Fiends (15 page)

(Jolted by his father's scream, Arne fires. It's all a blur to him, the blackish thing with head like a bear's and arms of raw meat, human in shape but not resembling anything he's ever seen before, unsightly, ungodly—it stumbles, falls out of the thicket a dozen yards away, lies heaving on the ground and screaming its own scream, a high-pitched hissing. The little bullet couldn't have missed, the thing is down and rolling in agony as Arne pulls back the bolt, ejecting hot brass, and inserts the last bullet in the breech of the Winchester. Sweat in his eyes. His father's hand crunching one shoulder, he shrugs violently. What is it? What is it? he demands silently of Enoch, tugging at his shirt, mouth opening and closing like a puppet's, only strangled sounds coming from his throat. Now it looks to him like a man, a half-butchered naked man crawling with flies and other, tinier insects visible only as a crowd where his skin has been sliced or ripped from torso, arms, and massive thighs.)

"It's
another
one, Arne. Another one flayed alive, God knows how he lived this long! Let me tell you—I must have fell asleep at Birka's side, and when I woke up she were singing a pretty little song in her language. Pretty, but it made my flesh creep, too. Just hunched over me on the bed a-singing like a mad woman, holding a butcher knife against my throat. It were near dark then, the sky red as blood and blood dripping down from the bodies of the poor old man and woman whose cabin it was, I saw them hanging by their heels from the rafters 'twixt us and the doorway. And outside the sun going down. And she's singing, the look in her eyes like she don't have no idea who I am. And that sharp blade pressed so firm if I'd a swallered hard I'd a cut my own throat . . . go on, Arne, shoot the poor bastard in the head this time! Listen to him, I just can't stand it no more! Put him out of his misery, son, send him home to Jesus—!"

(Pushed toward the suffering man, Arne is shaking to pieces. Dark curly hair and beard thick with gore, but the worst of it is his nearly skinless body as he is eaten alive by those insects not busy depositing masses of tiny eggs in the suppurating flesh.
No:
the worst may be his sightless eyes, the pupil of each eye slit, exploded by something sharp as a thorn. His head is raised, there is a dazzle of sunlight where sight should be, he is gasping, but weaker now, and Arne sees, below a naked collarbone, the red oozing pucker where his first bullet struck, doing no serious damage. Shoot, shoot him . . . Arne falls to his knees three feet away and lifts the muzzle of the rifle. One bullet, and he realizes how desperately he wants the precious bullet for himself—he looks back at his father, hatefully, pleading. But Enoch knows his mind.)

"What's the matter? Did I raise you for a coward? If that be so, then God damn you, let him die in his own time—and me—how long can I last without you? Go on, shoot yourself dead, and by the time both of us is lying here just a molder of bones, and nothing to tell who we was, that's not too many months from now I'm talking about—a year—everybody else in this entire state of Tennessee—maybe the whole country—they'll be just as dead as we are, or a part of the plague itself! Which is worse. A lot worse than being dead, Arne! You saw her, didn't you? You saw her, too! Ain't that worse for her than being dead? Well, answer me! Answer me one way or 'tother!"

(Trapped between the hideously flayed man and his father's righteous anger, Arne throws back his head and howls. Blackbirds explode like splinters from the tops of trees. Arne points the muzzle of the rifle two inches from the ridge of bone between the eyebrows of the flayed man and shoots him, although he is so numb he doesn't feel himself doing it, and he doesn't hear the report of the rifle. Flies boil into an iridescent green cloud, the shaggy head falls down hard at Arne's feet. A little blood spatters Arne's bare toes as he rises, turns, slings the rifle away. Suddenly he isn't breathing. His chest heaves, but he can't swallow air. He just stands there, twitching and unbreathing with his eyes rolling back in his head, and that's when Enoch seizes him, carries him headlong by the waistband of his denim pants, feet dragging and catching on roots and branches and the bark of deadfalls until Arne too is nearly flayed from ankles to toes; carries him, gasping and turning dark in the face, the shortest way to the brow of a hill overlooking the millpond where he pushes Arne off. It is twenty feet to the surface of the pond. The last thing Enoch sees of his son is the sole of a foot fading deep into dark green water. Utterly exhausted, Enoch slumps down crying.)

"You ain't done, Arne. I know you ain't done. Come up now. You'll make it. Got to, son, got to. Now.
Now.
Oh, God, I can't do no more! Help him live. Help my boy!"

(The sensation of dying, smothering to death. Green smothering woods and the choking in his breast, as if it were packed full of grave dirt. Funerals. Churchside cemetery. The very young children playing at the edge of ceremony, oblivious, a dog barking when the mourners sing. His mother's voice the loveliest he has ever heard. No one, even in darkest sorrow, can help glancing at her when her voice is raised in a well-loved hymn. But he can't sing. He can't even breathe. Just forgot how. Heat and panic. Carried like a corpse undeserving of a decent burial to a precarious space at the edge of the sky, the sun a brand in his eyes, water surface filled with clouds. Spinning down to smack the water broadside. Sharp stinging pain, but still he isn't breathing. Caught by a cold current down there he begins, instinctively, to swim.

(Coming up now through the depths to raw sunlight, breaking the surface, yelling, then at last gulping down sweet air just before he goes tumbling across the slick wall and into the pool of the race below, a few feet from the slowly turning wheel. Missing the rocks that lie beneath the waterfall, touching bottom, bobbing up again, crawling through the shallows and collapsing amid cattails along the marshy bank. Lying there, face-up, teeth bared, lungs gradually cooling, shivering, until his father appears.)

"I'm sorry—sorry, boy. It were the only thing I could do, I reckoned you was a goner otherwise. God knows I thought I was about to die myself, more than once these past few days. That knife pressed agin' my throat, like Birka didn't have the least idea who I was. Like she were just a-doing what she'd been told by the Dark Man. I knowed then he had her; she was possessed entire by that unclean Spirit. That's when I saw him, standing in the dooryard, full-fleshed again. He were a big 'un. The sky was all but dark, but when he raised his arms from his sides it were like rainbows flashing in the sky—like he growed wings somehow. I can't describe it. Thanks be to God Birka took her mind off me for a few seconds, sort of turned to see him, and when I had my chance I just about wrenched her arm out of the socket, got a little cut under my chin is all. Well, she were on the floor screaming and trying to pick up the butcher knife with the other hand and he were in the dooryard, so I went through the window, sash and all, and I run. Run home to wait on you. But you was two days late on account of Hob-Nob's fetlock. So I waited around, figuring they'd come. Come hunting me. Couldn't go to nobody for help, not after the sight I'd seen in the old folks' cabin, the both of them hung by their heels and stripped of their skin. Well. Birka almost got me. Almost tricked me into turning. But now I be a-hunting them. And this is where they're all at. In there, Arne."

(Lifting his head slowly, a clot of fear moving quick as blood from his heart to his brain, exploding there white as the sun on the watery line of the spillway above them; his eyes going then to the dark windows of the millhouse but no faces there, no eyes like the eyespots of the dreaded luna moth. The millhouse is silent, empty, the huge wheel turning to no purpose, no grains are being ground into meal or flour today. He raises up out of the marshy water and looks around at his father squatting in the cattails, face black with beard, black with rot, eyes sunken and glowing, he seems no less fiendish in appearance than the fiends he pursues. He has brought with him the bundle of strangler fig Arne cut the day before. That, nothing else. Arne looks around again, at the millhouse. His father touches the back of his head, gently, correcting him.)

"No, they ain't in there, Arne. Otherwise I'd just burn it all down and be shut of the lot of them. We got us another ways to go. When you can't believe what you see no more, then just close your eyes and hold on tight to me. I promise if you do just what I say, you'll see the light of day again. If you don't—if you lose your nerve—well, then, reckon neither one of us has got a prayer."

August, 1970:

Huldufólk

1

"Potato
salad?" Rita Sue said. "Marjory, I told you yesterday
I
was bringing potato salad!"

"Must have been where I got the idea," Marjory said cheerfully. "Duane, could you give me a hand with all this stuff?"

"Sure," Duane said, leaping nimbly from the backseat of the Fairlane convertible. In addition to a picnic hamper, there were Marjory's portable Zenith shortwave radio, a folding card table, and a two-gallon cooler on the front porch.

"Potato salad," Rita Sue said again, fuming in the front seat. She was wearing sunglasses and a dab of sunblock cream on her vulnerable nose.

"Doesn't make any difference," Marjory assured her. "We don't make it the same way."

"I can eat me a bluing tub full of potato salad any day," Boyce said. Always the peacemaker.

"Marjory, I don't think that card table will fit in the trunk," Rita Sue objected.

"Yes it will. Have a little confidence, Rita Sue."

"Well, I've got my clothes back there which I don't want all mussed up."

"How many changes of clothes did you bring?"

"Three. What's wrong with that?"

"Nothing. If nuclear war is declared while we're gone, nobody can say you won't be dressed for it." Marjory opened the trunk lid. "Plenty of room. What's in that box, tools?"

"Oh, that's mine," Duane said. "Killing jars and stuff. A can of carbon tet."

"Is that for butterflies? Why do you kill them?"

"To relax them."

"I'll bet it does. So why do you want to—tell me after lunch." Duane grinned. "I'll show you. There's an art to preserving specimens so they look lifelike, like they could fly right up out of the schmitt box."

"The what?" Boyce said, chortling.

"Stuff it back where it came from, Boyce," Marjory advised him. "Rita Sue, what did you do with the camp stools?"

"Marjory, we're going on a picnic, for pity's sake! Can't you sit on the ground like everybody—"

"That's called roughing it, Rita Sue. I get in a really bad mood when I have to rough it. You know how long I lasted as a Brownie."

"Where're you going now? Marjory, it's already ten o'clock!"

"Enid has a camp stool she uses when she paints outdoors!"

"Rita Sue," Boyce complained, "let me have something to eat. My stomach thinks my throat's been cut."

"You can't eat yet. It's not time to eat! First we get there. Then we go swimming. That's the way I planned it. I don't know why everybody has to go and
ruin
things."

"Just let me have one bread-and-butter pickle, and I promise I won't ask for another thing."

"I'll have one too while you're at it," Duane said, settling down again into the backseat.

Eventually Marjory reappeared with the camp stool and several other items, including a flashlight and a snakebite kit, that she happened to think of at the last second.

"Boyce, can you drive okay with your foot the shape it's in?"

"Yeh, it's my left foot's the hurtin' one, I don't need it to drive." He mashed the accelerator and gave a rebel yell. "We're in like Flynn, and off like a dirty shirt!"

"Well, it's not
my
car," Marjory said to Duane, as they went hurtling in reverse down the drive to the street. "Hey, nice day. There's a pickle seed on your chin."

"No, it's a green pimple. Where're we going?"

"Ask the Tour Director."

"Are you referring to me, Marjory?" Rita Sue said.

"Where's the picnic?"

"Oh, I thought we'd go up to Dante's Mill for a change, because Rising Fawn is always so crowded on weekends. And it's nicer to swim there. Boyce, you better had
slow down
for this intersection! If you make a rolling stop we could get hit by a Ready-Mix truck, they come barreling down Beaver Ruin like they own the whole road."

Marjory said, "I suppose you all heard the Feds got Father Berrigan."

"Marjory, don't get
started.
He did break the law, and my daddy says what can you expect from a papist anyway? Everybody knows they're born troublemakers, when they're not drinking themselves to extinction. That's all I have to say on the subject."

"If they put him in jail," Marjory said to Duane, who looked sympathetic about the matter, "that's it. I've had it with this country. I'm leaving. I said, you'll have to get somebody else to pull you through Bio, Rita Sue!"

"Where have I heard all this before? Well, burn voyage, as the French say."

"Where would you go?" Duane asked, willing to take Marjory seriously.

"Enid and I are going to Italy. To Florence. She'll study painting, and I'll—I don't know. Must be plenty of things to do there."

"Next summer I'm going to take a motorcycle trip. The West Coast. Maybe up as far as Alaska."

"Will you be off probation by then?"

"Yeh."

"That's a terrific idea, Duane. Well, I probably won't make it to Italy. Not right away. We'd have to sell the house and everything. But we're going. It's a feeling I have in my bones. My sister needs to get out of the rut she's in, and do something with her life. Rita Sue, do you have that tube of zinc oxide handy? My shoulders are getting a little red already."

"Don't use it all up. I burn like a french fry in hell."

"You know who I'd like to be?" Marjory said. "Sophia Loren.
Mama mial
That beautiful olive skin. I'll bet Sophia doesn't get sunburn. If you could be anybody else, who would you like to be, Duane?"

"I don't know. Nobody. I guess I haven't been me long enough yet to know what it's like."

Marjory and Duane had done a lot of talking during the past four days, but still she was surprised by the way his mind worked; she thought he was the deepest person she'd ever met. Rita Sue said, "You do have a resemblance to Sophia Loren in one department, Marj," Marjory smiling sheepishly, said, "She's talking about my—" And Duane, also smiling, said, "I caught that right away." Marjory took the tube of sunblock from Rita Sue, uncapped it, and looked at Duane again. He spread the ointment on her shoulders, and then, even though she was wearing her baseball cap, which shaded most of her face, he dabbed a little on the end of her nose. Marjory went on smiling. Somehow it was sexier than kissing.