Fiends Read online

  Why won't he tell me?

  The truth chewed in his breast like a fox to be let out. Stoically he denied it, and walked back to the campsite with Hawkshaw leading the way. He carried the baskets at each end of the pole across his shoulders. As he started down from the ridge line he heard his father scream, scary as dynamite.

  3

  Hawkshaw stopped and bristled, whining.

  Arne, throbbing from terror, dropped his baskets and went skidding downhill on his tough naked heels with the barlow knife open in his hand.

  He found his father stretched out on his back next to the dwindling fire. He was twitching but breathless, as if he'd fallen out of a tree. The tar pot had overturned, there was an odor of seared flesh in the air. His father was still holding the handax. Bright blood spotted the blade. Even so, Arne was slow to comprehend what had happened until he saw that his father's left arm now ended at the wrist in a clot of smoking tar. The hand he had crudely amputated, partially wrapped in dirty streamers of bandage, lay palm up a few feet away.

  Then Arne, understood the tone of the nerved-up scream he'd heard, could visualize his father with his left arm laid just so across the windfall, and—raising up, reaching high with the ax and bringing it down as he screamed, the hand flying away (long squirts of blood glistened on the smooth weather-bleached wood of the windfall and on the ground). His father must have had just enough courage left to plunge his pumping wrist into the tar pot. His face was sweaty suet, veins had popped, the decaying flesh of his cheek coruscated like dragonfly wings.

  "Had to," his father groaned. "Gangrene. Wouldn't last an hour if that poison . . . reached my heart."

  Arne sobbed helplessly. His father let go of the ax and grasped him weakly by the shoulder.

  "I know . . . where they are. Know what to do. But I need two hands. You'll have to help me . . . put them all to sleep."

  The boy nodded, not understanding him. Tears fell on his father's tremoring hand.

  "Cut you some strangler fig. Twist it into loops. We need . . . thirty, forty piece of that green vine. God, there's aplenty more of them than I thought I'd find. Huh? Must be . . . every last soul in Dante's Mill. The son of a bitch . . . turned the whole town."

  "Turned? What? Who?"

  "Theron."

  The boy shook his head, slowly at first, then with a motoring agitation until his father stopped it.

  "The Dark . . . Man. That's his name. Theron."

  The damp hairs on the back of Arne's neck stirred, then fear bolted up to electrify the base of his skull. "The Dark Man . . . woke up?"

  His father nodded.

  "How?" But Arne remembered his mother telling him what could happen, should the dried vine clutching his neck be loosened. The legend was specific, the consequences—and he knew. "Mother?"

  "She could have done it. That's been my suspicion right along. She cut the fig."

  "Why? Why would she do that?"

  "I don't know."

  "Did the Dark Man make her go with him?"

  "I—I'm not sure. I ain't seen Birka since—"

  "You must have seen her! Don't tell me a lie!"

  "No . . . no, Arne. I wouldn't lie to you." He found the strength to tighten his grip on the boy's shoulder. "Get busy. Huh? Bring me that vine. But remember .. . the sun. After the sun sets, look up. Always be alooking up, because they don't make no sound when they come."

  His last words were nearly lost in a sigh. And he was out again, slumped heavily across Arne's thighs.

  "Look up for what?" the boy asked futilely.

  He tried to make his father more comfortable on the ground, covering him with his own blanket because his father felt so deathly cold despite the noonday heat. He thought, Vines . . . no, strangler fig. He knew what to look for, his father had pointed it out to him growing in the trees not far from their farm. Wrapped around and around the trunks, taking a mean choking grip from which the name derived. Crushing the life from the trees.

  The sun was overhead, he had hours yet. He added wood to the fire, cleaned and fried his fish, and made a soup, pungent with thyme and wild onion. He pounded slippery elm, blackberry leaves, and chamomile flowers to pulp and mixed the pulp with water. His father was in and out of consciousness during the early afternoon, his coldness yielding to a rattling fever. In his wakeful moments Arne made him drink. Only after his father had taken some nourishment did Arne eat, choking down part of the fish. The rest, with a couple of hush puppies, he gave to Hawkshaw.

  He had been trying not to look at the cut-off hand, the moldered fingers. His father was a cripple now. How would he be able to handle Ol' Vol the plowhorse, flatbreak their fields come next spring? Finally Arne nerved himself to pick up the severed hand between two pieces of charred firewood. He carried the hand to the edge of the campsite, batted the inquisitive Hawkshaw away, dug a hole deep and buried the hand, then set a large rock on top of the filled hole. He wondered if he should say something, like at a funeral, but couldn't think of any words from the Bible that would do. Funeral for a hand. But his father was still alive, praise God for that.

  He was ready then to search for the strangler fig he'd been told he must find.

  4

  Arne scrubbed the handax with creek sand and moss and took it with him. Now it was mid-afternoon, hot and still in the woods along the looping streambed he followed. The air was humid, and felt thick as paint in the shadowed hollows where no breezes stirred—only the frying hum of insects mimicked the sound of wind. Hawkshaw growled at a six-foot black racer twined around a bare limb on a windfall. It was swollen and sluggish from feeding on voles or frogs.

  The anthracite sheen of the snake, its lofty, sinister eye, reminded Arne of the figure lying on its side in a deep bed of excelsior, hands clasped between the drawn-up knees, sleeping the Black Sleep of the legend. The boy's stomach tightened into a fiery knot. What was true, and what was a story? How could something that looked like a statue of hardened tar be up and walking around now; and if he—it—was, what had become of Birka, Arne's mother? Was she dead? He felt a little dizzy from apprehension and stooped to splash cool water on his face. The dizziness went away, but the heated, almost panicked churning of his brain continued.

  Dead? Dead? Was that what his father knew but couldn't bring himself to tell?

  Panting, Arne sat down to rest, the ax in his lap, its edge (he reminded himself, flicking it carefully with the ball of his thumb) more than equal to the tarry strength of the Dark Man if they should meet . . . he couldn't make himself believe in what he had not seen with his own eyes although, while he rested, he was looking, searching the hidden places of the wood.

  He didn't know how far he had come, but he wasn't concerned about finding his way back before sunset. And he had Hawkshaw—but the bird dog had disappeared. Arne couldn't recall when he'd last seen him. As for hearing him, Hawkshaw was trained not to bark.

  Arne forced himself to get up. He crossed the creek where it was divided by small sedgy sandbars. Some tiger swallowtails were playing in the sun; one of the butterflies alighted on the back of his hand and he carried it, gravely, a little way up the bank to a stand of shagbark hickory and mixed oaks. For some reason the butterfly made him uneasy. It was beautiful and harmless, but he had dreamed of butterflies recently . . .

  No, moths . . . lunas, prometheas. And they had been huge, with the eyes, or eyespots, of human beings.

  Arne surveyed the trees, which had been invaded by wild grape, Virginia creeper, and the tenacious vine he was hunting. He blew on the butterfly, which vanished, and set to work, chopping, sizing, his hands becoming sticky and the ax dulling from the sap that oozed with each slashing. He stopped when he had two large bundles of shoots.

  With his work finished, despair returned. If there was only one Dark Man, why did they need so many vines? Hawkshaw was still missing. Arne slung the bundles of strangler fig across his shoulders and began to call as he worked his way down to the creek. The day was nearly sunless now,
in the deep hollow where he'd spent so much of the afternoon.

  "Hawwwkshawww!"

  His dog gone, all he needed with his other worries. Standing in midstream, watering down sore feet, Arne had an attack of the shudders. His father must be awake by now, and agonized. How could he live through another night of the numbing frost? They needed to move on before it was too late, establish another camp. But Arne was already tired; his right arm and shoulder ached from the effort of hacking the tough vine.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw something, and stiffened. But it was Hawkshaw, moving downstream, more at home in open fields than woodland but graceful nonetheless as he slipped through a thicket of hydrangea and spice bush at the water's edge. He was carrying something in his mouth—a bird or small animal, Arne thought, but when the dog took to the middle of the creek and came splashing closer the boy made out a childlike shape; dangling arms and legs dressed in blue calico, a square sewn-together face with button eyes and a yellow mop of yarn curls.

  "Where did you find that?" Arne said crossly. "C'mon, we have to go."

  Hawkshaw stopped a few away from him, not letting go of the corn-shuck doll, not making any sound, just watching Arne as if he were in the mood for teasing. The boy had a good whiff of his dog, who, in spite of his partial bath, smelled awful, worse than pigshit mixed with buzzard vomit, how could he stand himself?

  The dog turned as if put off by Arne's expression and lunged, high-headed, upstream.

  "Not that way! Come with me."

  Hawkshaw continued to the far bank before turning to give Arne a solemn look. But the boy was impatient with dog habits and dog wiles.

  "Hey you, dog! Come back here to me right now!"

  Arne had a premonition then, inspired by the doll in Hawkshaw's mouth and the rotten stench of him, that he didn't want to know any more about. But Hawkshaw appeared anxious for Arne to follow him. No, he couldn't waste time, there was too much to do . . . the bird dog waited remorselessly for him, hindquarters dappled by a volley of sun motes through overhanging leaves.

  "This better not take long," Arne muttered, and splashed his way up the creek behind Hawkshaw, the bundles of vines rubbing against his back and shoulders, ax swinging free in his right hand.

  They had to cross the ridge line and descend into a valley with few open spaces. Arne, unhappy, fighting brambles, lopped a few branches and kept an eye on his landmarks. A deer path wandered through a ravine overgrown with huckleberry and then sumac, almost as hard to get through as a tangle of fence wire; abruptly the undergrowth gave way to red cedar and a lone Judas tree growing beside the road to Dante's Mill.

  From the position of the sun over the empty road, Arne calculated that it was past five in the afternoon. His forehead smarted where a branch had lashed it; he was running a good sweat.

  "Now what?" he asked Hawkshaw, but the bird dog already was off at a fast pace up the road, going in the direction of Sublimity and not Dante's Mill: toward home. Arne chewed his lower lip and followed.

  They had covered a couple of hundred yards when Arne became aware of two things: a slow float of buzzards close to the treetops and a frost-bitten patch of woods, and a clouding of the air, dreadful odor, dead things but not newly dead.

  An unplaned log bridge crossed the branch that ran beside the road, then a track entered a cove where a decrepit wagon was standing, the wagon sheet almost in tatters on the wooden hoops that supported it. Arne had seen relics like this wagon in the courthouse square on market days. Hill people, those who lived so far back in forested crannies there was almost nothing that could be called a road, still used them for transportation on those rare occasions when they went anywhere.

  Except for the low notes of a mourning dove, it was very quiet.

  Arne saw a chestnut horse down in the trace chains of the wagon, not moving. Flies circled around the bloated corpse and a beaky scavenger was jerking at something tough and unyielding, pinkly purple as new sausage in the hazy drift of sunlight through the trees surrounding the cove. A part of the horse's intestines burst with a fetid popping sound, but the odor already concentrated in the cove was nearly enough to knock Arne over. The grass was cold-burned, and nearly all of the leaves to the highest tree limbs hung lifelessly, grayish-green, a touch of bleak horror. Except for the heat and humidity, it might have been a winter's day: like "Old Christmas," when horses talked at midnight, and cows walked on their knees. And ghosts just walked.

  Arne went slowly to the cookpot, suspended over the blackened heap of fire, staying as far from the horse as he could. Last night's—last week's?—stew had congealed in the pot, not even the bluebottle flies were interested in that grease with more attractive meat strewn on the ground behind and to one side of the wagon. Two, no, he could make out three bodies: a man, for sure, the dark full beard lively with red ants was unmistakable even though he was bald from the eyebrows up, or:——(scalped?——My Jesus!) . . . and two women

  (they had the shapes of women but blunter, fantastical, without all the skin)

  one of whom had the sunshine-blond hair of his mother. Arne was strangling, hand pressed against his nostrils to smell dirt, anything, dirt and sweat weren't strong enough to block that other odor but he had to go closer to see, to make sure it wasn't her.

  Flies roared up from the nude, skinless torso except for one, pulsating, embedded like a jewel in the navel pit where a scarce patch of skin (there, on the ears, around the eyebrows) remained. The woman's open eyes were as cold as stars, her bared teeth thickly lacquered with her own blood. The corpse appeared bitten in places, perhaps by wild animals or Hawkshaw the dog. No, it wasn't, couldn't be, his mother! A fly squeezed out of her mouth through a space where a tooth had been and walked across her lip. Arne turned with a bawl of distress and ran, throwing up on the dead run, past other flayed corpses: little ones, all in a heap. By the road the air was better and, bless the mercy of the Lord, someone was coming, help was on the way.

  5

  He saw through tears but heard nothing of the running horse because of the pressure of blood in his ears. From his knees Arne watched as the horse and shay came nearer. The woman with the reins wore a short-sleeved white dress, like a wedding dress, that glowed in the shade of the hood, a white Sunday hat with a heavy, glossy veil, and white gloves past the elbows.

  Sick and trembling, Arne got slowly to his feet, conscious of the weight of the bundles of strangler fig on his back. The horse, a gray mare not too well cared for, slowed to a walk and the shay, one wheel squeaking, drew alongside him.

  There was something bulky knotted in a red and white checkered tablecloth on the small seat beside the woman. The horse snorted and pawed at the dirt road, made nervous by the smell from the cove, the presence of buzzards. There were raw whip slashes on the mare's lathered flanks.

  The woman slowly, cautiously lifted her veil and peered out as if from a secluded parlor, her colorless mouth pursed in astonishment.

  "Mother!"

  "Arne, what are you doing here?" Birka said, and smiled fondly.

  He turned toward the cove, trying to frame an explanation, but his knees were buckling. He turned back to her and lifted his arms, still winded, wanting at the moment only to be held and comforted.

  "Yes," she said, socketing the butt of the whip into the holder. "You come, too."

  Arne took a step toward the shay. His mother frowned, drawing back on the seat.

  "But get rid of those awful things."

  He didn't know what she meant. Birka gestured toward the bundles of strangler fig still oozing their clean sap, then quickly withdrew her hand. But not before Arne saw that something had popped through the kid glove where her little finger should have been.

  It looked like a long black thorn.

  The bundle on the seat next to his mother bulged, and Arne heard a terrified squeal. He thought it must be an animal, a baby pig, but then the bundle spoke.

  "Help! Help meeee!"

  A girl's voice. His thoughts
flashed to the cornshuck doll in Hawkshaw's mouth. Horrified, he looked into his mother's eyes, just before she dropped the veil. The next thing he knew she had lifted him from the road by one arm, nearly wrenching it out of the shoulder cuff. She was a tall woman, but he had never known her to have this kind of strength. One of the bundles of strangler fig slipped from his shoulder and fell into the road.

  "Never mind," his mother said grimly, and she hit the tablecloth with her other hand, hard enough to provoke more squeals. "She's mine. You just come along and do what I say."

  Even through the glove leather he felt the shocking coldness of her fingers. Her breath was like a blue norther on his cheek and there was no familiar odor about her, of sachet, of clean and well-brushed hair.

  He swung wildly with his free hand, knocking away the wide-brimmed hat and veil.

  His mother's head was perfectly bald.

  Before she could pull Arne into her lap, Hawkshaw came snarling up from the road between them, going straight for her throat. The mare reared and his mother let go of Arne to fight off Hawkshaw. The carriage teetered on one wheel and Arne fell hard, the breath knocked out of him. Then Hawkshaw dropped beside him, thrashing, his wide-open throat spraying blood, and the shay, settling down on both wheels, lurched ahead, the big right wheel spinning in the dust past Arne's head, just inches away. He saw his mother, whip in hand, standing precariously, lashing the mare down the road to Dante's Mill.

  "Noooo!"

  She turned her head momentarily, that frightening head with no hair, eyes big and furious, features like clever painting on an Easter goose egg in the window of Bauman's Mercantile.

  "I'm going to Theron!" she called. "Tell Enoch to stay away this time, or it'll be the end for him!"

  Arne was stumbling after the shay, not thinking about what he was doing, certain that what he thought he'd seen was not real but some kind of elaborate, awful joke (his mother had hair!). But he couldn't make her out any more because she had settled back in the seat next to the child bound up in the checkered tablecloth (had she been acting bad, was that why she—but his mother would never punish anyone that way, so it had to be a joke too, part of the joke on him like his father pretending to cut off his hand) and there was a lengthening rooster tail of dust between Arne and the shay. He was really busting his gut to catch up so the joke could finally be over, and laughing: he screamed with laughter until he fell headlong and the cut ends of the remaining bundle of strangler fig jabbed at the back of his head. He breathed dust until his tongue was caked with it. His chest heaved as he still tried to laugh. Then he sat up, looking expectantly down the road; but the shay was gone, and so was the dust, the sun was lower. She hadn't come back to explain the complicated joke, to take off her hat and veil and shake down her abundant hair, to unknot the tablecloth. (Wait until you see who's inside, Arne / I know I know it's Mary Louise Petrie.) And that's who it was! (HA HA Arne Horsfall didn't we fool you!)