Dark Harvest, page 8
That girl can’t hide her feelings—her boyfriend might as well be a shadow as she dreams her dream…and pretty soon he is. A lush cornfield eclipses his face, the words WELCOME TO CORNCOB, NOWHERE threading like dark weeds through the green. Coming through that cornfield is a pumpkin-headed maniac with a knife, and if that naked girl got a look at him she’d scream her little head off. But she’s long gone by the time this particular September night rolls around—Sawtooth Jack’s razoring a path toward an artistic kid who’s so damned scared he can barely work up the courage to draw the demonic scene stirred up in his brain…a kid who’ll knuckle under in just a second and run into the night, leaving his art-class chalk there on the floor. And his pumpkin-headed creation will live up there on the wall as the calendar turns another page, but the chalk won’t last. It’ll grind to dust under a pair of heavy boots two weeks later as an angry boy with one hand in a cast cavemans a message on the wall, calling down the sadist who shattered his wrist with one crack of the nightstick. FUCK JERRY RICKS, the wall practically screams, AND THE HORSE HE RODE IN ON.
And finally there’s a quote, written as inspiration just a few nights ago. Eight words invented by a young man with too much imagination and too much faith:
AIN’T NO STOP SIGNS
ON THE BLACK ROAD.
—JIM SHEPARD, ’62
Jim Shepard never spoke those words in the seventeen years he spent on earth, but the October Boy whispers them now. They cross his jagged teeth in a dizzy fury, and for a moment he staggers under their weight…but only for a moment.
He shakes off the weight of shadows, and the weight of those who cast them.
All those strangers are gone now, but their words still cling to the wall.
Jim reads them in the harsh yellow light, staring at his name, knowing quite suddenly that he doesn’t even own it anymore.
That’s right. It isn’t his. Jim Shepard doesn’t exist anymore. Sure, he’s buried out in a cornfield, and sure, he’s walking around on a pair of twisted-vine legs tonight, but nothing remains of the boy he was. What Jim had has been stolen, the same as everything else…stolen, and set to another purpose…until all that remains is a bunch of words scrawled across a wall, and those words spell out sentences that get kids drunk the same way those sweet poisons they find in bottles get them drunk.
And that’s the way it works. With words, with poison. You drink those sentences down, and they prop up the dreams you keep inside you, and they spark something up there in your brain, and when you’re done you’ve got a bellyful of the most dangerous liquor on earth.
When you’re done, you’ve got yourself a story…one you can really believe.
That’s what the October Boy finds in Jim Shepard’s bedroom.
A story…the story…only it doesn’t have anything to do with the real Jim Shepard, and it isn’t even the truth.
It’s a lie. Same as Jack and the Beanstalk, with his goose that lays the golden eggs. Same as the story about that hook-handed killer who haunts every lover’s lane in every little town you ever heard of. Same as that old yarn about George Washington hacking down a cherry tree, or the tales you hear about Davy Crockett, or Billy the Kid, or Mickey Mantle.
They’re all lies.
The October Boy laughs his sandpaper laugh. Take one look at him and you’d have to say that there’s not much left of Jim Shepard that anyone would call human. There’s only a weavework of unnatural growth topped off with a carved nightmare of a head. But rooted deep within all that is a piece of equipment that’s as human as it gets. It’s a gnarled collection of vines twined one ’round the other like a thing created to dull an angry fieldhand’s scythe. It’s a backbone, and right now it feels finer than any made out of bone and blood and muscle.
Right now it feels like case-hardened steel, like it could shatter any blade in the world.
And it will. The October Boy will stake everything he has on that. He breathes the raw stink of scorched cinnamon and gunpowder and melting wax boiled up in his own hollow head, and he tells himself it will be so. The butcher knife creeps slowly from his wrist like a demon tomcat’s claw, and his fingers strangle the hilt as it fills his hand, and he promises himself that he’ll slaughter that lie tonight; he’ll carve the truth straight out of the shadows. He’ll make it to that church before the steeple bell tolls midnight. He’ll scream his ollie ollie oxen free so loud that everyone in town will cringe at the sound of his nightmare voice, and he’ll ring that bell until the rusty clapper flies free, and God help any fool who gets in his way.
That’s the way it has to be. The cycle will be broken tonight. No other boys will write on this wall, and no other boys will read the lies written there. Richie Shepard will never dream a single dream in this dead room. He’ll remember his brother Jim the way he was. He’ll never be touched by the sour wishes that live here, and he’ll never be tempted to add one of his own to those that blacken this wall.
The October Boy will see to that. If he lives until the calendar turns a page, then the story can’t. If he makes it to that church before midnight, then there’ll be no winner to sacrifice, no new boy to bury out in that cornfield. If he wins, the only dead thing remaining to fill the undertaker’s shovel will be the story, and that won’t be enough to grow another October Boy next year.
The Boy turns his back on the lies written on his bedroom wall. It’s time to go to work. His eyes spotlight the windowsill. There’s a matchbook to one side of the melted candles. He snatches it up. Next come the blankets from the worn mattress, which he tumbles against the far wall.
It’s hard to light a match with twisted-vine fingers.
You have to be careful.
You have to take a chance.
PART THREE
Fire
Of course, the October Boy knows what stands between him and the church. Packs of teenagers roaming the street like armed villagers in some old Frankenstein movie. Loners clinging to the shadows, ready to take off his head with baseball bats and fire axes. Young men sitting on the scar-colored brick steps of the church, waiting for their hometown’s own personal Big Bad Wolf to come sniffing at the door.
The October Boy knows he can’t run that kind of gauntlet. There’s not enough luck in this bleak little town to see him through. And that’s part of the reason he lit the fire—to create a diversion that will draw those young men away from the church, and at the same time give himself a sliver of a chance to get inside that building alive.
That’s what the Boy’s thinking about as flames erase the words written on his bedroom wall. He slams the door of the house he used to call home, and he slips behind the wheel of Mitch Crenshaw’s Chrysler. As he keys the engine, he pictures himself kicking open the front doors of the church.
A fireball blooms in his old bedroom as he peels out. The black window explodes. Shards of broken glass stab the dead lawn. Flames sweep down the narrow hallway, spilling into the dining room, climbing the legs of the dinner table his father built, blistering wallpaper that bursts aflame.
The thing that used to be Jim Shepard doesn’t see any of that. He doesn’t even look in the rearview mirror. He stares dead ahead, into the night. There are other fires waiting to be lit. And there are matches in the pocket, each one of them the seed of an inferno. But the October Boy isn’t thinking of fire as he hangs the corner and leaves the burning house behind. In his mind, fire is only a means to an end. His thoughts remain fixed on the church.
Seen in the cold yellow consciousness crackling within his hollow head, that building is already empty. Those who gathered around it on this blackest of nights have already turned their backs on it. That’s how solidly the Boy believes in fire, and his strategy. But that strategy is flawed. For there is at least one person who won’t be drawn away from the heart of the town tonight. The heat of a thousand fires wouldn’t move that man from his final sanctuary, though Jim Shepard doesn’t realize that yet.
No. Jim doesn’t know about the man who sits in the front pew, alone in the darkness. For the powers that be—those trusted few who make up the town’s Harvester’s Guild—that man is an insurance policy, a last line of defense. But for the October Boy, that man is a destination—however unanticipated—as well as an individual.
He’s the place where a single line connects into a circle.
Dan Shepard sits alone in the front pew, a riot gun cradled in his arms.
Jim’s father stares at the cross hanging dead center on the wall ahead, but that piece of hardware has never been more than window dressing in this town. It doesn’t mean much of anything to Dan, so he looks at his hands instead.
Cupped palms fill with moonlight filtered through a stained glass window. When he was just a teenager, Dan had those palms read at a carnival that passed through town. The fortune-teller told him that his lifeline was strong and his heartline was deep. But looking at his hands now, Dan doesn’t remember which line was which, so he has no idea if the intervening years have changed that schematic.
He only knows that his hands hurt something awful. Been a while since he worked with a hammer, like he did earlier tonight. And he sure never did a job with a butcher knife like the one he did out in that cornfield. Carving a face for the thing that used to be his son really put the ache in him. If he had some aspirins, he’d chew them up good right now and dry swallow every bitter grain.
Not that aspirin could mask the real ache, the one that lives down deeper than the grooves scoring his calluses. No. The real pain hides beneath his heartline and his lifeline and whatever those other lines are called. It lives in his joints; it lives between his bones. And Dan knows why that ache feels at home there, though he can’t quite remember how long it’s been that way. All he knows is, it’s a sure-enough fact that he put his hands through the mill in the years since that dark-eyed fortune-teller closed her fingers around his.
Dan always worked them hard in the fields—he did that for twenty years and then some—but he worked them harder tonight. Carving a face for his twice-born child at twilight. Then turning his back on the thing that used to be Jim and driving back to town. The way Dan sees it, that was plenty enough backbust for one evening, but it turned out it was only the beginning. Toss in a phone call from some bigwig in the Harvester’s Guild a couple hours ago if you want to notch things up, add the bastard telling him he had to meet Jerry Ricks face to face if he was prepared to blow things off the dial.
Ricks. The bastard who put a bullet in his son’s brain a year ago tonight. By the time Dan made it to the cop’s house, the eager monster was already out on the streets—that’s how impatient he was about getting his licks in tonight. So they had to meet here, at the church. That little dance was a whole different kind of torture, one Dan can’t forget:
“If it was up to me, you wouldn’t even be here,” Ricks says, dragging on a cigarette. “I don’t like the way you cringe, Shepard. I think you’re the kind of man who cries in his beer.”
“But you need me anyway, don’t you? Because I’m the only man who can stop him if he gets this far. I’m the only one he’ll listen to. You can’t talk to him. If you tried to explain things to him, he’d carve out your guts with that butcher knife before you could say two words.”
“Maybe, maybe not. Doesn’t really matter if the Boy could slice off a hunk of me. I couldn’t take him down even if I wanted to. We both know it has to be a kid brings down the October Boy. That’s the only way it works. And as far as sitting that freak down and explaining the facts of life to him—well, that’s sure as hell not my job.”
“Yeah. I almost forgot. You’re the town executioner, aren’t you, Jerry?”
“Shit on that. This year I’m the goddamn exterminator. The Run’s gone nuts. I had to gun down a bunch of kids over at the market. The little bastards were trying to break in. They killed Ralph Jarrett in cold blood—”
“Weeding out the strong ones, huh?”
“Just doing what needs done, asshole. I expect you to do the same. Your kid makes it through that door before twelve, you have a come-to-Jesus meeting with him. You show him he can’t win this thing. You explain exactly why he has to lose. And if he doesn’t get the message, you jam that shotgun barrel against his belly and you tell him to get his ass back out there on the streets where he belongs. Because if he’s not dead by midnight, this whole damn town is going straight to hell.”
“You’re a little late, Jer. We made that trip a long time ago.”
“Keep it up, smart guy. Go ahead and act like you’ve got a backbone, if it’ll make you feel better. You just take care of that freak if he comes walking into this place tonight. He’s your responsibility. After all, you’re the guy who squirted him out of the end of your dick.”
Ricks smiles when he says that last part. Just a little bit. Just enough. And the words and the smile burn in Dan’s brain and set his guilt on the sizzle. He nearly bites his tongue, nearly doesn’t say a word. Because he’s already lost one son, and he’s got another one at home, and he knows exactly what Ricks and his buddies in the Guild are capable of. He knows shutting up would be the smart thing to do, but his mouth is working before his brain can dam up his words, and those words are measured and bitter when they come.
“You can’t imagine what it takes. Just to sit here and talk to you. Just to do that much.”
“Oh, I can imagine. One look at you, and I get a real clear picture.”
“You don’t see shit.”
“Yeah I do. I see plenty.”
“No you don’t. You can’t see anything, and for one simple reason.”
“What’s that, genius?”
Dan takes a deep breath, staring at the clueless bastard.
“You don’t have any kids of your own, do you, Jerry?”
“Hell, no. You’d have to be nuts to have kids in a town like this.”
Again, Ricks smiles, the way he smiles when he works that heavy bag in his backyard. It’s as if the lawman nailed Shepard with a jab, dodged a counterpunch that had some potential hurt in it, then came back with a hammer of a right hand that shook his opponent to the core. And now he’s standing there, just waiting for Dan to forget the Marquess of Queensberry and go to fucking work.
In another town, it’d happen just that way. Dan would raise that riot gun, and Ricks would draw his pistol, and in a second one (or maybe both) of them would surely hit the floor bleeding. But that won’t happen here. In this town it’s different. Here, Dan Shepard can’t take that risk, not with a wife and kid at home. So Dan swallows those words…and though they’re not a pleasant meal, they’re nothing he hasn’t tasted before.
Once he gets them down, all he can do is laugh.
It’s his laughter that allows him to turn his back on Jerry Ricks.
It’s his laughter that carries him inside the church.
So that was that. Dan carried Ricks’s riot gun up the back steps, unlocking the back door of the church with the preacher’s own key, thumb-popping his knuckles as he walked through the silence and took his place in the front pew.
And he sat there, and he waited.
And he sits there now.
No, you don’t have to ask Dan Shepard about hurt. And you don’t have to ask how he got here, or how he can sit in the quiet with a shotgun cradled in his arms while he waits for the thing that used to be his son. He knows why, even if the words don’t cross his lips. Dan’s not a stupid man.
Just because he can’t put a name to the furrows life carved in his hands doesn’t mean he can’t see where those ditches run. He knows well enough where they run. He even knows how those ditches were dug. Hell, sometimes he can almost see the shovels working. And tonight he hears those kids screaming in the streets, and he remembers what it was like to be sixteen…or seventeen…or eighteen, and run in their number. When he could believe the things that people told him, and he could chase after a dream until his heart pounded like it was ready to batter its way through his rib cage and take off on its own.
And that’s the way it was back then. For Dan and for all the guys he knew. You remember how it was, because you weren’t really any different. You could believe the things that people told you, too. Their words were gospel, and you trusted them. You believed because you were sixteen…or seventeen…or eighteen. You believed because your dreams had started running up against the Line like it was a brick wall that didn’t have a single crack. And you believed—most of all—because you had to. You needed to believe that someone could get out of this town, same way you needed to believe that that someone just might be you.
And you held on to that belief. You had to. You held on, and it saw you through the Run, saw you crowned the winner. And it saw you down the black road to a cleared patch of dirt in a cornfield, a spot where Jerry Ricks’s Smith & Wesson took all your dreams away.
That’s the way it was for you, but it wasn’t that way for everyone. If you were a guy like Dan Shepard, you walked a different path. When those three special birthdays ticked by and you came up short, the way Dan did…well, you found a way to live with it. You made your peace with your failure. If nothing else, you figured you’d had your chance. You took your cuts at the Line, and you fell short, so you really didn’t have anyone to blame but yourself. And, hey, it was a bitter pill to swallow, but at least you knew you took those cuts. At least you tried. And if you didn’t catch the brass ring, well, hell, it wasn’t the end of the world. It was just the way things turned out…it was the way things turned out for damn near everyone you knew.
That’s right. If you were like Dan Shepard, you weren’t alone. Plenty of other guys had to swallow that pill, and they kept on getting up every morning. So did you, if you were a guy like Dan.
