Читать книгу Ghost Road Blues - Джонатан Мэйберри - Страница 10

(1)

That year the monsters came to town a whole month before Halloween. The monsters didn’t wear costumes. No Shreks or Jedi Knights, no Harry Potters or Orc Warriors, no Aragorns or Captain Jack Sparrows. These monsters weren’t white-sheeted ghosts peering hopefully out of eyeholes cut in old percale; they weren’t hockey-masked slaughterers of young virgins; they weren’t four-foot-high tottering Frankensteins with Kmart plastic faces. They didn’t caper from house to house with pumpkin-headed flashlights or ghostly green glow-sticks. None of them carried paper sacks filled with ghoulish gatherings of Snicker’s bars, sandwich bags full of pennies, apples, and snack-sized Three Musketeers.

They were monsters all the same.

They blew into town on a Halloween wind, coming into Pine Deep along the black length of Extension Route A-32, whisking over Black Marsh Bridge and through the cornfields. They came in a black car that had bloodstains on the door handles and the single unblinking black eye of a bullet hole on the driver’s door. The monsters came rushing into town like a storm wind, pushing cold air before them and dragging darkness behind.

There were three monsters in the car. Two of them sat in the front, a third crouched in the back. They all had their monster faces hunched low into the collars of their coats, hidden by the shadows of their hat brims. They were silently snarling, these three monsters. The monster in the backseat bared his teeth in desperation and fear; the monster behind the wheel bared his teeth in pain and hopelessness; but the monster in the front passenger seat bared his teeth in a grin of pernicious delight.

The black car flew with a raven’s speed along the dark road, but it did not fly with a raven’s precision: it veered and swayed and staggered from one side of the road to the other as if the monster who drove did not know how to control the machine. Yet it continued to drive fast for all its careening and swerving. In it the three silent, hungry monsters rolled into Pine Deep as night closed around the town like a fist.

But there were other monsters in Pine Deep that night. It was that kind of town.

These others did not need to come to town in a bloodstained black car; they were already there, had always been there. One drove through town every day in his own machine, a monstrous wrecker with a gleaming hook; another one labored all day repairing expensive cars and trucks, and labored all night to destroy precious hearts and souls; one walked around town and smiled at everyone and he never knew that a monster looked out of his laughing blue eyes, waiting, waiting…

One monster, the worst of all, waited in darkness under wormy dirt, awake now after a long, long sleep.

There were many other monsters in Pine Deep.

Waiting. All of them, waiting.

(2)

Lightning singed the edges of the dark thunderheads, but no rain fell; thunder rumbled distantly, shaking the trees and shaking thousands of soot-colored night birds into startled flight. They swarmed like locusts and then flew back toward the trees, believing themselves safe when the lightning flashed.

One night bird peeled off from the flock and soared through the raw air until it leveled off just above the tips of the corn, skimming along on the breeze, flapping its dark wings only occasionally. It was a ragged bird, its shape defined more by shadows than substance. The fields whisked along beneath it and when it reached the end of one farmer’s lot it veered left, drifting across the knobbed expanse of a pumpkin patch. All of the best pumpkins were already gone, picked and sold to supermarkets in Philadelphia and Doylestown, awaiting the jack-o’-lantern surgeons and the bakers of autumn pies. Only the ugly pumpkins remained, the pumpkins too gnarled and deformed for sale as decorations, too diseased to be welcome on any table.

This year there had been more diseased ones than the good kind; this year all across the township and its outlying farmlands hundreds of tons of pumpkins lay rotting, along with truckloads of fetid corn and wormy apples. It was a blighted year for Pine Deep, what the old folks called a Black Harvest, and they unearthed all the tales—short or tall—about the pestilential harvest of thirty years ago, of bad times come again.

The ugly pumpkins squatted in row after hideous row, or stood in huge mounds like heads piled high after a great battle. The night bird circled the biggest mound once, twice, and then veered off again, rediscovering the black road and following it up and over a series of small hills. More cornfields stretched away on either side of the road, and here and there darkened farmhouses began the ritual of turning on lights to combat the invasion of night shadows. The lights did not make the houses look safe and homey: they made them seem impossibly lonely, as if each house were the only house in the whole world, alone and lost in the eternal sea of dryly whispering corn.

The night bird uttered a strange, high shriek; not a caw, but a sound more like the wail of an abandoned and terrified child. The shrill sound floated through the night air, and the people inside the farmhouses, the ones who allowed themselves to hear it or could not block it out, shivered as if some dark and shambling thing were breathing its damp breath on their naked skin. None of them would forget to lock their doors that night, even if they were unaware of the subliminal dread that wail had sown in the soil of their hearts.

One farmhouse, older than the others, more battered by time and cold winds and disinterest, stood at the edge of a vast cornfield and overlooked a couple of acres of flat ground enclosed by a low stone wall. The ivy-covered stone wall embowered a small and disheveled cemetery in which the rows of shadow-painted tombstones stood in snarls of bracken and pernicious weeds. Wailing again, the night bird flew low over the cracked and wind-sanded headstones, circling and circling. No lights shone in the window of the old house. No lights had shone there in months, nor might ever show there again. Only shadows lived there, stirred now and again by the frigid breath of old ghosts. The night bird wailed yet again and flapped noisily toward a tree where it settled on a twisted and gnarled branch that reached out toward the tombstones. In daylight the fading colors of the leaves would have made the promise of beauty, but by starless night the leaves were a uniform and featureless black, forming nothing more than an amorphous bulk against which the night bird disappeared entirely.

The night bird turned a single black eye toward one headstone that leaned drunkenly just below the tree. It had been pushed off-balance by the roots of the tree but was held fast to the ground by one sunken corner and its own ponderous weight. It was a simple tombstone, blocky and gray and cheap, thirty years old and unkindly worn by each of those thirty winters. Chiseled into its face was a name: OREN MORSE.

Below that, a single word had been cut into the lifeless stone: REST. No date, no other inscription. The wind blew brambles and fallen leaves across the grave and one dry leaf, propelled by the vagaries of the breeze, skittered upward to the top of the gravestone and then tumbled over and off into the shadows beyond. Except for the murmuring wind and the whisper of the cornstalks, there was no sound. Even the night bird held its tongue.

Then a man was there.

He stepped out of a shadow and was abruptly there. The night bird let out a startled cry and fluttered its wings, but did not fly away. The man stood quietly looking down at the headstone, his gray lips moving as he read the name. He was scarecrow thin and dressed in a cheap black suit that was smeared with dirt. He wore no topcoat, no hat. His skin was as gray as the gravestones around him, but there was no moon now to shine on it. Still, that pale skin seemed to cast its own weird light. He held his hands loosely at his sides, and every once in a while those long fingers twitched and clutched as if grasping something, or desiring to.

Then he reached down into the shadows behind the tombstone and when he straightened he held the long neck of a battered old blues guitar in his hand. He looped the strap over his shoulder and drew his slender fingers along the silver strings. The friction made a sound like old door hinges creaking open.

Abruptly the whole graveyard was caught in the harsh white glare of headlights as a car crested one of the small hills and rushed down the other side toward the graveyard. The lights shimmered through the trees and danced along the tips of the corn, casting weird capering shadows. The gray man turned, watching as the car drew near, passed, and drove on. The car was moving very fast and swerving as if the driver was drunk. Three shadowy figures hunched in the car’s seats, two in the front, one in the back. Tires squealed as the car careered along the road, sashaying from one lane to the other and back, and then finally settling on a course dead center, as if the grill were devouring the single yellow line. The machine roared past a large billboard that read:

THREE MILES TO PINE DEEP, THE MOST HAUNTED TOWN IN AMERICA…WE’LL SCARE YOU SILLY!

If the men in the car noticed the sign, they gave no indication. Their shadowed heads didn’t turn as they passed the sign, the engine never slowed. The car clawed its way up the far hill, and in a few minutes the taillights were gone, fading first to tiny red dots, like rat’s eyes, and then vanishing altogether. A minute later the sound of the engine was gone as well.

The man in the graveyard stared into the distance, his eyes squinting as if he could still distantly see the car, though it was impossible in those deep shadows. His eyes lingered briefly on the billboard and the irony was not lost on him.

Again lightning flickered behind the clouds. In the tree, the night bird shivered its wings and uttered its strange wailing cry.

With a final lingering glance at the tombstone, the thin man tugged on the strap so that the guitar hung behind him, with the neck hanging down low behind his right hip; then he turned and began walking. He walked slowly and without haste, his long legs maintaining a steady, deliberate pace, like that of a pallbearer. He stepped onto the road and began walking in the direction taken by the car and its three passengers. His shoes made no sound on the blacktop. Lightning flashed again and again, a deception of a storm, but the storm was elsewhere. The lightning cast brief but bold shadows across the road, the wall of the graveyard, the gnarled tree, the night bird…everything starkly cast its shadow onto the blacktop. Everything except the man who walked without making a sound.

With slow and measured steps, he climbed the long hill and was soon lost in darkness. The night, and the night bird, followed after.

(3)

“Jesus Christ, Tony!” Boyd yelped, gripping the back of the driver’s seat with his one good hand. “Watch it!”

Tony Macchio wrestled the wheel and pulled the car back into the right-hand lane, missing the oncoming milk truck by inches. The car swayed drunkenly on its springs as Tony fought to steady it with clumsy hands. His fingers were caked with dried blood, and they felt cold and weak. He could barely even feel the knobbed arc of the steering wheel.

“What the fuck’s wrong with you?” snapped Boyd as the car finally settled into balance and began accelerating again, climbing a long hill.

Tony coughed once but didn’t say anything. His stomach felt hot and acidy, and he had too much phlegm in his throat. He just shook his head. Next to him, looking casual in spite of the wild ride, Karl Ruger watched Tony. Ruger’s eyes were cold slits, but he was smiling. The smile and the eyes seemed as if they belonged to two different faces: the smile seemed warm and pleasant and affable, but above the smile Ruger looked at Tony with the expressionless eyes of a reptile. Eyes the color of dusty slate, like a blackboard from which all the writing had been forcefully erased. Ruger had a long, thin nose that arced over the mouth like the blade of a very sharp knife, a pointed chin, and a sharp, strong jaw-line. His cheekbones hung like ledges over the concavity of hollow cheeks, and Ruger’s brow was high and clear but cut by the black dagger-point of a widow’s peak. He took off his hat and smoothed his greased hair flat against his skull. If he had had a kinder face, he could have looked like a stage magician, and he did have the air of magic about him; but it was a dark magic, and it clung to his soul and to his face, and to his fate. The dark magic was there in his long white fingers and in the shadows of his black, black heart.

Karl Ruger looked at Tony and smiled as he watched the man slowly die.

He found it fascinating to watch as Tony tried to cling to consciousness, tried to deny the coiled snake of pain in his gut where the Jamaican’s bullet had capped him. Gut shots were agonizing, Ruger knew, and he marveled at the manner in which Tony tried to bull his way through what must be searing pain. Idly, Ruger wondered if the loss of blood was providing Tony with some kind of insulation against the pain. God knows he’d lost a lot of it. Tony was sitting in a lake of it, and more of it was pooled around his feet. The fresh-cut copper smell of blood teased Ruger’s senses, and he wondered, not for the first time, why no one had ever made an aftershave that smelled like fresh blood.

The car rolled past a sign that read: WELCOME TO PINE DEEP! Ruger felt a cold wind blow through his chest. It was scary, but he liked it. He mouthed the name of the town, silently tasting it. Pine Deep. Yes. He closed his eyes and for just a moment he thought he heard a voice say: Ruger, you are my left hand. But no one had spoken. He opened his eyes and stared at the unfolding black road, feeling the prickle of expectant excitement in his chest, but at a loss to understand why it was there or what it meant.

Boyd asked again what the fuck was wrong with Tony, and Ruger watched as Tony tried to say something but only managed to blow a small bubble of viscous red between his purple lips. Ruger was fascinated by the bubble as it expanded, filled with Tony’s ragged breath, and then popped. A mist of tiny droplets dotted the windshield.

“Yo! Tony!” Boyd snapped.

“Shut up, Boyd,” whispered Ruger. He always spoke in a whisper. It was all he could manage since a spic in Holmesburg Prison had stabbed him in the throat during a small dispute between Ruger’s own Aryan Brotherhood and the brown-skinned critters on the Block. The spic had wanted to kill him so bad he had a hard-on, an actual hard-on, as he drove a sharpened spoon into Karl’s throat. Ruger could feel the hard length of the man’s dick when he had grabbed the spic’s groin and squeezed it. Makeshift knife in the throat or not, Ruger had all but ripped the man’s pecker off before one of the other Aryan Brothers had stepped in and cut the spic’s throat with a sliver of sheet metal that he’d stolen from the machine shop. The other Brother had taken the rap for the kill, which was fine for Ruger because he didn’t get any time added to his stretch. The spoon had not really done him much harm, just a nick on the larynx and a bit of pain. Big deal. Pain didn’t mean a goddamn thing to Ruger. Pain was just a “thing” that sometimes happened. And if his voice was now a hoarse and ghostly whisper, well, that was fine. It scared the shit out of a lot of people, and it made them listen closely to whatever he had to say.

“What the hell, Karl? He almost wrapped us around that truck!”

“He’s doing fine,” Ruger whispered. “Just fine.”

Tony turned and looked at Ruger for a moment, his brows knitted together and glistening with cold sweat.

“Fine, my ass!” Boyd said. “He took one back there.”

“So did you. So what?”

“Yeah, but I only got clipped and I ain’t driving the fucking car. Look at him, man! He’s halfway to being dead.”

More than halfway, Ruger thought. “He’s fine. Aren’t you, Tony?”

Tony glanced at him again, his eyes bright with fever but seeing only about half of the things he was looking at. He tried to speak, wanted to actually agree with Boyd, wanted to stop the car so one of them could drive. Boyd had only been shot through the left biceps; he could drive if he had to. Ruger hadn’t even been touched, but when he looked in Ruger’s eyes, into those icy reptilian eyes, Tony couldn’t find the courage to say anything. He felt trapped by that ophidian stare and by the bullet in his belly, completely unable to understand why Ruger was pushing him to drive. It didn’t make any sense to him. Ruger was a survivor type, so why would he risk dying in such a stupid and pointless way? Tony had never been able to figure Ruger out, and lately it had been even harder. He knew that Ruger was one evil son of a bitch, but now he thought that he was a little crazy, too.

Maybe more than a little.

Boyd had seen Ruger go crazy on the Jamaicans back at the warehouse. He’d shot nearly all of them himself and then instead of fleeing like anyone halfway sane, the crazy fuck had taken a shovel from the trunk and used the blade to chop them up. Boyd had thrown up watching it and when he’d tried to pull Ruger away, the psychopath had wheeled on him, his faced streaked with blood, and had given him a look that made Boyd want to piss his pants. He nearly did.

“Aren’t you, Tony?” Ruger asked again, leaning on the question and nudging the driver’s shoulder with the tip of a long white finger.

Tony nodded, just once, and then concentrated on the road. For a few minutes he managed to keep the car steady, but with each mile, each minute, it became harder to do. It was like trying to hold on to something from a dream.

Boyd shook his head disgustedly and sank back against the cushion. His arm hurt like all hell, but the bleeding had stopped. He had a towel wound around it, and kept it in place with steady pressure from his good hand. Tears burned in his eyes, but he turned his head and looked out at the night, hoping that Ruger hadn’t seen them.

Ruger, of course, had. His cold eyes missed very little. He saw Boyd’s tears just as clearly as he saw the blood and the life seeping out of Tony’s gut. He upped the wattage on his smile and chuckled low in his throat, too low to be heard over the roar of the engine.

Three minutes later, Tony crashed the car.