The Hum and the Shiver

32

Dwayne slammed face-first into a tree. He felt—and worse, heard—the bridge of his already-broken nose crack again from the impact. He staggered back, slammed into another tree, and fell awkwardly to the forest floor. His whole face was numb, and his skull rang.

He raised his hands to his face, convinced he would find his nose completely flattened. It was still in place, although when he touched it, the formerly strong upper line now felt mushy. He whimpered in anticipation of the pain.

He was totally lost. After the realization that he’d seriously injured Bronwyn penetrated his dope-fogged brain, he’d tried to return to his truck, but could not find his way. Then he remembered that he’d also knifed Bronwyn’s brother. The law would be after him now, to send him back to prison. He had to get out of Cloud County, out of Tennessee, maybe even out of the country somehow. But first he had to get out of these goddamned woods.

He tried to orient himself. It didn’t matter which way he went, he reasoned, as long as it was downhill. Just as he was about to start walking, a new sound reached him and stopped him dead. Somewhere nearby, someone was crying.

He followed the sound and emerged into a clearing where a lone figure lay curled up on the ground. As Dwayne approached, the man raised his head and stared up at him.

“Thank God,” Fred Blasco said. He crawled to him, holding his laptop computer to his chest, and clutched Dwayne’s legs with his free hand. “Oh, sweet Jesus, thank you. You’ve got to help me, I can’t find my way out of these woods, I’ve been wandering for days, I need help, I’m lost, I’m starving—”

Dwayne kicked the man away. “Get the fuck off me!”

“No, please, don’t leave me!” Blasco begged. “I can pay you, really, you can have my credit cards, anything you want.”

“Fuck you!” Dwayne said, and ran off into the night. Blasco began to cry again, a sound so forlorn, only the hardest, coldest of hearts could ignore it. Dwayne did.

He stumbled up a ridge and down into a gully. He tripped over a root, slid in the wet leaves, and rolled downhill until he slammed, again face-first, into a half-buried boulder. He turned slowly onto his back, groaning, wondering if his nose would ever look right again.

“That must’ve hurt,” a voice said from the dark.

He sat up and looked wildly around. The forest was so thick, there were only little shafts of moonlight visible, like blue gray splinters piercing the blackness. Nothing moved in them.

“Fuck!” Dwayne bellowed into the night. Could the cops have already found him? Or someone worse? “Who the fuck is out there?”

The voice began to laugh. A shape emerged from the darkness as if exuded from it. “You don’t know me, Dwayne Gitterman. But I know you.”

The gathering clouds parted enough to let one wide, clear beam of moonlight reveal a shambling figure with a long beard and baggy clothes. The sin eater, Dwayne thought in terror: the man who waits outside the homes of the recently dead. Those inside take a plate of food from the corpse’s chest and leave it at the back door; when the sin eater consumes the food, he also consumes the bad deeds of the deceased. No one knew his name, only that he did his job without complaint or fuss. And, of course, that it was a monumentally bad omen to meet him.

“What do you want?” Dwayne said, scooting back against a tree. “You following me?”

“I’m not looking for you, Dwayne. You crossed my path, remember?”

Blood ran both down his face and throat, coating his senses in its warm, salty taste. “Fuck you, then.”

The sin eater laughed again. “Your old standby, eh? Don’t you hear what’s on the wind tonight? Hear the song?”

“Shut the fuck up.”

The sin eater sang, his voice surprisingly clear and true:

When he finished he coughed a little, then said, “That’s someone’s dying dirge. Now who you reckon could be dead tonight?”

Dwayne almost gagged on his own blood as he said, “Not Bronwyn. I didn’t hit her that fucking hard, it was just a tap, a fucking shove.”

The sin eater smiled, and laughed again. “If you were smart, you’d wish Bronwyn Hyatt was dead, son. No, that’s the song of Kell Hyatt, who’s dancing in the wind tonight.”

The memory of the fight, of the pure satisfaction of burying his knife in the other man’s flesh, came back to him as he comprehended. “Wait, wha… Kell’s dead? But he…”

The sin eater came closer, so that his charnel odor washed over Dwayne. “You got so far away from yourself that you started to think all those Tufa stories about riding the night winds and songs with the power of life or death were just dumb-ass superstitions, didn’t you? But you can hear the wind tonight, can’t you? And baby, it can hear you.”

Dwayne’s laugh turned into a gag, and he spit blood on the ground. “You been smoking what I been growing, old man.”

“That’s true,” the sin eater agreed. “And you do grow a nice crop, I’ll grant you. But it doesn’t change anything. I won’t be eating your sins; you’ll tote them with you. I know what’ll happen to the Tufa part of you; as for the rest, well… send me a postcard from Hell.”

He did not move, but the shadows seemed to pull him back and reabsorb him. Dwayne threw the first rock his hand found after the sin eater, but it bounced harmlessly off a tree. He stuffed the front of his T-shirt against his face to stanch the blood and resumed moving forward. If he kept going downhill in a straight line, eventually he had to cross a road where he could flag a ride and get home. There he had guns, money, and transportation.

But he emerged from the trees and saw, stretched before him, the entire Needsville valley and realized with a start that he’d been climbing, not descending. The terrain ended at the edge of a cliff, and far below he saw the dark tops of trees waving slightly in the wind. The moon hung full and clear in the cloudless half of the sky; the other half was dark and shimmery with the approaching thunderstorm.

“Thanks,” a familiar voice said. “You saved me the trouble of tracking your sorry ass down.”