Fiends Read online

  Trade Hardcover Edition ISBN 0-913165-16-6

  FIENDS Copyright ©1990 by John Farris Illustrations Copyright ©1990 by Phil Parks

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblence to actual events or locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All Rights Reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America FIRST EDITION

  Dark Harvest / P.O. Box 941 / Arlington Heights, IL / 60006

  The Publishers would like to express their gratitude to the following people. Thank you: Kathy Jo Camacho, Stan and Phyllis Mikol, Jan Babiarz, Wayne Sommers, Dr. Stan Gurnick PhD, Gary Fronk, Linda Solar, Fran Phillips, The people of the All American Print Center, Luis Trevino, Raymond, Teresa and Mark Stadalsky, Tom Pas, Tony Hodes, Lynda and Ken Fotos, and Ann Cameron Williams.

  And, of course, special thanks to John Farris and Phil Parks.

  For Robert Gleason

  In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.

  —The Book of Genesis

  The following is taken from an article by Katherine B. Singerline, arts editor of the Nashville Tennessean, which appeared in that newspaper's edition of August 2, 1970.

  * * *

  Perhaps the most striking talent in evidence at the inaugural Patients' Fair and Art Show belongs to Mr. Arne Horsfall, whose age is "about 70" according to officials at Cumberland State. Mr. Horsfall is mute; he does not read or write, and thus is unable to provide information about himself. No one at the hospital is able to say for sure when he was admitted; all records of older patients were destroyed in the disastrous fire that claimed many lives in 1934. But psychiatric nurse Althea Tidball, who will retire this year after forty years' service at the hospital, says that Mr. Horsfall had already been in residence "several years" before she joined the staff in 1930. It seems reasonable to conclude that Mr. Horsfall has spent all of his adult life at Cumberland State. Where he came from, who his parents were, remains a mystery that may never be solved.

  Nor do we have a clue as to the inspiration for his remarkable series of drawings, all of which, in an explosion of creativity, he has produced in the past two and a half years. He works exclusively with charcoal pencil and white shoe polish on pads of newsprint provided by the hospital. According to his art instructor, Vanderbilt graduate student Enid Waller, Mr.

  Horsfall's technique is largely "pure"; that is, he does not seem to have been influenced by or even to be aware of such modern masters as Klimt and Munch, some of whose paintings come to mind when we study the wintry compositions in dusky black and shocking white, the not-quite-earthly faces that haunt us long after we have left the exhibition. Mr. Horsfall paints only portraits—one in particular, the hairless woman or wraith who may dominate his dreams. Who is she? Did she ever exist? If only Arne Horsfall could speak, what a tale he might have to tell!

  1

  The boy awoke to familiar sounds: the morning songs of hooded warblers and ovenbirds, the crackle of new dry wood on the fire, the daily sharpening of the ax, the skinning knife. And the unfamiliar: his father weeping.

  Arne flinched beneath his blanket, wishing he could go back to sleep, no matter how bad his dreams had been, how uncomfortable the ground he slept on. But the pointer dog lying heavy against his side raised his head and yawned; warm, stenchy breath, also familiar, and preferable to the reek of hot tar that stung Arne's nostrils and brought tears to his eyes before he could focus on his surroundings.

  He was thinking what had been, until now, unpardonable to think: crazy. His father must be crazy. But Arne's point of reference was questionable, and he knew it: the only son of Luke and Elvira Slater ("Son" but full-grown, gray-haired in fact, hugely fat and slovenly in his overalls) sat with bare feet dangling from the tailgate of the Slaters' wagon on town days, swigging Coca-cola and crying out moon-eyed and rapturously when the mood was upon him, unable to speak intelligibly. "Born without brains," an older friend of Arne's had said, contemptuously, as if this were "Son" Slater's own fault. Crazy. Without a doubt, Arne's father was behaving more and more oddly—but unlike "Son" Slater he had brains, so how could he suddenly have gone crazy?

  Yet there was no accounting for why they were here, with chores to do at home, a cow that needed milking. Maybe, Arne thought, some of the corn could still be saved, along with the apples and pears in their orchard. Instead of laboring at this salvage they roamed almost aimlessly by day, staying to the woods, and hid at night . . . no, that was wrong, his father didn't hide. He frequently left Arne and went off alone, never saying where or troubling to explain what was on his mind. He didn't answer questions. Often he seemed not to hear Arne because he was listening so keenly to something else—in his head, in the distance. Unenlightened, Arne felt smaller than he knew himself to be, not worthy of trust. Or love. How their relationship had changed, in so few days.

  Propping himself on an elbow, Arne wiped his eyes. Hawkshaw rose and stretched. Arne's father was sitting with his back to a windfall on the other side of the fire, holding down the whetstone with one foot. Honing the handax blade. Through the heat waves and wood smoke Arne looked at his oblivious father and saw him in tears. Men didn't cry. Fear crowded the boy's heart—like crowding a small frog, throbbing and cold, in his cupped hands. His father was crying because he was in terrible pain.

  Tears on one cheek, the other a ruin. Three greenish bruises there, like putrescent fingerprints. Arne's eyes went to his father's left hand. All he could see of it was a big lump of bandages stiff from ichor. Arne didn't want to think of what the hand must look like by now.

  (It froze)

  That was all his father had been willing to explain, when Arne questioned him. It froze. In high summer, in baking heat, the hand had frozen.

  Will it get better?

  No.

  How did you do it?

  I don't know!

  Crazy . . .

  Arne got up clutching his blanket around him Indian-fashion and without another glance at his father walked to the edge of their campsite. The sun wasn't yet above the treeline, but most of the frost had vanished, although the bright night had glittered from it. A hard white frost, in the middle of August. But it wasn't everywhere. It seemed to follow them, from camp to camp in the remote hollows where they had been living since they left their farm—no (Arne corrected himself severely), they'd run away, with the clothes on their backs and not much else . . . Arne was shivering and fumbling, and he nearly started peeing in his pants before he managed to get them unbuttoned.

  He wet down the furze which the mysterious frost had blighted or killed. The leaves of a nearby redbud were brown at the edges, and many had fallen. He heard his father muttering, then a loud sob. Arne shut his eyes tightly, trying to stop his own tears. He'd lost two suspender buttons, and his denim pants were low on his hips. His bare arms and ankles were covered with the festering bites of deerfly and chigger. Full-faced tow-headed boy, small eyes, like a blond hedgehog. He was dirtier than he'd ever been in his life, and hungrier. Last night, when his father returned well after dark to their camp, he had no food with him, not even a red squirrel to fry in the last of their cornmeal. He was in such a daze, so pale, nearly stumbling into the fire as he dragged more wood to it, that the boy was afraid to complain.

  Hawkshaw, who must be hungry too, was already foraging among the shrubs and understory trees that grew in the moist creek bottom. But

  Hawkshaw was trained to silently hunt and retrieve, not kill; he had to be fed or he would die.

  His mother missing, his father hurt, his dog dying—it was too much for Arne. Trembling from anxiety and anger, the boy approached his father, who had slumped, mouth open, the ax gripped loosely
in his right hand. He was far gone from fatigue. He had stood watch the remainder of the night while the fog clung to the trees like spider shrouding and the chill deepened, the moon a weak gazer, stone giant's eye.

  "We're hungry!" the boy protested, and almost started to cry again. His face itched from shame, but he was scared. Scared of lies, scared of truth-whatever the truth might be. He glanced at the liquid tar in the iron pot over the fire. A bubble swelled fatly on the surface. He was puzzled; what was it for?

  "Where did you come by that pitch?"

  His father opened and closed his mouth, momentarily unable to speak. He was a young man, not yet thirty, strongly built. Only his youthful strength had carried him this far. He hadn't shaved for more than a week. Nor changed his clothes.

  "Dante's Mill," said his father.

  "Is that where you went last night?"

  "Yes."

  Arne felt a surge of excitement; now he was going to find out something, for sure.

  "Who all did you see?"

  "Nobody."

  "You didn't?"

  "Wasn't. . . nobody there." His father looked down at his left hand. His lips tightened. He looked at his son, ignoring the disappointment, the disbelief in Arne's eyes.

  "You can go. It's safe for you now. You'll find food. You know what to pick, what to dig."

  "Can I take the rifle?"

  "No. Almost out of . . . ca'tridges." Arne's father shook his head slightly, annoyed by his forgetfulness. "Don't know why I didn't remember that last night. Could've helped myself to all I wanted. But bullets. . . ain't no good."

  "They're good for shooting squirrel," Arne said, almost belligerently.

  "Go do you some fishing. I need to . . . sleep now."

  "When can we go home?" Arne fidgeted at his father's blank stare. There was the odor of wood smoke, and of tar. Corruption too, from the swollen, absurdly dying hand. "Don't you know you need a doctor?"

  "I do know that. Promise you, boy, we'll go home soon. Tomorrow, when it's done."

  "But what are you going to do? Can't we go home now? 1 want to see mother!"

  Groaning, growling, his father stroked the blade of his ax against the whetstone again, as if unsatisfied with what was already the sharpest edge the steel could take. There was such a look of despair in his face that Arne had to dig his fingers into the bones of his chest to keep from screaming.

  "Where is she? Where did mother go?"

  His father lay back against the windfall, eyes closing. A log popped on the fire, showering sparks across the boy's bare feet. He danced wrathfully.

  "Not so far that . . . God be willing . . . I can't bring her back."

  The putrescent marks on his face shimmered as he turned his face into a shaft of sun. He looked at Arne. He was able to smile, for the first time in days. A strong man, who always made jokes, sang, was happy. At 18 and still growing he had knocked down a fractious stallion with his fist, earning him the nickname Horsekiller.

  "Green vine," he said softly. "Strangler fig." His mind seemed to wander then; his eyes looked vague, reddened by the wood smoke and glare of flames. Before he could say anything else he fell asleep. He was so inert that for a few dreadful seconds the boy thought he had died. Then the big chest shuddered, his father snored. Arne covered him with his own blanket.

  2

  Arne took fishing line, two hooks, and a sinker from their knapsack and left the campsite. He carried a gnarled club of hornbeam, the hardest wood that grew in the Tennessee forests, for reassurance and protection—he was almost nine years old now, largely on his own, although Hawkshaw was somewhere around and would catch up to him before long.

  He worked his way up from the creek bottom to the ridge line, chewing a handful of spearmint leaves to give his stomach something to be grateful for. It was cool where he walked through the oak and hickory forest, bathed in fuming mist that condensed in his hair, on his forehead, while the dew on the ferns that grew, luxuriantly, everywhere, soaked his pants as high as the knees. Wood pewees and vireos flickered in sunspots but it was dark, still, up in the rafters of the great trees. He heard woodpeckers and saw more red squirrels than he could count. His mouth watered when he thought of plump, fried squirrel, almost his favorite meal next to roasted tom turkey. As always, and without constantly thinking of the necessity of it, he kept track of landmarks: two half-fallen trees sagging against each other and overgrown with clematis, forming a natural arch; an outcrop of limestone with a cave centered like a watchful eye. He would never lose himself in the woods, no matter how far removed he was from home.

  From the summit he looked east. There was a golden haze in the valley where the Cumberland and Harpeth rivers joined; he could make out the copper spire of the new Baptist church in Sublimity, the town where he attended school and hung around the stores two Saturday mornings a month. He felt heart-tugs, sadness. Closer, there was smoke from isolated cabin chimneys. Although he didn't reckon distance in terms of miles, Arne knew how far he could walk in a day, and most of the cabins as well as the town of Sublimity were within reach. But his father, obsessed by unnamed dangers, continually glancing at the night sky while he fed wood to the fires, had warned him to stay away from everyone. To hide, even in daylight, from strangers, or those he knew as friends. Children his own age.

  He couldn't think of a single boy near his age he had cause to be afraid of; he could lick them all. Girls he never paid attention to.

  Crazy. Crazycrazycraz—

  Arne swallowed the word like a stone, like bad medicine, and was sullen, heartsore, trying not to think very hard about his—their—predicament as he walked a little way through an understory of redbud and dogwood toward the sound of trickling water. He located the spring which fed the stream that coursed through their campsite below. There were deer tracks around it. The water flowed clear and inches deep over velvet-green slabs of limestone. Runners of purple violet and watercress drifted in small eddies. He went to his knees to drink, shivering as the water touched his face, his tongue quickly going numb.

  He had not quite satisfied his thirst when he heard something, larger than a rabbit or a woodchuck, moving down the leafy slope behind him.

  Arne looked around, instinctively raising his club. But it was Hawkshaw, and he was okay. Arne hugged Hawkshaw, his hands on the liver-spotted dog's prominent rib cage. Hawkshaw had a wood tick feeding behind one ear, but before Arne could do anything about it the dog squirmed loose and began lapping water from the spring.

  Arne opened his barlow knife and got down to business. He was soon fully absorbed in doing familiar and pleasurable things, so that all of the unpleasantness, the confounding and difficult events of the past week, while not fully forgotten, were put aside in his mind.

  He cut a fishing pole, as his father had taught him, from a straight piece of rattan. Then, taking care not to disturb a couple of ground-level nests of yellow jackets, he dug around in a rotted stump until he came to a teeming mass of beetle grubs. There was life everywhere around him, buzzing, singing, pulsating, life that renewed his spirits. He began to sing a song his father loved.

  "Life is like a mountain railway

  with an engineer that's brave;

  you must make the run successful

  from the cradle to the grave."

  Nearby, growing in the fertile, dark litter of the forest floor, were tempting mushrooms, and Arne licked his lips. He'd eaten succulent, white-capped mushrooms like those. But he was afraid to choose, to try his luck. If they were the mushrooms called destroying angels, they killed with the certainty of a bullet to the heart.

  Arne carried the beetle grubs in his pocket down the stair-steps of the broadening stream until it tumbled six feet into a pool that lapped, in a sun-filled vale, around the old dark knees of river birches. He baited his hook with a grub and anchored the pole on the bank, wedging it upright in a vee of a young Cottonwood's branches.

  Not far away he located plum trees the birds hadn't stripped and gobbled ha
ndfuls of the ripe fruit, almost swallowing a couple of stones in his hunger. He washed the plum juice from his chin to keep the midges off and located a stand of white oak in a dry area not far from the creek. With his knife he cut numerous oak withes, then sat down cross-legged to fashion his baskets, one to fill with hickory nuts and spring beauty tubers and plums, the other with the fish he hoped to catch. There was not much good fruit to be had in this month: it was late for all but highbush berries, too early for bittersweet black cherries, persimmons, or the custard-flavored paw paw of which he was uncommonly fond.

  When Arne returned to check his line he found it taut from the tip of the pole to the roiling water, and pulled out a good-sized carp. By late morning he'd added three more to the basket and was humming again. The day was fair, the deerflies had almost disappeared from the woods, and mosquitoes were few; he thought poignantly of home, of hilly cultivated fields and ripening corn, and almost made himself believe that if—when—they went there again, it would all have been miraculously restored. The healthy ears of corn; his mother's smile. But the power of his faith was not equal to what he knew was lost, unrecoverable. The killing frost had come ten days ago, riming the windows of their house, shriveling what had been a lush acre of vegetables, turning the newly tasseled corn tobacco-brown as far as the eye could see.

  On the morning of the frost, his mother was gone. His father was frightened, and the strange marks that would slowly deepen in putrefaction were on his cheeks. But nothing had happened to his hand yet. That was later—Arne didn't know for sure just when he had frozen his hand.

  He must know where she is, Arne thought.

  The humming stopped, and his mood took a sudden turn; he felt even worse than he had on awakening.