Wildwood

by Farris, John

  WILDWOOD

  By John Farris

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Copyright 2013 / Penny Dreadful, LLC

  Copy-edited by: Kurt M. Criscione

  Cover design by: David Dodd

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Meet the Author

  John Lee Farris (born 1936) is an American writer, known largely for his work in the southern Gothic genre. He was born 1936 in Jefferson City, Missouri, to parents John Linder Farris (1909–1982) and Eleanor Carter Farris (1905–1984). Raised in Tennessee, he graduated from Central High School in Memphis and attended Southwestern College (now Rhodes College) in Memphis. His first wife, Kathleen, was the mother of Julie Marie, John, and Jeff Farris; his second wife, Mary Ann Pasante, was the mother of Peter John ("P.J.") Farris.

  Apart from his vast body of fiction, his work on motion picture screenplays includes adaptations of his own books (i.e., The Fury), original scripts, and adaptations of the works of others (such as Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man). He wrote and directed the film Dear Dead Delilah in 1973. He has had several plays produced off-Broadway, and also paints and writes poetry. At various times he has made his home in New York, southern California and Puerto Rico; he now lives near Atlanta, Georgia.

  Author's Website – Furies & Fiends

  Other John Farris books currently available or coming soon from Crossroad Press:

  All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By

  Catacombs

  Dragonfly

  Fiends

  King Windom

  Minotaur

  Nightfall

  Phantom Nights

  Sacrifice

  Sharp Practice

  Shatter

  Solar Eclipse

  Son of the Endless Night

  Soon She Will Be Gone

  The Axeman Cometh

  The Captors

  The Fury

  The Fury and the Power

  The Fury and the Terror

  The Ransome Women

  Unearthly (formerly titled The Unwanted)

  When Michael Calls

  Wildwood

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  "Every exit is an entrance somewhere else." —Tom Stoppard,

  Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

  Prologue

  November 1938

  Crouched in concealment in the laurel slick, the quarry heard the hounds approaching, and feared them more than he feared the men with guns.

  Around sunset there had been a momentary break in the low, chilling sky, a passing radiance without warmth. Now it was darker; rain had set in on the shoulder of the mountain. He was naked and shuddering uncontrollably. But there was some benefit in this new misery: perhaps the wetness would throw the dogs off his scent, which was enhanced both by his fear and the blood; he was slashed head to toe like a young savage undergoing a rite of passage.

  He had no idea of how far he had run (so awkwardly) through the wilderness, at times only a few hundred yards ahead of his pursuers and their baying, leashed hounds. He had been, before his crossover, nineteen years old. He no longer knew how old he was, or where he was. He had become totally isolated by the hunting party, cut off from those who might have been able to help him. Even by the most lenient standards of civilization he would not have been judged sane, although he was harmless to himself and to others. What remained of his rational mind focused on the image of ferocious Plott hounds, bred for bear hunting in these remote mountains. He once had seen another Walkout torn to shreds by a pack of hounds, until what remained on the bloody killing ground could not accurately be identified as man or beast.

  Now there was little hope of escape; it could be his time to die.

  But the laurel slick was a vast hiding place on the shrouded mountain. Long ago a landslide had carried off a section of hemlock and hardwood forest, leaving a bald spot that gradually became covered with a dense thicket as high as a man's head—intertwined laurel and rhododendron bushes that retained their glossy leaves through the short winter. It was not possible to walk upright through the slick. The hunters would find the slick difficult to penetrate, even on their hands and knees. But eventually the dogs would find him, well-hidden but helpless. It was not his habitat. Instinct urged him to seek the open air, in spite of his injuries, once he had rested and could move again.

  He heard the hunters calling to one another in the twilight; there were many of them, and as many as two dozen of the lean, scarred dogs. They had reached the fringes of the laurel slick.

  With his teeth chattering, the quarry looked up, toward the fuming sky nearly hidden by overlapping leaves. Tears ran down his cold face. Still crouching, he began to move, slowly, away from the approaching hunters. Keeping his balance was difficult. Another bad fall, further injury, would finish him now. He had to reach open ground. Only the sky could save him. But he might have a long way to go through the heath, at an agonizing pace.

  A different note in the baying of the Plott hounds: the hunters had unleashed them to track him through the maze of laurel.

  The ground slanted beneath him; for a dozen yards he slipped and slid and floundered. The hounds still had his scent, in spite of the rain. They came leaping, crashing through the tangle of branches, separate yet building in momentum, their power radiating in waves ahead of them, the furor unbearable.

  He came to a stop on bare rock, where no shrubs could take root. A long sloping ledge; beneath it, an abyss. Looking up, he saw the full moon through streams of clouds.

  The light of the moon would betray him. But he couldn't wait. The dogs were only seconds behind him, ecstatic, aroused to kill.

  He rose shakily from his knees. There was room to spare. He felt faint from horror. The dogs—or the guns.

  Trembling, the quarry took three running steps, unfolded hawklike wings, and soared above the ledge.

  Below him the first of the hounds, breaking from the slick and unable to stop, skidded on the wet stone and blundered into the airy gorge with a yelp of anguish.

  The quarry beat his wings furiously in the sodden, windless sky. As he was only partly made for flying, he used up his blood too fast, clumsily striving for altitude and distance; the moon blazed in his frantic eyes as he flew away.

  The dogs crowded on the ledge, milled on top of one another, snuffling and bellowing in frustration. The hunters at the edge of the laurel slick stared up at the pale nude man with scimitar wings spread twice the length of his body. He was almost half a mile away, and fading now into clouds rising like a tide of ink just beneath the moon.

  One of the hunters swiftly raised his rifle and fired a single shot.

  The wingbeats ceased. For a moment their quarry seemed suspended precariously in the air. Then the light of the moon sank beneath the sea of cloud. They lost sight of him.

  The one who had fired the shot, the hunter with the keenest eye among his companions, claimed he saw the hawkman crumple and fall.

  They argued about it for months; but Arn Rutledge was too quick to reinforce his conviction, or obsession, with his fists, and gradually the subject was laid to rest.

  No one dou
bted that Arn had the ability to make the difficult shot; he had honed his marksmanship since he was old enough to carry a rifle, and later made good use of his skill in places like Biazza Ridge, Chiunzi Pass, and Ste. Mère-Eglise. But, although the hunters searched long and hard in the gorge of the Balsam Mountain range where the hawkman would have fallen, no remains turned up.

  Of the ten hunters who had seen the hawkman fly, four died during the next three years, in mysterious, gruesome accidents in the woods. The others went to war; only Arn returned in 1946. And continued to talk about the hawkman, to argue the truth of what had become a part of the folklore of his region, to look stubbornly for what might be left of his trophy.

  Eventually he found the lightboned skeleton of the hawkman, or so he claimed. But that's only part of the story.

  Chapter One

  April 1958

  Long before they reached Asheville, Whitman Bowers wished he hadn't chosen to make the long trip down from New York by car. And by then he was afraid he had made a mistake in bringing his son along. It would have been better, perhaps, if he had postponed this trip and tried to entertain the boy in New York.

  Terry had spring vacation the last two weeks in April, and his mother had plans. As usual. Custody arrangements worked out years ago provided for Terry to spend alternate holidays with his father, and six weeks each summer. At Christmas they had skied for five days at Col de Ia Faucille, and the reunion had gone okay. Terry was in his element on the ski slopes of the Jura Mountains, expert for his age. But he wasn't a kid anymore. He was shooting up and growing older, too quickly. Changing in ways that baffled his father. He would be fifteen in July—on the ninth, to be exact—and he had entered the world just about the time Whit Bowers was convinced he was going to leave it, as he parachuted into gale-force winds over the dark southern coast of Sicily.

  The boy had been cool from the moment he cleared Customs at Idlewild, carrying his things in a small Air France nylon bag and his Alpine backpack. Whit was sure that Terry had added another couple of inches since Christmas. Taller than six feet now, and almost able to look his father in the eye without cheating by going up on his toes a little. Terry let it be known that he'd had plans of his own for this holiday period. Sailing with friends from St. Tropez to Corsica and back. Millie vetoed the idea: there would be no adults aboard, and the western Med could be treacherous at this time of the year. So Terry was letting his father know his displeasure. There were no welcoming hugs, not even a handshake. He was reluctant to smile. I'm too old now, his attitude said, to be told where I have to go and what I have to do. Whit felt both a pang of regret and annoyance that he was being made a scapegoat.

  Charley Hodge, president of the division of Langford Industries that employed Whit, had four kids to Whit's one, and all of them were teenagers.

  "Forget it," he told Whit, "the kid'll thaw out. They're all impossible to deal with at this age."

  "So how do I handle him?"

  "Be patient but don't take any smartmouth shit."

  There was no overt rebelliousness on Terry's part, no petulance when he found out where they were going and was told the purpose of Whit's visit to the Great Smoky Mountains. His mother had raised Terry with a firm, sometimes iron hand, and from the age of six the boy had attended elite schools where most of the subjects were taught in French. He was well-traveled, moving with a cosmopolite's confidence and a certain aloofness through the hurly-burly of international airports, the lobbies of five-star hotels. In many ways he was more European than American. His manners were above reproach, but the distance he kept between himself and his father from the time they left Manhattan and motored into the mild emerging spring of southern Appalachia became a trial for Whit. They would have ten days together, and Whit had planned side trips: Washington to view the usual monuments, then the Luray Caverns ofVirginia and on to Colonial Williamsburg. Terry accepted each diversion with a polite lack of enthusiasm.

  "I think we'll stop in Asheville for the night," Whit said as they drove southwest on the Blue Ridge Parkway through some of the highest mountains in North Carolina. It was the afternoon of their fourth day on the road, the next to last leg of their trip.

  Terry yawned and stretched in the front seat of the rented DeSoto sedan. He looked vulnerable coming out of a doze: a reddened crease along one cheek, mouth softened, greenish eyes opaque. A bit of mustard at one corner of his mouth, left over from a hot dog lunch, was fetchingly childlike to Whit's eye. But the child was gone forever; Whit had to deal with new complexities, a maturing, challenging male he feared he might never get to know very well.

  Terry spoke for the first time in two hours.

  "What's in Asheville?"

  "Oh—Thomas Wolfe was born there, I think. Have you read anything by Wolfe?"

  "You Can't Go Home Again."

  "Did you like it?"

  "It was okay. Too long. I like Hemingway better. And Irwin Shaw. I talked to Shaw at one of Mom's parties. He's a ski nut, like me."

  "The Biltmore mansion and gardens are in Asheville. It was a summer house for one of the Vanderbilts. All those nineteenth-century millionaires were trying to outdo one another building imitation European chateaux. If you want to have a look—"

  Terry shook his head. He said, "I've seen a lot of chateaus."

  "I'll bet you have. How about a plain ordinary American movie tonight?"

  "That sounds okay," Terry said, nodding, his coarse blond hair, falling into his eyes. He wore it longer than kids in the U.S., and Whit tried not to nag him about the length. Brushing his hair back with one hand, Terry gave his father a sideways glance and a slight, optimistic smile.

  At five-thirty they checked into a motel, the units of which were miniature replicas of Mt. Vernon. It was a little hazy in Asheville, the sun just hanging on above the grasp of the horizon, a full plum in ether. The temperature was a chilly fifty-five degrees. But there were two imposing Japanese magnolias in bloom on the motel grounds; the hill immediately behind the horseshoe arrangement of units was a glowing tapestry this third week in April, pinkish dogwood and flame azalea, earthbound clouds of white rhododendron. In their room they had a wood-burning fireplace, a TV with phantasmal images.

  After chicken dinners in the motel's restaurant they drove to downtown Asheville and looked over the available movies.

  Terry chose The Beginning of the End, a low-budget thriller about grasshoppers that ate a radioactive substance at an agricultural station, grew to heights of twelve feet, and proceeded to terrorize Chicago. Terry sat with his knees propped on the seat in front of him in the nearly empty, cavernous theater, munched popcorn, and snickered often. Whit chewed gum and tried not to think about smoking.

  As they were driving back to the motel Terry said, "Grasshoppers that tall would fall apart if they tried to walk."

  "They would?"

  "Sure. Their joints would collapse, unless they were lined with something as hard as diamonds."

  "That's interesting."

  "Remember when the army was hitting them with flamethrowers and cannon and stuff? All they really had to do was throw a few rocks."

  "Why?"

  "Grasshoppers are arthropods. Their skeletons are on the outside of their bodies, and they're always shedding them and getting new ones while they grow. The new skeletons are soft, and if you hit a twelve-foot grasshopper with enough rocks, you'd make so many dents, he'd kink and fall over."

  Whit laughed, popped a spearmint Chiclet into his mouth, and offered the last one in the box to Terry. "So you didn't like the movie much."

  "Yeah, I liked it. Sometimes dumb things are fun."

  While Terry took his bath in their motel room Whit built a fire on the stone hearth. Then he dialed the only number he had for Arn Rutledge in Tyree, which he had obtained from the 505th Regimental historian. But the number was long out of service. Information had listings for several other Rutledges in the western Carolina area, possibly a relative or two of Arn's. Whit thought he might try the
m tomorrow if he didn't have any luck tracking the sergeant-major down, but it had been a long time. Arn had attended only one 505 reunion, in '48, a reunion Whit had missed. If he was dead, then the historian would have known about it. Although it was difficult to imagine Arn in circumstances so straitened he would leave his birthplace, he might have been forced to move up north, to Detroit or Cleveland, and find employment on an assembly line.

  Whit did one sit-up and one push-up for each year of his life, then showered when Terry was finished in the bathroom.

  Afterward they lay in their beds with the lights off, lulled by flames in the little ovenlike vault of the fireplace, feeling, as wanderers had always felt while holed up on unfamiliar ground, shielded and protected by their fire, by unknown gods propitiated. Terry, whose biological clock was still trying to adjust from Paris time, usually fell asleep by nine-thirty. But tonight, although he yawned frequently, he also twisted and turned and seemed to be searching for a way to get a conversation going. He settled for a further critique of the movie they'd seen.

  "If a twelve-foot grasshopper, which would have to weigh about four tons, fell off the Wrigley Building, it wouldn't just get up and walk away. It would be a grease spot. That's a function of mass and momentum."

  Whit said genially, "They're not wasting your time where you go to school, are they?"

  "I guess not," Terry said, secure at least in this area of acknowledged superiority. "Dad?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "Did you ever see a paratrooper jump and his chute didn't open?"

  "Couple of times."

  "What happened?"

  "The first one bounced about two feet off the ground; probably every bone in his body was shattered. The other Roman candle came down through some pine trees at Bragg and walked away with scratches and a dislocated shoulder after falling seven hundred feet. He was a chaplain, by the way."