Ghost Road Blues

The face of…what? What was it? He didn’t even know what to call it.

It was the face of the thing that every night rose up and hunched over Sarah’s sleeping body, reaching for her with twisted hands, opening its mouth to reveal those huge…

He shuddered and closed his eyes, not even wanting to think about it, because every time his mind tried to put a name on the face reflected in the stainless steel door, his thoughts drifted immediately back in time, drifted thirty years back, revisiting the Pine Deep of his boyhood. The town had been so different then. It was a smaller place, and a darker place; darker without the merchandising and licensing of spooky things that now made the town rich, not the mildly scary darkness of Pine Deep, Bucks County’s Haunted Playground. Terry tried not to think about those days. He tried often and he tried hard, but he rarely succeeded, not when he looked in any reflecting surface and saw the daily changes that made his face less and less his own, and more and more the face of the nightmare beast. Those long-ago days had left their mark on him in more ways than one, scaring him body and soul, and snatching away from him the one thing he loved most in all the world. Mandy. Little red-haired Mandy. Three years his junior and more precious to him than most little sisters are to little boys. She was always happy, always smiling — something Terry as a child rarely was, and she always managed to find some way to trick him into laughing. But she was thirty years dead, lost to the darkness of those times.

“Terry?”

Terry Wolfe stiffened as he heard the tiny voice behind him in the elevator. His big body became suddenly rigid and he stared forward, instantly afraid to turn and look.

“Terry…?” asked the voice.

He stared at the closed door of the elevator, too terrified to even move. He knew he was alone in the car. This is it, he thought with something like resigned acceptance, this is the way it happens. First the dreams, then the hallucinations, and finally the voices. This is how people become insane. This is what it feels like when your mind dies. Oh God!

“Terry, please…”

“Go away!” he hissed between gritted teeth. He brushed a hand behind him as if shooing away a cat. “You’re not here!”

“Terry, please…look at me.”

“No,” he muttered, grinding his teeth. The elevator stopped at his floor, but the doors refused to open. He stabbed the buttons but they remained cold and dark.

“Just look at me…look what happened to me.”

Behind him she shifted and now he could see her hazy reflection in the stainless steel of the closed elevator door. A small, slim figure, girl-high and girl-shaped in a ragged and tattered green dress. Even though the reflection was smeared and distorted, he could see her face, see the slashes on it, the blood that welled from it that ran like rainwater down her dress and clung to the matted red curls.

“Oh…God…” he breathed and pressed his eyes shut against the sight; tears struggled out from under his eyelids and burned their way down his cheeks. “I’m so sorry…please…”

“Terry, I don’t want to make you cry.”

“Then go away!”

“I can’t, Terry. You know that.” The voice was a little girl’s voice, but the words and the manner of speech were far older than that.

“For the love of God, why can’t you leave me in peace?”

“God?” she echoed with soft mockery in her voice. “God didn’t save me, Terry. God didn’t save you, either. And God won’t save this town. Don’t you understand yet? He’s not dead, Terry.”

He almost turned, almost wheeled around to face her. “What? What did you say?”

“He’s not dead, Terry,” she said quietly, but there were echoes of sadness and of fear in her voice. “He’s still there, Terry. Still there after all these years.”

“No! That’s not true.”

“Yes, Terry. It is and you know it. He’s still there — still here! — and he is going to start it all over again.”

“No!”

“Yes. All of it, over again. All the hurting, all the dying. Can’t you smell the blood already? He’s coming back, Terry, but this time he’s different. He’s a lot stronger now. Being dead has made him so much stronger.” Her voice was so old now, ancient with cynical grief. “You thought he was a monster back then, Terry? He’s worse now. You know I’m right — you’ve seen it in your dreams. And you know what he wants from you, what he wants you to be. You see that, too. You see that every time you look in the mirror.”

“Shut up! Please!”

“You can stop him.”

“I can’t stop him! How could I ever stop him? I couldn’t stop him from…from…”

“From hurting me?” she offered. “I know, Terry, but you tried. You did try, and I love you for it. But he hurt me, and he hurt you, and then the Bone Man came and hurt him.”

“Killed him, you mean.”

“No, hurt him. Reduced him,” she said in her young-old voice. “Don’t you understand? Evil never dies…it just waits, and it gets stronger in the dark. He can’t die. He isn’t like other people. He isn’t real.”

“Neither are you!”

“I know,” she said in a sad whisper of a voice, “I know. That’s why it’s up to you, Terry. You have to fight him.”

“It’s you who doesn’t understand! How could I fight him, even if he was still alive?” There was a long silence, and then Terry felt her hand slip into his. Her fingers were small and cold and wet, and he almost jerked his own hand away — almost, but he didn’t.

“You know how to fight him, Terry.”

“Then how?” he suddenly snarled. “How am I supposed to fight someone like him? Fight — some- thing like him?”

“By coming with me. By not being like him.”

“What are you talking about? I’m not like him!”

Her silence answered him; then after a pause she said, “Terry, the only way to not be like him is to be like me.”

Now he did jerk his hand away. “What is that supposed to mean?” He wheeled at last and faced her, but she had vanished completely, leaving only the chill of her touch on his fingers. He looked at his hand, at each finger where she had touched him, and saw the tiny droplets of blood. “Mandy…” he whispered. Behind him the elevator doors opened and he spun and blundered out into the empty corridor.

(2)

Officer Jim Polk slipped the little pint bottle of apricot brandy into his hip pocket and tugged his uniform jacket down to cover the bulge. He felt tired, but now with an ass-pocketful of good times, he felt relaxed.

He was not a good-looking man by any stretch. He was average in height, weight, color, and build, but his whole appearance was spoiled by a shiftiness in his eyes that hinted at the avaricious pettiness of his soul. At fifty he looked like a seedy used car salesman in someone’s borrowed cop uniform. Out of uniform, no one would ever have guessed him to be a professional law enforcement officer with thirty-one years on the job. Not that he cared. If he had a bottle of something sweet, or maybe a good fifth of Wild Turkey for those really pissy days, then he was sitting pretty. The weight of the brandy bottle in his back pocket was a comfort to him, and it made him want to smile.

Across the street, his new temporary partner sat slumped behind the wheel of his unit, arms folded across her chest, head nodding. Polk grinned as he walked up to her side of the patrol car, and stood there for a moment, watching her sleep. Polk liked having a woman partner. He liked it a whole lot. He had never been paired with Rhoda Thomas or Shirley O’Keefe, and he had always wondered what it would be like to share job time with a chick. A chick with a shield and a gun. A chick who knew guns and could talk rough and act tough.

Polk thought it was just Jim-jumping-Dandy.

He conceded to himself that this one, Melanie White, was no Pamela Lee, but she had a good rack of bombs — he could tell that even with the Kevlar vest she wore. Despite the bagginess of her uniform trousers, she looked