Dead Man's Song

Terry slowly turned back toward her. The muscles in his arms and back began to ripple with an unnatural spasm, and pain danced in Terry’s eyes. He tore at the carpet with his fingernails, and a line of drool slipped from between his lips to hang pendulously below his chin.

Sarah could have run, could have been out the bedroom door, down the steps, gone from the house in seconds. The ambulance wail was closer now and she could run toward it, toward safety, but she stood her ground for love of him. The twisted, snarling knot of muscle and bone that inched toward her had madness in its eyes and enough physical power to easily break her apart. She knew that if he attacked her she could not—and would not—fight him. She held her ground as he stalked to within inches of her, his face wrinkled in a grotesque parody of an animal’s silent scream, like a tiger’s face before it kills, like a wolf as it leaps. Sarah believed it, knew the threat, felt that her life was measured now in seconds. Slowly, slowly, she lowered herself down to her knees in front of him, bending until she sat on her calves, her head level with his, feeling the sharp bit of glass into her knees but not caring, not reacting to that—pain and blood were nothing to her at that moment.

His eyes watched her, alight with hunger. Sarah reached out with her hands and touched both sides of his face. At first he jerked away, growling low in his throat, but she tried again, saying a single word, “No.” Just that one word, said softly.

The places where her palms touched seemed to crackle with energy, though whether it was real or not, she couldn’t tell. She knelt there, touching his face, and said it again, “No.”

The moment was unreal. He was there on all fours, transformed in a broken moment from a gentle man who had held her and loved her to a damaged and incomplete imitation of some predatory thing—a beast of indefinable nature. She was there, kneeling on a glass-strewn and blood-splattered carpet, touching madness and denying its power with a single word. “No.”

He looked at her with the eyes of madness. In the uncertain light by the open bedroom doorway, his eyes no longer seemed blue at all, but appeared to glow with a bizarre red-gold glow. Animal eyes. He turned his face toward her bleeding palm, sniffed at it.

“No, Terry.” He leaned closer toward the flowing blood. An inch away, less. The smell of salt and copper filled his nostrils. Sweat burst from his forehead. He was shaking all over as if he had a raging fever. His tongue wormed from between his lips, reaching, needing, almost touching the blood, almost tasting it.

“NO!”

This time it was Terry himself who said it. Yelled it. Screamed it—and the words were ripped out of him, bellowed with horrible and inhuman force as he reared up and shoved at her, knocking her into the hallway, knocking himself back against the bed.

“NO!” he screamed again and the red-gold glow of his eyes burned with incandescent fury. Sarah fell heavily, her head rapping hard against the banister. Dazed, she watched as Terry rose up from the floor, first to his knees and then slowly, with terrible struggling jerks and spasms to a crouch, and finally all the way to his full height. Naked, crisscrossed with bleeding slashes, bathed in sweat, he was an awesome sight. Every muscle in his body was locked in battle, one against another, evidence of some titanic internal struggle.

“NO!” he roared, and he wept, too, his tears burning bright in his eyes. “No, you can’t take that away from me, too! You can’t make me, you bastard! You lose, Griswold, you fucking lose!” He laughed with weird triumph, though his laugh became a sob.

He wrenched himself around to face Sarah, his mouth working as he tried to speak, but only choked sounds came out of his constricted throat.

“Sarah!” was all he could manage, and then he spun around, ran straight across the room, and threw himself headfirst out of the window with Sarah’s horrified, despairing scream following him all the way down to the garden flagstones.

Chapter 29

(1)

Diego saw them walking along the back road and cut through the rows of corn to intercept them, pushing his John Deere cap back on his forehead and smiling. “Little dark out here for a stroll, ladies, dontcha think?”

Val shrugged affably. “Taking the shortcut back to the house. How’s the tractor?”

“Axle’s shot, but we’re going to tow it in back to the shed and José and Ty can fix it tomorrow.”

“Okay. I have to go into town for a bit. You guys should knock off for today.”

Diego grinned, his teeth very white against the deep black of his mustache. “Okay, we’ll wrap it up as soon as the tractor’s moved. Besides, it’s Little Halloween and there’s a keg party at the campus. Ty and the others were planning on heading out there.”

“Not you?”

“Too old for that crap. Gonna order a pizza, watch Dawn of the Dead on cable, and fall asleep in my La-Z-Boy. At my age that’s partying.”

“Sounds like a plan.”