Dead Man's Song
Page 67

“What’s that?” Crow called from ten feet lower on the slope.
“Nothing. Just an old dime.” The dime was dated 1966 and had a crude hole punched through it.
“Let’s keep moving,” Crow said. “It’s not a treasure hunt.”
Newton nodded and made as if to throw the dime away but without realizing that he was doing it put it in his pocket instead. Later on he would remember that dime and for the rest of his life he would wear it on a string around his ankle as a reminder of why he survived the autumn of the Black Harvest. Why he had survived while so many others died.
Dark Hollow was a deep depression formed at the base of one medium-size mountain and two huge sidehills and their steep sides kept most of the hollow in shadows except at noon. Farther southwest the land flattened out and even opened up in spots so that a rare beam of sunlight could reach down to the floor of the hollow, but there were also spots that never saw the light and it was toward one of these spots that Crow and Newton descended yard by yard. There was a clear division line where the mountain crest blocked the sun from reaching any farther down into the valley. It took the climbers twenty careful minutes to reach that point, and as they crossed that division line from sunshine into shadow, Newton felt a chill pass through him. Certainly the air was colder without the touch of the sun, but to him it felt as if he had stepped into a freezer unit. He blew out his breath and was surprised to find that it did not steam the air; it felt cold enough by far. He glanced at Crow, to see if he felt it, too, but Crow was reacting in a starkly different way to the shadows of Dark Hollow. Despite his jaunty baseball cap and grunge-crowd sunglasses, despite the affected spring in his muscular step, he was sweating bullets. Perspiration beaded his face and trickled in icy threads down his face. Unnerved by the sight, Newton said nothing and they kept moving, heading deeper into the valley.
They climbed down without conversation, silent and alert to the deceptive irregularities of the slanting landscape. Newton became more and more aware of the ambience of Dark Hollow.
Crow removed his sunglasses and stowed them away in a pocket. “Black as pitch down here,” he said vaguely. “Come on.”
Ten minutes later they reached the floor of Dark Hollow.
At the bottom they stopped and stepped away from the slope, their legs wobbly, and when they pulled off their gloves, their hands were pink and puffy. Crow took both pairs of gloves, then wrapped several turns of both climbing ropes around them and tied it all off so that nothing would be lost, weighting the ends with rocks to mark the spot. As he did this, Newton unslung his walking stick and shrugged out of his backpack so he could get to his canteen. He took a long pull and handed it to Crow. Then Crow fished a PowerBar out of his pocket and split it between them. They stood in the gloom, chewing, looking around them. The place was a bleak nothing, cold and damp and utterly still.
Crow consulted his compass and pointed northeast. “Griswold’s farm is that way,” he said. “I think,”
“You…think?”
Crow shrugged as he put the last piece of the PowerBar into his mouth. “It’s not like I’ve been there before, dude. I found it on the county surveyor’s map. Its location is mentioned in some old borough zoning records.”
The way ahead looked choked with brush and stumpy scrub pines and Newton gave it a dubious stare. “Is there a path?”
Crow shook his head. “I doubt it. Come on.”
If there had ever been a path it was thirty years overgrown and as they went northeast they simply picked their way through the path of least resistance, and for an hour they crept forward with no feeling of having made any real progress. They clambered over rocks, crawled through coarse shrubs, slithered under fallen trees, and leapt gullies, feeling like they were running an obstacle course with no breaks in it at all. Newton’s legs felt leaden as he lumbered along behind Crow, and he struggled to draw chestfuls of air. He wanted to blame his breathlessness and tiredness on the sedentary life of a writer, or the arduous terrain, or the weight of his pack, but he was unable to manufacture any real belief in those fictions and tried to work it out logically, tried to pick apart his own nervous reactions and explain them away, using weather, lack of sleep, bad coffee, and cold air as culprits for each individual emotion. He tried, in short, to be a reporter and slant the story in a way that would favor a totally rational explanation for everything. For most of the trek he was happy with that, but as the shadows got deeper and the air got colder the farther into the Hollow they went he kept having to remind himself of his own logic. He really didn’t want to openly acknowledge the grim and oppressive atmosphere of Dark Hollow, because to allow it to be a fact, or even a possibility, would be to accept that the place itself possessed some kind of negative energy, and to him that was preposterous. Crow was the one who believed in this freaky shit, not him.
Eventually even Crow’s pace faltered and he stopped and leaned his back against a hemlock tree; he dragged his forearm across his face and examined the dark stains of perspiration on the sleeve. His chest was heaving, though he looked less like someone who was exhausted from exertion than someone from whom breath had been robbed by illness. His skin color was bad and his dark eyes looked faintly feverish as he sucked at the air like a gaffed fish.
“Jesus,” he breathed raggedly as he unclipped his canteen and took a long pull, “this is like fighting your way through a jungle. Never seen such dense brush.” Crow wiped his face again. “Man, I’m sweating like a pig.”
“Pigs don’t sweat,” said Newton distractedly as he looked around at the high walls of shadow that climbed the steep sides of the hill.
Crow shrugged. “They would if they were down here.”
There was a squawk from the branches of the hemlock and Crow looked up to be a half-dozen ragged black birds clutching to the bare branches. Mostly female crows with their blue, green, and purple iridescent wings, and one fat albino male that was a sickly ash-gray. The jury of birds watched them with black intelligent eyes, and the albino squawked again, softly.
“Tell me something,” said Newton, finally reaching for the canteen. “How come you never tried to come down here before? I mean…why now?”
Not taking his eyes off the birds, Crow said, “Thought about it a million times. Even drove out here twice, once got as far as the top of the pitch, and chickened out.”
“You looked like you wanted to bug out today, when we were about to start down.”
Crow looked at him, and though he laughed there was little humor in it. More of a nervous chuckle. “I came close, Newt. If I’d been alone—well, let’s just say that Mike could have used some help at the store and I would have been fine believing that’s why I turned around and went back to town.”
“But you didn’t. I find it hard to believe that you feel safer with me here.” Newton said, and when he saw Crow’s lip twitch, he said, “Yeah, it’s okay to laugh at that.”
“Nah, it’s not that I need someone to protect me and hold my hand…it’s just that I think I would have felt too ashamed to cop out with someone watching.”
“You hardly know me. What would it matter if I knew that you copped out?”
Crow flicked him an appraising glance. “It’s not that you specifically knew, it’s that anyone would know.” He sighed and took another hit from the canteen. “I’m the guy who killed Karl Ruger. I can’t pussy out of climbing down a hill to visit a haunted house.”
“Who’d think that?”
“Me. Oh, and don’t give me that look, buddy boy, ’cause it’s no great revelation that we have to believe in our own hype sometimes.” He nodded toward the northeast. “Let’s get moving.”
“Well…I’m no psychologist, that’s for sure,” Newton said after they’d gone a dozen yards, “but I think you’re being way too hard on yourself.”
“I have a lot of personal work to do regarding my feelings about the guy who used to live down here. I’ve got enough personal baggage to open a luggage store, believe me.”
“I know, you told—”
“Newt, ol’ buddy, I’ve only told you part of it, and I’ve got to work up the nerve to tell you the rest.” Crow gestured as if trying to grab the right words out of the air. “I’ve got to prove to myself that my fears and superstitions are as silly as Val insists they are. You see, she doesn’t believe most of the stuff I believe. Oh, don’t get me wrong, she believes that he was the killer all those years ago, but she thinks it ended there and then.”
“And you don’t?”
“And I don’t.” Crow shrugged. He tried to make it look lazy, offhand, even careless, and failed. “You see, it doesn’t matter which of us is right, it just matters that I get this shit sorted out up here.” He tapped his temple with a finger. “Besides, there’s this old samurai axiom about facing your fears. If you’re afraid of ghosts, sleep in a graveyard.”
“Very pithy. So, are you afraid of ghosts?”
“Mostly, no.” Sweat trickled down Crow’s cheeks. “Sometimes, yes.”
“One ghost in particular? Ubel Griswold’s ghost?” asked Newton.
Crow stopped and turned, but for a moment just looked up above Newton’s head at the leafless branches of the tall, black trees. “I would appreciate it,” he said with exaggerated calmness, “if you would refrain from using that name while we’re here.”
Newton laughed. “Oh, come on! You’re not going to tell me you’re afraid of saying his name?” The reporter studied him. “You’re…serious.”
“As a heart attack.”
“Then you’re scared, is that it? This isn’t just an AA self-realization exercise, is it?”
Crow looked all the way up to where sunlight dazzled the very tips of the trees, a pure light that did not have the reach to warm the shadow-darkened valley. “Newt, ol’ buddy, I am so freaking scared right now I could cry. For two pins I’d run all the way back up the hill, get back in my car, and drive to the first bar I could find and drink it dry. That’s how scared I am.”