Then the flash caught something shiny lying in the dirt just outside the barn door and Val bent to pick it up. It was a small diamond-shaped medallion with a length of broken silver chain. Clearly stamped on the front was a six-armed cross painted bright red and set with a tiny caduceus in the center.
“That’s odd…that’s Mark’s MedicAlert necklace,” Connie said with surprise, “for his peanut allergy.”
“I know,” Val said, turning it over to see the warning notice and phone numbers. “He must have dropped it.” She looked around and then skimmed the flashlight beam along the dirt path that led from the barn to the house. A line of footprints, clearly Mark’s smooth-soled Florsheims, was visible heading toward the barn, but no overlapping prints led back. Frowning, Val slowly followed the footprints, and saw a second set of prints—shoes of a different size but still city shoes—also heading toward the barn and these were overlapped by Mark’s. Was he meeting someone there? That seemed very odd. The prints led right up to the door, and the last visible print was cut off by the door that had been pulled almost all the way closed. Obviously Mark had gone into the barn and pulled the door shut behind him.
Connie shifted to stand next to her, her eyes following the same path and the same logic Val had used, and there were twin vertical lines between her brows. “Is Mark in the barn?” she asked, as if that was the strangest thing in the world.
“I think so.” Val took a half-step toward the door, and then paused. Did she really want another screaming match right now? She was shaking her head in answer to her own question when Connie said, “Open the door.”
“If he’s still in there, Conn, then maybe he wants to be alone for a bit. Let’s leave him be.”
It was at that moment that they heard something move inside the barn. It was a soft, shuffling sound—a scrape of a shoe on the hard-packed dirt floor just on the other side of the big plank door. It froze Val in place and she stood staring at the nearly closed door, at the black line of inky darkness between the door and the frame. Was Mark right there, listening to them? Listening and saying nothing? Standing there in the dark?
She glanced at Connie, who had also heard the sound. Her frown lines had deepened. “Mark…?”
Another sound—a shift again and this time Val was sure that it was the scuff of a shoe on the floor, just on the other side of the door. It had to be Mark, of course, but why was he standing there in the dark? It was so—she fished for the word. Weird. Especially for Mark, who was not the type to be loitering in the darkened barn. Farm-bred or not, Mark was a city boy, and this was just not his sort of thing. It was—prankish; even a little mean. That part—the meanness—that could be Mark, but not prankish.
A third scuff and now there was a second sound. A more organic sound, like a grunt. Not a middle-register grunt of a pig—there were no pigs on the Guthrie farm—but a deeper sound, almost a cough, or maybe a single short snort of laughter.
“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!”
That scream—a tearing screech that tore her throat and flecked her lips with her own blood—galvanized both Boyd and Val. With a howl of furious delight he flung himself at Val. The sound of both screams broke her paralysis of shock and she hurled the Maglite at Boyd and threw herself at Connie, knocking her sideways and down so that Boyd’s lunge missed them both. Connie fell hard and Val crashed down onto her and there was a loud snap! as Val’s hip landed on Connie’s ribs. Connie’s scream modulated upward into a shriek of agony; Val rolled off her just as Boyd came scrambling off the ground and she tried to dodge the swing of his open hand, but he clipped her as she moved—not a whole-hand blow, just the flats of his fingers, but it was hard enough to send her reeling against the side of the barn. She struck it with her forehead and the pain stabbed through the healing eye socket where Ruger had similarly struck her. Her right eye went black and the other exploded with white light and the whole barnyard spun around her in a sickening reel. She collapsed into an awkward heap as Connie’s screams continued to rip holes in the night.
Because of the blow to her head everything was suddenly muted, and Connie’s screams seemed to be coming from a hundred miles away. Val tried to crawl toward her, but she couldn’t see. She kept blinking, trying to clear her sight. The right eye stayed black and blind, but there were images now in her left one—fuzzy shapes cavorting in the indirect glare from the fallen flashlight. She saw a hulking shape—Boyd, it had to be Boyd—rising to his feet a half-dozen yards away, and he had something in his hands. Something smaller. Connie! Struggling, still screaming, kicking and flailing. Fighting back. Fighting back against Boyd the way Mark had said she hadn’t done against Ruger.
Mark! Oh God!
Darkness wanted to close around her, to smash her into nothingness, but she fought it with a snarl of heartbroken rage, fought it with hate for what this man had done. Val pulled herself to her hands and knees and supported herself on one palm while she reached behind her back and pulled out her father’s big .45 Colt Commander; she sagged back onto her heels, racking the slide with trembling hands. Her one eye was clearer, but it was like looking through oily glass, and as she raised the gun Boyd lunged his mouth toward Connie’s throat. The sound of his teeth tearing through the softness of her skin was lost in the cannon-loud explosion of the gun. The bullet took Boyd in the hip and the heavy slug’s impact spun Boyd around; he lost his grip on Connie. To Val it seemed like he fell to the ground in exaggerated slowness, trailing a thin arc of blood as he collapsed into the dirt.