Dead Man's Song
Page 71

Newton stood stock still, his back pressed against the gnarled bark of the pine tree, his face burning. He licked his lips and swallowed a dry throat, then slowly straightened and smoothed down the front of his clothes. He looked around at the forest—the gray forest—and felt very cold and small. “Crow…,” he began, but Crow waved him off. Newton pushed himself off the tree and walked tentatively forward. “Look, Crow…I’m sorry I mouthed off the way I did…but put yourself in my place for a minute.”
Crow turned to look at him.
“Granted, I wasn’t there thirty years ago,” Newton said, “but I have a pretty open mind. Yesterday I didn’t so much as believe in the tooth fairy and today you want me to believe that there are such things as werewolves. I mean…werewolves for Christ’s sake. How should I even react to something like that?”
“You could try a little trust.”
“Crow—coming down that hill with you, coming out here with you—that’s showing more than just a little trust, but believing in werewolves…at the risk of you slamming me into another tree, that’s going to take a bit more than simple trust.”
They stared at each other for a while and then Crow sighed heavily and nodded. “Yeah, goddamn it.” A rueful grin twitched up one corner of his mouth and he bent and picked up the hiking stick and held it out. “Sorry about the whole slamming into a tree thing.”
“Sure,” Newton said snippily and snatched the stick out of Crow’s hands and held it defensively in front of his chest. “Don’t worry about it, but please don’t do it again.”
“Scout’s honor,” Crow said and held up three fingers.
A little breeze swept through the clearing and stirred some leaves. “So now what?” Newton asked.
“It’s your call. I’m going that way,” he said, nodding to the northeast. “If you want to head back, no harm, no foul.”
“I should go back,” Newton said. “I really should. But…what the hell.”
A big grin broke out on Crow’s face and he stuck out his hand; after only a moment’s hesitation, Newton took it and they shook. “But,” Newton said, not letting go immediately, “this doesn’t mean I believe in werewolves, witches, goblins, or honest Republicans. All it means is that I’ll go to his house and we’ll see what we see. Fair enough?”
Crow pursed his lips, then nodded. “Fair enough.”
They started walking again, heading farther up the road, and in a loud stage whisper that was meant to be heard, Newton said, “Werewolves, my ass.” Then suddenly a memory kicked its way out of the shadows in the back of Newton’s mind and he jerked to a stop and grabbed Crow’s sleeve. “Holy shit!”
Crow wheeled. “What’s wrong?”
“Ubel Griswold…” Newton stammered. “Werewolf!”
Crow blinked. “Um…yeah. We covered that.”
“No, Jesus Christ, I just remembered something that you absolutely have to know. About Griswold.”
“Newt—if you’re going to reveal that you’re his long-lost son or some B-movie shit like that I’m going to hurt you. A lot.”
“No, shut up and listen. The other day when I was doing a Net search for my feature I searched on Griswold’s name and—jeez, how the hell could I have forgotten this?—I found a reference to Ubel Griswold and werewolves. I totally forgot about it.”
“And you’re just telling me now?”
Crow whapped him on the top of the head with his open fingers. “You friggin’ cheesehead. How the hell could you not remember something about Griswold and werewolves when we are in Dark-frickin’-Hollow arguing about werewolves while going to Griswold’s frickin’ house? Explain to me how that is possible.”
“I don’t know…I just forgot. I guess I just didn’t pay much attention to it at the time. I’m sorry, okay? But at least let me tell you what I read.”
“Yeah, useful information might be—oh, I don’t know—useful?”
“Stop shouting. It was just a quick reference, and I guess it didn’t really register at the time because it referred to something that happened in the late fifteen hundreds, maybe early sixteen hundreds. Something about a guy put on trial for being a werewolf. Peter something or other. Can’t remember his last name. Point is, he was point on trial for being a werewolf and later executed.”
“You lost me. Guy named Peter gets killed four hundred years ago, what’s that got to do with—”
“They gave a bunch of aliases for him. One of them was Ubel Griswold.”
Crow stood there and stared at him for quite a while after that. “Oh, that’s just swell,” he said.
“Maybe it’s an ancestor of his,” Newton offered. “If Griswold was descended from someone who was accused of being a werewolf—and a pretty famous one if the transcripts of his trial are on the Internet four hundred some years later—then maybe he played on that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Figure it out. He took the werewolf thing from his ancestor as a gimmick to disguise the fact that it was just an ordinary man—albeit a serial killer—behind the Reaper murders. Or, maybe he was really nuts and thought he was channeling his ancestor. Didn’t Son of Sam get messages from a dog or something?”
“I think that was something he made up to try and prove to the cops that he was insane.”
“Well, he was a mass murderer…how sane could he have been?” Newton said. “But the point is that if you’re a homicidal maniac and you discover that your ancestor was tried and convicted of being a werewolf, wouldn’t you play on that? Use it to increase the terror and thereby increase whatever psychosexual pleasure these guys get from killing? Isn’t that like a given here?”
“It would be,” agreed Crow, “except for one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“During the Pine Deep Massacre no one even floated the word ‘werewolf.’ Not even me. I don’t think I’ve even said that word aloud in conjunction with Griswold until today. I didn’t even tell Val that’s what I thought Griswold was.”
“Balls.”
“Yeah, so any connection Griswold had with the four-hundred-year-old werewolf trial was kept pretty well hidden until you found it on the Net. I never even made that connection, and believe me I have looked.”
“Well, regardless of that…the original Peter what’s-his-name is dead, and the Griswold of the 1970s is dead, so as spooky as this is it’s all kind of academic.”
Crow turned away and looked down the tangled path. “Maybe,” he said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Crow turned back. “What if they’re the same werewolf?”
“Oh, come on now, that’s going too far. First you want me to believe you met a werewolf, now it’s an immortal werewolf? Next thing you’ll tell me that his real name is Dracula.”
“Dracula was a vampire.”
“Well, Crow, you want me to believe in ghosts and werewolves. Why not vampires, too?” Crow walked away from him and started down the path. Newton called, “Hey, while we’re at it we can see if we can find a crop circle and maybe a leprechaun.”
Crow held up one hand, forefinger raised.
(2)
Mark stood on the porch, leaning his shoulder against the pillar, the neck of a Sam Adams hooked between his index and forefingers. The sun was up but storm clouds were rising in a solid ring from every point on the horizon; they were closing like a camera aperture, shutting out the blue of the sky. In another half an hour it would be black as night. Weird weather patterns lately, he thought. When he heard the screen door open and then bang shut he knew it would be Val and not Connie following him out of the living room battleground.
He didn’t turn to look, just said, “Don’t start.”
“I’m not going to say a damn thing.” Val’s voice was ice cold. Mark had heard his mother sound like that on those rare times when she and Dad were fighting.
“It’s not your business anyway,” he said.
“You’re right, it’s not.”
“It’s between Connie and me. So, butt out.”
Val did not reply. He heard the boards of the slat bench creak as she sat down. Over beyond the barn an owl hooted, probably confused by the coming darkness, and there was the sound of some traffic on the road. Truck, by the sound of it.
The day had started okay, with Connie acting more like her old self, even to the point of doing a bit of gardening, but when Mark had come up behind her and wrapped his arms around her, pressing his loins up against her rump, she had screamed. Actually screamed, and then started struggling to get away from him like he was some kind of damn rapist. It made Mark sick and it scared him, and it also made him mad. He hadn’t seen her struggle like that when Ruger was running his hands all over her that night, but when her husband wanted to cop a feel—her frigging husband who had rights—then she was all piss and vinegar, fighting for her maidenly honor. Well screw that. Then, of course, she had burst into tears and gone running off to cry on Val’s shoulder. She cried all the damn time. There were times that he wanted to shake her, slap her, tell her to just get over it. It had been like that since they’d gotten home. Connie spent most of her time either crying or staring off into space like a zombie, and now they were sleeping in separate bedrooms.
Val was being a pain in the ass about it, too, always siding with Connie and treating him like he was Jack the Ripper.
“Mark?” He tried to ignore her. “Mark,” she repeated, putting a finer edge to it.
“What?” he snapped, still looking out into the big dark. There was the sound of another vehicle out on A-32. A car this time.
“You need to get help, Mark.”