The Axeman Cometh

by John Farris

  The wind soughs in Don's ears; but if there's such a strong wind, how can there be fog? He pauses, bends down, touches—hmm, clipped grass. That's reassuring. He plucks a piece and tastes it. Juicy greenness. Papa is a shadow ahead of him. Don hurries.

  Now there is a shape that he can recognize in the paleness: the trunk of a tree. Papa pauses beside it The fog is thinning. The wind's velocity lessens. They can see more trees, shrubs, a fence, a garden plot enclosed by chicken wire. Gopher traps outside the chicken wire.

  Gopher traps?

  "Papa, this is—"

  "Kansas, bub."

  He sees the house. He has been here before, on a melancholy quest.

  "Shannon's house!"

  "This is where it all happened."

  "I know! My God. What time is it When is it?"

  "You can't expect me to know everything," Papa grumbles. "Maybe it's just the right time. The wedding's over, but the guests are still here . . ."

  "What are you talking about? There's nobody—" Don finds he must shout. There's less fog but the wind is roaring, leaves are flying through the air against a sky green as pond scum. Air pressure hurts his eardrums. He sees a light in the house, moving like a will o' the wisp. Brighter than starshine, fainter than the sun. The clotheslines are hung with flapping sheets.

  "That includes the guest of honor! At the groom's request!"

  "Axeman!"

  Papa nods. "He's inside!" They are both shouting now. The sheets on the line crack like pistol shots.

  "Let's go!"

  "I'll never make it! Up to you to save your Beauty, Carnes!"

  "You've got to come with me!"

  "I'm with you! For now! But the cyclone's coming! Get in the house!"

  "Can't hear you!"

  Papa pushes him, hard. Don stumbles into the midst of the billowing sheets. They look as if they haven't been washed. Then he sees that each one contains a charcoal drawing. Portraits. Friends, neighbors, of the Hills of Emerson, Kansas. Shannon's work. Men wearing their Sunday coats and ties, women in spring finery. And a few who look as if they dwell in niches of the New York subways, bundled up like Eskimos in an arctic night. Bizarre guests at a postnuptial lawn party. They press in on him, one thick smothering layer after another. There is a babble in his head, small talk, mildly off-color jokes suitable for Rotarian lunches and occasions such as this. He can't breathe, he's perspiring heavily. Then he realizes it isn't perspiration. Some of the sheets are wet. Wet with sopped-up blood from unimaginable butchering-beds.

  Horrified, he fights his way clear of the embracing sheets; sticky and smeared with blood like a warrior on his last legs, he steadies himself in the fierce wind. Looking back, he gestures with the sword in his hand for Papa, who doesn't move. Old Hummingbuffer's grinning, but stressfully, something seems to be wrong. Suddenly he begins to shrink in a peculiar, sideways, crumpled manner, as if he is no more than a drawing himself, on a piece of paper someone has decided to dispose of

  The last thing Don sees is the crinkled ball of that indomitable head, the lasting grin; then, all but weightless, Papa goes skimming off in the high wind until he is no more than a spot, a steadily dwindling black hole in the freakish, ominous sky.

  If it could happen to Papa, then—

  The light he has seen, flashing here, flashing there in the forbidding house, is steadier now; Don feels it focused on him, throwing his shadow four ways at once against the flapping, wailing, ghostlike sheets on the backyard lines. His breath is trying to escape his lungs like a panicky little bird. He feels mercilessly scrutinized, mocked by a devil. There is a lightness to his bones, no familiarity of flesh within his clothes. The wind is sucking him right out of his shoes. Like Papa, he begins to crease and fold, trivially to crumble.

  He holds up the sword—or, perhaps, the sword holds his hand up, Don isn't sure—which repeats the light like a metallic mirror until the light withdraws inside the dark, tight house. Don no longer feeling flimsy as the paperboy, and once again secure in his shoes. Holding out the sword also shuts down the wind between him and the house, where the dark turns to a red as mournful as dawn in hell and then to dark again; and a face appears in one window, like a ghost in iodine. The face of a rival, an enemy. He can't make it out very well. But he's not afraid of what he sees. With the lull in the wind he enjoys a calm space around his heart. Shannon, after all, is his through investiture, the giving and receiving of love. The Axeman, malhechor, claims solely by terror. The little toy sword he disdained is vibrating like a tuning fork from a secret vigor, energy pouring off it and causing the tip of his nose to tingle. "Made in Taiwan" is stamped on the blade, which is still some kind of inexpensive vinyl and wouldn't cut through a stick of butter. He knows this. He has no wind and can't fight, never did learn how. Logically, he has no chance. He knows this too. But he could not be crumpled, blown away like Papa, the tiniest of bangs in the universe. According to up-to-date insights provided by computer mathematics, much of the universe cannot be accounted for. It is simply missing. Toy swords made in Taiwan do not stop the wind. This is bad mathematics. Obviously the Taiwanese knew something when they made this particular sword, something they have not let on to the world at large. Just as obvious, it has served him as an entry to one of those islands of the missing universe, like a complicated musical code or the pattern of blood vessels in an eye. Don chuckles. He is calm. The windows of the house, the doors, are opening. He hears stentorian music. Martial, Wagnerian, but nothing he is familiar with. His heart starts up from a swoon like a prodded steer. Let's go, he says to himself.

  He is walking up to the back porch. Behind him the cyclone rages, shedding light in artillery bursts. It is Emerson, Kansas, and it is not.

  In Shannon's house they are all dead, or else they never were.

  He goes from room to room looking for corpses, finding nothing but neatly made beds and hand-embroidered for-show pillows. Home-sweet-homilies. Invocations.

  There is nothing to see in the bride's bedroom but her white shoes, and red teardrops on each shoe.

  "Shannon?"

  The music plays like someone's rage.

  "Shannon, answer me!"

  The toy sword is sulking in his hand.

  Down dusty back steps to the kitchen, where no one has made coffee in ages, and the roast on the silver plate on the table is too old and dry for mice to eat.

  The house shakes as if from a bomb. It trembles in sorrow.

  More steps, down.

  Petals on the steps from the bride's bouquet forget-me-riots.

  Her small footprints luminous as snail tracks.

  "Shannon, I love you."

  For lack of anything else to say.

  She's there in the cellar.

  Barefoot, a little careworn, but alive.

  He is there too, debonair in cutaway and silk cravat, leaning on the cheated ax as if waiting for an audience.

  The music is as powerful, as stifling as the depths of a river.

  Shannon is seated on the edge of a large and curving petit-point chair, precariously, as might be imagined, in a wedding gown full as a flowering tree. Her arms are extended to the low curved back of a similar chair, her head forward like a swan's and resting on her arms, baring all of her lovely neck. She doesn't look, to Don, to be a day over sixteen.

  The love inside him is a great blundering thing, like an ape on a chain.

  Axeman is as youthful as Don imagined him to be, although there were never any clues: fresh, highly colored by the infection of homicide.

  In his free hand he has another of Shannon's drawings of Don, which he holds cannily propped against his breast like a door-to-door salesman. Getcher Time!

  Donald B-for-Burnside Carries, Man of the Year.

  A tingling in Don's right arm, as if he has plugged the toy sword into a wall socket.

  "It won't work," Don tells him, the flare-up of bravado like a torch in the cellar dimness. "Also, frankly I think your music stinks. It's not original. You neve
r had any talent and you never will."

  Axeman begins slowly to crumble the page, enjoying his mastery. Don feels a contraction of gut and muscle but doesn't flinch and the sensation ebbs. The Taiwanese sword is twitchy, like a cat at a mouse hole.

  Shannon slowly lifts her head in hazy wonder.

  Axeman tosses the half-wadded drawing to the floor and takes a step back, raising in a smooth effortless lethal motion the prodigious ax. It has never failed him. Glowering half-moons that throw off death like radium. Shannon trembles in her wilting wedding gown. The house above their heads cracks like a brittle walnut shell. The wind flies in, filled with dust from an opened grave. Her face is parched by the draught, her rouged lips look stark as graffiti on a church wall. Don stands firm as the Axeman cometh, blades windmilling fancily to trim his flesh and dress him down to his humble bones.

  The Axeman gloating over his catch.

  "Finished! Finished! Finished!"

  "Damn right," says Don, and the little sword flies up, marvelous in its dance, in the precision of its mathematics—flies against the trajectories of the ax and bewilders them, undoes the equations of butchery by splitting the ax through the handle and to the wrist, leaving fingers here and fingers there on the floor and a gout of blood on Axeman's frilly wedding shirt. Don's sword leads him adeptly by the arm, pointedly taking inventory of vital spots, support columns and various low joints while Axeman writhes and screams in obligatory partnership, until there are only stumps of him left to do the dance, his eyes are as blind as belly buttons, buttons, his hair a hive of hardened grave dust.

  And at last they rest, while the gathering of Axeman by the stellar wind goes on, his pieces distributed according to laws of celestial mechanics Don is too bushed to ponder. Nor can he reckon yet with his own situation.

  He's in Kansas. There's a Kansas-size wind blowing, the stuff of tall tales. And Shannon lies on the floor, pale as a twisted soda straw, naked as January.

  He crawls to her, grateful for even that much locomotion. Gathers her in his arms. Kisses her shriveled lips back to a sweet redness. Her young breasts bloom beneath his hand. At last her eyes open.

  "Oh, Shannon. Let's just get out of here. But which way?"

  Puzzled, she studies his face as if it is a road map in Cyrillic.

  "Thank you. I don't think I need any more help. I can make it the rest of the way."

  "Shannon—it's Don. Wake up!"

  "I am awake. Well, sort of." She smiles. Her eyes seeing past him, as if trying to focus on the shimmering edge of a faded, rainy dream, an ice palace in a desert. "But I want to go back to sleep. There's plenty of time. It's Saturday, isn't it? I don't have to get up so early on Saturday."

  "Shannon. What's going on? You don't know what I—what we've been through!"

  "I don't even know who you are," she says, and yawns contentedly. "But that's okay. I know you won't be here when I wake up again."

  "Stop it! Listen to me! He's gone for good now! You're rid of him, Shannon. You never have to think about him again. So there's no reason why we can't be happy—"

  Her eyes have closed.

  "I'm very happy," she murmurs, begging off. And then, not looking at him, she puts her lips to his cheek.

  " 'Bye."

  "No—no, you can't! Shan, I love you! We're going to be together now! We have to be, that's what this was all about! I saved you from the Axeman. Wake up, please, come back! It's me, Donald! You've got to wake up, beauty!"

  The wind is loud and strong. But Shannon lies unruffled in his arms, fair of skin in the strong cocoon of Time, glistening newly like lightning in a bottle. She will smile forever, but no longer for him.

  Tears in his eyes. He is lost and knows it. Lost in goddamn Kansas, with nowhere to go, and all the magic he might have expected as his due is worthless, inert, as flat as week-old beer.

  The least he can do is put her back in her own bed. He weeps at the thought.

  His tears falling on her face as he carries her lightly up the cellar stairs. The toy sword thrust into his belt. But he can't swagger, there is no freebooter in him, only an ice cave, a lonely heart like a pebble covered with snow.

  Her room, and he receives a shock. It is pretty much as he imagined it would be, from crime-scene photographs he once looked at. Another shock: there is a body lying curled in pajamas on the floor, wrapped in a chenille spread pulled from her bed. He steels himself, expecting horrors, more blood. But the boy is unharmed. He snores gently, with a slight rasp.

  Don lays Shannon on her bed. He dresses her in clean pajamas and smoothes the rumpled hair with her own brush, but he knows nothing will wake her as long as he is there. Should he stay until he is blind from cataracts and deaf to his own heartbeat, she will sleep and have no thoughts of him. They will all sleep.

  When he pulls the sheet up to her breasts, Elefunk tumbles out of the folds, one white felt teardrop dangling from a doleful, thickly lashed eye. He puts Elefunk in the crook of Shannon's arm and thinks he sees the slightest change in her expression, a deepening of contentment as she slumbers on.

  Chap stops snoring but doesn't wake up when Don lifts him into the bed beside his sister.

  As he turns to leave the room his gaze lingers on a framed photograph on her vanity. A good-looking, dark-haired boy in a football jersey. Not just another jock, perhaps. There is a sensitivity about the eyes Don finds appealing. He has inscribed the photograph To Shannon: the best and the most at Emerson High and finished with a quotation: This hour I tell things in confidence/I might not tell everybody/but I will tell you.

  He can't leave the house without checking all the bedrooms. Just to be sure.

  So it's Dab and Ernestine first, in rudimentary nightclothes, finishing this night together as they have finished the nine thousand nights that came before, not decorating their bedposts like horrendous Toby mugs.

  Allen Ray breathes peacefully but not through his throat, where the only mark is insignificant, from his own razor.

  Now Don has overstayed; he is walking around and around in a museum where he knows all the exhibits by heart.

  He no longer hears the wind. Perhaps it is too close to dawn. The house has settled on its old foundation, nails and mortar snug, the refrigerator humming its familiar buzzy song.

  He leaves by the backdoor, and it is like passing through an airlock.

  Japanese lanterns like multiple suns dangle from the trees in the backyard.

  There are no houses beyond the back fence. The neighborhood ends abruptly there, in empty sky and prairie, gold on this windless morning. It is Kansas, or it is not But there is no other way to go. He does not trouble to look behind him.

  He has walked a mile when things begin to look both different and familiar. The chrome yellow of wheatlands is giving way to green thickets, orchard bush. He sees thorn trees in yellow flower. He crosses a clear stream. On the bank the red mud and reeds are heavily trampled. Animal dung covered with camel flies steams in the cool air, not unpleasantly. That, and the tang of game, excites his nostrils, his sporting blood.

  Don rubs a hand across his lower jaw. Growth of whiskers there. Almost a beard. Another few days. Then he will shape it. He always knew he had a good face for a beard, but of course they had rules back there, in the actuarial department of New York Life.

  His stride lengthens. He's not surprised to find that he's wearing crepe-soled walking shoes suitable for the bush. Also high socks and shorts and a short-sleeved safari jacket from those perennial expedition outfitters Abercrombie & Fitch. He's unarmed, except for his small toy sword, which no man dares make fun of. He has knocked a few men down for daring. The sword will always go with him. It will never be far from his hand at night. No matter what his women have to say about that.

  The sun is higher. From his musette bag he takes a bandana, cocks the brim of his Stetson higher and knots the bandana around his head below the hairline so that perspiration won't mist his glasses. The wind is from the west and in his face, swaying
almost noiselessly the tall grasses all around him. The game trail is cut like a shallow winding trench through the grass, but smooth and shining like mudpies patted tirelessly by small hands and left to dry, in the sun. This is a good country, not too broken, some tough climbing but nothing that will wear a man down

  Ah. He hears one now. Simba's cough, deep and full of anger. Somewhere over the next shaded ridge. His hands tingle. He is walking quickly but making no sound. Even the vanguard of Somali gunbearers jump when they realize he's joined them, and grin in relief. It is only Resase modja.

  Papa, crouching, the .256 Mannlicher in his right hand, looks back over his shoulder. So does the white hunter beside him.

  Papa says in a low voice, "You made excellent time. Baron Blixen, this splendid-looking bastard is my good friend Donald B-for-Burnside Carnes."

  Blixen offers his band. "I've heard so much about you. Delighted you could join the hunt."

  "My pleasure," Don says, and kneels. He thrusts out his left hand, and almost immediately his own weapon is there. He senses the nerves of Abdullah, his gunbearer, knock-kneed in flimsy khaki shorts, and touches the black man reassuringly. Then he opens the breech of the Springfield and is satisfied. Clean as a hound's tooth and loaded with five solids, the 220-grain bullets. Power hitters. But he and Papa will need only one shot apiece. They are the best.

  "Cotsies are bloody restless," Papa murmurs. "Also they've winded us."

  "When they come," Don says, studying the maned lions that are just barely visible at seventy-five yards in the donga grass, "they will try to flank us like the good soldiers and hunters they are."

  "I wouldn't care for this situation at all," Blixen says thoughtfully, mopping his brow. "If I were with any but you chaps, what?"

  "I am highly complimented," Don says, not breaking his concentration. And then he realizes, with the superb hunter's instinct, that the lions are going to charge. Perfectly synchronized, he and Papa cock their rifles. For a moment their eyes meet. They smile.

  The gunbearers, brave in their own right but weaponless, have retreated before the anticipated charge. A shout goes up. The grass undulates as if tornadoes are snaking through it. Don returns his attention to the beast surging within his sights. A large male, four hundred pounds or more, capable of breaking a buffalo's neck with a single paw-swipe. Papa's lion is equally large. Such speed and beauty, Don almost hates to pull the trigger. His pulse is racing. His heart is full. He is where he was always meant to be.