Fiends

by John Farris

  "Was it the same sort of impulse that made you hot-wire that Cadillac?"

  "I think it was."

  "Uh-oh." Because the light had been in her eyes, she couldn't see anything but sparkles. She didn't know if he was smiling. There was just something about Duane: maybe he didn't always do the right thing, but when he felt like making a move he made it, and to the best of his ability.

  "Do you want me to come over tomorrow?"

  "Afternoon," Marjory said. "I'm busy in the morning." Then, when he just stood there and didn't say anything for a while she raised a hand and touched his cheek, and with dry mouth and thudding heart, kissed him back, beside her fingertips and at the corner of his lips.

  5

  Getting ready for bed, Marjory bumped into Enid coming out of the bathroom with her newly washed hair wrapped in a towel. "How was your date?"

  "Duane's been lifting weights for a year, don't you think he looks terrific? He's nuts about Janis Joplin, too. And he's real smart. He's going to be a zoologist or specialize in space medicine or something like that. He stole a car once, but it was just a youthful indiscretion. He kissed me and I kissed him back."

  Enid put a bare foot up on the railing and with a tissue dabbed at a blood drop over the ankle bone where she'd nicked herself shaving. She gave Marjory a slant look.

  "Why, Mar-jory."

  "Wasn't time not to," Marjory said, drawling like Duke Wayne.

  6

  He was awakened in the early morning by a shaft of sun through a large gap between logs of the hillside cabin; by pesky mosquitoes and a louder, intermittent humming. He identified without having to think about it the squeaky-wheelbarrow voice of black and white warblers, the sweeter notes of nuthatch and thrush. He was shaking uncontrollably, jarring his bones. He couldn't remember where he was. He didn't know why he was there.

  At the Place it was always warm. In winter the radiators hissed and chattered. Sometimes there were as many as six male patients in his room, usually only three or four. The single bureau in the room, metal that looked like wood, had six drawers. The sheets were changed twice a week, unless somebody had an accident. There was a blanket on each bed. Tears ran down his cheeks now as he shivered and made noises in his throat. He missed his blanket. He missed the routine of the Place. Nothing much to do, really. One day his team mopped floors, on another they cleaned the bathrooms. Breakfast was always at seven-thirty, lunch at eleven-thirty, supper at five-thirty. He liked cinnamon toast for breakfast. That was Sunday. Creamed chipped beef and biscuits for dinner. That was Wednesday. Chili mac, he never cared much for chili mac, always let Rooney have the chili mac off his tray in exchange for an apple or orange. Friday the best day, though, because every Friday his mother baked two pies: apple, cherry, huckleberry, it depended on the—

  "Unnnnnhhhhh!" he groaned, and dark phlegm jetted from his lips as he lunged to his feet, momentarily ignoring the pain in his arthritic knees. His brain, already on a low ration of blood, reeled; he saw flashes of light brighter than the sun streaming into the hidden cabin. There was a lot of noise in his ears, like sand rubbing on glass. For several moments he was on the verge of fainting, but clung to the stones of a chimney as if it were the face of a cliff until the homeostatic mechanisms of his brain, for too many years subjected to routinely prescribed chemical abuse, once more stabilized the aging body. The neurochemical flood in response to crisis awakened in its own time, ahead of the brain that had little or nothing to do with adaptation and survival.

  Arne heard his dog barking. He saw, quite clearly, the hills and fields of home just outside the cabin door. He saw his mother, apron fat with feed, scattering corn to the chickens. He saw his father plowing the straightest furrows west of the Cumberland River. He limped to the doorway, crying, and found himself in the cold, damp passage of a cavern two hundred feet below the earth, the way lighted by emanations from—from giant luna moths clinging to the walls; must be a trillion of them! His dog was barking. Arne turned and saw a dusty road in red sunlight and Hawkshaw lying in dust with blood spilling from his opened throat. You come, too, his mother said, raising a hand black as a thorn, limber as a whip, to rope him in . . .

  I'll let you have my apple for some of your chili mac, old Rooney said. He said it every Thursday night, been saying it for—

  Arne turned to take the apple but it was his father, eyes drained like the dead, handing him a stone wet from the river.

  For my grave, Arne.

  Hawkshaw was barking again.

  He heard voices.

  Morning sun painful to his eyes, that persistent whining in his ears.

  "Come back here!"

  A girl's voice. Arne's throat constricted. He felt glad and then distressed. It was Enid—and she was mad at him for running away, even though it hadn't been his fault. Nothing that had ever happened to him in his life was his fault, and now see the fix he was in! He needed a place to hide. She would look in the cabin first thing, discover him cowering there. Even if she took him back to the Place, they wouldn't let him in again. Somebody else had his bed and bureau drawer now, somebody else had taken his place on the team. Floors Monday and Thursday. Bathrooms Tuesday and Saturday.

  Shrill whistling. The sound hurt his ears.

  "You get back here right now, I'm done chasing you! We'll just leave you and see how you like it!"

  A little dog ran into the small clearing and came to a skidding stop when he saw Arne. Black and tan beagle. Foxhunter. His tail shot up and his throat swelled and he began to bay. Arne backed up slowly, not because of the dog, but because he'd heard Enid coming—no, there were two, perhaps three of them, Enid's blond sister too, with the big body and short haircut, she'd been afraid of him for some reason.

  He crept behind low-hanging sumac where he wouldn't be seen. The beagle held his ground and quivered, eyes popped, crooning hoarsely. A teen-aged girl pushed her way through a thicket, followed by a freckled boy, and they pounced on their dog.

  "Smarty britches!" the girl scolded, when she had the struggling beagle under control. The boy snapped a leash to the dog's collar. "Just about missed your breakfast, chasing those old squirrels! We got to be all the way down to Texarkana by tonight, you hear that, Gumshoe?"

  When they were gone Arne stirred, freeing a pants leg from a sticker bush. His clothes were in sad shape, his shoes muddy. Cinnamon toast. His stomach rumbled, his mouth watered. He'd been living off what fruit he could find, a few nuts. The shattering visions had vanished, but his heart palpitated. He listened, hearing the boy and the girl at a distance, the whining sounds which he now identified as truck tires on pavement, a trickling of water not far away. He heard a radio, a car horn. So there might be a town nearby. Had to be careful no one saw him.

  You don't know who they are, his father warned him. You don't know who none of them are, so keep away.

  Arne looked around—and there was his father sitting with his back to a windfall, left arm propped up, the wrist a blackened smoking stub. Ax in his father's right hand. One side of his face shimmering like flies in offal.

  Arne grabbed his own face with both hands, fingers digging into his scalp until a little blood trickled down. He couldn't look, he couldn't scream. His unused throat like a dry well crammed with stones. His tongue had healed long ago, but with each passing month it was easier not to speak, easy to forget he ever could.

  When he dared to lower his hands he saw a wolf spider on a piece of log where Big Enoch had been. Arne got to his feet, grasping anything he could reach to help pull himself up. Instincts prevailing, he went in search of the water he could hear trickling over rocks. When his thirst was satisfied, he simply followed the little stream downhill. It was the easiest direction to go, and going was better than sitting around, dozing off, having a fit or a spell of seeing what he never wanted to see again.

  Through a gap between ridges he had a glimpse of a wide concrete highway and one big truck after another, windshields dazzling in the sunlight. Even this far fro
m the highway there was a visible gasoline or diesel haze in the air. No wind. Already the morning was heating up. He came to a dirt road that looked well used, heard a car or truck coming, and slipped into shadow. It was a pickup truck, towing a trailer almost as big as the house he'd lived in as a boy. Looked like a house, with windows and a door. He'd seen similiar trailers on television, but still he was amazed by the size of this one, it brushed tree limbs on either side of the road. Dust from the wheels set him to sneezing and coughing as it drifted through the woods. The cloud of dust was a long time settling. When he could breathe again he walked on slowly through the woods, staying a few yards in from the road.

  Around a leisurely bend he saw a large clearing and the glimmer of a lake through trees. Campground, on a little bluff above the lake. More cars, boats and trailers, mobile homes. A few tents pitched beneath tall trees. There was also a wooden building with a long roofed porch, two flagpoles in front. He heard a radio and smelled bacon sizzling on a grill. Three children were playing with what appeared to be a dinner plate, throwing it back and forth. He hadn't seen anything like it on television. The children were adept at their game. The yellow plate soared as if it weighed almost nothing, dipped, skimmed along inches from the ground.

  There was another dog on the campground, big as a wolf. It was called a Rin-Tin-Tin, he knew that from one of his favorite television shows. The Rin-Tin-Tin was on a chain, chewing a bone. Arne was far enough away across the campground so the dog couldn't be aware of him.

  A gray-haired woman in plaid slacks served up bacon and slices of ham from the grill and called the children to breakfast. Arne held his shrunken stomach, soured from fruit, and looked around. There were several wooden signposts with symbols and letters burned into them. Arrows pointed in different directions. Arne could read very well, a fact which he had scrupulously kept from the administrators of the Place. He had finished third grade when his formal schooling suddenly ended, but nearly fifty years later, he slowly improved on his long-neglected skill with the help of television sets installed in the patients' lounges.

  His lips moved. He sounded out the simplest words. The hairs on the back of his sunburnt neck prickled. At last he knew where he was.

  Dante's Mill State Park

  Birdsong trickled through the woods. A child laughed, the radio played a country song. A car and trailer drove past him out of the campground. He saw a red squirrel on a chinquapin limb, tail shivering. He saw a whirligig of butterflies in a hot flash of sun. He saw an arrow on a saw-toothed sign beside the road, pointing the way he must go.

  Across the road on the tent ground a boy and girl wearing identical khaki shorts and tank tops left their tent. Towels around their necks, they strolled toward the bath house.

  When they were out of sight he walked across the road and into the trees, hearing the radio they'd left playing in their tent. No one else was camped nearby.

  When he glanced into the tent he could see the portable radio on a little folding stool. He was dismally afraid. But he must have the radio; it was more vital to him than food. Although he would never do what she wanted him to do, he had to hear his mother's voice again.

  Nobody was looking; nobody knew or cared that he was there. Arne reached a long arm into the tent and stole the radio. It was heavier than he'd thought it would be, and he almost dropped it. Also there were so many buttons and knobs he couldn't figure out how to turn down the volume; this panicked him. If they came back soon and found their radio missing, they'd be able to follow him through the woods. He couldn't walk fast enough to get away. The young man was muscular and would probably beat him. Arne stood behind a tree frantically working the dials, and although he couldn't turn it off, he succeeded in silencing the radio between stations. Then he unbuttoned his shirt and held the radio against his chest, pulled his shirt over it, and retreated to the woods across the road.

  The theft, his mental anguish, his panicky getaway, took a severe toll. Out of sight of the campground, he couldn't walk another step. Clutching the radio, which was staticky but not loud, he found concealment in a rhododendron thicket. Woodpeckers hammered at a dead tree nearby. He held the radio in his lap and stared at it, longing for the sound of her voice. If she had spoken to him while he was in the bedroom at Enid's house, why wouldn't she speak to him now? The sun rose, his mind wandered. After three or four hours the batteries in the portable radio went dead. Arne's head slumped in a stupor. The muscles of his outstretched legs and arms jumped erratically. His eyes were half-open, but he had lost touch with his surroundings again. His mind was elsewhere in time.

  (Arne, get up! We're going now.

  (Sluggish from sleep, gasping at the pain from his bitten tongue, Arne looks up. The fire is low, the moon is down; daybreak, the angel-eyed watchers gone, and his father has risen. At that moment of preternatural consciousness Arne can smell fear and death as plainly as any animal.

  (He shakes his head vehemently.

  (I need you, Arne. Can't manage without your help. Pick up that bundle of vine and—

  (Arne opens his jaws in a silent scream. Tracks of dried blood down either side of his chin. He shudders as his father drops on one knee beside him. Tears. Big Enoch wets the fingertips of his remaining hand in the water of his fiery eyes and attempts to erase some of the old blood, stroking, soothing the boy.

  (But we got to do it! It's for her sake as much as ours, can't you understand?

  (Shaking his head again, crying, too.

  (Come on. While we're walking, I'll tell you why. Tell you everything she done—and what she done to me. What she'll try to do to you, if you give her the chance. There ain't a choice in the matter, Arne. Believe me. I wanted it different, but no—just ain't no hope for her now.)

  August, 1906:

  Big Enoch's Tale

  'Of course she'd had the coughing sickness, so that accounted for a part of it, I mean that Birka was strange to me even after she got most of her strength back. Now I never suspected that she'd been touched by an unclean, an accursed Spirit. What call did I have to believe she'd been deceived in her heart and couldn't love me? I'm sorry I was brought up as ignorant of the Bible as I am, but it's too late to be sorry. Well, you know your verses pretty good, Birka did see to that. I know it says in the Good Book somewheres there is Deceivers that will rise up and preach a different gospel, there is Deceivers will make you believe their torment is another kind of Paradise. Anybody that's looked into his eyes, I'm telling you now of him who turned her, Theron is his name, anybody that's seen him in the flesh and knowed the power of his unclean Spirit, then they know his other name is Torment."

  (Saying this to the boy, his voice rough and low; they have traveled less than half a mile from their last campsite and already Big Enoch's footsteps are ponderous, dragging; he stumbled through the woods as Arne tries to steady him, keep him from falling. But Arne is laden with all of their gear, the handax, the awkward bundle of strangler fig, and the going is treacherous for him, too. Breakfast was meager, and he could not chew for the swollen, excruciating bulk of his macerated tongue. His thirst is enormous, but tears continue to course down his cheeks. When they must stop to rest and his father's eyes close, his head droops, Arne prods him desperately to keep him awake, and talking. He is shocked by the heat of his father's skin, by the fact that Big Enoch has wet his pants and doesn't seem to know it.)

  "Well, she took to talking in her sleep, and it was that other language that she knowed, which I understand a word or two of, but that's all. She never taught it to me. I only heard the language spoke those two weeks I was up there in Maine State for us to get married. That were in Zipporah, Maine. Twenty-six miles from Portland, where my brother was there in the hospital just lingering on after he was burnt so bad in the ferryboat accident. Anyway she'd talk in her sleep, which I heard her do, maybe it was three or four nights in a row before she took to getting up and going outdoors, what I reckont was she had a problem for which she needed to use the privy. But she didn't
come back, and she didn't come back. I'm a sound sleeper with Birka beside me, but when the other half the bed's empty, it be enough to bother me. That second night she were gone so long, I followed her. The privy was empty, but the barn door was standing open. And she were in there in the dark, talking a blue streak, just a-talking her own language to that damned crate! I'm telling you, the hairs stood out like porcupine quills on the back of my neck. When I called her she wouldn't come, and when I went to drag her out of there she fought me like the devil."

  (The boy shuddering at this image of violence between the two people he loves most dearly; he looks at the putrefying marks on Big Enoch's cheek, then touches the decomposed flesh. Big Enoch lurches, howls, throws Arne onto his back with a sweep of his right arm and gets to his feet. He trudges on, muttering to himself, without looking back. It is no trouble for Arne to catch up to him. But he follows behind his father, afraid of both his strength and his pain—afraid that each step Big Enoch takes will be his last. A horse, a mule in his sad condition would lie down, refuse to budge.)

  "Before I could get her on into the house, she fainted on me. Carried her to our bed and laid her down. Had 'nother thought, and tied her up so she couldn't leave the room. Because her eyes was open by then, and glaring at me. All she would talk was that language. I knowed she was a-cursing me, even if I couldn't understand exactly. If I'd let that go on, she would have waked you for sure. So I bound up her mouth and hoped she wouldn't choke on her tongue. Once I done that, well, it wasn't like she fainted again because her eyes never closed, she just lied there so still and, oh God, I never did see her again in her right mind! You'll forgive me for doing it, won't you, Arne? Tying up your poor mama thataway? Because I swear to you, warn't no other—you forgive me, don't you?" (Enoch's strong right hand on Ames shoulder, squeezing, too close to his throat, and the boy is nearly convulsed. The stump of his father's wrist almost in his face, he can smell it, the vile blackness, the bone-deep rottenness the cautery couldn't reach; he is sick to his stomach. His father releases him and he goes down in a crouch at Enoch's feet, trembling, unable to look up, hearing:)