. That guitar had history, and even the Bone Man himself — or Oren Morse to those back home — had played it in a hundred clubs and coffeehouses from Pocahontas, Mississippi, to the Village in New York to the smoky black clubs in Philadelphia. Now it was splinters and all its music and magic had fled out.

Still, it had held enough magic to kill the devil, and what more can you ask of a guitar than that?

He covered over the pieces and stood up. The moonlight showed him the way up the hill and he started climbing, his legs aching from all of the running and his heart still hammering with the greasy residue of terror.

He climbed and climbed and almost the only thought that ran through his head was It’s over.

A dozen times he caught his trouser cuffs on thornbushes and had to pull hard to free himself. He never noticed that one time when he pulled he tore loose the dime on its twine. The old charm fell into the brown grass and was lost to him forever.

He reached the top of the hill just as a flat black cloud cover from the south was being pulled like a tarp over the moon and stars. Even so he could see his way. There was a dirt road that led from the Passion Pit back out to the main road of the A-32 Extension; or he could just cut through the corn to the Guthrie place. All of the corn, far as the eye could see, was Henry Guthrie’s, and way over past the fields was the barn and in the barn was the Bone Man’s bedroll.

“It’s over,” he said to the night as he set out toward the corn.

Then the lights came on.

Four sets of car headlights and one set of blue and red police dome lights. All at once he was caught in a circle of light. He stopped, frozen in the moment, as he heard the sounds of car doors opening and shoes crunching down on gravel.

“Hold it right there, boy.”

Boy. There it was again. Suddenly he felt as if he was down South again. He knew this was trouble.

He stood there, arms long and heavy at his sides, as seven men walked toward him from all sides, forming a