Newton shot him a cautious glance. “Yeah. You mad?”
“I should be, but—screw it. It’s your job.” He made a face. “After all…this is news.”
Newton cleared his throat. “Crow…I only called in the basic stuff. The shootings. Val’s brother and the guys who work for her. I—left out some stuff.”
Crow digested that. “The Hollow?”
“Yeah.”
“Just that?” Newton was quiet for so long Crow turned to look at him. “Newt?”
“Crow—I saw that man’s body. I was looking over your shoulder. I saw what you saw.”
“And what did I see?”
A pause. “I saw something that can’t be real.”
Crow drew a breath, let it out, said nothing.
Newton said, “I heard what Val told you, too. I heard her tell you how many times she shot him. I read the police reports on Castle, too, and I know that he fired off nine shots. Crow—you found every single one of those bullet holes. Every one. I was there, I saw you. I saw them.”
“Okay.”
“No—no, it’s not okay. We both know it’s not frigging okay.” Newton looked at Crow. “And I know what you’re thinking.”
Crow gave him a crooked smile. “What is it that I’m thinking, Newt?”
“You’re thinking that Boyd was like
So, Crow said it for him. “That somehow Boyd was a werewolf?”
“Yes. Jesus—this is impossible. I can’t wrap my head around it.”
“You’re wrong, Newt.”
The reporter swiveled around to stare at him. “What?”
“I said that you’re wrong. I don’t think that Boyd was a werewolf. That’s not at all what I think.”
“But—the gunshots. He—”
“What I think, Newt,” Crow said, his eyes reflecting the great dark nothingness beyond the window, “is that Kenneth Boyd was a vampire.”
To that, Newton had nothing to say.
“I think Ruger was, too. I don’t know how, I don’t know why. I just know what I saw.” And Crow told him everything. The attack in the hospital, Ruger’s eyes, his unnatural strength. Newton kept shaking his head throughout, but it wasn’t that he thought Crow was wrong. He just did not want to believe it.
They sat there in silence for a long time, oblivious to the hospital sounds close at hand or the traffic sounds outside. Newton sniffed, wiped his eyes on his sleeve. “We’re all going to die,” he asked, “aren’t we?”
Crow had no answer for him. None at all.
(2)
He sat on the rooftop, legs folded Indian fashion, old guitar laid across his bony knees, singing blues to the night. The wind had turned cold and fierce and it blew around him and through him. On that gale he could hear the voice of the creature in the swamp. The wind was filled with his rage.
The Bone Man smiled. He felt great sadness that Henry’s boy had died, but he also felt great pride that Henry’s daughter, Val, had stood up and stood tall. Henry would be proud of her. She’d done what no one—certainly not him, and probably not Griswold—had thought anyone
He strummed his guitar. So much pain downstairs. So many folks hurting and dying. So many folks
Yet it wasn’t all dark, not even up here in the wind, and he ran his fingers over the strings, picking out a tune. Val had taken her stand, and now for the first time in thirty years the thing down there in the wormy dark was not so sure, not so cocksure by a long mile, and that was good. Now there was a little more hope mixed in with all that hate and rage on the wind. Not much, maybe, not enough almost for sure, but some—and for tonight that was going to have to do.
He slipped his bottleneck out of his coat pocket and fitted it over the forefinger of his left hand, sliding the smooth glass down the strings as he plucked a note and then another. Downstairs they were doing their trying and their dying, their sewing and their praying. The Bone Man was no sage, he didn’t know who was going to make it through this night, or who was going to make it through till the coming of Griswold’s Red Wave. He didn’t know if anyone would be able to take another stand, like Val did tonight. Maybe Crow would, but that was something the Bone Man would have to see. Crow…and maybe Mike. He played some notes, finding his way into a song. The old one that he used to play on Henry’s porch. The one about prisoners walking that last mile to Old Sparky down in Louisiana. The one he played on that long ago summer. “Ghost Road Blues.” He played it and then he started to sing the words in a voice no one could hear.
As the wind shrieked its fury around him, the dead man sang his song.
EXCERPT FROM
(1)
The Bone Man was as thin as a whisper; he was a scarecrow from a blighted field. He stood on the edge of the hospital roof, toes jutting out over the gutter, his pant legs fluttering against the stick slimness of his legs. His coat flaps snapped vigorously but silently around his emaciated hips. The only sound the wind made as it whipped by him and through him was a faint plaintive whine as it caressed the silvery strings of the guitar slung behind his back.
Far below the parking lot faded back from the glow of the emergency room doors, spreading out in a big half circle that had been cut acres-deep into the surrounding sea of pines. Even this late there were dozens of cars down there, dusted with moonlight but asleep. All around the town there was a ring of black clouds that were invisible against the night, but above the Bone Man the stars flickered and glimmered by the thousand.
For three hours he had sat cross-legged on the roof, playing his songs, humming and sometimes singing, coaxing the sad blues out of the ghost of an old guitar that Charley Patton had once used to play “Mississippi BoWeavil Blues” at a church picnic in Bentonia, Mississippi. Another time the Bone Man’s father, old Virgil Morse, had used that guitar to play backup on a couple of Sun Records sides by Mose Vinson. The guitar had history. It had life, even though it was no more real than he was. A ghost of a guitar in a dead man’s hands, playing music almost no one could hear.
He’d sat there and played and listened to the whispers and cries and moans from inside the hospital; hearing the beep of the machine that breathed for Connie Guthrie. Hearing the sewing-circle whisper of needles and thread as the doctors sewed stitches in Terry Wolfe’s skin, and the faint grinding sound as they set his bones. He heard the whimper of hopelessness from the throat of Jose Ramos as the doctors stood by his bed and explained to his mother that his back was broken; and then the scream as the enormity of that drove a knife into his mother’s heart.
