Dead Man's Song

“Must be something.”

(3)

Vic spun around, whipping a pistol out of his belt and dropping into a shooter’s crouch as Kenneth Boyd stepped heavily out from between two maples. Vic’s scowl melted away and he smiled as he straightened, easing the hammer down and shoving the gun back into the shoulder rig he wore under his windbreaker. He’d been waiting for over an hour, seated cross-legged on the tailgate of his pickup, chain-smoking and working things through in his head, waiting for Boyd, who took his sweet time getting there.

Boyd stood in the darkness under an elm, staring hungrily at him. The forest and the field were both cast in shadows thrown by the mountains, but Boyd stood in the heart of the darkness, shying away from even the wan daylight.

Vic stretched his legs and stood, affecting a yawn, then he turned and as he started walking toward the forest he slapped his thigh and whistled. “Here, boy!”

With red hatred in his eyes, Boyd followed, his lips curling back to reveal a row of jagged teeth that looked more like they should belong in the mouth of a barracuda rather than a man. Together they went deep into the woods.

Vic always kept a small canvas folding chair in a zippered vinyl bag stowed behind one of the rhododendrons by the edge of the swamp. He unzipped it casually, pointedly not looking at Boyd, showing both his lack of fear and total disregard for the creature, especially here in the presence of the Man. He took his time setting up the chair, pushing the legs down into the mossy earth until they held firm against roots or stones, and then he sat down, facing the muddy pool. Bubbles were constantly rising to the surface of the pool, popping with a mingled smell of sulfur, methane, and rotting meat. Vic had long since grown used to the smell, but he took a lucifer match from his shirt pocket, popped it alight with a thumbnail, and held the flame to a fresh cigarette, then flicked the still burning match at Boyd. It bounced off the creature’s cheek and save for a tiny flaring of eyes and nostrils Boyd did not react. Those eyes never left Vic’s throat, however, and after a few minutes, as Vic sat there and smoked—his own eyes fixed on the black pool—cold spittle gathered in Boyd’s mouth and dripped in fat drops to his chest.

As he finished his cigarette, Vic said aloud, “Einstein over there nearly screwed the pooch, Boss.” His words were directed to the rippling surface of the pool, and he cocked his head to one side as if listening to an answer. “Yeah, I think we can turn it around. Worst case is that everyone’ll think Boyd here just went off his nut. I can make that work for us.” He listened again. “Sure, but it’s all based on whether Boyd will do what we say. He should have stayed out of town, should have gone to ground, but here he is, big as life and twice as ugly. If it was me, I’d cap him right now. Got those special rounds in your old Luger—they’d take Shitbag here down quick as you please, then I could leave him where he can be found and then let things go quiet for a while. Halloween’s coming fast, and cops crawling up everyone’s ass could slow things down.” He listened again, sighed, and nodded reluctantly. “Okay, I can see that…but I still think we should dump this one and just work on the other one. Well…the other three now. Maybe they won’t be brain damaged like this useless turd.” Vic leaned forward, his face, his eyes, his entire being focused on the center of the swamp. “You know I will, Boss. One thing in all the world you never need to do is doubt that. But if Boyd here steps out of line one more time—if he endangers the plan one more time—useful or not I’m going to put him down like a broke-dick dog. I won’t let anything stop the Red Wave. Not anything, and not anyone living or dead.”

He listened again and his face slowly registered surprise, eyebrows arching, and he looked from the swamp to Boyd and back again. “You can do that? You can—what word am I looking for here, boss?—you can dial up the brainpower on this moron?” He grinned like a kid. “That’s just too cool! But let’s not overdo it. Just enough to make him toe the line and maybe help with some fetch-and-carry nigger work I got to get done.”

Beside him, Boyd dropped down onto hands and knees and then leaned forward until he was able to dip his whole face into the swamp. He lay there for ten minutes, buried head and shoulders in the black bubbling ichor of Griswold’s grave. When he eventually pulled back a green-black slime oozed from his ears and nose and mouth. Boyd got slowly to his feet and staggered back to the treeline, watching Vic with eyes that were a shade less milky and bland. Not intelligent eyes, but eyes that showed the dawning of an animal cunning that had not been there before.

Vic bent and ground out his cigarette, then slid off the chair onto his knees and also fell forward onto his palms, leaning out over the edge of the swamp and craning his neck out and down until his face was nearly touching the mud. He did not immerse his face in the mud, but instead closed his eyes and bent further still and kissed the roiling surface of the swamp. “With all my soul and all my hated, I am for thee,” he said, and it was the closing line of a ritual that he had acted out many hundreds of times, and which others had acted out many tens of thousands of times before him. Boyd, watching, tried to understand and, just for a moment, felt a stab of jealousy spear him through the heart.

(4)

Every reporter in the region had the story of the killing of Jimmy Castle and Nels Cowan, and it was front- page news from D.C. to Boston, riding as it was on the coattails of the hostage-murder drama at the Guthrie farm. Locally it was big enough to earn program interruptions for news bulletins. Nationally it was above the fold in the morning editions and below the fold by the evening press. By morning it would have faded into inside stories everywhere except in eastern Pennsylvania and parts of New Jersey. Then the October 2 morning edition of the Black Marsh Sentinel came out with an exclusive by reporter Willard Fowler Newton. The headline said it all:

CAPE MAY KILLER SLAIN IN PINE DEEP

AMERICA’S MOST WANTED MAN KILLS THREE,

DIES IN HAIL OF GUNFIRE

POLICE COVER-UP SUSPECTED

Newton’s article had about the same effect as tossing a hand grenade into a crowded room—everyone was blown away.

The Sentinel, knowing it had one hell of a story, printed four times the usual number of copies and churned out special editions all through the day. By seven-thirty that morning, the radio stations had picked it up and were force-feeding it to the commuters in five counties; by nine it hit the bigger affiliates and the story again went national. TV reporters quoted it verbatim because their field reporters did not have a single fact aside from the regularly issued—and clearly evasive—press releases from the mayor’s office and the chief’s office. Not one of those press releases had so much as whispered “Cape May Killer,” let alone suggest that the man responsible for the attack at Guthrie Farm was the same killer.

It was top Philadelphia Daily News columnist Nick Robertson who first linked the story to Pine Deep’s haunted history with a story headlined SERIAL KILLER IN SPOOKTOWN. On CBS, Gail Harkins, her face frowning in concern, talked about how the “tragic events of last night were the latest chapter in a centuries-long history of menace, mystery, and murder in this quiet, upscale town.” Mitzie Malone of New York’s Channel 9, speaking in a hushed haunted-house voice, said that “in a town that boasts the country’s greatest number of spooky stories and campfire tales you would think that one more monster on the loose would not be noticed—but this monster is not out of a fireside yarn. This monster (dramatic pause) is real.” The evening commentator for Fox News called Karl Ruger the “ghostmaker,” hoping it would stick. It didn’t. Instead Ruger was simply labeled a “monster” and that was appropriate enough. None of the reporters seemed to be able to keep their stories free of cliches. The term “macabre” racked up a lot of mileage; every lurid adjective was dragged out and squeezed into the Who, What, Where, Why, When, and How of the story. For the first half of the day, though, the Black Marsh Sentinel owned the story. By ten that morning Dick Hangood was sitting at his desk with a smug grin on his face as he watched the way the story broke on the networks. Every time one of Newton’s sentences was quoted, Hangood made a tick mark on a scratch pad. By noon the page was black with them.

Newton himself was in the middle of it, and the other reporters were elbowing each other out of the way to