Crow gave the tractor some gas and picked up speed. Usually the ride through the dark farmlands and forest was done at little more than a walking pace, slow enough for the spooky shadows under the trees to get the customers in the proper frame of mind for the beasties to scare the hell out of them every couple hundred yards. Crow tooled along at a respectable thirty miles an hour, slowing only to embark a few wandering creatures of the night.

The job, the great and important mission assigned to him by Terry Wolfe, had been accomplished so quickly and easily that Crow almost felt a twinge of disappointment. Not that he wanted any kind of trouble, but the thought of real-​life monsters out there had pumped him full of adrenaline, and now he was fidgety.

Back in the office, he supervised the return of the cash and the handing out of rain checks. He also found a moment to take Coop and some of the older monsters aside and tell them about what was happening in town. They were all suitably impressed.

“Okay,” he summed up, “here’s what I want to happen. Rigger, you and Bailey make sure all of the customers get to their cars. Give the usual spiel about keeping windows and doors locked, not picking up strangers, and driving with headlights and seat belts on. Tom and Del, you two work the road with flashlights and make sure everybody gets onto the right side of the road. Not like last October. We don’t want any fender benders tonight. Okay? The rest of you, close down the buildings, lock everything up, and report back to Coop. Coop, I want you to do a roll call. No, don’t look at me like that. I want everyone accounted for before you leave. Everyone goes on the buddy system. Even if you have to take a leak, bring your buddy to shake it for you. No one, and I mean no one, works alone or drives home alone. If you came in separate cars, then follow your buddy home. These are really bad guys out there, kids, so let’s not get stupid. Let’s shut ’er down and go home.”

Which is exactly what they did.

While all of this was happening, Crow strolled over to the main office, where Barney was helping count the cash.

“Hey, where’s Mike Sweeney?”

Barney looked up and Crow could see the residual shock in the young man’s eyes. “His, um, folks came and got him right after you left.”

Crow searched his face. “What happened?”

Barney looked around to make sure no one else was close enough to hear, then in a hushed voice told Crow what had happened.

Crow stared at him, eyes hard and angry, mouth a tight line. He said nothing.

Barney shook his head. “And people come here to see monsters.”

Chapter 15

1

Vic pulled into the driveway in front of his house and then killed the station wagon’s engine. Inside the car the only sound was Vic’s steady breathing, in and out through his nose like a bull. Lois Wingate had her hand over her mouth and her face turned away, ostensibly staring out the side window but actually looking at nothing. She hadn’t said a single word since Vic had pulled into the hayride.

In the back, Mike was sprawled in a heap just staring at the roof of the car, nearly lost in a world composed entirely of pain.

Never in his life had he been hit so hard. Mike would remember those moments at the Haunted Hayride for as long as he lived. It was the very first time Vic had ever punched him, and the fact of it, far more than the force, had numbed his brain. It had come out of nowhere and exploded a big white bell in Mike’s head, then darkened his skies and his thoughts for a long moment. He had been beaten before, but it had always been an open hand or a belt. Never a fist. Vic had just taken him down one level to a lower place of darkness. From now on the beatings would be different. Vic had crossed a line, and Mike knew that there was never any way to go back. Lying there in the back of the car, Mike knew it with a dreadful clarity.

Vic got out, slammed his door, and jerked open the back door.

“Get out.” His voice sounded incongruously mild, and for a moment Mike’s optimism flared. Maybe that punch was all there would be. Maybe it was enough.

Moving as if his stomach and ribs were made out of fragile glass, Mike peeled himself up off the seat and got out of the car. He flinched away from Vic as his stepfather swung the door shut.

“Get in the house.”

Mike fled into the house and was starting up the stairs when just behind him Vic said, “Where do you think you’re going?”

The moment froze in time, and if Mike had a button somewhere that he could push and end his life right there, he’d have pushed it. He had one hand on the banister and one hand on the wall, his left leg raised to step up. His stomach was a fiery ball of pain greater by far than the steady ache in his ribs.

Then there was his mother’s voice, thin and wavering, but still there in the doorway. “C’mon, Vic, don’t you think that’s enough?”

It was the longest moment of Mike’s young life as he waited for what Vic would say. He turned and looked down at Vic, who stood halfway between where Mike’s mother was framed in the open doorway and the foot of the steps. Vic raised his finger and pointed to her the same way he had pointed to Barney at the hayride. “If you open your fucking mouth one more time—just once more—so help me God, I’ll beat you so hard you’ll shit blood for a month. You know I’ll do it, too, Lois.”

His mother had paled at the threat and snapped her mouth shut. She came in, closed the door, edged past Vic, and fled into the living room, snatching the bottle of Tanqueray off the wet bar as she went. A second later Mike heard the TV come on.

Mike’s gaze drifted across the wasteland of his optimism to where Vic stood smiling. A powerful and implacable figure at the foot of the stairs.

“Come down here,” Vic said. “Right now.”

Mike debated his chances. He might be able to make it up the stairs and into his room before Vic caught him, but what then? Vic could easily kick down the door, and an open act of defiance would be like throwing gasoline on a fire.

His legs moved before his mind was aware that he’d surrendered, and he came down into the living room.

Vic never stopped smiling as he beat Mike from one end of the house to the other.

Mike didn’t remember all of it; maybe he passed out once or twice, or maybe the mind can only contain just so much, but large parts of it were gone, just vague blurs of hard hands and harder words and Vic’s smile as Mike recoiled from each punch, peering down at Mike as he waited for flesh to puff.

When the beating had started Mike had pleaded, and begged…and wept. Usually the tears stopped the beatings, as if it was a prize Vic sought and was satisfied with. This time there was no stopping, and if anything the tears made Vic hit harder.

The beating had started in the foyer but when Mike’s mind was able to take some sort of stock of what was happening he found that he was crammed into the corner of the kitchen with no clear memory of having crawled there, squeezed as far back as he could into the narrow slot between refrigerator and cabinet, his forearms crossed over his face. Vic stood over him, chest heaving from his exertions, sweat running down his face.

“You little piece of shit. Do you have any fucking idea how much trouble you put me to? Do you have any fucking idea how embarrassing it was to have to come out and fetch you like that? Do you have any fucking idea how embarrassing it was to have the fucking mayor of the fucking town call us up to tell us to go get you? It makes your mom and me look like bad parents. Letting you out till all fucking hours of the night. Do you know how much fucking trouble you are, you pissant little turd?”

“Please…” Mike whimpered. Tears streamed from his eyes.

“What the hell are you crying for, you little pussy? I ain’t begun to hit you yet!”

It began anew. Vic dragged Mike out of the corner and rained down punches and kicks and slaps until that was all that existed in Mike’s world.

But then something happened.

One minute his mind was filled with pain and terror and shock, and as if some hand had punched a button on a remote control everything switched. All at once Mike’s mind stepped out of itself. It was the weirdest feeling in his life, and he was fully aware of it. He could feel an actual physical shift as his consciousness just lifted and moved to another place. Not far off, but not in the body that was being beaten. It was like the out-​of-​body experiences Mike had read about in articles on people who had died and were later revived. He could see Vic standing there, straddling the body that Mike’s consciousness knew was his own, but he was just not in that body. Somehow—impossibly—he’d left. Just got up and left.

He didn’t know how, and he didn’t know why, but without meaning to his thinking mind had stepped out of the body. None of the blows that rained down mattered now. He didn’t feel them—at least he didn’t care about them. He was aware of a kind of sensation, almost like a vibration, or an echo, as if when each blow landed it sent a tremor through his flesh that only vibrated against his separate self, but it was just that. A vibration without the corresponding pain. Like the tremble from the TV speakers when something in a movie blew up. Only that and nothing more.

Mike had one brief moment of panic when he thought that this meant that he was dead, that one of Vic’s punches had done something to him. Burst something, knocked something loose, and that his body was dying as he floated there watching. Was he having a near-​death experience? If so, there was no team of doctors waiting to zap him with a defibrillator unit.

The fear faded, though, as if his spirit could not hold such an intense emotion for very long. Or, perhaps, emotion was merely chemical, as his science teacher said it was. Out of the body there were no chemicals to mix to provoke or sustain emotions.

Mike felt the panic quickly replaced with a kind of bland peacefulness. Or, perhaps, a lack of caring.

He watched Vic and saw the man’s muscles bunch and roll, saw his hands move up and down, saw him shift to put power behind each blow. It was fascinating, like watching a machine, and he could study it with a total lack of emotional involvement. The hands rose and snapped down, sometimes as slaps, sometimes as punches.