Fiends

by John Farris

  Where she aimed the beam of the flashlight Duane saw something shapeless—to his unaccustomed eyes—not only shapeless, but dark and writhing like a bucket of eels. Making those chilling human sounds of anguish, birth pangs. One glance, and he didn't want to see or know any more. The voices on the radio, all of them screaming now, like a mob at a prizefight. Locked in her maniacal grip, he looked at Puff, and she was chewing her lip in a frenzy, making it bleed. Blood just flowing down her chin. He was cold and dizzy from horror. There was a fog rising from the matted-down silk where the whippy thing struggled to live, or die; their own breaths were condensing. And now some of the luna moths, eyespots aglow like small lanterns, had begun to flutter around their heads, as if taking a keen interest in the spectacle, the abomination, the horror . . . Duane tried to draw back, to pull Puff with him as if from the brink of an abyss, but she was immobile except for the thrilled antic workings of her face, the sharp teeth piercing her lip.

  "He's coming," she muttered, as if what she was watching were pornographic. She wiped her swelling lip with the back of the hand that held the flashlight. At least she had stopped biting herself. Duane shot another look at the floor as something popped up darkly, slick with fluid, through the fog and silken haze: something with a gaze as stark and stunned as his own. The round hairless head of a kinetic tarbaby. It was still not clear, from the expression on its face, if it was struggling to live, or dying in agony.

  "Damn you, Puff, why did you take that vine from around its neck?"

  She looked at him in surprise, and responding to the pressure of his fingers on the back of the hand she held him with, relaxed her grip.

  "Mama told me to!"

  "Your mother's not here!"

  Puff did her little joyous, herky-jerky dance. "Look, look at him now!"

  It was sitting up, he could see that much. The wildly contorted limbs, once twisted like the length of vine Puff was still holding, had straightened. Fingers were recognizable, and toes. So was an immature penis, half the length of Duane's little finger, and erect. Tremors still ran through the small body in waves, but the screams had become sobs. And its—his—skin tone was softening, turning from pitch thick as a tar road to a dark gray, with faint pinkish highlights which at first Duane thought were reflections from the wings of the moths flocking to the beam of the flashlight. As the child took shape and its own birth-vapor formed like a blanket around its head, the tremors and upheavals lessened.

  "He'll get his hair back. Won't he?" Puff said, smiling deliriously. And she reached down to run her hand over the crown of the well-shaped head, a milder gray than the rest of him. His skin continued to lighten, to soften everywhere. At Puffs touch he held up his arms to be taken. "Ohhh," she said, rapt in motherhood. She handed Duane the flashlight.

  "Puff, don't!"

  "I'll take him with us. We'll come back to get mama. I need something to cut away all the vines. I don't want to leave any of them like this." There was a squawl of protest on the radio, and Puff hesitated as she was bending over to pick up the child. She frowned. "It's all right," she said. "I said I'd come back. You can depend on me." She listened. "You can depend on him," she said, but with less conviction, and although Puff didn't look his way, Duane felt a warning pang around the heart. "I'll leave the radio on for you," she said then with a note of finality, and turned her full attention to the waiting child, who watched her solemnly, arms still uplifted. Duane thought he might be five or six years old, but it was hard to tell—that hairless head.

  "Don't," Duane said again, but he was drained of protest; there was no reasoning with her.

  She lifted the child and brushed away some of the cobwebby silk that clung to his moist, wrinkled, repugnant skin and held him against her breast. His head was on one of her shoulders but his eyes, elliptical and filmy, didn't close. He looked steadily at Duane, without curiosity or any other sign of intelligence.

  "I'm going to call him Alastor," Puff said. "Do you read Shelly? Do you know that story?" She spoke happily to the child. "How do you like your new name, hmm?" A moth sat exquisitely on the child's head. Alastor gave no indication he knew it was there. He was perfectly quiet and seemed not to be breathing. Duane reached out slowly and touched a boyish shoulder, jerked his hand back. The child's flesh was impossibly cold, as if he'd been plucked from the waters of a well.

  The eyes moved, following Duane. A small hand clutched Puffs arm above the elbow, and Duane realized something was wrong with that hand. The little finger hadn't turned, it was still carbon-black. And tapered; it came to a point as sharp as a thorn's.

  "Puff," Duane said, his voice cracking, sounding childish, "put him down."

  "What?"

  "Just put him down, and let's go. We don't have any business—"

  "We're going, all right, but Alastor's going, too."

  "No."

  "What do you mean, no? What do you have to say about it, shithead? He's mine!"

  Another luna alighted on the boy's skin, now a spoiled-looking whitish-gray. Two more. With their wingspans, three of them were nearly enough to cloak the inert Alastor in alluring moths. They gave him, with their beaming eyelets, both stature and menace.

  Duane swallowed. He'd nearly lost his voice. He looked at Puffs eyes and knew there was no sense in yelling at her. But maybe he could save her. He trembled in his guts. His chin wrinkled.

  "I think . . . he's used to being down here, belongs here, and . . . if you, we . . . take him outside, who knows what'll happen?" To us.

  Puff gave her head a toss and laughed; Alastor's thin hands clutched her arm tighter, and Duane looked at the thorny little finger denting her skin.

  "You're crazy!" Puff said. "Nothing's going to happen to him. Now what're we waiting for?"

  "Feel how cold he is, Puff. He shouldn't even be . . . alive."

  "He isn't cold! He feels fine to me! He's probably hungry! I want to get him something to eat and some clothes and stuff. Toys. He wants some toys to play with, don't you, big boy?" Puff jogged Alastor up and down a couple of times; the child rode glumly on her shoulder. The faintly luminous moths fluttered but settled down as if they'd become attached to him. "I'll call my brother Max collect in Wisconsin. When I tell him the good news he'll wire me a hundred dollars right away. Then . . ."

  Puff, having fixed a course of action in her bombed-out head, pushed her way past Duane. After a few steps she looked around wearily.

  "That's the way we came in, over there. Isn't it?"

  "I think so."

  "I can't get out without the light, Duane. Help me?"

  "Oh, Puff."

  "If I can just get a little help from my friends now and then, I'll do fine." She was crying.

  The hairless child on her shoulder, on his bed of shark's teeth, closed his eyes. He seemed to have gone to sleep. Maybe his hair would grow back. Maybe there was nothing to be afraid of, after all. The radio was as still as a stone. If he wasn't afraid, Duane thought, then why didn't he stop shaking? If he'd gone crazy too, down here with mummies that came back to life, then somebody would recognize that right away when he reached the surface; they'd put him in a safe place until he got sorted out. He yearned for that safety. It was a craving much stronger than hunger.

  "You go first, Puff," Duane said. "I'll light the way."

  19

  The telephone in the kitchen rang at five after nine, and when Enid answered she heard a thin high voice made less intelligible by crackling static on the line. "I haven't seen Marjory for hours and I can't find her anywhere! I don't want to speak to her, I just want to know if she's home!"

  "Rita Sue?"

  "Yes, it's Rita Sue!"

  "Where are you, baby?"

  "Dante's Mill State Park! Phone booth! Campground! Everything's closed here! I think she went behind the waterfall, that's why I'm—"

  Enid took the receiver away from her ear and said sharply, "Ted!" He was under the sink with his tool box taking another crack at a leak that had resisted his
previous efforts at repair. He backed out and glanced at her, reaching for a grease rag to wipe his hands on. Rita Sue was still talking. Enid gave Ted a baffled look, shook her head worriedly, and got back on the line.

  "Rita Sue—wait—tell me that again. Where did you see her last? Who was she with? That boy—"

  "No. We didn't see Duane. She had some of his stuff with her, you know, that he uses to collect butterflies. She put it in the backseat and said—what was it she said, Boyce?"

  Enid said quickly, "Rita Sue, put Boyce on and let me talk to him."

  "Hi, Enid, this's Boyce."

  "I know. What's going on over there?"

  "Beats me."

  "You're not being much help, Boyce. Now think about it calmly and tell me everything Marjory said the last time you—what time was that anyway?" Enid looked around at Ted and pointed upstairs, telling him to get on the telephone in her bedroom and listen in. He nodded and went at a jog to the stairs.

  "I reckon it was a little past four."

  "Where was she?"

  "By the millpond at the old town."

  "She's not there now?"

  "Well, they close the road over there at sundown."

  Enid heard Ted pick up the receiver of the phone in her room. "You saw Marjory a little after four, but Duane wasn't with her."

  "No. I don't know where that booger's got himself to, and if he's not careful he's gonna violate his probation—"

  "I don't care about him," Enid said sharply, "I'm worried about Marjory. What did she say to you?"

  "She said—near as I can recall—'Duane's missing. He's with some girl.' And, oh yeah, her radio got stolen, that was it, Duane was helping the girl get her radio back. I think. They had to go behind the waterfall after it."

  "Behind the waterfall? At the millpond?"

  "That's right." Boyce paused, apparently to listen to something Rita Sue was saying urgently in the background. "Oh, yeah. Marjory must've called the Highway Patrol, she said they were coming. But they never did. Then she took her flashlight out of her shoulder bag and said she was going to go look for Duane behind the waterfall."

  "Oh, good Lord! How deep is that water there? Ted?"

  Ted asked Boyce, "Did you see Marjory go behind the waterfall?"

  "No, sir. Me and Rita Sue stayed in the car until we decided to go have us a ice cream—"

  "Boyce, how could you let Marjory—"

  "Nuggins, calm down. I can barely hear him."

  Boyce said, "Well, I was gonna go with her, but you know, because my foot's all wrapped where I dropped that crankcase, I can't get around so good."

  "I heard about it. Where'd you say you're at now?"

  "Oh, you know, the big campground where the park headquarters is."

  "I want you to stay right there with Rita Sue," Ted told him. "There'll be some law officers on the scene in just a few minutes—"

  Enid lowered the receiver of the telephone between her breasts and put a hand over her mouth. She was still standing there like that when Ted came running down the stairs, peered at her in exasperation from the doorway, then came quickly to hang up so he could make a call.

  "We don't know it's anything; maybe they—" He was dialing.

  "She's been missing five hours? How could she go behind the waterfall? Isn't there—it's like a big wall! There's no way—"

  "Hold on. Hi, Loretta, this's Ted. I'm over at Enid Waller's. Her sister's up at Dante's Mill, and she and maybe a couple other kids have been missing since right after four o'clock this afternoon. Marjory Waller. Her date was a boy named Duane—" Ted snapped his fingers a couple of times until it came to him. "Eggleston." He spelled it. "Yeh, do that first, and also notify the Wingo County Sheriffs Department, have them meet me at park headquarters. Oh, and give ol' Rhubarb a call, ask him to take my shift tonight. . . I know that, but the horse show's rained out tonight, they don't hold hunter-jumpers in a dang downpour. There's one more thing." Ted turned away from Enid and walked toward the back porch as far as the telephone cord would reach, but he couldn't get his voice low enough not to be overheard by Enid. There was thunder outside, going on and on like a bowling ball rolling downstairs.

  "Tell Wingo County we may be needing their tracker dogs. And enough men to drag that pond up there at the old mill. Yeah. Leaving right now."

  When Ted turned around Enid was facedown in a heap on the floor. Because of the thunder, or the pressure of blood in his ears, he hadn't heard her fall.

  20

  Birka was finding out that coming back from the Black Sleep was no bowl of cherries. She was having the devil of a time holding on to the Marjory-human, and in Birka's present circumstances, Marjory was the only hope she, or any of the huldufólk colony, had left.

  Killing Arne had been a mistake: purely an accident. After the deeply painful minutes of awakening from the Black Sleep, Birka had been too easily enraged to discover she wasn't free at all. Arne (unrecognizable, to be sure, as her son, except in distant neurons of the hypothalamus where primitive structures of human emotion survived vestigially) had prudently tethered her feet to the tree with strangler fig. Petulantly she reversed the polarities of his brain, rendering him unconscious. No harm in that, ordinarily, but then, because he was biologically antiquated, perhaps, he suddenly stopped breathing. Birka had a lot to learn about mind-tempering, the harmful effects of misfires on hormonal balances, although she couldn't have put any of this into words. Theron was the learned one, surrounded by fledglings, but he'd had little time to instruct Birka before

  Enoch and the boy caught up to them and banished them all to limbo with nooses of fig. She had never taken Enoch seriously enough, Birka lamented, and that had been their -downfall.

  Once she was certain Arne was dead, instinct fifty million years old took over: no sense wasting a human, so Birka skinned him. (Uh-oh; she visualized this a little carelessly, and the Marjory-human jumped nearly a foot off the ground where she was crouched partway down the hill. Birka turned on the childish tears again, loading up the cortical belief-systems of her own mind with images of kinship. Her enormously sensitive, telepathic pineal "eye" distributed these diverting images and messages to priority systems in twinkling thickets of the Marjory-human's hierarchical brain, preempting, but not with complete efficacy, conscious awareness of her present surroundings and circumstances.) All that aged, mottled skin might prove to be of no value in Birka's renascence, but it was something to start with. Theron would have criticized her for not taking advantage of the opportunity. If she ever saw Theron again.

  Heaving Arne's skinned carcass high into the fork of a limb was no more difficult for Birka than lifting, in her former unsatisfactory incarnation, a pot of beans from the back of the stove. Even though she couldn't stand on her numbed, poisoned feet. Nor touch the knots of strangler fig without instantly losing the use of her fingers. She had persuaded the Marjory-human (must think of her only as "Marjory"; the leak-through, the currents of cross-imagery, disturbed the basic, reptilian brain that wanted to scuttle, and save the irreplaceable body) to untie her, continually eliciting sympathy through imagined kinship: a taxing exercise in Birka's present state of development and difficulty. Now she continued the exercise, but Birka felt drained, incapable of Turning the girl, even if she could position her for this effort. Such a malignant fate, almost free, then lightning striking the tree just as the stubborn fig-knots came loose in Marjory's hands. Fortunately Marjory wasn't killed, but Birka lay trapped in a cage of limbs, a welter of green leaves. Not the type of leaves to send her off to the Black Sleep; only a vine around the throat could do that. But the greenery sapped the vital energy of the pituitary gland, caused an annoying mist in her mind when she most needed all of her faculties.

  And the steady rain had thinned the flocks of messengers, the luna moths; she had no idea what was going on down below where Theron waited, entombed. The force of his mind had remained potent even in the rigors of the Sleep, although she couldn't hope to tap him now, throug
h layers of limestone and deeps of pitch. What would he say, advise, in these moments of crucial helplessness?

  He would say that her fear of dying was vestigial, unworthy of her status. Her flesh was so cold marauding animals or vultures would not care to touch her. The sun, of course, was a different matter: to be illuminated unpityingly at dawn, quickly banished by the hated orb of God; oh, the smoking horror of the unhidden which preceded the Sleep! A noose was bad enough, she never wanted to undergo the torture of sunlight. But she might have hours left, before dawn. And what else could harm her? Nothing.

  Her immediate needs were clothing and shelter. A farmhouse, a barn would do. Was Marjory from a farm, or town? Birka preferred the isolation of a farm; not so many humans to deal with. Marjory was all she could handle, for now.

  Birka's other option was to return immediately to the cave and free the others. With Marjory's help, of course. Only a human could release the Sleepers. But this might put too much of a strain on Birka's efforts to maintain their relationship. She couldn't afford to lose Marjory, but controlling another's primal fears was ticklish, even at this range. The child was so afraid of death (Birka sensed without crystallizing the event a catastrophic loss of parents). For now wherever Marjory went, Birka had to go.

  "Oh, Marjory! Are you hurt?"

  "Yeh. I hurt all over."

  "Can you walk?"

  "I think so. Did you—why were you running?"

  "I was afraid of the storm. I'm still afraid! Take me home."

  (Marjory's eyes darting to the sky where lightning flickers, then to the damaged tree. No trees in their Icelandic valley. Marjory sees instead the tumbled stones of a sheepcote.)

  "I'm pinned down! Hurry, Marjory, get the stones off me!"

  "I'm . . . coming, Birka."

  A long way up the slope for her, slipping and sliding. Breathing hard. Struggling through the wet leaves and myriad branches of the huge chestnut limb lying half on the ground. A raw wound in the side of the old tree visible as lightning flashes again. (All of this recast by Birka as tumbled sheaves of hay under a fallen shed roof. The lightning is very useful to Birka because it is something else Marjory dreads, reducing the activities of her brain to basic survival alarms.) Marjory cringes, and sees Birka lying helplessly in mud, looking up at her.