Wildwood

by Farris, John

  The good smells of bacon and eggs cooking came to him through the green wood. He walked numbly back to the open space on the bluff, only stubbing his toe once, and limped toward Josie, who was now sitting cross-legged with the blanket he had slept in spread before her. She was eating, a heaped plate on the blanket, long-handled spoon grasped in one foot. Terry was appalled and fascinated. Freaks. He wiped at a tear-striped cheek. She looked up neutrally at him. The hell of it was, he couldn't help liking her while he was feeling sorry for her. At least, except for taking his clothes away, they didn't mean him any harm; the worst that could happen, he might catch cold. But that was being a hell of a baby, even thinking such a thing.

  "Sit," Josie said between mouthfuls.

  The blackamoor brought him a plate of bacon and eggs and some kind of fruity beverage in a metal cup. Up close he smelled decidedly of goat, and Terry stiffened involuntarily. Josie noticed, with a touchy smile. Holding her metal plate at a slight angle with one foot, she scraped it clean with the spoon.

  Terry picked up his own spoon, wondering when he would be able to stop looking at her pussy, when it would merely be there, unremarkably, like the nose on her face. It was just that every time she lifted her foot to her mouth—

  "Those are quail eggs you're eating," Josie told him, to be making conversation. "Ever tasted quail eggs?"

  "No. Uh, how did you—learn to—"

  "Feed meself? Brush me hair? Wash me face when it's darty? Well, now, it's more than three years by that I crossed over, wearing wings instead of the arms I was barn with. Real wings, not pretty sequins stitched on silk. That's the sacred wonder of it all. Me first thought was, if it is I have died and gone to heaven, then where are the pearly gates? And all the saints gathered beneath their golden halos? Before long I was welcomed, by some others who had crossed over long before me. Saints they were not. Creatures from a brimstone pit, more like. Aye, and I nearly went daft from grief and fright. A common reaction among Walkouts."

  "Wait a minute. What's a Walkout?"

  "Those of us who have slipped through the vale of time, to our sorrow, from the night of Mad Edgar's Revels into this day and age."

  "How did that happen?"

  "Best fill your stomach while you have the chance. We've a few miles yet to go this morning."

  "But how did you—T'

  The goatman brought Josie another heaping plate of bacon and eggs and also some dried fruit, which she nibbled first.

  "There are others who can explain 'crossing over' better than me. You'll have the opportunity of talking to them once you reach Walkout Town."

  He stared at her, perplexed.

  Josie swallowed and paused before digging into her mound of steaming scrambled eggs.

  "The truth is there's naught but theories of black magick or witchcraft to argue, endlessly it seems. Me, I try not to think about it so much anymore. What happened to us was strange and tragic. Why God would permit such a thing is a mystery. But I have to keep me faith, though it has been very hard. Many's the time I've wished for a priest to talk to. Ah, well. I'll not question His divine wisdom in giving me wings on this earth, and that's all there is to it. Because, Terry, I have the wits to know I've gained more than I ever lost."

  She was silent for a while, eating with a gusto Terry couldn't match, although he managed to put away a few mouthfuls himself. The goatman sat on his heels beside the fire, with his own plate.

  "Well, I eat a great deal, as you see," Josie said as if apologizing. "Six large meals a day, but gluttony it is not. That is barely enough food to keep the meat on me bones. I use e-nah-mous amounts of energy when I fly."

  "Do you like flying?"

  "Do I like it, says he? I would soar with the sweeping wind day and night, sleep in the lofty clouds if I could."

  "How do you fly? Is it easy to do?"

  "Ha! Easy? And have you ever rowed a boat?"

  "Yes.''

  "Sure and wasn't it hard work, then, after a few minutes. Well, that's how I fly—by rowing through the air. Sounds simple—but I can tell you, I was many a week catching on. Because I was afraid at first, you see, deathly afraid. Of falling, and tearing me wings to tatters. Then what would I be? At last I screwed up me courage. Scolded meself: 'Josie, if you won't use your wings, then it's dead you might as well be; for what sart of life will you have, stranded on the ground?' Then I took meself to this high place. It was to fly, or drown in the pool. But that day, with God's help and a generous wind, I flew—no, I soared! I may not describe the ecstasy of it. No longer was I a self-pitying coward, but blessed. So many crossed over as hopeless, blinded, bumbling creatures. But Josie Raftery, a nobody, had the gift of flight."

  "How old are you, Josie?"

  "I would be twenty years of age now surely. I was not yet seventeen when I crossed over. I was a seamstress, me sister a scullery maid, and us both nurse-child—arphans, you would say."

  "What happened to your sister?"

  "I have not seen nor heard of Patricia to this day. She may never cross. Or perhaps she's among those misfortunate souls, trapped between there and here in what we call the Well of Sorrow."

  "Do you mean the pool down there in the quarry?"

  Josie nodded. "Aye. 'Tis the way in. But so far there has been no way out for the likes of them."

  "Or Faren?" he said, such fear in his voice that Josie prudently looked away.

  "Your friend has a magic caul about her, a way with the Serpent, an understanding of the nether world such as few possess. That is all I know of the matter, and all I care to know. I pray to God she will be successful in that she was sent to do."

  "Where do you live? In the woods? What about winter, don't they have blizzards here?"

  "Blizzards we have surely. But where we are the winters are not so harsh, and often they are mercifully brief. And I do live in me own snug hut in Walkout Town, with a bubbling spring for bathing and warmth."

  "Do you live with anybody? I mean—" He looked at Taharqa. "With him?"

  "I do not!" Her wings fanned out in a show of indignation; but her lips twitched amusedly. "Not that it would matter. He is a eunucher."

  "A—he doesn't have any—"

  "Hmm. Just so. Our arrangement is a simple one. Taharqa gathers food for the both of us, and prepares it. In return, I read to him."

  "Read?"

  "Do you take me for an ignoramus? I have me own Bible. And there is a library in Walkout Town."

  "A library? Where do the books come from?"

  "Why, they are bought in bookstores," she said dryly. "There are those courageous souls among us who have decided to go outside, to earn money for those things we cannot make or gather in Wildwood. Tools and radios and the batteries needed to operate them. Medical supplies."

  "You mean they—do they work in sideshows, in carnivals?"

  "Yes. What else is there for them to do? They close their minds to those who would make a jeer of them, and are paid handsomely in the bargain."

  "That's what I saw! It was a trailer with a flat tire outside the motel where we were staying in Asheville. There was an old man who looked like he was wearing a deer head and another one in a monk's robe, with a croquet mallet. Maybe you know who—"

  Josie nodded. "I know them. They are brothers. One is dying but we have an infirmary, morphine to ease his suffering. Before Midsummer Eve they were men of quality; they lived with their families in fine houses, in the city of Boston."

  "I'll be damned!" Terry said excitedly. "Listen, those two really scared the—I couldn't even explain to Dad—"

  He fell abruptly silent; it had been a while since he had thought about his father.

  "What is it, Terry?"

  "My father's in Wildwood somewhere. He was going up to the mountain. But something must have happened to him. I need to find him, Josie."

  "Was he in the company of a man named Arn Rutledge?"

  "That's right! Do you know where they are?"

  "I know where Mr. Rutledge is
." She put out her right foot. The vine burn around her ankle had scabbed over. "Do you see this?"

  "Yeah; how did it happen?"

  "I was bait in a trap, for the clever Mr. Rutledge."

  "You were trying to trap Arn? Why?"

  "Self-preservation."

  "What happened to him?"

  "Beat him good-looking, I did," Josie said with grim satisfaction. "I told you. I know how to take care of meself."

  She stood up then, with a slow unfolding of her wings. Stared down at Terry, a harsh angel, someone altogether new to him.

  "Mr. Rutledge was not badly hurt; he will recover. Taharqa fished him from a spring not far from here, once I had done knocking him in the head with a stone."

  "But what about my dad?" Terry looked reluctantly at Taharqa, his mouth open in shock, thinking of the black man's ease with his hand ax.

  "I truly do not know where your father went, nor what has become of him," Josie said. "I will try to find that out for you."

  "Where's Arn now?"

  "Walkout Town. In a few days we will decide, by council, what should be done with him. He may be let loose, with a severe warning. On the other hand—" She turned, showing Terry her slashed buttock. "He did this to me, so I'm not in a forgiving mood. I think the man would stuff and mount me like a trophy if he could. But I'll be no man's trophy, or plaything, ever. If the deciding vote is left to me, I will vote for him to die."

  She flew then, straight up from the ground. Bocephus rose lumberingly and barked as Josie glided in a graceful, sunny figure eight above the quarry pool. A line of birds in flight broke sharply from her path, skimming past the radiance of an extended wing, her flowing hair. Terry, feeling dull and earthbond, could only stare, amazed by her virtuosity.

  Josie called to him.

  "You may pull on your trousers now, if it's more comfortable you are that way. Follow Taharqa—he will take you to our Walkout Town. Meantime I will just have a gander up the mountain, to see if there is any sign of your da."

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Arn Rutledge reckoned he was lucky to be alive, but the circumstances didn't please him.

  Some of the sight of his right eye had returned, although his head was still swollen and aching below, the temple from the thumping Josie Raftery had given him. Never saw it coming, that was what galled Arn so bad. She'd been just too clever and quick for him. More wasp than butterfly, that Josie. Maybe if he was so lacking in wits he couldn't stay one jump ahead of a shanty-Irish kid (no matter that she could fly better than a goddamned helicopter), then it was time he quit the woods. But, more than likely, the decision was no longer his to make.

  He was tied up, his hands down in front so he could take a leak when he had to, but he couldn't reach up and back far enough to adjust the knot of the heavy noose around his neck. A vengeful snare at the end of a slack rope that gave him some freedom of movement so he could sit outside the hut in diffused sunlight, but still the threat was always there, rough hemp rubbing under his jaw, reminding him of the fact that he could just as easily be vertical and dangling in air, neck bones loose as unstrung beads in his cooling flesh. Since worry never cured a thing, he didn't dwell on the possibility that when the Walkouts finished disposing of their late, lamented dead they would get around to him. Meantime he just stayed quiet in the dooryard of the conical hut covered in split-oak shingles which served as his jail, wished for a drink of whiskey, and observed all that he could see of Walkout Town.

  It was no longer a mystery to Arn how he'd never found it during all the years he'd rambled freely through Wildwood. The town site had been chosen and then laid out by a man with a talent for camouflage and misdirection. From the angle of this morning's sun he had judged the location to be midway up the southeast slope of Tormentil, an area so thick with conifers standing seventy feet in height or more that even the pilot of a low-flying plane (if one had the nerve to approach this close to the notoriously jinxed mountain) would see nothing but familiar monotonous patterns of bough and bark, rock and rill, shadow and shifting light and frequent mist on the floor of the evergreen wood. But even a daredevil pilot couldn't fly directly over Walkout Town. It lay, in a neat pentagonal pattern, in the cleft of a three-sided bluff of nearly vertical naked rock that looked pale, almost glacial, from a distance. This apparent translucence was due to numerous shallow waterfalls winding down the rock. All year long, Am was sure, the angles of the bluff had maximum exposure to the sun wherever it traveled in the sky, sunlight that was reflected down and through the trees and the swirling mists, the smokes, from the many hot springs bubbling up through shale earth. There was one inside his hut, and maybe all the huts were built around such springs. Most days, then, the odd, disarranged citizens of Walkout Town must go about their business in a warm and glowing fog. Even deep in winter, Am suspected, temperatures might not fall below freezing here.

  Anyone who attempted to climb the mountain from the south, on a trail that eventually would take him close to Walkout Town, would be faced with a series of ravines after negotiating some of the most treacherous terrain Wildwood had to offer, filled with bog and bramble and bear wallow, home to painters and packs of wild European boar. From sinkholes vapors rose that were less than healthful, that in fact would kill a man who breathed too deeply the bad air. Am had, in his younger days, pushed his way through a part of this hard uphill country, more from stubbornness than from curiosity. At some time or other he might well have stopped (a Walkout had informed him) less than a quarter of a mile below their town, surveyed a ravine across which poison oak and ivy grew in tangled strands, never realizing that beneath the forbidding ivy they had concealed a suspension bridge strong enough to support the weight of an army halftrack.

  He would like to meet the man who had engineered all this, Arn thought. Because Arn admired his style, his practical nature, his sense of proportion. He was pretty sure he and Travers would get along, up to the moment the Walkouts found it necessary to hang him.

  Today they were holding a funeral service, which didn't go very far toward cheering him up; the mourners were out of sight somewhere in the scintillating grove, all he could hear was the hymning. Late last night they had brought the victims in. He was still plenty groggy but could see everything because the mountain was acting up, and the sky was bright with bolts of lightning. He made out one of the victims to be the engineer of the locomotive that had rumbled trackless through a gap in time and wound up in the gorge of the Cat Brier. The other was an old lady in a long black dress, a frilly cap. Nursemaid, he decided, because one of the Walkouts was wheeling an old-style wicker baby carriage, and he heard the squawling of the hungry child. The two bodies lay atop a cart pulled by the big nigger with the goat's head. He wondered what the baby looked like, but wasn't eager to find out. He did think about his wife, and the child they'd never had, before he crept back into the hut and passed out again.

  After the proprieties of burial had been observed Walkouts drifted back from the gravesites, crossing an open rectangular area that was neat as a pool table and almost as green. Moss, he figured; grass couldn't grow beneath the needle-shedding pines and other evergreens. He wondered what they used the space for. On the far side of the rectangle stood a building similar in design to the huts in which they all lived. But it was much larger, a meeting place or storehouse.

  The woman who appeared out of the shining mist to his left startled him and he swore under his breath. But then he recognized her; she'd come the night before. All she wanted was to give him a drink from the pail she carried. Except for birds and hymns, the creaking of the wheels of the funeral cart last night, and the baby's famished wail, Walkout Town had been nearly a soundless place since his arrival. Arn was accustomed to woodland quiet and solitude, but the noose had him jumpy, and the Walkouts—well, the nigger goatman was a prize beauty compared to some he'd had glimpses of. The woman who held a dipper to his lips had a plain but serene face and a slight, sad, unvarying smile. Her long hair was graying. A
few age spots showed on her slim hands. There didn't seem to be anything wrong with her; but either she was mute or didn't want to talk to him. The drink, as before, was a cool herbal tea sweetened with honey.

  "Send the boss man around," Arn said to her when he had slaked his thirst. "I think we've got a few things to talk about."

  The woman replaced the dipper in the pail and turned to go. The hem of the long dress she wore caught on a twig of a low shrub and pulled just enough to reveal a flash of a stem-like leg, the rock-hard toe of an ostrich. Arn's stomach lurched but he didn't throw his tea up. He just sat there with his tied hands between his knees watching as she slowly returned down the misted path, wondering if the bustle of her dress concealed a bulbous, feather-duster behind.

  About half an hour later a man wearing a russet monk's robe and hood came hobbling on a deformed foot to Arn's hut. He wore a dirty sock on the foot and carried a croquet mallet, either for defense or balance. His mismatched eyes were wide of Arn's direct and inquiring gaze. He had a troublesome wheeze.

  Arn smiled pleasantly, raising his hands a few inches in greeting.

  "Why didn't you let me drown and have done with it?"

  "No, sir; then your death would have been on Josie's conscience."

  "But you do aim to hang me."

  "That has not been decided, Mr. Rutledge."

  "You know me, but I don't know you."

  "My name is Oliver Waring the Fourth."

  "You can just call me Arn, never could get used to any 'mister.'"

  Oliver Waring the Fourth nodded slightly. "Boshie will do for me. I've answered to that silly name since I was a toddler."