“Vince, stop it for Christ’s sake!” Crow bellowed and emphasized it with his own elbow. It caught the detective somewhere soft and there was a whoosh of air and a grunt of pain.
They both stopped thrashing and let the moment settle around them.
“Are you hurt?” Crow asked.
“Everything hurts,” was LaMastra’s muffled reply.
“Let’s get this frigging carpet off us…”
But that fast the folds of the carpet were whipped away from Crow by unseen hands. While LaMastra still struggled to get free of the carpet, Crow scrambled around onto his hands and knees, his heart hammering in his chest, scrabbling for the fallen flashlight, but his desperate fingers sent it rolling away. The light pinwheeled around and then came to an abrupt stop as someone caught it with the toe of a polished shoe.
On all fours, Crow stared at the face of the man who stood over them. The blood turned to ice in his veins and the world seemed to spin sideways into unreality as he watched the man bend down and pick up the Maglite.
Jimmy Castle held the light in his bone-white fingers. He held the beam under his chin the way a prankish child might at a campfire.
“Boo!” he said, and his mouth stretched wide to show two rows of jagged white teeth.
Chapter 35
1
It took a long time for Val to soothe Mike. Clinging to her he seemed to regress to an almost babylike state, his words reduced to an inarticulate wordless noise that was drenched with tears. She stroked his matted hair and kissed his dirty face and rocked him back and forth until his terrible sobs slowed to a whimper and then he felt silent. Jonatha and Newton came in and when they saw Mike they kept silent; Weinstock waved them over to the far side of the room. Jonatha sat in a chair and Newton leaned against the wall, both of them looking as confused and uncomfortable as Weinstock.
When Mike finally lifted his head, he sniffed, accepted the tissue Val gave him, then slowly looked around the room as if he’d never seen it. He wiped his nose and blotted his eyes. He offered no weak smile or embarrassed apologies for his tears. People in wartime don’t need to do it, and their fellow refugees don’t require it of them.
Because his eyes were now so red and puffy Jonatha and Newton didn’t immediately notice their unnatural look.
Val helped Mike to his feet and led him to the bathroom. “Why don’t you clean yourself up, honey? Take your time. You know Mr. Newton, he’s a friend. He knows what’s going on. Professor Corbiel is also a friend. She’s from the University of Pennsylvania.” She put her hand on his cheek. “She’s a folklorist. She knows about vampires.”
That made Mike’s eyes flicker and he turned to look at her and she saw his eyes. Jonatha gripped Newton’s knee and her fingernails dug deep.
Mike went in and closed the bathroom door.
Val and the others huddled around Weinstock and she told them what Mike had said.
“What’s with his eyes?” Newton asked.
“We don’t know yet,” Val admitted, “but something terrible must have happened.”
They heard the toilet flush and the door opened. Mike came into the room and sat down on the edge of the bed. His face was composed, but the abiding hurt was there in the stiffness of his posture and the profound sadness of his face.
“Mike,” Val said, sitting down next to him, “you know what’s going on in town, don’t you?”
He nodded. “Some of it,” he said. “Maybe a lot of it, but not all of it.”
“What do you know?” Newton asked.
Mike sighed. “This is going to take time.”
Val wrapped her arm around his shoulders. “We have to know.”
“Before I tell you what I know I guess I should tell you how I know.” He took a breath, held it, let it out slowly. “You know that there are vampires in Pine Deep, don’t you?”
Val just squeezed his shoulder.
“My mother is one of them.”
“God…” Weinstock breathed.
He told them what happened at his house and didn’t dare look at the horror on their faces. “She saved my life,” he said, and sniffed back some tears.
“So…Vic Wingate’s involved in this,” Jonatha said. “If he knew about Mike’s mom—”
Mike snorted. “Vic isn’t just ‘involved’…he’s his right hand.”
“Who, Mike?” Val asked.
He gave her a quizzical look. “Why…Ubel Griswold, of course. Don’t you know?”
“How do you know that?”
“That’s the other thing…the other way I know about what’s going on. I know because the Bone Man told me.”
“The Bone…,” Val put her hand to her mouth. “Mike…tell us everything.”
He did. He started with the Massacre and how Griswold began hunting humans after his cattle were killed by the first blight. A blight, he said, that was different from the current one because it actually was just a freak of nature, a real plague. “This new one is something Griswold did,” he told them. “The first plague just gave him the idea.”
He told them about how the Bone Man, who knew a thing or two about the supernatural from his childhood in the deep South, was able to piece together what Griswold was doing, and what Griswold was. He told them how the Bone Man hunted Griswold that day, trying to catch and kill him before he turned into a monster as the moon rose. He told about the fight they had in Dark Hollow, and how the Bone Man killed him with his old blues guitar and buried him in the swamp a couple of miles from Griswold’s old house.
Val said, “Crow went down there with two police officers, the detectives from Philadelphia who were here during the manhunt.”
“Can you call him, tell him to come back?”
“I tried, there’s no cell phone reception. But they have guns and other stuff. Garlic to use against the vampires, and gasoline to burn the house down.”
Mike looked uncertain. “I hope that works.”
“Go on, kid,” Newton said, “tell us the rest.”
“After Griswold died he was just gone for a long time. There wasn’t any trace of him, even in the swamp, except maybe like a, I don’t know—a presence, if that makes sense. Then sixteen years ago he just woke up. Just like that. He was weak, confused, and he didn’t even understand exactly that he was dead. He was really scared, too, and he called out for the one person he knew would always be there for him.” He paused and his mouth twisted into an ugly shape. “Vic.” He took another steadying breath. “Vic started coming out to the swamp every day, and he started doing research about the supernatural. Griswold told him everything about what he was, about being born to a race of werewolves in Serbia.”
Jonatha glanced at Newton, who nodded.
“Griswold always believed, you see, that when he died he’d just come right back to life as a vampire right away, but that didn’t happen because somehow when the Bone Man killed him it weakened him really badly. The Bone Man thinks it was some magic in his guitar. I don’t know, that sounds kind of stupid.” He wiped his nose again. “Anyway, Griswold was scared, thinking he was just going to be a spirit without a body, trapped there in the swamp, but Vic found something in one of his books, a kind of ritual that sometimes allows a ghost to kind of possess a human body. Not like in the movies, not green pea soup and all. This was more like hijacking a car. Neither of them knew if it would work, or how long it would last. They tried it over and over again, but nothing happened. Vic killed people and Griswold tried to inhabit their bodies. Vic even let Griswold try and take over his own body, but it didn’t work, but then Vic came up with the idea of Griswold trying to use a blood connection to make the process work better. That’s when they decided to try and have Griswold possess the body of his only living blood connection in town.”
They all exchanged puzzled looks. “A blood relative?” Newton asked. “In Pine Deep?”
“Oh…Christ,” Val said, making the connection. Mike looked at her and nodded. She said, “You’re talking about…Terry!”
Mike kept nodding. “During the Massacre, when the mayor was just a kid, his sister was attacked and he tried to save her. She died and Mr. Wolfe was almost killed. He was bitten by the werewolf and was in a coma for weeks. He never turned into a werewolf himself—the Bone Man says that’s because Mr. Wolfe’s spirit is too full of light, or something like that, I don’t really understand that part—but the blood connection was established, and because of that link, Griswold was able to hijack Mr. Wolfe’s body and use it as his own. He…um…well, the way the Bone Man put it—Griswold went out for a night on the town. Drinking, partying, and, um, sex.”
“Good God!” Weinstock stared at Mike. “I feel sorry for whatever poor gal wound up in the sack with him!”
“Do you know who it was?” Val asked.
Mike turned to face her and his eyes burned like flame. When he spoke his voice was bitter and tight. “Take a look at me, Val. All of you take a good look and figure it out for yourselves.”
Her eyes became as big as saucers. “Oh. My. God! A long time ago, when Terry and I were dating, he told me that he got drunk and had an affair. We were…in love at the time, and it’s what broke us up. He tried to tell me that he didn’t remember any of it, that he just woke up in bed with a woman. It was someone I knew, someone I’d been friends with in school. He said that he had no memory at all of what happened, or how he got there. I thought that was a weak, bullshit excuse and I kicked him out.” She reached out and gave Mike a fierce hug. “Oh, Mike…oh you poor kid! I never noticed…none of us did.”
Mike gently pushed Val back. “Why would you? How could anyone know? I didn’t know, even though I delivered the mayor’s paper every day. The mayor doesn’t know, either. Only my mom and Vic know that I’m Mr. Wolfe’s son.”