The Good the Bad and the Infernal

by Guy Adams

Getting to my feet, I looked over my shoulder to see the pretend man was following slowly, his wooden legs bending and creaking as he shifted first one and then the other. If nothing else, I should be able to outrun the thing, whatever the hell it was.

  I saw movement across the street. The dressmaker’s doors burst open and another strange figure stepped out into the light. Swathed in gingham, it had wicker arms and legs and a face cut from a pane of glass. The glass flashed reflected sunlight into my eyes before it shifted slightly, tilting its head as if curious. There was a cracking sound and a pair of eyes appeared like bullet holes. Another and there was the sketch of a smile, a sharp crescent curving from one edge of the glass to another.

  I ran around the corner. The boardwalk on either side of me was coming to life with a bunch of similar figures. There was a man made from stretched leather and straw, creaking and crunching his way towards me. Another was made entirely from bread, a hot wave of air from the baker’s oven pushing him out onto the street. Yet another had been built from vegetables, leeks like bones, potatoes at the joints, a soft pumpkin head that oozed juice from its split smile. Finally, a lumbering giant with the belly of an oil drum clanged and boomed his way out of the General Store. His head was an oil lamp, burning with excited flame and smoke to see me.

  I kept moving, desperate to get across the town line and out of the madness of Wentworth Falls. What had the old man said about the place? That’s no natural town. It would seem he’d been right. I began to wish I had just listened to him. Of all the mad, freakish things to have walked into my life in the last couple of days he was the only one that seemed to have my best interests at heart.

  As I got closer to the arched town sign, it suddenly flipped around to face me. Wentworth Falls, it said, but where before it had counted its population as 403 the numbers faded and then reappeared, as if being burned into the wood by an invisible finger. Now it said 404.

  The town name vanished and new letters appeared. STAY, it said. I was not inclined to follow its advice, but the town wasn’t in the mood for argument. The buildings on either side of the street suddenly splintered, breaking down into planks, glass and felt. It was as if the place had been hit by a hurricane, with time slowed to a point that you could watch the destruction stretch out in front of you.

  The two buildings met in the middle, forming a barrier beneath the sign.

  The word STAY vanished, to be replaced with the word FOREVER.

  Not a natural town. No. Not a natural town at all.

  I veered off to the left, running between a pair of buildings that groaned and shifted on either side. There was a shattering of glass and I ducked as one of the windows exploded out towards me. The glass shards rained into the wood on the other side of the street, any one of them sharp enough to cut me to the quick.

  The narrow street opened out into a small square. At the centre of the square was a chapel, from which soft organ music was playing. I could take no comfort from it. The doors swung open and I was close enough to see inside. Lit by the red and blue beams of sunlight passing through the stained glass, I could see a mound of skeletons, piled high like a bonfire. I guessed I had found the remains of the previous four hundred and three visitors to Wentworth Falls.

  The large double doors banged open and closed, like snapping jaws. The organ music got louder and louder, the notes distorting. I could imagine the metal pipes inflating and bulging as the air flowed through them, like a rat working its way down inside of a python.

  I ran out of the square, only to find myself in the main street again. The boardwalk was rippling, its planks flapping up and down as if excited.

  I ran in the opposite direction. The slow procession of pretend people followed me as I tried to get out of the other side of town.

  Again there was the tantalising promise of open country ahead of me, but I knew what was going to happen before I even got close. I was ten feet from the end of the street and again the buildings uprooted themselves and fell to block my path.

  Across the flat planking more words appeared: WHY RUN? and, THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME.

  This was no home of mine, and though I could see no way of ever leaving it, I would collapse with exhaustion before I gave up trying.

  Now I was running past the pretend townsfolk. They reached out their strangely-shaped arms, trying to grab hold of me. I felt fingers of broken glass scratch at my arm. A woman with a head carved from a brightly-painted shop sign coughed a shower of splinters at me as I ran past; they bristled on the side of my face like cactus spikes.

  I turned off the main street again, once more aiming for the open. I was sure the blockade would be repeated again. What I hadn’t counted for was to come face to face with someone else.

  It was the old man, stood on the town line, his gun in his hand.

  “Maybe next time,” he said, as I fell at his feet, “you won’t be such a dumb fool and you’ll listen to my advice.”

  I was relieved to see him, which goes to show: all you need to embrace something that scares you is to find something that scares you more.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but you didn’t seem to exactly have my best interests at heart.”

  “Shows what you know,” he replied. “Now get behind me.”

  I did so gladly.

  “What are you going to do against a whole town?” I asked. “I can’t imagine shooting it is going to make much difference.”

  “That all depends on what I shoot,” he replied, walking towards the gathering crowd. He raised his gun and took a single shot. There was the clang of metal and I saw the figure that had come from the General Store, the man made from an oil drum and a lamp.

  The old man nodded gently to himself and then fired repeatedly.

  I could see the holes appearing in the oil drum, thin spurts squirting out like blood from a wound.

  The other figures were grabbing at the old man as he kept pushing forward, marching towards his target.

  He holstered his gun and shoved his hand in his pocket.

  I saw his hat fly off his head as someone swung for him, and then he vanished under a mob of them.

  I could only imagine the damage they were doing. Those fingers of nails, those teeth of glass.

  Then there was a soft explosion and the crowd erupted into flame.

  The effect was instant, all of the figures dropping away, spiralling around in panic. At the centre I could see the old man, his body ablaze. The flames didn’t seem to slow him down as he grabbed at the figures on either side of him, hurling them towards the boardwalk and the buildings. He grabbed at a blazing straw head, tearing it from its shoulders and tossing it through an open doorway.

  The buildings all began to move, shrinking back from the flames, folding in on themselves and trying to keep their timbers away from the fire.

  The old man turned and walked back towards me, the fire still flickering around him, trailing from the hem of his coat and coming off his head in a fat plume that made him look like a walking candle.

  “Doesn’t that hurt?” I asked as he came up to me.

  “Fire can’t burn me, boy,” he said. “Haven’t you guessed that much yet?”

  He stooped to pick up his hat and dropped it on his flaming head, snuffing it out. “Now, let’s get out of here while the town has more important things on its mind.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  TAKE A HARD RIDE

  WE WERE MAYBE half a mile away from Wentworth Falls before I risked taking a look over my shoulder.

  The whole town was shifting and writhing, buildings losing their shape and reforming. It was like a snake, I thought, camouflaged until its prey got close enough for it to break cover and strike.

  “How did you know?” I asked. “You could tell the town was unnatural.”

  “I have a sense for these things,” he said. “One you should listen to next time; it would have saved us a hell of a lot of trouble.”

  He was still smouldering, thin wisps of smoke ris
ing from his clothes and skin. The fire seemed to have had no effect on either. He should have been black and raw, and yet he looked just as he always did: a tombstone in a dust coat.

  “I guess it takes one unnatural thing to know another,” I said.

  “That’s about the size of it. Now are you going to keep running off or can we finally get on?”

  I had no more fight left in me. “I ain’t going nowhere.”

  He nodded and kept walking, rising towards where he had tethered his horse and my mule to the low branch of a ponderosa. “Good, because things are about to get difficult.”

  I looked at his face, hoping this was an example of his rare humour, but it wasn’t. The lunatic seemed to think everything up to this point had been easy.

  We climbed onto our respective mounts and began back on the trail.

  “So,” I said after a short while, forcing the mule to do its best to keep up. I wanted explanations from the old man. I accepted that he had taken to saving my life with regularity, and was grateful for it. I’d even go so far as to say I was beginning to trust him. I’m not an idiot; you can only pull my ass out of trouble so many times before I settle on the fact that maybe you’re not the enemy. That was all well and good, but it didn’t change the fact that I was riding to Heaven alongside a man that held a fire in his throat and seemed as invulnerable as the Rocky Mountains. “You going to tell me what you are?”

  “Someone you can trust,” he said. “That not enough?”

  “Not really. You’re telling me that I have no choice but to follow you to Wormwood. You say it’s my destiny. Fine. I’m not sure how I feel about that, but I’m not so stupid as to keep fighting it right now. That’s not to say I don’t deserve an explanation.”

  He thought about that for a while.

  “That is fair,” he admitted. “But you have to understand there are some things I just can’t tell you. Not because I don’t want to, but because there are laws that I can’t break.”

  “Like what?”

  “You want an example of something I can’t tell you?” He gave one of those dry laughs. “And how is that supposed to work? Actually... maybe there is an example. There’s a question you’ve never asked me, something simple. The kind of thing you would ask anyone you had just met. Can you think what that is?”

  His name. I could never ask his damned name. Even then I tried to say it out loud, not even as a question, but the words wouldn’t come. In the end, as frustrated as ever, I just had to nod. “Yeah. However much I try and say the question, it won’t come out.”

  “Even if you could, I wouldn’t be able to answer it. That’s one of the laws. Most of the time people don’t even notice. Maybe afterwards they’d realise it was something they hadn’t asked. You and I have spent more time together; the idea’s crept into your head, made worse when you realised you couldn’t do anything about it.”

  “But why? What’s so important about your...?” I gave one of those dry coughs, like old Mrs Hawthorne, the word lost in my mouth like water boiled away in the sun.

  “It’s part of who I am, and that’s what I can’t talk about.”

  “So you’re saying you can’t tell me a thing about you?”

  “Pretty much. I can tell you where I’m going and I can tell you that I mean you no harm. That’ll just have to do.”

  “Can you tell me about Wormwood?”

  “Some. Not as much as you’d like, and most of it will have to wait for nightfall.” He stopped his horse and nodded ahead. “One thing I can tell you for now: we’ll find it at the end of that.”

  In front of us the landscape had changed, the rocks and greenery swamped by sand. As far as you could see, there was nothing ahead but desert.

  “That’s not right,” I said, pulling my map from my saddlebag. “Since when has there been a desert here, for Christ’s sake?”

  “Since we wanted to find Wormwood,” he replied. He nodded at my map. “You can put that away, it’s of no use to you. The road we travel, like all in life, is a personal one, and you won’t find it on any map.”

  “But how far does it stretch?” I pushed the mule forward a little, its hooves crossing from the trail and onto the sand. I was suddenly hit by a wave of heat. Crossing that line was like sticking your head in a kiln.

  “Hot?” he asked.

  I loosened my collar. “Like Hell.”

  He shook his head. “No, it ain’t.” He rode over and joined me. “But hot enough.”

  He looked at my saddle. “How much water you got?”

  We’d filled our canteens a couple of days ago. Of the four I carried, two were still full, with maybe half gone from the third. I’m not a big drinker, and the coffee and cooking had come from his supply.

  “I guess that’ll just have to be enough,” he said.

  “And if it isn’t?”

  “Then of all the ways to die, thirst ain’t the worst.”

  And with that happy thought, we entered the desert.

  I’D KNOWN SOME hard environments in my journey from the East Coast, but none like this. The old man claimed Hell to be hotter, and maybe that was so, but I couldn’t imagine it. The heat roared around us, a baking fist that had me leaning over the saddle within a couple of hours riding.

  I was scared to drink, now suddenly aware of how precious the water could be. I had heard there were stretches like this in Arizona, had planned my route so as to avoid them. This was no real desert. This was another impossibility, on a journey that had become marked by them. Who could tell how many miles the sand would stretch on for? Who knew how hot it might get? We were riding into the unknown, and I couldn’t help but feel it would be the death of us.

  The old man had said that Wormwood would lie on the other side. I guessed if anyone knew, it was him, so that was what I held on to. He hadn’t seen me dead yet; if he thought we could survive this, then likely we would.

  That comfort lasted me through until late afternoon, by which point, my skin red and as sore to touch as if my fingers were knives, I was a long way from hope.

  We hadn’t stopped; there was no shelter, and you could sip at your water just as easily from the back of your horse as stood next to it. By the time night began to fall, a welcome darkness that smothered the sun, we must have been riding for ten hours straight.

  “Let’s rest,” he said, climbing down from his horse and sitting down on the ground. There was no cover, no break in the rise and fall of dunes, so we made our camp right there in the sand.

  “Nothing to build a fire,” he said. “We’re going to have to eat dried food.”

  “I don’t think I could stand having a fire anywhere near me,” I admitted. “Not with my skin so burned.”

  “You say that now, but you just wait until the night settles in.”

  And he was right. The temperature dropped through the floor, and I was soon wrapped in my blanket, shivering and wondering if I’d be solid ice by the time the sun rose to bake me again.

  “It’s just impossible,” I said between chattering teeth. “Too hot or too cold. How can anything survive this place?”

  “That’s the point,” he replied. “The challenge. Wormwood calls to you, but it makes it difficult. It wants only the strong.”

  “You’re making it sound like a living thing again.”

  “I guess I am. It’s hard to talk about the place without granting it a sense of life.” He fell silent again, but I didn’t interrupt. It was clear he was planning on speaking, just trying to get his thoughts in order. Eventually he continued:

  “Wormwood, or the place that lies beyond it, has always drawn people to it. It needs more than the dead. But it only wants the best. The way that things change, the closer you get, that ain’t just an accident. It’s a way of filtering out the weak from the strong.”

  “I’m not strong.”

  “You’ll be alright. I’ll make sure of that.”

  It seemed to me that that was a promise he couldn’t be sure he could keep. />
  “But I wasn’t drawn to it,” I said. “Not like you. I wasn’t heading that way. This is all by accident.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe if we hadn’t met, you would have carried straight on to California. Maybe. But we did meet and it felt right. I believe in my instincts, and when I saw you I thought this was your road.”

  “Well, if I die halfway, then you’ll know you were wrong. I’ll do my best to spit on you when I’m breathing my last.”

  “You’re stronger than you give yourself credit for. Maybe that’s why you needed to make this journey. To prove as much to yourself.”

  “Now you’re reminding me of that whore in Indiana,” I said, “trying to understand why a man does what he does. It seems everybody thinks they know me better than I know myself.”

  “Of course they do,” he replied, “that’s always the way.”

  I decided I wasn’t in the mood for that sort of head talk. I wanted facts or I wanted sleep. Having had no more than a couple of hours rest in the last two days, the idea of sleep won.

  I WOKE TO find the sun beating down on me again and the prospect of another full day’s ride ahead.

  I had emptied what water was left in the third bottle and made a dent in the contents of the second. I figured that meant I had to drink less, or we had to reach the end of the desert in the next day and a half. But what was the point of trying to predict how far we would have to ride? For all I knew this desert could stretch on forever; we could ride and ride and never get anywhere. The old man was using the sun to get his bearings, but even then, could we trust it? I asked him as much once we’d been going for another couple of hours.

  “I can feel the right way,” he said. “It’s not just a case of north or west. Wormwood pulls at me here.” He tapped at his belly. “I could no more lose it than I could forget which way was up or down.”

  Of course, by noon, even up and down was fast slipping away from me.

  I had read about people who became delirious in the heat. Their brains boiling away in their skulls until they couldn’t tell dreams from reality. That was a distinction that had been hard for me to make even before we set foot in the desert.