The Axeman Cometh

by John Farris

  He hears Allen Ray walking in the hall upstairs. The stairs are dark, beyond the first two. He puts a hand on the railing and starts up, slowly. Not sure it is the right thing to do. He'll have to invent some good reason why he'd been passing by her house at this hour—oh, the hell with it, Perry thinks. Just tell her how he feels, get it over with. This recklessness excites him, scares him. He moves more quickly up the stairs, ten, twelve of them, but still he can't see, there's no light anywhere. Allen Ray seems to have vanished. Perry knows he's in a forbidden place at the wrong hour: it's eerie, not unlike some dreams he's had, but he can't stop himself.

  The top step. Which way? He looks around the corner to his left and there's a streak of light shining through a doorway down the hall, he can see green leaves with brown tips in a planter. Your brother said you wouldn't mind if I just said hello. I've got to get to work—you know, out on the Interstate. Maybe I'll see you tonight, if that's okay. Better get back to sleep now. ("Little you know the subtle electric fire that for your sake is playing within me.")

  At her door, which is half-closed.

  "Shannon?"

  He hears something. Not a word. Like a groan. Maybe telling him to come in. He pushes the door open, smiling sheepishly. The reading light clamped to the wrought-iron headboard is pointed at him. Hits him right in the eyes. The bed quakes. He sees her frantic, tied-together hands and flailing feet. Then her face. Red from strangulation, the blue eyes watery, fathoms of terror. There's a rope around her neck, tied to the headboard. A patch of shiny silver-gray duct tape across her mouth.

  She—

  This isn't—

  It can't—

  "Oh, my." He hears the high-pitched voice behind him. "I thought you'd have your dick out by now, ready to f—"

  Perry can't turn around quickly enough. Something hits him stunningly in the back, the left shoulder blade, and he is driven headfirst into the brass planter and bowl that contains a fat rubber plant. The ax blade is wrenched free of the shallow bone it lodged in, the ax comes slashing again with hardly a pause, blade clanging off the planter and ricocheting at a deep angle into the bicep of his left arm. He knows he's grievously hurt; the arm just hangs, blood flowing. Perry gets his feet under him quickly. Sensing certain death behind him, instinctively he doesn't turn around. The next swing of the ax is off the mark, missing him, blade striking the wall an inch from the back of his head. He tumbles through the doorway into the master bedroom.

  On his back, foot lashing out, he kicks the door shut in the Axeman's face. What little he sees of that face in the backlighting from Shannon's room is a terrifying sight: yellow hard hat, clear goggles of the type construction men wear to protect their eyes from dust and bits of rock and metal. A gauze mask smeared with blood covers the nose and mouth.

  The ax rips into a panel of the stout door, sticks momentarily; the Axeman has to work it free.

  Perry sits up, fumbling for the Buck knife on his belt.

  "Shit!" In a frenzy to be after Perry, the Axeman kicks the door, kicks it again.

  Perry puts the handle of the knife between his teeth and opens it with the fingers of his right hand. On the left side, all numb, the numbness spreading down his leg, scaring him worse than the copious bleeding. The madman with the ax now takes time to turn the knob, open the door, step into the room.

  Perry rolls frantically to his right onto fringed carpeting. The ax thunders down like the hammer of Thor into the carpet and lodges solidly in the oak flooring. The Axeman must work it loose as Perry scrambles blindly backward, pulls himself up again, slowly, at which lie sleepers. But how can they be sleeping through this? He feels a drip of something on his face and looks up to discover a partial answer there is a severed head impaled at sort of a cocky angle on one of the bedposts. Then the Axeman is on him again, swinging horizontally and cutting him two inches deep across the belly.

  In shock already, he feels almost nothing. The Axeman, half-turned away from Perry at the conclusion of his full-length swing, has his right foot twisted in the carpet Perry reacts unthinkingly. Right hand shooting out, five-inch blade up, almost all of it slicing through the Axeman's liver and into his lung. He hears a squeal of dismay. His weight has shifted to his left and his leg can't hold him. Perry falls, knife coming out of the Axeman. Bad cramp in his stomach. He must do something. Crawl. Under the bed, he thinks. Where the ax can't find him. But it's too late. Oh, Shannon. I love you. But too late.

  He is looking at the Axeman. The mask, the oval, sucked-in dimples where the nostrils would be. The protective glasses, spotted, eyes rolling wildly behind the lenses. Could this be Shannon's brother? No. Something terrible has happened to Allen Ray, to them all. With his ax half-raised for a killing stroke, a shudder runs through the Axeman and he cries out in pain, the sound muffled by the mask. He tries again. There is a bright red spot the size of a quarter where his mouth would be. Perry's vision swims. His own pain, suddenly, is immense—he has to cough, wetness in his throat; the cough is nearly enough to kill him. When he recovers he senses he is alone. Through tearing eyes he cannot see well—where has the Axeman gone?

  Perry has no fight left in him. He lets go of the knife in favor of holding himself where the pain is. Just at the belt line, the belt cut in two, his abdomen open, his fingers slip in. Now breathing is a problem, and his head is expanding with a buoyant gas. He can't think. But he remembers: Shannon, on her bed, thrashing, asphyxiating. Must find the knife he dropped. Feels on the floor for it. Ah. Go now to Shannon. Maybe too late already. Try. Can't. Get up!

  Weeping, Perry gets to his feet. In a crouch, right arm tight across the waist, where his navel used to be. Light from her room coming across the hall and into this room. Walk? No way to walk. Just hobble. Bluntly, as a beggar with no toes. The rumpled carpet a hazard for his feet. Fall again, never get up. His left arm still there but he feels it swinging oddly, as if the bones are steady drip of blood from his nerveless fingertips. So scared. He looks around at the four-poster bed. Shapes of the using of axes. And eyes high above him, half-opened, blandly terrifying in their eternal dreaminess. Where is Axeman now? Where gone? Hurt bad? What if he has gone back to Shannon's room? Get moving. Kill him.

  The Axeman's not in Shannon's room. She isn't thrashing and twisting on the bed now but Perry can't see her well; the light's in his eyes and there's a fog everywhere. Perry's teeth chatter, he's very cold; and he can't hold himself in any longer, there's a pulpy mass he doesn't want to look at slipping down over his right forearm. When he has to let go to cut her loose—Perry sobs. What if she's dead? Suddenly he can't do it. He slumps down on the side of Shannon's bed, too weak to scream at the violence of the pain. The fog so bad now the light on the headboard barely shines through it.

  He can let go, though. Sitting down he's not afraid he'll spill everything out where the ax ripped him.

  Shannon?

  Perry blinks, trying to see her. His teeth won't stop chattering. He's beginning to see other things, also dear to him: his mother, little Elsie. There in the fog. Scenes of childhood. All of it going by very fast, but he's enraptured, he almost forgets—

  The mattress begins to move under him. He is kicked in the thigh. Shannon's bare foot. He leans toward the headboard and there she is, too, in the fog, neck tightly bound, eyes bulging horribly. He reaches out, the hand with the knife, just as a cramp hits him. His bloody hand falls on her face. She kicks him again. He wants to tell her to stop, but his mouth is full. Can't talk with his mouth full. Can't swallow either. Slides the hand up through her hair, must be careful, not cut her with the knife. Cut the rope. Clothesline. Easy to do any other time, but he can't manage now. Roaring in his ears. Waterfall. The Colorado River flooding through the Grand Canyon. Rapids of the Snake. He's been there. Seen them all. Peaceful days in a knock-about life. Cut the rope. But he's busy now, navigating, alone in his canoe on the foggy, turbulent river. Coughs. Blood all over both of them. Shannon dying, will you—cut—the

  He's not a
ware of having done it. But she's sitting up beside him, eyes a few inches from his own. His blood on her face and in her hair. Sucking wind through her nose so violently the nostrils are pressed shut with each intake.

  She doesn't recognize Perry. There is nothing in her eyes but terror. He thinks, Hi, Shannon, but with her bound hands she is shoving him aside, nowhere to go but down the rapids, his disappointment as heavy as the rock where his belly should be. Sinking in darkness while his angel flies.

  But now I think there is no unreturn'd love,

  the pay is certain, one way or another

  Five-twenty-one a.m.

  Robert McLaren leaves the house by the front door.

  He has taken off the surgical mask but holds a handkerchief to his mouth, dabbing at the blood that rises steadily to the tip of his tongue, his lips. In his left hand, away from the side where his pierced liver and lung are causing him considerable discomfort, he carries the heavy tool bag containing everything he brought with him to 298 West Homestead. The sky in the east is the color of mercury, tinged with old gold. There is a dark red oval on the gray coveralls where Perry's knife went in, but most of the damage is internal. His liver. Right lung penetrated but not collapsed. He walks slowly down the steps and out to the curb where a pickup truck is parked at an angle with one door open. He looks inside. The keys are in the ignition. He lifts his tool bag with several inches of half-erect protruding ax handle into the bed of the truck, shuts the door, goes around to the driver's side and gets in. Starts the engine. Drives off. No rush, no telltale squealing of tires. Thirty-four seconds have elapsed.

  Within a minute-and-a-half he is seven blocks away, puffing up behind the rental car he left on one of the busier commercial streets of Emerson, Kansas.

  Robert waits while a station wagon pulling a trailered boat goes by in the opposite direction. Farther down the Street a sixteen-wheeler is coming, blazing with lights. He doesn't care. He's feeling just the least bit woozy now, partly from lack of sleep, and the handkerchief he holds more or less constantly to his lips is filling with blood.

  He gets out of the pickup, leaving the keys, takes the tool bag from the back, feeling the strain of lifting now. Carries the tool bag to the rental car, unlocks it, puts the tool bag on the floor on some newspapers he spread there earlier. Gets in behind the wheel but doesn't leave immediately, just stares east through the windshield where the sun will rise soon. He listens, hopefully, but he doesn't hear it.

  I have to hear the music, Shannon. The music is the only thing that keeps me from going insane.

  Where will he find another family in time?

  He starts the car, makes a U-turn, and heads for the airport.

  And as he drives he begins to sob, just crying his eyes out.

  Madge Mayhew gets up early every morning to attend to her correspondence and other writings before her husband Adolphus, a retired lawyer, starts bumbling around in the bathroom and then the kitchen, disturbing her. Madge writes an average of thirty letters per week; some of them run to a dozen pages. She's a genealogy buff, and for the last fourteen years has been working on a family history. The Hockenhulls. She's a vice-regent of the Magna Carta Dames and a fellow of the Colonial Order of the Crown, made up of lineal descendents of the Emperor Charlemagne. Pretty impressive. Madge compensates for the rather dull life she has lived with the man of her dreams, who can only trace his forbears back two hundred years, by being a raving Anglophile. Every three years she travels to England for several weeks. She was there for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth. Her house is filled with photographs. Madge on Waterloo Bridge, Madge at the Trooping of the Colors. Madge at the Tower of London, which was good for a few delicious shudders after she saw Olivier in Richard III at the Old Vic. Those poor little princes . . .

  Madge closes their bedroom door behind her and walks down the shadowy hall to the living room where the rows of photos, three walls filled with them, are lightly gilded by the rising sun. In the kitchen she uncovers the parakeet cages and sets them all to chirping with little kisses and coos. She runs water into the kettle for tea, turns up the gas, opens a tin of imported shortbreads, settles herself at the table in the breakfast nook where, the night before, she laid out her pens and linen stationery on the writing board. Thoughtfully nibbling on a biscuit, Madge looks out the bow window and sees Shannon Hill, who is trudging across her, Madge's, back yard in pajamas, carrying a large stuffed animal and a flowered pillowcase in her two hands. A real job of work for Shannon, judging from the awkward way that she—and her face all fiery red from exertion. Except for the large gray strip of tape that appears to cover—

  Madge is up so quickly the opened bottle of India ink goes teetering around the table, but it doesn't spill. The next thing she knows she has banged open the screen door and is getting a really good look at Shannon. And the smell of blood fouls the still morning air.

  Blood on her pajamas, the pillowcase. Her hands, feet, hair. So bedraggled and gamey she is like a shot rabbit. What's that dangling from her neck? A piece of clothesline? More clothesline binds Shannon's blood-caked hands together. There is a look of dreadful numbed earnestness in her eyes. Clutching the tubby blue stuffed animal with the floppy ears and long trunk—Madge recognizes Elefunk, which Shannon has had since she was four years old. Madge has seen the child oh so many times, sitting in the old squeaky glider beneath their persimmon tree, rocking the glooms and meanies away with her dear Elefunk.

  "Shannon! Oh God! Oh bless you sweetheart! What have you—"

  Her eyes go to the silent, familiar house Shannon has left in haste, and back to the soaked, lumpy pillowcase. Shannon keeps coming, determinedly, but with a stumbling, palsied gait, and Madge, quaking head to toe, reaches out. Screaming now. Just ripping up and down the neighborhood like a keening buzz saw, leaving not a soul in his bed. Only Shannon fails to respond. She collapses in a soft heap by the back steps and lies there wrenched by tremblings. Clutching her pillowcase, and Elefunk.

  (When they pulled the layers of tape off they found she had bitten her tongue with sharp canines, puncturing it sixteen times.

  (By the time they coaxed the pillowcase away from Shannon they'd already been inside and had a good idea of what she'd gathered up, brought with her from the house.

  (She gave up her brother Chapman's head and right arm—severed just above the elbow—but she wouldn't let go of Elefunk. Shannon would have killed anyone who tried to separate her from Elefunk, or died in the attempt.)

  Flaps retracted, gear up. The Piper Aztec takes off from the Emerson airport in a pink-and-azure dawn, heading west. At the controls, Robert McLaren, slowly bleeding to death internally from a rip in his liver. It can take as long as four hours before, body cold, brain an inert gray lump, fully depatterned, he ceases to function altogether. He has an inkling of this. So little time left, no one to care, he has failed in an act of courage and daring and must now improvise with what remains of his mental vigor. Meanwhile blood rises slowly in his throat like sap in a tree and he continues to sponge it from his tongue and lips. Already accustomed to the heat, the slickness, the harsh carbolic taste of it. The unexpected thirst it causes. Unaccustomed to the frustration of work not completed. Shannon lives. The powerful symphonic poem he was in the act of composing, the great work that could unite him with his mother at an intersection of space and time mathematically implicit in the music, revealed only by the music, may be irretrievable.

  He coughs. Can't help himself. Blood sprays the instrument panel in front of him.

  Perry.

  Who was he? Nothing but a "dirty trick" they'd played on him. His father's and his grandfather's idea. Like the time they came to him, all smiles, and coaxed him out of his room and drove him to the place where they did the shock-thing. Oh, again and again until the music was gone, it took him years to figure out a way to get it back, bloodletting enjoyable of itself but not the essential thing. What was the use of lamenting? Forget treacherous people and "dirty tricks." The music ho
vering in the air above Shannon's head, swoop down, gather it in, set a course for zero-starlight, mother-home.

  Looking down, Rob tries to decide where he is. Photographic memory, instant recognition of terrain, landmarks. He's too far west already, the city behind him, wishbone intersection of silver railroad tracks enclosing a towering white grain elevator. Rob banks left.

  There's the interstate, coming to an abrupt end at a vast plowed field. Road graders, ready-mix trucks, gangs of men at work on an unpaved mile. He is flying at a thousand feet. Remembering the house at 298 West Homestead. The thick stands of trees all around. Tricky. He will have to dive almost straight down toward the front of the house to hit the bedroom in which he left her. Explode into it at better than one-hundred-fifty miles an hour, obliterating them both. It's a tremendous idea. He's overwhelmed by the, gutsiness, the cavalier brilliance of his plan. He can see Dabney Hill smiling at him (a lot of gum exposed where he removed his bridge before retiring) high up on the bedpost. Kamikaze. Those were the Nip suicide pilots. They'd load up with munitions and dive straight for your ship. In a microsecond he will have the music back, complete in all its shadings, crescendos, significance. He will have pleased God with an act of supreme courage, and God will give him back his mother.

  Circling, the sun coming into his eyes like a slowly flooding, golden river, Rob reaches for aviator's sunglasses and puts them on. The nose of the Piper Aztec is a little too far down into the sun; must pull up. There. Eastbound, back to town. He follows the highway toward the spire of the First Presbyterian Church, Shannon's neighborhood. A few cars and trucks in transit below. Banking right; the cockpit is filled with blazing, celestial light. He is cold, and quivers from time to time, little tremors of mortality. How much time? But already he sees the Hill house as his plane continues around to the right over West Homestead. Just two blocks away but what's that?