Wildwood

by Farris, John

  "These are the Smokies," Arn told him. "we do have occasional dry spells, but ordinarily it rains up there five days out of seven, off and on all day. In between showers the sun'll come out, and that's what accounts for the smokes."

  "Why did you bring your dogs?"

  "You walk a bear trail, you run into bears. I'd ruther scare 'em off then shoot 'em, if I don't need the meat." Arn stopped suddenly, tired of talking over one shoulder. "Am I walking too fast for you, Colonel?"

  "Yeah<" Whit admitted, trying to catch his breath. They paused beneath a red maple, twenty foot garlands of wisteria and lilac bloom-clusters hanging from its branches.

  Arn shrugged and said with a slightly exaggerated patience, "Well now, this here's the pussy part. Later on the goin' gets close to vertical."

  "Later on I will have sweated out this goddamned hangover."

  "Reckon you got a fair start on that already. I want you to know, I only give you the good stuff to drink. There's worse white lightnin' you can buy."

  "What does the bad stuff do to you?" Whit asked, trying to imagine feeling worse than he did already.

  "If it's bad enough, got a-plenty lye or lead salts or maybe fusel oil in it, it'll flat-dab kill you. Just a little bad, after a while you come up with a liver you carve you initials on. You doin' some better, now that you've had a blow?"

  "Yes. Give me another minute. Arn?"

  "What's on your mind?"

  "That skeleton you showed me last night. How could—any ideas how a man got to be like that?"

  "Well, you know, there's plenty of peculiar things occur in nature. Ever been to a freak show at a carnival? Used to dote on those when I was a-younger. Sneaked under the tent one night to watch a red-haired stripteaser with balls and a dick like a blood sausage. She could get it up too. Or maybe it was a man with a woman's bodyu and big jugs. Take your pick. Seen the alligator boy and the three legged man. Now, that couldn't've been no fake. I'll swear to it on the Bible. He was settin' there in plain sight on a little stool and all but naked; and he could wiggle the toes of his three feet. Mountain woman my mama knew personally, lived a ways back up yonder of Blackhaw Ridge, she delivered herself of a babe with a two-foot tail hairy as a wolf's all wrapped around its little body; and they say it had wolf's eyes and ears too. The mister, he took it straight to the tanning trough and drowned it in lye water. Then he shot the lights out of his woman with an ole .44, 'cause he knew she'd had to have been with a werewolf to conceive such a child."

  "Sounds like one of those stories that gets better every time it's told. A werewolf? Now, you don't honestly believe in something like that."

  Arn didn't crack a smile. "Hereabouts a man's counted a fool if he don't believe, and takes measures to protect himself. I told you there's wild creatures, not three miles farther on from where we're standin' right now, that has the minds of men. Farfetched? Colonel, you and me fought in a war that seen men on both sides turn animal in ever' way but looks. What was the name of that dago boy grew up on the streets of Chicago, he was so good at slippin' behind the kraut lines at night with his knife? I seen him come back from patrols with blood on his mouth, he'd been drinkin' Kraut blood after he slit their throats. Call that human?"

  "He was a psycho."

  "Maybe he had a cravin' to drink blood that he couldn't control. He needed it. 'Nother thing, there's still babies born with tails, more common than you might think. Doctor just snips 'em off like a rosebud and nothin' more's ever said about it."

  "Vestigial tails are one thing. Functional wings are another."

  Arn pushed his shabby hat back and rubbed his creased forehead below the hairline. He gazed thoughtfully at Nolichucky, his redbone hound, who was pursuing a feisty squirrel through Virginia sweetshrub and deer laurel on the other side of the swiftly flowing creek. He whistled sharply. " 'Chucky, leave off doin' that and get your butt back over here!" He looked again at Whit. "Well, no, I don't accept that the hawkman was born that way. I think he was a hundred percent normal till he got misused by some kind of black magic, a trick that didn't come out right."

  "What kind of trick puts wings on a human body?"

  "Search me. But it is a fact that Edgar Langford was a hell of a—what's the right word; Faren told it to me once—kind of a male witch."

  The appropriate term came readily to Whit's mind. "Warlock. Necromancer. But necromancers were chiefly known for raising spirits from the dead. No, he couldn't do that."

  Arn looked surprised. "Didn't know you was that well-acquainted with the black arts. Or ole Mad Edgar himself."

  "I'm not," Whit said, feeling a curious, quick lightheadedness; the brilliance of the splashy creek obscured Am's presence momentarily, dimmed the barking of the dogs and the warblers in pale greenwood. He felt a tugging sensation, as if the waters of the creek had shifted and he were standing deep in the foaming current. Easy to go with it should he so elect, floating to where all currents converged in a dark backwash of time—he resisted, afraid. At that moment his head pained him as if it had been struck with an ax and cleaved in two; with one disoriented eye he saw some people grouped in a wild garden of thorn and lair, mistily observing him: they were albino-foreign, with eyes like darkroom bulbs, so close he might have reached them in a few strides, if he dared. With the other eye he saw Arn's sunfired puzzled face, sharp gaze of gunsight gray. This split level of consciousness was fleeting; then the headache that had flared up excruciatingly began to fade, he found his tongue again.

  "I don't know a thing about magic," he assured Arn. "But I—I've been reading a lot about Langford recently. When was it you shot the hawkman?"

  "November of '38."

  "Edgar Langford died in 1916."

  "Yeah, maybe."

  "Maybe?"

  "Could be died ain't the right word for what happened to him."

  Whit laughed; the conversation struck him as ridiculous. From hermaphrodites to werewolves to necromancers. He still felt a little clouded and bemused. He wanted to lie down in the softly sunned bed of lime green fern that overhung the creek until the feeling passed. Instead, he leaned against the maple's swayed trunk to take some of the stress off his already pack-sore backbone.

  "What in hell are you talking about, Arn?"

  Arn had faced north, the direction of the unseen mountain. Two of his hounds came leaping up the bank from the creek and shook themselves vigorously, sprinkling both men.

  "Sayin' he might still be up there."

  "Oh, Jesus," Whit muttered.

  "Livin' in his fancy chateau like 1916 was yesterday . . . yesterday, hell. A fraction of a second ago. Faren's seen the chateau a time or two. Her last look was just before she got packed off to that mental ward. So—I don't know. Maybe it is there. But we can't locate it, see it with our own eyes no more."

  Whit didn't say anything. After a minute or so Arn turned and asked him, "Remember screamin' meemies?"

  "For the rest of my life I'll remember them."

  "Those .88's traveled faster than sound, you didn't know one was comin' until shitttttt, there was dirt and vehicles and pieces of bodies flyin' all over the place. Just pure luck if you didn't happen to be in the way of one of them shells. Well—Faren says the chateau and most of the people in it somehow got to travelin' so fast, close to the speed of light, that normal eyes just can't pick it up. So to us it's just the same as if the chateau had disappeared."

  "You're talking about a stone chateau, weighing as much as an Egyptian pyramid and covering twenty-four acres of land. And it, what was that you said, 'just got to traveling'?"

  Arn looked disgruntled. "That's the way Faren described it to me. Reckon maybe there's a law of physics would explain how that could happen. Or else it's one of them black arts secrets that'll stay secret until somebody figures out the answer. Anyway, Faren knows and I believe that lookin' ain't always seem'; we need to make use of other senses we don't know we got."

  Whit started to say something that Arn might have interpreted as a chal
lenge to his wife's sanity, thought better of it, and also decided he wasn't in a mood to try to reconcile Arn's mystical speculations with his customary hardheadedness.

  Arn didn't seem particularly interested in pursuing this most recent flight of fancy either. He picked up his own pack, and the rifle he had set aside.

  "When you're feelin' froggy, we'll jump," he said.

  They were soon at the borderland of the cove, broom corn pasture gone wild, the last of a succession of abandoned homesteads fallen to ruin, rail fences down in high weeds and brambles. The early morning sun slick on new leaves, faintly warming the backs of their necks. The dogs, having worked off their early exuberance, trotted along with tongues lolling, in front of and beside the deliberately walking men. Off to his left, at a distance, Whit could see a tall thin man in a porkpie hat and a woman wearing a calico bonnet hoeing in the garden behind their house. He caught the glint of a car moving south along the road that passed Arn's place a mile and a half away. Then the mouth of the big woods opened and took them in. Suddenly it was quite a bit darker, sunlight limited to pale freckles and blazes across their path, which was crossed and recrossed by the exposed sprawling roots of hickory, white oak, and poplar, roots grown so thickly together the path seemed nearly paved with them, like an antique corduroy road.

  Arn stopped suddenly, looking around, taking a deep draft of the air that smelled, to Whit, only of humus and moldering logs, uprooted trees crushed against one another, the long strands of maypop and strangler vine that festooned their cracked bare limbs looking like a fright wig.

  "Chestnuts," Arn pointed out. "Used to be a fine grove of them trees standin' in here; but the blight's killed 'em all off. Big as they be, these woods could die, make no mistake, if nobody takes care." He took another deep breath, frowned, went down on one knee to examine the dark ground between two gnarly roots. "Our friend Jacob's come through here already," he said. "Half hour ago, 'bout."

  "On his bike?" Whit said, looking at the rough uphill path ahead.

  "Yeah. I can still smell the tailpipe fumes."

  "You've got some nose."

  "Never ruined it with cheap tobacco. Didn't care to end up like my daddy, coughin' his lungs out bit by bit on his deathbed, but still cryin' for a smoke."

  "How deep in the woods does Jacob live? He doesn't look like much of an outdoorsman to me."

  "That's a fact. Well, I found the little lean-to where he leaves his bike, but I never thought to track him the rest of the way. I don't believe he's put up lodging of any kind. But I got a suspicion as to where he's holed up. He must have found a way in, so I reckon in that regard he's been sharper than me."

  "A way in to what?"

  "Mad Edgar's cave. You know about that?"

  "He shipped so much artwork from the Middle East—at least two trainloads—that he had to have a place to store it all until his chateau was finished. So he blasted a huge cave in the side of Tormentil and ran a spur line into the cave."

  "Yeah. You can still make out where that spur line was, but there's a hill of rock and dirt and near to full-grown trees in front of them old iron gates now, they dynamited a whole bluff down in that gorge. If you could get a couple bulldozers up there, which is just about impossible, it'd take a week to move all that fill. I doubt that it's worth it. I don't believe there's anythin' of value left in the cave. But I'll bet you there was 'nother entrance. Because ole Edgar, he was too clever not to have a secret way in and out, probably convenient to where he was buildin' his chateau."

  Arn whistled up his dogs and leashed them; they walked on.

  After a hundred yards or so the trail they were following, growing steeper and more complicated in its wanderings, divided, and Arn took the left-hand fork. It went around a hill and up another, very long hill that Arn described as a ridgeback. Limber sapling branches on either side grew almost to touching in the path's center, flicking at, fencing with them, whipping them smartly as they passed. The footing, of red clay mixed with mast and leaf marl and crumbling rock and decayed wood, sodden from all the rain, was treacherous. Arn, handling himself and his dogs as well, seldom paused and never faltered. Whit had sweat in his eyes and a fiery welt on one cheekbone. His headache had diminished. The trees overhead, immense shaggy vaults through which birds flickered lighter than air and without wingbeats, closed out all but precious fractions of the sky, the clear and cheering morning light. Around the walkers mist fumed, there were ghostly exhalations in choked groves. Whit caught sight of a doe's still-watching head, quickly withdrawn into shadow. The dogs panted as if exhausted but seemed to have spring steel in their haunches; their splayed heavy feet with claws like obsidian were dyed red to the dewclaws, stringy mud hung from their underbellies and wrinkled throats.

  "Now, dogs," Arn said, "them three's all I got left, and they ain't nothin' too special, mostly good company. But for the best part of my life I've run with a pack of hounds thick as fiddlers in hell. Blue ticks and Plotts and redbones and a Catahoula hound I fetched back from Louisanner once upon a time; he didn't take to the mountains all that good, bein' a canebrake hunter, got a bad cough one December and perished of it. But sometimes the best dog you can have is just an ole cur. Had me a runty little wirebeard once that was the best tree dog I ever saw, it come natural to him. He'd follow a coon to torment, then he'd set a tree till he starved that coon down, and whip the stripes off 'im. Lord, I'm tellin' you. And boar dogs—you got to know it takes a nervy dog to fight a wild boar, and them weighin' upwards of three hundred fifty pounds, slip in just right and grip him by the ear so he can't use his tushes. Good boar hunters need more'n a dab of bulldog stock in 'em, that's a fact."

  They came to a stream too wide and full to cross, and had to make their way up along the crowded bank, using for handholds slippery branches of rhododendron and the washed-out roots of mighty trees soaked black in the flume. Breaking through elaborate spiderwebs, the frail light caught in them like the light of church windows. Am reacted to every detour, every obstacle, with nonchalance, indifference; obviously he knew how to get where they were going, but was in no hurry, this was his church, his morning of communion. Whit's thirst had grown the more he sweated, the taste of spray on his lips was sweet and agonizing; he felt as if he had a mouthful of dirt in which his tongue, barely wetted, lay half dead. He was too thoroughly occupied by the act of climbing, reaching, straining, maintaining balance, to be awed by the prolific thickets with which he was immediately challenged, and the dark immensity of the woods to come. He didn't feel lost, exactly: he had a compass with him and good geological survey maps, and in a pinch he knew he could find his way out of Wildwood simply by following running water to the flatlands, but he was at a loss, humbled, a blinded man groping to be informed; he did not fit his skin well today, and his bones, like dry bones he had transported from the scorched desert of his dreams, were alien here in this fiercely greening, richly fecund, breathing, murmuring, terrifyingly beautiful and treacherous place. The sensation he felt most penetratingly, as he struggled toward Tormentil, was one of rebirth. But by daylight it was not possible to recall the symbolic circumstances of his dying, symbols so infallibly ordered on the stage-set of sleep. So there was no meaning to be derived from the sensation that was as pure and chastening as hunger or sex; he had only the faint apprehension as he toiled through tangles toward the hidden sky and the mountain clouded by time and magic, that something crucial must occur before he would be allowed, or enabled, to come down again.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Terry was just awake but with a lassitude that kept him motionless, staring at the ceiling and listening to birdsong outside the spare bedroom in Hickory Smith's house, when Faren came in, laid his washed and ironed clothes at the foot of the bed, then sat down beside him.

  "Hi."

  He turned his head, studying her, tongue worrying the sore lump where his lower lip had been split. She'd washed her own things. Her hair was clean and brushed and looked blue at the crown because of the l
ight from the shaded window behind her; her lips were freshly colored. She looked well and at peace with herself. But a little shy with him, not knowing where to begin.

  "You should have—" Terry said, and his throat tightened hostilely.

  She nodded. "Oh, sure, you're right. I ought to have warned you, there might be snakes."

  "But why—"

  "Terry, it's a vital part of our religion, the taking up of poisonous serpents when you're moving just a-joyful with the spirit, loving the Lord, and there's no wavering in your faith. Because it says, right there in Mark 16, 'In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them.' We believe every word of that."

  "You mean because it's in the Bible nobody can get hurt?"

  Faren lowered her head regretfully. "Can't say that hasn't happened, because it has, lots of times. And people have died or been brain-crippled from snakebite or swallowing poison. Those people just weren't ready; they felt the need but didn't have the victory."

  "It just sounds weird to me. And I thought you were going to get bitten."

  "No, I never have been. But I've handled snakes only a few times, and those were copperheads. A copperhead bite'll make you dog-sick, but the poison won't bust your heart the way rattler poison does."

  "Where did you go? How did you get out of the church so fast?"

  "Terry, I'm honestly not sure. I can only tell you, something did come over me that wasn't the true spirit of the Lord. And the snake I was holding turned into a wooden serpent with a gold and silver head, and ruby eyes that were spitting all over me like sparks from a stirred-up fire; I just went up and out in a flurry of sparks, right through the church roof." Terry winced slightly, wryly; she gripped his hand. "I'm not lying! Next thing I knew, I was walking down long hallways filled with statues and pieces of statues that must have been thousands of years old; and I could look right through closed doors three inches thick at people getting dressed up fancy. I can't begin to describe the gowns and wigs and getups for men, old-time silk breeches and embroidered waistcoats, it was like pictures I've seen of the Court of Versailles. But some of them were putting on costumes of feathers and fur, the skins and claws of animals. I realized I must be in Mad Edgar's chateau, on Midsummer Eve 1916, and his revels were about to commence. But nobody took notice of me; they couldn't tell I was among them. They didn't know something else was there, either: an evil force I could feel right away, it sapped my strength and drained my soul. I was just dwindling away, atom by atom." She tightened her hold on his hand, fearing an attempted withdrawal, rejection. "Oh, I was scared! I started to run, trying to find a way out before it was too late. And then I—"