Ghost Road Blues - Джонатан Мэйберри A Pine Deep Novel

Скачать книгу

then something that was totally out of the blue happened. The book was nominated for the main award in the horror industry, the Bram Stoker Award. It was nominated twice, in fact. Best First Novel and Best Novel.

      In that latter category I was up against Stephen King. He trounced me—fair enough—because he’s Stephen King and his book that year was the beautiful and nuanced Lisey’s Story, which deserved to win.

      In the Best First Novel category I was also up against serious talent—and what’s fun is that they’ve all since become good friends. Those other books were killer. Absolutely killer.

      But Ghost Road Blues won the Bram Stoker.

      I was at the Stoker Awards banquet, held in Toronto that year. I vaguely remember them reading the names of the winning book and author. I remember kissing my wife and stumbling up to the podium to give an acceptance speech. God only knows what I said. I sure as hell don’t remember.

      At that point I had no real plans in fiction beyond the three books of the Pine Deep Trilogy. I expected to go back to nonfiction— and I did, kind of. I wrote five more nonfic books on supernatural folklore, this time under my own name. But something had changed in me. Through a process I’ve never quite been able to define I had changed from being a nonfiction writer to a novelist.

      Novelist.

      That was something I never expected to use as a self-defining word.

      Now, though, that’s mostly who and what I am. And most of what I write is horror. The experience of writing the Pine Deep Trilogy left a curious mark on me. I fell in love with the characters— Malcolm Crow, Val Guthrie, Terry Wolfe, Iron Mike Sweeney, Ferro and LaMastra . . . they’ve become friends. And the tragic, confused, but well-intentioned ghost, the Bone Man. I even like the villains in the way one can like a villain. Karl Ruger, the utterly vile Vic Wingate, Jim Polk, and Ubel Griswold are fun to write even if they are loathsome in every practical way.

      Since the books came out in 2006, ’07, and ’08, they’ve remained in print. They’ve become popular in audio. I’ve revisited the town in quite a few short stories that have gone into the series’ prehistory and also revealed what happened after the end of the third book. The town of Pine Deep remains as a second home for me, troubled as it is.

      At this writing, with October 2015 about to start, I am writing the pilot for a possible Pine Deep TV series. I’m also writing my twenty-fifth novel since I tried my hand at this weird “fiction” thing. Writing number twenty-five, and I have seven more presold and stacked up behind it, with no end in sight. I write some articles and I write comics for Marvel, IDW, and Dark Horse, but when I pick a single word to define who and what I am, it’s “novelist.”

      And it all started with Ghost Road Blues. A book I wrote because it was the horror novel I wanted to read. A book that changed the course of my professional life, and—despite the appalling things that happen in its pages—has made me a happy man.

      In the succeeding volumes of this tenth anniversary printing I’ll talk more about the content of these books. The legends behind the novels. The horror inside the horror.

      For now, though, I wanted to share the story of how I chose to write my first novel.

      So, old friend or new reader, turn the page and go visit the troubled little town of Pine Deep, Pennsylvania. I hope you enjoy your stay. But . . . don’t go wandering alone in the dark.

       Del Mar, California

       September 2015

      Prologue

      One Month Before Halloween This Year

      I have wrought great use out of evil tools.

      —Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwe-Lytton,

      first Baron Lytton, Richelieu

      Every evil in the bud is easily crushed;

       as it grows older, it becomes stronger.

       —Cicero, Philippicoe

      I got to keep moving, I got to keep moving

      Blues falling down like hail, blues falling down like hail

      Mmm, blues falling down like hail, blues falling down like hail

      And the day keeps on remindin’ me, there’s a hellhound on my

      trail Hellhound on my trail, hellhound on my trail.

       —Robert Johnson, “Hellhound on My Trail”

      (1)

      The last thing Billy said was, “Oh, come on…there’s nothing out there.”

      And then two sets of bone-white hands arched over the slat rails on the wagon and seized him by the shoulders and the collar and dragged him screaming into the darkness. He tried to fight them, but they had him and as he rasped along the rail, feet flailing and hands scrabbling for some desperate purchase, other white figures closed in and he was dragged away.

      Claire screamed at the top of her lungs. Everyone else screamed too. Even the guy driving the tractor screamed.

      Billy screamed louder than all of them.

      Claire launched herself forward from the hay bale on which she’d been sitting just a moment ago holding Billy’s hand; she leaned out into the darkness beyond the rails, her fingers clawing the air as if that could somehow bring him back. Thirty feet away six figures had forced Billy down to the ground and were hunched over him, their white hands reaching down to tear at him with hooked fingers, their black mouths wide with slack-jawed hunger, their bottomless dead eyes as vacant as the eyes of dolls.

      “Billy!” she screamed, and then grabbed at the others around her, pulling at their sleeves, slapping at the hands that tried to pull her back. She wheeled on them—on eighteen other kids, most of them from her own high school, all cringing back against the wooden rails of the flatbed, or trying to hide behind bales of hay—she begged them to help. A few shook their heads. Most just screamed. One boy—a big kid who looked like he might be a jock—made a halfhearted attempt to move forward, but his girlfriend and his buddies dragged him back.

      Claire spat at them and spun back, screams still ripping from her throat as she watched Billy’s thrashing arms and legs. She looked up at the man driving the tractor, but he was white-faced with shock and was frozen in a posture of near flight, half out of his seat.

      Then one of the white-faced things bent low toward him and because of the angle Claire could not see what he was doing, but Billy gave a single high, piercing shriek of absolute agony and then his legs and arms flopped to the ground and lay still.

      The moment froze.

      Slowly, the creature raised its head from Billy’s body and turned toward the tractor with its towed flatbed of schoolkids. It snarled at them—a low, menacing growl, the kind a dog would give when another animal came close to its food. The creature’s white skin peeled back from its teeth and there, caught between those yellow teeth, was a drooping tube of purple meat that trailed back to the red ruin that was Billy’s stomach.

      Claire’s scream rose up above the darkened road, above the vast seas of whispering corn on either side, far up into the swirling blackness that spread like a shroud from horizon to horizon. Flocks of nightbirds cried out and took to the air. The driver stamped down on the gas and the tractor’s engines made a guttural roar as the flatbed was jerked forward.

      Three of the creatures rose at the sound and turned to face the tractor, their faces painted with crimson, their jaws working as they chewed. As the tractor inched forward, the wheels still churning in the mud that had stalled it there a few minutes ago, the creatures began moving toward the smell of fresh meat. Of living flesh.

      Everyone screamed again and they shouted and cursed at the driver to move, move, move! The man at the wheel kicked down harder and with a great sucking sound the wheels tore free of the mud and the whole mass—tractor, flatbed, and kids—lurched forward,

Скачать книгу