Fiends

by John Farris

  "I saddled Hob-Nob and I want you to get up now and ride to your great-uncle Carl's and ask him for the borry of his crosscut saw. They'll invite you to stay the night and that's okay, it be too much of a trip for Hob-Nob back and forth in one day."

  (Hearing this, and looking around as if he expects to see the saddled chestnut horse right there with them, and then in his weariness and fear remembering: No, I did that already! Rode the better part of fifty miles up to Long Cane, Tennessee, for a crosscut saw his father could have had for the asking just down the road at the Oakmans'; but pleased that his father trusted him to ride so far alone on their best horse, excited by the prospect of an overnight visit with his red-haired cousins. So excited he didn't notice anything unusual about his father, who dogged his every step until Arne was mounted. Even then his father walked with them a few hundred yards in the brightening dawn, finally reaching up to squeeze Arne's hand before giving Hob-Nob a soft whack on the rump. And the next time Arne saw him—

  (—No, wait! There is more he hasn't heard, more he wants to know.

  (Getting to his feet again. Taking his father by the hand. Just holding him, walking him, as if Arne is the father now, Big Enoch the child. Leading his father this way is preferable to the deathlike stillness—the vacancy in Enoch's eyes. Walking. Until, looking down from a ridge through evaporating mist, the modest steeple of the white church in Dante's Mill, the shining, wet twenty-foot wheel in the swishing millrace, become visible to them. Dogs bark. A rooster crows. A neglected cow lows to be milked. There is no human voice but his father's, who speaks up suddenly, loudly, causing Arne to jump.)

  "I seen you out of sight, then I went straight away to the barn. It were cold in there, Arne. Cold as Christmas, just like it will be down underneath. We got to go in there anyhow, because that's where they'll all be in the daytime. Where they all live now, where she is. But 1 was a-sayin', I had to pull on gloves to lift that crate into the wagon bed. I don't know why it was so cold to the touch, on a summer morning. I can't account for a thing that's happened, before or since. All you got to do is believe me, until you see for yourself. . . Well, I did know I had to get it off my property and into the ground somewhere in the woods, where no 'un's were ever likely to find it. That's just what I did. Drove clear t'other side of Coachman to the high hills and into woods so deep there weren't a track no more and Ol' Vol by himself couldn't haul the wagon past the thickets. I cleared a space of ground with ax and shovel, and put that crate down in a hole I was near four hours digging without hardly a pause. And all the time wondering, What's in it? What's in it to make her act like she did? But I wasn't about to open that crate and look inside. I was afraid. That's the bald truth. Even though it wasn't what you'd call cold no more, or maybe because I piled some cut-off branches on top of it while I was clearing ground. Some white ash and box elder and shumard oak. Done the right thing without I knowed why."

  (Sunlight. The trees swaying in a soft morning breeze. Pine warblers overhead; Arne hears the gobble of a wild turkey not far away. His mouth waters. Roast turkey. Hunger in the pit of his stomach like a piece of smoldering charcoal, but he is too despondent to make the effort to find something to eat. Only a couple of bullets for the rifle. Maybe he could get more in town. He has money to buy all the bullets he wants, another rifle if need be. He has a five-dollar gold piece at the bottom of his pouch of valuables and lucky pieces, the gold a christening present from the grandfather in Maine he has never laid eyes on. Maybe he can buy something to eat, down there. He has never been to Dante's Mill. But his father said—His eyes are on the town, the sunstruck pond, the shimmering line of the falls over a rock dam beside the gabled millhouse. It must be almost nine o'clock in the morning, yet there's not a soul to be seen. The breeze tickles the hair on his forehead. His father has slumped down, breathing through his mouth, the vacancy in his eyes again. Arne's shoulders and back hurt. He puts down the bundle of cut vine. The leaves are beginning to dry out. He does not want any bullets. He won't go down there in search of food even if he starves to death. He is terrified of this silent town.)

  "I'm telling you I was fair whipped when I was done. All I had left to do then was push the crate into the bottom of the hole and shovel it over with dirt. See, I wanted to go straight home. But I couldn't—well, by then 1 didn't have no more fear of it. It were just a box I was buryin'. So I had my tools with me and I thought, couple minutes more. Just to satisfy, and not always be a-thinkin' what could it of been in that crate. I weren't meaning no harm. So I fetched the crowbar. If it'd been hard, why, I'd of left off and just piled on the dirt. But it were like sliding open a bureau drawer. No more trouble than that. Like the lid had been pried off once already. Maybe Birka—but I don't see how, with what little strength she had lately. Anyhow. I pried, and off it flew. And, oh God! I looked inside."

  (Cold and trembling as his father speaks, knowing that he is the one, he is guilty, if not for him they wouldn't be here, none of this would have happened.)

  "It were after dark when I fetched on home. Birka was a-lyin' on the bed where I'd left her all tied up, not moving, she just watched me with her eyes. When I set down beside her she commenced to cry, so I untied her hands and feet and took off the rag I'd stopped her mouth with and the first thing she asked me, 'Did you do it?' And I said, 'It's done.' Then she told me what it was, what they was, some poor creatures from way back at the Creation, four thousand and four years ago, children of Eve, and God done give to them a hell of their own. She asked me if I touched the vine around its neck, and I told her I couldn't touch none of it. I didn't want to be a thinkin' about it ever again. Well. After that we—we done what men and women do when they're married, Arne, reckon you already know about that, we—done it twice, and that finished me off,, for the night, I thought.

  "But it were still dark when I heard Ol' Vol snort, woke up to the wagon creaking dead slow past the window. I got up and saw Birka on the wagon seat. When I hollered she just raised up the whip and laid it across Vol's back like he never knowed before, and he took off at a run that was bound to kill him before he traveled far. I looked around for my boots but couldn't find 'em—clothes nuther. She'd taken ever stitch of mine with her. Didn't stop me for long. I just lit out after Birka, naked as the day I was born."

  (Something unseen, but big, stirring in the thicket off to their right. Hairs standing up on his neck, Arne reaches for the model 1904 Winchester and their remaining bullets. His father oblivious, eyes on a circling hawk of Heaven, mouth slack, throat muscles working as he tries to put this new ordeal into words. Arne works the bolt, drops a .22 cartridge into the breech of the rifle, closes it carefully. The other, the very last bullet, is clenched in a sweaty palm. The rustling continues. Up on one knee beside his father, he strains to see into the tangle of laurel and baneberry and young vine twisted around a half-fallen and rotting tree. Some little birds, worm-eating warblers, burst from concealment like a blizzard of dirty snow: something coming, all right, coming directly at them—)

  "I never should've told her where the crate was at. And she had a good start on me, although the way she was driving 01' Vol proved to be the death of him. I come across the wagon off the road near the burial place; he was down in the traces, covered with foam and blood, breathing his last. By then it was all I could do to hobble, for the pain in my feet. But she'd left the clothes throwed in the wagon bed, boots, too. I couldn't get my boots on, my feet was swole. By then the sun was up, and I followed her track through the woods. Now she never knowed from me exactly where at I dug, yet she went straight for him. Maybe it had to do with the moths that was still fluttering around, or the cold air in that hollow. There was a frost everywhere. It covered the heap of dirt she'd throwed off the crate with my shovel. The lid was a-lying off to the side, and wasn't nothing left in the crate but excelsior and a piece of old dried-out strangler fig, cut in two with a knife.

  "Birka was on her back, still holding the shovel with one hand. Her skin was dead-white, but b
lue where the bones showed through. I couldn't bear to touch her, she was so cold. She were a-breathing, but so slow I almost couldn't tell. I knowed I had to get her to a house, put her in a hot bath. Or else—"

  (Scarcely listening to Enoch now, all of his anxiety concentrated on the thicket where the unseen beast is blundering, crashing, coming closer, sounding, in the quieted wood, like a steam tractor he once saw on the road to Nashville. He raises the rifle butt against his shoulder, finger on the trigger, thinking of how small the bullet is, undoubtedly all but useless against whatever horror is about to show itself; his left eyelid twitches, his breath is like teeth in his throat, his penis spurts. But he is between his helpless father and the thicket, he will not turn and run.)

  "Nearest farm were about two mile, a old hardscrabbly place like to fall to ruin; only one old couple there, and him with the rheumatiz so bad he needed a crutch to get around. But she was all right, little bird of a woman who reminded me of my ma. Them kinda eyes cold as nailheads that'll send a chill straight through to your backbone. Bless her, she didn't waste words asking no questions, just hotted up some water on the cook stove and we 'uns got Birka into the tub. That old woman scrubbed with a brush fitten to scrape the hide off a scalded hog, but it were just what Birka needed. By and by some color come back. We poured hot tea into her and she opened her eyes and said a few words. She didn't make no sense, it were more of that damned language, but at least she was a-talking. We put her to bed, and I set there with her most of the day, so wore down from commotion I couldn't move nor eat a morsel of food. Then—oh God! Oh no! Shoot! Kill it! Kill it, Arne!"

  (Jolted by his father's scream, Arne fires. It's all a blur to him, the blackish thing with head like a bear's and arms of raw meat, human in shape but not resembling anything he's ever seen before, unsightly, ungodly—it stumbles, falls out of the thicket a dozen yards away, lies heaving on the ground and screaming its own scream, a high-pitched hissing. The little bullet couldn't have missed, the thing is down and rolling in agony as Arne pulls back the bolt, ejecting hot brass, and inserts the last bullet in the breech of the Winchester. Sweat in his eyes. His father's hand crunching one shoulder, he shrugs violently. What is it? What is it? he demands silently of Enoch, tugging at his shirt, mouth opening and closing like a puppet's, only strangled sounds coming from his throat. Now it looks to him like a man, a half-butchered naked man crawling with flies and other, tinier insects visible only as a crowd where his skin has been sliced or ripped from torso, arms, and massive thighs.)

  "It's another one, Arne. Another one flayed alive, God knows how he lived this long! Let me tell you—I must have fell asleep at Birka's side, and when I woke up she were singing a pretty little song in her language. Pretty, but it made my flesh creep, too. Just hunched over me on the bed a-singing like a mad woman, holding a butcher knife against my throat. It were near dark then, the sky red as blood and blood dripping down from the bodies of the poor old man and woman whose cabin it was, I saw them hanging by their heels from the rafters 'twixt us and the doorway. And outside the sun going down. And she's singing, the look in her eyes like she don't have no idea who I am. And that sharp blade pressed so firm if I'd a swallered hard I'd a cut my own throat . . . go on, Arne, shoot the poor bastard in the head this time! Listen to him, I just can't stand it no more! Put him out of his misery, son, send him home to Jesus—!"

  (Pushed toward the suffering man, Arne is shaking to pieces. Dark curly hair and beard thick with gore, but the worst of it is his nearly skinless body as he is eaten alive by those insects not busy depositing masses of tiny eggs in the suppurating flesh. No: the worst may be his sightless eyes, the pupil of each eye slit, exploded by something sharp as a thorn. His head is raised, there is a dazzle of sunlight where sight should be, he is gasping, but weaker now, and Arne sees, below a naked collarbone, the red oozing pucker where his first bullet struck, doing no serious damage. Shoot, shoot him . . . Arne falls to his knees three feet away and lifts the muzzle of the rifle. One bullet, and he realizes how desperately he wants the precious bullet for himself—he looks back at his father, hatefully, pleading. But Enoch knows his mind.)

  "What's the matter? Did I raise you for a coward? If that be so, then God damn you, let him die in his own time—and me—how long can I last without you? Go on, shoot yourself dead, and by the time both of us is lying here just a molder of bones, and nothing to tell who we was, that's not too many months from now I'm talking about—a year—everybody else in this entire state of Tennessee—maybe the whole country—they'll be just as dead as we are, or a part of the plague itself! Which is worse. A lot worse than being dead, Arne! You saw her, didn't you? You saw her, too! Ain't that worse for her than being dead? Well, answer me! Answer me one way or 'tother!"

  (Trapped between the hideously flayed man and his father's righteous anger, Arne throws back his head and howls. Blackbirds explode like splinters from the tops of trees. Arne points the muzzle of the rifle two inches from the ridge of bone between the eyebrows of the flayed man and shoots him, although he is so numb he doesn't feel himself doing it, and he doesn't hear the report of the rifle. Flies boil into an iridescent green cloud, the shaggy head falls down hard at Arne's feet. A little blood spatters Arne's bare toes as he rises, turns, slings the rifle away. Suddenly he isn't breathing. His chest heaves, but he can't swallow air. He just stands there, twitching and unbreathing with his eyes rolling back in his head, and that's when Enoch seizes him, carries him headlong by the waistband of his denim pants, feet dragging and catching on roots and branches and the bark of deadfalls until Arne too is nearly flayed from ankles to toes; carries him, gasping and turning dark in the face, the shortest way to the brow of a hill overlooking the millpond where he pushes Arne off. It is twenty feet to the surface of the pond. The last thing Enoch sees of his son is the sole of a foot fading deep into dark green water. Utterly exhausted, Enoch slumps down crying.)

  "You ain't done, Arne. I know you ain't done. Come up now. You'll make it. Got to, son, got to. Now. Now. Oh, God, I can't do no more! Help him live. Help my boy!"

  (The sensation of dying, smothering to death. Green smothering woods and the choking in his breast, as if it were packed full of grave dirt. Funerals. Churchside cemetery. The very young children playing at the edge of ceremony, oblivious, a dog barking when the mourners sing. His mother's voice the loveliest he has ever heard. No one, even in darkest sorrow, can help glancing at her when her voice is raised in a well-loved hymn. But he can't sing. He can't even breathe. Just forgot how. Heat and panic. Carried like a corpse undeserving of a decent burial to a precarious space at the edge of the sky, the sun a brand in his eyes, water surface filled with clouds. Spinning down to smack the water broadside. Sharp stinging pain, but still he isn't breathing. Caught by a cold current down there he begins, instinctively, to swim.

  (Coming up now through the depths to raw sunlight, breaking the surface, yelling, then at last gulping down sweet air just before he goes tumbling across the slick wall and into the pool of the race below, a few feet from the slowly turning wheel. Missing the rocks that lie beneath the waterfall, touching bottom, bobbing up again, crawling through the shallows and collapsing amid cattails along the marshy bank. Lying there, face-up, teeth bared, lungs gradually cooling, shivering, until his father appears.)

  "I'm sorry—sorry, boy. It were the only thing I could do, I reckoned you was a goner otherwise. God knows I thought I was about to die myself, more than once these past few days. That knife pressed agin' my throat, like Birka didn't have the least idea who I was. Like she were just a-doing what she'd been told by the Dark Man. I knowed then he had her; she was possessed entire by that unclean Spirit. That's when I saw him, standing in the dooryard, full-fleshed again. He were a big 'un. The sky was all but dark, but when he raised his arms from his sides it were like rainbows flashing in the sky—like he growed wings somehow. I can't describe it. Thanks be to God Birka took her mind off me for a few seconds, sort of turned to see him, and
when I had my chance I just about wrenched her arm out of the socket, got a little cut under my chin is all. Well, she were on the floor screaming and trying to pick up the butcher knife with the other hand and he were in the dooryard, so I went through the window, sash and all, and I run. Run home to wait on you. But you was two days late on account of Hob-Nob's fetlock. So I waited around, figuring they'd come. Come hunting me. Couldn't go to nobody for help, not after the sight I'd seen in the old folks' cabin, the both of them hung by their heels and stripped of their skin. Well. Birka almost got me. Almost tricked me into turning. But now I be a-hunting them. And this is where they're all at. In there, Arne."

  (Lifting his head slowly, a clot of fear moving quick as blood from his heart to his brain, exploding there white as the sun on the watery line of the spillway above them; his eyes going then to the dark windows of the millhouse but no faces there, no eyes like the eyespots of the dreaded luna moth. The millhouse is silent, empty, the huge wheel turning to no purpose, no grains are being ground into meal or flour today. He raises up out of the marshy water and looks around at his father squatting in the cattails, face black with beard, black with rot, eyes sunken and glowing, he seems no less fiendish in appearance than the fiends he pursues. He has brought with him the bundle of strangler fig Arne cut the day before. That, nothing else. Arne looks around again, at the millhouse. His father touches the back of his head, gently, correcting him.)