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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.
He raced on, feeling his throat closing, feeling the air fighting its way into his lungs and scorching its way back out. Blood mingled with the snot as it seeped out of his nose and a single bloody teardrop broke from his left eye and collided with the regular tears, staining them and his face an angry pink.
The father of his soul.
Mr. Morse had shown him who that was…and what it was.
So Mike raced on and on into the murky landscape fleeing the thing he carried with him, trying to outrace the poisonous contamination of his own soul.
4
The Bone Man felt the darkness rising from the ground like cemetery mist. He stood in the middle of A-32 and watched the sun fail and he fancied that he could hear the night cry out in triumph. No, not triumph…more like a challenge. A hunting call.
Above and around him the night birds took to the sky, startled into flight, terrified of the thickening shadows. The Bone Man turned as a whole flock of them rose and headed away from Dark Hollow in a mass as thick as locusts. Only one bird stayed with him, landing on the top rail of a wooden farm fence.
He looked down the road and saw Mike Sweeney riding as if hellhounds were biting at the tires of his bike.
“I tried to tell him. ” The bird cocked its head at him and regarded him with one obsidian eye. “I tried to warn him, to make him understand…”
The bird shivered its wings and cawed once, high and shrill. “Instead,” the Bone Man said, “I think I might have gone and killed that boy. ”
The crow looked at him, his eye penetrating, accusing.
“It’s going to be bad,” asked the Bone Man. “Ain’t it?” The bird just turned away and watched the boy. “Yeah,” the Bone Man said, answering his own question, “it’s g
oing to be bad. ”
5
Mike was barely even aware of the road as he shot along it like a suicide bullet. His heart was a screaming red explosion in his chest and he could taste blood in his mouth. Air tasted like acid in his mouth and throat. When he hit the broken tree branch lying in the middle of the road and his bike left the ground he closed his eyes, feeling the lift as he began to fly, hoping he was going to die. Maybe he would never feel the impact, maybe he would. It didn’t much matter as long as at the end of that moment there would be nothing.
Time vanished around him. He had no sense of movement, no sense of the ground either falling away or rising to meet him. With his eyes closed and the wind now a soft stroke on his cheek, everything was peaceful.
Then he hit the tree from which the branch had fallen.
Chapter 16
1
“Where the hell are we?” Josh was looking for roadside signs.
His wife Deb was hunched forward using her cell phone’s meager display light to try and read a map. The dome light of their car hadn’t worked in four years. “I think we’re near some town called Black Marsh. ”
“Never heard of it. We just passed a sign for a bridge,” he said, looking in the rearview, though behind them everything was black.
“Good, take that. We’ll cross back into Pennsylvania and go through…um, looks like something called Pine Deep. ”
“Yeah, that’s that dumb tourist place that’s been on the news. All that Halloween crap. ” Josh was getting cranky. The two of them had driven from Erie for a wedding in Ocean City, New Jersey, and had gotten directions off the Internet. So far those directions had failed them three times, and for the last hour they had been Brailling their way through back roads in New Jersey. The little finger of the gas gauge was pointing accusingly at E, needling Josh for not filling up when he had the chance “They ought to have a gas station or two. Being, you know, a tourist place and all. ”
Josh said nothing.
“If not…we have Triple-A. ”
Josh hadn’t renewed the AAA membership and didn’t want to have to tell her, so he just concentrated on the road. Their car, a battered Jeep Cherokee that had seen better decades, rolled onto the heavy timbers of the bridge and rattled across the Delaware River into the borough of Pine Deep. In the darkness of the cab, both Deb and Josh Meyers shivered. Neither noticed the other do so. It was an instinctive reaction, a trembling as if in the face of a chill wind, but their windows were rolled up and though set on low the Jeep’s heater was on.