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“Then, while we were on the porch examining those locks, the whole porch roof just suddenly collapses down. ” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that. Damn near killed us. Don’t you think that’s a little strange?”
“A ‘little strange’?” Weinstock echoed hoarsely. His color was horrible.
“Well, buckle up ’cause it gets stranger. ” Crow told him about the swarm of roaches that attacked them. “Now here’s the last part of it. When I was standing there on the porch, before the roof fell and the roaches attacked us, I thought I heard a voice in my head. Very faint, but definitely there—and before you start making jokes about me hearing voices, here’s what it said, ‘She is going to die and there is nothing you can do to save her. ’”
Weinstock stared at him in horror. “This was last night? You had that in your head while—”
“While Val was walking into the trap with Boyd. I was being teased with it, as if he knew I’d never get back to Val’s farm in time to save her from Boyd. ”
“‘He’? Are you saying that this was Griswold’s voice?”
“I don’t know. I mean…I think the bastard’s dead. Thirty years dead, probably buried by the Bone Man in an unmarked grave, and there haven’t been any attacks around that you could point to as being like Griswold’s. ”
“Unless he isn’t dead and maybe moved away for a while,” Weinstock ventured. “He could have moved over to Jersey or up to the Poconos, started another farm, kept himself in check all these years, and maybe now he’s come back. ”
“I thought about that, and it’s certainly a possibility—but I feel like he’s dead, that he’s been dead since 1976. Just a gut thing, but it’s what I believe. ”
“So whose voice was it?”
Crow shook his head. “That’s just it. I suppose it might have been Boyd doing kind of vampire mind-fuck on me, but my gut still tells me it was Griswold. ”
“Which makes sense only if, somehow, Griswold is still here. As…what, though? A ghost? Are we finally adding them to the mix?”
“Hell if I know. I guess that very last part of it, at least from my end, is the whole Boyd thing. I saw his body, and apart from all the rounds Val pumped into him he had a whole bunch of other bullet wounds. Nine, to be exact, and all of them pretty well healed over. Remember, Jimmy Castle emptied his gun into him, hit him every damn time. ”
“Jeez…don’t tell me that. I haven’t even had a chance to view the body yet. ”
“Now,” Crow said, “now let’s hear your side of this. ”
Weinstock gave him a long, flat stare. “You won’t like it. ”
Crow made a rude noise. “I knew that before we started talking. But I have to know. ”
Weinstock told him everything. Crow didn’t like it.
Chapter 4
1
The silence between Vic and Ruger was thick as mud. Vic went back to his workbench and tried to concentrate on how many sticks of dynamite it would take to bring down the cellular phone relay tower. When he was done with that he had to go out and meet a candy maker he knew who was doing some work for him. Treats for Halloween night. There was a ton of other stuff needing attention, and Vic was feeling the pressure.
Ruger was in the recliner reading a battered old copy of Emily Gerard’s The Land Beyond the Forest. Someone had made extensive handwritten notes in the margin of every page.
Into the stony silence, Ruger murmured, “I’m getting hungry. ”
Vic’s right finger paused over the Enter key on his calculator; his left hand twitched in the direction of the pistol lying on the table. “It’s still light out,” he said, not turning.
Ruger was quiet for a while, then very softly—so softly Vic barely heard him even though he straining to hear any sounds coming from that end of the cellar—the killer whispered, “Hungry. ”
The word haunted the air in that dark cellar.
2
Weinstock rubbed his tired eyes. “How much of this does Val know?”
“She knows the backstory, the Massacre and that stuff. She knows my theories. I didn’t have time to tell her what happened down in the Hollow yesterday. Not after what she went through herself, still she has to know there’s something strange is happening. You know Val—she’s not stupid or given to hysterics. She knows what she saw last night when Boyd came after her. She kept shooting him and Boyd kept wading through the shots. ”
“Not all of them, apparently. ”
