by John Farris
That didn't leave many options, Duane thought. Call the Caskey County Sheriffs Department one more time, have them go by the house.
What's it about, sir?
Well, I think—I mean it could be—it has to do with—just go look, goddammit, they could be dead! Or—worse.
Duane heard Nannie Dell on the front porch, saying good night to the neighbor who had given her a lift to the Planning Board meeting. His father was out of town on business. The family car, a Buick Riviera, was in the garage, but Nannie Dell couldn't drive. Duane's father wouldn't teach her. He liked having her as close to the house as possible at all times.
Their bedroom was strictly off-limits to Duane, although not to Raybeth. He was not allowed in there for any reason.
He heard Nannie Dell call cheerfully, "Duane!" as she came in the front door. He sat rigidly on the side of the high bed with the hand-pieced Appalachian star-pattern quilt and didn't answer.
Nannie Dell walked up the stairs and turned down the hall to Raybeth's room. All was peaceful there. She walked back to her own room, opened the door, and stopped short.
"Why, Duane."
He just stared at her. She was wearing a gray skirt and burnt-orange sweater, and, as usual, thickly braided pigtails that, came down over her shoulders and hung, perfectly straight and glossy, below her breasts. She had a clasp envelope in one hand. She was unaccustomed to Duane staring at her; open hostility on his part was unheard of. Nannie Dell moistened her full unpainted lips and decided to smile, a trifle sternly.
"I believe you know you're not supposed to be in here. What—is something wrong?"
"Yes."
"Well—whatever it is, you look terribly upset. Why don't you give me a few minutes, and then we'll have a talk about—"
Duane pulled Marjory's letter from inside his denim jacket and just held it, not taking his eyes off Nannie Dell. She batted her thick lashes a few times, and pursed her lips.
"This is a letter from Marjory Waller," Duane said in a low voice, gravelly from anger. "She's written me three letters in the past couple of months. She's called, too. What happened to those letters? Why didn't you tell me Marjory called?"
Nannie Dell took a deep, thoughtful breath, summoning Patience, alerting Virtue. She put her envelope aside and joined her hands, not quite prayerfully, in front of her.
"Well, Duane—" she began.
Duane sprang off the bed, thrusting the letter at Nannie Dell, who swayed back, mouth ajar.
"I want to know where you get the nerve to throw a letter addressed to me in the fucking garbage!"
"Duh . . . waaaayne!"
He began to sob. "I put up with everything else . . . around here, all of his shit, but not you . . . I really liked you! Don't you know what you've done, Nannie Dell?"
"Duane, you'll wake the children."
"I don't care! You can't treat me this way! I can't get hold of Marjory! I know she's in terrible trouble, but what am I supposed to do?"
"Duane, John Wesley and I. . . all those awful things happened, and it was on television, and they made it seem like—you were some sort of delinquent, and after what happened with that car—don't you see, for your own good he just didn't want you involved in anything else, involved with that girl we know nothing about! I'm sure when you think about it, you'll appreciate that he was only protecting—"
Duane turned away from Nannie Dell, face contorted, sobbing, humiliated and powerless. "That son of a bitch. Son of a bitch, I fucking hate him, you hear me?"
"Duane, you may not ever, ever speak about John Wesley again in that—”
"That's fine! I won't! I won't talk about him, or to him! I've had it!"
Tears flowed down Nannie Dell's flawless cheeks. "Duane, you don't mean it. I'm sorry . . . I knew it was wrong, but it's what John Wesley wanted me to do. I'm a Christian woman. I can't defy my husband. Duane, I'm sure if we approach this problem in a prayerful manner, everything will be—"
"No it won't." He stared at her, blinking away tears. "If you ever saw what I saw when I was in that cave, your tongue would stick to the roof of your mouth. You'd never pray again, Nannie Dell, because you'd know it wouldn't be any damn use."
Duane sagged. He sniffed a couple of times, and then a fresh spate of crying drove him out of her room and to his own room, where he had the presence of mind to lock the door behind him before he fell on his bed with his face deep in a pillow, so deep he couldn't hear Nannie Dell pleading with him outside in the hall, and she couldn't hear his sobs.
2
About ten-thirty they saw the lights of the pickup truck coming along the winding track in the Evernola National Forest, and the two cavers who had been hunkered down beside a campfire got up to stretch and throw away what cold coffee was left in their tin mugs. The driver of the pickup flashed his spotlight on the campsite and they signaled back with their hands in the glare.
There were three men crowded into the front seat of the pickup, which belonged to Wingo County Deputy Sheriff Wayne Buck Vedders. The other men were Ted Lufford and his first cousin, an explosives expert named Bill Whipkey, Jr. Ted introduced them to the cavers, two men in their thirties who preferred not to give their last names. The cavers were both undersized men, dirty, smelly, and bearded. They wore orange coveralls and pockmarked metal helmets with carbide lamps. They'd been underground for the better part of five days.
The caver who called himself Rex unrolled a hand-drawn map and said to them, "Maybe found what you're looking for. It's a big room, about three thousand feet from where we're standing right now. Honeycomb walls, some kind of hairy stuff all over the floor." Ted nodded. "Boogers, too. How many boogers you reckon, Alvy?"
"I must've counted two dozen boogers. Scariest sight I ever seen in my life."
"Naw, the scary part was when that radio cut loose. All them voices screaming." Rex laughed uneasily. "I thought sure the boogers was after us. I don't have much hair on my head, but I know all the hair around my peter done turned white. Hell, it shrunk up so bad I can't even find my peter no more."
Wayne Buck Vedders said, "You need to see one flitting around, that'll set you up for a coronary anytime."
Rex said, "What the hell they be?"
"All we're sure about," Ted explained, "is that they are something purely unnatural we don't want running around aboveground. And the first of next week the state proposes to start pulling the boogers out of that cave and giving them what they call a proper burial."
"Seen 'em yourself, Deputy?"
"No, but they were well described to me."
The caver named Al watched Whipkey unload his gear from the back of the pickup. "Shit. If he's got nitroglycerin, then you can count me out of this party."
"It's all plastic," Ted assured him. "Billy's just back from two years of blowing gook tunnels in Veet Nam."
"That's good. 'Cause it's three or four vertical drops and a couple of muddy squeezes afore we get to where you want to go."
"What's a squeeze?" Wayne Buck Vedders asked.
Al grinned. The front of his mouth was all but toothless. "A squeeze is a hole in the rock that's about twice as tight as your Aunt Minnie's asshole. Can't get through on your hands and knees; got to wriggle. The ceiling drips like a pisser most everywhere, and the humidity's a hundred percent. That's the bad news. The good news is we didn't see no transparent alligators. Them kind can be a bother."
Bill Whipkey came over to the group around the campfire carrying his backpack by the straps, and an unwrapped loaf of plastic explosive in the other hand.
"I ain't much for crawling on my belly. I travel first class when I go, and this stuffs my ticket."
Rex, looking at the plastic, shook his head woefully. "Ever make any mistakes?"
"Still waiting on my first."
"How's your peter hanging now?" Ted asked Rex.
"It's hangin' out the back," Rex said.
3
By eleven o'clock Nannie Dell, an early-to-bed person and a sound sleepe
r even without her husband there, was no longer a problem to Duane.
In the kitchen he made another try at getting Marjory on the phone, although instinctively he was sure it would be no use. Hearing the phone ring and ring in their house in Sublimity just gave impetus to his panic. He hung up and went outside to his workroom in the detached garage.
Here he kept everything Nannie Dell wouldn't let into the house: live scorpions in their own terrarium, two tarantulas, more than two hundred specimens of butterflies and moths mounted on dark blue velvet in glass-topped cases he had made himself, various husks and cocoons and dried salamanders and rodent skulls, and an open-top box with smoked-glass panels that contained beetles. He was currently rejiggering the diurnal cycles of a few of the beetles. Over the two plywood-and-sawhorse tables which contained his collections several sunlamps were mounted on a grid. At one end of a table books were piled in two untidy stacks.
He rummaged under the table in a cardboard carton that contained several types of nets, killing jars, and a half-gallon can of carbon tetra chloride. In another area of the garage he located an old-fashioned plunger action squirt gun for killing garden pests. This he filled with the carbon tet.
He paused for a few moments, suddenly blank and remote, gazing at the leafy spread wings of two luna moths pinned side by side in one of his cases. Ruddy eyespots glowed in the light of a sunlamp overhead. Duane began to shudder, as if the temperature in the garage just out of the sunlamp's range had fallen precipitously.
Marjory hadn't said anything about the presence of real moths in her letter, so maybe he shouldn't—
Bullshit. Pain smote him in the pit of his stomach; his mouth twisted from remorse and dismay. He didn't want, was mortally afraid to go, to expose himself again to the dreadful white floating creatures with pale, grim eyes, their stares that blighted the soul as frostbite withered skin. This time-
No. This time he was prepared for them. Marjory, whom he had told nothing, left defenseless, had no hope at all without him. Assuming he wasn't too late already.
Duane knew where the keys to the Buick Riviera would be: in the top drawer of his father's dresser. And he knew, without going near her door, that Nannie Dell had locked it tonight. He had scared her with his anger, and the other threat that had always been there, unacknowledged, his sexual desire for Nannie Dell. Waiting for her on her own bed, then shouting at her, profanely, it was a form of rape, although no more than Nannie Dell deserved and she had known it. He had read her guilt and shame in her eyes and weak gestures, read into abject helplessness that she cared more for him than his father, but this, instead of mollifying him, had made Duane feel all the more aggressive toward her—brutally, dangerously, aroused. A revelation more potent than Christ in both their lives.
He didn't need any goddamn keys! Taking his father's car without them, in effect stealing it, would be a final act of defiance, of resignation from the family. His father would kick him out of the house anyway once he got home and heard what Nannie Dell had to say. So he would travel to Sublimity, and by morning, if he lived to see another sunrise, he would be well on his way beyond Tennessee.
It took him about ninety seconds to strip the ignition wires and start the Buick. At five after eleven he was traveling north on 31 toward Brentwood and Nashville, staying off the Interstate because he urgently wanted to push it, knowing that the last thing he needed tonight was to be pulled over and hauled off to jail again.
4
The cavers had distributed kneepads to Ted Lufford and his party. They had marked the passages below, knew where they were going, and had brought equipment appropriate to the rugged underground terrain, including rope ladders, which made their descent into the byways of the Dante's Mill cavern easier for the novices.
Pausing to rest and grab a smoke on a ledge partway down a 110-foot cliff, Bill Whipkey looked around a stark cave which Rex had already named The Dragon's Mouth on his map. Every time one of them changed his position on the ledge or turned his head, their far-flung shadows leaped or receded on the gnarled walls and curiously slanted stalactites, like jagged teeth, that had earned the cave its name.
"Never saw anything like this in Nam. Heard there was some such caves up around the boundary with Laos. Haunted, they said."
"You looking for haunts, you ain't gonna be disappointed," Alvy informed him.
"Just what do these boogers resemble? Bats?"
"Mummies," Ted replied. "Nigger mummies."
"Oh. Well, that ain't nothing. Maybe that particular cave's just where a Indian tribe did their burying a long time ago."
"You won't think it's nothing when they get up and walk at you," Wayne Buck Vedders said, his perfectly round eyes giving him a look of intense credulity. "Except they don't walk. They creep along upside down on the ceiling."
Rex laughed and then had a coughing fit. "You seen that, did you?"
"Damn right we did, me and Lufford. It was like a five- or-six-year-old kid. He was just full of sass, too."
"Oh, he talked to you?" Alvy said. "Did you paddle his britches for him, Deputy?"
"No, I shot him in the head. It didn't even slow him down."
Nobody said anything for several seconds.
Rex stubbed his cigarette out, and put the butt into a pocket of his vest. "Where did he go then?"
"Can't say for certain. I allow he's still around."
"Wonder why I never heard none of this before me and Alvy volunteered to come down here?"
Alvy snorted and said to Vedders, "Reckon you got a right to jerk off all you want to, don't make me no neverminds. Just don't splash none of it on me when you're fixin' to come."
Vedders smiled and opened his jacket and drew an enormous revolver from a shoulder holster. "This here's all I jerk off with."
"Lordy, Lordy," Rex said in a jesting tone, "we're all friends here."
"Shoot that thing off inside, hoss, and we'll all be deaf," Alvy said.
"Naw, I learned my lesson last time. Pulled some of the powder, and changed the cartridges. These here are full mercury loads."
"What does that do?"
"I tried them loads on a couple of four-pound rabbits at thirty yards, and there wasn't nothing left of either of 'em but paws and the tips of their ears."
Rex yawned and got up from his crouch. "Gen'mens, it's been purely delightful. But we got us a ways to go yet."
5
Duane couldn't remember the way to Marjory's house and had to ask directions at a Gulf station when he reached Sublimity.
It was seven minutes to twelve when he drove slowly down Old Forge Road and turned into the long gravel drive. A porch light was burning, which made him feel a little better, and Marjory's old car, the rustbucket '62 Plymouth, was parked at the end of the drive near the back porch. He didn't see Enid's car.
He stopped at the edge of the front porch and got out, looking at the house. Except for the porch light, the house was dark in front. They had to be asleep. One of the cats, he didn't know which, looked at him with liquid blazing eyes and slipped under the railing as he approached the steps. Ears of dried corn and a crepe-paper Halloween black cat decorated the front door. He opened the screen and twisted the handle of the manual bell, hearing it ring inside. The porch light glazed the floor of the foyer and showed him the first couple of steps, but the rest of the staircase was dark. He was jittery and had a headache from driving at night; his glasses needed changing again. He needed to go to the bathroom. Should have used the men's room at the Gulf station. Hi, Marjory, how've you been, I really need to take a piss.
Hoping for a light to go on in the upstairs hall, Marjory or Enid calling down, everything okay then, he'd stay a few minutes, hit the road, come on, Marj. He twisted the bell-pull again, his breath fogging the outside of the glass. The house so still. Cold. Cold seemed to radiate from within, penetrating his buttoned-up denim jacket. Duane shuddered. His hand dropped from the bell-pull to the doorknob, jerked away. Very cold. He tried again. The door was locked
.
He walked along the porch, cupping his hands, peering in at the windows. Saw only the shapes of furniture in the parlor and dining room, the low gloss on polished wood from the porch light. Silence. Duane retreated, slowly, back down the steps. The corner room on the right, upstairs, was Enid's room. Marjory's bedroom was on the back, overlooking the gazebo and pond.
Duane, gritting his teeth against the midnight shudders and the urgent warnings from his bladder, walked around the house toward the back porch, paused where he couldn't be seen from the road (but no one had come by in the last five minutes, and only the roof of Crudup's barn was visible against the radiant sky from where he stood). He gushed on flowers already frost-killed, wondering what he was going to do next, as if he had a choice: his criminal career would be well advanced before the night was over.
Marjory could be anywhere, spending the night with Rita Sue, for instance. Or she could be sound asleep upstairs and oblivious of the bell. But why was the house so cold? He sensed it was below freezing in there, while the temperature outside was only about 45 degrees.
Duane zipped up and started toward the back porch, remembered something and returned to his father's Buick. He had left the engine running. As he opened a back door a shadow swooped behind him and was repeated on the flash of moving glass in the window. Duane ducked, throwing up an arm.
It grazed the back of his hand, a cold burning sensation, and winged gracefully away, pale green in the moonlight, the eyespots aglow. Luna moth. There seemed to be more of them, flaky silhouettes in the moonlight above the woods on one side of the property, where the weedy show-horse ring and unused stables were located.
Duane reached into the backseat and snatched up the spray gun that reeked of carbon tetrachloride. He didn't take his eyes off the sky, expecting more, perhaps the largest nightflyers of them all with their mock-wings made from human skin. His throat had dried up, his heart was a stone, his fingers, his face, felt numbed and bloodless.
