Bethany's Sin

III

JULY

TWELVE

NIGHT ON THE KING's BRIDGE ROAD

"We're closing up, hon," the woman with the bun of bleached-blond hair said. Neely Ames glanced up at her from behind his glasses and nodded, and she turned away, moving from his table back toward the bar. Light glinted off the amber glass of four empty beer bottles precariously stacked two-on-two before him; another beer bottle, half-drained, lay on the floor beside his chair. He watched the woman what'd she say her name was? Ginger? - go back behind the bar and start counting money out of the cash register.

He strummed a few more chords on the time-worn twelve string Gibson guitar in his lap, and Ginger looked up, gave him a quick and tentative smile, then continued counting where she'd left off. Vic, the bartender, a burly man with a reddish beard and a gut that preceded him by a foot or so, cleaned beer mugs with a cloth and listened to the younger man play.

They were old songs, but of course neither Ginger nor Vic had ever heard them before because Neely had written them himself.

Some of them had lyrics, some didn't; some were complete, some were fragments; but each one in its own way was special; and each one sprang from a particular event or feeling in his life, something that had burned through his gut and finally made its way out, with much pain and often confusion, through his fingertips, to be voiced by that guitar. He was good at it, and he'd left home in Nebraska years ago to join a group of musicians called the Midnight Ramblers, but nothing had ever really broken for them and eventually they'd gone their separate ways. For some time after that, he'd made a fair amount of money playing in clubs and roadhouses like this one, but he didn't really know a lot of the new, popular songs, and people seemed to want to drink rather than listen to music, anyway. Most times, he'd play a couple of his tunes for club managers and they'd shrug and say sorry, that kind of guitar music doesn't sell too good anymore. And of course that was true, but he'd decided a long time ago that he'd play his own music or nothing, and he'd paid for that rather brash vow by a succession of menial jobs like the ones he'd been doing in Bethany's Sin. It was money in the pocket though, and there was no use complaining

From time to time, when he sat in a darkened bar with an ashtray full of stubs before him and empty bottles lined up like friends who've come and gone, something came to Neely: the memory of a voice, a sight, a taste, an aroma that made his mind slip back. Back through the years, back through lifetimes. He remembered his father, a strapping man with a crew cut and a preference for red cowboy shirts, playing guitar with a band called the Tru-Tones on the country carnival circuit; through him Neely had learned about music and pain. Neely's father had been an alcoholic, a man who drank at night and screamed at the moon like a wounded dog; his mother, a graceful and intelligent woman who had been a minister's daughter, became in time both a borderline drinker and a tent revivalist who passed out pamphlets on the saving mercy of Christ. Neely remembered her praying beside her man as he hung his head down in a pool of vomit that smelled of moonshine. But his mother had slipped, too, giving up the almost impossible task of trying to get him on the wagon in favor of crawling through the ruts at his side. Theirs had been true love.

And now Neely sometimes found that drinking helped the creative juices flow: he wasn't an alcoholic, he wasn't bound to it, but by God it eased some of those bad memories, and took him through lonely nights, and mostly just helped him forget the day his aunt and uncle had come for him and had his mother and father taken away to one of those white-walled hospitals where everyone's eyes looked like holes that had been drilled through to the brain. he'd grown up fast, taut and smart with lessons no school could ever teach him. Sometimes when he drank raw whiskey, which wasn't often, he thought he could see the same vision his father must have seen: that real life started tomorrow, down the road, around the next bend. Real life was waiting ahead.

After a few minutes more, Neely clutched his guitar by the neck and stood up. The beer bottles wavered, making the light dance a jig.

Ginger smiled at him again, and Neely wondered what would happen if he asked her to go home with him. She was probably ten years older than he, but what the hell? No, no. Shouldn't do that.

Maybe she was the bartender's wife; he'd seen Vic put his arm around her waist a couple of times that night.

He watched her for a moment more and then moved toward the door.

"Hey," Vic said, "you okay?"

He nodded. "Yeah."

"You got a long way to drive?" "Bethany's Sin," Neely said. "I work over there." His tongue felt a little swollen, but other than that, he felt fine

"Well," Vic said, "you take it easy on the way home."

"Thanks. I will."

"Good night," Ginger said. "I like the way you play that guitar."

Neely smiled at her and then was through the door, walking in the glow of the red neon sign that said COCK'S CROW; above it was a rooster, outlined in neon, crowing toward the sky. Only his truck and a Chevrolet station wagon remained in the red-neon-licked gravel parking lot. He slipped into the truck, eased his guitar onto the seat next to him, started the engine, and turned toward Bethany's Sin. As he drove, he glanced at his wristwatch, saw it was only a few minutes before two. Breathing the night air as it swept in through the truck's open windows, he was feeling pleasantly light-headed; he didn't want to think about six o'clock when Wysinger would probably be calling him with some work to do. The King's Bridge Road stretched out before his headlights, a smooth asphalt ribbon that was one of the better-kept roads in the area surrounding the village; it led him past the darkened Westbury Mall and intersected with 219 for the last few miles into Bethany's Sin. At this time of the morning there were no other cars, and the night ran before the truck's lights.

He found himself thinking about that yard he'd cut today.

Whoever lived there was gone; there was no doubt about it. All the clothes gone from the closets, nothing left but the furniture. That bothered him: why cut the lawn of an abandoned house? In the last couple of weeks he'd seen two other houses like that one, both dark and silent, one over on Blair Street and the other on Ashaway. Of course it was summer, vacation time for those who could afford it.

After all, there'd still been names on the mailboxes. The locals were fanatics for keeping their village looking immaculate, and of course there was nothing wrong with that, but Neely wondered if a great deal of it wasn't just to impress those who happened to drive through the village. Or maybe to entice more families into Bethany's Sin.

Whatever. It wasn't his concern anyway.

His ears were filled with the insect songs of the forest. There was a bend in the road coming up ahead, and Neely decreased his speed - no need to run off into a ' gully and get in trouble with the troopers. They'd sure as hell smell the beer on him because he could smell it himself. Hell, I'm okay, he told himself. I'm doing damned fine.

And as if to emphasize that point, he hit the accelerator a fraction as he rounded the wooded bend. Too late he realized that something was in the road.

The glare of headlights off something dark and moving. Several figures. Black things. Animals. He heard a low-pitched rumble and realized only then that they were horses; they scattered before the truck, hooves flashing, and then he was through them and around another bend. He glanced quickly into the rearview mirror, tapping the brakes. Horses? What the hell were horses doing out here in the middle of the night? He hadn't been able to take a good look at the riders because he'd gone through them so fast, but he'd had the split-second impression of torsos and head turning swiftly toward him.

The headlights had gleamed sharply off eyes that had been widened and unblinking and...yes, by God, as blue as raw electricity passing through power cables. He shivered suddenly, staring into the mirror, the truck slowing, slowing, slowing....

Stopping.

Night birds cried off to the left. Crickets shrilled with their buzz-saw voices and then died away. Beyond the range of his headlights the road was so dark as to be nonexistent. He watched the rearview mirror, saw the splay of red from the truck's taillights.

And that was when he saw them coming.

Shadows, approaching through the red. Sweat glistening off the flanks of those huge, muscle-corded horses. The riders bent forward slightly, cleaving the wind. Some thing catching moonlight, gleaming. Something metallic.

His hands tightened involuntarily around the wheel.

He plunged his foot down on the accelerator. The truck coughed, backfired, began to pick up speed. Now he couldn't see them following but he knew they were there, and though he didn't know how many or what they were, he had no thought now but to get back to Bethany's Sin. The truck's aged engine rattled and groaned like an old, rheumatic man; the wind roared in through the windows, tangling his hair. In another moment he thought he could hear the wild, hoarse breathing of those horses bearing down behind him. He glanced in the rearview mirror, saw nothing; looked over his shoulder, saw nothing. But they were there; he knew it. Coming closer. And closer. The engine racketed, and he gritted his teeth and mentally urged it on. With one hand on the wheel he leaned over, rolled up the far window. Then the window beside him. He could smell his own sweat. Something screamed just behind him: a wild, high cry that made his heart thunder with fear, and in that second he knew that something out on this shadowed road was alive and dripping with a terrible, vibrating hate. He could feel the tendrils of it reaching for him like so many black fingers gripping at his throat.

On both sides of the road the tangled silhouette of the forest swept past, dark against dark. The speedometer needle quivered between forty-five and fifty. And again Neely heard that cry, apparently from just behind his head; he flinched from the eerie, piercing whine of it.

The noise seemed to be driven through him like icy steel. A hand clutched at his stomach and he hovered on the brink of nausea. He felt like screaming and laughing at the same time, laughing wildly and hysterically until his voice cracked, because he knew this had to be the DTs or beer jitters or something like that; it couldn't be real, no, it couldn't actually be happening. He'd scared a group of deer crossing the road, that was it, and then his imagination had taken over. Glance in the mirror. Nothing back there. Everything dark.

Nothing. Deer. Long gone by now, all scared as shitless as he'd been.

You're drunk, by God.

Another curve in the road, a wicked one. He put his foot to the brakes, heard the tires begin a squeal. The speedometer needle dropped to thirty-five.

A movement beside him that made his nerves cry out in alarm.

He twisted his head to the side. And stared, his mouth coming open to release a horrified, guttural croak.

One of the riders had pulled up beside his window.

The figure's raven-black hair streamed like the mane of the huge, frothing horse it rode. The figure was hunched over, one hand at the base of the massive, muscular neck, urging the horse faster and faster. There was no saddle, no harness. And then the rider's face came around and stared in at Neely. The lips were contorted in a terrible scream of hate, teeth glittering with moonlight. And those eyes: orbs of fierce, glowing blue, a power deep in those sockets that almost literally jerked Neely's head back to snap his neck. Cold terror flooded his body, and he fought to maintain control over the steering wheel. And in the blink of a second the rider's other arm whipped out, carrying with it an object of metal, something that brought another cry from him and made him throw one arm up across his face.

Which saved his eyes. Because in the next instant the ax blade smashed through the window glass, filling the truck's cab with stinging wasps. The arm rose and fell again with blinding, terrible strength; he heard the blade bite metal on the doorjamb and then scrape off. Neely twisted the wheel, his foot going for the accelerator but hitting the brake instead; the truck began to swerve, then fishtailed off the road, crashing through brush and wild vegetation, glancing off a thin poplar, shaking Neely as if he were the dice in a cup held by an ancient, laughing god. He hit the accelerator again, felt a bone-jarring crash as the truck smashed down a scraggly mass of thorns; he heard glass break, and one of the headlights went out, leaving him in murky semidarkness. Neely could hear the breathing of the horses now, and could see the figures all around him. How many? Ten? Twelve? Twenty? He braced his arms and twisted; the truck screamed, battering its way through the brush like a fear-maddened cyclops, and regained the road. Another ax blade struck his door, glanced off. He sank his foot to the floor; his glasses had fallen off and lay somewhere on the floorboard, and his guitar had slipped down as well, making moaning noises as the tires slammed against asphalt. The speedometer needle reached fifty and vibrated crazily.

And there, perhaps half a mile ahead, was the blinking caution light that was the turn-off onto Ashaway. He took it at fifty, the tires shrieking so loud he was certain the noise echoed across Bethany's Sin like a banshee's wail. He whipped the truck through the village's darkened streets, past silent houses, through the Circle, and toward the two-story wooden boardinghouse where a middle-aged woman named Grace Bartlett rented him a room for twenty-five dollars a week. When he pulled up before the boardinghouse, the noise of his tires made windows vibrate.

Fearfully he looked over his shoulder, his breathing harsh and forced, his heartbeat out of control.

Nothing had followed.

Shaking, he ran a hand over his face. Nausea rushed him, almost overtaking him before he could open his door and lean out.

Glass tinkled off the seat and out of the doorjamb. Jesus, he told himself, trying to steady his nerves; Jesus Christ, what did I see out there? The sour stench of beer rose into his face, and he turned his head away. Noises seemed to be gathering over him like dust stirring in heavy folds. The sounds of insects in trees; the lone calling of a bird over toward the Circle; the gentle stirring of branches in a hint of warm breeze; a dog barking repeatedly in the distance. Neely found his glasses, put them on and stared into the night for a moment, then took his guitar and slid out of the truck, his head still spinning and his limbs leaden. With a nerveless hand he traced the scrapes along the driver's door; bare metal showed through the layers of paint, and he could see the dents where the powerful blows had been struck. If it were not for those ax-blow signatures and the broken glass, Neely would have talked himself into believing he'd had some kind of nightmare on the road, that he'd drifted into a beer-induced sleep where something terrible and evil had struck.

But no.

The window.was shattered, and tiny bits of glass speckled the underside of the arm he'd thrown up in self protection. He looked again into the darkness, felt his spine crawl, then heard a voice within him shout out, Get inside quickly quickly quickly! Neely turned away from the truck and almost ran into the house. Climbing the hallway stairs, he fumbled for his key and then twisted it in the lock of his door. He switched on the overhead light, illuminating the bedroom papered in a dark brown bamboo design. After setting the guitar in a corner, he crossed the room and slid open a window overlooking the street. And there he stood for perhaps fifteen minutes, watching and listening - for what, he didn't know.

But nothing moved down there.

He ran a hand over his face; there was glass in the palm.

Wysinger should know about this, he decided finally. Something.

tried to kill me, and I saw its face; I saw those eyes, and I know what it was.

Something hideous and breathing hatred. Something in the form of a woman. But...no, not human. Not really human at all.

After a while he shut the window, picked the glass from his arm and hand with a pair of tweezers, and finally tried to sleep. It came to him shrieking and bearing a moon-glittering battle-ax.

Just before dawn a shadow climbed the stairs, paused at Neely's door. Quietly tried the doorknob. Then vanished the way it had come.