Dead Man's Song

Page 70

“Such as?”
“Such as the cattle on his farm. Remember what I said about him raising a herd of cattle?”
“Uh…right, the cattle he never sold. So what?”
“So, what happened to the cattle?”
“You mean, why did they die during the Black Harvest?”
“No, you ninny, what happened to them in the years before? He raised cattle, he bred cattle.”
“So, maybe he fancied himself a cowboy.”
“Cute. No, his herd, small as it was, changed size from season to season. Sometimes he had a lot, sometimes only a few dozen.”
“So what?”
“If he didn’t sell them, then what was happening to make the herd dwindle during the times when he didn’t have as many?”
“I don’t know, for Christ’s sake. Maybe he liked a lot of steaks.”
“No one eats that much beef. Not even Gus Bernhardt,” Crow said with a grin. He drew his machete to cut away some vines that blocked their way. “Plus, isn’t it odd that the killings of the people in Pine Deep only started after all of Griswold’s cattle had died off during the plague? Put those two facts together and you have a pretty odd pattern.”
“What…you think he was amusing himself by killing his cattle for years,” Newton said, “and then when they bit the dust, he started in on the local citizenry?”
“Something like that.”
Newton laughed. “Oh, come on! And people call me paranoid.”
“You explain it.”
“Why bother? Griswold probably really was selling off his cattle somewhere else.”
“People in town would have known.”
“How? Did you have twenty-four-hour surveillance on his property? Maybe he had a private arrangement with a meatpacking plant somewhere, just selling a couple here and there to supplement his income, or justify his image as a gentleman cattle rancher, Pennsylvania style.”
“We would have known,” Crow insisted stubbornly. “This is a small town, and it was a lot smaller back then. People know everyone else’s business. Besides, in order for a person to sell off cattle they have to pay taxes on the sale, and Griswold never once paid taxes on a single cow or bull, not once in ten years. I checked. The only records show the cattle he bought to replenish his herd. I still think that he was killing them off himself.”
“Hell, he wouldn’t be the first farmer to shy his taxes.” Shaking his head and smiling, Newton said, “But even if he wasn’t, why on earth would he kill them himself? What would be the point?”
“Maybe he liked it,” Crow said. “Or…maybe he needed to do it.”
Newton blinked. “Needed? For what? Some kind of religious voodoo thing?”
“There are other reasons for killing.”
“Such as?”
Crow cut away a thick vine, putting arm and shoulder into it so that the heavy machete blade sheared cleanly through it. His wrist and ribs had healed nicely and the exercise felt good. “For lack of a better term,” he said, “call it a primal need.”
“Primal need? That’s a weird choice of words.”
“It seems to fit.”
“Why? What makes you so sure, so certain of all this? You seem bound and determined to pin all that horror and all that crime on Griswold. Why?”
“For the same reason I already told you. When he dragged me out of the bushes, I saw his face.”
“Yeah, and you thought he looked like a monster. Come on, Crow, you were a terrified kid! Your brother had just been killed in a horrible and terrifying way. You almost certainly had nightmares the night before, and here it was, nighttime again. You were sitting in your yard, daydreaming, rocked by the loss of Billy, horrified by the other killings, too young to make any kind of sense of it all. Mix all that together and you have the perfect brew to warp a child’s perceptions of what he sees. Then someone tosses you into a bush and before you know it strong hands are pulling at you. You say that the face you saw was a monster’s face? Crow, with all that going on, how could you not have seen a monster?”
Newton sighed. “Look, I’m not trying to badger you, man, but try to see it objectively. All the evidence points to Oren Morse—none of it points to Griswold, except the cattle thing, and I could work up twenty good reasons for that. You were a little kid. Terrified, in shock, confused. What you saw was a man’s face, his features probably distorted by shadows and moonlight and the leaves of the bush. There are no monsters, man. Truth to tell, there are enough rotten, bloodthirsty sons-a-bitches in the human race without us needing any help from things that go bump in the night. That’s one of the reasons I don’t believe in the devil. If there’s a devil making people do it, or if there are demons possessing innocent folk and making them hurt other people, then it takes the culpability away from man himself. We have to be responsible for our own actions.”
He gave Crow a reassuring nod. “When you were nine, you couldn’t understand that any man, any human being, was capable of committing the horrors that were happening in town. You couldn’t accept that a man had done those things to your brother. For a kid, it’s much easier to believe in monsters—after all, monsters are supposed to do bad things, they’re evil by their nature, so there is no betrayal of human morality. Crow, you needed it to be a monster, and so it was.”
“You’re wrong,” Crow said simply. He stopped and slid the machete into its flat sheath and looked at Newton with humorless eyes. “There are monsters. I saw one. You make a really good argument, Newt, I’ll give you that. Very persuasive, eminently logical, but you are wrong. I know what I saw.”
“But—”
“It was pretty bright, despite being nighttime. It was two days past the peak of the full moon, there was a lot of light. I saw his face.”
“Griswold’s face?”
“Uh huh. Almost his face. Maybe in another couple of nights it would have been even more like his face. Maybe two days earlier it had been a lot less like his face—but on that night, it was somewhere between.”
“Between…what and what? You’re not making sense.”
Crow’s dark eyes glittered. “Between the face of a man,” he said softly, “and the face of a wolf.”
Newton opened his mouth to speak. Words utterly failed him.
Crow nodded. “Yep, that’s exactly what I’ve been trying to tell you. There were two sets of murders, each spread out over a handful of days, separated by just less than a month. Both sets began just two days before the full moon and ended two days after.”
Newton still couldn’t manage the words.
“I think Ubel Griswold was a werewolf,” said Crow.
Chapter 24
(1)
“Please tell me that you’re just having a mental breakdown,” Newton said, “and that you don’t really believe that Griswold was a werewolf.”
They had stopped walking and stood together in a natural clearing surrounded by wild rhododendrons and holly. A few crows were gossiping back and forth above them in the trees. Crow met the reporter’s skeptical stare with his own flat and level one. “I know what I saw.”
“You were nine!” Newton yelled.
“Yeah, I was nine!” Crow yelled back, “and at age nine I saw a fucking werewolf! I don’t care if you don’t believe it.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Well I damn well do!” Crow bellowed those words and they seemed to hang in the air around them like ozone.
Newton made a dismissing hand gesture and turned away, walking ten steps down the path they had come, saying, “This is nuts. How the hell I ever got talked into coming down here…”
“You can go back if you want to.”
Newton wheeled and marched right back and, when he was close enough, jabbed Crow in the chest with a stiffened finger. “Tell me what you saw. Exactly, every detail. Put me in the scene if you want me to believe this bullshit.”
Crow’s face went suddenly scarlet and in a movement too fast for Newton to see he grabbed the reporter by the front of the shirt and spun him completely around and slammed him up against a pine tree and held him there, fists knotted in the cloth of his jacket front. Newton’s hiking stick went clattering to the ground between them and Crow kicked it angrily aside. He leaned in close and his voice was a feral whisper. “Listen, asshole, this thing killed my brother and it damn near killed me. I was not hallucinating, and what I’m telling you right now is not me flashing back to the DTs. I saw its face, man, I looked right into Griswold’s face and I saw it change. I saw bones moving, Newt, I saw his eyes turn from blue to yellow to red. I saw that snout and saw the teeth tearing through the gums, dripping blood, getting longer. I smelled its breath on his face. I saw Ubel Griswold change. I saw it. Not a man, not some jerkoff in a fright mask. I saw the change.”
He took a breath and exhaled sharply, and then pushed himself away from Newton. “I saw it.” He turned away, flapping an angry hand at Newton. “Val was right. You’re really are an asshole and I should never have trusted you.” He kicked a stone and it went skittering through the brush, startling the crows, who leapt into the air to find higher branches.
Then he turned back to face the reporter. “If you want to go back, then go back. You know the way. But I’m going on and I’m going to find his house. I want to look inside…I need to look inside. Maybe I’ll find nothing but raccoon shit and thirty years of dead termites…but maybe I’ll find some evidence of who he was, and what he was.” He stopped and pointed to the northeast. “Did you even bother to look up Griswold’s name on the Internet?”
Newton nodded, unable to speak.
“Did you look up what his name means?”
A shake of the head this time.
Crow laughed. “I told you that it probably wasn’t even his real name. I told you that on Val’s porch; well the other day I did a translation on it on Google and guess what I found out. You know what it means? You know what ‘Ubel Griswold’ means?” He didn’t wait for an answer but stepped closer. “It’s German for ‘Wolf from the Gray Forest.’” He spat on the ground. “Don’t you get it? He was screwing with us back then. It was a nickname, a stupid in-joke for him and that goon squad that hung around him. Wolf from the Gray Forest. This is the gray forest, you moron!” Crow shouted. “Look around you.” Indeed the forest was perpetually gray, always in shadows. “And he was the wolf that lived here.” He closed his eyes and shook his head. “He was telling us all along and we were just stupid yokels who didn’t have a clue. God!” Once again he turned and stalked a few feet away, swiping angrily at the air and cursing.