by John Farris
"Marjory," Puff said, still hanging on to her arm, "don't be a poop. Actually I think this is kind of fun."
"Here, take the flashlight," Marjory said, and she worked her way betweens Duane and the wall an inch at a time. She didn't feel anything like toothpaste; she felt overblown in these close spaces, hippo-dumpy. Their downward progress had been slow to this point; they couldn't have come far, she was sure of that.
Their faces were almost together; they exchanged breath like oxygen-starved divers. She wanted to rest on Duane, like a featherbed. Dream a little dream, awaken to trees and rain. But she would have to earn her way out of this unenchanting place. Suddenly Marjory had the hiccups, and Duane started laughing. Marjory popped free of him, feeling vaguely humiliated but giddy herself.
Duane said, "You and Puff could wait here. I just want to take a quick look a little farther down the bend. I hear water dripping; that might mean a big cavern."
"Uh-uh, I'm going with you," Puff said.
"Marjory?"
"No, I've—hup!—h-had it."
"Five minutes, Marjory. Sure you'll be okay?"
"Yes. It's just—hup!—up there." She took deep breaths. Duane's hand found her shoulder, squeezing. "I'm okay," she insisted. "No, actually, mick! make that a little panicky. But I promise I won't 1-lose it."
Puff said tolerantly, "I lost it when I was eleven and a half years old."
"I'll ,bet that stung, but it's not what we're t-talking ahup! about."
"Thanks for the flashlight. Holler if you need help."
"Helllllp," Marjory said, squealing like a mouse, and they both got a laugh out of that. The laughter was distorted in a way that sounded ominous to Marjory, who found no bliss in inky darkness. She feasted on the beam of the flashlight as Duane turned himself and Puff the other way. Then she started up the passage, fingernails scraping rock and veins of crystal, vision smothering in her eye, the suppressed hiccups burning in her throat, erupting spasmodically despite her best efforts at control. Weary of walls, of darkness, unable to see anything of herself, fingernails dragging but failing to strike a spark. After a few seconds she thought she detected the mild glow of the chamber they had recently left. This cheered her considerably. She heard Puff and Duane conversing, she heard all the nuances of their passage deeper into the cavern. When she looked back she saw only the momentary glow of the flashlight beam reflected from a cloudy aggregate of quartz. Faint as fireflies. Puff was still rattling on about retrieving her radio. Puff, Marjory thought, was demented, but she was most concerned about Duane. At least his interest in exploring further was understandable. He'd been in caves before, and had no fear of them. Maybe Puff wouldn't be able to talk him into something foolish or dangerous.
Marjory kept going, slowly, looking down at her feet as if she could see them. Looking up again, at nothing. It was one of those rare times when she felt used up, devoid of energy. Almost sleepy. Duane and Puff had stopped talking. Marjory heard instead the flowing of the waterfall beside the mill. She knew she was going the right way . . . but there was only one way she could go. Wasn't there? The hiccups continued. Marjory stopped a couple of times and rubbed her eyes, which felt dry and smarted. After rubbing she saw flashes, trifling visions, like outtakes from forgotten dreams. But any light, even false light provided by the optic nerves, mysterious impulses of the brain, was welcome.
Marjory fetched up a massive shudder, then trembled almost continuously as the muscles of the body twitched furiously to keep her warm. Her mind was wandering. It seemed to her she was heading down again, not up; but that couldn't be possible. How much longer? The waterfall was louder, she had to be dead on course. She didn't recall hearing it so loud before. But all sounds were magnified down here, and maybe a mild but persistent anxiety had sharpened her senses. Marjory shivered and yawned. Then her head jerked up with a start and she bumped, hard, against a wall of the passage. Dozing on her feet? She yearned for the spit and fury of the sun. Marjory was not an underground person—if ever there'd been a doubt. When she died she was not going to be buried. Put that in her last will and testament. Great-aunt Lillie Day Wingo had insisted on a funeral pyre in her will. But she'd been one of the more conspicuous loonies in the family. Aunt Lillie Day. Hard-boiled as a hanging judge. Buried three husbands. And two of them were just napping. Ha-ha, where had she heard that joke, on Laugh-in?
Much lighter up ahead. The waterfall pouring in her ears. Almost like daybreak, with little flecks of nearly transparent birds wheeling in a slate-gray sky. Enormous. Thunder. It was, God, had to be, the hoped-for waterfall; but it had never sounded like that. She felt a draft in her face, a freshet of depths and secret places with no end to their astounding darkness.
Oh no. Please. I'm not. I can't be! I can't be lost!
That was when she saw it, not too far away, drifting so high she had to raise her eyes, the thing illuminated by many moths clinging like shroud cloth but with an excited flutter of all-over wings. Svelte, gleaming, but with a gruesome head, nearly featureless, knobby as a ball of tar. The eyes electric red, as startling as an exhibit in a carnival's chamber of horrors.
The vision cured Marjory's hiccups on the spot. But she peed down both legs.
9
When Rita Sue had her breath back she lifted her damp blond head from Boyce's shoulder and said deliberately, "Boyce, if you ever say a word to any body about this, I mean if you let on to a living soul, what I'll do is I'll get daddy's shotgun out and blow the ears off you, son."
"I won't say anything. I love you, Rita Sue."
"I love you, too." It was darker in the cove of Dante's Mill State Park where they'd found privacy; either the sun was setting or it would rain soon. Marjory's radio played beside them in the backseat. Rita Sue's bare bottom was still molded to his lap. She couldn't, and didn't, move. "Don't be putting your hands where it's all sunburnt. My lip's swollen. You must've bit it. I am going to be such a mess in the morning." Now she moved, experimentally. "You like me doing this?"
Boyce took a deep breath and said, "Yeh, just like what you were doing before. It don't hurt you none?"
"There was just a little hurt at first. It wasn't as big as I thought it was going to be. It's still like a hot dog, only without the bun."
"Well, the only thing small about me is my pecker. My daddy's got a little one too, I reckon it runs in the . . . uh, Jesus! The family."
"I like it just fine," Rita Sue assured him, running her fingers through his strawberry-blond hair. "Reckon it's going to stay like this all the time now?" she teased.
"Only when I'm with you, sugarpie."
"That better be the whole truth and nothing but. Tell me how it feels, now."
"Oh. Rita Sue! It feels so fine."
"Maybe you just better . . . hurry. Because I think I'm way ahead . . . of you, hon."
Wind rushed through the trees outside, turning the leaves silver. Rain spattered down on the convertible top of the Ford Fairlane.
"Boyce!"
"Huh."
"Say the F word to me again while we're doing it."
10
What was it she saw, or thought she saw?
Nothing less than Arne Horsfall, stealing a nigger's mummy.
And what seemed to be a billion luna moths fluttering luminously within this deep cavern of fluted, hollowed limestone, following him like the tail of a comet through interstellar space. Remarkable. He had to be at least a hundred yards from Marjory, and climbing, carrying the thing in his two arms, but she recognized him: there was no mistaking Arne Horsfall, she could never forget him.
Through a deep cleft in a wall what amounted to a river poured twenty feet or more to a churning pool in the floor of the cavern, and this was the waterfall she'd heard, while thinking it was the spillway of the millpond. There was no telling how she had so easily lost track of where she was going, but she was lost, all right.
But not frightened so much any more, even of the lightshow moths: they came close to her, eyespots like
drops of blood, stirring the air with delicate wingbeats. The adrenaline surging in her body seemed to produce a wave of heat, a field of energy that kept them from clinging to her the way they shrouded the red-eyed mummy Arne had in his arms. So after twenty seconds Marjory was able to breathe without screaming, and as for flooding herself, she'd needed to go anyway and it didn't matter, because sooner or later, before she got out of there, she was going to take another cold shower.
Arne was moving very slowly as he climbed through what amounted to a limestone beehive, solid rock carved as intricately as a Chinese puzzle box by the action of water that dripped and flowed apart from the fuming torrent of the underground river. As Marjory watched him, he almost lost his balance; the eyes of the black moon glowed furiously for a few moments and Marjory heard a scream of outrage that made her cringe.
She heard—
But that was impossible; the roar of water pouring into the cavern was too loud. She couldn't hear anything like a scream because she knew good and well no one would hear her, even if she let go at full lung power.
Without thinking, she did it, took a deep breath and hollered until her throat ached. She couldn't even hear herself. Arne Horsfall failed to react. He stumbled on in the midst of a cloud of glowing moths that turned his skin a vivid lime-green shade. Some aperture in the beehive afforded him passage, and he disappeared, although a seething afterglow remained.
What turned them on? Marjory wondered, but she didn't stand there thinking about the luna moths. Maybe Arne knew where he was going, and the chances were fifty-fifty he was headed out. Better to follow him, and the trailing moths, than to blunder around on her own and eventually get so lost no one would ever find her.
The rush of adrenaline had receded, and she was shaking again. There was a way to cross the cavern above the river: haphazardly slanted flow-stone ledges, like stairsteps through transparent, hanging formations that looked as delicate as wind chimes: they actually moved in the drifts of spray from the falls. The steps looked forbidding, treacherous. As long as she could see where she was going, okay. What if the moths suddenly left, drawn off like smoke through some small passage she could barely get a fist into? Or else died—just like that. One timid glow after another, fading into darkness. Marjory had a fleeting impression of herself welded in fear to some high pinnacle, unable to see, to move, until her bones were indistinguishable from the spiny limestone. A hundred years from now, jus) ;i quaint photograph on the wall of one of Enid's great-grandchildren.
If nothing happened to Enid, that is.
Why should she suddenly be more worried about Enid than herself? Marjory was the one who had to go poking around holes in the ground; Marjory was the dummy, not Enid!
But it was Enid who had brought Arne Horsfall home from the asylum; that had been the start of all their troubles, and the end was not in sight.
Not as long as he lived.
This thought got Marjory moving, and fast: no longer afraid for herself, but perilously concerned about her sister, about something that was going to happen, and soon, to the unsuspecting Enid, if Marjory didn't keep track of Arne Horsfall. If she didn't—couldn't—
Stop him.
11
"What are those things?" Puff said, behind Duane's back. She was holding his left hand, squeezing it nervously. He had Marjory's flashlight in the other hand and was slowly playing the beam around the walls of the chamber they'd entered. "Some kind of bat? I'm not going another step if they're bats."
"Luna moths," Duane said. "Giant silks. These are the biggest ones I've ever seen. Take it easy, Puff." She was digging her nails into the heel of his palm.
"Sorry. Do they live down here?"
"I don't know how. The adults don't feed, but they lay their eggs on tree leaves so the larvae have something to eat after they pupate. Puff, close your eyes a minute."
"Put your arm around me first."
"Puff, get serious. I'm going to turn the flashlight off, that's all."
"Are you sure that's all?"
"I just want to see something."
"Okay. Tight shut." She also had a tighter grip on his hand. "No tricks. I hate when people play tricks on me. I go bananas. Are your eyes shut?"
"Yeah."
"Duane, tell me something. How old are you?"
"Sixteen."
"Wow. I could've sworn you were older! You act older. Most of the guys I've met up with lately, they're twenty-five going on twelve, if you get what I mean. You must still be in high school."
"Yeah. I'll be a junior."
"Wow. Well, I guess it doesn't matter, if you're attracted to somebody. I mean, you're old enough. You've probably got it on with a couple of girls already, haven't you? I was wondering if you and Marjory—"
"You can open your eyes now."
"Uh-uhhh, you have to kiss the sleeping princess before she'll open her eyes! I used to play that game with daddy." She put a hand to her face, fingertips touching her forehead; sullenness and pain showed through the partial mask. "Of course it was only princess time when he wanted to cop a feel. When he needed his boots polished, I was 'Corporal Puff.'" Eyelids twitching, she lowered her hand and grazed Duane's forearms. "You've got goosebumps. Did I give you—my God!"
"They glow in the dark. I've never seen anything like it. Moths must have been the source of light we had in the chamber back there—it passed through the rock crystal in the walls."
"This is so fucking beautiful! It's a fairyland. How many do you think—”
"No way to count them all. This chamber's maybe sixty feet across, forty feet high—"
"Cobwebs! All over, the floor's covered with—it looks like, you know, what do they call it, angel hair? Or maybe cotton candy—"
"I think it's silk. But not cobwebs. I don't see any moth larvae. That's amazing. The lunas must come back here after they pupate. Wait a second—"
"What do you see?" Puff asked nervously.
"I'm not sure." Duane went down on one knee and turned on his flashlight, carefully pulled apart a cloudlike mass of pale silken thread.
"Hey, there could be something under there, like spiders?"
"Spiders didn't spin this stuff." Duane held up what appeared to be a transparent twist of papery material, several inches long. He frowned. "Could be part of a cocoon, but—"
"You have such a beautiful back," Puff said, leaning over him and then on him, fingertips caressing the nape of his neck. "Did you ever think of letting your hair grow and wearing a ponytail? Men's ponytails are so sexy."
"A ponytail would get me stomped to death where I go to school. Could we just stop talking about sex?"
"Am I embarrassing you?" Puff teased.
"No." Duane folded the papery strip and carefully placed it in his damp shirt pocket. "As long as we're here, I'll just look around and see what else—”
"You're not going to walk through that hairy shit."
"Why not? It's only silk. But that's the weird part."
"What do you mean, weird?"
"Lunas aren't true silk moths. So I don't know where this stuff came from. Maybe somebody's been raising silkworms down here, where it's dry and cool and there aren't any predators. But they eat a ton of mulberry leaves, and I haven't seen even a piece of a leaf anywhere. Of course it may have been years ago . . ."
"Duane? Look!"
"What's the matter?"
"Where you were about to step!"
"Oh—yeah." He turned on the flashlight again, tracking damp depressions in the glossy, matted-down silk. "Right. Somebody was here. Not too long ago." He dipped a finger into a footprint. "Mud."
"The kook who stole my radio!"
"Probably." Duane looked as far as the beam of the flashlight would throw. "Went that way."
Puff lowered her voice to a whisper. "He might still be here."
"I don't think so. I think he was just passing through."
"Let's find out where he went!"
"Marjory's going to be wondering—" Duane
bit his lower lip. "Well-okay. Follow me."
"I wasn't thinking of going first. You're right. It's beautiful, but it's really—weird. Where did you say the silk came from?"
"Uh—silk moth larvae."
"Are you sure you didn't say 'worms'?"
"They aren't actually—"
"Oh, they just look like worms. If you see one, bud, you better let me know well in advance, because if I step on a fucking worm I am going to spend the rest of my life getting even with you."
"Come on if you're coming."
"How long do you think it took to make all this stuff?"
"Oh—one strand of silk can be more than a thousand yards long. But that's another thing: silkworms spin cocoons, sort of oval-shaped."
"Duane?"
"Yeah?"
"Well—when you look at it—this cave is, it's definitely, like oval-shaped."
"I guess so."
"So maybe—what we're walking through—is one big cocoon." Puff lurched against Duane suddenly, and they almost fell.
"Hey, watch your step."
"Sorry, I got hung up. The silk clings; it just grabbed my ankle and wouldn't let go."
"Step where I step."
"You know what, I feel like I'm tripping out. I am not shitting you, Duane boy. All those butterflies, the colors are fantastic—"
"They're luna moths."
"And this cocoon, or whatever it is. Like a big dreamboat of a bed. So soft. I always wanted a bed like this when I was a little girl. There aren't any worms, are there? We'd have seen some by now."
"No. I'm sure there aren't any worms. Haven't been any for—who knows how long this stuff has been here?" Duane felt a tug on his hand, halting him. He turned.
"Hi," Puff said, grinning. She had thrown her long hair back over her shoulders, exposing her breasts. There was excitement in her good eye; the other looked forlorn, a little weepy. Twins with radically different temperaments. Puff stood almost to her knees in billowy silk, shivering, pruny nipples erect.