Fiends

by John Farris

  Maybe he was out of earshot. Enid picked up the lantern and walked slowly toward the cleft in the piled rock. Just wide enough for the two men to have slipped through sideways. Enid, not going in, called again. This time she heard her echo, which made her uncomfortable. She listened, tense and disappointed as the echo died away without a response. Well, if it wasn't Ted, or the deputy, then it was nothing. Nothing human. Rats, bats, what else lived underground? Enid didn't want to know. She had never possessed much nervous energy. Her system was already on overload. She had a vision of something dark and feisty shrieking at her, getting tangled in her hair. She would just as soon die as go through an experience like that. Take me now, Lord, I don't have the strength, their mother used to say. Fear of loathsome flying objects was the major reason Enid had stayed close to the fruit cellar steps and away from the rocks during her vigil.

  "Ted? Is that you? Did you find Marjory? Ted, answer me!"

  Enid edged a little closer to the cave entrance, extending the lantern with its multiple halos of yellow flame, and saw the climbing rope, tied to spikes driven into the hard-packed cellar floor, move slightly, stretching tighter as if someone were on the other end, coming up. She reached out with her free hand and felt a faint vibration.

  Too heavy for a rat; if it was Ted or the other deputy, why—

  "Ted . . . please?" She gave up on Ted. "Who is it?"

  Enid glanced at the fruit cellar steps, but Ranger Tilghman didn't appear, and the voices above had faded; it was sepulchrally quiet in the cellar. The thick climbing rope shifted again under her hand. Enid's heart vibrated sympathetically. She moved a little closer to the shaft, going slowly to her knees for balance, then creeping near the brink, pushing the lantern ahead of her inches at a time, blood drumming in her temples. She filled the cleft between shaft and cellar like a cork in a bottle. Earlier she'd watched both men straining, working themselves sideways to force their bodies into the same space. Poor Ted, heavier since she'd met him, Marjory was just too good a cook—

  The metal base of the lantern scraped on stone as she pushed it to within a foot of the shaft. As far as she intended to go. The rope was quiet between her knees. She smelled something, an odor she hadn't been aware of before. Nothing she could be definite about, it was just. . . unclean. She was poised between fear of what might be there, and an intense desire to see what lay at the bottom of the shaft. Ted had warned her, just before starting his descent, not to try to follow, the shaft was deep. If Marjory had made it down, Enid thought, then she was, had to be, okay. Enid made sure of her grip on the lantern, almost belly down now as she wormed closer, her other hand on the rope. Fingers reaching the point where the rope made a right angle and disappeared over the edge.

  A grubby set of childish fingers, stunningly cold, slid up the rope and closed on her hand.

  Enid reacted as if she'd reached into a wolf trap, trying to jerk free, shrieking in horror. She almost lost the lantern in the shaft. The bleak white gunshot face of little Alastor bobbed into the light, his mouth open wide as if he were screaming, too; but no sound came from his airless lungs. Enid, heaving backward, swung the lantern, breaking it on the earless side of his head. Still he clung to her, coming up, coming out of the shaft with a bowlegged bound as Enid scrambled backward on torn knees into the fruit cellar.

  The lantern flame was snuffed out. Still in the hard grip of Alastor's small hand, Enid beat on him in a frenzy with the remnants of the lamp, soaking them both in dashed kerosene. Her right hand, her wrist, burning from cold. His right hand flailing, she was stabbed on forehead and cheek, low on the side of her neck, but, anesthetized by fright, she felt nothing. They rolled together, pummeling each other, Enid screaming until she choked on the old and evil-tasting dirt.

  The darkness of the dust-filled cellar was pierced by flashlight beams, she heard men shouting. Suddenly she was released by the naked boy, he seemed to fly away from her body, a leap that took him nearly as high as the cellar roof. He came down in a crouch in front of the gang of men, right hand up, blazing in their lights, then jumped into the midst of them. Someone was slashed as if by a razor and reeled from the pack, spurting blood from a torn wrist. Enid saw a revolver in another man's hand. Flashlight beams crossed through the haze, searching like lighthouse beacons; a beam nearly blinded her just as she glimpsed Alastor on the steps. The cheeks of his behind, thin little wings of shoulder blades, the human crease of backbone . . . and the head, so hideous, like a gargoyle's. She had a glimpse, no more. He was up the steps in another bound, knocking a man off balance, pitching him sideways to the cellar floor.

  Enid tasted kerosene, and retched. It was one antidote to frenzy. She was on her knees with her head low; as blood flowed back into her face she felt wasp-stung. Revulsion, weakness, she was beginning to tremble violently when two men lifted her.

  Their voices, just babble to her ears. More men crowding down into the cellar. Bitter dust everywhere, in her eyes, her mouth. She couldn't forget his lashless and faintly glowing eyes as he gazed at her from the brink of the pit, his grip that could grind her bones. So that was what was down there, where Ted had gone: hell was down there. She didn't want to be touched any more, but she couldn't fight them off. Just leave me alone, Enid thought, as she was half carried across the cellar to the steps. My God. Isn't it enough yet?

  48

  They were adult versions of Big'un, Ted observed, trying to be calm and rational and not succeeding; both of them naked as original sin, fully, almost obscenely human in appearance (the male particularly, level in flight with long arms outstretched, his genitals hugely hanging) but with skin so white it took on the subtle coloring of their diaphanous wings—if they could be called wings—as full as parafoils, as vivid as auroras, that held them in suspension above the pool in which they were so precisely mirrored he also felt threatened from below. They were a little like angels he remembered from a Sunday school comic book long ago: picture stories from the Bible. But the skin of Ted's face felt as if it were shrinking two sizes too tight from the cold radiance surrounding them almost as visibly as the billowing, floating tissue that clung to their bodies and kept them aloft. Angels or fiends? His breastbone ached from shuddering, as if it were splitting in two. Whatever they might be, he desperately did not want them to see him shudder.

  Their eyes seemed unusually large, perhaps because of the shorn skulls or the fact that, like the eyes of animals, they didn't blink. He could see, reflected in the blue pupils of the female, the fluttering of moths as large in flight as his two spread hands. What did moths have to do with these creatures? The moths were a benign presence. For now the strangers kept their distance, but not as if they had fear of him. Bald heads seemed innately savage to Ted, but they were not immediately antagonistic, although both the male and the female had needle-pointed, ebony thorns in place of the little fingers of their right hands, like the smaller thorn which Big'un had slashed Ted with below his knee. There was a hard, immaculate beauty about the female (he couldn't think of her as a woman) that fascinated Ted, but he couldn't look at her for very long without feeling as he did when he was in the dentist's chair, relaxed and aware of his surroundings but sort of dreaming at the same time, numbed along the jaw line and between the eyes as well. He was not particularly imaginative and had no superstititons; "vampire" had conveniently come to mind l<> describe the startling appearance and preternatural agility of Big'un, but here were two more of the same species, and now he wasn't so sure of his appraisal. Although he couldn't name them, he was inspired to speculate about where they had come from. Cave dwellers, or just the opposite? Within moments speculation became conviction. Ted was more awed than frightened.

  Eight months after he had joined the sheriffs patrol, Ted responded to a not-very-specific complaint from a woman who lived on a farm in northeast Caskey County, remote from her neighbors. She had called about someone shining bright lights in her windows. When Ted got there the woman was trying to coax a couple of hounds out from und
er the porch. The dogs wouldn't budge, even for food. The woman had an ancient double-barreled shotgun in one fist and a lump of chewing tobacco in her jaw. She spat with particular vehemence and said, "Reckon if you didn't take half the night to get up here you'd of seen 'em. They was in my cornfield nigh on twenty minutes, just a-strolling around like they had a purchase on my place."

  "Who was?" Ted asked.

  "They wasn't no friends of mine! And I ain't a-talking about the Second Coming. Reckon I'll know Jesus when I see him. No sir. They was outer-space people."

  "Space people? What did they look like?"

  "They was maybe twice as tall as you, wearing them silvery looking suits like the moonwalkers. Heads as skinny as carrots and nary trace of hair. No ears neither, that I could tell."

  "What about their eyes?"

  "Well now, they had plenty of eyes 'tween 'em. They had more eyes than Old Glory's got stars, all the way around their heads, kind of little eyes and glittery, without much color to 'em. You think I'm a born liar! Just come on with me, then, Deputy. I can show you right where at they come down, making a whistling noise so the dogs foamed at the mouth and crawled on their bellies. The corn's blowed over like a cyclone hit it, and blanched. Now I don't know what we'un's is supposed to do for a crop this year. The pond was partial frizz too, it had ice all around it, and this here is July, not December."

  "Come down in what?"

  "What do you think? Some kind of space ship."

  "How big?"

  "Big! I didn't get that close a look, it hurt my old eyes. Give off rays, is what it done. My eyes's still a-smartin', can't you tell? They don't make water like this otherwise. What I'd like to know is, how many other folks seen it tonight. Don't know how anybody could miss that dang thing. It come down quiet enough, till it shined them bright lights through the house, but the dogs didn't bark like they might've. Right away they just cowered and whimpered and crawled off to hide. Dogs, they know when something ain't natural."

  . . . When something ain't natural. There was tension in Marjory's body, and Ted responded by tightening his grip on her. The female hovering a few feet away in the pink glow of the flare on the ledge above him was staring at Marjory. Ted was in an awkward position on the narrow ledge, left arm cramped against the rock so that he couldn't reach the holstered revolver on the other side. But it probably wouldn't be any help, even if he could get to his gun.

  "Don't let them take Marjory," Duane said hoarsely.

  "Don't intend to," Ted replied, looking into the eyes of the male. "Where do you come from?" he said.

  The male seemed uninterested in answering him.

  "Tell me this. Do you live down here?"

  The female turned her head, glancing at her mate, then looked at Ted and smiled.

  "We're not from the stars. Live here? We live wherever we like."

  I don't care for this human. He's a yokel, but dangerous. Like your yokel husband. Take the girl from him and let's go.

  No, have patience, Theron. They both know too much about us, don't they? Can't you read the boy?

  Of course I can read him! I didn't plan to leave these two alive. Perhaps . . . the boy should come with us, too. There is something about him . . . he's intelligent, not like the pious, ignorant dirt farmers of the town. Like that other boy. All he wants to do is play, and be a nuisance.

  No. I'm against it. I think you're still too weak to take him.

  And I think you're jealous. If you have the girl, why shouldn't I have someone? Young enough to fashion in my image?

  Ted said to Birka, "Well, what are you doing down here, then? I suppose there's a bunch of others like you. How do you do that, anyhow? Just float up there that way? Kind of like a big moth yourself."

  Saying that, Ted felt a little bump of the heart, a tweaking of intuition —he suppressed the idea immediately, because he had the uneasy feeling that either of them could see inside his mind if they tried. ("We're not from the stars." But he hadn't said anything about his trip out to the cornfield, the strange footprints, the bits of metal some agency of the U.S. Government he never heard of before had confiscated by sunup.)

  The creatures were drifting apart now, the big male rising as if in a subtle draft of air. Ted licked his dried, numbed lips, and tightened his grip on Marjory, who had become agitated, moving her head against his breast as if to see for herself the circusy spectacle; but her lids remained shut.

  Duane said, "Don't let them get close to you, Ted! See those thorns they've got? They'll try to stab you in the back of the neck. That's what happened to Puff! Then she turned cold"—Duane whuffed a full cloud of breath—"and her hair fell out. She wasn't breathing. I swear! She just stopped breathing, but she was walking around, she talked to me, she wasn't dead."

  Maybe I won't keep him after all.

  It certainly doesn't matter that he knows. There's nothing he can do to stop you from turning him.

  How are you going to get the girl away from the other one? Don't forget you're at a disadvantage. Those jagged rocks . . .

  I'm leaving that up to Marjory. Watch.

  "I don't know what Marjory has to do with you . . . people, but if you have any decency in you then you'll help me get her out of this cave, and to a hospital before she—"

  The female was smiling at Ted, gently, but her eyes, so sharply blue moments ago, became vague, as if she were no longer listening, or even aware of him.

  Marjory suddenly tore herself away from Ted and stood, teetering on the brink of the ledge.

  "Birka!"

  "Here, darling! Reach up."

  Ted tried frantically to get a firm grip on Marjory as she lifted her arms toward the hovering female, but something happened, like a furious burst of static in the mind that jammed his will and made him powerless to do anything but turn his own eyes slowly to the male, now staring him down with a ferocity that was enough to petrify his heart and bleed marrow from his bones.

  I thought you could use some help.

  Thank you. Just hold him there a little longer while . . . Theron, look out!

  Birka's fingertips were on Marjory's own trembling fingers when Duane, rising from his knees on the ledge above Ted, grabbed the spiked flare from the porous rock where Ted had anchored it and dove toward Theron, blazing a smoky red path through an air carpet of moths and landing on Theron's back. For a few moments Theron wallowed helplessly, silently, as Duane clung to him with an arm locked around his throat; then the precious fabric that held them both in suspension blazed—first in little jet puffs, then a great gauzy flare. Singed and howling, Duane loosened his grip and plunged head-down into the pool. Ted, freed from the grip of Theron's mind, made a grab for Marjory but was too late; Birka had her, and was bearing her away.

  Help me—I'm burning!

  I'll burn, too!

  Moths, Ted thought, looking at Theron as he tried to stay aloft on his crisping, shrinking wings, and then at Birka who, with Marjory limply in tow, pulled slowly away from the ledge on which he stood. He was astounded by her strength, the power of wings so easily destroyed: Ain't nothing but overgrown moths, is all, and the worst thing that can happen to moths is to fly too close to an open flame.

  But there went Marjory, and what could he do?

  Ted smelled human skin scorching, and Theron plummeted right in front of him, missing the ledge by a few inches, trailing sparky ribbons of tissue, residue of charred luna moths. He fell silently and made a deep pocket in the black water just as Duane's head appeared several feet away.

  Without the flare, now dead in Duane's hand, the level of light in the cavern sank to the greenish glow of moths, like blips on a radar screen. Ted tore into his pack for more flares. Below him Theron struggled in the water, lips pressed tightly together, eyes furious. Ted popped another flare and looked down in the sizzling pink light. Theron was trying to get his hands on Duane, who kicked frantically away, looking up and around for Marjory. Theron, missing Duane, sank. It was obvious to Ted that the male coul
dn't swim and had no buoyancy. Something else he'd observed: in the cold they had brought with them his own breath had turned to vapor, but though the female had spoken, twice, she'd left no trace of breath in the frigid air around her. Cold, airless creatures. With no air in their lungs, unable to swim, they should be no better off than stones cast into the

  water. He waited, almost too long, for Theron's head to reappear and cancel this hunch, then called out to Duane.

  "Marjory's going in! Get her!"

  He popped a second flare and looked out over the glaring pool where Birka seemed to drift without resistance, like a giant balloon aloft on the wind; now she was apparently holding Marjory around the waist. But it was difficult for Ted to distinguish a human form out there. They both were fringed with fluttering moths. The moths glowed supernaturally like a big green storm cloud twenty feet above the pool and just below the tips of clustered stalactites.

  There appeared to be open water below the cloud, over the center of the pool. He knew he was about to risk Marjory's life, but what was the alternative?

  Ted heaved a flare end-over-end into that pulsing cloud and saw the moths scatter precariously, some exploding in little bursts of flame as the thin fabric that gave the female power over gravity billowed from heat and burned in a flash. Within moments the fabric turned dark and vanished, except for flakes of char and another sickening odor as Birka, clasping Marjory, turned over once and fell head down. Unnaturally silent as they fell, together they made a huge splash—not the small splash he was dreading, which would have meant they'd fallen on something solid just beneath the surface, crushing Marjory.

  Ted, already without his jacket, pulled off his sneakers, then stripped his pants and holstered revolver. He jumped feetfirst from the ledge, the way he'd been taught in life-saving classes, to protect himself as much as possible from unseen obstacles in unfamiliar water. He had nerved himself for cold water, but it was cold beyond his expectations. He came up gasping and struck out toward the middle of the pool. He heard Duane ahead of him, his voice echoing frantically through the cavern.