Wildwood

by Farris, John

  "I asked for the boss man, and here you are. What I'd like to know—"

  "We are a community. No one of us is 'the boss.' I shall try to answer whatever questions you may have."

  "Just one question. Who killed my best tracker dog, Boshie?"

  "I did."

  "I'm surprised you could pull a boot on over that foot. What is it, anyway, a split hoof?"

  "I'm not the devil. And not all of us are part animal. My deformation is due to an accident sustained years ago during the construction of Walkout Town."

  "If you're so-called normal, what's kept you here?"

  "For one thing, I am needed. For another, I have never doubted the day would come when I would have the opportunity to redress the unspeakable evil done to members of my family."

  "You expect to somehow get your hands on ole Mad Edgar, is that it?"

  Another stiff nod. "Yes. The time may be nearer than we have calculated. There has been so much activity during the past forty-eight hours . . . do you have another question, Arn?"

  "No. Just a statement of fact. It ain't a-gonna be that easy to hang me, no matter how it looks to you right now."

  "We all do what we must to survive. It may be of some comfort for you to know that your fate is in your wife's hands. As much as we despise you, we revere Faren for her spiritual support. We can only pray that she is a match for the evil she must soon encounter, on a plane of existence where the sorcerer undoubtedly will have the advantage over her."

  "Jesus," Arn said, the blood draining from his face. He lunged against the noose that held him powerless. "What have you freaks done with my wife?" he croaked.

  "She has been influenced, naturally, by her concern for your well-being, but also by her desire to find a solution to the terror that has possessed us these many years. She is much too good a woman for you, Arn. There is nothing more I can tell you now. All any of us can do is wait, and prepare as best we can for the final crossing."

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Belly-up from mushroom, he was nudged awake by drops of water beading coherently from spindrift apart from the brouhaha of the water-wall, along the underside of the gray pipe railing—drops falling thriftily, measuredly, on the bridge of his nose, wetting cheeks and dry-blooded lip. He awoke in a shaking of cramped and scattered limbs as if in a grave-fit, his brain twinkling glumly in the old, odd twilight of mushroom dreams. He was deaf to the balmy thunder of the water-wall. Where he looked, light rocketed or pinwheeled, the goldenrod and chromed magentas of cave light. He faced, upside down and in free-fall, as weightless as his shadow skimming clouds, a jagged bowl of mountains.

  Hallucination.

  Stalactites in a cave, Whit thought, ears peeping open to the languors of the water-wall. He was pleased to be making sense at last, having been marooned on his ledge of rock for at least a month. He felt at his fingertips the hum of a wizardly generator. Other, furtive fingertips touched his face. Stubble. A bump on the forehead, soreness ear to ear. His tongue dry and sour. Another drop of water fell: he blinked, flinching as if it might be buckshot.

  The images in his mind—birds and corpses. Black-bearded Jacob.

  Eat.

  Where was Jacob?

  He accomplished the chore of sitting up. Nausea smote him.

  Drinking with Jacob; and the seductive mushroom. His undoing.

  Whit leaned against the pipe railing, engaged in thought, aging from the effort. He licked a line of water beads from the railing. The front of his brain glowed from the ferment of the water-wall—the primeval water-wall.

  Now he remembered something of importance. He had looked at photographs of virgins, dark and light; the lightness of the one too pure for longevity, the other's dark sex boasting and virtuoso: where was she now?

  With Jacob.

  There was an emptied bottle of wine on the ledge with him, two campstools with remnants of dried fruit and nuts on one of them.

  His clothing was there too, strewn carelessly. But he was not one to fling his clothes any which way while undressing. Military upbringing. Neatness a necessity.

  He found his chronometer. Smashed. It told less of the passing of time than the stubble on his jaw. Only a day's growth of beard, to his surprise.

  Time to get going. Somewhere; anywhere else. Starflash, sunrise, a wind coursing through tall pines. But no more of carious rock, the hot and misting pool, this underworld.

  He began to put on his damp clothing.

  When he picked up his tan twill pants he saw, unmistakably, most of a handprint in blood. The blood on the material was still tacky, it adhered to his fingertips when he touched it.

  He had no wounds. His own hands, when he looked again to be sure, were clean except for the just-smudged fingers.

  But his hands were too large to have left this print. And so, he was sure, were the hands of Jacob Schwarzman—a scholarly man too squeamish to kill.

  But someone, steeped in blood, reeking of a slaughter, had prowled this cavern while he lay so profoundly unconscious he might well have passed for dead, someone had examined his clothing like a curious animal. And left.

  He felt ineradicably marked, a pariah, beyond redemption. He shook from dread. At the same time he cast around for a weapon. But there was nothing more substantial than one of the dull tubes of some glasslike mineral, that took on a wan glow as soon as he picked it up, absorbing ambient energy from the whorls of wire that, he had been told, ran overhead through almost every passageway of the caverns.

  He called to Jacob, but heard only his own voice ghosting back through corridors to drown in the splashing of the water-wall.

  Only Jacob could get him out of here.

  He went out through the passage with the lightweight tube raised, its extra light welcome, his shadow bending tall above him.

  The giant's cavern with artifacts from a dead country, iron gates at one end shut and barricaded by tons of mountainside, gave no hint that Jacob had been there recently.

  Something had been said about a library. Jacob had seemed eager to bar the way.

  Perhaps that was where he lived as well, with Pamela.

  "Jacob! Pamela!"

  There were two connected rooms. Stacks of clay tablets in one. Scrolls and books and manuscripts in Jacob's hand. A magnifying glass. Tools, including a hefty chisel more than a foot long. Whit picked up the chisel in his other hand. Fortified, he entered their living quarters.

  Jacob had constructed a sizable bed from packing crates and straps of iron and leather, furnished it with pillows and patchwork quilts he'd bought or perhaps lifted from the clothesline of an isolated cabin somewhere. He'd made a chair that looked comfortable. There were stoneware basins to wash or urinate in, a clothes tree from which hung a work shirt, overalls, an old-fashioned-looking calico dress. In a leather casket Whit found bottles of pills and two hypodermic needles.

  A third hypo was crushed on the stone floor, which had also absorbed a considerable amount of darkened blood.

  Someone was dying—or dead.

  But where?

  He took care examining the floor with the light in his hand, found an easily followed line of blood that tapered to intermittent splotches in the passage winding uphill from the death chamber.

  He was afraid to keep going that way; but he had nowhere else to go.

  The only light here was the light he held in his hand.

  He hadn't gone far when he heard the shuffling, snorting, laboring sounds of someone dragging a sack-like weight over the rough floor of the tight passage.

  Whit stopped, listening, nerves prickling.

  Heavy, rasping breathing echoed through the passage. Then, abruptly, it was quiet.

  The silence was worse than anything he'd heard so far.

  With the light thrust ahead of him, he resumed. But the light seemed to be fading. Looking up, he saw that the loops of wire did not extend through this passage. With each step he was moving farther away from the field of energy that empowered the mysterious tu
be.

  How soon would he be in total darkness?

  The passage branched; he hesitated. Then she was on him almost before he realized anyone was there.

  Her lovely, dark-eyed face emerging from the taupe background. She was wearing a long skirt of a grayish shade like the rock, a black cape with a high collar. Her heart-shaped pale face took on a slight amber tint from the waning light.

  "Pamela—good God."

  She didn't respond to his voice, just stared at him with an almost phantasmal absorption.

  "I'm Whit—Jacob must have told you about me."

  Nothing came back to him from the locked and isolated brown eyes, the stiff pout of her red lips. There was a streak like rust on one cheek. He realized she was holding a hand behind her back. The other was seated deep beneath the cape; a balmy Napoleonic pose.

  "Where's Jacob?" he asked her.

  She began, slowly, to back away from him. The mildest apprehension revealed in her tentative movements.

  "Is he hurt? Are you hurt?"

  Whit followed, pressing her. She moved faster. Watchfully. Not taking her eyes from his face.

  So little light now, he was opposite Jacob and only three feet away before he noticed him, and then he might not have seen a thing except that Jacob was shanky naked and quite pale; he was jammed into a cleft of rock, almost as flat as a fresco except for a bulge of belly eaten into, lusciously bitten but some time ago, only a stagnant ooze of blood continued. The right side of his head was torn away to the bone. One eye gone, and the other a dreamlike blue. The black beard shellacked hard with blood.

  Pamela pulled her hand from behind her back and threw down what she had been concealing, Jacob's overalls. She bared bloodied teeth and from her throat came a yellow yowling, that betrayed a carnivore's passion for another kill.

  Tossing off her cape, she came at Whit, quick and cunning.

  The swipe of her short-haired massive paw, equipped with needle-pointed claws two inches long, missed his face; but he smelled the tarry old blood caked between claws. The instinct to kill or be killed, fortified on battlefields nearly as bizarre as this one, saved him. With the chisel he struck deep where Pamela was exposed and most vulnerable, in the hollow of her throat between her collarbones. The chisel broke her neck, impaling her; she died at his feet.

  He dragged her down the passage, far from Jacob Schwarzman's blue and deathly lugubrious gaze.

  He couldn't help himself, he had to undress her. Everywhere she was woman, except for the hard black pads of the tufted paw, striped tangerine and old gold of a tiger's powerful forearm.

  Yet her face was lovely, unmarred now except for a trickling of blood from one corner of her mouth; he could understand Jacob's infatuation with felinity, his valiant attempt to salvage her mind.

  He covered Pamela up again, and closed her long-lashed clouded eyes. Sat grieving on his heels for all of them.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Wildwood, June 19, 1916

  The inventor Nikola Tesla, who had not slept for forty hours, yet was customarily and impeccably attired in a dark suit, the knot of his tie as perfectly formed as a rosebud, had nearly completed the last of his three laps along his chosen path at the ragged edge of the parkland which surrounded Edgar Langford's chateau. Here the down-drafting winds of mountain forest were inflamed with resin, a tonic for the mind. He was less than a month away from his sixtieth birthday and although he had been crushed and crushed again by disappointments, detractors, and thieves, he still possessed the energy of a stevedore. It was a summer night of waltzes and whippoorwills and the thrilling whistle of the evening train as it rushed across the long trestle through Ellijay Gap. The chateau, its outbuildings and large gazebos, were uniformly lambent, beauty which Tesla, the light-bringer, had created in painterly fashion. The lawns, beneath a frequently sulking moon, were bathed in dew; garden hedge work green as Guatemala lined the serpentine walks and coaching paths of crushed marble stelliform in their high brilliance. But his mind, as he walked, was not on what he considered to be a trifling chore effortlessly brought off. He could have illuminated the entire range of the Smoky Mountains like a diadem had he possessed sufficient funds and the desire to do so; the resultant lightshow would have been visible far away in space as the planet Mars. It was a subtly frightening enigma that absorbed him, a great rarity in his prolific career: a machine, a dynamo which had no proprietor, and thus could not be under any man's control. It was his inability to manipulate what he had wrought that Tesla found perplexing, and chastening.

  He was aware of something huddled, dark, on the path ahead, outlined in a dying-down light like the pallid fire around a nearly consumed coal; he slowed his pace, then realized, after taking a few more steps, that it was a human form, kneeling face to the ground, either in pain or prayer. He heard a sighing, thanksgiving sound. Abruptly the person rose and faltered, footloose, lurching; he suspected drunkenness, and at the same time realized that it was a woman, although she wore close-fitting trousers and hiking boots. She was a stranger to Tesla. He kept some distance between them.

  "Have you injured yourself?" he asked, giving her the benefit of the doubt.

  Regaining her balance, she shook her head, throwing off a few luminous droplets of light, as if she had been bathing in an ethereal, incandescent pool. He was fascinated; there was no indication of St. Elmo's fire in their immediate vicinity. Her hair was short. From her features, the savage duskiness of her skin, he surmised that she was of the Cherokee. They were not forbidden on Tormentil Mountain, but few of them had ever come this far seeking work.

  The woman took a couple of deep breaths and, with hands on hips, stood staunchly in his way, staring at him. It was annoying to be interrupted, but Tesla was unfailingly gracious to all women, particularly those with Slavic cheekbones the equal of his own. He was taken with her strict and niggerish beauty, and he was curious. He bowed slightly. She smiled in return, white-toothed, but her expression quickly was grave again, inscrutable.

  "I haven't seen you here before," he said. "Do you speak English? What is your name?"

  "I'm Kálanu: the Raven," Faren Rutledge told him.

  "My name is Nikola Tesla."

  "I thought so. You're very tall." She gestured toward the round towers of the chateau, the soaring lantern of the central facade aglow beneath the night sky. "Is that your work? It's almost as bright as noon."

  The great inventor smiled. "If you know who I am, then you know I am the master of light." Now that he had been diverted, he indulged a whim to startle, or perhaps amuse her, if she had any degree of sophistication. Tesla snapped his fingers, and a ball of red flame appeared almost under his long nose. She flinched, awed, but resisted stepping back. He balanced the ball of fire on the back of one hand, rolled it up his arm, passed it around the back of his neck. There was no smoke from the fireball; only a faintly acrid odor in the air.

  "Hold out your hands," he said, as the fireball lolled on his left shoulder like a tamed cockatiel. He demonstrated. "In this manner."

  She hesitated, then smiled, trusting him. He plucked the fireball from his shoulder and placed it gently in her cupped hands. Her eyes widened, she tensed as if she were about to drop it. But she wasn't burned, there was no pain.

  Faren swallowed, dazzled, dark eyes avid, pondering the phenomenon she held in her hands.

  "What do you want me to do with it?"

  Tesla shrugged, then leaned over and blew on the fireball. It disappeared without a trace. Slowly Faren rubbed her hot but unsinged palms together.

  "That was brave of you," he acknowledged. "But now, if you will pardon me—"

  "No, don't go!"

  "I have much to think about, and I think best when I am alone."

  "But I've come a long way, and I need your help," she said, an uncontrived note of desperation in her voice.

  "Well. If only I could spare the time. But I am fully occupied for now. There must be someone else who—"

  Faren glanc
ed again at the distant chateau, at the lantern with its dome of glass that occupied the highest point above the many spires and chimneypots. A nerve center glowing with a different, more ominous light, galactic in its coldness, silvery cerise, pulsating rhythmically.

  "Can you destroy his machine, the way you blew out the ball of fire?"

  Tesla was shocked, as if he'd felt, just then, her quick thoughts in his own sacrosanct mind; her fear.

  "Who are you? What do you know about—and why should you say such a terrible thing?"

  "I know about the machine. I know it eats the stars like a toad feeding on flies; and if you can't stop it, then we're probably all doomed. Because I can't go back now, either, to where I come from. Not unless that damned machine is dismantled, or blown up. If it isn't, then I'll be like the others: a Walkout. If I live at all."

  She was emotional, irrational; she distressed him profoundly. He shivered slightly at the whistling of the train, nearer.

  "You are not making sense to me."

  "You helped him build it. And you're too smart not to appreciate how dangerous it can be."

  "Within defined limits, there is no danger."

  "Oh, bullshit."

  "I beg your—"

  Faren held out her hands to Tesla, palms up. She was trembling too.

  "Your ball of fire couldn't hurt me. But that web will soon have power enough to turn men into creatures that are part bird, part animal—I've seen them! I know he hasn't told you, but that's what Edgar Langford plans to do; he hates everybody, hates them—"

  "Preposterous!"

  "Maybe even you. Listen. That beautiful chateau, the gardens, the birdcage, the zoo—on Midsummer Eve everything will just vanish; it'll all be whisked away by his machine, unless you do something now."

  Tesla scoffed, but his throat felt tight and dry. "Nothing as solid as stone may simply vanish."

  Faren shook her head despairingly. "It will pass into a kind of vale where our senses can't locate it. I've always known what happened to the chateau; but that's because I have the Gift."