Bad Moon Rising (20 page)

The scream ended. Mike sagged to the ground, limp and exhausted. His eyes—more red than blue now—cast wildly about to find the Raggedy Man.

He was there. Right there, right next to him, looming over, looking down. Mike could see that face, that mask—which was not a mask at all, not some wrinkled dark cloth rippling in the breeze. It was his face that rippled, that…
writhed.
There were no eyeholes because there were no eyes—not human eyes; no mouth either—not a human mouth. What there was, what composed the man’s entire face, was a black, roiling, chitinous swarm of bristling insects. Roaches and beetles. Slugs, maggots, centipedes. Flies and termites. In the gaps between his gloves and his sleeves the exposed arm was the same—every foul creature of the shadows wriggling together to form a wrist. Between shoes and cuffs, the same. Wasps and earwigs, lice and locusts.

“No!” After the scream Mike’s voice was a frayed whisper. Overhead the crows circled and circled in terrible silence.

The Raggedy Man raised his left hand as if to reach for Mike. It was not a threatening movement, but everything about it was dark with
wrongness
. Mike screamed again, weakly this time, a croak in a torn throat. “Help me!”

Instantly the sky around him was filled with whispery noise as the flocks of circling crows hurtled down toward him. The leading rank of night birds struck with such force that several of the birds died, their necks snapped on impact, but the sheer mass of them surged forward…not at Mike, but at the Raggedy Man. The birds slammed into him and drove him backward, the beaks of the birds slashing and stabbing at the old clothes, their cries tearing the air. The Raggedy Man staggered and for just a moment he seemed to catch his footing, to hold his ground, but the night birds hit him in wave after implacable wave, and then the Raggedy Man
exploded,
losing whatever power it had to retain the man shape, and the hundreds of thousands of insects that made up its hand, its arm, its shoulder, burst apart into their separate selves and showered Mike, landing on his chest, his face, crawling on him, crawling into his nose and mouth and…

FUGUE.

Mike’s mind burned out like a cinder.

Above him the clouds overhead paled from rose red to gray as the dawn took hold on the day. The crows swarmed over Mike, beaks darting here and there, snatching at the bugs, tearing through carapace and shell in a savage frenzy of killing and eating. They fed and fed and fed. As the sun rose it bored a single hole through the clouds and punched a hard beam of cold yellow light down onto the field. Then another, and another until the morning sky stretched into a blue forever that was clean and hard.

Soon a stillness settled over the place where Mike lay, silent and unmoving. Sunlight sparkled on the dewy tips of the dying grass and turned the morning mist to a ghostly blue-white opacity. The light gleamed on the blue tubing of the bicycle lying by the side of the road. It caressed the freckled cheek of the boy who lay sprawled among the dry autumn leaves. And it glittered on the edges of the broken shells and cracked antennae of ten thousand insects whose corpses lay scattered across fifty yards in all directions from where the boy lay. In the center of this slaughter, the ground around the boy was completely empty except for the tatters of some old torn clothing as all the birds flew away into the trees.

All but one, a single crow that stood on the boy’s sternum.

Everything was as still as death. There was not the slightest tremble under the bird’s feet. The crow tilted its head, angling one black-within-black eye to stare at the boy’s slack face. The smell of blood was everywhere. The music rode the breeze, a little stronger now, the blues melody plaintive. The mist retreated all the way to the road.

The boy took a breath, and the crow cawed quietly.

A full minute passed. The boy took another breath. Then another. The crow hopped down from his chest and walked away, angling to keep an eye on the boy.

FUGUE
.

From a blackened cinder Mike’s mind coalesced into living awareness once again.

Minutes floated past on the breeze and gradually sense returned to him along with awareness of his body. He no longer felt helpless and wrecked. It took a while and it took a hell of a lot of effort, but Mike gradually sat up. He shook his head like a drunk, lips slack and rubbery, nose running, eyes going in and out of focus as he stared at the withered grass between his knees. Awareness came back with slow reluctance. His body hurt in a dozen places, his head worst of all. Mike probed his scalp, found lumps. He explored his mouth with his tongue and tasted old blood, but found no cuts. Memory was sluggish and it hurt to try and pull it out of the junk closet of his mind. He looked around, saw that he was in a field, saw his bike lying nearby. He vaguely remembered racing down the road, remembered hitting something in the dark and then falling. But after that…nothing.

He had no idea what time it was. It looked like morning, but that was ridiculous. His last clear memory was biking toward the hospital to visit Val, but…had he gotten there? Mike wasn’t sure. Everything was weird, and his head felt like it had been ransacked, all the drawers pulled out and dumped, everything just thrown onto the floor.

He plucked at his shirt, saw that it was crusted with dried blood, but he couldn’t find any cuts on his body. Some bruises, sure, but not even a scrape on his arms or legs or body. Could that much blood have come from a nosebleed? He doubted it, but when he touched his nose it felt eggshell fragile and sore. Some blood caked around the nostrils, though not as much as he expected to find. More blood on his chin and throat. He flexed his hands, pressed his fingers against bones and ribs. There was pain just about everywhere, but nothing seemed broken. Except maybe his head, because that pounded like a psychopath doing a drum solo.

Mike climbed carefully to his feet, swaying a bit, watching the field tilt and whirl like a carnival ride; but after a moment it slowed, steadied, stopped. There was a rustle behind him and he turned to see a crow standing in the grass a dozen feet away. Without knowing why Mike smiled at it. The crow cawed softly. Mike thought he heard music on the breeze, but ignored it. He always heard music. He figured it was just part of being crazy.

On unsteady feet, Mike trudged over to his bike, picked it up, spun the wheels to make sure they were true, and walked it back to the road. He stood there for a moment, looking up and down A-32. There were no cars this early and in the dips and hollows of the road there was the faintness of a dwindling fog. He swung one leg over, wincing with the effort, then turned and looked back to the field. He felt—on some level
knew—
that he should be more worried about all this than he was, but he couldn’t make himself care about it. His head hurt too much. The strangeness of it all made it hard to think.

“Vic will kill me,” he said, and the crow cawed again.

Vic’s house rules didn’t allow him to be late, let alone out all night, but that wasn’t something he could control. It would mean a beating, but that was okay. He’d had plenty of beatings; he could handle another. He pushed off and began his slow, creaking way back to town. With each mile it became less and less important to try and remember what happened.

(5)

The Bone Man sat on the wooden rail of the farm fence and watched Mike ride by. He wasn’t sure if the boy was able to see him now. The boy probably could, the Bone Man considered, because from what little he knew of ghosts from his days down in the superstitious South the dying were supposed to be able to see the dead. Death was a window, his aunt had told him. He was pretty sure Val Guthrie had seen him that night in the rain, but not since; maybe she’d had one foot on the ghost road and then stepped off. He knew for certain Henry Guthrie had as he lay dying in the rain.

The kid looked bad as he biked by. Sick and thin, bloody and gaunt. He looked mostly dead now, but he never even turned his head toward the Bone Man, so the point was moot.

The last crow came over and perched on the rail next to him, and the Bone Man stared into its black eye for a long time. “I wish you could talk, little brother,” the Bone Man said. “I’ll bet you know a lot more about this than I do.”

The bird opened its mouth and gave a nearly silent caw, almost of agreement.

“Least now I can know whose side you’re on.” He smiled. “It ain’t no good to be alone all the time.”

The bird rustled its wings. They both turned to look down the road.

The Bone Man knew full well that Griswold had not sent the Raggedy Man to hurt Mike—that would have been suicidal—but he wasn’t sure why it was sent at all. Maybe some kind of test, an attempt to gauge how strong Mike was. Well, he mused, I wonder what he’ll make of what just happened. “Bet you didn’t expect that to happen, did you?” he asked the wind, hoping Griswold could hear him. Now Griswold really had something to think about.

So, he realized, did the Bone Man himself, because what he just saw didn’t fit into anything he knew about what a
dhampyr
was or could do. Maybe
dhampyr
wasn’t even the right word to use anymore. Maybe there just wasn’t a word to describe what Mike Sweeney was becoming.

That thought sat uneasily on him as he watched the figure vanish into the distance. A
dhampyr
was something he understood, and a
dhampyr
had hope built into it, but if Mike was becoming something
else
, then maybe the last little of bit of hope Pine Deep had was going to leak down the drain. Maybe there was nothing standing between the Red Wave and Pine Deep. Beside him the bird cawed again; the Bone Man looked at him and frowned. Or…maybe there was.

(1)

Mike got home at nine-thirty and he pedaled around back to see if Vic’s truck was there. It wasn’t, but he did not know if that was good news or bad. He chained his bike to the side-yard fence and went inside. The house was quiet and still. It had an empty quality. He went into the kitchen, took the orange juice out and drank half of it from the carton, put it back. As he turned to go he heard a sound. He stopped, looking at the door to the basement. Mike had never been down there; it was Vic’s domain and more than once Vic had promised the world’s worst beating if Mike so much as thought about going down there. Mike never thought about it. Pissing off Vic was not a hobby.

But there was that sound. Like a muffled grunt. Not of pain or effort. Just a human sound, like someone might make walking into a chair. A kind of oomph. Then nothing.

He moved closer to the door and listened. Vic’s truck wasn’t out back, and he was sure Vic was not home. Vic never lent his truck to anyone, either. Mike pressed an ear to the wood and as he did so the door shifted. He stepped back like he’d been burned and looked at it. The door was closed, but it wasn’t locked and now that he was paying attention to it he could see that the lock was broken. There were splinters of wood sticking out—small ones, but telltale. More splinters littered the floor. The door was closed, but there was no lock to hold it firm, so it had swung out on its hinges maybe a half inch, and Mike’s leaning against it had made it thump back against the frame.

Mike quickly backed away, not liking this at all. Either this was some new trick Vic was playing, a trap to make him break the house rule about going downstairs, or else someone had busted that door. Mom? Would she have done that?
Could
she have done it? Even had she been sober Mike doubted it, and Mom was never sober. Besides, she’d told him yesterday that she would be in Doylestown all day today, something about a craft show that started early.

Then what was left? A burglar?

He almost smiled at the thought. Here in Pine Deep, after all that had happened, a simple breaking and entering seemed comical. The smile almost took root on his face, but didn’t. This was Pine Deep, after all, and nothing was ever that simple. Certainly not something like this.

A tingling sensation began behind his eyes. It was like the feeling he had when one of his headaches was coming on and a hairy ball of sick dread began forming in his throat.

No, this was bad. Whatever it was, whatever it would turn out to be, this was bad.

Without making a sound Mike backed away, backed out of the kitchen. When he was in the hallway he spun and sprinted for the stairs, taking them two at a time. He raced to his room, yanked open a drawer, and pulled out clean underwear, a sweatshirt, jeans, and socks and stuffed them into a nylon gym bag. He opened his window and dropped the bag down into the side yard, closed the window quietly, and then went into the bathroom. He stuffed a deodorant stick into one pocket and his toothbrush and toothpaste into another. Then he crept back down the stairs, all the time listening for sounds from the basement.

For an agonizing moment he wondered if maybe that was his mom down there, that maybe she hadn’t gone to Doylestown. That maybe whoever this was down there had come in before she left and…

No. His instincts—perhaps his fears—said no to that. Mike was pretty good about reading the energy at his own house. He knew when Vic was home, knew when his mother was home. Always. None of what he sensed at home felt like Mom’s energy. Everything just felt…
wrong.

Mike opened the front door very quietly, slipped outside, and then raced to grab his gym bag and his bike. He’d stop on the way to school and pull on his sweatshirt to hide the blood, then clean up in the boy’s bathroom. If anyone asked, he would say he fell off his bike on the way to school and had a bloody nose. He’d change, drift into homeroom, and pretend this had never happened. Let Vic sort it out. That sounded good, sounded like a plan, even though he knew it was all total bullshit. He raced away into the morning.

(2)

Ruger heard the kid moving around upstairs. He could smell blood on the kid’s clothes and it made him smile. Lois heard him, too. When Mike was upstairs, while Ruger was paused in an attitude of listening, face turned toward the ceiling, Lois had tried to make her move.

She drove her elbow back and into his stomach as hard as she could, slamming it into him with a terrible and desperate fury, and lunged forward, trying to break free of his arms, kicking away from the lounge chair. She was fast, she was vicious, and she wanted to hurt him as much as she wanted to try and warn Mike. She almost made it, but Ruger was much, much faster, and the blow had only surprised him. It hadn’t hurt him at all. As she lunged forward he snaked out a hand and caught her by the wrist, locking his icy white fingers so hard that she was snapped back and spun around and came crashing back down on top of him. Air whooshed out of her as she collapsed down, and before she could scream Ruger clamped a hand over her mouth, bending forward fast and close.

“Make a single sound, you silly bitch, and I’ll kill your boy.” His voice was a reptilian whisper that froze her heart. His mouth was smiling, but his eyes told her the truth of his threat. Black eyes with no whites, no color other than red shadows. “I’ll use him worse than I used you, sweetheart, and I’ll make you watch.”

Lois felt the world tightening around her like a noose. “No…” she whispered. Just a faintness of a sound. “God, no.”

Ruger pulled her closer and ran his cold tongue up her throat and over her chin. There was blood on her face and he licked it off. “Smart move, sweet piece.”

Lois closed her eyes. They were naked, entwined in an ugly way on the lounger. She had blood on her face and throat and breasts. Blood streaked her thighs and buttocks. Her pale skin was splotched with the livid outlines of his open hand. Her nipples were torn and there were bite marks on her hips and stomach. Ruger had not taken much, just a taste here and there, drawing it out, making it last, loving the terror he tasted on her skin and the disgust he saw in her eyes.

The rape was bad enough, but Lois lived with Vic and he had never wanted anything she gave willingly. He had always taken it, enjoying the fight, the win. Hard and vicious use had become her life, and mostly the gin could blunt it. But Ruger was not Vic. By contrast Vic was almost kind. He was cruel and brutal, but he was a man.

What Ruger did…what he forced her to do…was beyond anything Vic
could
do to her. The thought of Ruger turning those appetites on Mike was too horrible to even think about, and Lois’s soul collapsed in on itself. “No,” she kept saying, over and over again, a mantra against Ruger’s hungers. She lay still and they listened to Mike’s footsteps upstairs and then heard the front door. Above them the house settled into empty stillness.

Ruger pushed Lois off him and she landed hard on palms and knees as he rose to stand over her. His skin was so white it was almost translucent and he stood above her, naked, indomitable, relentless.

“Hey,” he said, “want to learn a new game?” But since she didn’t answer he showed her anyway. Now that the house was empty it didn’t matter that she screamed. And screamed.

(3)

Vic stood in the doorway to the cellar and watched Ruger stand up and, without cleaning any of the blood from his skin, begin slowly pulling on his clothes. All the while Ruger smiled. Ruger picked up Lois’s robe and tossed it over her, the bulk of it covering her face and chest, leaving the rest of her exposed to Vic’s stare.

The gun in Vic’s hand hung there, a dead and forgotten weight at the end of his arm, barrel pointing at the floor. Vic could have killed Ruger right then, shot him point-blank. The special loads in that gun would have snuffed Ruger out like a candle, yet the gun just hung there as Ruger tucked his penis into his pants and zipped up the fly. He took his time about it, too, staring at Vic, smiling with bloody lips.

It wasn’t Ruger’s smile that hurt Vic so deeply. It wasn’t even that Ruger had broken his house rules, had taken what belonged to him. Had taken his
wife
. It wasn’t that as much as it was the steady, slow, very soft laughter that echoed in his brain.
His
laughter. Not Ruger’s.
His.

“Penance is a bitch,” Ruger said as he buttoned his shirt. He started to turn away and then paused, looking down at Lois. Then, glancing up at Vic as he did so Ruger sucked up a mouth full of bloody phlegm and spit on Lois.

And still Vic did not, could not, lift that gun.

“It’s a new world, pal,” Ruger whispered with his graveyard voice, “and it must be a real kick in the nuts—especially after all these years and all you’ve done—to realize that you’re on the wrong end of the food chain.” Ruger tucked in his shirttails, then licked his fingers and used them to smooth back the hair from his widow’s peak.

“Griswold is my god,” he said, and turned away.