Wildwood

by Farris, John

  "Which way, Bo? Where did Faren go?"

  The hound began to move grudgingly. Terry crept along beside him, keeping a tight grip on his studded collar, the membrane expanding palpably with each step he took, the blazing tree throwing red sparks into the sky. Instead of winking out, the sparks fell into a circulating pattern, faster than hornets, thicker than the mountain stars. Faren had vanished, a farewell voice from a lonely wood; his father, the death camp unfortunates, had all vanished from the garden of his sexual dream. Only the prehistoric war continued, and he was its lone survivor.

  The flaring light, as Terry and Bocephus moved uphill through thin smoke, was nearly continuous. Nocturnal birds and animals seemed confused, crossing their path obliviously: all movement in the wood was slowed, exaggerated. Shambling possum and gliding owl, paunchy raccoons like old boxers retiring from the ring, larks by the basketful. Bocephus, nose down to Faren's scent, couldn't be distracted. The burning tree hadn't set anything else on fire, but the sparklers like little pops of fireworks stayed sky-high, an angry tattoo. Terry saw a black and gray tufted cat, twice the size of a domestic tabby but smaller than a panther, grimacing at them from atop the root clump of a windfall, its stiletto whiskers tipped glowingly as if drenched in radium. Then the membranous air seemed to warp and expand, the bobcat grew enormously and out of proportion like a shape in a funhouse minor until it was just a slippery image without definition; Terry and the hound slid on past this anomaly—or rather, he had the sensation of walking in place while everything else moved, slanting through his field of vision, the light accelerating to a mad velocity defined by the speed of sparks above his head, the streaming-by of smoke. It was too odd and unearthly to be truly frightening. He had only a jittery, awed, what-next feeling that was, surprisingly, almost enjoyable: because he knew he couldn't be fully awake, he was still half steeped in his absorbing dream.

  Then the snakes started coming, big rolling hoops of them, black coach whip racers and peppermint-striped ribbon snakes with their tails in their mouths, spokeless bicycle wheels descending streakily between shrubs and trees, rebounding with a cold rubbing sensation from his up flung hands and wavering off-course high in the air.

  Terry yelled. He lost contact with Bocephus. He started to back away from the springy onslaught of hoop snakes.

  But when he turned around there was nothing behind him.

  Literally nothing at all. A starless void. The end of the world.

  He slogged on uphill. His heart lumpish and seeming to beat only when he paid attention to it. He called to Bo, to Faren, to anyone who might be listening, until his throat had shrunk and all he could do was croak.

  The sky above the bluff he was climbing had changed to a shade of gold in which the fiery sparks had come together like two ophidian eyes that regarded him hostilely.

  In that glow he saw Faren standing, as if bewitched, at the edge of another abyss, hands by her sides, looking down. And all of their world had shrunk to the bright bubble that contained them: half a mile, perhaps, in diameter, and suspended in a grayish void of eternity.

  Terry recovered his voice.

  "Faren, where are we?"

  She trembled slightly as if disturbed by his presence, but didn't look around.

  "Faren . . . Faren . . ."

  He wasn't the only one calling her. The other voices, a sorrowful chorus, rose from the depths of the well beneath her.

  He caught up to Faren. She looked into his face, frowning, a quick hand going flat against his breastbone.

  "But I asked you not to come. The bargain's made, there's nothing you can do here, Terry."

  "What bargain?" He looked down into the old quarry, squarely sawn sides gleaming white, at a milkishly emerald pool. From where they stood it was nearly a vertical drop.

  And in the pool—

  My God.

  "Who are they?"

  "Oh, Terry." She caught his face between her hands, kissed him warmly but sadly on the lips. Then she stepped away. A long step, to the edge of the quarry. "We'll see each other again," she said with a heart-torn smile. "I know we will." She looked up then, dutifully, at the lowered, seething sky. Her smile faded as if by command.

  Terry looked too. He saw the well-shaped, cloudlike, golden head of a serpent, savage ruby eyes in the fulminating cloud that filled nearly half of their earthly bubble. And from one of the eyes came crooked lightning that stunned and knocked him flat.

  From where he lay he had only a glimpse of Faren going over the side of the quarry in a meek, sacrificial swan dive. Gliding like a leaf, and down. Harmlessly. Down.

  The lightning crackled like a cage about Terry's head; his hair was standing raggedly on end. He decided that he couldn't stand up without being struck, perhaps lethally, again. But he could crawl forward on his belly; when he had gone far enough to look down at the strange green pool, he thought he saw Faren sliding deep into its swarming, heavily peopled heart.

  The lightning was sullenly withdrawn; the eyes of the serpent came apart, sparks flying at random, brief atoms growing dim at aphelion.

  He sat up in a fever, unlacing his boots. Intending to go after Faren. If she had jumped and survived, then he could too. No matter what was down there (the square pool appeared to be, not watery, but a mass grave in tumult) he would not let her face it alone.

  "Oh no you don't!"

  Terry looked over his shoulder, and was so startled he nearly toppled sideways into the quarry.

  Josie Raftery reached out with one foot and grasped his sweater while continuing to hover more than three feet above the ground. The cyclical movements of her butterfly's wings fanned the air around them; she seemed to radiate body heat from the effort she was making to be aloft. She pulled him firmly away from the precipice.

  "Can't follow after her, boy. You don't have the protection, see." She smiled down at him a bit shyly, showing a gap between her front teeth. "You stay with me. I'm Josie. I'll look after you."

  He was trying to assimilate what was absurd and incomprehensible: her melodious Irish tongue, the broad rowing wings that kept her airily on balance, only a waist-length shawl of strawberry blond hair to cover—not much. From the strong outthrust foot that still gripped him to an ivory hip and frankly revealed pudendum, she was naked.

  "Sure and I must seem a bit strange to you," Josie said with a wider but embarrassed smile. "But we all do grow accustomed to one another, in the fullness of time and in the sight of God."

  Everything seemed bleak to Terry then; his mind welcomed bleakness, oblivion. The unearthly sphere in which he was marooned with this creature now encompassed a bare half acre of rocky ground, a patch of starless night. The world at God's end, forgotten, a spit bubble. Faren was lost; he had no hope of sunrise. There was only a faint radiance from the butterfly girl, the sweet warm draft of her wings.

  Terry shook her off and, with a last disbelieving sulky look, lay down again, cradling his head in his arms.

  "Merde," he said, his tone irritable. "I'm going back to sleep."

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  "First a glass of brandy," Jacob Schwarzman proposed, his voice echoing as he held up a dusty bottle plucked from a scrapheap of archaelogica: "Napoleon brandy. At least eighty years old. But the finest brandy may well be ageless."

  He looked to Whit for confirmation, not smiling, his troll-blue eyes alight as if from brain-burn; his exhilaration seemed manic to Whit Bowers, who by contrast was immobile from weariness, reduced to child size where he had slumped upon a monarch's throne of alabaster, chalcedony, and gold. But the throne itself seemed small, a plaything, when compared with the size of the manmade cavern in Tormentil Mountain that, Jacob claimed, had been home to him for more than three years.

  This single oblong chamber, dynamited and chiseled from solid rock half a century ago, was big enough to contain a steel mill. The chamber was well-illuminated by bluish tubular lights that glowed like neon but had no connection with the whorls of electric wires high above them
on the vaulted ceiling. The power source was, perhaps, dependent on a waterfall Whit could hear but had not seen, in a cavern distant from them.

  After considerable manipulation on Jacob's part the cork popped from the dark bottle and a little brandy like insect's blood oozed down the hairy back of one hand. "Ah!" he cried, and reached for a vitreous, heavily ornamented goblet, the bowl held aloft by maidens in filigreed singlets. The goblets were from a trove on a long table, an eighteen-foot slab of solid pink marble that rested on the backs of winged lions. He poured several ounces of brandy for Whit, handed him the goblet, filled another for himself.

  "I'm a poor fisherman and I can't bear to hunt; so I've seldom eaten well during my sojourn here. But thanks to our absent Caliban, who left forty cases of fine vintages stored in these chambers, I have drunk divinely."

  "Caliban?"

  "Absent for how long, I wonder?" Jacob mused, nose to the rim of the lucent goblet. His eyelids were half lowered. "'How soon,'" he recited, "'will time hide all things! How many a thing has it already hidden!'"

  "Marcus Aurelius," Whit murmured, looking at the slightly dusty surface of the old brandy in his own goblet. He sniffed; the fumes hit him bracingly and freed an impulse that resembled laughter but didn't reach his lips. To hell with the dust, he thought. He drank.

  "You've read the classics?" Jacob said, mildly delighted.

  "Had to. They were Blackie's passion. He wanted me to know something besides engineering and soldiering."

  "Blackie? Is that the name of your adoptive father?"

  "Brigadier General Walter 'Blackie' Bowers. United States Army. Did I tell you I was adopted?"

  "Is General Bowers living now?"

  "No. And Ruth—my mother—died right after the var. Complications from pneumonia." Thinking of burials, he looked around, at sand-worn statues of partial men and maimed gods lining the wall behind him to heights of twenty feet or more. They scared Whit a little. But he'd had a fright as severe as cancer burning in his bones long before descending into this chamber. "Would you mind describing the circumstances of your adoption?"

  The brandy went to Whit's stomach like a saber cut. "Why?"

  "It may be of some value as we try to figure out how you got from here"—Jacob lifted his goblet, indicating the world outside the cavern, the wild mountaintop—"to there." And he pointed, indefinitely, distantly, with a finger.

  Now Whit laughed, but he was annoyed by Jacob's actorish behavior and the insinuation.

  "I've never been here before."

  "But you have! You were born here! Haven't you had sufficient proof of that already? You recognized Jacqueline, your old nursemaid. And the Ethiopian you encountered in the woods: you know his name, of course."

  "That—goatman?" Whit had begun to shake from the omnivorous cancer. He spilled a little brandy, then gulped too much of it down, which made him choke and cough. In his mind there was a rainless bolt of lightning. His lips were parched, the soles of his feet blistered; his nearly naked child's body glowed from a remorseless sun. He bowed his head and recalled, hazily, horsemen on a gray desert floor. Texas. The Fort Bliss Military Reservation. All that was familiar from his early life, dependable in memory.

  "The circumstances of your adoption?" Jacob prompted quietly, coming closer to the throne on which Whit squirmed uneasily, eyes closed.

  "I was—abandoned, I suppose. In the West Texas desert, a few miles from El Paso. I wasn't a runaway. I didn't have any clothes with me, no keepsakes. They—they checked with the police in three states, but nobody ever reported me missing."

  "How old were you?"

  "Six, six and a half, maybe. A few months later I began to lose my baby teeth. I've always celebrated my birthday from the day that Blackie's cavalry troop found me wandering in the desert."

  "Yes? And what day was that, Colonel Bowers?"

  "June twenty-fourth. Nineteen hundred and sixteen."

  "The time of day?"

  "Late afternoon." Whit raised his head and looked hostilely at Jacob, who was standing a few feet from the throne, rubbing his brushy beard. "Does that prove anything?"

  "Mmmm. What do you recall of your life, prior to being found in the desert on Midsummer Day?"

  "I've never remembered a thing."

  "Except for your name."

  "No, I was—they named me Whitman, after Ruth's father."

  Jacob paused, free hand going to his forehead as if he needed to check his temperature, having a tendency to overheat when he was excited. He drank deliberately, then took a deep breath to dilute the brandy fumes in his lungs.

  "Your true name is Alexander Langford. Your mother was Laurette Langford, known as 'Sibby'; one of those rather meaningless, ridiculous nicknames children of the wealthy were given during the so-called Gilded Age. She was, of course, the wife of Edgar Langford."

  "What is this—bullshit, Jacob? Are you trying to tell me that Mad Edgar Langford—was my father?"

  "That is one possibility. But perhaps only your mother knew for sure. Unfortunately only some baby pictures of Edgar Langford exist. For most of his life he flatly refused to be photographed or to sit for his portrait. This was not due to mere shyness on his part; I suspect a hysterical obsession. He was sickly as a child, and possibly considered himself ugly. The diseases he contracted during his explorations would not have enhanced his self-image. Descriptions of Edgar as a grown man are sketchy; his enemies found him to have a rather malevolent countenance, with 'burning' or 'penetrating' eyes—only feverish, I'm sure. From what I have observed of you since we met, I think it's entirely likely that James B. Travers was your natural father."

  "Who?"

  "The architect of Mad Edgar's chateau, and Sibby's lover for the last decade of her life. I believe their affair may have begun as early as 1906. I have some photos of Mr. Travers: he was a tall, strapping fellow, like yourself—and your son. You bear only a passing resemblance to your mother, except for the lightness of your eyes. Travers's eyes were dark, dark brown perhaps, so I can't account for that anomaly, the dominant gene should be—"

  "Jacob!"

  "What is it?" Jacob asked irritably, digging into his beard again, disturbed in his speculations.

  "I've had enough to drink, and—I'd like to get out of here. If you'll kindly show me the way, I don't remember just how we came in."

  "Go? Now? You can't go!"

  "Do you think you can stop me?"

  "What I mean is—by tomorrow morning you will be lying in the woods as dead as"—Jacob retreated to the long table and picked up a beautifully feathered orange-and-blue bird with a crushed head that he had brought with him from the aviary—"as this Borneo kingfisher."

  "I'm willing to take my chances out there," Whit said, getting down from the throne. "I need to locate Arn."

  "But you don't understand—" Jacob let the gorgeous bird fall back to the table, and despairingly set his goblet down. "Oh, I see. You think I'm insane."

  "No—but it may be you've lived down here by yourself a little too long, Jacob." Breathing the old breath of caves, that carried' the spores of hallucination, of another man's lunacy.

  "On the contrary, I'm perfectly lucid and I know exactly what I'm talking about. You're the one who is—quite naturally—confused."

  "Yes. I'm damned confused. But I'm not staying here."

  "Don't you want to know? Is it more than casual circumstance that brings you to Wildwood at this critical time? You've come full circle in your life, Alexander. You've come home."

  "Whit. Whitman Bowers. I've never been anyone else. I'll find my own way out, Jacob. Good night."

  "I warn you! It's dangerous to wander out there on the mountain at this time. The appearance of the aviary was only the beginning. You may suddenly find yourself buried beneath tons of stone when the chateau returns."

  Whit was walking toward the far end of the chamber, feeling a current of air against his face, hearing more loudly the sounds of the waterfall and a humming generator. Rusted
railroad tracks bisected the floor between more of the monumental works of ancient artisans. The spoils of Edgar Langford.

  Jacob's voice echoed. "I can explain! What no one else can ever explain to you! How you came to be in the desert with no memory of your first six years! Just listen to me!"

  The floor of the chamber by the rails seemed hot to Whit; he could almost feel it burning through the soles of his boots. There was a small sun blazing in the back of his mind. He was parched again. Not for drink, but for knowledge. Maybe even a crackbrained theory was better than a void.

  "I'll listen," he said, ''while you show me the rest of this place."

  Jacob came on the run.

  "I've dedicated my life to the mysteries, the phenomena. Others have come to Wildwood, hoping to discover what was hidden here. They all failed but I, I did meticulous research, years of research, before beginning my explorations. It took me less than a week to find the alternate entrance to the caverns—only a hundred yards from where the aviary reappeared this afternoon."

  Whit thought of the frantic nanny, blown dead in a bad squall of birds. And what had become of the infant in the perambulator? He knew it was wrong to have left her behind. But the light in his mind, the glowering sun, dissolved all images of the aviary as guilt sharpened to pain like a splinter of steel through his temples.

  He was walking too fast. Jacob slowed him down by tugging at a sleeve of his sweater. He waved his other hand at the collection around them, a jigsaw city of dust-shrouded relics: steles and tombs, sections of frescoed walls, stylized faces in profile regarding them dimly from within massive packing crates.

  "I'm sure you have no idea of the significance, the immense value of these artifacts. They were left in the caverns because of their sheer size: Edgar Langford simply couldn't fit them into the scheme of his chateau, huge as it was."

  They had come to a series of passageways the size of subway tunnels, spread like fingers from the square palm of the cavern they were in. The rails continued far back into the mountain, beneath receding vertical tubes some of which had dimmed to shades of purple or indigo, creating shadowy spaces along the way. From one of the tunnels a draft of moist air flowed strongly. The waterfall.