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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. ”
