Dead Man's Song

“Frightening!”

—Montgomery County Intelligencer

DEAD MAN’S SONG

JONATHAN MABERRY

To my wife Sara and my son Sam

SO MANY PEOPLE TO THANK…

To my first readers: Arthur Mensch, Randy Kirsch, Charlie Miller, and Greg Schauer…for your comments, observations, and insights.

To my experts: Chief Pat Priore of the Tullytown Police Department; Larry Kaplan, DDS; Dan Noszinski; Richard F. Kuntz, First Deputy Coroner of Bucks County; and Jim Gurley. Any errors that remain in the book are purely the author’s doing.

To the publishing folks: Michaela Hamilton, Sara Crowe, Elizabeth Little, and Doug Mendini.

To my fellow writers: Tess Gerritsen, Stuart Kaminsky, J. A. Konrath, John Lutz, Yvonne Navarro, Steve Hamilton, Richard Sand, Bill Kent, Michael Laimo, Charles Gramlich, Simon Clark, David Housewright, Jeremiah Healy, Bev Vincent, Jemiah Jefferson, Stephen Susco, Tim Waggoner, H. R. Knight, Gary A. Braunbeck, Ken Bruen, Kealan Patrick Burke, Nate Kenyon, David Wellington, Bryan Smith, Katherine Ramsland, Scott Nicholson, Don D’Ammassa, W. D. Gagliani, Bruce Boston, Gregory Frost, Fred Wiehe, Noreen Ayres, and Kim Peffenroth for endless support.

To my guest stars: Stephen Susco, Ken Foree, Tom Savini, Jim O’Rear, James Gunn, Brinke Stevens, Debbie Rochon, and Joe Bob Briggs for dropping by to make an appearance in this book and the next.

To the Bluesmen, Mem Shannon and Eddy “The Chief” Clearwater, for allowing me to use their wonderful blues lyrics in this book and the next.

My colleagues at Career Doctor for Writers (www.careerdoctorforwriters.com) and Writers Corner USA (www.writerscornerusa.com).

And to the superstars of my Novels for Young Writers class, Brett Knasiak, Aly Pierce, Ali Dowdy, Charlie Patton, Richard Wang, Lee Biskin, Jack Inkpen, Rachael Lavin, and Julie Hagopian.

PROLOGUE

THE GUTHRIE FARM

And I think I’m gonna drown I believe I’m gonna drown I think I’m gonna drown Standing on my feet.

—Mem Shannon, Drowning on My Feet

Sing it like the midnight wind, Sing it like a prayer; Sing it on to the way to hell, Them blues’ll take you there.

—Oren Morse, Dead Man’s Song

(1)

It was October when it happened. It should always be October when these things happen. In October you expect things to die.

In October the sun shrinks away; it hides behind mountains and throws long shadows over small towns like Pine Deep. Especially towns like Pine Deep. The wind grows new teeth and it learns to bite. The colors fade from deep summer greens to the mournful browns and desiccated yellows of autumn. In October the harvest blades are honed to sharpness, and that’s when the sickles and scythes, the threshers and combines, maliciously attack the fields, leaving the long stalks of corn lying dead in haphazard piles along the beaten rows. Pumpkin growers come like headsmen to gather the gourds for the carvers’ knives. The insects, so alive during the long months of July, August, and September, die in their thousands, their withered carcasses crunching under the feet of children hurrying home from school, children racing to beat the fall of night. Children do not play out-of-doors in the nights of Pine Deep.

There are shadows everywhere—even in places they have no right to be. The shadows range from the purple haze of twilit streets to the utter, bottomless black in the gaping mouths of sewers. Some of the shadows are cold, featureless—just blocks of lightless air. Other shadows seem to possess an unnatural vitality; they seem to roil and writhe, especially as the young ones—the innocent ones—pass by. In those kinds of shadows something always seems to be waiting. Impatiently waiting. In those kinds of shadows something always seems to be watching. Hungrily watching. These are not the warm shadows of September, for in that month the darkness still remembers the warmth of summer suns; nor were they yet the utterly dead shadows of bleak November, to whom the sun’s warmth is only a wan memory. These were the shadows of October, and they were hungry shadows. When the dying sun cast those kinds of shadows, well…

This was Pine Deep, and it was October—a kind of October particular to Pine Deep. The spring and summer before had been lush; the autumn of the year before that had been bright and bountiful, yielding one of those rare and wonderful Golden Harvests that are written of in tourist books of the region; and though there had been shadows, there hadn’t been shadows as dark as these. No, these shadows belonged to an autumn whose harvest