Fiends (23 page)

19

The telephone in the kitchen rang at five after nine, and when Enid answered she heard a thin high voice made less intelligible by crackling static on the line. "I haven't seen Marjory for hours and I can't find her anywhere! I don't want to speak to her, I just want to know if she's home!"

"Rita Sue?"

"Yes, it's Rita Sue!"

"Where are you, baby?"

"Dante's Mill State Park! Phone booth! Campground! Everything's closed here! I think she went behind the waterfall, that's why I'm—"

Enid took the receiver away from her ear and said sharply, "Ted!" He was under the sink with his tool box taking another crack at a leak that had resisted his previous efforts at repair. He backed out and glanced at her, reaching for a grease rag to wipe his hands on. Rita Sue was still talking. Enid gave Ted a baffled look, shook her head worriedly, and got back on the line.

"Rita Sue—wait—tell me that again. Where did you see her last? Who was she with? That boy—"

"No. We didn't see Duane. She had some of his stuff with her, you know, that he uses to collect butterflies. She put it in the backseat and said—what was it she said, Boyce?"

Enid said quickly, "Rita Sue, put Boyce on and let me talk to him."

"Hi, Enid, this's Boyce."

"I know. What's going on over there?"

"Beats me."

"You're not being much
help,
Boyce. Now think about it calmly and tell me everything Marjory said the last time you—what time was that anyway?" Enid looked around at Ted and pointed upstairs, telling him to get on the telephone in her bedroom and listen in. He nodded and went at a jog to the stairs.

"I reckon it was a little past four."

"Where was she?"

"By the millpond at the old town."

"She's not there now?"

"Well, they close the road over there at sundown."

Enid heard Ted pick up the receiver of the phone in her room. "You saw Marjory a little after four, but Duane wasn't with her."

"No. I don't know where that booger's got himself to, and if he's not careful he's gonna violate his probation—"

"I don't care about him," Enid said sharply, "I'm worried about Marjory. What did she
say
to you?"

"She said—near as I can recall—'Duane's missing. He's with some girl.' And, oh yeah, her radio got stolen, that was it, Duane was helping the girl get her radio back. I think. They had to go behind the waterfall after it."

"Behind the waterfall?
At the millpond?"

"That's right." Boyce paused, apparently to listen to something Rita Sue was saying urgently in the background. "Oh, yeah. Marjory must've called the Highway Patrol, she said they were coming. But they never did. Then she took her flashlight out of her shoulder bag and said she was going to go look for Duane behind the waterfall."

"Oh, good Lord! How deep is that water there?
Ted?"

Ted asked Boyce, "Did you see Marjory go behind the waterfall?"

"No, sir. Me and Rita Sue stayed in the car until we decided to go have us a ice cream—"

"Boyce, how could you let Marjory—"

"Nuggins, calm down. I can barely hear him."

Boyce said, "Well, I was gonna go with her, but you know, because my foot's all wrapped where I dropped that crankcase, I can't get around so good."

"I heard about it. Where'd you say you're at now?"

"Oh, you know, the big campground where the park headquarters is."

"I want you to stay right there with Rita Sue," Ted told him. "There'll be some law officers on the scene in just a few minutes—"

Enid lowered the receiver of the telephone between her breasts and put a hand over her mouth. She was still standing there like that when Ted came running down the stairs, peered at her in exasperation from the doorway, then came quickly to hang up so he could make a call.

"We don't know it's anything; maybe they—" He was dialing.

"She's been missing
five hours?
How could she go behind the waterfall? Isn't there—it's like a big wall! There's no way—"

"Hold on. Hi, Loretta, this's Ted. I'm over at Enid Waller's. Her sister's up at Dante's Mill, and she and maybe a couple other kids have been missing since right after four o'clock this afternoon. Marjory Waller. Her date was a boy named Duane—" Ted snapped his fingers a couple of times until it came to him. "Eggleston." He spelled it. "Yeh, do that first, and also notify the Wingo County Sheriffs Department, have them meet me at park headquarters. Oh, and give ol' Rhubarb a call, ask him to take my shift tonight. . . I
know
that, but the horse show's rained out tonight, they don't hold hunter-jumpers in a dang downpour. There's one more thing." Ted turned away from Enid and walked toward the back porch as far as the telephone cord would reach, but he couldn't get his voice low enough not to be overheard by Enid. There was thunder outside, going on and on like a bowling ball rolling downstairs.

"Tell Wingo County we may be needing their tracker dogs. And enough men to drag that pond up there at the old mill. Yeah. Leaving right now."

When Ted turned around Enid was facedown in a heap on the floor. Because of the thunder, or the pressure of blood in his ears, he hadn't heard her fall.

20

Birka was finding out that coming back from the Black Sleep was no bowl of cherries. She was having the devil of a time holding on to the Marjory-human, and in Birka's present circumstances, Marjory was the only hope she, or any of the
huldufólk
colony, had left.

Killing Arne had been a mistake: purely an accident. After the deeply painful minutes of awakening from the Black Sleep, Birka had been too easily enraged to discover she wasn't free at all. Arne (unrecognizable, to be sure, as her son, except in distant neurons of the hypothalamus where primitive structures of human emotion survived vestigially) had prudently tethered her feet to the tree with strangler fig. Petulantly she reversed the polarities of his brain, rendering him unconscious. No harm in that, ordinarily, but then, because he was biologically antiquated, perhaps, he suddenly stopped breathing. Birka had a lot to learn about mind-tempering, the harmful effects of misfires on hormonal balances, although she couldn't have put any of this into words. Theron was the learned one, surrounded by fledglings, but he'd had little time to instruct Birka before

Enoch and the boy caught up to them and banished them all to limbo with nooses of fig. She had never taken Enoch seriously enough, Birka lamented, and that had been their -downfall.

Once she was certain Arne was dead, instinct fifty million years old took over: no sense wasting a human, so Birka skinned him. (Uh-oh; she visualized this a little carelessly, and the Marjory-human jumped nearly a foot off the ground where she was crouched partway down the hill. Birka turned on the childish tears again, loading up the cortical belief-systems of her own mind with images of kinship. Her enormously sensitive, telepathic pineal "eye" distributed these diverting images and messages to priority systems in twinkling thickets of the Marjory-human's hierarchical brain, preempting, but not with complete efficacy, conscious awareness of her present surroundings and circumstances.) All that aged, mottled skin might prove to be of no value in Birka's renascence, but it was something to start with. Theron would have criticized her for not taking advantage of the opportunity. If she ever saw Theron again.

Heaving Arne's skinned carcass high into the fork of a limb was no more difficult for Birka than lifting, in her former unsatisfactory incarnation, a pot of beans from the back of the stove. Even though she couldn't stand on her numbed, poisoned feet. Nor touch the knots of strangler fig without instantly losing the use of her fingers. She had persuaded the Marjory-human (must think of her only as "Marjory"; the leak-through, the currents of cross-imagery, disturbed the basic, reptilian brain that wanted to scuttle, and save the irreplaceable body) to untie her, continually eliciting sympathy through imagined kinship: a taxing exercise in Birka's present state of development and difficulty. Now she continued the exercise, but Birka felt drained, incapable of Turning the girl, even if she could position her for this effort. Such a malignant fate, almost free, then lightning striking the tree just as the stubborn fig-knots came loose in Marjory's hands. Fortunately Marjory wasn't killed, but Birka lay trapped in a cage of limbs, a welter of green leaves. Not the type of leaves to send her off to the Black Sleep; only a vine around the throat could do that. But the greenery sapped the vital energy of the pituitary gland, caused an annoying mist in her mind when she most needed all of her faculties.

And the steady rain had thinned the flocks of messengers, the luna moths; she had no idea what was going on down below where Theron waited, entombed. The force of his mind had remained potent even in the rigors of the Sleep, although she couldn't hope to tap him now, through layers of limestone and deeps of pitch. What would he say, advise, in these moments of crucial helplessness?

He would say that her fear of dying was vestigial, unworthy of her status. Her flesh was so cold marauding animals or vultures would not care to touch her. The sun, of course, was a different matter: to be illuminated unpityingly at dawn, quickly banished by the hated orb of God; oh, the smoking horror of the unhidden which preceded the Sleep! A noose was bad enough, she never wanted to undergo the torture of sunlight. But she might have hours left, before dawn. And what else could harm her?
Nothing.

Her immediate needs were clothing and shelter. A farmhouse, a barn would do. Was Marjory from a farm, or town? Birka preferred the isolation of a farm; not so many humans to deal with. Marjory was all she could handle, for now.

Birka's other option was to return immediately to the cave and free the others. With Marjory's help, of course. Only a human could release the Sleepers. But this might put too much of a strain on Birka's efforts to maintain their relationship. She couldn't afford to lose Marjory, but controlling another's primal fears was ticklish, even at this range. The child was so afraid of death (Birka sensed without crystallizing the event a catastrophic loss of parents). For now wherever Marjory went, Birka had to go.

"Oh, Marjory! Are you hurt?"

"Yeh. I hurt all over."

"Can you walk?"

"I think so. Did you—why were you running?"

"I was afraid of the storm. I'm still afraid! Take me home."

(Marjory's eyes darting to the sky where lightning flickers, then to the damaged tree. No trees in their Icelandic valley. Marjory sees instead the tumbled stones of a sheepcote.)

"I'm pinned down! Hurry, Marjory, get the stones off me!"

"I'm . . . coming, Birka."

A long way up the slope for her, slipping and sliding. Breathing hard. Struggling through the wet leaves and myriad branches of the huge chestnut limb lying half on the ground. A raw wound in the side of the old tree visible as lightning flashes again. (All of this recast by Birka as tumbled sheaves of hay under a fallen shed roof. The lightning is very useful to Birka because it is something else Marjory dreads, reducing the activities of her brain to basic survival alarms.) Marjory cringes, and sees Birka lying helplessly in mud, looking up at her.

"That stone . . . so heavy. Can you lift it, Marjory?"

"Don't . . . know. Trying. Leg . . . broken?"

"No. I can move it. A little more—there! Give me your hand."

"What happened . . . to your pretty dress?"

"I don't know. I don't care. Let's get out of here. We'll go to your house. I want to take a bath. You'll lend me a dress, won't you?"

"Sure. Birka . . . I saw you flying. How . . .?"

"Marjory, don't be ridiculous. Which way?"

"I don't know. I'm . . . lost."

"Well, then. There must be a road. We'll have to walk until we find it."

"Walk until we find it."

"We'll tell each other stories. Keep our spirits up. It can't rain forever."

"You're so cold."

"But I like being cold, Marjory."

21

The girl called Smidge had looked in Puffs luggage twice for the gasoline card, but she couldn't find it. Sorting angrily through raunchy underpants and other items of clothing sprinkled with reefer dust and Johnson's baby powder, paperback copies of
The Origins and History of Consciousness
and the poems of Shelley, autographed photos of trash gods and already obsolete rock icons of the fast-diminishing Love Generation, and
beaucoup
empty containers for Tuinal and Quaaludes, she found, the second time around, wrapped in aluminum foil and stuffed in the toe of a lizard-skin shoe, the only thing of value Puff owned that was immediately accessible to them: some jewelry that looked old enough to be genuine gold. It might, Smidge estimated, be worth a fast hundred bucks at the right place, a pawn shop or jewelry store that specialized in such stuff. So she took the jewelry without telling either of their male traveling companions, Wiley and Deke. Smidge had, after an initial infatuation on the beaches of Sanibel, just about given up on Puff, who wouldn't let Smidge fuck her unless she was so high she didn't know what was going on anyway.

In Smidge's opinion Puff had, at some point during their last few hours in the backwoods of Tennessee, come across a guy with a good-looking bike or something who appeared to be a better deal than she had with
them:
maybe she'd met up with her very own "exterminating angel," which she claimed a fortune-teller in Europe had told her she was destined to meet. Smidge had thought Puff was so cute, she'd just hung on every word there for a while until it came to her that most of Puffs philosophy was rock-hipster bullshit right out of
Crawdaddy.
Because the woody wasn't acting right, burning gallons and gallons but getting no significant mileage, Puff probably figured they'd have to camp out for a while, and she could spin by and pick up her things in a day or two once she was comfortably relocated.

Smidge was still reeling a little from the after effects of a mescaline high two days ago, feeling mean as a dog with a thorn in its paw. They had no money and nothing to drink. Wiley had thrown up in the woody while she and Deke were out scouring the countryside for the treacherous Puff. The rain had been bad and she could only crack the windows and try to get used to the rotten smell—not that it had been smelling all that good in there before he chucked his guts. Wiley, conscious now but not much help, was huddled under the canvas the two guys had pitched above the popped hood of the woody while Deke tried to get the carburetor cleaned out, or whatever, so they wouldn't be stalling every thirty feet and jerking along at twenty miles an hour. Deke was a whiz at electronics: he could take apart a malfunctioning guitar amp and reassemble it in the dark onstage while fifteen thousand teenyboppers were screaming at a concert. But he wasn't much with cars. Wiley was no fucking good with anything but a cocktail lounge piano and Puffs pussy, at least to hear her tell it.

Both of them had vetoed ditching Puff the first time she brought it up. Give me one good reason, Smidge demanded, and Wiley, the asshole, racked his putrefying brains and said with a smeary grin, "She knows how to have some fun," putting Smidge down again and shoving her farther to the outside of their little group than before. Smidge was of a mind to out-boogie both of them. Her little romantic schemes involving Puff having collapsed like the castles on the sand they'd built together while they were still friends, what was the point of hanging out any longer? She didn't mind hiking with her backpack through a little rain, once the lightning abated. She was scared silly of lightning, those flashes that lit up her skull like-X-rays, followed by a
crack
that seem to jolt the heart loose from its moorings.

Wiley was holding a flashlight over Deke's shoulder while Deke worked, and the smell of gasoline in the station wagon was almost enough to overcome the stench of beer puke. Smidge concealed the stolen jewelry in her backpack, put on her Seminole poncho, and opened the tailgate of the woody. Wiley was jiving and making jokes under the square of tarp that sagged in the middle from accumulated rainwater. What's the difference between a clever midget and a venereal disease? Do you know the difference between a genealogist and a gynecologist? That kind of joke. Good old Wiley. You could dress him up, but you couldn't take him anywhere. Smidge decided to say good-bye to the fellas after all.

"Where you goin', babe?" Wiley said, when she had their attention.

"Find a place to sleep tonight. Get myself a bath. My hair smells pukey."

"Hey, yeh, listen, I'm sorry about that, it was just an accident." He was flicking the flashlight on and off in her face.

"Yeh, well, sure. Anyway, I'm gone."

Deke said, "What do you want us to tell Puff?"

"Tell her I'll be around the old campground," Smidge said vaguely. "Wiley, don't shine the damn light in my eyes like that."

"I'll get this thing going in a little while," Deke promised. "We'll drive over in the morning and pick you up."

"Do that." Rain was running down her neck. Smidge felt an unexpected pang, thinking about Puff. A clever midget is a cunning runt, and Puffs a runny— She said to Deke, "Which way did we walk to get to that town?"

"Just pick up the trail over there and follow it," Deke said. "Then you come to the road we drove in on, and it's all downhill."

Smidge looked over her shoulder and saw nothing, and shuddered.

"How the hell am I going to get there in the dark?"

"I thought maybe you noticed that already. It's dark, and it's raining."

"Well, I could use the flashlight."

"Well, we only got one and we need it here." The wrench he was using slipped from Deke's hand and fell to the ground underneath the woody. Deke uttered a blasphemy.

"Can't you swear and leave Jesus out of it?"

Wiley laughed. "Preacher's daughter," he said.

Smidge said, "There's some things I'm sensitive about, believe it or not."

Deke grabbed the flashlight out of Wiley's hand and got down to look for the wrench.

"Wiley could walk me as far as the road, there's probably some lights on in the town. Okay, Deke?"

"Yeah, hell. Go on. I'm sick of this shit anyway." Deke came up with the wrench in his hand and scowled a\: it, then banged the hood down as Wiley jumped back with a laugh and did a little of his Jamaican dance, the one he said appeased the crocodile gods. "We got anything left to eat?"

"There's some Cokes, and peanut brittle."

"Peanut brittle! Whose idea was it to boost five pounds of fucking peanut brittle?"

Wiley said, "There wasn't much else to boost, except all that shit made out of seashells, and postcards and stuff. But that's a good idea. Maybe I can get us a couple six-packs in this town. Smidge, we'll work it the way we did at that convenience store, you know, where the old lady looked like Granny on
Beverly Hillbillies?
I could've walked out with half the store, and she—"

Wiley abruptly stopped talking and licked his lips and looked off with a slow sideways movement of his head. He was doing that a lot lately. The flashlight in his hand dipped, shining on the bumper of the woody and the faded sticker that read We Want the World and We Want It Now! Smidge reached out and took the flashlight from his hand. Five seconds later Wiley came around, eyes blinking rapidly, and said,
"Beverly Hillbillies.
That show fucking cracks me up. You going somewhere, Smidge?"

"We're taking ^ hike down to the town. Except it's not a real town, Wiley. Nobody lives there any more. It's an exhibit. Come on if you're coming."

"Right on, babe. Back before you know it, Deke."

"Yeh, swell. I'm gonna crash."

"Smidge, you know the difference between a genealogist and a gynecologist?"

"No, and I don't care," Smidge said, shining the light up the wide firebreak they had followed off the road and into the woods, staying far enough from the road so the occasional park ranger wouldn't come across them and make them leave. Two days already. They could've been in Chicago. There were friends of friends in Chicago, at the university, who she knew she could put up with.

"Where did you say Puffs got to?" Wiley asked her as they trudged up the path in the rain. Lightning off to the north, or what she thought might be north, not close enough to be really scary. The flashlight had a good strong beam, like a headlight almost. She was wearing her muleskinner's hat, which kept the rain off her face. Wiley, as usual, was barefoot. His striped railroad pants were sodden and muddy, his vest of unborn pony hide gleamed wetly when she swung the flash toward him. He'd been a husky guy, well-built, but beer was turning him to a pile of suet. He couldn't be more than thirty, but there was gray in his scimitar sideburns. Well, he was better than no company at all.

"I didn't say. I don't know. She took off about four o'clock, I think, and didn't come back."

Wiley was silent about that, and then he began singing "Lovely Bunch of Coconuts," jumping around on the path, behind her, in front of her, leaping into the air and holding his balls. Inevitably he slipped and crashed down and lay there on the trail, muddy and with a look of pain in his triangular eyes.

"Wiley, get up."

"Can't," he said, wincing.

"Knock the breath out of you?"

". . . Yeh."

"What you get for being such a—" Smidge offered a hand. Wiley grasped it and raised his head slowly, but then he was deadweight.

"Don't think I can get up yet."

"What'd you do?"

"Back, feels like."

"Oh, great."

Wiley slowly inched to a sitting position.

"You gonna be okay?"

"I think so. You can go on if you want to. Maybe I better go back to the woody."

"Can you walk?"

"Yeh, sure. In a minute."

"Look, I'm gonna take the flashlight, because—"

"That's okay. No
problema.
I'll get back okay. See you in the morning, huh?"

"I feel like a shit, man, leaving you here."

"No sweat."

"Okay, then."

Smidge actually did feel, at least momentarily, bad about leaving him sitting there, but on the other hand you could never tell about Wiley. Maybe he was faking it. Maybe he only wanted attention. She felt better about his situation when he started humming
"Malaguena."
His back couldn't be hurting all that much. She resumed walking uphill along the firebreak, averting her face when lightning streaked low off to the left. The trees were a dark oceanic blue, rolling like combers in a surge of wind that hadn't reached her yet. The rain quickened, or else it was just runoff from the drenched boughs overhead. Smidge paused to adjust the straps of her backpack.

She heard Wiley call out then, full-throated, "Smidge!" His voice sounding hoarse and high, and as she whipped around awkwardly another bolt fired off at tree-top level, dazzling her. Thunder came at her like a jet flying six feet off the ground, breaking the sound barrier; she grabbed her ears with both hands and the flashlight slipped, glancing off her hip on the way down. Smidge bent over to pick it up. Something about the tone of his voice.
Scared.
Wiley scared? He had the trust of a two-year-old that nothing bad could ever happen to him. A true moon-in-Aquarius. Maybe he'd tried to walk, and slipped again, and was just sitting around spaced-out in the mud.

Smidge aimed the light down the firebreak but didn't see him. She didn't think she'd come very far, but in the dark and rain she didn't have her bearings. She walked back slowly, following her own boot prints.

"Wiley?"

Smidge looked right, then to her left at the undergrowth ten feet on either side of her, thinking Wiley might have become bored and was going to—well, if he tried anything cute, she'd give him a fat lip to go with his lame back. The rain was beginning to make her miserable. Goddamn Wiley! Lightning. Cringe. Thunder. Cringe again. Flashing her own light around. Boot print, boot print, she couldn't have passed him by, boot prints, footprints, yeh, Wiley's big feet, size twelve or better but he hated shoes, this was where they—

But whose footprints were
those?

Smaller, narrower, a feminine foot. They came from the left, down from the woods, two, then almost three feet apart as if she'd been running, running to this big mud wallow in the middle of the firebreak. Depressions filling with rainwater, a big churned-up area as if they, there'd been—

And then sort of a fresh path going off diagonally the opposite way toward the fullness of woods on the other side, and alongside that dragged path the womanly footprints began again, all the way to—

Smidge was starting to turn to stone. Interesting reaction. She'd heard of people petrified by fear and had never thought that much about it, yet it was exactly what happened, beginning with her knees. They turned to stone, they wouldn't work. Then she was stone up the back and across the shoulders and the throat, yes, the tongue too . . . she could still feel her heart beating, though, and the rain dripping from the brim of her hat onto the hand that held the jittery flashlight. Smidge was making noises like a blind kitten trying to find its mother when something came crashing in a panic out of the brush twenty feet away with a deep sob of anguish, and stopped dead in the beam of the light.

Not that he could see it. What was left of the pulp of his eyes was running down his cheeks. And what was left of the skin of his torso hung off the pegs of rib bones, the keel of his breastbone, like a yellowish, bloodstained toga. Blobs of fat undulated at his flayed midsection. His hands rose and fell uselessly in the streaming light spread out across the mass of understory shrubs behind him.