Ghost Road Blues pd-1 Read online

  He felt wonderfully happy. The hayride was a success, even if it did push the limits — a fact he’d never openly admit — and Val Guthrie was the most wonderful woman on earth.

  Then, without warning, he shuddered. A deep shudder that raised gooseflesh along his arms and made all the hair on his scalp twitch and tingle. Somewhere beyond the veil of black nothingness he heard the faintest growl of thunder. Just the hint of a coming storm. The thunder sounded a little like laughter. The deep kind, from far inside the chest. Mirthless.

  He shivered again.

  “Someone walked over my grave,” he said aloud.

  In the distance the thunder laughed again and there was a single flash of lightning that scratched a deep red vein in the darkness.

  Off to his right he could hear the screams of the kids as they encountered monsters. At that moment, Crow didn’t like the sound of it.

  (2)

  That night, after leaving the hayride and driving over to Val’s farm, and after taking a moonlight stroll and then making love, Crow drifted to sleep in her arms, the strangeness of the coming storm gone from his mind. But down there in the darkness, even with Val’s arms around him and the warm reality of her breath against the side of his throat, Crow sank down into a tangle of an old dream. Not a dream that was so old that he hadn’t dreamt it in a while, but a dream that was worn into the fabric of his mind like calluses on a grave digger’s hands. Part of the dream was actual memory — the latter parts — but most of the dream was a patchwork of things he had guessed, or pieced together over the years, or intuited. The dream was as ugly and as compelling as the morbid fascination of watching a neighbor’s house burn down, and on some level Crow knew that he had to pass all the way through it, relive every bit of memory and supposition, before the dream would leave him alone. Asleep, he set his jaw and ground his teeth and floated helpless on the current that took him back thirty years….

  (3)

  Autumn of 1976

  The Bone Man killed the devil with a guitar.

  He chased the devil past the crossroads and chased the devil through the corn, and he caught the devil in the hollow between the mountains where the deep shadows live. It was a swamp down there with mosquitoes as fierce as hurt dogs and snakes the color of mud.

  Truth is, they chased each other. Sometimes the devil had the upper hand and he hunted the Bone Man, first with a German Luger he’d been issued a long time ago, and then when he ran out of bullets he chased the Bone Man with a skinning knife. Though the Bone Man was skinny and looked sick, he was a strong man with twenty years of fieldwork in his hard hands and a back made of iron slats and old rope. They’d grappled at the top of the hill, down at the Passion Pit where the kids go to neck. They were both filled with blood and rage, but the moon was still down and the devil was still only a man; on equal ground the Bone Man was stronger. The skinning knife went spinning off into a tangle of wild rose and the devil lost his footing there at the edge. He fell and rolled and tumbled and finally overturned back onto his feet and went running the rest of the way down that steep slope into the shadows of Dark Hollow.

  The Bone Man stood panting at the top of the hill for just a second, looking west to see the sun dropping toward the tree line and gauging how much day he had left to do this thing. The amount of day was the same as the amount of time he’d had left to live if he didn’t catch the devil right now. Once the moon was up, the tide of events would turn, and turn red.

  His guitar was still strapped across his bony shoulders — it had jiggled and jounced throughout the chase and the fight but it was still there. Clear beads of cold sweat ran in steaks down his brown face and glistened like splinters of broken glass in his Afro.

  Then he jumped over the edge of the hill, dropping eight feet onto the slope, running so fast that he beat the pull of gravity and kept from falling. He wore no socks and around his ankle was a dime with a hole through it strung on a piece of twine. The dime flashed in the dying sunlight with each step, and then he reached the line of shadows created by the angle of the farthest mountain, and the twinkling dime winked out. His aunt in Baton Rouge had given him that, and even though the Bone Man didn’t do vodoun, he was smart enough to keep any charm against evil. The slope was three hundred yards and almost as steep as the inside of a pilsner glass. The Bone Man could hear the devil crashing through the brush in the shadows a dozen yards below.

  The Bone Man raced faster, not caring at all when tree branches whipped his face or briars tugged at his ankles. He had to catch the devil before moonrise.

  He hit the bottom of the hollow hard enough to jolt him down to his knees and he cried out in pain, but he hauled himself right back up because crying about it don’t get it done. Setting his teeth against the pain and setting his heart against the fear, he ran into the shadows, his eyes adjusting to the bad light, searching for the devil and finding him almost at once. The devil had stopped to wrestle with a tree branch, trying to break it off, but the wood was green and didn’t want to die.

  The Bone Man had no Luger, no skinning knife. All he had was his guitar and without even thinking about it he plucked the strap from his chest and hauled the instrument over his head just as the devil broke off the green branch. As the devil turned to face him, the Bone Man could see the man’s eyes change from blue to yellow to red. Just like that. The pupils contracted to slits and the devil suddenly laughed, his mouth opening wet and wide, and there were a lot of teeth in there. The devil looked at the stick in his hands and as his hands began to change he snarled with contempt and threw the stick away.

  The Bone Man didn’t stop, didn’t flinch though his heart was turning to ice in his chest. He gripped the guitar by the neck and as he raced the last few yards he swung it. The devil was arrogant. He was into the change now and he knew what he would become. He was prideful, was the devil; and pride is a dangerous thing, even to the devil.

  The guitar whistled through the air and the strings hummed with dark music as it cut around in a tight arc, powered by every ounce of strength the Bone Man possessed. The body of the guitar hit the grinning devil in the face and exploded into a million fragments of swamp ash and maple. The strings broke and twanged, singing chords of anger; the rosewood fingerboard split in two pieces. In the microsecond before the impact sent the devil crashing to the ground his face changed from a sneer of hungry triumph to a look of pure human amazement. He spun away, crying out in shock and pain, spit and blood erupting from his mouth as he fell. He wasn’t far enough into the change to be able to shrug that off with a sneer. He was still more man than wolf.

  The devil crashed to the muddy floor of the hollow, his red eyes flickering like candles, his distorted face a dripping red mask of hate and pain.

  The Bone Man stood over him with only the broken neck of the guitar in his hands. In the darkness of Dark Hollow there was no trace of God’s sunlight, and somewhere over the mountains the moon was rising. Above them the tips of the pine trees were turning to silver as the death-mask face of the moon climbed into the night.

  Even now, beaten down and bloody, the devil was about a heartbeat away from winning. He needed only the kiss of moonlight and the night would be his.

  The Bone Man’s face was streaming sweat and his eyes were streaming tears. He was a gentle man, but gentle wouldn’t get this done, and he tried to make his heart turn to stone as he took the guitar neck in both hands and raised it over his head. The strings of the guitar and all the tuning pegs touched the moonlight and turned to silver fire.

  “You go back to hell!” he screamed and then slammed the broken and jagged end of the guitar neck down onto the devil’s back. The Bone Man’s body arched back and then bent forward as he convulsed to use every ounce of strength he had to drive the wooden spike like a stake through hair and flesh and muscle and bone; drive it deep, seeking the devil’s black heart.

  The devil screamed so loud all the crows fled the trees, and the echo of it slammed off the walls of the three mountains
that formed the hollow. The scream burst through the Bone Man’s ears and he let go of the stake and grabbed his own head and staggered back. The scream was so loud that in the swamps of the hollow frogs died and worms turned white and sulfur gas erupted from the mud. Pinecones rained down and caught fire as they fell. The Bone Man coughed and blood sprayed from his mouth and nose.

  The devil tried to rise, tried to reach behind him and claw the stake out of his body, but his arms wouldn’t reach. He screamed again, and again, but now the screams were man screams, and they were weaker. The red in his eyes drained away and then the yellow faded and the eyes were an icy blue, but still they were without any trace of humanity. No love, no fear, just a cold and enduring hatred that burned into the Bone Man even as the eyes began to glaze and empty of all light.

  The devil collapsed back onto the muddy ground near the swamp. His mouth opened one more time, but instead of a scream a dark pint of blood splashed heavily onto the damp leaves.

  The Bone Man sank down onto his knees and then toppled forward onto his palms. Blood dripped from his mouth and nose and fireflies danced in his brain. He stared at the devil for a long time, stared at him…and watched him die.

  Above them the moonlight shone cold and hard on the devil, but now it was only light and it did no harm.

  (4)

  The Bone Man went through the devil’s pockets. There was some cash, but he left that. He flipped open his wallet and looked at the driver’s license. The devil’s face stared at him, a small cruel smile caught by the camera. The name on the card was Ubel Griswold, but the Bone Man suspected that it wasn’t the devil’s real name. He found nothing else that was personal enough, so he just tore out some of the devil’s hair, wrapped it in a leaf that had a few spots of blood, and put it in his shirt pocket. When he got back to his sleeping bag, he’d take the hair and blood and mix it in a bowl with some herbs and then bury it in a churchyard. Evil, he knew, is hard to kill, and he wanted to kill the devil on the spirit plane as well as the physical. Else it’d come back.

  He dragged the corpse of Ubel Griswold toward the swamp and pushed it down into the steaming mud. He found the green stick the devil had broken off and used it to push the body down into the hungry mud. It took a long time, but eventually the body was completely submerged in the black goo. Now no one would find it except the bugs and the vermin, and the Bone Man thought that was fair enough.

  He spat on the stick and threw it into the woods, then wiped his hands on the seat of his work pants.

  Then he gathered up the pieces of his guitar — all except the neck, which was still buried in Griswold’s back — and dug a fresh hole and buried them. He wept for his guitar. It had been his father’s and then his great-uncle’s before that. That guitar had played a lot of sweet blues music, from Mississippi and all over the country. Once Charley Patton had borrowed the guitar from his great-uncle and had played “Mississippi Boweavil Blues” on it at a church picnic in Bentonia, laying it on his lap like a Hawaiian guitar and singing in that loud gospel voice of his. Another time the Bone Man’s father, old Virgil Morse, had played backup on a couple of Sun Records sides by Mose Vinson. That guitar had history, and even the Bone Man himself — or Oren Morse to those back home — had played it in a hundred clubs and coffeehouses from Pocahontas, Mississippi, to the Village in New York to the smoky black clubs in Philadelphia. Now it was splinters and all its music and magic had fled out.

  Still, it had held enough magic to kill the devil, and what more can you ask of a guitar than that?

  He covered over the pieces and stood up. The moonlight showed him the way up the hill and he started climbing, his legs aching from all of the running and his heart still hammering with the greasy residue of terror.

  He climbed and climbed and almost the only thought that ran through his head was It’s over.

  A dozen times he caught his trouser cuffs on thornbushes and had to pull hard to free himself. He never noticed that one time when he pulled he tore loose the dime on its twine. The old charm fell into the brown grass and was lost to him forever.

  He reached the top of the hill just as a flat black cloud cover from the south was being pulled like a tarp over the moon and stars. Even so he could see his way. There was a dirt road that led from the Passion Pit back out to the main road of the A-32 Extension; or he could just cut through the corn to the Guthrie place. All of the corn, far as the eye could see, was Henry Guthrie’s, and way over past the fields was the barn and in the barn was the Bone Man’s bedroll.

  “It’s over,” he said to the night as he set out toward the corn.

  Then the lights came on.

  Four sets of car headlights and one set of blue and red police dome lights. All at once he was caught in a circle of light. He stopped, frozen in the moment, as he heard the sounds of car doors opening and shoes crunching down on gravel.

  “Hold it right there, boy.”

  Boy. There it was again. Suddenly he felt as if he was down South again. He knew this was trouble.

  He stood there, arms long and heavy at his sides, as seven men walked toward him from all sides, forming a loose ring. Big men, some of them. None of them were strangers. The man with the badge was Officer Bernhardt, a stocky young man with a hound-dog face and little pig eyes. He had his right hand on the walnut grips of his holstered.38, and his left thumb and index finger circled around the handle of his baton where it jutted above the belt ring. He was the only cop.

  The others were townsmen. All of them were young, with Vic Wingate at seventeen being the youngest, though he had the meanest face. Vic always called him Nigger Joe whenever they chanced to meet. The Bone Man had always tried never to meet him. The oldest was Jimmy Crow — and that was almost funny, Jim Crow—but there was nothing funny about the cold humor in Crow’s eyes. Next to him was the biggest of the men, Tow-Truck Eddie. The Bone Man didn’t know his last name, but the kid was about twenty and had to be six and a half feet tall. Tow-Truck Eddie never sassed him with race names, though; he was a polite kid, and the Bone Man was a little heartened to see him here because he knew the kid was a regular churchgoer and was often seen in Apple Park, sitting on the bench reading a Bible. The other three were just young guys from town, Jim Polk, who had just started at Pinelands College, and Phil and Stosh, but the Bone Man didn’t know their last names.

  Seven men with seven hard faces, ringed around him.

  The Bone Man had been rousted by cops from every jurisdiction from here to Benoit, so he knew it was always better to wait and find out what the game was.

  “You that boy Morse, aintchu?” said Officer Bernhardt. Again the “boy” rankled, coming as it was from a kid ten years younger than the Bone Man.

  “Yessir.” When he was scared his accent became more that of a southern farm kid. It came out like “Yahsuh.”

  “Whatchu doin’ way out here, Nigger Joe?” said Vic Wingate.

  The Bone Man wanted to toss them all down the hill. He also wanted to run. He said, “I was jus’ taking a walk.”

  “Taking a walk?” Jimmy Crow echoed. “Taking a fuckin’ walk?”

  “Maybe he came out here to peep into some cars and see white kids making out,” suggested Polk. “See some white titty.” As he laughed he touched his genitals.

  “No, sir,” said the Bone Man, trying to force the Delta drawl out of his voice. He wasn’t going to be Amos or Andy to this pack of shit kickers. “I’m not a Peeping Tom. ’Sides, there’s no one out here tonight. Ain’t nobody been out here for weeks, ya’ll knows that.” He heard the slip again and almost winced.

  “How the hell you know that?” growled Crow.

  “’Cause everybody knows that. Since them killings started nobody comes out here to neck. Nobody hardly comes out at all.”

  Vic stepped half a pace forward. “But you go out for evening strolls.”

  The Bone Man said nothing.

  “This is bullshit,” said Crow. His face was set and hard. His oldest boy, Billy, had b
een the third victim of the killer and the hurt of it was in his eyes.

  “Why’s that, boy?” asked Bernhardt.

  Morse tried not to let the rage and humiliation show in his face. Boy? What did that fat ass think this was, 1956? It constantly amazed him how much more redneck Pennsylvania was than most of the South.

  “I’m not afraid to go walkin’,” was what he managed to get past his clenched teeth.

  “That’s really strange,” Vic said. “Everyone else is afraid of the dark, afraid that the killer might get them…but you’re not. Now, why is that?”

  The Bone Man said nothing.

  “C’mon, Morse…why is that? Why is it that a skinny nigger like you is the only person in this whole town who ain’t scared to go out in the dark when there’s a killer running round loose?”

  Polk snickered. “Maybe he ain’t afraid ’cause the killer can’t see him in the dark, black as he is!”

  A few of the other guys laughed, but Vic didn’t and neither did Tow-Truck Eddie. The big man’s face was almost thoughtful, but he didn’t say a word. Vic on the other hand flapped an arm at the others to shut them up.

  “Bullshit, Jimmy. This motherfucker ain’t afraid of what might be out here in the dark because he’s what’s out here in the dark.”

  It took Polk and the others a couple of seconds to sort that out. Tow-Truck Eddie just inhaled and exhaled, slowly and deeply, through his nose.

  “What kind of shit is this?” the Bone Man said, staring Vic right in the eye. “That’s jus’ bullshit and you know it.”

  “Is it?” barked Crow, and Vic snapped, “Then why you got blood on your shirt?”

  The Bone Man glanced involuntarily down at his shirt. It was speckled with blood, though in the darkness it just looked black and wet.