Dead Man's Song (35 page)

In a fair approximation of Obi Wan Kenobi, Mike said, “A lightsaber is the weapon of a Jedi—not as clumsy or random as a blaster.” He slashed it back and forth and made electrical humming noises on each pass.

Crow grinned at that. “I’ll give you some books on the samurai, Mike…and you can look up some stuff on the Net. They were among the greatest warriors in history, and to them the sword was emblematic of their soul. In fact they believed that their sword was a physical manifestation of their soul.”

Mike looked at his wooden sword and then at Crow’s beautiful weapon and then cocked an eyebrow. “So…my soul is a beat-up piece of wood and yours is a work of art?”

“Well, of course, that’s obvious,” Crow said straight-faced, then smiled and shook his head. “No, the difference between the two weapons is like the difference between what you are and what you can become.” When he saw that Mike wasn’t following him, he tried it another way. “You look at the two swords and see the difference between us, or at least what you perceive is the difference between us, but in fact the difference is that your sword is blunt. Just like you right now. Now, consider Vic for a moment…he’s dangerous, but he isn’t sharp. He isn’t refined. He’s the perfect definition of blunt force.” He saw Mike glance suddenly down at the wooden sword as if he wanted to spit on it and throw it away. “Whereas you may be starting blunt and unrefined you are not going to stay that way. Are you?”

Mike hefted the wooden sword and considered its weight, and then glanced at Crow’s sword. He shook his head.

“So, I’m going to show you some things to do with the sword because the sword teaches us so much.”

“Like what?”

“Glad you asked,” said Crow, and winked. “Kenjutsu, the Japanese art of swordplay, may not be practical on the streets of the twenty-first century, that I’ll grant you, but the process of learning the sword
is
. Very much so, because it teaches focus, balance, precision, timing, control. You see, there’s a paradox in swordplay that is at the heart of its appeal. You know what a paradox is?”

“Dude, how many science fiction novels have I read? Of course I know what a paradox is.”

“I stand corrected. Well, the paradox at the heart of kenjutsu is that there is no way to achieve perfection in swordsmanship. No matter how good you are, there is always a level of skill beyond where you are.”

“So…what’s that mean? That it doesn’t matter how good you are?”

“Not exactly. What it means is that it only matters that you are striving to be better than you are.” Crow let Mike chew on that for a moment.

Mike rolled his eyes. “Is this one of those ‘the journey
is
the destination’ things?”

“Yep, and if you’re about to dismiss that concept just because you’ve heard it before—don’t. In this case it’s especially important because in learning the sword we aren’t just learn to be good at it…we’re discovering that each time we train we’re better at it, and that the more we concentrate on it and the harder we train, the more subtle and deft we become. You see, when the samurai trained all those thousands of hours in swordplay, only part of it was to sharpen their skills in case they had to fight. What they were really doing was sharpening their souls.” He paused. “They were refining who they were. Cutting away at the elements of their personalities that did not advance them forward in spirit.”

“You’re starting to go all Yoda on me here.”

“Yeah, I guess.” Crow sucked his teeth for a minute, assessing his own words. “Tell you what…let’s just do some training with the sword and then we’ll see if you’re getting anything out of it. Is that simple enough?”

Mike shrugged. “I guess.”

Crow walked over and flipped open the top of the plastic cooler that was set on the back step of his building, fished around in it, and then brought out an apple. “I’m going to throw this at your head,” he said casually. “Try to knock it out of the way with your sword.”

“You kidding me here?” Mike said.

“Nope,” said Crow and tossed the apple. He threw it under-handed and without much speed or force, but it bumped Mike in the forehead despite the wild swings of the wooden
bokken.

“Ow!”

“Sorry. Now, pick it up and throw it back.”

Looking angry, Mike picked up the apple and threw it. Harder than he intended and much faster, right at Crow’s face. There was a rasping sound, a glitter of sunlight on steel, and the two halves of the apple hit the back wall of the building on either side of where Crow stood. He held the sword in one hand, the scabbard in the other, and he was smiling. With a snap of his wrist he pointed the sword down at the floor and droplets of moisture from the apple flew from the oiled blade and patterned the flagstones; then with a flash that was too fast for Mike to follow, Crow swung the sword around and returned it to its scabbard.

“Holy shit!” Mike cried.

“Watch your language, you juvenile delinquent,” Crow said, feeling pleased with himself—especially since he sometimes bungled that particular trick and screwing it up right now would have really sucked. That it had worked so well just then he counted as a nice gesture on the part of the universe—not for himself, but for Mike, whose eyes were sparkling with excitement. “So…you wanna learn how to be a samurai?” Crow asked.

Mike looked at the two pieces of apple, then at Crow’s sword, and then at his own.

“Yeah,” he said softly and when he looked up, Crow could see that something had ignited in the boy’s eyes.

But Crow read it wrong. Mike was not standing there dazzled by what Crow had just done—he was impressed, sure—but seeing the sweet elegance of that cut had done something else to Mike and he was teetering on the edge of understanding it. He was also dangerously close to lapsing into another fugue state, but that part of his mind was closed to introspection. No, the realization that was slowly catching fire in his mind was how close all of this—Crow, the sword, the skill of the cut—was to the stuff of his recent dreams. Even the sword Crow held looked the same. Mike was almost positive it
was
the same, though he knew it couldn’t be. As Crow’s sword flashed through the air Mike felt as if somehow lightning had danced from the edge of that blade right into his chest. He felt supercharged and while he stood there listening to Crow speak and not taking in a single word, Mike’s grip on the sword
changed
. It was a subtle thing, but as he held the sword in his hand his fingers flexed to let the handle rest more comfortably against his palm, his elbow bent a bit more to allow his forearm to counterbalance the weight of the long wooden blade, and he raised the tip of the sword so that it would not touch the ground.

He was aware of none of this. The changes were small, the corrections subtle, but thereafter he never picked up the
bokken
and held it incorrectly again. Weeks later, when he held a real sword in his hands, all of this would matter.

Worlds turn on such moments.

(4)

Newton set his coffee cup down, rubbed his tired eyes, and turned back to his monitor screen. He had four Explorer browser screens open and he was nearly fried from surfing the Net all day, getting as much backstory as he could on the information Crow and Val had given him. He did background searches on every name Crow had given him—Vic Wingate, Polk, Bernhardt, half a dozen others—working to get inside of the story, to try and see it from the point of view of a nine-year-old Malcolm Crow. He also searched for any scrap of information he could find on Ubel Griswold. If he was going to go with Crow into the forest to find Griswold’s old farm—thirty years overgrown—he wanted to know the man, perhaps to demystify him as a protection against what Crow believed of him.

The research, though, was hampered by too much information. Not specifically about Griswold, but about the haunted history of the town. Since 1957 there had been fifty-six separate university studies by paranormal researchers on the hauntings in Pine Deep. The Sci-Fi Channel had run a whole season of one of its ghost hunter shows in town in 2004. The Discovery Channel had done a special last Halloween on the remarkable number of graveyards in Pine Deep (eleven), and on how many of the graves were disturbed each year with no forensic evidence left revealing who had dug them up. When Newton had done a Google search on the keywords “Pine Deep” and “haunted,” he got fourteen thousand hits. Granted a lot of them were repeats of stories about the town’s yearly Halloween celebrations, and movie listings from the film
Ghostwalk
that Dimension Films had set in the town, but that still left thousands of references to strange happenings in the town. Malcolm Crow’s name appeared as an information source on 1,944 sites.

“The man gets around,” Newton said.

As Newton went through his notes, he cut and pasted any unique keyword into the search engine, usually getting some kind of hit, useful or not. When he reached the name Ubel Griswold, he put it into the search screen, hit the button and waited, expecting little. When he switched from using the local catchphrase “Pine Deep Massacre” to “Pine Deep” and “killings” he got more useful hits than he had gotten prior to interviewing Crow, including a list of all sixteen of the official victims, and then a university site that had seventeen names on the list, with Griswold’s filling in the last spot. Then he hit one Web site reference to Griswold that was completely different from all the others:

He looked at it for a while, grunted, and made a note next to Griswold’s name on his notepad. The notation he made was “Ancestor?” That done, he moved on. It was an interesting coincidence of name, nothing more. He hit the back button to go to the Google screen again and kept working.

(5)

Terry Wolfe knocked on the door of the Crow’s Nest despite the “Back in Twenty Minutes” sign. When he got no answer he pulled his Razor from his pocket, flipped it open, and punched in Crow’s number. Crow answered on the fifth ring.

“Your door’s locked,” Terry barked.

“We’re around back.”

“I don’t want to walk around the block. Go open the front door.” He flipped his phone shut and waited with bad grace for Crow to unlock. Terry rubbed his eyes and sighed. He sighed a lot these days, and was even aware of it. He tried not to, but he kept doing it, only catching it on the exhale. He tried to work out every day, but lately he couldn’t face the gym, couldn’t even face his own Nordic-Trak. Though he didn’t look it he felt soft and heavy, and his posture was bad. For days now he had been wearing his steel-rimmed glasses because he couldn’t keep his hands steady enough to put in his contacts. His fingers shook so bad he was afraid of putting out an eye. Yesterday he had gotten his short hair and beard trimmed, but he hadn’t shaved since then and above and below the neat beard there was an unkempt red-gold five o’clock shadow.

When Crow unlocked the door, Terry brushed past him, accidentally clipping Crow’s shoulder. Crow grunted at the impact, but Terry just let it go; it wasn’t worth the effort to apologize. “Jesus, Terry, you look like shit,” Crow said.

“I feel like shit,” Terry said as he lumbered through the store, pausing only a half-step when he saw that Mike Sweeney—looking sweaty and shifty—had come in from out back and had slid surreptitiously behind the counter. The kid waved and may have said something, but Terry didn’t want to waste effort on pleasantries, either. Silently he walked through the shop and jerked open the door to Crow’s apartment toward the kitchen, and went inside with Crow following along. Terry went right to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator door and looked bleakly inside, poked listlessly at the swollen and vaguely threatening packages of forgotten food, gave a disgusted shrug, and slammed the door. “Make some tea, will you? You got anything herbal?”

“Just peppermint and chamomile.”

“Chamomile.” Terry rubbed his callused palms over his face.

Crow filled the Wile E. Coyote kettle with water and set it on the burner.

“Why’s that kid running the store? Since when does he work here?” Terry asked.

“Since the other day…like I
told
you the other day.”

“I probably wasn’t listening,” Terry said.

“I’ve seen you look better.” Crow cleared his throat. “Still having those dreams?”

“Every time I close my eyes.”

“And, um, Mandy. You still seeing her?”

Terry grunted and nodded.

“Damn, brother. You talk to your shrink about all this?”

Terry pulled a big pillbox out of his pocket and rattled it. “All he knows how to do is prescribe drugs.” Terry began opening cabinets, shoving boxes of Fruit Loops and Count Chocula back and forth in search of nothing in particular. He took a box of Wheat Thins from one cabinet, fished inside, stared at the cracker as if it was something totally alien to this planet, and then ate it without tasting it. He slammed the box back into the cabinet. Gloomily, he stalked back into the living room and threw himself into an overstuffed chair. In silence Crow finished making the tea and handed a mug to Terry, who took it with and a grunt. Terry said, “Crow, for God’s sake, stop looking at me like I have two heads. If I’m going crazy, then I’m going crazy. Don’t worry, once Halloween is over I’m planning on checking myself into a hospital for a nice long stay, and when I get out—providing they don’t throw away the key—I’m taking Sarah and the kids to Jamaica for the rest of the winter. No crops, blighted or otherwise. And no Halloween.”