Dead Man's Song

“Mark?” Connie asked again and started reaching for the door handle, but Val instinctively caught her wrist.

“No,” she said quietly, staring hard at the door, at that vertical line of darkness that showed a total lack of light inside. “Don’t.” She hadn’t liked that grunt, whether it was a cough or a snort, it just didn’t sound right. “Let’s go back to the house,” she said. She took Connie’s wrist in her free hand and then took a single backward step, drawing Connie with her. Connie resisted, her gaze lingering for a moment on the door before finally turning around to give Val an uncomprehending stare.

“But—it’s Mark,” she said, giving Val a frowning smile of confusion.

There was a second grunting sound and then a light slapping sound as if someone had placed their open hand flat on the inside of the door. The heavy door trembled and opened maybe half an inch, broadening the line of darkness. Val pulled Connie another step back. This time she was sure she had identified the kind of sound coming from behind that door. It was laughter. It just wasn’t Mark’s.

“Let’s go back to the house,” she whispered harshly. “Now.”

Connie tried to pull away and as she did so she turned toward the door and shouted Mark’s name.

“No!” Val yelled as the door suddenly swung open. She shined her light on the face of the man standing there. It wasn’t Mark.

It was Kenneth Boyd.

(2)

They struggled up the last few feet and collapsed onto the grass that fringed the Passion Pit. The sun was long down and the sky was bright with a billion stars. It was warmer up there and a rowdy gaggle of geese was waddling around the clearing, honking contentedly and poking into the grass for bits of stale hamburger buns and cold french fries. In the trees the last finches of the season were chatting noisily. There were even some elderly fireflies drifting lazily through the air. Newton, lying on his back, recorded these things. “Is this even the same planet?”

Crow shook his head. “Don’t ask me, son, I have long since lost the capacity for rational thought.” Crow struggled to sit up and reached over to pat Newton’s leg. “We’re going to have to talk about this. I mean we’ll have to think about it some, and then you and I are going to have to talk about this.”

“Well,” Newton said, “there’s one thing I can tell you now, and that’s you can pretty much go on the assumption that I am somewhat less skeptical about this town’s reputation for being haunted.”

“How much is ‘somewhat’?”

“Like maybe a hundred percent.”

“That’s all?” Crow tried on a smile, but it didn’t fit. Even the muscles of his face hurt from strain. He took a breath, exhaling as he forced himself to sit up, and after a moment stood up, reaching a hand down to haul Newton to his feet. Then he walked over and unlocked his car. He reached in for his cell. “Still no bars. I’ll have to call Val from the road. Come on, cowboy, let’s go.” He lingered by the open door, looking at the black edge of the pitch. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Crow fired up the engine, did a three-point backing turn, and then headed back up the bumpy dirt road, away from Dark Hollow. Neither of them spoke as the car bounced over the ruts, and when Crow reached the crossroads, he turned right toward town. Away from the Guthrie farm.

(3)

Boyd stood there in the doorway, framed by darkness, shadows behind him, his skin gray-white in the glare of Val’s flashlight, grinning at the two women. His eyes were sunken into desiccated sockets, his cheeks gaunt, his nose askew with splinters of cartilage and bone poking through the flesh like cactus needles. But it was his mouth—his awful mouth—that held them in an immobility born of total horror. Boyd’s lips were curled back from his teeth and those rows of teeth, top and bottom, were twisted and elongated, set crookedly in the gray meat of his gums, and each one ended in a wicked point. Those teeth gleamed wet and dark and red in the flash’s light. Blood dripped from his mouth onto the filthy tatters of his suit. He snorted again, a bestial grunt of laughter that caused a bubble of bloody mucus to form between his rows of fangs. It swelled and then burst with an audible pop, seeding the air with a mist of blood.

Val was frozen to the spot, unblinking, unable to process what she was seeing, but then Boyd stepped to one side and turned, allowing the light from her flash to slide off him and shine in through the open barn door. He turned his head and held out one hand, gesturing inside like a magician revealing a clever trick. Just inside the door, only a yard beyond where the last of the footprints had ended, was a body slumped in a shattered, rag-doll sprawl, with arms and legs flopped away from the torso, and a head thrown back, mouth wide as if caught in the midst of a great scream, tilting away from the red ruin of a savaged throat.

Connie Guthrie stared past Val, past Boyd, through the open door, and into the wide and sightless eyes of her husband. And screamed.

“MARK!”