The Revenant Road Read online

  He’d made the trip from Chicago, where we’d lived until 1973, to New York, largely because my parents had only allowed me to take one toy with me during a hastily organized move conducted in the dead of night.

  The black-clad Doctor Necropolis wielded a ‘Flying Death-ray Lazer Pocket Watch,’ ‘Perfect Karate-chop Action’ and a ‘Time-Grenade’ that could blast his enemies into the distant future or the forgotten past.

  My Doctor Necropolis knew when people were going to die.

  He’d begun speaking to me sometime after my sixth birthday, an item he’d instructed me never to share with either of my parents.

  Newsflash from Futureville, O-dog,” Necropolis chuckled.

  My father was fiddling with the radio as we drove along the Merritt Parkway toward New York while Lenore sat staring out of the passenger window, her jaw muscles clenching as she gnawed the bone of her discontent. Finally, the bone broke. Always consistent, Lenore went for the marrow.

  “When we left Chicago you promised me that it was over, Marcus.”

  Marcus took a deep breath and kept his eyes fixed upon the road.

  “They’re breathing down my neck, Lenore,” he said.

  Briefly, our eyes met in the rear-view mirror.

  “Let’s talk about this later,” he said.

  My father took pains never to argue with Lenore in front of me. Sometimes this made him appear weak before the juggernaut that was (and is) my mother: Lenore suffered from no such compunction.

  “I don’t care,” she hissed. “I don’t care if he knows. You spend more time with Kowalski than you do with him anyway, so don’t pretend that you care.”

  “Lenore, when Kowalski calls...”

  “You jump,” she said savagely. “You jump up and run to him like his little black lapdog every time.”

  When angered, Marcus could bellow like a general commanding troops under heavy fire. Marcus worked nights. A lot of nights. Often, I’d heard them arguing when they thought I was at school. I’d sit on the front porch until the screaming stopped, too angry to open the door and scream at them to shut up shut up just shut...up.

  But the finality I heard in my father’s voice that afternoon scared me more than the loudest shout.

  Party’s over, O-dog, Doctor Necropolis whispered.

  “You have no idea what’s happening out there, Lenore,” Marcus said, “and I’m tired of explaining it to you.”

  My mother actually gasped. She was (and is) a woman unaccustomed to being thwarted.

  “You arrogant son-of-a bitch,” she snarled. “Don’t you dare talk down to me.”

  “Dad?” I interrupted.

  Marcus looked up at me in the rear-view mirror again.

  “Quiet, son,” he said.

  I returned his smile. They were rare and I wanted to make this one last.

  May 19th, O-dog, Doctor Necropolis whispered. Wanna know what year?

  Shut up, you bastard, I thought.

  Part of me hoped that I was crazy; that a twelve-dollar bundle of balsa wood and string couldn’t really predict when a man would die.

  The problem was that four months earlier, Necropolis had predicted the death of Tubby the Wonder Cat, my Aunt Selena’s Siamese surrogate child. He’d correctly forecast the fatal heart attack of our next-door neighbor, Mr. Grant, as well as the abduction and murder of my kindergarten-teacher Mrs. Reagan.

  The problem was that Doctor Necropolis was never wrong.

  Marcus and Lenore loved each other, for the most part, but some unuttered resentment clouded the air between them. For my whole life we’d lived under that cloud the way prairie dogs live beneath the shadow of a circling hawk. We completed the drive back to New York shrouded in the kind of silence you find at the better funerals.

  Marcus moved out the next day.

  4

  An Affair to Dismember

  Criswell Nature Preserve, Northwestern Seattle.

  At 10:38 PM, two nights after Jeannie Montgomery was killed, a black Suburban sat parked on the edge of a clearing two miles south of the abandoned guard gates. The park rangers had received a call concerning an injured bear cub that had been sighted on the other side of the park.

  Neville Kowalski, the man who made the call about the bear cub, opened the passenger door of the black SUV and stepped out into the clearing. In the circle of illumination thrown by the SUV’s headlights, another man knelt in a patch of red grass.

  “That her?” Kowalski said.

  His partner didn’t answer.

  “Grudge?”

  Marcus Grudge stood and nodded, “Some of her.”

  As Kowalski ambled toward the clearing he stubbed his toe on a log half-hidden in the soil.

  “Son of a... Fuck!” Kowalski hissed.

  Grudge frowned. “You kiss your mother with that mouth?”

  Kowalski shrugged. “Every chance I get, brother.”

  The two men stared down at the gutted corpse at their feet. Kowalski glanced up at Grudge. The big black man was glaring at the Montgomery girl as if he could reanimate her by the force of his will.

  “Something’s not right,” he said.

  “I know,” Kowalski said. “Two o’ those goddamn chimichangas at Taco Mundo and I got the worst gas leak since the Exxon Valdez.”

  “I’m serious, Nev,” Grudge said. “Something’s hinky.”

  Kowalski looked around the clearing.

  “Whadda ya got?”

  Grudge shook his head, “Not sure.”

  Kowalski knelt to study Jeannie Montgomery’s remains.

  “Nosferatu?” he said.

  “No,” Grudge grunted. “Too messy. Whatever ate this poor gal was also a mutilator. ‘Suckers don’t waste blood.”

  Kowalski scratched the three-day growth of graying beard stubble that clung to his cheeks. “Wolf?”

  “Hasn’t been a skinwalker in the States in five years,” Grudge said. “But this thing, whatever it is… it feels a little like a Wolf.”

  Grudge shook his head, his brow furled in concentration. “Something like it anyway.”

  Kowalski belched and stood up. “We’d better get in the wind,” he said. “Park Ranger’ll be making the rounds any minute.”

  “Jesus,” Grudge said. “Can’t you feel it?”

  Kowalski stopped. After twenty years on the Road with Marcus Grudge he knew when to stop and pay attention.

  “What is it?” he said.

  Grudge was silent for nearly a minute. But finally, he opened his eyes. “Nothing,” he shrugged.

  He dropped a big gnarled hand on Kowalski’s shoulder and offered a faint smile.

  “You alright?” Kowalski said.

  Grudge shrugged.

  “I miss them, Neville,” he said. “I miss my life.”

  Grudge rubbed his eyes with his knuckles and sighed deeply. “I’ve been thinking a lot about them lately. Know what I mean?”

  Kowalski nodded. “Well, family ain’t everything it’s cracked up to be.”

  The night wind kicked up sharply. A cold draft raised the hackles on the back of Kowalski’s neck.

  “You think what we do matters?” Grudge said.

  Kowalski shrugged.

  “Dunno,” he said. “Freezin’ my ass off though.”

  Grudge remained silent.

  “Say,” Kowalski snapped. “What the Hell crawled up your skink-hole?”

  “Choices,” Grudge said. “I’m just not sure they were the right ones.”

  Kowalski scowled. “Somethin’ you ain’t tellin’ me?”

  Grudge didn’t answer. He stared at the dead girl lying in the grass. Then he swore and punched Kowalski in the shoulder.

  “I guess I’m just getting too old for this sh—”

  The howl from beyond the treeline cut him off.

  “What the hell was that?” Kowalski said.

  Grudge pulled a silver-plated H&K .38 automatic. Kowalski’s Sig Sauer appeared in his right fist as if by sleight of hand. The two men s
tood back-to-back.

  The howl repeated, closer this time.

  “Christ,” Kowalski snarled. “What is that?”

  “Goddamit, I don’t know.”

  “Bullshit,” Kowalski said. “You holdin’ silver?”

  “It’s not a Wolf,” Grudge hissed. “Look, over there.”

  Kowalski looked toward the edge of the clearing.

  Something was watching them. A dark shape, partially hidden, high up in the trees. The thing glared at them, a sick amber light flickering in its eyes.

  “Holy Mary Mother of God,” Grudge hissed.

  The hunters lifted their guns, too late, as the shadow thing screamed and leapt at them.

  It was Marcus Grudge’s sixty-fourth birthday.

  May 19th.

  5

  Skirmish

  Television sucks.

  And let’s face it, dear reader, before you get the idea that I’m one of those idiots who try to convince everyone that film is the last, great, modern art form, movies suck too: How many Nicholas Cage pictures can civilization take?

  Television and movies, however, are the best things to happen to writers like me since the printing press.

  “We’re back in one minute, Connie.”

  Two months after the Montgomery murders, I was sitting in a television studio with Connie Sawyer, literary critic and host of The Eighth Hour, the hottest primetime arts and culture magazine in the public television universe.

  The blonde, tall, icily attractive Sawyer ratcheted her black leather chair up just enough to allow her to look down on me. I didn’t mind: The sales from The River’s Edge would shore up my ego.

  “You’re much better looking than that God-awful photo your publicist sent,” she said. “Too bad you write such crap.”

  “You’re not so bad yourself,” I replied. “For a sour old hooker doomed to belittle those more talented than herself.”

  Sawyer’s smile vanished. She’d likened my first book to “…a vile descent into a world too banal to be horrified by its own senseless violence,” and “…a relentless dry hump.” It was a testament to the persuasive powers of my publicist that I had agreed to appear on Sawyer’s show. The last thing I wanted to do was help her: I wanted to drop kick her down an abandoned well.

  The assistant director stepped in and waved his fingers in my direction. “Five seconds,” he said. Sawyer glared at me, her perfect teeth clenched.

  “Smile, asshole,” she snarled. “This sour old hooker’s about to make you a lot of money.”

  “Four. Three. Two. One...”

  Red lights ignited and Sawyer smiled for the cameras.

  “We’re back with author Obadiah Grudge, whose new book, The River’s Edge, has graced the New York Times Best-Seller list for four weeks in a row.”

  “Five, Connie,” I injected.

  Sawyer’s smile cracked. Not a mortal rupture (She was far too frigid for that), merely a minor stress fracture, but it made my night.

  “Obadiah, your books have been called “dark,” “menacing” and “ominous,” she continued smoothly. “What is it about the shadowy element of society that attracts your focus as an aspiring writer?”

  Bitch

  “I don’t think of my characters as menacing, Connie,” I said. “Some of them are as familiar to me as members of my own family.”

  Sawyer laughed.

  “Scary family,” she said.

  I smiled and counted royalty checks in my head.

  “Let’s talk about The River’s Edge, the story of a little girl who is abducted by her father and taken on a gruesome cross-country odyssey. Were you inspired by real events?”

  “Connie, I think all ideas spring from experience. Stories are like doorways into the human psyche. Sometimes they lead to something productive and entertaining, like The River’s Edge, sometimes they lead to the unknown; unexplored rooms in the mansions of the mind.”

  Sawyer smirked.

  “You must spend a lot of time in dark rooms.”

  “I’d like to drag you into one sometime, Connie.”

  We chuckled invisible daggers at each other. Off camera, the assistant-director cleared his throat.

  “The best thing about those doors, Connie, seriously, is that you never know where they’ll take you. Some people find that scary. I take comfort in it.”

  “Some might call that that cold comfort,” Sawyer said.

  I made a mental note to call her for a date.

  “Sometimes that’s the only comfort we get, Connie.”

  * * * *

  My assistant, Carla, was waiting in the limo.

  “Yo, your publicist booked you on JUNO for next week,” Carla droned. “Oh, and your mother called. She said it was like, very important.”

  Carla Quintana might have been the cloned lesbian love-child of Jennifer Lopez and Fran Drescher. A proud “New Yorican,” Carla was sexy in the way that all girls from the Bronx are sexy. She was compact, with the body of a hip-hop video dancer and the mouth of a Mexican longshoreman.

  “Call my mother,” I said. “Tell her I’m in the hospital: Minor stroke, some edema. Nothing serious, but no visitors.”

  Carla wearily punched in the number.

  “You are going straight to Hell,” she said.

  The limo driver chose that moment to speak.

  “Mr. Grudge, I just want to tell you that I loved Death and the Sorcerer.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “It’s my favorite book.”

  “Thank you so much.”

  The driver brightened, encouraged. His attention shifted from the road to the rear view mirror, seeking mine, searching for the click. I reached into the mini-bar and grabbed a tiny bottle of Jack Daniels while he rattled on.

  “I love the hardboiled private-eye stuff,” he said. “You do it better than a lot of these guys.”

  “Cheers,” I said, lifting the bottle, steeling myself.

  “You know, I write a little,” the driver said. “Mostly...”

  “Mostly Fantasy stuff,” I cut in. “Maybe a little Horror thrown in for good measure, right?”

  “That’s amazing,” the driver said. “See? I knew you and me was from the same tribe. How’d you know?”

  I shrugged and drained the too-small bottle in one gulp. It was an ordeal I’d endured at least twice daily since the publication of my first novel, Death and the Sorceror: fervent slobberings from semi-sentient tassels of the literary lunatic fringe that is Horror/Fantasy fiction today, a fringe that I despised.

  Let me explain: I hate Horror.

  Any form of “literature” that smacks of the supernatural makes my ass bone throb with disgust. I write mysteries, “Hardboiled” suspense stories. Violent? Yes. Dark? Certainly, but my novels are grounded in real-world horrors: serial killers, mad gunmen, and drunken detectives at the end of the line.

  But for reasons unfathomed by me at that time, my work had always appealed to the Horror geeks. This had proven to be a distinct handicap in an industry that sells thousands of Horror titles each year while ghettoizing even its most successful adherents, saddling them with the literary equivalent of a scarlet letter: the title of Horror Writer.

  No horror writer whose name doesn’t begin and end with ‘Stephen King’ is ever considered a real writer. They are laughed at, ridiculed and discounted by the publishing industry, the literary establishment and the public.

  “Call me a snob,” I said to the hopeful driver. “But I’d rather let a one-eyed baboon shave my balls with a rusty hacksaw than waste my time writing such inane bullshit.”

  To my savage satisfaction, the driver’s hopeful expression died. He pushed a button on the steering wheel and raised the privacy screen between us without another word.

  “It’s your mother,” Carla said.

  I shot her a look full of the promise of murder.

  She handed me the phone and looked out the window.

  “Yeah, mother. What’s up?”

&nbs
p; Three minutes later, we were heading for my mother’s house in Bronxville.

  My hands were shaking. As the car turned around and headed North, toward the suburbs of Westchester County, I willed them to be still. When I looked at my watch the trembling returned, worse than before: Death had come to call on an old family acquaintance.

  She was right on schedule.

  6

  An Affair to Dismember:

  Part Two

  The only thing longer than a Catholic wedding is a Catholic funeral. As mourners flooded out of St. Theresa’s Cathedral I stood on the steps, doing deep knee bends in an effort to force the blood that had pooled in my lower legs back up to my brain.

  St. Theresa’s overlooked the Hudson River and the West Side Highway. To the east, Harlem was waking up. Hip-hop music blared from a passing S.U.V., the bass beatdown an incongruous accompaniment to the occasion of my father’s final, fatal shuffle.

  “Stop that,” a familiar voice hissed. “You look like you’re about to run a footrace.”

  My mother Lenore is what the old Italians used to call a “ball-breaker.” The fact that she’d once graced the covers of such publications as Vogue, Redbook, and Essence belies the fact that she can decapitate a man at twenty paces with one slash of her tongue.

  “I didn’t even know he was Catholic,” I said.

  Lenore shrugged. “When we were married Marcus didn’t believe in organized religion. I suppose as he got older...”

  “He got soft?” I smirked.

  Lenore glared at me. For the briefest of moments an emotion that I didn’t recognize flickered in her eyes.

  “Obadiah,” she said. “Your father was a good man.”

  I afforded her the kind of scrutiny usually reserved for men who masturbate in public.

  “Obadiah, listen to me...”

  “Who are all these people?” I said, changing the subject.

  We were standing on the sidewalk, waiting for the coffin and pallbearers to appear.