by John Farris
He and Tilghman went in through the kitchen. There was a small dining room, a front parlor, two bedrooms, and an indoor bathroom. Traces of footprints on the flowery parlor carpet, up and down the polished oak floor of the center hall. A wardrobe door stood open in one of the bedrooms. There were no closets, only cupboards and chests. No one was concealed, or lying dead, under either of the walnut beds. Nothing appeared to be disturbed. All of the windows were closed; the front door was still padlocked, from the outside. Tilghman shook it to be sure.
"They came in; then where'd they go?"
"What's underneath?" Ted asked.
"There's a fruit cellar. Trap door in the kitchen floor."
"Okay." They returned to the kitchen. Ted motioned to Enid on the porch, and shook his head as she came inside.
"Where can she be?"
The kitchen table had been pushed up against the stove, a black iron brute. Tilghman held his light on the ringbolt of the trap door and Ted lifted it slowly on creaking hinges. A short flight of steps went down into musty blackness, to a dirt floor crossed and recrossed. The footprints were more distinct, easier to read then those left on the back porch.
"That one there," Tilghman said, moving the beam of the flashlight slowly, "looks to me like a woman's print, or maybe it's a man with an uncommonly delicate foot. Those are the prints of a child, I'd say. And the others, looks like a man wearing shoes or dress boots." He nodded for emphasis, enjoying his detective work. It beat checking fishing licenses and campground permits.
"We didn't see any shoe prints on the porch," Ted pointed out.
"That's true. Maybe somebody was waiting on them, here in the parsonage."
"Oh, God, what is going on?" Enid moaned.
A car went by quickly in the road, with a signature splash of red lights against the side kitchen window. Ted looked up, frowning, then again at the cellar.
"I'll have a look," he said, and started down the steep unrailed wooden steps.
"Ted-!"
"Nobody's here now, we'd of heard something. I just want to get some idea of where they all went."
"Could those bare prints be your sister's?" Tilghman asked Enid.
"Oh, I don't think so. Marjory's foot is bigger than that. Like mine. We both have daddy's feet, unfortunately. Not much arch, and—"
"What made you so positive outside that she's been here?"
"A feeling," Enid said vaguely. "Mr. Tilghman, could I—I just want to have a look around the house myself."
"We already made a thorough search." Enid just stared at him; she had to see for herself the house was empty, except for them. "Sure, go ahead," Tilghman said sympathetically. "Take my flashlight." Tilghman returned his attention to the fruit cellar, which glowed from the light of Ted's torch. "You okay down there, Deputy?"
"A lot of loose rock's been moved, and there's a cave entrance. I'd bet that's what it is."
"You don't say! I rnust've been in this house a hundred times, but I never knowed there was anything down in that cellar. Maybe it's part of the same cave you located behind the waterfall."
"Like I said, there was a pile of rock in the way. Some chunks too big for me to tote without throwing my back out. But that's where they went. They had a rope with them, and it's at the bottom of this shaft."
"A mine shaft?"
"I don't know. Doesn't look dug out. Probably it's a natural shaft, or chimney is what I think they call them. My guess is it's about sixty feet. A hell of a climb down there in the dark."
"What are you aiming to do?"
"Carry any rope in your car?"
"Tow chain, but there ain't no sixty feet of it."
"I better think of something else, then."
Enid called loudly, almost hysterically, "Tedddd!"
Ted came scrambling up the rickety steps on all fours and followed Tilghman to the room where Enid kneeled beside a cedar chest at the foot of the high bed. She had uncovered some damp clothing—a short-sleeved shirt with Marjory's monogram on the pocket, and walk shorts—and a pair of filthy, wet sneakers. She cradled a sneaker as if it were an abandoned child.
"Oh, no. Oh, no."
"Marjory's things?" Ted picked up the other sneaker. "Are you absolutely—"
"Yes! They were at the bottom of this chest. Somebody hid them here! Why?"
"Honey . . . listen, Enid—"
"If she's not walking around naked, then maybe they—they've—"
Ted had already looked for bloodstains; didn't see any. "Don't go jumping to conclusions."
Enid jumped at him instead. "We've got to do something! Find! Marjory!" He was impassive a moment too long, thinking, and Enid hit another conclusion head-on, at two hundred miles an hour. She twisted violently in his arms. "You found her! In the cellar! They put Marjory in the—”
"No. She's not dead. I'm not lying." Enid slumped. Her eyes dropped, her mouth trembled. She raked her lower lip with her teeth, and two tears fell.
"I think she's all right. I do. Wet clothes, Enid. Sure! Marj was out in the rain, we know that. So she had to change. Probably borrowed some of the things that were in this cedar chest."
Enid looked up, gazing abstractedly, eyes swimming. "You think?"
"I found out where they went. There's a cave. I don't know what's down there, but I'm going after them right now."
Tilghman said, "Don't know that I'd go alone, if I was you. Caves is plenty treacherous, in my experience."
"Get me that tow chain," Ted asked him. "And anything else you might have in your car that would come in handy."
36
Smidge said from behind the closed door of the office at park headquarters, "Don't come in. I don't want anybody to look at me except a doctor. When's the doctor coming? Did somebody call me a doctor? My hair's falling out. I'm—"
Her voice, already thick with grief and phlegm, ended in a choking sound; she coughed and strangled.
A portly man in an undershirt and Bermuda shorts, one of many campers aroused by Rita Sue Marcum minutes before, knocked on the door and then tried to open it. The door wasn't locked, but Smidge had barricaded it, probably with the park superintendent's desk.
"Miss, I'm not a doctor, but my wife's a registered nurse and she can help if you'll—”
His wife, wearing a plaid bathrobe and hair curlers like rolls of baling wire, said encouragingly, "Just open the door, hon, and let me have a look at you. It's probably something you ate."
Smidge was vomiting, gasping for breath between spasms.
In a corner of the lodge Rita Sue's pert face twisted and she said to Boyce, "I'm gonna throw up, too! I can't help it. When I hear somebody being sick I get sick."
They heard a siren. Boyce said, "Maybe that's the ambulance."
Someone near the door spoke up. "It's the Highway Patrol. Two of 'em. But they ain't stopping here."
Smidge continued to retch horridly. Rita Sue's face was enflamed, but her blue eyes were so washed out they looked colorless. "Walk outside with me, Boyce, I'm going to heave. Then you better take me straight home."
The portly man and his wife both knocked on the office door. "She sounds real sick," the woman murmured.
"Wonder if we should try to knock this door down," he said. "But I hate to take that responsibility on myself. They could get me for destroying state property."
Smidge moaned.
"'Scuse us," Boyce said, walking Rita Sue through the crowd at the entrance and outside to the porch. Rita Sue hobbled meekly in his grip, holding her stomach.
"Rita Suuue! Where are you?"
Rita Sue paused and looked around, alarmed, a hand going to her mouth.
"Rita Suuue! Don't leave me!"
"Oh God," Rita Sue muttered, digging her nails into Boyce's wrist. "Get me out of—"
The office door suddenly flew to pieces, as if dynamited, and the woman in the plaid housecoat screamed as she was flung backward to the floor. Her husband staggered and tripped over his own feet, hands groping a face stuck full of
splinters.
Smidge came flying off the desk jammed up against the shattered door like a projectile from a circus cannon—half clown, with a naked skull and huge encircled eyes and a vivid red mouth, half-battered carcass of something foul and unidentifiable. There was no smoke, only a fine spray of blood from Smidge's throat as she howled and tumbled across the body of the prostrate woman. An assaultive odor accompanied her, expanding like a cloud of thick coal smoke to fill the large room.
On all fours, the Smidge-thing was nearly motionless for a few moments, searching for Rita Sue. The nose drained, the ears ran blood and brain fluids, her bare scalp literally crawled, as if there were frantic worms beneath the skin, which had turned all shades of bruises from pale green to deep purple. Her arms, like Popeye's, were deformed. The fingers of the left hand resembled a leper's: clubby, stubby, decaying. On the right hand there were no fingers at all, but sprouted, spike-hard thorns. She had destroyed the door with one swipe of this hand; now she gouged the solid floor, routing it by the handful like a cat trying to cover up its droppings.
"Rita Suuue!"
One eye bulged hugely in the blotched, thunderously discolored face; it appeared to zoom in on the cowering Rita Sue. Then, alight with anguish, it exploded with a soft plopping sound and drained like a slow jelly tear from the socket. Smidge stopped digging up the floor and made for the door, wobbling like a baby on inefficient appendages, with a slathered-on smile for the object of her desire.
A sound went around the room as people shrank from the dismal sight; not a concerted scream but the kind of stressful moan one hears from sleepers locked in a nightmare.
"Not like . . . others," she gasped: protesting, denying. "Can't make me . . . one of them. I won't. Nononono. Just get me . . . doctor. Huh? Need a shot. Sleep. Be all right. . . in the morning. But stay . . . stay with me, Rita Sue. I need you . . . Precious."
Smidge was having locomotion problems as she crawled through the doorway; no one limb of her body cooperated with another. A hand wanted to claw; a leg wanted to kick ferociously. There was a froth of lung tissue on her swollen lips. She coughed and sobbed. Parts of her skin were bubbling like thick mud in a thermal spring. The stench had more shock value than her grievously misshapen and untidy appearance; the porch emptied of all but a few of the more rigidly fascinated.
"Precccioussss," Smidge hissed adoringly, lifting the needle-tipped hand that could go through hardwood like a spinning mill saw. Rita Sue was pressed against the sturdy railing of the porch as if welded there, pale knees resembling little globes of fruit and well within reach. On Smidge's cheek the flesh erupted like a sunspot, widened smilingly.
Boyce, holding on to Rita Sue with one hand, pivoted in grinding pain on his injured foot, reached out with his other hand and seized a golf putter from the hand of a camper who had been slowly backing up out of Smidge's way. He swung the putter up and back and got all of his shoulder and plenty of wrist into the downward stroke. The blunt end of the putter hit Smidge dead-center in the forehead and disappeared up to the shaft. There was an implosion, of sorts: everything just caved in except for Smidge's intact eye, which was fixed on him. All else about her was freakish and awful except for that one sane, normal, sweetly reproachful eye. Nobody else did anything or said anything except Rita Sue, who started bawling. Boyce stood there holding the wrapped handle of the putter, unable to let go or as if willing to believe he'd killed her; he held Smidge like a gaffed fish with the strength of his arm until his lips began to get numb and twittery and he felt like he was a thousand miles away from there, yawning and wanting to go to sleep.
37
Marjory was concentrating on the last stubborn knot of the dried vine around the dark and wizened throat of the mummy, thinking all the while that it was Birka's childhood friend Páll who was lying there so still and making her uneasy (what a dumb game, everybody tied up like this), when she heard something that made her jump.
"Marjory. No. Don't. Get away from it."
His voice low and hoarse, sounding funny, but she thought she recognized—
As she turned for a look over her shoulder all she saw was Alastor, hanging from a wall with a big grin showing in the light of Duane's flash light. Then Alastor detached himself and kicked away like a swimmer and went almost straight down, plunging on top of Duane. By her side Birka said sharply, "Get rid of him!"
There was a violent, nearly silent scuffle in billowing silk, the flashlight beam muffled, vanishing, reappearing as Duane rolled over and over trying to fight Alastor off. Moths were everywhere, in a light-storm frenzy. Marjory, astonished, glanced at Birka.
"Who's—”
"It doesn't matter, they're only playing." Duane cursed and Alastor squealed, from the fun of it and not from pain. He could never feel pain, even when Duane hit him twice in the head with his fist. In turn Alastor drew blood pointedly, from an earlobe, a shoulder, Duane's breast above the heart, but missed the vital spots he was instinctively intent on penetrating: either eye, the back of the neck, the depths of an armpit.
"I want to go home," Marjory complained. "I'm tired."
"Not yet. Not yet. Look, it's almost finished. The knot, the knot, Marjory."
"Oh, all right," Marjory said crossly, kneeling again to her task, picking with cold fingers at the last knot, her vision a little blurry.
"Marjory!" Duane gasped, but she ignored him. She hated being around boys when they were acting like roughnecks. If only she had fingernails, the knot would be easy. Why couldn't she stop biting her nails? There. It was coming. There, it was off. Wake up, Páll. Stop the silly—
Alastor, squealing loud as a rat, came flying into the middle of the cocoon as moths scattered, leaving random little comet trails in the air.
Next to Marjory, the long mummy began to squirm like eels feeding in ink, startling her, filling her with dread.
"Birka?"
Birka went slowly to her knees at the mummy's head, hands poised above the closed but twitching eyes, a look of rapture on her face.
"Oh, shit," Duane said, looking down over Marjory's shoulder at the mummy. She looked back again just as he reached out with a blood-stippled arm and snatched her to her feet. Duane almost wrenched her arm out of her socket; it hurt, and Marjory burst into tears.
"Stop!"
"Come on, Marjory!"
The mummy began thrashing horridly against her legs and Marjory backed away, staring at it with her mouth open. Staring at Birka, seeing her. Seeing all the horror at once as Duane got a better grip on her and hauled her through the clinging silk. Marjory wailed.
Duane took the nearest exit with Marjory, not knowing or caring, for the moment, if that was the way he'd come in. Marjory, on instinct, kept up with him. But, unfortunately, the passage he chose seemed to be narrowing too abruptly, he was forced almost into a crouch. He couldn't speak; each breath was like a sob. And Marjory, bumping awkwardly along in tow behind him, just wouldn't stop her high-pitched wailing.
Duane wormed his way around a bend where a drip of water hit him in the face. He stopped, breathing through his mouth, and aimed his flashlight, which bounced off a water-smooth, precipitously steep surface: the end of their passage.
"What's that?" Marjory gasped over his shoulder.
"Water slide."
"Where's . . . it go?"
"I don't know!"
"Don't . . . yell in my ear."
"Sorry."
"Duane."
"What."
She rested against his back, breast heaving. "Who were . . . those?"
"Don't know."
"Well . . . do you have any idea where we—"
"No."
"Excuse me," Marjory said. She turned away and retched, although nothing much came up.
Duane's fingertips were coming back to life after being half-frozen; they stung like hell. Fighting with Alastor had been like wrestling a chunk of dry ice. He glanced at Marjory; her head was hanging, her mouth open as her throat worked convulsively. When
she got it under control Duane said, "Let me have one of those shoes."
"Okay. Duane—"
"Just don't ask me anything right now, I told you before I don't know!"
He took the shoe she handed him and crept forward toward the slab of rock on which water fell in a ribbony stream and drained into darkness. He pitched the shoe and tried to follow it with the beam of the light. After the shoe disappeared he counted slowly: two, three, four thousand—and heard a remote splash.
"That's it," he said. "Let's go. You hold on to my waist."
"Duane—we don't know what's down there!"
"Well, we can't go back."
"Why?"
They heard Alastor laughing in the dark; Duane trembled. He pointed the flashlight and turned her head with his other hand. They saw Alastor's baby face. He was crouched on all fours a little distance behind them, grinning. Just waiting.
38
Ted Lufford rappeled down the shaft beneath the Dante's Mill parsonage and Wingo County Deputy Wayne Buck Vedders followed him. Ranger Tilghman had opened the mercantile store for them, and they were well equipped, although the rope which the store had stocked in 1906, the year the people of Dante's Mill vanished overnight, was too thick and heavy for efficiently exploring caves. The best thing they had was two cans of fluorescent spray paint from the trunk of Tilghman's car, and a dozen flares to augment their flashlights. Between them they carried axes, a pickax, and shovels. Both men had brought their revolvers.
"What now?" Vedders said, when his feet were on solid ground. He'd had a rough descent, twisting and banging against the sides of the shaft. He didn't like heights. He wasn't crazy about caves, either. When he was eight years old a friend of his had been bitten by a bat, necessitating a painful course of rabies vaccine.
"We'll try to keep up with their tracks. You blaze a trail with those aerosol cans so we don't wind up enjoying our old age down here."
"Lufford!"
"What?"
Vedders had his nickel-finish Smith in his hand, hammer cocked. "Saw something fluttering around over there. Man, I have to tell you, I can't tolerate bats. I'll take a nigger with a razor any day."