Newton looked like he was about to cry. He placed both hands—lightly this time—on Mike’s shoulders. “Mike…has anyone ever told you that you were the greatest person to have ever walked the earth?”

Chapter 22

There are shunned places in this world where no one should ever go. Black places where the darkness clings to the sides of trees and the undersides of rocks, like lesions from some ancient disease.

These places are not consciously shunned; they don’t call enough attention to themselves for that. The oldest and most instinctive parts of our minds avoid them perhaps, just as the hummingbird abhors the dying flower and the bear eschews the diseased fish. Year after year, century after century, they endure. Sometimes they fade away to paleness like the dust on old bones, the malevolent fires banked, almost cold—but never, never going out. Sometimes that dark energy flares, stoked by the deliberately manufactured death of some innocent thing, or by the desire of some hateful heart.

Such a place can be infused with even greater darkness if enough deliberate evil is enacted there: the blood and tears, fear and malfeasance imprinting the soil and stone and trees, the corruption leaving a stain that no rain or hand can sponge away. There have been houses that have endured and witnessed such horrors that they have become like batteries storing up evil; some battlefields are like that, the blood-​soaked soil still vibrating with the echoes of dying heartbeats, cold with the last pale breaths of fallen soldiers who lay and bled and begged for salvation and ultimately cursed God as they died. In a kinder world, such places would be locked away behind impenetrable forests, or buried unreachably deep beneath granite mountains, or lost in the sands of the most remote and forbidding desert. In a kinder world, such malignant places would be fewer and weaker and would not possess the power to reach out into the world of men and whisper the doctrine of darkness, to seduce minds hungry for some corrupt purpose, to inspire tainted hearts to apostolic devotion; but in this world the evidence that such things have happened time and again is all too clearly written in the book of human suffering. In a kinder world such places could be eradicated, made pure, washed clean. In a kinder world, but not this world. These shunned places endure, waiting, patient, and always hungry.

Black-​hearted men who sense this are drawn to these places, and finding them is like coming home.

The town of Pine Deep lay nestled in the arms of the mountains, overlooking vast forestland and farmland, streams and brooks, the silvery thread of the river, hollows and marshes, and one dark, forgotten, shunned place. It lay southeast of the town, pushed down into the shadows of the three tall hills that stand over the narrow valley known as Dark Hollow.

There is a place, deep within the hollow, where the ground is always marshy with black mud, the air thick with blowflies and mosquitoes. The leaves and pine needles that lie like a blanket over the swampy ground turn black within seconds of landing there and they give off a stink like rotten eggs and spoiled meat. From beneath the carpet of leaves there is a darker ichor that bubbles up every once in a while and stains the banks of the marsh; the ichor smells like fresh blood but tastes like tears.

Thirty years ago there was a murder there at the edge of the swamp. A thin black man from the Mississippi Delta and a big white man from Germany, both of whom had traveled long and strange roads to get to that spot, and fought as night fell and the moon rose, and the black man had killed the white man. He beat him down and stabbed him with a stake made from the shattered neck of a blues guitar. The black man buried the white man in the swamp and an hour later he himself was dead, beaten to death by rednecks who thought he was the devil himself and not the man who had saved the whole town from a monster. It was the kind of thing that should have ended up in a song, maybe even a blues song, but no one ever knew about it and no song was ever written to tell about how the Bone Man killed the devil with a guitar.

For thirty years that swamp lay like a secret, its reality becoming something akin to rumor as the years passed. It was too difficult to get to except by intrepid hikers, and for some reason hikers never went that way. Only one person ever came there, but he came there not as a hiker but as a supplicant, kneeling to worship at the edge of the Dark Hollow swamp.

Vic Wingate’s soul and mind were as dark and rancid as the muck beneath the leafy covering of that swamp, and he had appointed himself to be the caretaker of that terrible grave. He knew its secrets—had known them since he’d coerced those other men into beating the Bone Man to death. At first he’d thought killing the Bone Man was just revenge, but now he knew that it was part of a master plan so comprehensive that it rolled forward like destiny. He was caught up in it, and he loved it.

Vic had been part of it even then. Even as a teenager he had belonged heart and soul to the fallen devil at whose graveside he worshiped. When Ubel Griswold had still lived in Pine Deep, Vic had become something between apprentice and lapdog, just as now he had become something between priest and general. As those long years had passed, Vic had labored to keep his secret safe and to prepare the way for those events that were foretold by the dark whispers of the buried dead; and for his labors the ancient voice of shadows told him many secrets, forcing Vic’s inner eyes to open wide and behold things that were only possible when love and compassion and restraint were abandoned. It spoke to him of a time when even the dreaming dead would awaken and then the whole world—not just the town of Pine Deep—would drown in a tidal wave of blood. In the unsanctified shadows of Dark Hollow the ghost of Ubel Griswold converted Vic Wingate into a believer in the glory of the Red Wave.

Vic had waited patiently as the years had passed, but over the last few days his heart beat faster, his breath came in short excited gasps because he knew that the waiting was almost over. It was Thursday the thirtieth of September, just one full day since Karl Ruger had come into town like a bad storm, bringing violence and death. In a few hours it would be October, and that was his month. The month of the sleeper beneath the swamp. By the end of October, Vic knew, for the people in Pine Deep, perhaps for all the people in the world, the sands of time would have run out. The first time he’d thought of that it sounded grandiose, but now he understood how it was going to work, and he believed—knew—that it would work. He would be at the Man’s right hand when it happened, a general with more power than kings.

During the days Vic worked on his cars in Shanahan’s Garage and he thought about that dark, shadowy place, about him who slept there, but who came awake now every night. He could feel the calls the Man sent out every night, the call to other darkly beating hearts, hearts like Vic’s own. Like Karl Ruger’s. Vic knew now that Ruger had been drawn to Pine Deep somehow; the Man had done that by some means that even Vic didn’t understand. Probably Boyd, too; after all, the Man had wanted him and had sent the construct out to fetch him from Guthrie’s farm. Vic knew that every night the dead thing in the swamp burdened the earth with its prophets, and they went forth through the forests and the fertile fields, spreading a perverted gospel to the damned. Vic loved it all, and he loved him—the Man—the sleeper on the threshold of awakening.

Now Vic waited for the Man to awaken him who would be his left hand. The other general in the army of the Red Wave. Vic understood some of it, but not all of it. For all of the darkness in his soul, he was still a creature of the light and could not fully grasp the subtleties of the world of night. He read a lot, though. He tried to fill himself with knowledge on everything that might pertain to the Man and his plan, but he was still human. Boyd no longer was. And Ruger…well, the Man had special plans for him.

Vic squatted at the edge of the swamp. It was getting late. In another hour the sun would be down. Lois was home, probably deep inside a bottle by now. That punk Mike had better be there, too. No matter how much his creepy smile had unnerved Vic last night, if that kid so much as stepped one cunt-​hair’s width out of line Vic was going to break something this time. Maybe an arm bone. Maybe a collarbone. Something that would hurt so much Mike would not even think about giving him any kind of jerk-​off smile. Fuck that. Vic would do what he had to do to show everyone who was the big dog.

He’d felt the Man call him to the hollow, and he’d come, but since he’d been there the Man had said nothing. There were whispers in his head; the only thoughts there were his own.

He lingered though, knowing that he wouldn’t have been called without a reason. So he hunkered down and watched with growing fascination as thousands of insects—beetles, roaches, ants, praying mantises, caterpillars—crawled out of the woods on all sides of him and threw themselves into the swamp. They vanished beneath the carpet of blackened leaves and there were small popping sounds as the bigger ones were yanked beneath the surface. The smaller ones didn’t make a sound as they were sucked beneath the surface. The Man was hungry, Vic thought, and he smiled. He used to love watching the Man eat back in the day. Sometimes he’d bring him tied-​up rabbits and toss them into the swamp, watching as the Man’s black blood bubbled up around them and dragged them down.

A twig snapped behind him and Vic was instantly up and turned and there was a German Luger in his hand. The gun had once belonged to the Man and Vic had found it years ago, lying in the mud almost where he now stood facing the woods. It had been Vic’s most prized possession—the last thing the Man had touched before he died.

His finger had five pounds on an eight-​pound trigger and Vic was a twitch away from killing something. His eyes cut back and forth across the wall of evergreens and shrubs. Then a tangle of vines parted and a figure stepped out into the gloom, and Vic lowered his gun, smiling thinly. He slid it back into the shoulder rig he wore beneath his windbreaker.

“’Bout fucking time you showed up,” he said, squatting down again. “You look like shit.”

The figure stared at him with fevered eyes. It stood swaying on dirt-​streaked legs, its clothes in rags and showing skin that had been bleached white with blood loss. There was a brightness of sweat on the stranger’s face and his mouth hung open, lips slack, teeth clotted with blood and dirt. There were bullet holes in its chest and stomach; some of them still seeped blood and pus.