17
She should have run away.
That much was obvious to Marjory, even as the balance of her mind fell into a kind of dismal funk. But the longer she stood there gaping at the body of Arne Horsfall, jammed between tight branches of the chestnut tree ten feet off the ground, the less important he seemed. The fact of his death was no longer important. He'd been old, of no further use to—
"Marjory?"
Birka was calling her. Marjory's face, stiff with shock and distaste, relaxed enough for her to smile. She continued to shudder. Thank God the cold, sifting rain was ending. She turned her head one way, then another, looking for her friend. There was a light in the eastern sky, rays of the rising sun illuminating smoke from the mile-high volcano that dominated lava fields only a few kilometers from their green—and treeless—valley. Marjory looked up again, slow-witted, and had a surprise. There was no chestnut tree where she was standing, no dangling man raw as a leg of mutton. How could she have dreamed such a thing? And there weren't any dark, ancient caves underlying the smoothly contoured pastureland where five families lived. Beneath the occasional fertile valleys and lava deserts of Iceland there were only chambers filled with steam, rivers of glowing magma. In a past century the subterranean heat had been high enough to bake potatoes in the fields. No human thing could survive down there . . . but that was part of a melancholy dream that seemed to have lasted as long as winter. Now the reddening sun, which would remain above the horizon for the next four months, was full in her face; blinded by the unaccustomed light, rainbows in her eyes, she was ecstatic. All summer long the six of them played outdoors until they were exhausted. The children Marjory's age were Páll , Gudný, Vigdi, Lun. And Birka, eight months older than Marjory, who was nine. Always the leader among them.
"I'm caught, Marjory! Help!"
Birka's distress sounded real enough. But where was she, and where had all the others gone? Were they hiding? Despite the reappearance of the sun the constant wind was still cold, burning Marjory's ears and the tip of her nose. She felt a little bump along her bones, like an earthquake's signal, accompanied by a subtle displacement. She had, mysteriously,
moved, from grassland to a colder place near the crest of the last lichen-covered hill that lay below the ashy tor of Hekla, which in the length of its fissured sides resembled a fallen dinosaur. Here the wind was punchy, boisterous, it stalked her. Behind Marjory, almost four kilometers away, red roofs, the smoke of homefires. Sheep grazing.
"Where are you, Birka?" Had she ever been this far before, unaccompanied? And what was Birka doing on this hill, treacherously rocky and long uninhabited except for—
"They
did it to me, Marjory! They brought me here! You have to get me loose before the shadow covers me!"
Marjory's eyes watered from the light and the wind, which sometimes flung grit so fine it couldn't be seen even on her fair skin but stung, invisibly. Nevertheless she climbed higher to where the hill was broken, bearing only scattered shrubs in deep lees where the wind couldn't reach them. Rifts underfoot, some so wide she had to jump across; they were packed with old snow and ice turned nearly black from drifted, ingrained volcanic ash. Here the stones had vague statue shapes, as if once the hill had been a wild sanctuary, or sacred ground. Still sacred, perhaps, to the
huldufólk.
Marjory trembled, her chest tightening painfully with each spasm. She was instinctively afraid—but they were the Hidden Ones, as God willed: the pure light of day was death to
huldufólk,
turning them darker than the lava flanks of Hekla. She would be safe as long as the sun—A loose stone caused Marjory to slip; she shrieked but didn't fall.
"I hear you!" Birka called out. "This way!"
Birka began sobbing, which made it easier for Marjory to find her, at last.
"Oh!"
The shock. Like another warning shiver of the earth, prelude to a destructive upheaval. The sight of Birka lying wedged faceup in a green cleft of the rock naked as a pea in a pod except for the rope of horsehair wrapped three times around her ankles. Her nakedness somehow unchaste in this mean and desolate setting. Her belly white as marble, plum-colored nub of navel. Marjory had always cherished Birka for her spirit, for her soul, like that of a crystal angel. Now she looked cast down, punished—but why? Her pale blue eyes shimmered from overflowing tears.
"Who did this?"
"Páll. Gudný. They left me here for the
huldufólk
to find. That's what they said! They think it's a big joke!" But she blinked and her eyes darted nervously. The shadow of Hekla was approaching with the sideways movement of the sun. Who could tell what creatures crept with the shadow, anxious to claim Birka, and make her one of their own?
"They took off—your clothes?"
"They're
mean!
They should have come back by now! Oh, please, Marjory, get me out of here! Untie the rope."
(Gesturing; but if her hands were free, why hadn't she untied herself?)
"Are you—going to tell on them?"
"I don't know. I don't think so. I'll get back at those two, don't worry. I'll steal
their
clothes when they're swimming, and they'll have to walk home with nothing to hide their backsides. Come on. G-get me out of here! I can't move my feet. I have a cramp."
"Where are your things? Did Páll—did Gudný—they touched—"
"No. They aren't stupid. Just mean. And I'm lying on my clothes."
"I—maybe I'd better get your father."
"Have
him
see me like this! He'd kill them both. I'm not
that
mad at them. I don't think. Just untie me, all I want to do is go home, I'm so cold."
"B-but, your hands—"
Birka held up her hands, fingers drooping, as if confessing a lack of strength, powerlessness.
Marjory understood, or thought she did. She kneeled, touching Birka's knees, then a shinbone that felt like a blade of ice. Odd that Birka wasn't trembling. Now that Marjory was doing something about her predicament, the last of Birka's tears trickled down her cheeks and she seemed in control of herself. Smiling in spite of her discomfort. Marjory wondered how this could have happened to Birka. They had never played a game remotely like this one before. Birka would have been quick to condemn the suggestion, and her disapproval was always a mandate. Páll and Gudný were not mean, as far as Marjory was concerned. They teased and taunted, like all boys, but this act of near brutality seemed beyond anything their minds could conceive. It was also inconceivable that Birka would tell a lie . . . thoroughly confused and scared, Marjory focused on the danger in this lonely place. What if the
huldufólk
had found Birka first? She shuddered so violently that her vision blurred.
Birka said impatiently, "Stop fumbling! Get me loose!"
"The knots—under your ankles—I can't—"
"Oh, you idiot! No. I'm sorry. I didn't mean that. You know you're my dearest friend, Marjory."
Marjory sobbed; she couldn't help herself. She kneaded her stiff fingers and tried again. It seemed so dark here, where had the sun gone? And the vine he'd bound her with was wet and slippery.
(The vine? Wasn't it horsehair, a horsehair rope? She could've sworn—)
Birka's eyes, so blue they burned. Burned right through the center of Marjory's forehead, causing not pain but a terrible sensation of loss. Loss of will, of hope.
But you have everything to live for, Marjory! And you're going to live forever. Darling, what do you think of that?
"Don't . . . know. It's . . . not possible."
Oh, Marjory. You know so little. And I have so much to teach you! Now the knots . . . there!
Choking. Marjory wanted to swallow. Couldn't manage it. Birka's eyes twin blue suns, her breasts so unlike those of a child . . . but what had happened to her beautiful pale shoulder-length hair?
"Did they cut off your hair, too?"
Birka's eyes flashed, losing all color, flashed as white as lightning; Marjory felt as if she had been turned-inside out. Weightless, her skinless self sizzling, reeking of ozone, she was swept up brutally, thrown through the air and came crashing down hard on sodden ground.
I should have run away! Now I'm dead.
Still sizzling, but not on fire, Marjory raised her head, which wobbled erratically. She was sick to her stomach. Her eyes focused slowly. The huge chestnut tree flared where lightning had struck, sending a heavy limb to the ground. In spite of the rain the body of Arne Horsfall was outlined in flames. She could see his eyes, then greasy smoke from his own body obscured his face.
But where was the mummy he'd carried from the caverns?
Marjory retched. She felt so terrible it was an effort just to sit up. God, she had been
talking
to it! Just before the lightning bolt struck only a few feet above her head. Now she was a good forty feet from the tree, swept aside by the falling limb, tumbled down the slope of the hill into a scrub thicket. Smarting all over her body. Her lower jaw felt displaced, it hurt terribly when she tried to close her mouth. It hurt to take a deep breath.
(Talking to it. As if—)
No, no, that was wrong! It wasn't a mummy, it was a naked ten-year-old girl bound hand and foot like a sacrificial virgin on a gloomy hillside in Iceland. Her best fr—
Her best friend was Rita Sue Marcum, and she'd never been to Iceland, and she wasn't going to sit here in the mud and go crazy if there was any other possibility. That meant getting up and walking away, fast.
Marjory was able to cover a dozen yards downhill before sinking to her knees, shockingly depleted. Never in her life had she been so lacking in stamina. Marjory sniveled and closed her eyes. When she looked up the sun was shining and Birka was running down the hill with her multicolored dress in one hand, the material streaming in the wind like smoke and as lovely as the plumage of rare birds; free again, she was laughing. Marjory called futilely to her,
Wait, wait—
secretly afraid she'd been tricked into doing something all of the children would soon be laughing about, taunting her.
But what's the joke? I don't get it.
Tears in her eyes from the wind, her vision obscured, Birka seemed no longer to be running, but flying. Marjory pouted. Maybe Birka had deserved to be tied up and left forever on that barren hill. But nobody ever told her
anything.
Marjory wiped her tearing eyes and saw the top-of-the-world sky, saturated with the vivid colors, lemon to heartsblood, of Birka's special dress, which she now wore as a pair of voluminous, undulating wings that lifted her lazily into the clouds. Marjory was pained and furious and bereft.
—Lightning flashed, shocking in the blue, the sky fumed and darkened and poured and there she was again, looking up at what was left of Mr.
Horsfall, smelling him as he flickered and charred, turning as black as the feet and ankles, encircled by vines, of his mummy.
(But it was only her feet that were tied and blackened. The rest of her was alive; and oh the wicked, entrancing blue of her eyes as she promised
You're going to live forever.)
Didn't seem likely. At the moment Marjory felt so rotten she wasn't sure how she was going to make it through the night.
18
Duane's heart started beating properly again when he saw Puffs head lift slowly above the muzzy drift of silk that covered the cavern floor.
"Puff, what're you—”
"Oh, Duane," Puff said, in a calm, hushed voice, staring at something in the cocoon maze, "come see this!"
"Uh-uh, I really do think it's time to get out of here."
Puff didn't answer him or look around. The flashlight in Duane's hand danced a little as he put the beam on her. She appeared totally absorbed, excited, breasts rising and falling quickly as she breathed through her mouth. Something dangled from her right hand. To Duane it looked like a piece of the dried vine which all of the mummies had in common. He didn't like that much; he didn't want to think about where it might have come from. Duane's skin was crawling. He'd heard that expression before, "Made my skin crawl," and by God it was the literal truth, it did crawl. It also puckered pretty good when he heard a thin, fussy, wailing sound, like that of a newborn just beginning to breathe. Like the first sounds of his baby sister, whom his stepmother Nannie Dell had given birth to three weeks early in their mountain vacation home. He'd more or less helped his father deliver the baby, along with a part-time midwife who worked at the Minnie Pearl's in Gatlinburg, and he didn't want to ever have to do that again.
Puff was still breathing heavily through her mouth, which she closed in order to swallow and talk. In the light he held on her she trembled, flesh appearing to ripple like muddy water, jogging the numerous shark's teeth on her breast. "Duane? You know what?"
"Puff, damn it, come on, we've got to—"
"No. Hurry! It's . . . he's . . . alive!"
"Jesusss!"
"Duane," Puff said, seemingly the calm one now despite the husky heaving of her breast, "bring the flashlight over here so I can see this better."
She turned her face then, full into the beam, eyes wide and unblinking, one of them vibrant with precious rings of color, the other marred and moody, it looked scrawled on her face, an afterthought by a careless totem artist. When she grinned her large sharp canine teeth appeared even more prominent than usual. Not just nerves on his part: seeing that grin, as hostile as a killer's dog's, Duane realized dismally how Puff could be so agitated in the flesh, jerky as a tribal dancer, while talking to him in a near monotone. Her brain had cracked, her mind flung all over the inside of her skull messy as uncooked egg. Now he had real problems.
The wailing at her feet again. Puff looked down slowly and said, "It's happening. It is
really
happening! I always knew he wasn't . . . they didn't just throw him away! Oh, no, don't you see—this is where they put
all
of them, Duane, isn't it? Oh, God. Now I don't have to feel guilty any more. Duane, would you bring the light over here?" She held up the length of tough shriveled vine. "Mama wanted me to untie her first. But it was on too tight. So I did
him.
What do you think I ought to call him, Duane? Huh?"
Duane didn't reply, and couldn't move. The flashlight in his hand dipped. The absence of the beam distressed her.
"Don't leave me! I told you to bring me that fucking
flashlight!"
On "fucking" she gave a leap, astonishing because she was nearly up to her hips in silk, and charged high-stepping through the frothy cocoon, shark's teeth flying as high as her ears, arms working like the erratic limbs of a capering marionette. He backed up only two steps before she dropped a fist hard as a hammer on one of his collarbones, snatching at the light with her other hand. Duane was driven to his knees, and as Puff turned frantically to go back to the nesting place, she inadvertently smashed him in the jaw with an upshot knee.
Duane went over sideways in a burst of sparks and comets that thinned drastically in a gathering fog. Dark gray, but not black: he didn't totally lose consciousness. He was numb and bleeding inside his mouth, but he could hear exceptionally well. Voices on the damn radio again, the baby's wail, now Puff babbling and calling to him, Duane, just as if she hadn't put him down for the count moments ago. His fingers, digging through silk, found bedrock. He pushed himself upright, tilting, wobbling. He'd bitten his tongue. His jaw was still numb but the back of his neck hurt like hell.
For the first time since they'd made the discovery of mummies in the sepulchral cavern, Duane was very much afraid they weren't going to get out of there alive.
Puff was back, standing over him, shining the light in his eyes.
"What's the matter?" she asked him.
He couldn't say anything. Puff reached down, took him by the arm, and set him on his feet. He couldn't believe how strong she was, how weak he felt in her grip. His knees weren't supporting him too well. Fell off the garage roof when he was eight, didn't hurt any worse than this.
"Come look," she said happily, and dragged him into the midst of the cocoon. "I was three months along. They told me, it doesn't look like anything at three months, not as big as a mouse, even; but that was all lies. Huh? It was no fucking
mouse,
it was my little baby boy! I had it done in Puerto Rico, you know. They speak English there. In Puerto Rico. They rob you, too. It cost five hundred dollars, but she wasn't even a regular doctor. I don't think."
"Jesus, Puff, let go of me!"
"Three years ago. Huh? I thought he was dead. Wait till everybody finds out about this!"
"No, Puff,
no,
this place—I'm not sure
what
it is, but I know we have to get—"
"There! There he is! Look, isn't he
beautiful?"
Where she aimed the beam of the flashlight Duane saw something shapeless—to his unaccustomed eyes—not only shapeless, but dark and writhing like a bucket of eels. Making those chilling human sounds of anguish, birth pangs. One glance, and he didn't want to see or know any more. The voices on the radio, all of them screaming now, like a mob at a prizefight. Locked in her maniacal grip, he looked at Puff, and she was chewing her lip in a frenzy, making it bleed. Blood just flowing down her chin. He was cold and dizzy from horror. There was a fog rising from the matted-down silk where the whippy thing struggled to live, or die; their own breaths were condensing. And now some of the luna moths, eyespots aglow like small lanterns, had begun to flutter around their heads, as if taking a keen interest in the spectacle, the abomination, the horror . . . Duane tried to draw back, to pull Puff with him as if from the brink of an abyss, but she was immobile except for the thrilled antic workings of her face, the sharp teeth piercing her lip.
"He's coming," she muttered, as if what she was watching were pornographic. She wiped her swelling lip with the back of the hand that held the flashlight. At least she had stopped biting herself. Duane shot another look at the floor as something popped up darkly, slick with fluid, through the fog and silken haze: something with a gaze as stark and stunned as his own. The round hairless head of a kinetic tarbaby. It was still not clear, from the expression on its face, if it was struggling to live, or dying in agony.
"Damn you, Puff, why did you take that vine from around its neck?"
She looked at him in surprise, and responding to the pressure of his fingers on the back of the hand she held him with, relaxed her grip.
"Mama told me to!"
"Your mother's not here!"
Puff did her little joyous, herky-jerky dance. "Look, look at him now!"
It was sitting up, he could see that much. The wildly contorted limbs, once twisted like the length of vine Puff was still holding, had straightened. Fingers were recognizable, and toes. So was an immature penis, half the length of Duane's little finger, and erect. Tremors still ran through the small body in waves, but the screams had become sobs. And its—his—skin tone was softening, turning from pitch thick as a tar road to a dark gray, with faint pinkish highlights which at first Duane thought were reflections from the wings of the moths flocking to the beam of the flashlight. As the child took shape and its own birth-vapor formed like a blanket around its head, the tremors and upheavals lessened.
"He'll get his hair back. Won't he?" Puff said, smiling deliriously. And she reached down to run her hand over the crown of the well-shaped head, a milder gray than the rest of him. His skin continued to lighten, to soften everywhere. At Puffs touch he held up his arms to be taken. "Ohhh," she said, rapt in motherhood. She handed Duane the flashlight.
"Puff, don't!"
"I'll take him with us. We'll come back to get mama. I need something to cut away all the vines. I don't want to leave any of them like this." There was a squawl of protest on the radio, and Puff hesitated as she was bending over to pick up the child. She frowned. "It's all right," she said. "I said I'd come back. You can depend on me." She listened. "You can depend on
him,"
she said, but with less conviction, and although Puff didn't look his way, Duane felt a warning pang around the heart. "I'll leave the radio on for you," she said then with a note of finality, and turned her full attention to the waiting child, who watched her solemnly, arms still uplifted. Duane thought he might be five or six years old, but it was hard to tell—that hairless head.
"Don't," Duane said again, but he was drained of protest; there was no reasoning with her.
She lifted the child and brushed away some of the cobwebby silk that clung to his moist, wrinkled, repugnant skin and held him against her breast. His head was on one of her shoulders but his eyes, elliptical and filmy, didn't close. He looked steadily at Duane, without curiosity or any other sign of intelligence.
"I'm going to call him Alastor," Puff said. "Do you read Shelly? Do you know that story?" She spoke happily to the child. "How do you like your new name, hmm?" A moth sat exquisitely on the child's head. Alastor gave no indication he knew it was there. He was perfectly quiet and seemed not to be breathing. Duane reached out slowly and touched a boyish shoulder, jerked his hand back. The child's flesh was impossibly cold, as if he'd been plucked from the waters of a well.
The eyes moved, following Duane. A small hand clutched Puffs arm above the elbow, and Duane realized something was wrong with that hand. The little finger hadn't turned, it was still carbon-black. And tapered; it came to a point as sharp as a thorn's.
"Puff," Duane said, his voice cracking, sounding childish, "put him down."
"What?"
"Just put him down, and let's go. We don't have any business—"
"We're going, all right, but Alastor's going, too."
"No."
"What do you mean, no? What do you have to say about it, shithead? He's mine!"
Another luna alighted on the boy's skin, now a spoiled-looking whitish-gray. Two more. With their wingspans, three of them were nearly enough to cloak the inert Alastor in alluring moths. They gave him, with their beaming eyelets, both stature and menace.
Duane swallowed. He'd nearly lost his voice. He looked at Puffs eyes and knew there was no sense in yelling at her. But maybe he could save her. He trembled in his guts. His chin wrinkled.
"I think . . . he's used to being down here, belongs here, and . . . if you, we . . . take him outside, who knows what'll happen?" To
us.
Puff gave her head a toss and laughed; Alastor's thin hands clutched her arm tighter, and Duane looked at the thorny little finger denting her skin.
"You're crazy!" Puff said. "Nothing's going to happen to him. Now what're we waiting for?"
"Feel how cold he is, Puff. He shouldn't even be . . . alive."
"He isn't cold! He feels fine to me! He's probably hungry! I want to get him something to eat and some clothes and stuff. Toys. He wants some toys to play with, don't you, big boy?" Puff jogged Alastor up and down a couple of times; the child rode glumly on her shoulder. The faintly luminous moths fluttered but settled down as if they'd become attached to him. "I'll call my brother Max collect in Wisconsin. When I tell him the good news he'll wire me a hundred dollars right away. Then . . ."
Puff, having fixed a course of action in her bombed-out head, pushed her way past Duane. After a few steps she looked around wearily.
"That's the way we came in, over there. Isn't it?"
"I think so."
"I can't get out without the light, Duane. Help me?"
"Oh, Puff."
"If I can just get a little help from my friends now and then, I'll do fine." She was crying.
The hairless child on her shoulder, on his bed of shark's teeth, closed his eyes. He seemed to have gone to sleep. Maybe his hair would grow back. Maybe there was nothing to be afraid of, after all. The radio was as still as a stone. If he wasn't afraid, Duane thought, then why didn't he stop shaking? If he'd gone crazy too, down here with mummies that came back to life, then somebody would recognize that right away when he reached the surface; they'd put him in a safe place until he got sorted out. He yearned for that safety. It was a craving much stronger than hunger.
"You go first, Puff," Duane said. "I'll light the way."