Wildwood

by Farris, John

  He was stopped by an emanation of sickroom, and brooding perfumes. But the light of the hallway was in a brackish mood; his bones felt as fragile as a skeleton of sand shaped by the blue tide, and the stones of the chateau seemed less than solid: they were subtly adrift in his field of vision, loosely packed dunes on their way, to a formless chaos; they might easily bury him if he was motionless for too long.

  He heard his mother's voice, a far-off plaining.

  He felt, where his heart must be, a slackening of attitude, a thin cracking of obdurate emotion like the shell of a walnut.

  How could he not have loved her? Or been restrained from loving?

  "Pamela? Where are you?"

  Where was Pamela?

  His throat convulsed. He had killed her, not many hours ago, with a chisel that broke her spine. But how could he tell that to his mother, if he went in there?

  He must go. Not to see her, now, was to fail them both in some eternally disgraceful, unforgivable way.

  In the sitting room, her Singer Sargent portrait overlooked richly stuffed furniture in tones of wistful magenta and sunny rum. But only a single small lamp illuminated the large bedchamber; it was difficult for him to make out his mother's still form, the meager flax of her hair on the slanted pillows.

  "Mother."

  "Who's there?"

  That wasn't easy to explain; and as he hesitated in the doorway, with the dreamland blue of magnetically-charged lantern light shimmering behind him, he was aware of-a malevolent other, a watchful third presence. He looked around uneasily. The air was bluest, direst, where the ceiling curved like a loaded bow above the ship-shape ruffling of the bed canopy. A brute eye, composed of black and silver lines of force, existing to electrify, floated there potently, full of itself, examining him. Fear muddled Alex's resolve to make amends, and kiss his mother's cheek, a kiss he had so long denied her.

  She tried to lift her head from the pillow, then abandoned the attempt with a dry sob.

  The eye shot toward him from the bow of the warping continuum. Sibby Langford's small lamp spun a web of intricate light from which came forth, dark as a spider, the ambitious sorcerer, his father.

  As his feet lightly touched the floor Edgar Langford appropriated the floating eye and popped it back into the cavernous socket, where it glistened like a morbid wound. He stared at the intimidated man in the bedchamber doorway, but it was Langford who suffered the greater shock.

  "I'm—Alex. I've come back, father."

  Langford wryly turned his head, accentuating his strained posture, the misaligned backbone. In Sibby's triptych mirrors the magician revealed three smiles at once: astounded, suspicious, inimical.

  "Take it off!" he demanded.

  Alex just shook his head, not understanding. Langford raised a hand to his own, saturnine face, in which the unassimilated eye glared supernaturally. "Your mask! Take it off! No one else can be me! I won't allow it!"

  Alex slumped, rubbing the stubble of his chin, his unfeeling jaw, which was paralyzed by tension. Tears of despair flooded his burning eyes.

  "There's no masquerade. Your Revels are ending, father. And I—I only wanted to say goodbye to both of you."

  His father shrieked in outrage, and plucked a hair from his head. He placed the hair in an outstretched palm, and blew coaxingly on it. Alex watched dully, no longer eager to be inflamed by even the most novel show of magick. He felt the tug of real time, and the collapsing of the sphere around them.

  The hair lifted from his father's hand, and assumed a more substantial, sinister shape: it was now a barbed black weed, turning with tornadic fury, an auger in the air. Alex straightened, alarmed, and raised his hands as he began backing away. But the deadly thing his father had created pursued him, punched through his left shoulder in a quick spouting of blood and ground-up muscle. It had the power of a high-velocity bullet ripping into him, and he was knocked down on the parlor floor.

  His mother, unable to discern what had happened, but recognizing the form of her husband, cried out in terror.

  Edgar Langford limped after Whit and crouched over him, hands extended, fingers spread.

  "No one else can be me!"

  Alex looked at the face of the man he had once loved unquestioningly. There was no remnant of this demanding affectibn, only sorrow. And, finally, loathing, for the perversion of genius that had ruined them all. But he had to try once more.

  "Father—I'm Alex. When I explain I know you'll understand how—"

  Edgar Langford's fingernails sprouted, sharp as sabers, two of them stabbing toward Alex's eyes.

  There was a sharp crack, almost a pistol shot. Langford's head jerked up, his eyes bulged. Alex saw a thin black line, like old blood, across the throat. His father was staring at something behind Alex, who already knew what was back there, he had smelled it.

  Langford's hands trembled ineffectually in the blue air above Alex's face, the growth of nails stopped: they withered. He was jerked aside by the blacksnake whip that was strangling him, fell heavily. Sibby Langford gazed aloofly down from her ornate frame. And her lover, iron shoes ringing on stone, came slowly into Alex's view.

  Alex sat up holding his bloodied shoulder, unnerved by the sight of his father in convulsions as he tried to breathe.

  "Let him go!" he begged the centaur.

  "He was a moment away from murdering you. Do you care so little for your own life?" The centaur gave another furious tug at the whip; Edgar Langford writhed across the floor, a posture of obeisance, dribbling red from a bitten tongue. His head swelled fat with congested blood. His eyes were on the centaur. He raised his hands again as if to summon magick; but his magick was nil. His rasping breath made the noise of an overstressed machine, of a drain in the earth. "I can't go back to what I was. None of us can. Oh, well. This hour is for the weary, our dancing is done." The centaur cast aside his whip and stood trembling, alight, intoxicated. Then he reared to a nightmare height and came plunging down, mashing Mad Edgar's ripened head against the starry marble.

  Alex tasted vomit, and spat it out. The centaur stood brooding above the body, head lowered, his spirit drained. The light of the lantern, comely indigo, was as pacific as the balm of afterlife. But there were crucial voids in its darkness.

  "Is she alive?" the centaur asked Alex.

  "Yes.''

  "You had better get out of here," the centaur advised, squinting at the charged light. He pattered around Alex and entered the bedchamber. After a few seconds Alex followed him, through a stiffened haze that might have been from his own pain, or something imminently fatal.

  The centaur had knelt, awkwardly, on his forelegs, beside the bed.

  "Sibby."

  She didn't acknowledge him, and Alex wondered if she had died too. Then her head turned on the pillow.

  "James?"

  "Yes, darling."

  "I can't see you very well. What is it you're wearing, a beard? And your hair—"

  "It's only my costume. For the Revels."

  "But what an ugly costume."

  "I'll take it off in a little while," he said.

  "James—I'm so glad you came. Edgar was here. I'm afraid—"

  "You don't have to be afraid anymore. I'll stay with you now, forever."

  Alex moved clumsily in the doorway, and they both looked at him, Sibby seeing only a hunched form, a familiarly shaped head.

  "James—who is that?" Sibby said, alarmed.

  "Only a friend. A very good friend. Don't worry."

  "The children—"

  "They are in no danger, I assure you. They will always be—in good hands."

  "Thank God. James, would you hold me for a little while? I've missed you so."

  The centaur took her in his arms. When he bent to kiss her forehead she was motionless, unbreathing.

  "Sibby?" he said.

  In the doorway Alex sobbed.

  After a few moments the centaur raised his head. But the electromagnetic haze had all but wiped him out, Alex s
aw only the hard glitter of his eyes.

  "Leave quickly."

  "You'll die too!"

  "At last. But there is no need for you to go with us. You have your son. And your sister, who needs you."

  The notion of a son meant nothing to Alex, but mention of his sister excited, for the first time, sympathy. But how could he find her now? He was faint from shock and pain. Turning in the doorway, he bumped his injured shoulder, and groaned.

  "Not that way," the centaur said calmly. "You have no time to run. Out the window."

  "Jump?" Alex said, confused. There was a mild wind in his face, grit, the dispulverated stones of the chateau flying around him in the vast slipstream of time. A skyey roaring clogged his ears, the roar of a hundred unbridled aircraft engines. Unsure of just where he was going, his back bent as if he carried an unnameable burden, he fought the billion-moted wind, and came to a sill, an opening on pure space in which raged a jungle of electricity, not unlike the sullen flares of concealed guns. His guts roiled. He would have to jump into that—but he had done it before, and survived. Instinctive courage guided him now. He clambered onto the wide sill, rocking, stung by the keening wind, nearly blinded. He waited for the signal.

  "Go! Go!" shouted Chiron, the jumpmaster. And, despite his crippling shoulder injury, he was able to push himself hard away from the door of the C-47, tumble thrillingly into the abyss of whistling flak and fireflies, down and down. He felt a slight popping at the base of his spine, at long last detached from the cumbersome past. But where was earth, serener pasture for the nakedly fallen? Into what deranged universe had he flung himself, in which direction did he travel now?

  Josie Raftery flew to the storming light, to the opened dome of the lantern. It occurred to her, dimly, that her wings, when exposed to all that energy, the crucible of magnetized, dreamtime blue, might vanish in a puff, leaving her to plummet at breakneck speed. But she was in a state of morbid excitement that was close to a trance. Although she had seen lightning from a distance, she drew none as she approached the glass clamshells, slowed to a circle and beheld the machine responsible for her transformation. It was not the horror she had sometimes tried to imagine. Rather the skein seemed almost frigid in its effulgence, burning, as ice burns, from the refraction of a hidden sun, hum-drum, with a power beyond mere potency. Josie felt awe, but she could not be afraid of it.

  But something fearful was taking place below, away from the strapping machine.

  The big raven with a woman's shapely head, stubbornly but futilely beating its wings in an attempt to break a silken spell; Arn Rutledge, nearly prostrate, oppressed by the might of the magician's walking stick—an airborne serpent, rounding into scaly coils, its own head rhythmic as a metronome in a hellfire haze.

  Josie acted without consideration, flying down to seize the serpent with her strong feet. One near the tail, the other behind its head, so that it could not strike with gilded fangs and rend a wing.

  The serpent reacted with such rippling strength it nearly dislocated her hipbones. She knew it would destroy her before she could fly up and out of the lantern, carry it far away from the chateau.

  "Get out!" she screamed at Arn. And with desperate force, her body on fire from pain, she rowed with a strength equal to the serpent's toward the machine.

  It now seemed more green than blue in its appealing deeps, lusher than Ireland, a sight for sore eyes and a wanderdone soul. The head of the serpent whipped loose, she felt it climbing swiftly toward her heart, but now the machine, the blessed machine, was taking hold of them. . . .

  Arn awoke as if he were in a picture-show and looked up, into the lustrous air. He saw Josie and the dangling serpent superimposed on the hair-thin wires of the machine. There was a moment of writhing, a silvery pop, a thousand tiny Josies and insignificant serpents, then nothing but buoyant impulses of light, all going their separate ways, sizzling faster than his eyes could follow, in interesting trajectories, pathways to blue oblivion. He arose stupidly, weak at the knees, and stared at the unsightly mess of dark feathers strewn across the floor. A wind was blowing, lightly stinging his exposed flesh. His life seemed to be going by, he was numb with recognitions, but felt a yearning not to be finished so soon. It could have been due to vertigo, yet the walls of the lantern seemed to be loose, affecting a vague shilly-shally as if they were immersed in a clear, subtropical sea.

  He became aware of tentative movement in the heap of feathers and saw Faren's hand, wedding band glinting, grope across the stone. He pulled her, naked, coated with something slippery like afterbirth, from a pile of wispy corbin-bones that dematerialized almost as soon as she was clear of them.

  She looked at him and smiled with a flimsy, trembling mouth. Then her eyes rolled back in her head, and she fainted.

  Arn threw her over one shoulder and carried her from the insubstantial lantern, finding the zigs and zags of bright impulses in the deep blue light confusing, inconsistency in his bones, his heart and brains just floating. There was a sound as if one of the faraway revelers had popped a particularly big champagne cork. It was a meaningful sound, last call, he remembered a refrain from pub-crawls in England: Hurry up please it's time. Burdened with Faren in the hospitable, grasping light of the lantern, he turned down a dimming flight of stairs, not sure of the way out. If there still was one.

  The wind was a lash, a beast, a wailing, a remonstrance, an outpouring from the deep-set caverns of time and space. Terry and Bocephus huddled together, tied to a wildly swaying tree by the length of rope attached to the hound's collar.

  When the wind stopped, as abruptly as it had begun, the end of the night was mild, sweet, clear and cold. The chateau was gone.

  Josie, his father, Arn, Faren—gone too.

  Terry got slowly to his feet, still holding on to Bocephus, who trembled nervously, his nose in the air.

  "Where are they, Bo?" Terry whispered. "Did they get out? Can you find them?"

  With clumsy fingers he untied the dog. Bocephus just stood there for a few moments. Then he began an exploratory circuit of the sunrise woods, flushing birds and small game, but nothing that interested him. Terry, with a glow of fever, anxiety gnawing dully at his breastbone, followed as best he could, sometimes losing sight of the tracker dog in hefty stands of hemlock and blue spruce, thickets of flesh-pink rhododendron. Then Bocephus barked and Terry ran, stumbling, where it was still shadow-dark. Up a rise with the trees close together like very tight doorways, then a sudden brightening,, a space through which Faren Rutledge stepped sideways. He nearly ran over her. She was wearing Arn's Ike jacket and nothing else.

  "Terry!"

  She held him to her breast, hugging him almost hard enough to pop a couple of ribs. Arn came up grinning behind her, Bocephus leaping all around him.

  "Arn, what happened?"

  Arn shrugged. "Well—it ain't all that clear in my mind, but we're okay. Did you see your dad anywhere?"

  "No! And Josie—she flew to the chateau just before—" He stopped, thinking of his last glimpse of her, as little as a moth among the distressed stars above the shining lantern.

  "Saw her," Arn said, his face so unexpectedly, grim that Terry cringed.

  "Well, is she—did she—"

  "I don't know exactly what happened to her, Terry. But she won't be comin' back."

  Terry turned and walked away from them, stunned and angered.

  "What about dad?"

  "I don't know," Arn told him. "Hell, I just don't know. Bo, take off!"

  They searched the wood for two hours, until Arn called it off. He sat down to have a talk with Terry. The exhausted boy, who shivered in fits and starts, was beset by panic. Arn talked to him as if he were a young soldier under fire for the first time. His hand was on Terry's shoulder, squeezing hard.

  "It looks like we ain't gonna find him."

  "But if you g-got out, he m-must have got out too!"

  "Now, I'm not sayin' he didn't. But it's plain he ain't around here. Terry, I'll be back to loo
k for him, with all my dogs, and I'll stay in these woods a month if need be, until there ain't no hope at all. Meantime, Faren's got no clothes, and we don't have food. You understand, don't you, Terry? We've done all we can today."

  Terry had chewed his lower lip raw. He nodded tersely. Arn helped him to his feet. Faren looked on silently, her face blank, in the doldrums herself. With Arn in the lead they made their way slowly down the mountain to Walkout Town. No one had the strength to say a word.

  The mists of Walkout Town had cleared beneath a blazing sun. They stopped at a spring and drank, and lay down. Terry closed his eyes for a minute. Then he got up. He looked spectral, as if his heart were missing. He began to call Josie, his voice echoing.

  "Terry, that ain't no use. She's dead. I saw her die. I don't think she suffered none, if that's any—"

  Terry stopped calling and stared at Arn, tears running down his cheeks as he tried to get his breath.

  That's when they heard the baby cry.

  "Good Lord," Faren said. "Where's that coming from?"

  Terry took off, running across the rosy green littered with croquet wickets, stumbling over one he didn't see, falling; he got up and started to run again, going toward he hut in which Josie had lived.

  The baby continued to cry.

  Arn said reluctantly, watching Terry, "Reckon we got to find that baby, and put it out of its misery."

  "For God's sake, Arn!"

  "Faren, it has to be some Walkout's kid. Odds are it"s a freak. Do you want it to—"

  Terry, on the green, stopped suddenly, with an incoherent cry.

  "Arn, look!" Faren said.

  They saw a robed figure emerging slowly from one of the huts. The Walkout had the baby in one arm.

  Faren, limping from a stone bruise, Arn's jacket flapping around her hips, led him at a jog toward Terry, who was staring at the Walkout. They couldn't make out his face, although he seemed to be looking at them, waiting. He acted as if he didn't know what to do with the baby.

  Terry said incredulously, "I think that's—"

  The Walkout sat down heavily, nearly collapsing, but didn't drop the baby. Faren gasped and ran. She reached the robed figure and took the baby from him. He lifted his hand and pushed the cowl back from his face and lay back. His other hand was out of sight, perhaps useless. His eyes were glazed from nightlong pain. But he had a smile for his son when Terry kneeled beside him.