ever been caught, and it was Gus’s disillusioned opinion that the first thing med students at Pinelands learned was how to bypass the hospital’s years-out-of-date surveillance equipment.
Weinstock slogged to the office, tore off his clothes, and climbed into a clean set of scrubs, but his socks and shoes were soaked and the paper booties wouldn’t do him any good. His feet were freezing. He snatched the phone off the hook and called maintenance and read some poor sap the complete riot act, slammed the phone down, waded barefoot through the pool—which was draining through the floor grille now that there was no torrent to feed the flood—and left a set of wet bare footprints all the way to the elevator, snarling at everyone he met along the way.
(5)
The Bone Man stood in the shadows of Dark Hollow, at the base of the slope that climbed up through darkness into the wan sunlight hundreds of yards above. Up there was the Passion Pit, where young lovers came to sweat and grunt, and it was where the police had paused in their search for Boyd. He sighed. It was also the place where, thirty years ago, a gang of local men had beaten him to death.
The Bone Man turned and looked back down the murky vine-choked path that lead through twists and turns to the bog where he had fought Ubel Griswold. He stroked the strap of his guitar, remembering how he had used the instrument to smash the man down, and then had stabbed him with the splintered spike of the wooden neck. Panicked, insane with terror, he had dragged the body deeper into the swampy bottom of the hills and shoved him down into the mud, burying him where—in the words of his Uncle Lester—“God can’t even find ’im.”
Yeah, he’d done that, and all things considered it was safe to say that God never did find him down there in Dark Hollow. But the devil did, sure as hell, and now Griswold was back.
But so was he, and how, why, and what for were questions he couldn’t begin to answer. His very existence seemed like the punchline to some kind of cruel cosmic joke. If he had been brought back to try and save the town as he did once before, then someone up there forgot to tell him how to do it. He was barely more than a shadow, more invisible and disregarded now than when he’d been a living black man in the white man’s world of the sixties and seventies. A ghost who can’t make himself be seen most the time, one who gets weaker every time he tries. A ghost who can’t even touch the people he wanted to help. A ghost who didn’t know how to be a ghost.
“You want me to save these folks,” he yelled, glaring up at heaven, “then you got to give me just a little help.” But his voice was empty. Even the chirping birds failed to hear him. He closed his eyes and shook his head, cursing God and all his white-bread dumbass angels. “You can’t be so damn cruel that you’d bring me back just to watch everyone I saved die, one by one.” He shook his head. “Not even you’re that cruel, Lord.”
The silence all around him seemed to mock that claim.
(6)
Val sat on the side of the bed and brushed a blond curl from her brow, but Connie did not even look at her. She just lay there, silent, lost inside of herself. “Sweetie? You okay?” Val said softly.
Connie said nothing. Did nothing. Val shifted her position carefully, hiding her own grimace of pain, trying to force some eye contact. Gently, but insistently, leaning over her, searching her sister-in-law’s eyes for any kind of reaction, for even the slightest connection, but it was like looking at the glass eyes of a doll. “Come on, honey, you can talk to me.” Nothing.
The nurse—Half-Pint Horror Williams—came in to do her routine with thermometer and blood-pressure cuff, and Val stood up and moved over to the guest chair, lowering herself carefully into it, favoring her bruised left shoulder. She watched as the nurse worked, saw that Connie allowed herself to be touched and moved and manipulated, that she never protested, never resisted, and never truly reacted. She just
Val knew that it was not catatonia, because Saul had related conversations he had had with Connie, as had the staff psychiatrist Dee Simonson, but this was the second time today Val had come into her room to speak with her, and both times Connie had shut down as soon as Val had walked through the door. The first time Val hadn’t seen the change happen, but this second time she had. Connie had been reading
When Val had finally given her a final good-night kiss and had scuffed her way slowly out of the room, Connie closed her eyes for a full minute, feeling the tears that wanted to rise to her eyes, feeling the stitch in her chest that wanted to break free as a sob, feeling the deep and utter contempt—the burning, fiery red furnace of contempt that burned in her heart. For herself. When the nurse came in to give her a pill, Connie was curled into a fetal position, a pillow held tightly over her head, her body spasming and jerking as she wept.
(7)
Terry Wolfe was only missing because he wanted to be. His cell phone was turned off, his house phones unplugged, and his wife Sarah was manning the fortress walls to make sure no one bothered him. He had not told Sarah everything that was going on, but she’d been there for enough. When he had come shambling in last night, she had held out her arms to him and he had clung to her, sinking to his knees, weeping against her breasts.
“I need to sleep,” he whispered brokenly. “Please, God, let me sleep.”
Sarah had led him upstairs, took him into the shower and soaped him from head to toe, then toweled him off and took him to bed. There in the silent darkness she had kissed him and loved him, and then held him while he drifted off.
He slept for twelve hours without dreaming and didn’t even wake when Sarah slid out of the bed to go and take care of the kids. When he did wake, he didn’t open his eyes, didn’t even move for another few hours; he just lay there and thought about how the last month had been for him a slow descent into hell and since Ruger had come to town the pace was picking up. Even without the manhunt and all of the hurt to the people he cared about Terry was reasonably sure that he would be insane or dead by Halloween.
The whole thing had begun to spin around him when the crop blight started back in July as Pine Deep’s first wave of corn crops came due for harvest. Hack Jeffers reported an outbreak of gray leaf blight on half his crop, and by the end of that week four other farmers had reported crop infestations. The following week it was eighteen, and from then on it was an accelerating downward spiral. Not just gray leaf, but a variety of blights ranging from Stewart’s bacterial leaf blight to northern corn leaf blight, and in the following weeks there were reported cases of stalk rot, gibberella, fusarium, and diplodia ear rot diseases. By the first week of September there were widespread cases of maize dwarf mosaic and maize chlorotic mosaic, as well as armies of weevils, root worms, and stalk borers of all kinds. One of the farmers who had been hit the hardest, Jacob Troutman, had said to him, “If I was a superstitious man, Terry, I’d think this town was cursed. We have more plagues than Egypt ever saw during Moses’ time.”
Teams of specialists were brought in from private and government agencies to try and salvage some of this year’s crop, or to prevent the diseases from returning next season, but the trend was downhill. As mayor of a town whose income is half based on farming, Terry knew that leaf blight diseases could be found in almost any field, but to have so many different kinds of diseases and so many aggressive species of crop-destroying insects present in one town was beyond his knowledge, and apparently beyond the experts that were brought in from all over the country. Nor was it just the corn crop that was dying—the pumpkins, peaches, apples, and tomatoes were equally spoiled. Only two major crops were untouched: garlic—which made up about 5 percent of the town’s agriculture— and the holly farms north of town. In a season of strangeness there were things that stood out as stranger still, such as the fact that a handful of farms, including Henry Guthrie’s place, showed no sign of the plague at all, and that made no sense; and if a solution could not be found, then most of the farms would fail. That meant bankruptcy and financial ruin for many of Terry’s friends. Every single farm in town was owned by a family that had worked the land for generations. No one was starting new farms in town, and the youngest farm in Pine Deep was over sixty years old. To destroy those farms would be to destroy the history of the town. To Terry it felt like murder.
