Wildwood

by Farris, John

  "Faren!"

  "What?"

  "There's a body in the cab of the locomotive! It must be the engineer."

  ". . . You mean a skeleton?"

  "No! A body. He hasn't been dead long. And you should see where that locomotive rolled down the hill. And—there's fresh oil on the rocks by the river. Coal, too, big chunks. The accident must have happened today. Come on."

  Faren groaned and sat up. A glance at his eyes, his concerned puckered brow, convinced her he wasn't fibbing.

  She followed Terry to the wrecked Mikado . . . saw all that he had seen . . . glanced into the cab at the waterlogged phantom. Horror in a twilight green wood. She backed away shakily, too conscious of the bone yard of her own body just beneath the temperate flesh. Looked up along the treeless line of devastation, roots showing unearthed and broken, sharp as stakes.

  "I—don't—believe—this."

  Terry had no reservations; he started uphill. "Let's go see if—"

  Faren jerked him back. "I don't want to go up there!"

  He scowled. She had pulled too hard, hurting his arm.

  "Don't you want to find out what happened?"

  Faren shook her head, staring, her mind on possibilities that frightened her even more.

  They both heard, faintly, one of Arn's hounds crying.

  Terry broke from her grip and scrambled away, following the slashed and flattened path the locomotive had made; a lump of coal, kicked away by one of his boots, shot through with glitter like a furtive cat's eye, bounded toward Faren. Dodging, she called to him.

  "Wait, Terry! Don't go without me!"

  He paused on the slope and looked back impatiently.

  The light was fading fast, a tarnished silver, by the time they climbed to the ridgeback. The hound named Bocephus met them there, whimpering. It was obvious he was hurt. Faren kneeled and took him in her arms. The hound had a large lump between his eyes.

  "Bo, Bo, what's happened to you? Where's Arn?"

  Terry walked farther up the ridge, to the place where the trees were knocked down. The locomotive's path ended abruptly, some thirty yards back in the woods. He didn't know what to think. He took his flashlight from his pack and searched the torn-up ground. Saw a section of rusted rail attached to rotted cross ties, partially buried beneath tree roots. Buried for how long?

  Faren summoned him with a wail of alarm and anguish that made the back of his neck feel spidery. He went running down to the open ridge.

  Bocephus was standing at her feet, Arn's hat in his mouth.

  "What's the matter?"

  Faren took the soiled old hat from the hound, turned it around and around in her hands, sniffed at the stain on the brim. Her head came up sharply as Terry aimed the flashlight at the hat. Shocked, she stared at him in the bounce light, nostrils still flared.

  "Blood," she said. "It's Arn's hat—and there's blood on it."

  The dog trembled and lay down, whimpering quietly.

  "Where is he, Bo, can you find him for me? Where's Arn?"

  With an effort the dog raised his head, then lowered it between his paws again.

  "Faren—"

  She made a sound of pure terror in her throat.

  "Faren, where did Bo get the hat?"

  She gestured at the woods behind them.

  "I'll go look," Terry said. But his teeth began to chatter. Only a streak of sun was left of the day. He didn't know if the air was getting colder. But he felt cold all over.

  He walked into the woods and soon found his father's backpack. There were several boot prints nearby. And the single imprint of a bare foot, huge, in a soft shallow depression.

  That was all he found, except for the croquet ball.

  He picked it up, nearly in tears and as scared as Faren was. Because he remembered the airstream trailer and the man in the monk's robe who carried a croquet mallet, whose brother was a creature with the ears and horns of a stag. Who cried geeeekkk! as Terry ran away from them.

  He began calling his father. Until he was hoarse and his throat closed. But there was no answer.

  He picked up his father's pack and went stumbling back to Faren.

  She was now sitting beside the injured dog, Arn's hat in her hands and her head against her knees, deep in grief. She didn't move when he shone the flashlight beam on her.

  "Look, I found—"

  He held the croquet ball in the light of the flash, but Faren didn't look around.

  "Faren, there aren't any train tracks. Just some old rusted rails, maybe fifty years old. Dad was here; this is his pack. And I called him, but he . . . what . . . what's . . ." His voice broke finally. "Going on?"

  She just sat there, spellbound. The curve of her back rejecting him, his unanswerable questions. He heard the river, and the hound panting, and the cicadas starting up like an old watch being wound.

  When he turned off the flashlight to save the batteries he was shocked to realize how dark it was.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  After Whit Bowers had run as far as he could run, then walked until he hobbled, heels aching, a severe stitch in his right side, he sat down to rest somewhere short of the summit of the mountain known as the Tormentor. The air at this altitude was so pure it had given him a savage headache.

  His pursuer, the nearly naked goatman, was, he assumed (perhaps fatalistically), far behind him, having become bored with the chase. It was sunset. He was alone in the pungent coniferous wood, and lost, and, for now, uncaring, his mind thornily hedged, threatened by the sudden jabs of terrifying unreality he had too frequently blundered into while goading himself to his physical limits. Too weary to lift his head, he sat with his back against a very old fir tree, a tall shaggy column as big around as one of the pillars of Hercules, surrounded, seemingly to infinity, by similar trees. Wood sorrel on the ground. Quick starred shadows of birds on massive trunks illuminated by long rays of the sun. The sun, which he needed as he needed his own heart, a diminishing globe of light now, swiftly and surely drawing away from him. Night would fall, soon; he wasn't sure he could cope with darkness, stranded like this. But there wasn't time to make his way back to the ridge where he and Am had parted company, where he'd left his bedroll and the matches he had to have to start a fire. It promised to be a cold night.

  He knew he should be up and moving, to somewhere. Instead, he closed his eyes, slumping.

  From nearby he heard what sounded like notes from a flute. He looked up, puzzled. The piping, bubbling sounds continued, along with more distant cries of towhees and Carolina parakeets, the rapid, hollow tapping of ivory-billed woodpeckers.

  A very strange bird appeared from behind a spiky old windfall a hundred feet away. The bird had a head like a crow. The crown of its small head and ample upper breast were a gleaming oily-green shade. Its back was yellow, the wings and tail deep red. From the flanks and sides of the breast ivory plumes flared, becoming as delicate in texture as lace at the tips. The bird's bill was blue, the eyes a glowing amber.

  His ex-wife had been an ardent amateur ornithologist and collector of bird prints, and Whit didn't have to look for more than a few seconds to realize he was seeing an Emperor of Germany Bird of Paradise, the male of the species. A great rarity outside its natural habitat, the highland jungles of New Guinea.

  Some seven thousand miles away from Tyree, North Carolina, and the Great Smoky Mountains.

  So what was it doing here?

  The Bird of Paradise didn't seem to know, either. From its agitated movements and cries, apparently it was in deep distress.

  Whit got slowly to his feet. The bird saw him and took off in fright toward the heights of the dense dark-green trees.

  Light in the woods had faded to a dusty brass. But there was a steadily brightening, heliographic glow in the distance, as if the last rays of the sun were striking glass or some other polished surface.

  It acted as a beacon to draw him uphill, silently, trudging across the centuries of packed needle turf and flowing, blossoming vi
nes beneath the mountain evergreens.

  He was almost unsurprised when he came across a couple of vivid pink flamingos. Either his appearance failed to startle them, or they were too stunned to react.

  Someone he had known (not Millie) had admired and collected such exotic birds. But when and where had he seen them?

  The source of the reflected light was a huge glass aviary, more than thirty feet high, covering perhaps two acres of ground. The steel-strutted dome was pierced by some of the tall fir and spruce trees, as if it had been carefully constructed around them.

  A toucan with a red bill flew, at him, then veered away, landing on a stubby branch of a tree to his left. The toucan tilted its head and fixed him, as if amused, with its shiny button eye.

  Whit saw, through the translucent walls of the aviary, swift shadowy flights of parrots, macaws, and toucans. On the floor of the aviary there were egrets, blue herons, and more pretzel-neck flamingos. The dissonance was unnerving, were was their violent, crazed movements. Birds flew headlong against the glass and the trunks of trees inside, fell stunned or dead to earth. Something had disturbed them. His presence? But he was too far away.

  There was a shattered pane of glass near ground level, through which the birds he had seen in the woods must have escaped. He approached the opening in the aviary and looked inside. Warm feather-laden air and the perfume of subtropical shrubbery, blossoms bleeding scarlet into the deepening dusk. He saw a woman in a black and white nanny's uniform with a full, ankle-length skirt frantically wheeling a large wicker perambulator around the floor of the aviary, dodging out-of-control birds; from what he saw of her face she was propelled by terror, but the birds were making so much racket he couldn't hear her. She went up and over an arched bamboo bridge spanning a small lagoon, comically awkward in her panic, nearly overturning the perambulator. She stopped abruptly as a brightly colored bird with the wingspan of a condor flew predatorily close. The perambulator rolled a few feet away from her. She clutched at her head and then at her heart, stiffening. One black-booted foot kicked, heel down, at the ground; then she fell over backward in a motionless heap.

  Whit Bowers had seen many men fall like that, but never a woman. He knew that she was dead.

  He cracked out a heavy jagged piece of glass from the broken pane, his tortured reflection flying away from him, and stepped into the aviary. He ran through scattered squalling birds and through a shallow fountain to where the woman lay. More birds waddled aimlessly around her: bright, scarce, gruesomely beautiful birds, dazzling but stupid in their search for freedom, the open air.

  He kneeled beside the nanny. Her eyes were open; but sightless; and they were shockingly blood-red, turning her, in unpeaceful death, to an ogress. She was not a young woman. She'd always had problems with her blood pressure. He touched a grizzled cheek and cried. Too many grotesque surprises in one day, combat had never unnerved him so desperately. A runaway locomotive, out of the blue. The goatman, a playful, oddly familiar masquerade turned horrifyingly real. Now his beloved Jacqueline—

  The baby was crying too. He got up dizzily and stared into the perambulator, at the clenched reddened face. A long-tailed bird with whining wings dropped a nickel-sized chalky clot on the satin-edged pink bunting, near the embroidered initial L.

  Whit was oblivious to the footfalls in mossy earth behind him.

  A hand fell on his shoulder. He jerked around, saw the barbarously bearded face and harmless, close-together blue eyes of Jacob Schwarzman.

  "Never mind," Jacob said. "She'll be taken care of."

  "Is it—?" Whit looked again at the infant, and felt a fine thread of nearly forgotten jealousy running through him.

  Jacob nodded impatiently. "We must get out of here. It's all happening too fast now."

  "Jacqueline—"

  "Yes, yes; a tragedy. But they'll see to her. She'll have a decent burial. Jacqueline isn't the first to drop dead just over the threshold. She might not be the last. But we don't want them to find us here. It violates conditions which—they believe—I have scrupulously observed."

  "Who? Who are you talking about?"

  "The Walkouts." Jacob nervously tightened his grip on Whit. "I'll explain everything," he promised. "You, of all people, have the right to know. But we can't talk here."

  He pulled Whit away from the silver-trimmed perambulator. The light was all but gone from this outraged arcady. Some of the birds had begun to settle down, in high palmy places, but a few, spectral white or silver in the thick gray dusk, swooped around them, wing beats chillingly close to the skin. Whit cringed, stumbling, his tears still flowing.

  "Where are you taking me?" he asked Jacob, but not as if it really mattered.

  "The caverns."

  "We can't just leave the baby."

  "She's safe in her perambulator. And with Pamela in the state she's in now—" He gave a world-weary shrug.

  "I haven't the means to care for an infant. But they'll manage. I'm sure some of the Walkouts will be here soon. They have what amounts, to a psychic awareness of crossovers, like Jacqueline and—"

  "Do you know—who the baby is?"

  "Of course; now I do. She must be your sister Laurette. Please. Can we hurry? Or we may not make it at all."

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  In his dream Terry was married to Faren and they were living in Paris, in the Rodin Museum, at the intersection of the Boulevard des Invalides and the Rue de Varenne. There was a war going on. At night the sky flashed ominously: artillery fire. The neglected garden was crowded with strangers camped out among the famous sculptures: The Thinker, Victor Hugo, Eve. The Gates of Hell. In contrast to the full-bodied, larger-than-life statues, the garden dwellers had the wasted frames and death-bright eyes of concentration camp inmates. Terry was afraid to leave the house and go into the garden. For one thing, he was naked; his body sterile alabaster, a fearless white. His mother wanted her gadabout home. She had sent Terry's father, in full paratrooper gear, to look for him. Faren's hair had grown very long, it was nearly down to her ankles, wrapping coarsely, enticingly, around and around her own brown body, tailing off across a glistening shinbone. He was in love, but he was afraid of her too. If he looked for longer than a moment into her eyes, they turned an astral shade of yellow with vertical, ellipsoid pupils.

  Without transition he and Faren were in the garden. They had taken the place of the man and woman of The Kiss on their pedestal. But they weren't just kissing, they were actually doing it. All around them, ghost faces like a night stop on the metro. He was embarrassed to have an audience but he continued to heave himself into Faren time and again as if into a fleshly net, staggered by the blows of his heart, her tongue cold as bronze going up and down his smarting face. She gripped him frenziedly with her knees, the sky was exploding, oh God—

  Terry ejaculated in his sleeping bag and woke up at once, distressed and faintly nauseated. He had taken off his jeans before bedding down, only his shorts were full of his sap. The sky was still flashing, exactly as in the dream. But he didn't have Faren in his arms. When he turned his head to look for her he saw that the other sleeping bag, two feet away, was empty.

  He got up and, trembling in the chill night air, searched in his pack for a clean pair of jockey shorts. He took the soiled shorts off, changed, pulled on his jeans, and laced his hiking boots. The sky lit up again, soundlessly; was it going to rain? He didn't think so, the air was too still: and he felt resistance, a tension when he moved, as if he were pushing from the inside of an overblown balloon.

  "Faren?"

  Earlier they had built a fire, eaten hash from a can, gone exhaustedly to sleep. How long ago? He looked at the green face of his chronometer. It was only a few minutes after midnight. He picked up his flashlight. The fire was low, a few wispy flames. The eyes of Bocephus were burning red glass in the flashlight's beam. The hound was lying down, still looking poorly . . . as Faren would have put it.

  Where could she have gone in the middle of the night without a f
lashlight of her own? But the sky was brightening every few seconds now, as much light where they had pitched their meager camp as a false dawn.

  When he called again, Faren answered.

  "I'm all right! Go back to sleep."

  She sounded far away. "Where are you?"

  "Terry, Arn isn't dead! And I know where they've taken him."

  "Wait for me!" But he was rooted, not knowing which direction to take; her voice could have been coming from anywhere.

  "No, no, Terry! Don't try to follow me. It can be dangerous. But I have to go now, the time is right."

  Her voice sounded fainter; she was leaving him behind. Terry shuddered, biting his tongue to keep from sobbing.

  "Faren—please come back!"

  "I can help them, Terry—the Lost Ones. I'm real close to them now in time. Josie says if I help them, the others will let Arn live."

  The next time he shouted there was no reply.

  The sky was a bitter pale nightmare green; and he felt the ground tremble beneath his feet.

  Terry moved through the resisting air as if he were rubbing against it, stretching it. First he tried to fight his way through the colorless membrane of the bubble that seemed to enclose their campsite; but panic only served to immobilize him more dreadfully, turning him to stone from the inside out. He quickly learned that slow, deliberate effort meant progress—he might stretch the resilient air to infinity as long as he was careful. Breathing was no problem. And while he could breathe, he would be all right.

  He pulled Bocephus to his feet. The hound whined in pain but the loose folds of his skin in Terry's hands, the sane sad eyes, reassured Terry that he wasn't losing his mind.

  "Go to Faren! Find her, Bo!"

  Lightning lanced out of nowhere, turning a tree a hundred yards away into a torch. Bocephus cowered in Terry's embrace. He grasped the hound's collar, crouching, and urged him on.