by Farris, John
"Kill Travers," Langford demanded.
Taharqa had recovered his balance from the nearly lethal swing of the ax and was crouched, wary of the horse's hooves. The room was beginning to fill with a magnetically blue and sparkling light. Edgar Langford seemed to dissolve in the light until nothing was left of him but the wise alert pupils of his eyes, the snakelike, eroded skeleton of his defective spine.
The last thing the architect heard before the Crack of Doom was Langford saying, "You will never have my son!''
Despite the pressure of his hand in the small of Alex's bare back, the boy suddenly flew away from him. Travers saw Alex for a moment, levitated just inside a window, screaming, small hands scrabbling in the charmed air for purchase. But the cloud behind the boy was agitated, as if by the screw of an enormous ship, or a twisted backbone with numinous power. He reached for Alex and saw his hand disappear mildly to the wrist in a blue whirligig, then the boy vanished like a blip of water on a scalding stove top. The dissolvent energy of the light spiraling into the room continued to take him painlessly and remorselessly, even as the horse beneath him swooned and the stone walls evanesced, and he felt as a trumpet's blare inside his mind the vile amusement of the man he hated most in the life he now appeared to be leaving.
Chapter Thirty-One
Wildwood, April 1958
"And that's all there was. A quiet death, followed, within a moment or two, by a nightmare, rebirth as something quite outside the realm of humanity."
They were moving at a slow pace through the woods beneath a sky of scary galaxies, meteors big as fish in a blood-soaked sea. Whit Bowers mounted on the centaur who wanted to be called Jim.
"When was that?"
"The year of Jim's rebirth? It was 1927." He breathed audibly, wheezing at times along the ill-defined path, but otherwise he gave no indication that he considered Whit a burden. He seemed to be more comfortable, even now, referring to himself in the third person while recalling his crude metamorphosis. "Already there were Walkouts in Wildwood, like a stranded sideshow. They were unable to form any sort of coherent community. A few quickly died; their hybrid selves functioned badly, or their minds failed, or the weather—" Whit's palm rested where the spines of man and animal were fused, and he felt a tremor there. Jim's voice was deep, his tone elegiac. "He was very sick himself, that winter; you can imagine the difficulty he had in accepting his fate, the wicked adversity visited on him by the demon Langford. Jim was horseflesh; he was human. A bereaved human being. But there are minds that break all too easily, and others that wear like steel. The pragmatic mind maketh a lesson of hardship, and seeketh solutions. Jim put his mind to work in the service of those more cruelly used than he."
"Could you tell me where we're—"
Without pausing the centaur lifted his tail and broke wind resoundingly, groaning all the while.
"Stomach trouble," he explained. "I've always had it. The problem is food. What my taste buds find agreeable disturbs my digestive tract. I'm certain I have an ulcer. And I've nearly worn my teeth to the gum lines from chewing, chewing, the coarse oats and grains I must depend upon to live. But on my rebirthday and on the New Year I allow myself a jug of whiskey." Jim reached up with his whip hand to courteously hold aside a large bough that might have swept Whit off his back. He laughed. "The truth is, I allow myself a jug whenever I feel like it. I learned to make my own whiskey by observing a small band of moonshiners who once plied their trade in these woods. That was, perhaps, fifteen years ago. When I was well-versed in the process of distilling spirits I showed myself to them and made application to purchase their works, when I might well have seized everything through the power of eminent domain. Their reaction was most interesting. The eldest of the three men fell down clutching his chest. His son, an individual of submarginal intelligence, attempted to fire a rifle at me. I appropriated it with my whip. He fled with his red-haired cousin, who subsequently fractured his pelvis in what must have been a nasty fall; the cracked bones and his overalls were discovered long after at the foot of Painter Leap. Before I could be of assistance, the old man died of heart failure. We buried him. No one ever showed up to look for him or claim the abandoned still. I wonder why?" His shod feet rang briefly on stone as they took another course downhill.
"How far—"
"Have patience," Jim snapped. "You're fortunate to be alive. And you have a strong body, you're in your prime. I don't drink when I'm in the woods, otherwise I might have been lolling by my pool, deaf to the world, while those boars eviscerated you."
"The last time you saw me, I was falling through the window of a room in the chateau."
"There was nothing I could do to resist the power that was attracting you."
"But—if the other Walkouts appeared in Wildwood, how did I wind up in West Texas?"
"I don't know the fate of all, the Walkouts. There may be a few others, like yourself normal in appearance, scattered throughout the world. Perhaps, because you were in free-fall at the time, you were simply deflected, a displaced mote, to the desert. You might as easily have reappeared in Malabar, or the South Atlantic ocean. There is no explanation."
"Do you think it's coming back?"
"What do you think, Alex?"
Whit began to shudder, as if the ghost of a child alien to him were awakening, dreadfully, like a long-dead nerve.
"Yes. I think it's coming back. But I don't want to see it."
"Odds are your father is still there." Jim added, sardonically, "You must surely want to see him."
"I don't—I still can't accept—"
For a few moments the centaur stood still at an overlook; below them smoke rose from the dim lights of the fires of Walkout Town. It obscured part of the distempered but silent sky, a catastrophe eons old threatening anew.
"Make no mistake. He is your father. And it would be fitting if he is there, waiting for you, Alex."
"Oh, Jesus."
"For me as well," the centaur said.
"And you—want to kill him."
The centaur ambled to a nearby tree and began to rub one shabby, balding flank against the trunk, sighing pleasurably. Then they continued downhill.
"For the last three years, since Jacob and I began to talk, and I came to believe in his theories of Wild-wood's disappearance, I've thought about little else. It may be that the potential opportunity for revenge, however remote, has kept me alive well past my time."
"We were in the same room, you said. And now we're all here, except my—except for Edgar Langford. Why isn't he a Walkout too?"
"Remember. It was his magic."
"I don't believe in magic."
"Nor centaurs, I suppose," Jim said. And he lashed Whit's back with a sweep of his wiry tail. A meteor flamed in the smoke and stuffy mist, illuminating them, too brightly. Whit closed his eyes, reeling from icy remembrance, and the sheer drunkenness of fantastical night. He nearly lost his balance, like a child on a cock-horse.
"Hold on," Jim said sharply, "and try not to shift your weight. We're almost home now. We'll have a drink at my place, and talk. If the appearance of the sky these last few nights is significant, then all of our questions may soon be answered."
Terry got up from the bearskin beside Josie Raftery's suspension bed and, after carefully moving aside one of her protective wings, went outside still half asleep to relieve himself. Through the blur of trees in a saffron mist he saw, passing at a distance of no more than a hundred feet, what appeared to be two men on horseback. Then his scalp crawled a little and his testicles shriveled like prunes; he wished for a closer look but was afraid to follow, and whatever had been there vanished so abruptly he couldn't be certain it was real. He heard a voice he recognized, was about to call out, shuddered and thought better of it. He crept back onto the bearskin in the hut beneath a warm wing, which quivered in response to his agitation. He was goose-bumpy all over.
Josie murmured, "Are you all right?"
"Uh-huh. I thought I heard my dad outside. He was
riding a—but it couldn't have been a horse." Still trembling, he curled up more tightly on the thick nap of claw-edged fur.
"What you saw is called a centaur. Half man, half horse. His name is Jim."
Terry giggled nervously.
"He may be the oldest Walkout; certainly he is the wisest, on his good days."
"What about his b-bad d-days?"
"Ah, well, poor thing, he does no harm. Look here, mister honey, if neither of us is going to sleep again this night, perhaps you wish to lie down with me again."
"Maybe I should go look for my dad."
"If he is here, you will see him come the dawning. Please, Terry?"
Her beryl eyes were vivid as catsgleam in the primitive dark; all else he knew by heart: her pretty breast, the masquerade elegance of her repose.
"Move over," Terry said.
In the darkness of his nightmare, Faren came to Arn Rutledge bearing light.
She held a lantern in an outstretched hand. It was scintillating, scathing, his eyes watered and ached to look at it. He preferred looking at his wife, who was tautly naked, her skin the color of copper and slicked-on old blood. Aroused, he wanted to embrace her, hands conforming to those familiar and comfortable contours of hip, pelvis and tarbabe pussy. But the noose the Walkouts had put around his neck still held him back; and, even if his hands had not been tied, the lantern was between them, an obstacle that seemed more formidable with each passing second.
"Faren, put that damned thing down and untie me!"
Look at it, she told him telepathically. Her eyes were wide, her Cherokee face so stern it seemed cruel.
Something fluttered in the brilliance of the rayed light, and strove to acquire an ominous shape: it was a black bird, a raven. He closed his eyes against the pressure of the light and the struggling bird. But the light burned through his dry lids as if they were onionskin.
"Faren—" he pleaded. Disturbing dreams made him meek, as nothing in life could ever do.
When he looked for her again all that remained was the caustic lantern suspended inches from his face. He saw, where Faren had been standing, a lifting of enormous wings saturated with fire at the tips. He tried to reach and hold her, but was choking at the end of the rope, fainting from lack of blood to his brain. The raven shrieked and flew, night-fierce; but something, not his own bound hands, dragged it fighting back to earth. The raven's talons were caught in the coils of a serpent of such size it had no head and no tail: it existed, endlessly, a colossus of the harrowing void between earth and sky.
Arn heard his wife scream, in a human voice, but the vision disintegrated grayly and he found himself facedown, gagging and trembling uncontrollably, on the burlap-covered, dirt floor of the hut. The rope had become twisted around his body during his bouts of possessed sleep. Getting untangled in the dark was a demeaning, frustrating chore. His fury mounted with each failure. At last he was able to crawl outside into the witching misty night and wake all the sleepers, the oblivious ones.
"Walkouts! You sorry sons of bitches! Let me out of here! It's got my wife! You hear me, freaks? Cut this rope!"
Arn paused for breath. But he was prepared to go on yelling for the rest of his life, or until someone came.
In the stall-like hut where the centaur lived with loaded shelves of books and his yeasty still, Whit Bowers heard the sergeant-major. He had been drinking the centaur's potent mash whiskey, and had dozed off along with the garrulous Jim. When he started awake he was disoriented and shaken, certain that he was in yet another foreign country during a lull in a ghastly battle.
As he got up from the floor he heard what could have been a dud shell going off just outside. He flinched, but the explosion was mild, even festive, as if a champagne cork had been ejected from a jeroboam. The noise was followed by an instant of blue-toned light, blinding as a photoflash. He was fixed in his tracks before he could reach the wide gate across the entrance to the centaur's hut.
Jim, who had drunk a great deal more than Whit, was stretched out on the floor, Chiron fallen, a living myth though sourly breathing, wearing a patchy scarred hide. With his retinas dazzled Whit stumbled against him. The centaur raised his head slowly.
"What was that? Where are you going?"
"Outside. I heard Arn, he's in some kind of trouble." Jim groaned and farted. Whit edged around the squalid equine body and pushed the gate open. Outside a stream of sparkling light dense' as a river flowed, with many sharp bends and against gravity, through the mist and thick trees that stood around the oblong park of Walkout Town. Whit cupped his hands around his mouth and called.
''Arn!''
The sergeant-major's hoarse voice came back to him as Whit heard the centaur getting to his feet in the hut. "Colonel Bowers!" His delight and relief were plain despite the distance between them. "Where you at? Get some help up here, ole buddy, can't hold this hill much longer—all by myself."
Jim clumped outside, his breath preceding him like a lush of gasoline. Nearby other Walkouts, wraithlike in the mist, appeared from their lodgings, attracted more by the fluent river of light than by Arn's distress calls. They made sounds of ecstasy, of tribulation.
"Hold on, Arn, I'm coming!" Whit turned to the centaur, whose bloodshot eyes contemplated the wending light. It shed thickets of crystals like ice that glittered alluringly but quickly melted in the warmer mist. "Where's Arn?"
"Never mind. He is not in jeopardy. Do you heat that?"
"Hear what?"
"Music. You must hear it. Music from the chateau!" Whit nodded. It was the same faint orchestra he had heard on leaving the aviary hours ago. Melody still missing, but the notes of a clarinet were needle-sharp and unerring as they flew across time. The Walkouts were agitated by the tantalizing reed, like bees in a hungry hive.
"Colonel Bowers! Hey, Whit! Get me out of this noose, Faren's in bad trouble!"
"What's he talking about?" Whit demanded. "What noose?"
"The man is a murderer," Jim said indifferently, his attention concentrated on the faded music. "We've merely given him a taste of our justice after all these years."
"You're going to hang him? For Christ's sake—"
Something remarkable had appeared, mildly dark but sharper than the sprightly transparence of the light stream, a few hundred yards from where they stood. It was weaving in and out with the swirling flow through the trees, acquiring a shadowy substance, coalescing. It was, perhaps, a lookalike centaur, galloping blankly but inexorably in their direction. Then Whit realized it was not one creature but a bluesy horse, another dark figure distinguishable behind its rider.
"Dear God," Jim said in a quiet voice; but he side stepped ponderously against Whit, nearly knocking him down.
"What is it?"
The running horse, each stride suspenseful, precise in its purpose as a ticking clock, was closer. The man in the saddle wore a broad-brimmed hat, and carried a coiled whip in one hand. He raised an empty face, glittery as days-old death, to the watchers. The other silent rider was a woman in tights. She clung to the man's back, hair floating slowly around her head like the hair of the newly drowned.
The centaur screamed, inflating Whit's pulse, provoking an uproar from the other Walkouts.
"It's Travers!"
More Walkouts appeared, surreptitiously, in the clearing near the motive light as the horse of nightshade blue and dream momentum passed by and began to vanish upstream, where the now-diffluent stream poured toward the crest of Tormentil Mountain, rising, like a dissipated spell, toward the sky. And then the wind hit them, a torrential blast clearing out the light and the mist and the failed music, sweeping trees toward the ground, bowling over those Walkouts who had nothing to cling to. Whit fell back against the centaur, reached up to anchor himself with a handful of gritty scalplocks.
As the wind subsided, a sparse exhalation, the night sky, for the first time in hours, was visible—the old eyes of eternity fire-flecked, a three-quarter moon glistening like the belly of a pregnant angel.
Whit thought he had become accustomed to the funereal and the bizarre, but as he stared at the sky, momentarily forgetting Arn, he saw a butterfly glide enormously from the dark treetops.
"Josie! Josie!"
The Walkouts were looking up, pointing. The butterfly soared higher.
"Tell us, Josie!"
For half a minute the butterfly hovered above Walkout Town, a ruddy shadow on the moon like a blood tattoo. Then it began a graceful descent.
"Dad?"
Whit turned and gaped at his son, who smiled assuredly, pleased to be a surprise. Then he stared, like almost everyone else, at Josie the butterfly, something secret of his own in his excitement, his admiration of her godlike skill.
"Terry—what the hell—where did you come from?"
Terry just shrugged, looked again at his father, then belatedly hugged him, his heart ripe with the affections of youth, the pride of a new-found manhood.
"You okay?" Terry asked him. "I thought you were lost."
"I was. But tell me—"
"Oh, I came with Faren. But I don't know what happened to her." He lowered his voice, casting an awed glance at the nearby centaur, very like a god himself but in his cups, and unsteady. "Arn's here, though. They—"
"Josie!"
More voices were calling now, anxious to be relieved of the horror of doubts.
"Is it there, Josie?"
As the butterfly flew toward open ground and the Walkouts converged on her, Terry pulled eagerly at his father's sleeve.
"Come on, I want you to meet Josie. She's—hey, she's just so neat."
The centaur broke into a clod-flinging gallop, the man-third of him thrust forward acutely, like the prow of an unseaworthy ship.
"Did you see it?" His intrusive bulk and his bellow momentarily silenced the other Walkouts.
Josie Raftery hovered a few feet above his uplifted face, splendid wings rowing slowly in the moonlight, her body severely straight and angled a few degrees from the vertical.
