LITMIR.BIZ

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      Chapter 2

      (1)

      That year the monsters came to town a whole month before Halloween. The monsters didn’t wear costumes. No Shreks or Jedi Knights, no Harry Potters or Orc Warriors, no Aragorns or Captain Jack Sparrows. These monsters weren’t white-sheeted ghosts peering hopefully out of eyeholes cut in old percale; they weren’t hockey-masked slaughterers of young virgins; they weren’t four-foot-high tottering Frankensteins with Kmart plastic faces. They didn’t caper from house to house with pumpkin-headed flashlights or ghostly green glow-sticks. None of them carried paper sacks filled with ghoulish gatherings of Snicker’s bars, sandwich bags full of pennies, apples, and snack-sized Three Musketeers.

      They were monsters all the same.

      They blew into town on a Halloween wind, coming into Pine Deep along the black length of Extension Route A-32, whisking over Black Marsh Bridge and through the cornfields. They came in a black car that had bloodstains on the door handles and the single unblinking black eye of a bullet hole on the driver’s door. The monsters came rushing into town like a storm wind, pushing cold air before them and dragging darkness behind.

      There were three monsters in the car. Two of them sat in the front, a third crouched in the back. They all had their monster faces hunched low into the collars of their coats, hidden by the shadows of their hat brims. They were silently snarling, these three monsters. The monster in the backseat bared his teeth in desperation and fear; the monster behind the wheel bared his teeth in pain and hopelessness; but the monster in the front passenger seat bared his teeth in a grin of pernicious delight.

      The black car flew with a raven’s speed along the dark road, but it did not fly with a raven’s precision: it veered and swayed and staggered from one side of the road to the other as if the monster who drove did not know how to control the machine. Yet it continued to drive fast for all its careening and swerving. In it the three silent, hungry monsters rolled into Pine Deep as night closed around the town like a fist.

      But there were other monsters in Pine Deep that night. It was that kind of town.

      These others did not need to come to town in a bloodstained black car; they were already there, had always been there. One drove through town every day in his own machine, a monstrous wrecker with a gleaming hook; another one labored all day repairing expensive cars and trucks, and labored all night to destroy precious hearts and souls; one walked around town and smiled at everyone and he never knew that a monster looked out of his laughing blue eyes, waiting, waiting…

      One monster, the worst of all, waited in darkness under wormy dirt, awake now after a long, long sleep.

      There were many other monsters in Pine Deep.

      Waiting. All of them, waiting.

      (2)

      Lightning singed the edges of the dark thunderheads, but no rain fell; thunder rumbled distantly, shaking the trees and shaking thousands of soot-colored night birds into startled flight. They swarmed like locusts and then flew back toward the trees, believing themselves safe when the lightning flashed.

      One night bird peeled off from the flock and soared through the raw air until it leveled off just above the tips of the corn, skimming along on the breeze, flapping its dark wings only occasionally. It was a ragged bird, its shape defined more by shadows than substance. The fields whisked along beneath it and when it reached the end of one farmer’s lot it veered left, drifting across the knobbed expanse of a pumpkin patch. All of the best pumpkins were already gone, picked and sold to supermarkets in Philadelphia and Doylestown, awaiting the jack-o’-lantern surgeons and the bakers of autumn pies. Only the ugly pumpkins remained, the pumpkins too gnarled and deformed for sale as decorations, too diseased to be welcome on any table.

      This year there had been more diseased ones than the good kind; this year all across the township and its outlying farmlands hundreds of tons of pumpkins lay rotting, along with truckloads of fetid corn and wormy apples. It was a blighted year for Pine Deep, what the old folks called a Black Harvest, and they unearthed all the tales—short or tall—about the pestilential harvest of thirty years ago, of bad times come again.

      The ugly pumpkins squatted in row after hideous row, or stood in huge mounds like heads piled high after a great battle. The night bird circled the biggest mound once, twice, and then veered off again, rediscovering the black road and following it up and over a series of small hills. More cornfields stretched away on either side of the road, and here and there darkened farmhouses began the ritual of turning on lights to combat the invasion of night shadows. The lights did not make the houses look safe and homey: they made them seem impossibly lonely, as if each house were the only house in the whole world, alone and lost in the eternal sea of dryly whispering corn.

      The night bird uttered a strange, high shriek; not a caw, but a sound more like the wail of an abandoned and terrified child. The shrill sound floated through the night air, and the people inside the farmhouses, the ones who allowed themselves to hear it or could not block it out, shivered as if some dark and shambling thing were breathing its damp breath on their naked skin. None of them would forget to lock their doors that night, even if they were unaware of the subliminal dread that wail had sown in the soil of their hearts.

      One farmhouse, older than the others, more battered by time and cold winds and disinterest, stood at the edge of a vast cornfield and overlooked a couple of acres of flat ground enclosed by a low stone wall. The ivy-covered stone wall embowered a small and disheveled cemetery in which the rows of shadow-painted tombstones stood in snarls of bracken and pernicious weeds. Wailing again, the night bird flew low over the cracked and wind-sanded headstones, circling and circling. No lights shone in the window of the old house. No lights had shone there in months, nor might ever show there again. Only shadows lived there, stirred now and again by the frigid breath of old ghosts. The night bird wailed yet again and flapped noisily toward a tree where it settled on a twisted and gnarled branch that reached out toward the tombstones. In daylight the fading colors of the leaves would have made the promise of beauty, but by starless night the leaves were a uniform and featureless black, forming nothing more than an amorphous bulk against which the night bird disappeared entirely.

      The night bird turned a single black eye toward one headstone that leaned drunkenly just below the tree. It had been pushed off-balance by the roots of the tree but was held fast to the ground by one sunken corner and its own ponderous weight. It was a simple tombstone, blocky and gray and cheap, thirty years old and unkindly worn by each of those thirty winters. Chiseled into its face was a name: OREN MORSE.

      Below that, a single word had been cut into the lifeless stone: REST. No date, no other inscription. The wind blew brambles and fallen leaves across the grave and one dry leaf, propelled by the vagaries of the breeze, skittered upward to the top of the gravestone and then tumbled over and off into the shadows beyond. Except for the murmuring wind and the whisper of the cornstalks, there was no sound. Even the night bird held its tongue.

      Then a man was there.

      He stepped out of a shadow and was abruptly there. The night bird let out a startled cry and fluttered its wings, but did not fly away. The man stood quietly looking down at the headstone, his gray lips moving as he read the name. He was scarecrow thin and dressed in a cheap black suit that was smeared with dirt. He wore no topcoat, no hat. His skin was as gray as the gravestones around him, but there was no moon now to shine on it. Still, that pale skin seemed to cast its own weird light. He held his hands loosely at his sides, and every once in a while those long fingers twitched and clutched as if grasping something, or desiring to.

      Then he reached down into the shadows behind the tombstone and when he straightened he held the long neck of a battered old blues guitar in his hand. He looped the strap over his shoulder and drew his slender fingers along the silver strings. The friction made a sound like old door hinges creaking open.

      Abruptly the whole graveyard was caught in the harsh white glare of headlights as a car crested one of the small hills and rushed down the other side toward the graveyard. The lights shimmered through the trees and danced along the tips of the corn, casting weird capering shadows. The gray man turned, watching as the car drew near, passed,

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