Dead Man's Song

Chapter 10

(1)

In his dreams he was usually Iron Mike Sweeney, the Enemy of Evil, a planet-hopping, dimension-crossing super-hero with high-tech weapons and vast powers that made him invulnerable to harm. In one of his favorite dreams Mike was the squad leader of a team of interstellar commandoes and in those dreams he moved with the ruthless efficiency and eyes-on-the-prize clarity of focus of Jack Bauer—if Jack Bauer had been a spaceman. Frequently the villains in his dreams looked like Vic—and even in the deepest of his dreams Mike realized what that was all about—and in each of those dreams the Enemy of Evil would kick the ass of alien invader-Vic, or demon-Vic, or monster-from-beyond-Vic. Those were pretty good dreams because it felt good to blast Vic with a laser or cut his head off with a two-handed broadsword.

Sometimes—rarely over the years and then almost exclusively over the last few months—Mike’s dreams changed into very regular and specific nightmares. In those dreams he would be walking through a dark swampy hollow. The bushes and trees around him were on fire and there were people lying everywhere. Dead people, covered in blood, torn apart. In those dreams Mike always carried a samurai sword, a katana, in his hands, which was odd because in his adventure dreams Iron Mike Sweeney always used either a blaster or a big knight’s sword, never one of the slender Japanese blades, but in these new dreams it was always a katana, and its blade was always smeared with bright blood.

In these dreams the dead people were people Mike knew. Crow was there a lot, and he almost always wore a big tank on his back of the kind that exterminators or lawn-care guys wore, and the hose was clutched in Crow’s dead hand. The only part of him that wasn’t covered in blood was the front of his T-shirt, which showed the logo for band called Missing 84, which Mike had never heard of. Crow’s fiancée was usually alive, but she’d been beaten to her knees and was weeping over the body of her father, Henry Guthrie. There were other people: Dr. Weinstock from the hospital, sprawled with his throat torn out, and the chief of police sitting with his back propped against a tree and his legs spread, a piss stain spreading on his pants as he dribbled blood from his nose and mouth and ears. Others, too, like his mom. She wasn’t dead, but stood naked and covered in blood—and when he was awake Mike wondered how sick it was that he dreamed of his mother naked and tried to imagine how much of his life would be spent in therapy because of that image—and his mom was laughing as the forest burned and people died. There was a dark man standing next to her, also laughing, but he was hazy like an out-of-focus photograph and Mike could discern no details.

Last night Mike had been through that dream again, all of the familiar images of pain and loss and horror, all the way up to the point where a shadow passed over Mike and he turned to see what had cast it. He turned and looked up…and up and it stood there: impossibly huge, monstrous, towering above the flames, laughing in a voice that rumbled like thunder. A vast creature like something out of horror movies, with hairy goatlike legs, the muscular torso of a man, a whipping tail with a barbed point, and vast black wings. A mouth that was filled with teeth the size of daggers and horns that were splashed with gore. A monster Mike had seen on TV and in films and that he’d read about in books, but though this was the form of the devil in every aspect, Mike knew that even its shape and appearance were a lie. A special effect, or at least done for effect. Not that it made the creature any less terrifying. If anything, the deliberate choosing of this image—an aspect intended to be reviled and feared on a primal level—showed the subtlety and mockery of the beast. In these dreams the monster would spread its great arms as if to encompass the burning hollow, the forests, the town, and the world, and he would hiss “Mine!” just before reaching for Mike.

This is how his dreams had started last night, and then at the moment those massive hands were closing around him the dream changed as abruptly as if someone had clicked a TV remote and immediately Mike was on his bicycle out on A-32, pedaling fit to burst his heart, his breath burning in his throat, as behind him the Wrecker barreled down on him, its horn blaring like the howl of a hellhound and the spiked bars of its chrome grille breaking apart in the middle to form two rows of jagged metal fangs. That dream also played itself out, all the way to the point where the wheels of the trucks rolled over him from the toes upward, pulverizing his bones and pulping his flesh while worlds of fire exploded in every cell and his mind absorbed all of it without escape.

Then last night, as this dream literally ground to a halt with his skull exploding into blackness, he should have awakened—as he had the night before, and the night before that—but again some perverse hand punched the Great Cosmic TV Remote and his consciousness was switched into a new dream. A brand-new dream, not a rerun. Mike was always aware that he was dreaming even when he was in the deepest part of his sleep. Part of him—he was never sure if it was his essential self or some alien part—was always watching as things happened. This had always been the case with him, even during the adventure dreams of Iron Mike Sweeney, the Enemy of Evil, and that part of him knew that it was not he who was controlling the Great Cosmic TV Remote. If it had been, he’d have channel surfed away from the burning forest and out from under the wheels of the Wrecker and back into an adventure dream in which he was the buff hero with a big sword rescuing a scantily clad heroine who would look suspiciously like Scarlett Johansson.

This new dream was, in its way, stranger than all the others, and in its way it was part of all the others. A blend. The burning forest was there, though instead of staggering through the forest looking at all the twisted dead, Mike rode down a long hill toward it. The hill started out as Route A-32, and the Wrecker was hot on his tail, the grille snapping at his back tire, but then Mike got a weird kind of second wind and it gave him the grit to amp it up. His legs became a blur and the thin rubber of his tires send up a high keening wail as he shot forward, moving faster and faster, pulling ahead of the Wrecker. Behind him the horn screamed in frustrated protest, but Mike was flying forward now, the wind moving across his cheeks so fast it felt like cold water. His red hair snapped behind his skull like the streamers of a torn flag.

The black flatness of A-32 changed under him and he looked down to see that asphalt had become hard-packed dirt and then a rutted road, but still he rode on. Several times he would surge his weight upward so high that the bike would lift under him and they would sail right over a deep pothole or a fallen branch. Nothing could stop him. As the tires thumped back down on the dirt the shock would go through him, but there was no pain in it. The jolt felt good because his muscles were hard and yet loose, tensed only where they needed to be, like a top athlete’s would be in the heat of the championship race. His lungs worked, but there was no burn in his throat. This was a pace that would kill anyone else, but it couldn’t kill him because it was his pace.

As the bike jolted back down he felt something bump hard against his back. Something long and comfortably heavy was slung across his back. He could not see it, but he knew what it was. His sword. His katana. A samurai sword with a wrought-iron hilt made to look like November trees whose branches were filled with crows. He knew the crows-in-the-trees pattern was painted on the black lacquered sheath.

His bike followed the path as it began to plunge down away from the highway, down into the shadows of Dark Hollow. The shadows cast by the mountains and the tall trees closed in around him, but Mike did not lose sight of the road. In this dream Mike could see in the dark. In this dream Mike understood the dark—though the part of him that was watching the dream did not understand what that meant. It was enough that the Mike in the dream understood it.

Down and down he rode, the path smoothing out as it neared the bottom. Ahead Mike could see the first of the burning trees and shrubs, and he knew he was reaching the place where the dead would be. Where the creature would be. Where the killing would be. The farther down he went the more of the forest was ablaze and he could feel the heat on his skin. It was leaning into a picture of hell, because the fire was filled with screams and bodies that twisted and writhed as they shrieked. Mike loved the fire, loved what it was doing, though he didn’t understand why he loved it. The slope bottomed out and broadened into a clearing and this field was packed with hundreds of people—some burning, some not. Those that were not aflame spun toward him, hissing like snakes, glaring at him with crimson eyes, snarling with mouths filled with yellow fangs.

These monsters clustered around a small knot of people—Crow, Val, Dr. Weinstock, a few others he didn’t know—and had been closing in on them as Mike swept down and skidded to a stop, swinging the back end of his bike around so that a plume of dust was kicked up into the air. Bits of twig and leaf in that plume caught fire, and for a second Mike was hidden behind a veil of that fire, then he leapt through the curtain, drawing his sword and howling with a bloodlust that was a match for any monster in any of his dreams. He felt older, bigger, powerful, insanely confident.

He laughed in triumph as his blade flicked out and cut one monster’s head from its shoulders. The creature instantly turned to a pillar of flaming ash and then exploded into dust. Mike landed in front of the crowd of people—and even Crow looked helpless and weak—and the creatures all hesitated. Mike’s sword flashed through the air and then he swept it down and slashed a line in the ground in front of his feet. The line burned as if the tip of the sword was filled with kerosene.

“Let’s do this!” he said aloud in a line cribbed from the movie Blade.

The monsters snarled and in a single mass of teeth and claws they closed in on Mike and his friends, but Mike’s sword became a blur of bloodstained silver as he leapt to meet them, slashing and twisting, skewering and then whipping the sword free and using the same motion to kill a creature lunging at him from behind. The monsters died by the dozens, they died by the score. Flames ignited everywhere as they died, and Mike never stopped laughing as he whirled and lunged and killed and killed and—

The scream behind him made his freeze in place and when he snapped his head around he saw that indeed all of the monsters had closed in at once. Not one at a time the way they did in the movies, but all at once. More than a hundred of them. Maybe two or three hundred. All at once. Mike’s flashing sword had killed fifty, sixty of them…and the rest had fallen on Crow and Val and Dr. Weinstock and the others and had torn them to bloody shreds. Mike stared as the last of his friends—Tyler Carby, from his homeroom class—was dropped to the ground, head lolling on a neck that was no more than raw meat and strings. Everyone was dead. Everyone. Crow and Val lay in a tangle of broken limbs and burst flesh and the only part of them that was not streaked with blood was her left hand where the diamond engagement ring glittered in the firelight, sparkling like an accusing eye.

“No…” Mike said—and the dreaming Mike and the watching Mike said it as one. One pale voice that caught fire and vanished into silent smoke. The ring of monsters all leered at him with looks that were almost comical what-did-you-expect looks. Mike tried to lift his sword, but it was too heavy for him. Around him the ring of monsters closed like a fist.

Mike Sweeney woke up with the sound of his own death scream in his mouth. He almost screamed out loud, but even in the worst moment of panic he still remembered Vic and so he snatched his pillow and pressed it to his face and screamed into that. It was three in the morning, and Mike did not go back to sleep at all that night. He didn’t dare.

(2)

On the pitched eave above Mike’s window, the Bone Man sat cross-legged in the cold wind of 3:00 A.M., his guitar across his thighs and night birds perched on both shoulders. He heard Mike’s scream as loudly as if the boy had shrieked it in his ear. He stared up at the moon, whose arc was cutting itself into the horizon over past the hospital.

“Damn, boy” he said to the wind, and shook his head. “Damn…you almost had it.”

One of the night birds shifted and cawed softly. The Bone Man nodded, as if the bird had said something profound. The wind that blew through him was cold, and he could feel it. He always felt cold, and now he felt colder still.

“Damn,” he said, and then he said, “Dhampyr.” The night-bird cawed more loudly this time and the Bone Man started to play one of the old songs, trying to work what magic he could to soothe the mind and the soul of the thing below that was no longer exactly a human boy.

(3)

In the basement two floors below, Vic lit a cigarette and settled back in his Barcalounger, drawing in a deep lungful as he scrutinized the face of his guest. The menthol felt good in his throat and chest. The chair was comfortable, too, a Frasier model—real leather in a nice chocolate brown. The other thing that felt good was the pistol laying on his thigh, the trigger guard resting on his crotch, the barrel more or less pointed in the other man’s direction. Not an overt threat but more than a suggestion. Behind him were shelves of books, floor to ceiling, wall to wall, many of them stolen, some purchased through second, third, and fourth intermediaries. A lot of them banned by the church for hundreds of years. Nothing you could find on eBay.

Vic exhaled and the smoke joined the blue cloud that had formed over his head. He’d smoked a lot of cigarettes this evening. “You stink,” he said, which was true enough. The other man smelled of dirt, old blood, shit, and Christ knew what else.

The man seated in the other chair—a straight-backed wooden chair with knobbed legs—just stared at him, his eyes flat and without expression, his face wax-white, the skin of his cheeks sucked in and moistureless, his mouth nothing more than a red slit.

“I feel…strange,” Karl Ruger said, and his voice was a dry whisper in his throat.

“No kidding.” Vic took another drag. “I’m curious…does any of this shit hurt?”

“Hurt?”

“Yeah. You’re just about as jacked up as anyone I’ve ever seen, sport. You had the shit kicked out of you, you been shot more times than Bonnie and Clyde, and you slept in a refrigerator for a couple of nights. That can’t feel good.”

“No,” said Ruger, looking down at his hands. They were as white as cream except for some streaks of dirt, though the fingernails had thickened and grown dark, almost black. Ruger flexed them. With the loss of so much fluid—almost all of his blood and water—his hands were unnaturally thin, almost delicate. Even all that he had taken from that cop, Golub, hadn’t done much to flesh him out. “No—no pain.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Vic said with a nasty grin.

Ruger raised his eyes. They were no longer without expression. “Kiss my ass.”

His gaze was hard on Vic for a while and then drifted sideways to scan the room. As that stare left him, Vic could feel a change in frequency or perhaps of vibration, and he noted it down in his mental filing cabinet. He watched as Ruger assessed the basement—Vic’s domain. It was Vic’s totally private space, hallowed ground where Lois and Mike were never allowed to set foot. The basement was partitioned in a mirror-image of the partitions in Vic’s own mind, and he was aware of it—and was aware of what the basement and its contents were telling Ruger. There were gun racks heavy with rifles, shotguns, and pistols; along one wall there were stacks of unopened boxes of Panasonic DVD players, HD and plasma TVs, Black and Decker microwave ovens, and Craig CD players.

In the far corner was a computer workstation with a laser printer next to which stood a tall stack of yellow leaflets bearing a crudely drawn caricature of a Jewish man who looked shifty and avaricious, cringing beneath a bold, black swastika. In the opposite corner was a complex telephone rerouting and answering system that serviced several different lines: Vic Wingate’s Gun Repair, White America, the Aryan Brotherhood, the National Socialist Party, and a pornography distributorship called V.W. Enterprises. At this end of the basement was a second computer workstation and a Mission table that was piled high with bundled stacks of money that were splotched with reddish-brown stains. Old blood. Ruger sniffed the air as he looked at the bills and Vic noted just the smallest lift of one of Ruger’s eyebrows. He filed that away, too. Ruger turned to face Vic but let his gaze linger significantly on the money before shifting back to meet Vic’s assessing stare. “That looks familiar,” he said mildly.

“Finders keepers,” Vic said. “Guess you’re shit outta luck.”

A shrug. “I can always get more.” As he said this he flexed his thin white hands.

Vic said, “Tell me something else, sport…how’s the old noggin’ working? You know who you are?”

“I know.”

“Can you tell me your name.”

“Blow me.”

“Fair enough.” Vic thought for a moment. “The Man wants me to determine whether you’re damaged goods or not. You understand what I mean by that?”

Ruger said nothing, but he smiled. A tiny lift of cold lips.

“He and I have gone to a lot of effort to bring you to this moment, right here, right now. I want you to pay attention now ’cause this shit’s important.”

“I’m listening,” Ruger said softly. His gray tongue flicked over his dry red lips.

In one smooth movement Vic picked up his pistol and pointed it at Ruger. “If it turns out that your brain’s turned to mush just like your buddy’s then I hate to break the news but it’s beddy-bye time, you dig? And don’t get any ideas about leaping over and trying to wrestle this away from ol’ Vic. That would be the last stupid move you ever made, ’cause I made these loads myself and if you were to guess that they’re special then you’d be right. Am I making myself clear?”

“As glass,” Ruger said. He never even glanced at the gun. His black-within-red-within-black eyes were fixed on Vic’s.

There was a sound above them—Lois’s footfalls as she walked from the study to the kitchen. A pause, then a thunk as the refrigerator door closed, and her footfalls retreated back down the hall. Lois getting more ice for her drink. Vic and Ruger both stared at the ceiling and then lowered their eyes at the same time, reestablishing contact. “Just so we both understand who’s in charge here.”

“Your house, your rules,” Ruger said.

“Just what I wanted to hear.”

“What happened to Boyd? Why’s he so messed up?”

Vic shrugged. “Not exactly sure. Theoretically he should have turned out like you, but for some reason his brain turned to mush. Basically he’s cold cuts with teeth, and even though the Man was able to dial up his wits a notch or two he’s as close to brain dead as one of you clowns can be and still walk around.”

Ruger was still smiling. “Why?”

“Don’t know. Not even sure if the Man knows.”

“I thought he knew everything.”

Vic’s eyes became slits. “He knows everything that matters.” He raised the barrel of the pistol until it pointed at Ruger’s face. “And let’s be clear on one more thing, sport—it’ll help us get along. You don’t make any wise-ass comments about the Man. Not ever, you read me loud and clear?”

Ruger’s eyes glittered. “Griswold is my God,” he said.

Vic looked at him for a long time, trying to read those eyes, looking for mockery, looking for a lie, but finding neither. He set the pistol down, stubbed out his cigarette, and then leaned forward, elbows on knees. “Then we have a lot to talk about.”