Another curve in the road, a wicked one. He put his foot to the brakes, heard the tires begin a squeal. The speedometer needle dropped to thirty-five.
A movement beside him that made his nerves cry out in alarm. He twisted his head to the side. And stared, his mouth coming open to release a horrified, guttural croak.
One of the riders had pulled up beside his window. The figure’s raven-black hair streamed like the mane of the huge, frothing horse it rode. The figure was hunched over, one hand at the base of the massive, muscular neck, urging the horse faster and faster. There was no saddle, no harness. And then the rider’s face came around and stared in at Neely. The lips were contorted in a terrible scream of hate, teeth glittering with moonlight. And those eyes: orbs of fierce, glowing blue, a power deep in those sockets that almost literally jerked Neely’s head back to snap his neck. Cold terror flooded his body, and he fought to maintain control over the steering wheel. And in the blink of a second the rider’s other arm whipped out, carrying with it an object of metal, something that brought another cry from him and made him throw one arm up across his face.
Which saved his eyes. Because in the next instant the ax blade smashed through the window glass, filling the truck’s cab with stinging wasps. The arm rose and fell again with blinding, terrible strength; he heard the blade bite metal on the doorjamb and then scrape off. Neely twisted the wheel, his foot going for the accelerator but hitting the brake instead; the truck began to swerve, then fishtailed off the road, crashing through brush and wild vegetation, glancing off a thin poplar, shaking Neely as if he were the dice in a cup held by an ancient, laughing god. He hit the accelerator again, felt a bone-jarring crash as the truck smashed down a scraggly mass of thorns; he heard glass break, and one of the headlights went out, leaving him in murky semidarkness. Neely could hear the breathing of the horses now, and could see the figures all around him. How many? Ten? Twelve? Twenty? He braced his arms and twisted; the truck screamed, battering its way through the brush like a fear-maddened cyclops, and regained the road. Another ax blade struck his door, glanced off. He sank his foot to the floor; his glasses had fallen off and lay somewhere on the floorboard, and his guitar had slipped down as well, making moaning noises as the tires slammed against asphalt. The speedometer needle reached fifty and vibrated crazily.
And there, perhaps half a mile ahead, was the blinking caution light that was the turn-off onto Ashaway. He took it at fifty, the tires shrieking so loud he was certain the noise echoed across Bethany’s Sin like a banshee’s wail. He whipped the truck through the village’s darkened streets, past silent houses, through the Circle, and toward the two-story wooden boardinghouse where a middle-aged woman named Grace Bartlett rented him a room for twenty-five dollars a week. When he pulled up before the boardinghouse, the noise of his tires made windows vibrate.
Fearfully he looked over his shoulder, his breathing harsh and forced, his heartbeat out of control.
Nothing had followed.
Shaking, he ran a hand over his face. Nausea rushed him, almost overtaking him before he could open his door and lean out. Glass tinkled off the seat and out of the doorjamb. Jesus, he told himself, trying to steady his nerves; Jesus Christ, what did I see out there? The sour stench of beer rose into his face, and he turned his head away.
Noises seemed to be gathering over him like dust stirring in heavy folds. The sounds of insects in trees; the lone calling of a bird over toward the Circle; the gentle stirring of branches in a hint of warm breeze; a dog barking repeatedly in the distance. Neely found his glasses, put them on and stared into the night for a moment, then took his guitar and slid out of the truck, his head still spinning and his limbs leaden. With a nerveless hand he traced the scrapes along the driver’s door; bare metal showed through the layers of paint, and he could see the dents where the powerful blows had been struck. If it were not for those ax-blow signatures and the broken glass, Neely would have talked himself into believing he’d had some kind of nightmare on the road, that he’d drifted into a beer-induced sleep where something terrible and evil had struck.
But no.
The window was shattered, and tiny bits of glass speckled the underside of the arm he’d thrown up in self protection. He looked again into the darkness, felt his spine crawl, then heard a voice within him shout out, Get inside quickly quickly quickly! Neely turned away from the truck and almost ran into the house. Climbing the hallway stairs, he fumbled for his key and then twisted it in the lock of his door. He switched on the overhead light, illuminating the bedroom papered in a dark brown bamboo design. After setting the guitar in a corner, he crossed the room and slid open a window overlooking the street. And there he stood for perhaps fifteen minutes, watching and listening—for what, he didn’t know.
But nothing moved down there.
He ran a hand over his face; there was glass in the palm. Wysinger should know about this, he decided finally. Something tried to kill me, and I saw its face; I saw those eyes, and I know what it was.
Something hideous and breathing hatred. Something in the form of a woman. But…no, not human. Not really human at all.
After a while he shut the window, picked the glass from his arm and hand with a pair of tweezers, and finally tried to sleep. It came to him shrieking and bearing a moon-glittering battle-ax.
Just before dawn a shadow climbed the stairs, paused at Neely’s door. Quietly tried the doorknob. Then vanished the way it had come.
13
* * *
What Neely Saw
SHERIFF WYSINGER LEANED forward slightly, his feral eyes narrowed above the cigarette stub in his mouth. Behind his desk there was an oiled walnut rifle cabinet and a shelf with gleaming football trophies. The goldflake paint had begun to crack on several of them, exposing ugly and valueless metal. He took the cigarette from his mouth and laid it on the rim of a red plastic ashtray. “Ames,” he said quietly, “it’s a little early in the mornin’ for these kind of stories, don’t you think?”
“What kind of stories?” Neely asked him from where he stood on the other side of the desk, his hands resting on his hips.
“Yarns. Fairy tales.” Wysinger drew on the cigarette again, exhaled smoke through his nostrils in a dragonish stream, and then crushed it out in the ashtray. Tiny red embers flared, glittered, died. “Now just what sort of shit are you trying to hand me?”
“Hey!” Neely said, lifting his arm so the other man could see the cuts. “And look at these!” He pointed out two small gashes he’d found on his chin that morning. “You want to come out and have a look at my damned truck?” He stood waiting for the man to move; he could see the overhead lights glittering on the pink flesh of Wysinger’s scalp.
Wysinger sat still for a moment. finally he shrugged with disdain and hefted his bulk out of the swivelchair. Outside the sheriff’s office the light of morning was pearlish, and a thin haze of wet ground-fog still haunted the curbs. Neely walked around to the other side of his pick up truck, and Wysinger followed at his own pace.
“There,” Neely said, motioning toward the scrapes and the broken window; in the morning light, the ax-blade gashes were clearly visible.
Wysinger moved past him, ran a hand across one of the cuts. “What’d you say you were doing last night?” he asked.
“I was at the Cock’s Crow until they closed,” Neely explained again. “On the way back to the village I drove through a group of horses and riders, crossing the road, I guess; I slowed to see who they were, and then they came after me. You can see for yourself what they did.”
“Yeah, I see. What time did you say this happened?”
“Around two.”
“Two?” Wysinger grunted. “Awful late for people to be ridin’ their horses on a country road. How many were there?”
“I don’t know. Jesus, I was just trying to get my ass out of there!”
“Uh-huh.” He stepped over to the window, examined the jagged edge. “What’d you say they were using? Hammers?”
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“No. Axes. One of them was, at least.”
“Axes?” Wysinger turned from the window and looked into Neely’s face. “You know that sounds wilder’n hell, don’t you?”
Neely stepped toward him, his jaw grim. “Now listen to me,” he said, not caring about Wysinger’s position in the village anymore, not caring about the damned job he held, not caring about anything but making this ox of a man believe. “I know what I saw last night. Riders, chasing me down. And by God one of them smashed my window with an ax! Tried to fucking run me off the road!”
“Watch your language,” Wysinger said quietly as a car drove past.
“They were trying to kill me!” Neely said, louder than he’d wanted to; he could hear his voice echo off the side of the truck. “I don’t see that you understand that yet!”
“I understand it. I just don’t understand who they were, or why they should try to hurt you. You hit one of their horses? That why your headlight’s broken and the grille’s all smashed to hell and back?”
“No,” Neely said, shaking his head. “I didn’t hit any of them. That happened when I went off the road.”
Wysinger smiled slightly, sensing that he had Neely where he wanted him. “Well, now,” he said, watching the other man. “Maybe all of it happened when you went off the road? Huh? Maybe you had a bit too much to drink last night and you slammed your heap into a gully, broke that window, and beat up the driver’s door? So to keep me from findin’ out you were drunk-drivin’ and had a wreck, this morning you made up a cock-and-bull story in your sleep and ran over here to—”
“No,” Neely said, his voice firm and cold as steel, his gaze matching the flint of Wysinger’s. “That’s not how it happened at all.”
“You’re sticking to this shit about horses in the middle of the road? Jesus!” Wysinger snorted. He turned away from Neely and moved toward the door. His lungs ached for the second cigarette of the morning.
“Wait a minute! Wait!” Neely stepped forward, put his hand on Wysinger’s shoulder, and twisted the man around. Wysinger’s eyes blazed briefly, and Neely dropped his hand away. “I haven’t told you everything yet. I saw one of the riders. I looked into her face—”
“Her? What the hell do you mean, ‘her’?”
“It was a woman. But I’ve…I’ve never seen a woman who looked like that before. It was like…like looking into a blast furnace. Or a volcano. I could feel the heat from those eyes, like they were burning holes through me. I’ve never seen anything like that in my life, and Jesus Christ, I hope I never see it again.”
Wysinger waited for a moment, his gaze probing. When he spoke, his voice was hard and emotionless. “Okay,” he said. “You want me to take a drive up Two-nineteen to have a look, I will. But I’ll tell you one thing. I don’t like you. I don’t like fuckin’ drifters on the make with their hands out for money. And worst of all, I don’t like drifters who drink in the middle of the night and then lie like rugs to stay out of trouble. I don’t believe a word of this shit you’ve been spreading, and nobody else will, either. If I could prove you were haulin’ ass down Two-nineteen last night with a bellyful of beer, I’d either throw you in jail or kick your ass out of this place!” Fleshy lids shawled his eyes. “Now get on over to the tool shed and get the mower. Cemetery’s weeded up.” Without waiting for Neely to speak again, Wysinger turned his back, strode toward the door, and disappeared into his office.
“Son of a bitch!” Neely growled under his breath. But he’d known even before he’d left Mrs. Bartlett’s that his story was strange and unbelievable, and that Wysinger would probably laugh in his face. At breakfast, in Mrs. Bartlett’s yellow-walled kitchen, the ample, rather motherly woman had eyed him with concern and asked him what time he’d gotten to bed the night before. It’s not right staying out all hours, she’d told him, moving about the kitchen in her peach-colored robe; when my Willy was alive, she’d said, he was early to bed and early to a rise. He was a hardworking man, too, and a good man. I can see in your eyes that you didn’t get a good night’s sleep, and that’s what a body needs most. You’re feeling all right, aren’t you?
He’d told her he was feeling fine, but he hardly touched his breakfast. He’d told her nothing of what had happened on the road.
Now Neely shook his head in disgust and went around to the other side of the sheriff’s office, where a chain-link fence surrounded a metal shed. Neely used one key to unlock the fence’s gate and another to unlock the door of the shed; inside were various hand tools, cans of gasoline, shovels and hoes, the red lawn mower Neely had grown so familiar with. He found a swingblade and wheeled the mower out, locking everything behind him because he was responsible for all the tools and there’d be hell to pay if anything happened to them. His biceps and forearms already sore, he loaded the mower into the truck bed, then threw the swingblade into the front and drove off in the direction of Shady Grove Hill. He felt a gray, desolate mood coming over him; alone, that was what he felt. Utterly alone. So perhaps it was fitting, in his desolation, that he spend the hottest part of the day in the cemetery.
As Neely drove away, Oren Wysinger let the blinds fall back across the window. He turned the lock on the door, crossed behind his desk, and took a key from the middle drawer. Then he walked to the file cabinet on the other side of the office and knelt down to unlock the lowest drawer. At the back of it, buried beneath blank sheets of typewriter paper, was a dark-brown book about the size of a photo album. Wysinger took the book out, laid it on his desk, and snapped on the gooseneck desk lamp. Sitting down, he drew on his cigarette and let the smoke dribble liquidlike from one side of his mouth. Then he opened the book.
Taped across the first page was a yellowed newspaper clipping with the headline CONEMAUGH FAMILY SLAIN. There was a picture of the Fletcher house. He turned the page. Another newspaper clipping: SPANGLER RESIDENT KILLED. A mug shot of a smiling middle-aged man wearing a tie, the name Ronald Biggs beneath it. On the next page two smaller items: WIDOWER SLAIN and BARNESBORO MAN KILLED. The book was filled with grim reminders of murder: photographs of houses where bodies had been found, of cars that had been discovered on the sides of country roads, of blankets covering what could only be horribly mutilated corpses. Like those of the Fletchers. They covered a span of ten years; the last one was a few paragraphs on how a Barnesboro woman had discovered the mutilated body of a George Ross mathematics teacher named Gerald Meacham. That had been a little over three months ago.
Wysinger smoked in silence for a few minutes, looking at the next blank page. When he felt the sudden heat on his fingers, he crushed the cigarette out. There was a dull, heavy feeling within him, as if his bodily fluids had pooled into a lake that became more stagnant every day, thickly slimed with some kind of evil filth. He knew the thread that ran through these killings. Most of them men living alone. All killed by tremendous blows of a sharp, heavy object. All killed in the night, between midnight and dawn. Three years after the mayor of Bethany’s Sin had given him the job of sheriff, Wysinger had sat down with a bottle of Jim Beam and a map of the county. For a long time before that, he’d been clipping the articles about the slayings from the small local community papers, probably because nothing in his life had shocked and sickened him so much as seeing the Fletchers ripped to pieces like they’d been. Possibly it was curiosity about the other murders, or a strange and sure feeling that they were all some how connected, or a feeling of terrible destiny, but he’d clipped and saved and studied for years, while the police in other villages blamed maniacs or drifters or hoboes armed with bludgeons. And that night, his spine stiffened by Beam, Sheriff Wysinger had drawn circles around the towns on the map where they’d found bodies or, in some cases, just empty cars on the roadside or off in the woods. Then connected those circles with lines.
And it was then he saw that Bethany’s Sin lay in the center, like a spider hanging in the midst of a web.
Now he touched that next, empty page in the brown book. His fingers felt contaminate
d, blighted, diseased. Often he awakened in the night, alone in his house, listening to the dark speak. The disease had crept into the marrow of his bones and festered there; sometimes the sores boiled over, and he wanted to scream. But he never did, because he was too afraid.
There would have been a new entry had Neely Ames’s truck crashed into the roadside thicket. The troopers would have found the man’s corpse battered beyond recognition. If they’d found it at all. Christ! he thought. Too close to Bethany’s Sin. Too damned close. Investigations, troopers probing around, people asking questions. Too damned close. He closed the book and turned off the light but did not move from his desk. He dreaded what was to come because now he’d have to talk to the mayor. And even though he knew from the calculations he rigidly kept that the moon was beginning to wane, he was deathly and numbingly afraid.
Kay thought: At three o’clock, silence is the instructor in the classrooms, teaching lessons on how time can slip away. She was sitting in her small office with test papers from her morning class before her, waiting to be graded. Most of the classes at George Ross were held in the morning and early afternoon, and by this time of the day almost all of the students and teachers were gone. About fifteen minutes before, she’d walked down the corridor to the teachers’ lounge and that unpredictable soft-drink machine that always had indignant notes taped to it. The halls had been silent and empty, doors closed, fluorescent lights switched off. She’d brought her Coke back to her office and continued working because to her there was something strange and slightly…yes, forbidding about a large building when all the noise had seeped out of it, when all the people had gone away. Silly, she told herself. That’s silly. I can work better when it’s quiet; I can get these papers finished and then pick up Laurie at the Sunshine School and go home to Evan. She was glad Pierce had gone home early. That man made her nervous.