by Farris, John
Faren broke off, eyes going blank, and she slowly knuckled her mouth with her other hand, thinking, brooding.
"How did you get out?"
"I'm as baffled as you are. All I know is I found myself in the midst of a glaring cloud, like morning fog just before sunrise: that cloud took over the chateau, getting hotter and brighter until I almost couldn't stand the brightness, I felt as if I were all bones and teeth, like an X-ray picture. That's the only way I know how to say it. I couldn't make out a thing except for those ruby eyes, serpent's eyes, big and with hot blood spots in them, watching me. Then I might have gone dead asleep for a few seconds: When lighting woke me up I was lying on the ground fifty feet behind the church with a torrent from a drain spout washing over me. I heard in my mind the pitiful cries of some of the people who had been getting ready for the masquerade back there."
Terry searched those vague moments when he had lain, at the end of a stressful day and close to oblivion, in the bed. "Last night you said—I thought I heard you say—they were lost forever. Are they dead?"
"No, Terry. I don't think so."
"Wasn't there a fire? And then the chateau was buried in an avalanche?"
"That's what I told you when we met, because it's the explanation most people accept as logical. People will always believe what makes them comfortable, and doesn't overagitate their brains. But I've never really accepted the avalanche theory. You see, when I married Arn and moved in with him and he'd go off hunting for a few days and come back, I'd have little flashes of intuition, just from touching him; something he'd collected out there in Wildwood, not knowing about it himself, was all over his skin. I had glimpses of things that I'd prefer not to have seen; which is why I'll get a Bible and swear to it right now, the chateau is still there, and all of a piece. I had to pass through a tornado of fire, how and why I don't know, but last night I was meant to walk through those marble halls."
Terry sat up and said with pained intensity, "No, listen, you were in the churchyard! In the rain, with me, but you weren't getting wet. I called you; I think you heard me. You came toward me like you couldn't tell where I was. Then you—walked right through me! I thought you must be dead; a ghost."
She ran a hand obliquely from the back of his neck across the top of his blond head, leaving his hair in a wrong-way Mohawk ridge and his scalp a-tingle; beneath the sheet his own, impulsive serpent grew long through the buttonless fly of the pajama bottoms he wore.
"I'm no ghost, that's for sure." Her hand continued, fondly, down the side of his face, her slightly irregular, pinkish nails just grazing his cheek; she gripped and held his chin, froze his attention on her face while her eyes stared past him, at a corner of the room where sunlight was pale as a watermark on the plain off-white wall.
"Maybe," she said, "there's a fine line that can be walked, balanced on; and that's how I appeared to be two places at once."
Her own intensity caused him to tremble, negatively; she took her hand away and put it with the other in her lap.
"Well, Terry, whatever happened to us last night, let's hope it's over and done with."
That shocked him. "You mean something else that bad could happen?"
"No—I don't think so. I just wish I could make out more of the meaning of what—" Her gaze was lifelessly remote again, for a few seconds; then she came out of it and tapped him lightly on one shoulder. "Well, let's just try to put it out of our minds. Time for you to be up and around, your daddy must be near to frantic by now, and I'm in Arn's doghouse for sure."
Hickory Smith's wife had died of cancer two years before, leaving him childless and alone in his hilltop house. Smith was working in his studio when Terry sat down to the kitchen table for the breakfast Faren fixed for him: buttery buckwheat cakes, bacon, and eggs. She had eaten earlier, much earlier, done the wash, and cleaned house for her brother.
"I could spend the rest of the day digging him out," Faren grumbled; but the windows sparkled, the house was airy, it smelled keenly of fresh turpentine and artist's oils. She took in the rest of the laundry flapping on the clothesline outside and they drove into the town of Cherokee in Smith's pickup truck, where Faren used a pay phone at the Texaco station. By then it was almost noon.
She came away from the telephone with a frown.
"Couldn't raise Arn at the house, and the phone at the grocery's out of order," she said. "I'll arrange for the garage here to winch my Ford off that stump and tow it in, then we'll drive on home. Jewell can bring Hick's truck to him this evening and thumb a ride back."
Faren wasn't talkative the few miles up the road to Tyree. The pickup had a front-end shimmy and she had to grip the wheel hard with both hands to keep it riding true and steady, muscles bunched in her walnut forearms. They listened to Hank Williams, Kitty Wells and Lefty Frizzell on the radio. Terry had never heard real country music, and "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels" and "I Told a Lie to My Heart" appealed to him: hardship, disillusionment, misery, and sin. Faren's feathery sing-along voice raised goose bumps. Williams, she related, had died alone in the back of his Cadillac at the age of twenty-nine. Coronary, but he'd been a heavy boozer. "My age," Faren said, as if this fact implied a kinship of fate. She seemed sad to Terry, and not just from listening to sad songs on the radio. She was in mortal conflict with herself this morning. Put it out of our minds, she had counseled, but whenever he glanced at her face in profile against a window reddish with reservation-road dirt he saw her as if by forked lightning, striding perplexed and (he now knew) a little frightened through last night's deluge; he had to keep looking at her to reassure himself that a stitch in time had sealed her safely in the present; she couldn't vanish from his sight again, they would arrive together at the conclusion of this bumpy journey in lambent April light. For now all was well.
But when they reached home and found out that Arn and the dogs were gone, and his father was gone, too, and she had talked to dopey Jewell in the grocery store and come out quickly, banging the screen door behind her, the look on her face, an adult acrimony and displeasure he had not encountered in her before, caused him to shrink a little, as if he had been smugly overinflated from adolescence these past two days and was about to be reminded of his true age and worth to Faren.
"They've gone to the mountain!" she said, raising a fist, not purposefully but in a gesture of frustration, face bathed in bad blood which, because her skin was already darkly toned, showed most startlingly in her eyes.
"What mountain?"
She used her fist, knocking in a northerly, direction. "Tormentil!"
"Why?"
Her fist moved to a spot near her breastbone, pressing there.
"Arn's begging for trouble this time, that's all I know."
Trouble—the word seemed as ugly as a psychic tumor she had, plucked from the center of her body; she seemed not to know what to do with it, she stood stiff-legged with unempowered energy, the noon sun streaming down on her hot raven head, bold brows casting winged shadows like witch paint to the corners of her unhappy mouth. Then she whirled away from Terry, crunching through the gravel of the lot past the high cab of the pickup truck she'd left near the store with the keys in it, her face flashing momentarily back at him out of the brightness of the side-view mirror. She reached in over the windowsill for her purse, continued on toward the house.
"Hey, where are you going?"
"After them! Before it's too late."
"I want to go with you, Faren!"
"No, you can't! Stay here, in the house, there's plenty to eat, you'll be safe here!"
"What's going to happen?"
She didn't answer him. She kept walking fast away from him, would've run but the denim skirt with the hem well below her knees didn't allow for running. He watched her cross the road in the shade of the trees near the house and hurry up the steps to her front porch, heard the faint clap of the 'screen door behind her. Jewell, attracted by the shouting back and forth, sauntered out of the grocery, bottle of orange pop in one
hand, his other hand shading his eyes. He looked at Terry, who explained nothing, and eventually went back in, where the light wasn't so bright.
When Faren came out of the house by the back door twenty minutes later, dressed for the woods and carrying a loaded backpack she'd had since her college years, Terry was waiting for her. He had his own well-used Alpine trail gear ready to go. He was sitting on a broad beechnut stump relacing a hiking boot that didn't feel right across the instep.
"Terry, I mean it. You stay put."
"No."
She walked slowly across the yard to him. Guinea hens roosting in a streamside sapling began an irritable squawling.
"One of those damn birds tried to bite me," he told her. "I don't think their eggs are worth it."
"They eat a lot of garden bugs, too, that's why we put up with their lousy dispositions. Look, your father's not here and that makes me responsible for you, and we've already been in one scrape too many, because I didn't use real good judgment. So I don't want to worry myself sick over you, you can't go."
He stared straight at her and it occurred to him, a major revelation in his young life, that women will always say no even when they don't mean it. Faren's face looked hard and stubborn but he wasn't fooled; when she knew he wasn't she stopped bluffing and dropped her eyes and that was that. Terry smiled briefly and finished tying his boot. He stood up then next to Faren, tall in thick-cleated soles. Feeling pretty good about the way he had handled himself so far. But worried.
"What kind of trouble?" he asked her.
"Terry, I just sense that something real bad is waiting for them up there on the Tormentor."
"Is something going to happen to my dad?"
"I don't know. But, more than Arn, he's the one should stay away from there."
Terry suppressed a shudder of nervousness. "Let's go find them, then. They're already way ahead of us, aren't they?"
She nodded. "Almost six hours. That doesn't mean much. Arn might turn the dogs loose on rabbits, or stop a while to fish."
"Should we take a gun? Arn has more guns in the house, hasn't he?"
"It's nothing we can shoot at, or I would."
"Don't you know what it is, Faren?"
"Yes. The chateau. It's dangerous. But I don't know any more about it than that, not yet."
"Do you know how to get up to the mountain?"
"I've never been in Wildwood. Never wanted to go. But all we need do is follow the creek here, which takes us to the headwaters of the Cat Brier up there on Tormentil." She gripped him by the upper arm and pressed her face against the right side of his neck for a few moments, gently, attentive to the fast pulse in his throat. "I guess I didn't really want to be alone in those woods, no matter what. We'll find them, Terry; everything'll be okay. Give me a boost with my pack, and let's be on our way."
Chapter Eighteen
After four hours of hard walking uphill Arn Rutledge and Whit Bowers came to an easier plateau, new wide-spaced growth of red and sugar maple with little underbrush, mainly dogwood and hobblebush, the creek meandering through it shallow, full of stepping-stones and tea-colored from the layers of leaves steeping on the bottom; the creek vanished in a bread swale filled with beaver lodges. A fire just after the war (Arn explained) had burned through several hundred of the acres they were now crossing. Arn, never at a loss for an opinion, thought that a good fire now and then was useful. It burned out choking thickets and helped break down the deadwood, giving younger trees room to thrive. There was a little too much emphasis nowadays on spotting fires early, jumping on them and putting them out before they could run their course as nature intended. But the U.S. Forestry Service hadn't yet put up any watchtowers on Wildwood land. The government, Arn said, was still pretty busy up at the park building new asphalt roads and campgrounds and hacking out trails in the wilderness that would make it just a hell of a lot easier for city people in their Bermuda shorts and Capezios to wander around admiring nature in the raw and maybe get themselves chomped on by a bear or a disgruntled coon in the bargain.
They paused before entering denser oak woods at the threshold of the mountains and had something to eat. Arn had brought along biscuits as big as quart jar lids and sausage, which they shared equally with his hounds. Whit had sore heels but no blisters, for which he was grateful. He sat with his back against a windfall comfortably padded with the big leathery leaves of mayflower. The sun was high and hot on the back of his neck and shoulders. The mountains he faced, wave after long wave in tones from burnished sunlit green to fade-away blue that became indistinguishable from the distant sky, looked barely penetrable. Whit no longer found preposterous the notion that a chateau could be missing in this wilderness; an entire civilization, cities and pyramidal temples, had all but vanished for centuries in the jungles of the Yucatan. The spring wood they had passed through earlier, still weeks from a fullness of growth but already convolute and as mysterious in its depths as the windings of the inner ear, was close enough to jungle for Whit; and there were more rugged miles to go once they reached the hemlock forest that solidly rose from the shoulders of the mountains to their mile-high summits.
Nineteen sixteen: it had been forty-two years.
He could easily imagine large blocks of dressed stone tumbled into ravines up there on Tormentil, covered by rivers of mud and loose rock in the heavy rains that followed a runaway fire, then by creeping wood sorrel and the tough tangled mountain rhododendron. Conifers grew quickly tall; there could be sixty-foot plumed pines and spruces, big around as shaggy barrels near the ground, where Sibby Langford had sat facing her several lives in a triptych of nighttime mirrors, languidly brushing her hair before bed. . . . .
Such sad, worried eyes.
His head was nodding, he was nearly falling asleep. Daydreaming.
Her slight, pale hands, brushing. The back of the hairbrush oval, luminous, inlaid mother-of-pearl. When her hands were at rest, in her lap, the veins were ugly and blue. With her hands raised to the crown of her head, the veins all but disappeared, they seemed smooth then, pleasingly childlike. But they were always cold.
She had been ill. She seldom left her rooms anymore.
She was looking at him in the mirrors with a wan, inviting smile, the curve of her mouth pretty, like a cowrie shell.
Come, sit beside me, I've missed you. Such a busy boy.
(No:
I won't I don't know any of this
None of it is true
Whit snapped out of the reverie with a nervous jerking of his outstretched legs, having started to free-fall but able to put on the airbrakes before it went too far.
Arn, watching him, said, a stitch of amusement at one corner of his mouth, "Fall out of the plane without your parachute on?"
Whit, dry-throated, said, "Yeah."
"Happens to me all the time."
Whit searched the sky for an afterimage of loving blue eyes and shuddered again. The day was clear with noon at hand, he saw only a suggestion of clouds in the northeast, an area of the sky that looked as if it had been scoured to bone-dry whiteness by a wire brush. The dogs were lying down after their meal, drowsing slackly in the sun. Arn used a toothpick, tossed it away, took another from his shirt pocket. Whit saw a dragonfly with some of the luminosity of mother-of-pearl at the level of his eyes, and when it flicked away there was a red-tailed hawk soaring just above the pinnacles of the dead trees standing in vague still water in the marsh.
He was nodding off again when the hounds began to stir and whine and then to bark mournfully. Whit looked up, mildly startled. Nothing had changed, as far as he could make out, but the dogs were on their feet and bristling, uneasy, not oriented to anything visible, not all facing in the same direction.
He started to get up, but Arn reached out and pulled him down again.
"Hold it."
"What's wrong?"
"Don't know yet." He picked up his rifle and cocked it with a callused thumb, looking around carefully, maintaining a low profile below the w
indfall. They were on open ground with only a scattering of thin trees anywhere near them, no places of concealment within fifty yards.
"Bear?"
"That's not a bear alert they're givin'; nor hog. But tushers, unless they've gone off in the head, sleep days and forage nights."
"What, then?"
"Somethin' the dogs sense but we can't."
Arn seemed satisfied with this interpretation of their behavior, and was motionless, without dropping his guard or taking his finger off the trigger of his Winchester. He watched his dogs, who also held their ground but with unnerved quiverings, glancing around at him with humid, unhappy eyes.
"How long are we going to wait?"
"I think I know what it is. We'll just wait till it happens, too dangerous to move now."
"Until what happens?"
Arn said testily, "You'll know for certain when you see it, and I won't have to waste words tryin' to half-ass describe it for you."
More time passed. The hounds whimpered and moaned. Whit was looking at a hawk, maybe the same one he'd seen earlier over the marshes, when everything in his field of vision moved. It was as if the sky and the mountains and the trees in the middle distance were all exacting reflections in a two-faced mirror mounted on a swivel, and the mirror had suddenly flipped 180 degrees to its magnifying twin, warping everything so hugely out of proportion that it seemed a nonsense blur of dark-hued elliptical shapes and flashing blueness turbulent as a monster-haunted sea. The eye could take in nothing but confusion, the mind balked; then the mirror reversed on the instant and the image regained its true, placid perspective, even as to the accurate placement of the low-flying raptor. And the mind balked again because from the clear sky a bolt of lightning carved its way earthward with the slow violence of a magical tree taking root.
