The Axman Cometh (20 page)

He is looking at the Axman. The mask, the oval, sucked-in dimples where the nostrils would be. The protective glasses, spotted, eyes rolling wildly behind the lenses. Could this be Shannon's brother? No. Something terrible has happened to Allen Ray, to them all. With his ax half-raised for a killing stroke, a shudder runs through the Axman and he cries out in pain, the sound muffled by the mask. He tries again. There is a bright red spot the size of a quarter where his mouth would be. Perry's vision swims. His own pain, suddenly, is immense—he has to cough, wetness in his throat; the cough is nearly enough to kill him. When he recovers he senses he is alone. Through tearing eyes he cannot see well— where has the Axman gone?

Perry has no fight left in him. He lets go of the knife in favor of holding himself where the pain is. Just at the belt line, the belt cut in two, his abdomen open, his fingers slip in. Now breathing is a problem, and his head is expanding with a buoyant gas. He can't think. But he remembers: Shannon, on her bed, thrashing, asphyxiating. Must find the knife he dropped. Feels on the floor for it. Ah. Go now to Shannon. Maybe too late already. Try. Can't.
Get up!

Weeping, Perry gets to his feet. In a crouch, right arm tight across the waist, where his navel used to be. Light from her room coming across the hall and into this room. Walk? No way to walk. Just hobble. Bluntly, as a beggar with no toes. The rumpled carpet a hazard for his feet. Fall again, never get up. His left arm still there but he feels it swinging oddly, as if the bones are disconnected. Looking down he sees the steady drip of blood from his nerveless fingertips. So scared. He looks around at the four- poster bed.
Shapes of the using of axes.
And eyes high above him, half-opened, blandly terrifying in their eternal dreaminess. Where is Axman now? Where gone? Hurt bad? What if he has gone back to Shannon's room? Get moving.
Kill him.

The Axman's not in Shannon's room. She isn't thrashing and twisting on the bed now but Perry can't see her well; the light's in his eyes and there's a fog everywhere. Perry's teeth chatter, he's very cold; and he can't hold himself in any longer, there's a pulpy mass he doesn't want to look at slipping down over his right forearm. When he has to let go to cut her loose—Perry sobs. What if she's dead? Suddenly he can't do it. He slumps down on the side of Shannon's bed, too weak to scream at the violence of the pain. The fog so bad now the light on the headboard barely shines through it.

He can let go, though. Sitting down he's not afraid he'll spill everything out where the ax ripped him.

Shannon?

Perry blinks, trying to see her. His teeth won't stop chattering. He's beginning to see other things, also dear to him: his mother, little Elsie. There in the fog. Scenes of childhood. All of it going by very fast, but he's enraptured, he almost forgets—

The mattress begins to move under him. He is kicked in the thigh. Shannon's bare foot. He leans toward the headboard and there she is, too, in the fog, neck tightly bound, eyes bulging horribly. He reaches out, the hand with the knife, just as a cramp hits him. His bloody hand falls on her face. She kicks him again. He wants to tell her to stop, but his mouth is full. Can't talk with his mouth full. Can't swallow either. Slides the hand up through her hair, must be careful, not cut her with the knife. Cut the rope. Clothesline. Easy to do any other time, but he can't manage now. Roaring in his ears. Waterfall. The Colorado River flooding through the Grand Canyon. Rapids of the Snake. He's been there. Seen them all. Peaceful days in a knock-about life.
Cut the rope.
But he's busy now, navigating, alone in his canoe on the foggy, turbulent river. Coughs. Blood all over both of them. Shannon dying, will you—cut—the

He's not aware of having done it. But she's sitting up beside him, eyes a few inches from his own. His blood on her face and in her hair. Sucking wind through her nose so violently the nostrils are pressed shut with each intake.

She doesn't recognize Perry. There is nothing in her eyes but terror. He thinks,
Hi, Shannon,
but with her bound hands she is shoving him aside, nowhere to go but down the rapids, his disappointment as heavy as the rock where his belly should be. Sinking in darkness while his angel flies.

But now I think there is no
unreturn'd
love, the pay is certain, one way or another

Five-twenty-one a.m.

Robert McLaren leaves the house by the front door.

He has taken off the surgical mask but holds a handkerchief to his mouth, dabbing at the blood that rises steadily to the tip of his tongue, his lips. In his left hand, away from the side where his pierced liver and lung are causing him considerable discomfort, he carries the heavy
toolbag
containing everything he brought with him to 298 West Homestead. The sky in the east is the color of mercury, tinged with old gold. There is a dark red oval on the gray coveralls where Perry's knife went in, but most of the damage is internal. His liver. Right lung penetrated but not collapsed. He walks slowly down the steps and out to the curb where a pickup truck is parked at an angle with one door open. He looks inside. The keys are in the ignition. He lifts his tool-bag with several inches of half-erect protruding ax handle into the bed of the truck, shuts the door, goes around to the driver's side and gets in. Starts the engine. Drives off. No rush, no telltale squealing of tires. Thirty- four seconds have elapsed.

Within a minute-and-a-half he is seven blocks away, pulling up behind the rental car he left on one of the busier commercial streets of Emerson, Kansas.

Robert waits while a station wagon pulling a trailered boat goes by in the opposite direction. Farther down the street a sixteen- wheeler is coming, blazing with lights. He doesn't care. He's feeling just the least bit woozy now, partly from lack of sleep, and the handkerchief he holds more or less constantly to his lips is filling with blood.

He gets out of the pickup, leaving the keys, takes the
toolbag
from the back, feeling the strain of lifting now. Carries the
toolbag
to the rental car, unlocks it, puts the
toolbag
on the floor on some newspapers he spread there earlier. Gets in behind the wheel but doesn't leave immediately, just stares east through the windshield where the sun will rise soon. He listens, hopefully, but he doesn't hear it.

I have to hear the music, Shannon. The music is the only thing that keeps me from going insane.

Where will he find another family in

time?

He starts the car, makes a U-turn, and heads for the airport.

And as he drives he begins to sob, just crying his eyes out.

Madge Mayhew gets up early every morning to attend to her correspondence and other writings before her husband
Adolphus
, a retired lawyer, starts bumbling around in the bathroom and then the kitchen, disturbing her. Madge writes an average of thirty letters per week; some of them run to a dozen pages. She's a genealogy buff, and for the last fourteen years has been working on a family history. The
Hockenhulls
. She's a vice-regent of the Magna
Carta
Dames and a fellow of the Colonial Order of the Crown, made up of lineal
descendents
of the Emperor Charlemagne. Pretty impressive. Madge compensates for the rather dull life she has lived with the man of her dreams, who can only trace his forbears back two hundred years, by being a raving Anglophile. Every three years she travels to England for several weeks. She was there for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth. Her house is filled with photographs. Madge on Waterloo Bridge, Madge at the Trooping of the Colors. Madge at the Tower of London, which was good for a few delicious shudders after she saw Olivier in
Richard HI
at the Old Vic. Those poor little princes . . .

Madge closes their bedroom door behind her and walks down the shadowy hall to the living room where the rows of photos, three walls filled with them, are lightly gilded by the rising sun. In the kitchen she uncovers the parakeet cages and sets them all to chirping with little kisses and coos. She runs water into the kettle for tea, turns up the gas, opens a tin of imported shortbreads, settles herself at the table in the breakfast nook where, the night before, she laid out her pens and linen stationery on the writing board. Thoughtfully nibbling on a biscuit, Madge looks out the bow window, and sees Shannon Hill, who is trudging across her, Madge's, backyard in pajamas, carrying a large stuffed animal and a flowered pillowcase in her two hands. A real job of work for Shannon, judging from the awkward way that she—and her face all fiery red from exertion. Except for the large gray strip of tape that appears to cover—

Madge is up so quickly the opened bottle of India ink goes teetering around the table, but it doesn't spill. The next thing she knows she has banged open the screen door and is getting a really good look at Shannon. And the smell of blood fouls the still morning air.

Blood on her pajamas, the pillowcase. Her hands, feet,
hair.
So bedraggled and gamey she is like a shot rabbit. What's that dangling from her neck? A piece of clothesline? More clothesline binds Shannon's blood-caked hands together. There is a look of dreadful numbed earnestness in her eyes. Clutching the tubby blue stuffed animal with the floppy ears and long trunk—Madge recognizes
Elefunk
, which Shannon has had since she was four years old. Madge has seen the child oh so many times, sitting in the old squeaky glider beneath their persimmon tree, rocking the glooms and meanies away with her dear
Elefunk
.

"Shannon! Oh God! Oh bless you sweetheart! What have you—"

Her eyes go to the silent, familiar house Shannon has left in haste, and back to the soaked, lumpy pillowcase. Shannon keeps coming, determinedly, but with a stumbling, palsied gait, and Madge, quaking head to toe, reaches out. Screaming now. Just ripping up and down the neighborhood like a keening buzz saw, leaving not a soul in his bed. Only Shannon fails to respond. She collapses in a soft heap by the back steps and lies there wrenched by
tremblings
. Clutching her pillowcase, and
Elefunk
.

(When they pulled the layers of tape off they found she had bitten her tongue with sharp canines, puncturing it sixteen times.

(By the time they coaxed the pillowcase away from Shannon they'd already been inside and had a good idea of what she'd gathered up, brought with her from the house.

(She gave up her brother Chapman's head and right arm—severed just above the elbow—but she wouldn't let go of
Elefunk
. Shannon would have killed anyone who tried to separate her from
Elefunk
, or died in the attempt.)

Flaps retracted, gear up.
The Piper Aztec takes off from the Emerson airport in a pink- and-azure dawn, heading west. At the controls, Robert McLaren, slowly bleeding to death internally from a rip in his liver. It can take as long as four hours before, body cold, brain an inert gray lump, fully
depatterned
, he ceases to function altogether. He has an inkling of this. So little time left, no one to care, he has failed in an act of courage and daring and must now improvise with what remains of his mental vigor. Meanwhile blood rises slowly in his throat like sap in a tree and he continues to sponge it from his tongue and lips. Already accustomed to the heat, the slickness, the harsh carbolic taste of it. The unexpected thirst it causes. Unaccustomed to the frustration of work not completed. Shannon lives. The powerful symphonic poem he was in the act of composing, the great work that could unite him with his mother at an intersection of space and time mathematically implicit in the music, revealed
only
by the music, may be irretrievable.

He coughs. Can't help himself. Blood sprays the instrument panel in front of him.

Perry.

Who was he? Nothing but a "dirty trick" they'd played on him. His father's and his grandfather's idea. Like the time they came to him, all smiles, and coaxed him out of his room and drove him to the place where they did the shock-thing. Oh, again and again until the music was gone, it took him years to figure out a way to get it back, bloodletting enjoyable of itself but not the essential thing. What was the use of lamenting? Forget treacherous people and "dirty tricks." The music hovering in the air above Shannon's head, swoop down, gather it in, set a course for zero-starlight, mother-home.

Looking down, Rob tries to decide where he is. Photographic memory, instant recognition of terrain, landmarks. He's too far west already, the city behind him, wishbone intersection of silver railroad tracks enclosing a towering white grain elevator. Rob banks left.

There's the interstate, coming to an abrupt end at a vast plowed field. Road graders, ready-mix trucks, gangs of men at work on an unpaved mile. He is flying at a thousand feet. Remembering the house at 298 West Homestead. The thick stands of trees all around. Tricky. He will have to dive almost straight down toward the front of the house to hit the bedroom in which he left her. Explode into it at better than one-hundred-fifty miles an hour, obliterating them both. It's a tremendous idea. He's overwhelmed by the gutsiness.