The Axman Cometh

  Tor Books by John Farris

  All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By

  The Axman Cometh

  The Captors

  Catacombs

  The Fury

  Minotaur

  Nightfall

  Sharp Practice

  Son of the Endless Night

  Wildwood

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

  THE AXMAN COMETH

  Copyright © 1989 by John Farris

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A TOR Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc. 49 West 24 Street New York, NY 10010

  ISBN: 0-812-50008-3 Can. ISBN: 0-812-50009-1

  First edition: July 1989

  Printed in the United States of America

  0987654321

  To the Reader From the Author

  Because we are about to enter into a partnership for at least the length of time it takes you to read, and perhaps reread The Axman Cometh, I think we should be fair with each other.

  I am not going to be easy on you. This is not a novel to nibble away at between planes or in that half hour you set aside before dinner to get some reading done. It is not a few comfortable goosebumps and then turn the corner of the page down and off to dreamland. The Axman Cometh is not your conventionally designed novel, with standard chapter breaks. It was planned to be read as a long story, at one sitting.

  Not up to it? Can't spare the time? I'm sorry to lose you, but I think it's someone else's book you want this time.

  Am I being unfair, Reader?

  No. Because if you're willing to meet me exactly halfway, I'll deliver. It's my belief that you've never read anything like The Axman Cometh. I doubt that you will ever forget it. Give me the time. Settle down in your favorite chair, turn the TV off, take the phone off the hook. And I'll take you for a ride that will beat anything you've ever been on at Six Flags or Magic Mountain.

  But let me warn you: once you're aboard, you won't be able to jump off. You're mine. And I'm not letting you go.

  Okay, Reader?

  I'm ready when you are. Just turn the page—

  What scares you?

  You mean here? New York? Highs. Lows. Penthouse terraces on the East Side. Then the subway, almost any subway station. Stenchy, screechy, overpoweringly stuffy in the summer. Damp, freezing in the winter. And I, I'm afraid of most of the people who ride the subways, people who aren't like me. Blacks, Asians, Puerto Ricans. I'm from Kansas, and I can't get used to them. Sorry, I just can't. I'm thirty-six years old and I've lived in New York for—is it twelve years now?—and I—back home (that's Emerson, Emerson, Kansas, population thirty thousand, it's almost right in the middle of the state, I'm sure you've heard of—) in Emerson there were like four black kids in high school, maybe ten families in town, and they were, they were just like the rest of us, none of us ever paid attention to their color—oh, God, OH SHIT, damn it, who am I TALKING to? Who are you? Do you have a face, do you have a name? Tell me who you are! Come out of the dark, show me your fucking face!

  Don't get excited. We've met before.

  "Help me, please! Can anyone hear me? It's Shannon, Shannon Hill! I'm stuck here, I'm in the elevator! Could somebody please call the fire department!!"

  It won't help if you let yourself panic. Don't lose control. If you lose control, then you'll lose me.

  Shut up shut up shut up! I don't care! Who you are! Where you are! Why don't you help me get out of here . . .

  I hurt my hand. I mean, it really hurts! I shouldn't have hit the door like that. I always did such dumb things when I was a kid, have these tantrums and wind up hurting myself— but why don't they hear me? There's got to be somebody left in this building! Petra's still upstairs, she must be, she said she had to work late. But if the power's off—I wish I could see. Something. Anything. It's so dark.

  You're not saying anything. But I know what you're thinking. I'm not afraid of the dark. Not that much. It's the elevator. I have never liked elevators. I always knew this was going to happen, I'd get stuck on one. By myself. All by mys—

  You're not alone.

  Like hell I'm not! That's BULLSHIT, I am alone, and I'm not crazy either!

  Of course you're not crazy.

  "Then why am I talking to you? Why can you hear me? Who are you, you son of a bitch?"

  Huh? Can't answer that, can you? Can you, Shannon?

  "I heard that! You are here! Right inside here with me! How . . . how did you . . . get on this elevator, I never saw—"

  Stop it, Shannon; you're hyperventilating. You'll black out. Cup your hands over your face. Breathe into your hands. Slide down the wall until you're sitting on the floor. No, don't scream. Don't. We may be here for a long time. These old buildings, nothing works right. But the elevator's okay. It was built to carry big, heavy loads. It won't fall. You're not going to fall, Shannon.

  "Ohh—kayy."

  Now you have to try to get control of yourself. For your sake. For mine.

  "Muuu — therrrrrr!"

  That's right, Shannon. Go to mother. Talk to her. And you'll feel better.

  My muuthermr ss deadddd !

  Is she, Shannon?

  Try real hard now, and I promise you'll see her—that's her, isn't it? In the back yard, wearing those old yellow pedal pushers and her floppy gardening hat, hoeing the bean rows near the fence. Talking to Mrs. Mayhew while she works. You see her there, Mrs. Mayhew? How did your father describe her? "Ugly as a tattooed lip." The old sailor man had a way with words, didn't he?

  The old—? Ohhhhh Jesus, now I know who you are, you're—

  No. He died. You found that out, didn't you? Don't think about sad things. Just think about your mother for now. Speak to her, Shannon.

  (So mild a day, she might be dreaming it. Yet the feel of deep spring grass on her bare feet and ankles is as real, as thrilling as the first kiss from the first boy she ever cared about. Shannon is four months from her seventeenth birthday. It is a Saturday in mid- May in Emerson, Kansas, 1964. There are twenty-two days until the Axman cometh.)

  "Mom! Hi, Mrs. Mayhew."

  Madge Mayhew, triple-chinned and with fool's gold hair, winds up an anecdote about hijinks at the most recent convocation of the Order of the Eastern Star, of which she is a past Matron, and both women smile at her.

  "Hello, darlin'," Mayhew says. "What have you got there?"

  "Oh, just some drawings I made," Shannon says secretively, holding the pad under her right arm. Her lower lip is tinted from the watercolor pens she habitually moistens with her tongue: a blue streak here, red there, so that she looks partially made up for a tribal celebration.

  Ernestine Hill straightens from the chore of mulching between butterbean poles in her sixth of an acre of garden, the light coming into her face as her hat brim lifts, illuminating freckles that reappear with the warm weather like wildflowers, the wide calm gray eyes and unplucked brows, the nub of a hand-rolled cigarette poised on a flaky under- lip.

  Shannon says to Ernestine, in a significantly lower voice that Mrs. Mayhew, who has the ears of a wild hare, is still going to overhear with ease, "Do you think I should say anything . . . ?"

  Ernestine strips one of her brown cotton work gloves (thirty-nine cents a pair at Dab's Hardware), and with the free hand takes a drag on what's left of her cigarette. Turns and squints at her neighbor, who has the sun behind her, and says with a smile, "I don't know why not. If you're going to pull this thing off, you'll need Madge's help too."

  "Now what are you two cooking up?" Madge Mayhew says with conspirat
orial glee, leaning her two hundred pounds against the post-and-wire fence where it's shakiest.

  Ernestine limps out of her bean patch to have a sip of sweet tea from her jug. Severely malnourished during her formative years in the dustbowl thirties, she has poor bones, chronic back problems that require her to wear a brace, the knees of a dinosaur. Yet she is obsessive about gardening, her only recreation. Unlike Mrs. Mayhew, she belongs to no clubs and gently sneers at "all that joinin'."

  "I guess you know Dab's coming up on fifty," Ernestine says.

  "It is next month, isn't it? I always do get Dabney's birthday mixed up with my stepbrother Horace's. One's the fifth of June and the other's the seventh, but for the life of me—"

  "It'll be the fifth—"

  "And we're going to give him the surprise of his life!" Shannon exclaims, beckoning for the jug of tea with which her mother has just refreshed herself. But Ernestine refuses to share, with a shake of her head and a little lift of the shoulders as if to indicate the jug is now empty. Or else she doesn't want Shannon to taste what she's cut the tea with.

  "A surprise party! Oh, listen, you can count on me—this goes no farther! Who all are you going to invite?"

  "I don't know," Ernestine says, lowering herself to the arm of a wooden lawn chair that Shannon sees, with a critical eye, needs repainting before the party. "Shannon's the one who thought of this. She's making all the arrangements."

  Shannon nods, an emphatic affirmation of the magnitude of her plans.

  "I'm sending out a hundred and fifty invitations—mom, do you think there's any chance Uncle Gilmore would come?"

  "I couldn't say." Ernestine blows smoke, showing the underside of her upper lip like a whinnying horse. "It's a long way from Miles City, Montana. Plus the fact that Gil was never your father's favorite brother. And vice-versa. That Gilmore will offer to jack your jaw over the pettiest of things."

  "Well, but he's the only brother Dab has

  left, and this is an important occasion."

  "Did I ever tell you Gil got drunk at our wedding and tried to—no, I never did tell you kids things like that."

  "Tell her later," Madge says, "and me too if it's one I didn't hear already. I've always deeply regretted that you don't have a picture of him wearing the bridal bouquet like a— well, I just don't know how to say it politely."

  "Jockstrap," Shannon says, affecting boredom, "I've been hearing all about it since I was ten."

  Ernestine chuckles, throwing away the little bit remaining of her cigarette as Madge returns her attention to Shannon and the surprise party.

  "A hundred and fifty people! Where are you going to find a place in the neighborhood with enough room, except maybe the Sunday school building or the VFW."

  "Right here. Our back yard's plenty big enough! I'm going to decorate—you know, with Japanese lanterns and stuff."

  "That's a nice idea. I could give you a hand with the food."

  "Would you, Mrs. Mayhew?"

  "Sure, we'll keep everything in our garage, in washtubs and that spare Frigidaire Adolphus got to running again the other day. Otherwise, how're you going to keep it a secret from Dab? What about entertainment —you know, if you play your cards right, Adolphus could probably persuade the Old Warhorses to do their act. Costumes and all." The Old Warhorses are a barbershop quartet; Madge Mayhew's husband is the somewhat creaky baritone of the cornball group. Most everybody in town calls him "Ragtop" because of the quality of his ill-fitting hairpiece.

  Shannon says cautiously, "Oh, thanks, Mrs. Mayhew, but—I think I've got a band already, some guys I know from the college."

  "Do they play rot-and-roll?" Madge says, accusingly, then relents in her condemnation. "Well, I suppose all the young people will want that caterwauling. Anyway, I think this party of yours is going to be a peck of fun!"

  Shannon glances at her mother, who nods but with no show of approval, then gets up to hobble over to the quart cans of tomato plants she is planning to set out when she finishes with the beans.

  "The only thing to watch out for," cautions Ernestine, "is the weather. Better check your Old Farmers. Because there's no way we're going to try to fit one-hundred-fifty people in my house. Provided that many trouble to show up. By the way, where are they all going to park?"

  "Church lot. It's only a couple of blocks." Shannon, convinced of her mother's lack of enthusiasm, uncovers the sketch pad and moves closer to the fence to show her work to her new ally Mrs. Mayhew.

  "Here's how I'm going to do the invitations."

  "Well, look there! Did you draw that? Isn't that Popeye the sailorman?"

  "It'll look more like Dab when I'm finished."

  "And there's you and Chap and Allen Ray in sailor suits! And Ernestine too! Why, these pitchers are just as clever as they can be! What d'you call 'em, caricatures? Like some of those editorial cartoons in the Topeka Capital that get Adolphus so riled he could spit bloody gallstones. Ernestine, you have just got to come look at this!"

  Ernestine obligingly leaves her tomato plants and, over Shannon's shoulder, studies the caricatures on the sketch pad.

  " 'Ain't it nifty? Dab is fifty.' Well, now. That's very clever, Shannon."

  "This girl has talent to spare. Nobody can tell me any different."

  "I'm going to write and illustrate my own books," Shannon mumbles, flushed and happy. "I've got some ideas already."

  "She's just full of ideas," Ernestine agrees, but with that faint tone of belittlement Shannon thinks she hears lately; wondering if it somehow has to do with her mother growing older in pain, limiting herself more and more to house and garden while Shannon dreams, aloud, of the wide world, of accomplishment and fame. "Have you given any thought as to how much this party will cost?"

  "Yes," Shannon says. "Three hundred fifty dollars for everything, that's food and drinks too. We're all going to share the cost—I mean, I'll pay a hundred, Allen Ray says he'll give me another hundred and Chap is good for fifty, he's saved more than that from his paper route. Then, I thought you might—"

  "Sure, count me in for fifty," Ernestine says, smiling, her little teeth like ruined corn in a parched field. She pulls on her shabby work glove. "It'll be worth it, just to see the expression on Dab's face. But you never know which way his mood's going to go, Shannon. He may get the sulks and ruin the party for everybody."

  Shannon experiences a sudden hostile closing of her throat, swallows, waits three sharp heartbeats and then is compelled to say, swiftly and cruelly, "You don't want to do this, do you? If it wasn't for me, you wouldn't do anything—oh, bake another cake. Same as always."

  Ernestine looks at her, unruffled but with the bleakness of one who has successfully throttled all temperament, and says, "You have to understand how Dab and me feel about things—as we get on in life."

  "I think he's going to have a perfectly wonderful time! Because—all we ever do is take Dab for granted; when has anyone ever treated him as if he was important?"

  "Well, that's the way it is, isn't it?" Ernestine says, casting around ironically, taking in the neighborhood, all of the small city in which they live. "When you come down to it, who matters that much?"

  "Dab's important to me!"

  "Okay, then," Ernestine says, with her air of edgy agreeableness, "coming from you, this party'll mean something to him. Like as not."

  Madge says, re-tuning the conversation as if it were a static-y radio, "How are you going to keep the party a secret from Dab? If you plan to string up Japanese lanterns and all—"

  "Oh, we can do that the day of the party. Dab always closes up at six-thirty, but on Friday nights he usually takes sin hour after work to go over accounts at the back of the store. He won't get home until it's almost dark."

  "That'll work," Madge says, nodding. "I'll have to tell Adolphus that something's afoot, but you know how he is, Shannon: never says two words to anybody unless it's politics. Then you can't shut him up."

  Ernestine pulls a little sack of cigarette tobac
co from a pocket of the Navy surplus shirt she wears to garden. She cocks an ear.

  "Washing machine's on spin, and it's out of balance. Can you get those clothes on the line while we've got this nice breeze?"

  Shannon sprints across the deep yard to the back porch. "I'm going to give Uncle Gilmore a call!"

  "Wait til after five o'clock!" Ernestine advises. "No sense running up our phone bill over a lost cause!"

  Shannon's older brother Allen Ray is a late riser. In pajama bottoms and a fading, sunflower yellow-and-brown high-school athletic jersey he stands in front of the open refrigerator in the kitchen drinking milk from a bottle. "This milk's old," he complains. He finishes it anyway. Allen Ray is nineteen. He works at the T P Garage and races his stock car on five-eighths of a mile oval dirt tracks around Emerson and as far north as Nebraska. His draft board has called him for his physical the second week in June, and Shannon is worried, with Vietnam an increasingly prominent topic on the nightly television news. He comes out to the porch with a doughnut and watches Shannon reorder the load of wet wash in the drum of their old

  Bendix. "What's a lost cause?"

  "Uncle Gilmore. Mom doesn't think he'll come. Look at the drawings I did for the invitations."

  "Oh. Neat."

  "How did you make out last night in Ellsworth?"

  "Blew a head. Finished fourth."

  "How much was that worth?"

  "Twenty-five bucks."

  "Do you think they'll take you?"

  "What? Oh, the Army. Sure, they'll take me. I'm a perfect physical specimen." Allen Ray, habitually slouchy, straightens and flexes his biceps. The fly front of his pajamas gaps open.

  "So I see," Shannon says with a smirk. Allen Ray grins and turns away to close up. "Allen Ray?"

  "Yo."

  "Why don't you join the Navy first, before you're drafted? That'd make Dab so proud."

  "Boats," Allen Ray says disdainfully. "I'm going to be a tanker."