Wildwood

by Farris, John

  "Then she made it through the—what you call the Crossover."

  "Yes. Her mind, unfortunately, was affected by the experience. But slowly—I know if I am patient—" Jacob's eyes were watering; he wiped them. "She's had some good days so far," he said optimistically. "I think I have been in love with Pamela from the moment I first came across that photograph, more than eight years ago. I never dreamed we would meet."

  "How old—?"

  "Pamela's twenty-one. She came to me only a few months ago, and of course time is frozen where they—the rest of them—are detained. Imprisoned."

  Whit was a long time raising the bottle of wine to his lips, and although he was careful, some of it dribbled down his naked chest.

  "Pamela's the one—told you about—"

  "The lovers. But she never betrayed Sibby. She refused to spy on her despite Edgar's bribes and finally his threats; when at last he discovered for himself that Sibby had deceived him, he tried in a fit of rage to strangle poor Pamela."

  "She isn't—dressed like a maid in the photograph."

  "No, that was one of her stage costumes. She assisted Caliban in the magic shows he staged for visitors and staff. She became quite accomplished herself at prestidigitation."

  "What else—did she do for him?"

  Jacob was furious at Whit's allegation.

  "She didn't go to bed with him! She has never belonged to any man but me!"

  "Where's—Pamela now?"

  "Sleeping. She hasn't been well lately, the reason I was forced to go into town two days ago. When that maniac Rutledge nearly succeeded in running over me."

  The bottle fell from Whit's hand, but failed to break on the stone ledge. He looked stupidly at it. Wine was leaking out, precious wine. He looked apprehensively at Jacob, who from this low angle was transformed, his head blown out of proportion to his body. His beard resembling a thicket sprouting thorns.

  "Jacob—I feel—something is—I think I—"

  "You're now feeling the effects of that last piece of mushroom you ate." Jacob's voice sounded as if it were coming from the bottom of a well, even as his head floated ragged as a storm cloud over Whit. "Which I selected especially for you, because it has distinctly powerful hallucinogenic qualities."

  "What the hell—you mean you—trying to kill—"

  "No, no, you won't be harmed! You'll have only a slight headache when the drug wears off in a few hours. In the meantime it will lay bare your subconscious, stimulate your memory, help to illuminate those six crucial years of utter blankness. Perhaps, if you think back now, you will be able to describe to me, minute by minute, what you saw on the night of Mad Edgar's Revels."

  "Crock of shit, Jacob. Telling you—I don't know. Never was here."

  "Come now, you are Alexander. Tormentil was your home."

  Photos fell from Whit's lap. Jacob hastened to retrieve them before they might become soaked in the puddle of spilled wine. He held up Sibby Langford's likeness.

  "Concentrate. Remember. This is the woman who gave birth to you. You suckled at her breast. Think of that warm and nourishing breast, let your memories flow, like the milk of your mother."

  Whit stood, a jointless flaccid exercise as if he were made of gum rubber, and tried to push Jacob aside. But he had no more push than a reflection, no elemental force. The waterfall tumbled huge and heavy, beat heavily on the mind. But through the lagoon of the inner ear it was a ripple, a spiritual sibilance. The photograph he wanted to deny preempted most of his field of vision. He tried to move his tongue, denouncing what the eye would not. His tongue felt dead as a stump. Brackish saliva flowed down his chin. A shadow had set upon her profound countenance, besmirching the time-golded forehead. He felt a corresponding jagged crack down his breastbone, through which his heart squirmed sick and full. He pressed it back with both hands and slumped, a martyred pose, on the campstool, nearly overturning it.

  Jacob, excited, steadied him.

  "Who are you?"

  His body flowed, thinner than any mist, through Jacob's hands, though the cavern walls and then a wall of morticed stone. He laughed at the conceit that occurred to him. Who am I?

  "Imaginary," he answered.

  "Do you see her? Listen! Do you hear her voice as she sits and rocks you?"

  "She's imaginary, too; doesn't exist." But the waterfall spoke differently; her phantom sang to him, plaintive song that shivered the fragile reality he clung to. He turned his face aside, seeing on the wall a tubular sun with a fiery corona. The light of this sun made silver a huge and brainy mass of wire; there were flashes of electric blue beneath a deaf and dumb eternity, black as the inside of the magician's box.

  (No I'll fall

  Help me

  father, help)

  The mercurial magician folded his box, then folded it again until it was small enough to slip into a pocket, and harmless. But the great machine kept on. And on, at its sacred work.

  It's only a machine that I have made for us, little Alex.

  (But what is it for? What does it do?)

  Tricks.

  (What kind of tricks?)

  The metaphysical magician, laughing. Embracing him. And the ghost-boy felt, at last, an emotion that fit true, unfalsified by archivists or the invective of tall-tellers.

  We can turn ourselves into birds and animals, an back again. Wouldn't that be fun?

  (I guess so)

  Or punish our enemies, my delightful Alex—by not bringing them back.

  Now the magician, Messianic, had frightened him a little. He seemed to understand this. He stroked the ghost-boy's head: so like his own, or at least he was willing to think so when his mood was right. The boy stared at the linked and wiry machine, through which he could study star maps near and far, aureoles and obelisks afire.

  (What are enemies?)

  Those who would do harm to us. Lie and cheat, and try to trick the trickster.

  (Do you have enemies?)

  I have profound and diligent enemies, sanctimonious conspirators who would take everything from me. My inheritance. My treasures! that I alone had the ingenuity to unearth, that rightfully belong only to me. They would take all that, and more. My wife, my life, my son.

  (No!)

  But you mustn't let them frighten you. Here, let me wipe your eyes, sweet Alex. My soul, my heartsblood. No one can ever take you from me. Because you see, I know my enemies. I know the worm in every bud, and its name is greed. And when they are all gathered here, in my house, I will deal with them before that worm can begin to devour me. What is a lowly worm to the celestial serpent? We will deal with them, my dearest son.

  All the fierceness that was in the ghost-boy went into his embrace.

  (Yes! We will!)

  But he shouted it to an idea, an unnumbered star, a vanishing ray, a cold and ticking brain, that buried lode in empyrean ether.

  "Whom are you talking to?" Jacob demanded, shaking him. He had lit a brash cigarillo. The smoke was rank and choking. The waterfall behind him crashing, then leaping up in splayed rainbows. "Who is it you see?"

  "Leave me alone! I want my father, I want him!"

  "But Mad Edgar is gone—he made you all disappear from the mountain, through his miscalculations. Is that the truth, or isn't it?"

  Whit struck at Jacob's face but drew only stinging fire from the end of the cigarillo, sparks that Jacob hastily brushed from his beard.

  "Don't call him Mad Edgar! It's time for the parade! My father and I are going to ride on my birthday float."

  "And your mother—"

  "I don't want to talk about her! I hate her!"

  "Alex—"

  Whit shook his head sharply; he put a hand to his throat. He was numb there, and choked by the smoke from Jacob's cigarillo.

  "Are you my enemy?" he mumbled.

  "No, no, I'm Jacob! Your friend. I'm everyone's friend. Even your father's. And there are many, many questions I want to ask him."

  "He's—" A sob. "I can't find him now."
/>   "Why don't you look for him again? Just go back a little further in time, Alex, I'm sure he'll be there."

  "The machine won't let me. I can't go back before the machine was."

  Jacob waggled his virile cigarillo, blue smoke circles in the air, tainting the rainbows. Whit squeezed his eyes shut but there was no place else to go, except into a black box of cosmic dimension.

  "Machine?" Jacob said eagerly. "Describe it to me."

  "Brain."

  "It looks like a brain?"

  "It is. A brain made out of silver wire. Stars flashing all over it."

  "Where is this brain, Alex?"

  "Oh, it's in the lantern."

  "And the lantern is open?"

  "Yes, yes, open!"

  "What's the matter?"

  "Storm!"

  "Lightning too?"

  "Yes, yes, lots of lightning! Oh, I don't want it to rain! Then there won't be a parade."

  "My God, my God," Jacob said, tugging ecstatically at his beard, "they did it, they put it together! But only Tesla had the genius to make it work. If he had been there that night, he might have prevented the great tragedy that—"

  "Where's my father!"

  "Try to understand, Alex. The chateau, everything inside or within a hundred yards of it—Jacqueline, rocking little Laurette to sleep in the aviary—was part of a harmonic pattern, sympathetic to the harmonies of our earthly sphere, but capable of being disturbed, susceptible to a certain electromagnetic slippage—"

  "I don't understand you!" Whit howled; held by Jacob, he was terrified of the beard and the close-together, fanatical blue eyes of a stranger; by definition, an "enemy." "I don't know you, let me go!"

  "Wait! He—he taught you magic tricks, didn't he? Tricks with scarves. Think of the chateau, the mountain on which it was built, as nothing more than a trick knot in a stage magician's scarf, a knot which he can slide with ease from one end to the other. You've done that trick yourself, haven't you? I thought so. All right, I want you to think of the chateau as another kind of knot, slipping just far enough along this harmonic scarf so that it suddenly seems to vanish—like the stars after sunrise. The stars are still there, but even the keenest eye can't find them in daylight. If we don't see them, why, we can easily believe they've gone, somewhere. Vanished magically from the cosmos. Now imagine this: all of the people in or near the chateau, all of the birds and floats and carriages and members of the band with their big brass instruments, picture them standing very, very still for a long time, just out of sight like stars in the noon sky, while we grow old. But they don't change or grow older by even as much as a full second of their time. Because for them, nothing has changed at all. They don't realize that anything has happened, that where they were just a moment ago on the magician's scarf, time has continued at its normal velocity, the world has gone on without them: babies have been born, the aged have died. Wars have been fought, inventions have been invented. Then the knot in the scarf is shifted again, just a fraction, and a few of them, one after another, along with croquet balls and perambulators and what have you, are literally dashed back into our stream of time They feel as dazed as if they had been struck by lightning. Some go insane from the scare. And nearly all of them are changed—in horrible, unalterable ways. Because your birthday party, the Revels, was to be a masquerade. Remember? Everyone was fitted for costumes that were made in the chateau's workrooms—costumes of feather and fur, of beasts and birds both mythical and real. Even you had a costume ready, Alex."

  "I don't know what you're talking about!"

  "But you know there was an aviary in the park, already stocked with exotic birds—not so many birds, however, that there wouldn't be room for more. And the animal park your father built was nearly empty: cage after shadowy cage ready to be occupied. At the end of Mad Edgar's Revels, all of his invited guests, those whom he unreasonably despised or feared, were to be, by means of his sorcery, transformed into the beasts they had innocently impersonated while dancing through the night—"

  It was not a man holding him, it was a vulturine bird with tough claws and the head of an old blue-eyed lion, the dark mane a crawl with lice-like screaming creatures. Whit flailed with both hands, smashing Jacob full in the mouth, sending the bloodied blob of cigarillo flying into the pool. He stepped forward to hit Jacob again, and silence him for good. He stepped on the wine bottle and his feet went out from under him.

  —And there he went, plunging again, headfirst through space, naked except for his underwear, he'd had no time to put on his soft and furry Pooh Bear costume. And the glare of the Texas sun on hardpan blinded him up to the moment his head smacked down. His lungs filled, then hardened with a weight of stone that sank him into an even more remote corner of eternity—hushed, vast, and lightless: without the hope of a tear to relieve its lonely monotony.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Terry awoke at the edge of the wood near the quarry pool, wrapped in a blanket that didn't belong to him. Already the morning was bright on his bare shoulders; even before opening his eyes he felt as if it just might be a good day. At any rate, nothing could be worse than the night before.

  "Hello," Josie Raftery said as soon as she saw him stir. "You slept right through the crack of dawn, begod."

  She was standing between him and the sun. The great scallops of her wings were spread, absorbing warmth. Terry sat up quickly, the blanket falling around his feet, and only then he discovered that he didn't have a stitch on. Mortified, he tried to gather the blanket around him, having awakened, as always, tumescent; but Josie, with a laugh, snatched it away from him with her toes.

  "Hey, what are you doing? What happened to my—" He sat hunched on the ground with his knees up and his arms wrapped around them; afraid to look closely at his surroundings. All the earth, it seemed, had been put right, but there was no telling how quickly it might be shaken again, tumbled into chaos.

  "You will not need clothing. I never wear any. Divil your shyness, then, and don't be making strange with me. Can't give you a pair of wings, boy; but in other ways we're equal now, like the first man and woman in Paradise." She laughed again. "You might as well stand up; it's pathetic you're looking, huddled there on the ground like a whipped cur."

  Terry filled his lungs and got to his feet, hands at his sides unprotectively; but blood was thick in his cheeks. Josie reefed her wings, then walked a circle around him. Unclothed and condemned to earth like a derelict goddess, she was hale but with a lewdness that was a pestering sore in his eye, her sex blunt and fox-furred. But then, all women were foreign to him between the legs, where he was proudly shaped and elongated and not so hairy yet. Her breasts, however, were pretty, and worth dwelling on: orbs within tresses, twin sunrises.

  "What's your name?" Josie asked, stopping again in front of him, muting the light on his face. He liked the crook of an ivory-mellow tooth when she smiled, the weather on her cheeks. Her wings thickened when folded. They were not as flimsy as he had first thought, seeing light filter through them, but appeared to be composed sturdily of scales, like a fish's but translucently fine.

  "I'm Terry. And you're—"

  "Josie."

  "Y-yeah." He was trying to be nonchalant, but his teeth had chattered and he gulped air. Then he was slowly reassured by the rustling breezes and plain-positive birdsong of a customary dawn, orchid and arc-light through simmering trees. He looked down at himself. "Well, how did you—how could—"

  "Wasn't me that undressed you; was himself over there."

  She fanned her wings toward Terry, barely skimming, tickling him: a spiritual, not a sensual touching. Are we friends? She meant to be touched in return, and he reached out timidly to stroke a leading edge of one wing. Nappiness; pleasant, mildly provoking. Then he looked behind him, where Josie also was looking. His heart chilled like a stone in a creek.

  The goatman was hunkered nearby, tending a fire in a circle of stones, slicing with a wicked hand ax strips from a side of cured boar meat.

 
Josie touched his cheek again; Terry shivered,

  "No, it's not a mask he's wearing. Name's Taharqa. He's my friend, and he'll be your friend as well, if only you will allow him to be."

  Terry, dubious, studied the tough dark body, the skeleton so thinly contained that bones shone fiercely in gleams beneath the skin whenever the goatman moved. He was tall and scarred and looked powerful. He worked with the ax as if it were a paring knife, until he had filled a big frying pan with bacon. He placed this pan over the crackling fire of fragrant balsam wood, began breaking a handful of little speckled eggs into another pan.

  Not far from where the goatman was cooking Terry saw, gratefully, Bocephus the hound chewing on a bone. The goatman had tied him to a tree, but he seemed to have adapted placidly to his circumstances, and his odd captors. Both Terry's and Faren's backpacks were hanging from stobs of that same tree.

  Terry shuddered, as if the hung pack symbolized her death.

  "Where's Faren?" he demanded.

  "No way for me to know that." Josie frowned, her wings fretting. "Somewhere in time she'll be, between here and there."

  "There?"

  "The back beyond the vale," Josie said vaguely, her wings more agitated. "She's under the guidance of the serpent Erim now, for good or ill. I believe you made his acquaintance, in the upheaval of the night we've just been through."

  He was breaking out in goose bumps and bit his lip futilely, trying to keep his body precariously under control.

  "I need—I have to take a—"

  "Anywhere in the woods you like," she said. The perfect hostess. "Mind you don't step on something sharp, if your feet are as tender as the rest of you looks."

  "Thanks," Terry said sardonically. The goatman had turned his horny head to look at him: was that a smile? He didn't know one goaty expression from another. Jesus, and he could have gone sailing!

  He went back into the woods where the pines were packed like a quiver of arrows, where he had some privacy to relieve himself. But still he had trouble, standing there in the new morning in unfamiliar surroundings, pee simply wouldn't come. And he thought of Faren grinning at him across the hood of her car, Want me to talk bear talk to it? That broke him, he gave a great hoohaw of a sob that probably could have been heard for miles and dropped shakily to his knees. While the tears streamed down his face he managed, in that position, to empty his bladder too. After a while he got up, wondering which way was home. Naked or not, he was getting out of here. . .