Bad Moon Rising (17 page)

FUGUE.

The face that had looked at him from the bathroom mirror in Crow’s store was an older version of himself, with a stronger jaw and gaunt skin stretched over sharply etched brow and cheekbones. Thin, hard lips in an unsmiling mouth. Dark red-brown hair. Strange eyes. Alien.

Mike almost reached out and touched this man’s eyelids to raise them, feeling a strange compulsion to see what color those eyes were. Would they be blue shot with red and ringed with fiery gold? Mike was afraid they would be.

He did not know that he was going to touch this man’s hand, would never have deliberately done so, but it was as if some unseen hand just nudged his forward. Without warning his fingers reached out and curled around the pinky and ring finger of the comatose man.

FUGUE.

Mike Sweeney, for all intents and purposes, evaporated into mist at the point of contact. The room in which he stood, the house around the room, the world around the hospital just melted into a featureless blur, faded to darkness, and then winked out.

FUGUE.

He was not Mike Sweeney anymore. He was…nothing. A shell casing where inside something that was not Mike Sweeney shifted and groaned. Time was meaningless. If there was air he did not breathe it, or could not feel himself inhale or exhale. If there was light, then either he was blind or could not process the concept of vision. He remained still, just a husk.

He heard another squelching sound and turned quickly, freezing at once into shocked immobility as a huge white stag paced around him in a wide, slow circle. It was snow white, with just a scattering of brick-red flecks on its haunches and eyes that burned with orange fire. The rack was huge, glistening with moisture from the damp air. It moved slowly, looking at him with calm intensity. Mike knew that animal, had seen it once before, that night on the road when it had stood between him and the section of cornfield where a car had gone off the road and plowed itself deep into the field. Mike had wanted to check it out, to see if anyone had been hurt, but this deer—an albino stag—had come out of the night and had stood between him and the wreck, barring his way. With all that had happened later that night, and all that had happened since, Mike had barely remembered the animal until now, and yet here it was.

But where was here?

Mike turned his head and saw that he stood on a gravel driveway leading up to the battered hulk of an abandoned house. Above the house the sky was bruise-blue fading to blackness in the distance. Lightning burning continuously around him, charging the air with ozone, but there was no thunder—just the constant strobe-flicker of lightning above and beyond the house. It was a house he knew, though when he had seen it the shutters had been freshly painted and secure, not hanging from rusted hinges; the windows had been whole, not yawning like jagged mouths, dusty gray on the outside of the each broken pane and ink black inside the maw. On this house the shingles had been shed like scabs from old wounds, and the door hung twisted, sagging down to a porch whose boards had all buckled and warped.

Aware that the stag was watching him, Mike turned away from the house, feeling and hating the deadness of the place. He looked down a wet farm road to where a barn had stood, but it was just a charred frame from which the last few tendrils of smoke curled without enthusiasm. Beside and beyond the burned-out barn were cornfields whose leaves were pot-holed by insects and whose corn hung fat and pendulous, swollen with disease and rippling with maggots. Strangely, the air around him suddenly felt calmer and he thought he heard the blend of musical notes as some unseen hand fanned down over the strings of a guitar. It came from behind him, where the stag had stood, and Mike turned quickly back, and his mouth opened in a soundless “O.” The stag was gone, antlers, dark spots, footprints, and all.

“You the one,” said a voice that seemed to come from the middle of the air. It was deep, soft, flavored with a Southern accent. “You the one we all got to pay close mind to now, you know that?”

Mike didn’t know where his mouth was or how to make thought into sound. He tried to move but felt himself frozen in place.

“Go ahead, son…you can speak.” The voice now came from behind him. He heard the sound of fingers lightly strumming guitar strings and the sound was so soothing, so…
safe.

Just like that, Mike could. Cool air rushed into his mouth and down into his lungs. “What’s going on?” he blurted.

“You dreaming, young son. You lost in the dreamworld, just like me.”

Mike braced himself to fight the immobility, but when he tried to turn it was easy; all restrictions were gone. He turned to see a black man in a dirty suit sitting on the top step of a flight of wooden stairs that led to the big wooden porch of the old farmhouse. The man’s skin was dark but ashy-gray and his hair was styled in an old-fashioned Afro, nappy with dirt and rainwater. The man smiled at him, and though his face was kindly his eyes were unblinking and covered with a thin film of dust.

“What the hell’s going on?” Mike demanded, angry and confused. “Who are you?”

The man picked out a couple of notes with his long fingers; on the forefinger of his left hand was a glass slide made from the neck of a whiskey bottle, and he drew this down the neck of the guitar to turn the notes into a wail.

“Who are you?” Mike asked again, his tone wavering between demand and plea.

“I ain’t hardly nobody no more, but you can call me Mr. Morse.”

“I don’t understand this. I don’t understand what’s going on. How’d I get here? I was at the hospital…at least I think I was…”

“You was…and you still is. This ain’t real, Mike, this is all a dream.” Mr. Morse smiled at him. He had a nice smile, but he looked very sad and tired. “You know what a shaman is, boy?”

“Sure. It’s like an Indian medicine man or something.”

“Or something, yeah. Well, a shaman would call what we got here a vision, and you’re on a vision quest.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Yeah, you do, but you don’t know you do. Y’see, Mike, you been having visions for a good long time now.” He played a few notes, the break of an old Ida Cox tune. “You call ’em dreams, but they are bona fide visions.”

“How…?”

“You been dreaming about this town just burning itself up, burning down to the ground.”

“How do you know that?”

“I know,” said Mr. Morse. “And you been having dreams of
him.
”

“Who?”

“You know who. You may not know his name, but his blood screams in your veins, boy. His breath burns in your throat.” The man stopped playing and leaned forward. “Look here, boy, you got to listen to me real good, because a whole lotta folks are sitting right there on the edge of that knife blade. You go the wrong way, you make the wrong choice…or worse yet, you don’t do nothing, and they all gonna die.”

“No,” Mike insisted, shaking his head.

“We don’t have to like something to make it so. Believe me, I know. Hell, yes, old Oren Morse he knows.”

“I don’t want to be responsible for people dying. I don’t want that. That’s not fair.”

Mr. Morse sighed and gave a sorry shake of his head. “Fair got nothing to do with this. This is Heaven and Hell. This is the bad times come to Pine Deep and everybody here got to play their part.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Well,” Mr. Morse said, leaning back and picking out some more notes, “that’s your choice. Everybody got a choice, even them bad ones—even they got a choice. It’s what we do with our choices that makes us or breaks us. The whole world is spinning right now on the choice you got to make.”

“I don’t
want
to.”

“Well that’s as may be. But your father is about to do some bad shit here in town, and Crow and Val, strong as they is, ain’t enough to stop him. Not alone. Not without you. I can’t see everything that’s gonna happen—an’ maybe that’s a good thing an’ maybe it’s not—but I know this, Mike Sweeney—if you don’t make your choice, if you don’t take your stand, then the Red Wave is going to wash over this town. It’ll start here…it’ll start in Dark Hollow, and it’ll start at the hospital, right there in that bed with your daddy in it, and it’ll start right on Corn Hill. The Red Wave will start here and there all over this town, all at once, and it’ll gain momentum and force and it’ll get so strong the boundaries of water won’t stop it, and it’ll wash out across this whole country.”

“My dad’s dead. My dad is John Sweeney and he—”

“Boy, it breaks my heart to break your heart, but Big John, good man as he was, he wasn’t never your daddy. Big John didn’t know it, but another mule been kicking in his stall.”

“Stop saying that! You’re a liar!”

Mr. Morse set down his guitar and stood up. He towered over Mike, covering him with his shadow, and his eyes were fierce. He placed his hands on Mike’s shoulders and when Mike tried to turn away Mr. Morse held him fast. His gaze was as hot as a blowtorch. “Now you listen to me good, Mike, you listen like a man, not like a boy. You listen like what you hear and what you do about what you hear
matters
. Don’t turn away from me, son, and don’t you dare call me a liar. You don’t know who I am, boy, but I
died
for this goddamn town. I died for it and my memory’s been spit on for thirty years. You think a man can rest quiet in his grave when every time his name is spoke there’s a lie and a curse put to it?”

Mike stared at him, shocked to silence, confused, his mind reeling. Mr. Morse’s hands were like hot irons on his shoulders.

Mr. Morse never blinked. Not once, and his dusty eyes were filled with a weird light. “Boy, I want you to listen to me for your own soul’s sake, even though what I’m going to tell you might take away what little love for this world you got left. I know that pain, boy, and I lost my own love and most of my hope, but by God I’m standing right here. I made my choice, and I’ll take my stand, come Heaven or Hell. Now…you going to listen?”

Mike didn’t want to. He wanted to block his ears, he wanted to hit this man, to push him away, to turn and run. He didn’t want to hear anything this man had to say. Rage mingled with terror in his chest and it felt like his heart would burst. When he opened his mouth he wanted to scream at the man, to tell him to go away, to leave him be.

What he said was, “Okay.” Just that.

That agreement unmasked a terrible sadness in Mr. Morse’s face, and for a moment he lowered his head, murmuring, “I’m sorry, boy. Believe me when I tell you that I mean you no harm.”

“Okay,” Mike said again.

Mr. Morse told him everything. Mike listened, and he listened, and he listened, and then he screamed. Sometimes the truth doesn’t set you free.

(1)

“The eye is not permanently damaged,” said Weinstock, distilling for Crow and Val the information he’d gotten from the tests and the specialists. Neither Crow nor Val said anything, their faces not yet showing relief. “The orbit is cracked even worse now that it was before, but that’ll heal. So, even though we have to be very, very careful it’s better news than we hoped.”

“But…?” Val asked. “Drop the other shoe.”

“No, that’s it. You must have been moving when Boyd hit you, so you actually didn’t get as serious an injury as you might have, especially considering the preexisting damage. If you hadn’t already had an injury there, this might have been moderately minor. Of course, you have to add shock, general stress, overall trauma…and the emotional component.” He cleared his throat. “Seeing Mark and all.”

Val touched the bandage over her eye, her expression pensive.

“Damn,” Crow said with a release of tension that seemed to deflate his whole body. He leaned over and kissed Val on the forehead.

“Thanks, Saul,” Val said. “When can I get out of here?”

Weinstock shrugged. “No reason we can’t cut you loose first thing tomorrow morning.” He held up a finger. “Providing you take it easy, and I mean really easy.” He reached over and jabbed Crow in the chest. “And that means no hanky-panky for a few days, too.”

“We’ll behave ourselves,” Val assured him.

After Weinstock left Val leaned back and blew a huge lungful of air up at the ceiling. Crow crawled onto the bed and she turned to him.

“Soon as we blow this joint I want you to stay at my place,” Crow said. He didn’t mention her house or her farm—the enormity of it was always right there with them.

Val just nodded. “I think that’s best.”

There was a tentative knock on the door and they turned to see Newton peering in. “Is this a bad time?”

“For once,” Val said, “it’s not. Come in, have a seat.”

Newton was an awkward man at the best of times and in situations like this was nearly spastic. He perched on the edge of a guest chair with all the skittishness of a high school kid waiting for his prom date.

Crow handed him a juice carton. “You find out anything useful on the Net?”

“Quite a lot, actually, though at this point it might just serve as backstory since you all seem to think this is all over and done with.” He pulled a thick file of computer printouts out of his briefcase. “Aside from the ton of stuff I downloaded about…” He looked around and then used his two hooked index fingers to simulate fangs and gave Crow a big stage wink as if the pantomime wasn’t enough. “I also e-mailed Dr. Corbiel at U of P. Turns out it isn’t Jonathan Corbiel, it’s
Jonatha
. No ‘n,’ a woman. Like the singer Jonatha Brooke.”

“Okay.”

“We talked on the phone for a couple of hours, and I told her I was doing a book on the haunted history of Pine Deep, yada yada, and asked her if she would be willing to come up here and sit down with us.”

“Really?” Val asked. “What’d she say?”

“She said she’d love to, though she said she can’t get away until the twenty-ninth because she’s giving midterms. I know it’s a long time to wait, but in the meantime we can still tap her for info via phone and e-mail.”

“Okay, fair enough. Where are we meeting her?”

“She didn’t really want to drive all the way here, so I compromised and told her we’d meet her halfway. I set it up for the Red Lion Diner in Warrington.”

“Okay, perfect.”

(2)

The nurses came back, this time to change Val’s IV and fuss over her and even though there was nothing they were doing that was actually too private or official enough to warrant kicking Crow out he still somehow found himself in the hallway on the other side of a closed door. Newton gave Crow a CD with his research notes and headed home to get some rest. Crow was slouching down to the solarium to buy a Yoo-hoo when he spotted Mike Sweeney coming out of the ICU wing.

“Hey,” Crow said, “you get lost or something?”

The kid stopped walking and peered at Crow with eyes that seemed at once shocked and dreamy—the pupils were pinpoints, his eyes wide. Crow waved a hand in front of Mike’s eyes, expecting the kid to snap out of his reverie with a sheepish grin. Crow had seen him woolgathering a number of times before, but it took Mike at least thirty seconds to come back to planet Earth. Crow could see the process happen. The boy’s eyes went from blank to confused to shifty and Mike’s rubbery lips congealed into two tight lines.

“Crow?” Mike said in a voice that was unusually hoarse, the way someone sounds after they’ve been yelling.

“Yo, kiddo…what planet were you orbiting?”

“What?”

“You okay? You look like you’re out of it.”

“Do I?” Mike rubbed his eyes and then looked at his fingers as if expecting to see something on them. What? Grit? Tears?

“Mike,” Crow said slowly, touching the kid on the shoulder. “Are you okay?” He eyed the kid, looking for fresh bruises. Maybe he’d had a run-in with Vic.

“I’m good,” he said. “Just having kind of a weird day.”

“Bad weird or just weird weird?”

“Pine Deep weird,” Mike said, and when Crow continued to stare at him, he added, “Soon as I’m old enough, man, I am so out of this frigging town.”

Crow snorted. “Soon as you’re old enough, kiddo, I’ll drive you.”

(3)

Mike left the hospital, unchained his bike, and fled onto the back streets of Pine Deep, whisking down the crooked lanes and shadowed alleys, aware of the tourist crowds thinning as he raced toward the farmlands and the forest. He made the last turn, cutting a sharp left off Alvy Lane onto West Road and headed south, leaving the last of the houses behind and rolling through a countryside that was open and vulnerable.

Though it was mid-October it was a November-colored day. There was green, but it huddled low against the ground as thinning islands of grass in a swelling sea of brown dirt. The treetops had been blown to crooked gray sticks by the constant topwind, and invisible snakes of current leapt off the fields and snapped at him, trying to push his bike over. He kept pedaling, his eyes locked on the center of the road thirty feet ahead, his head fixed forward, and only his peripheral vision took slices of the vista to either side and fed it into that nameless place in his mind that hung suspended between the conscious and subconscious.

He had nowhere to be. Crow said that the store would be closed for the rest of the day while he got Val settled in, and Mike didn’t have to be home for hours. He was free, the time was his, but he still felt like an escaped prisoner trying to outrun…

Outrun what?

He had snapped out of the fugue in Terry Wolfe’s room over an hour ago, and much of what he had seen—

—was still with him. Mike did not know how to think about what had happened there in that room; there in his head. Mr. Morse was as real to him as someone he’d actually met. He could smell the earthy stink of dirt on the man’s clothes, could smell his sweat. In his head the crystal purity of Morse’s silvery guitar notes played over and over again with such precise clarity that Mike was sure that if he had a guitar of his own he could pick out the opening of that song.

Cold wet air abraded his cheeks, making them burn both cold and hot. Despite the chill there was a trickle of warm sweat wriggling down his spine and gathering between his buttocks as his legs pumped and pumped.

What Mr. Morse had said was impossible. More than impossible. Terry Wolfe was the mayor of Pine Deep. He was Crow’s friend.

John Sweeney was Mike’s father. He knew that; everyone knew that. Big John Sweeney, who was a stand-up guy. Every time Mike ran into one of his dad’s old buddies, that’s what they said. Big John was a stand-up guy. You knew where you were with him. When the moment broke and you needed someone at your back, Big John was always there. One of the good guys.

Boy, it breaks my heart to break your heart, but Big John, good man as he was, he wasn’t never your daddy.

Those words put iron in Mike’s legs and stoked the fires that made his feet blur as he pumped up and down on the pedals.

The second after the fugue had snapped Mike realized he had been holding two fingers of Terry Wolfe’s hand, and had snatched his own hand away like he’d been holding a hot coal. For five whole minutes he just stood there, staring at the bruised facing of the battered mayor, searching for any hint of truth in what Mr. Morse had told him.

Big John didn’t know it but another mule been kicking in his stall.

Mr. Morse didn’t have to translate what that meant, and Mike didn’t have to ask if Morse meant that Vic had been fooling around with Mike’s mom. It wasn’t Vic. It was never Vic.

Mike had turned and lurched into the bathroom in Terry’s room and spent at least as many minutes staring into the mirror. The curly red hair. Terry’s was red-brown. Mike’s would be. In time. The same blue eyes. The same cheekbones and jaw. Mike’s was softer, younger, but it would change.

There was a little of Mike’s mom in his features, just enough so that Mike did not look like a clone of Terry Wolfe—and it was thirty years since Terry had been a boy—but there was too much of Terry’s face in his own. Way too much.

Big John wasn’t never your daddy.

That might have been okay. If it was just a case of Terry Wolfe being his real father, it might have been okay. As Mike rode on past the fields of dying grass he knew that it might have been okay. Awkward, sure. A little weird, definitely…but in the end it would have been okay. A Hallmark moment come next Christmas, maybe.

Mike’s life had never been filled with many Hallmark moments and this wasn’t going to start a new tradition. This wasn’t an After School Special, either. This was late-night scary-movie double-feature stuff. It was damn near
Star Wars,
and as he rode Mike thought about that, trying to find a splinter of fun in it; but it was like looking at the welling blood from a skinned knee and trying to glean from it the fun of bright colors.

Morse had gone on to say,
Boy, I want you to listen to me for your own soul’s sake, even though what I’m going to tell you might take away some of the little love for this world you got.

Yeah
, Mike thought,
you got that shit right
. A car came out of a side road and instead of braking Mike poured on more speed and shot across the mouth of the road inches ahead of the bumper, the horn shrieking at him as the driver stamped down on the brakes.

There was precious little in the world Mike loved. His mom, maybe, but in light of the things Mr. Morse had told him that was even more confused and polluted than ever. Mom belonged to Vic, and Vic belonged to…

Believe me when I tell you that I mean you no harm.
Morse had said that, and Mike believed him—then and now—but it didn’t change a thing. Big John Sweeney was no longer his father. At most he was a guy who was around for a bit when Mike was born, and died before Mike had ever gotten a chance to form a clear image of him. Anything Mike had ever believed about how Big John’s strength and dignity, his honor and good nature had all been passed down to Mike, filtered perhaps through Mom’s gin-soaked genes, was all for shit.
Big John wasn’t never your daddy.

Terry Wolfe was. And at the same time, he wasn’t.

Mike raced on, trying to outrun the insanity of it all, the sheer unscalable impossibility of it all, but it chased him down the road, running like a hellhound, never tiring, as focused on Mike as he was on the road ahead, as dauntless as truths often are.

Terry Wolfe? Sure, he was Mike’s father, but only in the strictest sense of empty biology. Mike was a realist, he could accept—however much it hurt—that Terry Wolfe had slept with his mother. In the scheme of things, so what? Shit happens, and it happened a long time ago. So, that was just the first incision. The really deep cut, the one that had marked him, the one that hurt in so many ways that Mike did not know how to react, did not know how to feel the pain of it, was knowing that Terry Wolfe was not his
only
father.

Yeah, that was a total bitch.

The afternoon sky above him was darkening as the high winds pulled sheets of gray clouds over the mountains toward the town.

What was the word Mr. Morse had used to describe Terry? A
vessel
. Another person—Mike’s
other
father—had come sneaking in like a mist through Terry’s pores, sinking deep into the flesh, and as Terry sank into drunken stupor, this other presence just simply took over. Like stealing a car. Going for a joyride. With Mike’s mom.

The thought alone was so disgusting Mike would have skidded his bike to a stop and thrown up his guts by the side of the road, but his stomach was as empty as his hope, and he rode on.

Terry Wolfe was his biological father. Okay, done deal. Someone else was his—spiritual father?
Spiritual? Was that the way to look at it?
It felt completely wrong because Mike knew that it was completely correct. Mike could have accepted being Terry Wolfe’s son. There was no shame in being the son of a guy like that, not even a bastard son.

His real father, the father of Mike’s own
soul
, well, that was another thing. That was a thing that sat in the center of his own soul and screamed in a voice of pure darkness and pure rage. His mom had a saying she used—the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree.

The tears ran down his burning cheeks, snot ran from both nostrils, and in his ears all he heard was a steady roar of white noise like a blank TV station with the volume turned all the way up. Blood vessels burst in his eyes, painting the landscape ahead of him in a hundred shades of red as blackness crept in around the edges. In his chest his heart was beating 160 beats a minute. 170. 180.