Mark’s body was in the morgue. Cold and empty, without Mark’s soul in it. Just flesh, she told herself. Not Mark at all…just an empty shell…and yet Mark had been killed by Boyd. And Boyd was a vampire. It didn’t matter that Weinstock checked on him three times a day; it didn’t matter than neither Mark or Connie showed any signs of being anything more than corpses. In a movie she’d seen once a vampire had said something about outliving his enemies by simply going to sleep for a century and then rising after they were dust. What if that sort of thing was possible? What if Mark, cold and dead as he appeared, was only waiting for some dark call to awaken him?
It was a stupid thought, she knew. Stupid, and fanciful, and utterly terrible. Val lay there and stared out through the lightless window into the blank blackness of the night and thought lots of such thoughts.
4
Mike knew that everything was broken, but he didn’t care. He didn’t know how to care anymore. The impact with the tree had smashed almost every thought out of his mind, and filtered what little remained into a single piece of understanding. “I’m dying,” he said in a wet voice.
He coughed and felt blood splash out of his mouth onto his chin. There was pain. Of course there was pain, but it was a remote island way off on the horizon of his perception. It had been there for hours, ever since he’d crashed, and it had done all the harm to him that it could. Now it was just there. He didn’t care about that, either.
“I’m dying,” he said again, smiling. It was the safest he’d felt in years.
Time, as meaningless as the rest of it, had long ago ceased to move…and yet the sky had changed. Mike couldn’t move his head and had been staring at the featureless black above him forever. Maybe he slept at times, maybe he just stared, but now the sky was less pervasively black, now there was just the faintest hint of color. A brick-red tinge dabbed here and there on the underside of the clouds.
The wind stirred, pushing some leaves around. One leaf blew against his cheek and stuck to the blood, quivering as if struggling to escape. Mike turned his eyes to look at it, saw its jagged brown edges vibrating, and it took him a few seconds to realize that he could see the color. He tried to lift one hand, wanting to see if there was enough light to see his fingers and was surprised when his hand moved. When he had tried to move his hand before it had not so much as trembled; there hadn’t been a single flicker of sensation from anything below his shoulders. That had changed now, but Mike still didn’t care. He was too busy trying to die.
There was the rustle of more leaves off to his left, not in the path of the wind, and Mike turned his eyes that way—and his whole head turned, too. His neck was no longer locked into immobility. Over there, just beyond where his bike lay, there was a man.
Mike looked at him, trying to pick out details in the gloom, but the light was still bad. At first Mike thought he was looking at a scarecrow, because the man was dressed in filthy rags whose tatters flapped in the breeze, but there was no post, no fence to support a scarecrow. And then the man took a step toward him. Such a strange step, and even in his semidaze Mike thought it was odd. A stiff and staggering step, more like the Tin Man from Oz than the Scarecrow. That thought flitted through his mind and Mike almost smiled at the absurdity of it. Another step, managed with equal awkwardness, as if the man’s knees were inflexible or unused to walking.
The dawn was filling in the world with colors, defining shapes, painting the day, and as he lay there Mike could see more of the man. He frowned. The stranger was truly a raggedy man, his clothes nothing but mismatched castoffs. A soiled pair of patched work pants, two different shoes—a sneaker and a woman’s low-heeled pump—a checked shirt that was torn in a dozen places. Heavy cotton work gloves. And some kind of mask, but it was still too dark to make out what it was. It was dark and shiny and the material it was made from rippled in the wind.
Daylight swelled by another degree and though the cloud cover kept any rays from touching the man, the quality of light increased but still the mask made no sense to Mike. There were no holes for eyes. It was just a swirling complexity of wrinkles that writhed and twisted with the steady breeze. The man took another jerky step forward. Mike had no urge, no desire to ask for help. The dying don’t need help to die, and if this guy wanted to be a witness, then that was on him. Mike felt removed from thoughts of help and safety, even of right and wrong.
He just wanted to die and he didn’t care if anyone—especially a raggedy man—stood by and watched. Another step and now the man was no more than twenty feet away. Two more steps, another, another. Ten feet now and the rosy glow of the dawn washed him in crimson from his shoes to his face.
To his…face? Suddenly terror struck Mike like a fist over the heart. In a single moment all of his detachment fractured and fell away. His whole body convulsed, arching belly-up to the sky like a heart attack patient getting the paddles. Every wound, every splintered bone, every inch of torn flesh, every nerve ending screamed in desperate, howling agony and terror. The shriek burst from his throat in a spray of bloodstained spit. If someone had sprayed him with gasoline and tossed a match on him the pain could not have been more comprehensive or intense. His scream went on and on and on. Hordes of crows exploded from the trees and raced in panic across the sky above him, sweeping in vast circles above the field. The sparse green grass that patched the dirt around him withered into sickly yellow twists and curled in on themselves to die. In the soil beneath him the sleepy October worms swelled and burst as if boiled.
The scream ended. Mike sagged to the ground, limp and exhausted. His eyes—more red than blue now—cast wildly about to find the Raggedy Man.
He was there. Right there, right next to him, looming over, looking down. Mike could see that face, that mask—which was not a mask at all, not some wrinkled dark cloth rippling in the breeze. It was his face that rippled, that…writhed. There were no eyeholes because there were no eyes—not human eyes; no mouth either—not a human mouth. What there was, what composed the man’s entire face, was a black, roiling, chitinous swarm of bristling insects. Roaches and beetles. Slugs, maggots, centipedes. Flies and termites. In the gaps between his gloves and his sleeves the exposed arm was the same—every foul creature of the shadows wriggling together to form a wrist. Between shoes and cuffs, the same. Wasps and earwigs, lice and locusts.
“No!” After the scream Mike’s voice was a frayed whisper. Overhead the crows circled and circled in terrible silence.
The Raggedy Man raised his left hand as if to reach for Mike. It was not a threatening movement, but everything about it was dark with wrongness. Mike screamed again, weakly this time, a croak in a torn throat. “Help me!”
Instantly the sky around him was filled with whispery noise as the flocks of circling crows hurtled down toward him. The leading rank of night birds struck with such force that several of the birds died, their necks snapped on impact, but the sheer mass of them surged forward…not at Mike, but at the Raggedy Man. The birds slammed into him and drove him backward, the beaks of the birds slashing and stabbing at the old clothes, their cries tearing the air. The Raggedy Man staggered and for just a moment he seemed to catch his footing, to hold his ground, but the night birds hit him in wave after implacable wave, and then the Raggedy Man exploded, losing whatever power it had to retain the man shape, and the hundreds of thousands of insects that made up its hand, its arm, its shoulder, burst apart into their separate selves and showered Mike, landing on his chest, his face, crawling on him, crawling into his nose and mouth and…
FUGUE.
Mike’s mind burned out like a cinder.
Above him the clouds overhead paled from rose red to gray as the dawn took hold on the day. The crows swarmed over Mike, beaks darting here and there, snatching at the bugs, tearing through carapace and shell in a savage frenzy of killing and eating. They fed and fed and fed. As the sun rose it bored a single hole through the clouds and punched a hard beam of cold yellow light down onto the field. Then another, and another until the morning sky stretched into a blue forever that was clean and hard.
Soon a stillness settled over the place where Mike lay, silent and unmoving. Sunlight sparkled on the dewy tips of the dying grass and turned the morning mist to a ghostly blue-white opacity. The light gleamed on the blue tubing of the bicycle lying by the side of the road. It caressed the freckled cheek of the boy who lay sprawled among the dry autumn leaves. And it glittered on the edges of the broken shells and cracked antennae of ten thousand insects whose corpses lay scattered across fifty yards in all directions from where the boy lay. In the center of this slaughter, the ground around the boy was completely empty except for the tatters of some old torn clothing as all the birds flew away into the trees.
All but one, a single crow that stood on the boy’s sternum.
Everything was as still as death. There was not the slightest tremble under the bird’s feet. The crow tilted its head, angling one black-within-black eye to stare at the boy’s slack face. The smell of blood was everywhere. The music rode the breeze, a little stronger now, the blues melody plaintive. The mist retreated all the way to the road.
The boy took a breath, and the crow cawed quietly.
A full minute passed. The boy took another breath. Then another. The crow hopped down from his chest and walked away, angling to keep an eye on the boy.
FUGUE .
From a blackened cinder Mike’s mind coalesced into living awareness once again.
Minutes floated past on the breeze and gradually sense returned to him along with awareness of his body. He no longer felt helpless and wrecked. It took a while and it took a hell of a lot of effort, but Mike gradually sat up. He shook his head like a drunk, lips slack and rubbery, nose running, eyes going in and out of focus as he stared at the withered grass between his knees. Awareness came back with slow reluctance. His body hurt in a dozen places, his head worst of all. Mike probed his scalp, found lumps. He explored his mouth with his tongue and tasted old blood, but found no cuts. Memory was sluggish and it hurt to try and pull it out of the junk closet of his mind. He looked around, saw that he was in a field, saw his bike lying nearby. He vaguely remembered racing down the road, remembered hitting something in the dark and then falling. But after that…nothing.
