Vic cocked his head and peered up at him. “If you can hear me, then do what you came here to do. You’re on the edge now, and you gotta do this right—and right means right now.”

The figure took a single step forward and then fell to his knees. His eyes were demented but pleading as they locked on Vic’s, but the mechanic shook his head. “Uh-​uh, chief. You gotta do it. It’s no good if I help you. Spoils the mojo.” He took a toothpick out of his pocket, tore off the plastic wrapper, and stuck it between his teeth. Mint. Very nice.

The dying stranger toppled forward onto his chest and lay there. Vic frowned at it for a moment, then relaxed when he saw that there was still a little movement of the chest. Still alive, but definitely on that edge. He idly chewed the toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other.

“Come on, sparky. You’re four feet away. If you want it that bad, crawl.”

The dying man did that. Slowly at first, just a faint flexing of white fingers in the dirt and a weak kick of the feet, and then the fingers dug into the mud and the toes of the shoes found purchase on a tangle of root, and the dying man began to crawl, wriggling like a misshapen snake through brown grass and mud.

Vic watched him, fascinated. He’d read about this in some of the books he’d found at the Man’s house, and on Web pages he’d prowled on the Net, but he’d never witnessed the process before. It was nothing like in the movies.

The man made it to the edge of the swamp and Vic felt a jolt of excitement shoot through him. This was it, he realized; the shit was really happening!

The dying man was at the end of his strength now, and with his very last effort he pulled himself over the bank and into the swampy mud. Blood still leaked from his wounds and it soaked into the black muck, becoming part of it. Vic could hear how hungrily the mud sucked at the wounds, drinking from them.

“Oh, hell yes,” he said softly.

“Yes…” This time it was the voice of the dying man. Faint but real, and it was full of joy as the swamp sucked the last blood out of him. “Oh…yes!”

Then there was a smell like sulfur and burned meat and gasses erupted from the swamp, curling up on either side of the dying man’s head. A moment later something black bubbled up all around him and Vic leaned close to see. It was thick, like blood, but it was the color of ink. Steam rose from it. It splashed all over the dying man and his face was completely covered in it. It pooled on the surface of the swamp and the biggest pool formed around the dying man’s head.

Vic waited for a moment to see what would happen next. The man looked dead; Vic could see no movement at all in his chest or back. And then he heard it…a faint sound. Like a baby nursing at a breast. A sucking sound.

Vic put his hands on the bank and lowered his head so that he could see the man’s mouth. Yeah, there it was. The man was drinking the black ichor of the swamp.

Smiling, Vic sat back on the bank and chewed his toothpick, feeling immensely pleased and powerful. It was a full ten minutes before the man raised his head from the surface of the swamp and sucked in a huge lungful of air. He turned with painful slowness and crawled back to the firm muddy ground and lay there, gasping, his eyes jumping with fever, his fingers twitching.

Vic tossed away the toothpick and took a cigarette out of his pocket and lit it. He smoked it all the way down, smoked another. It took about that long for the man just to sit up, and even then his head drooped down between his knees, muck and black goo dripping from his mouth and nose.

“How do you feel?” Vic asked sarcastically.

Karl Ruger just shook his head. A heavy barking cough spasmed through his chest and he vomited between his splayed legs. It was a mixture of red and black blood.

“I feel strange….”

“You don’t say,” Vic purred, enjoying this.

“My head…all fucked up…”

Vic snorted. “Pal, you don’t know the half of it.”

Ruger looked at him, his rheumy eyes sick but hostile. “Who the hell are you anyway?”

“Well, let me put it in words you might understand. I,” he said, “am the right hand of Ubel Griswold.”

The dying man’s eyes jumped.

Vic saw the words hit home and nodded. “Yeah, baby. Two dogs, one leash.” He bent forward, leaning his forearms on his thighs. “So listen close. My name’s Vic Wingate and the Man has work for both of us to do.”

Frowning, Ruger looked down at his chest, at the bullet holes that were not clogged with black goo.

“Good luck with that,” he rasped. “I’m fucking dying here.”

Vic shrugged. “Yeah, you are. But you’re one of his now, so pretty much Griswold will decide when and if you die—and what being dead will mean. It’s outta your hands as much as it’s outta God’s hands. New boss, new rules.”

Ruger coughed up a clot of blood. “You’re not making any sense. Christ, I’ve got four bullets in me.”

“Five, actually. But, lookee here—you ain’t dead yet. How about that?” He cocked his head to one side, considering. “Well…you ain’t completely dead. And you ain’t gonna really ever be dead until the Man wants you dead. Y’see, Ruger, ol’ buddy, you’ve got some work to do. I believe you have some unfinished business to attend to, old hoss.”

Some of the fire returned to Ruger’s cold eyes. “Fuck you, pal. If I’m going to do anything before I die it’s find that son of a bitch who shot me and tear his fucking throat out. And that broke-​nose country bitch.”

Vic stood up, brushed the dirt off his pants. “I believe we’re on the same page here, so I want you to listen to me for a minute. Yeah, you gotta square things with a few people. The asshole that shot you is named Malcolm Crow. He’s that Guthrie bitch’s boyfriend. It serves what the Man wants that both of them should stop fucking up the works. The Man has an old score to settle with Crow and it would go a long way toward getting with the program if you were to rip that little prick a new one.”

Ruger’s laugh was cold and wet, but Vic’s own face was sober as he added: “Understand something, though, sport. Make sure that however you do it, it makes headlines. Let’s give this fucker a Hollywood ending. Big, noisy, and nasty. Go down in a blaze of glory with the sons a’ bitches who did this to you. Hell, everybody’d believe that story. And belief, my friend, is what we need.”

“Why?”

“Like I said, the Man has his reasons. And then there’s one more thing you gotta do, and it has to be tonight.”

“What?”

Vic told him. As he spoke, black goo oozed from Ruger’s smiling mouth. His tongue flicked past his shattered teeth and over his purple lips, lapping up the ichor. He coughed again, spitting up more blood and pus and mud, but each time his lungs sounded clearer, though his face was still a waxy white from all the blood he’d lost. The fever in his eyes danced brighter and brighter.

Vic smiled, too; he took a long draw and snorted smoke out through his nostrils. “I’ll be seeing you later.” With that he turned and walked the mile back to his truck. He was still grinning when he slid behind the wheel.

Chapter 23

1

He didn’t even notice her when he stepped into the elevator, a small figure standing silent as a ghost in one corner; all he saw were the images crashing together in his mind. Terry jabbed the button for the fourth floor and was sucking on a kiwi-​flavored Lifesaver, thinking about Crow and Val, about Mark and Connie, and about Henry Guthrie dying alone out in the rain. He was close to overdosing on the Xanax, but he didn’t care. His plan was to go out, buy a bottle of something very strong—maybe bourbon, maybe scotch—bring it back, and sit vigil in the doctors’ lounge until they released Crow in the morning. He couldn’t make himself go home to Sarah, and he was too terrified to sleep.

Terry felt like he was a short step away from screaming. The effort of keeping a bland, normal expression on his face was driving him up a wall. Every time something else happened with this catastrophe he wanted to shout at everyone, to tell them to leave him alone; he felt constantly poised to run. Everything was starting to spin out of control, or slip like oily snakes between his fingers. Just in the last few weeks—since those awful nightmares had started, since a full night’s restorative sleep had become only a memory—it seemed as if each separate element of his life was becoming warped. The town was a mess. The crops were failing, the banks were going to have to foreclose on people Terry had grown up with, people who looked to him for answers because he was the mayor.

On top of that the town had become a battleground. Henry Guthrie was dead; Guthrie’s whole family was in the hospital. It was impossible to fit his mind around that. Crow had been shot! Police were swarming all over, taking control away from him. At home it was just as bad. Sarah wanted him to go back into therapy because of his dreams. Normally Terry liked the catharsis of therapy, but not lately—not with the kinds of dreams he’d been having. He did not want to be told that he was going crazy. It made him want to scream, because he thought he truly was losing his mind. Day by day, night by night, nightmare by nightmare. All he wanted from his shrink now was a fresh set of prescriptions. The antipsychotics and the antiaxiomatics weren’t doing their job, so he’d have to lean on Dr. Calder to prescribe something a whole lot stronger. Anything, as long as it took things down a notch and let him sleep without those dreams.

He stood there in the elevator, staring at his reflection in the polished steel of the elevator’s inner door; he stood there and looked at his face. No, not his face. The other face.

The face of…what? What was it? He didn’t even know what to call it.

It was the face of the thing that every night rose up and hunched over Sarah’s sleeping body, reaching for her with twisted hands, opening its mouth to reveal those huge…

He shuddered and closed his eyes, not even wanting to think about it, because every time his mind tried to put a name on the face reflected in the stainless steel door, his thoughts drifted immediately back in time, drifted thirty years back, revisiting the Pine Deep of his boyhood. The town had been so different then. It was a smaller place, and a darker place; darker without the merchandising and licensing of spooky things that now made the town rich, not the mildly scary darkness of Pine Deep, Bucks County’s Haunted Playground. Terry tried not to think about those days. He tried often and he tried hard, but he rarely succeeded, not when he looked in any reflecting surface and saw the daily changes that made his face less and less his own, and more and more the face of the nightmare beast. Those long-​ago days had left their mark on him in more ways than one, scaring him body and soul, and snatching away from him the one thing he loved most in all the world. Mandy. Little red-​haired Mandy. Three years his junior and more precious to him than most little sisters are to little boys. She was always happy, always smiling—something Terry as a child rarely was, and she always managed to find some way to trick him into laughing. But she was thirty years dead, lost to the darkness of those times.