Fiends (27 page)

29

Puff had the flashlight and wasn't about to give it up, so Duane had no choice except to follow her while he tried to think what to do. Followed her back down to the mummy room (as he thought of it), where, he was sure, she expected him to unknot the dried vines from all the throats of the strange blackened sleepers. He knew what would happen next, because he'd already seen one example. Then, after he'd done what she wanted— Duane stared at the back of Puffs head, as bald as the cheeks of her behind, and tried to imagine himself like Puff, although there was no way to describe exactly what she was like, had become. Terror caused him to lag behind her, stumbling across a chamber floor littered with breakdown, slabs of rock, some as big as doors and thicker than his body, that had fallen from the ceiling in a long-ago subterranean cataclysm. During the last few minutes he had learned a lot about himself, and about the activities of fear. He'd been scared a few times in his life, momentary jolts, like grasping an electrified strand of wire around a cow pasture. When the hands sweated, the jolt was worse. He wasn't sweating now, it was too cold down here—the temperature in most caverns was a constant 56 degrees, his mother had told him—and terror was nothing like a quick flashy jolt up the arm to the back of the head. Terror had an acid odor; he could smell it on his skin. Terror was a horrid destructive wasting process, as if there were termites at work throughout his body. Eating him from the inside out. Terror was literally eating him up. As long as he kept moving he could deal with it, but his movements were increasingly clumsy as he crawled over rockpiles. He only wanted to think about his mother. Any moment now she would glide smoothly down out of darkness on a thin strong rope and gather him in, hold him close to her breast; laughing, she would signal for them both to be lifted out into the blue of day. Later they would go canoeing. Swim together. The terror would stop. It was all he would ever ask for, as long as he lived. Mother!
Just make it stop.

There was a pall of rock dust where they traveled, and it packed Duane's nostrils, the back of his throat. He choked and halted, trying to clear his throat. His nose and eyes were running. The beam of the flashlight centered on his face momentarily, then lifted.

"Look, Duane. That's why I came this way. I wanted you to see this! Look up now."

Gasping, wheezing, his pulse running wild, Duane did as Puff asked. Not far overhead there was a fluttering reminiscent of the flight of moths in the mummy room. He had noticed a few stray glowing lunas in this chamber, but what he saw wasn't moth wings. The colors were similar, pale purples, reds and greens, but the materials were more like cloth, cloth he could see through. They hung from nearly invisible strands of silk. Puff walked around slowly with her light, admiring the display.

"These are our robes," she said. "The robes we wear. And when we wear them—"

Duane leaned against an oblong of rock, and it seemed to tilt slightly, noiselessly. The movement was subtle enough that he thought it might have been a tremor of his own body he was feeling. He pressed again. No, the slab moved. It was nearly eight feet long on one side, and perhaps two feet thick, part of a larger slab that had fallen ages ago and broken into several pieces. The largest section was balanced on one of a series of rounded boulders that might have been part of the cavern floor subject to the eroding, shaping action of water (the floor was dry now, but smoothed and etched in channels that suggested it once had formed the bed of an underground river, dried up or diverted millennia before dinosaurs disappeared from the region).

A giant teeter-totter, weighing several tons.

It had been a favorite game in first grade to creep up the green-painted board on hands and knees, to see how precisely he could balance the seesaw without tipping it to the ground on the other side.

Ridiculous to think that he could do it here, that this much stone would budge more than a millimeter.

But if it happened, if he got it moving—

Because his mother wasn't coming, nobody was. And if he got out of here, or if he died, whatever the outcome it would be better than going down to the cocoonlike mummy room with Puff, hearing their voices on the radio again, seeing them . . . Jesus,
wake up.

He raised one knee, grasped an edge of the slab, pulled himself up as slowly as a lizard looking for an angle on a fly. His heart was beating so enormously he couldn't be sure the slab had moved at all.

"I guess," Puff said, looking up, absorbed, "you want to know what the robes are made of. Well—that's what makes them so special. It's all skin, Duane. Human skin."

Duane crept another foot up the slab and this time he was sure it moved. His own weight was a hundred and eighty-six pounds. There was an angle of declivity to the cavern floor, too shallow to reckon in near darkness, but it might be enough. And more of the smoothly rounded boulders between him and the beam of the flashlight.

But when it went, if it did, the huge slab was going to make a lot of noise, deeper than thunder in the small cavern.

Duane caught his breath and lunged almost to the uptilted end of the slab and felt the low end coming up, silently: but what if it was webbed with cracks, and just broke into pieces?—no. No! Now it was moving, sliding, beginning to rumble, he held on with outthrust arms, and Puff, ten feet away, turned without haste, bringing the flashlight level, shining it behind her.

Duane and the flat-sided rock picked up speed faster then he'd thought possible as the beam of the flashlight shone at an angle in his eyes, but the distance was too far, all she had to do was step out of the way. The beam slashed suddenly to one side, to the deep end of the cavern and maybe Puff screamed, but he couldn't hear her for the rumbling and grinding of the stone slab across the jumbled stair steps of boulders, some of which rolled along with the slab like a set of clumsy wheels. Then something wet and cold came bouncing over the forward edge of the slab and lodged momentarily against his shoulder. Duane let go and slid backward just as the slab came to a massive jarring stop against a wall of the cavern and a shower of rock, from bits and pieces to fist-sized chunks, pelted him. He rolled off one tilted side of the still-intact slab and came down hard and painfully on his butt. His glasses fell from the end of his nose but landed in his lap.

There was a lot of dust in the air, he could barely breath without gagging. But at least he could see the dust, because the flashlight was still working, the beam remote but steady, aimed at the drifting robes overhead.

"Puff!"

He got to his knees and crept over debris toward the source of the light. The dust was^ thick enough so that he didn't see the necklace of shark's teeth until his right hand hung up in them. He backed away, shaking the hand with a growl lingering in his throat. There was something on the heel of his hand as red as blood but viscous, half-frozen, like a melting popsicle.

The light was a few feet behind the slab, and her body was wedged down between some boulders, sheared at the neckline, the red glop having spilled over in a kind of ruff like that of a turkey buzzard's, oozing down between her breasts.

He was cold and tingling himself. He couldn't feel his fingers as he pried the flashlight from Puffs hand, expecting her, headless or not, to sit up at any moment and battle him for it. He was sick with horror and felt himself sliding down a long spiraling windless tunnel, getting farther and farther from the light he craved. He had to stop gulping air; he knew that was the worst of the problem. Just get the precious light and back away, put his head between his knees. He saw why she had not escaped from the path of the huge slab. One foot was wedged in a crevice of the floor, the body turned precisely a hundred and eighty degrees from the angle of the foot, the knee exploded like a kernel of popcorn. If he fainted now the batteries of the flashlight would fail while he lay there unconscious; then, even if he woke up he might as well be dead. Like Puff. Or had she been dead hours before the hurtling slab ground her head off? It was a question he didn't feel like debating. All he wanted was the chance to see daylight again; once he got that far he would have a whole lot of time to think about the rest of it.

30

The Wingo County deputies Moon Milcock and Lee Winkfield discovered the half-skinned body of the man they subsequently identified as Gene R. Wiley, age twenty-seven, last address Key West, Florida, propped against a bur oak in a partial clearing fifty yards in from the firebreak. They found another young man, who identified himself as "Deke" but was otherwise incoherent, some fifteen feet off the ground in another tree nearby. He would not climb down when ordered to do so by Deputy Winkfield. When Winkfield climbed up to try to force him down, Deke howled and kicked furiously at him. Winkfield retreated to the ground, and Deke sat sobbing, more quietly, in the sanctuary of his tree.

Winkfield chewed the end of a kitchen match and walked over to his partner, who was studying the corpse by flashlight. Already the skinless flesh and blubber had attracted an amazing variety of tiny insects and a few nightcrawlers. There was an unmistakable stench of slowly putrefying flesh in the calm damp air.

"What about the wild man?" Milcock asked, getting up, his knees creaking. He took out a cigarette. "Let me use the business end of that match."

Winkfield took it from his mouth, wiped spit on his sleeve, and handed it over. Milcock struck it on a thumbnail as hard and rough as a concrete block. Winkfield said, "Stoned or crazy or both. I ain't gonna mess with him until we can get a line on him and yank him down from there."

"Reckon he did this?" Milcock said with a glance at Wiley's remains. He inhaled and blew streams of smoke through his nostrils.

"I don't know. His hands don't have no blood on them. And that there looks like a bloody job, front and back."

"It's a good job, though," Milcock said, like a connoisseur of the bizarrely maimed. "They didn't miss but a little patch or two. He weren't just butchered for the fun of it. And both his eyes, did you notice that, they're pierced straight through the middle of the pupil."

"Reckon what the point of that was?"

"Some goddamn ritual or other. Blinded him so he couldn't run off. It's all drugs, ain't it? I ain't never seen such abuse to human beings since we got all these fucking drugs." Milcock glanced at the tree Deke was in. "Maybe that hairy old Easy Rider boy didn't do it, but I'll bet cash money he got a look at who did."

"Yeh, he sounds more scared than anything. I'll tell you what, first time I've seen a man halfway skinned. That's a disgusting sight. A bear would've been kinder to him."

"How about that Willie Wigfall they found in the corn crib back of Cudsey's long about sixty-three, sixty-four?"

"Well, now you're talking nigger, and a commonness agitator to boot. You want to get old Low Cow up here, help us rope down the kid in the tree?"

"Fair 'nuff."

"Looks like we done pulled us an all-nighter, partner."

"You look out for yourself while I'm gone."

"Shit, that won't be hard," Winkfield said, smiling and patting the barrel of his Seneca 10-gauge.

31

Ted Lufford came out from behind the waterfall by Dante's Mill wearing only his Jockey shorts and said to the watchers on the bridge, "It's a cave back in there."

Enid called, "Did you see Marjory?"

"No sign of anybody. I hollered."

Low Cow Jones came in a shambling trot from the patrol car parked in the road and said to his partner Wayne Buck Vedders, "They need me up the road apiece. You wait here for the Highway Patrol and the boys from the TBI." The TBI was the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.

"No shit, the TBI? What's going on?"

"Found a body."

Enid drew a sharp breath like an indrawn scream. Low Cow said hastily, "No, ma'am, it's a male Caucasian, but that's all I know for sure." He returned to the patrol car, jumped in and went off with tires churning, mud and pebbles rattling in the wheel wells.

Down below Ted had waded to the sedgy shore with his flashlight. Enid crossed the bridge with his clothes and held the light while he turned his back, stripped off the wet Jockeys, and pulled on his pants.

"If that's where Marjory went this afternoon—I mean, into the cave, why was she way up there in the woods when that girl saw her?"

"We don't know where she went, or why. We don't know much of anything yet."

"Aren't you going to look in the cave?"

"Not by myself. Who's this?" There was another car on the road, a forest-green sedan. It stopped by the mill and a park ranger got out with a flashlight.

"One of you Ted Lufford?" the ranger said.

"That's me." Ted crossed the bridge buttoning his shirt. "This's Wingo County Deputy Wayne Vedders. And Enid Waller."

"How y'all doin' tonight? My name's Tilghman." He was a short man in his sixties, with slicked-back white hair. "What the devil's been going on? Those two kids up at the lodge—well, no there's three, counting the one had the seizure, they said it was—those two kids claim they lost somebody this afternoon. Where you been, in swimming?"

"No. Did you know there's a cave back of that waterfall?"

"You don't say. What kind of cave?"

"I didn't look."

"Well, there's caves all through this region. Some that ain't been explored but a little. Let's see. There's Big Spangle and Griffee and Bluefus—”

Enid interrupted. "Do you have keys to all the buildings?"

"Yes. What do you want keys for?"

"My sister's the one who's missing. We thought she might be—might be hiding in—"

"If she's inside one of the town buildings, then she either broke a lock or a window to get in. What do you mean, hiding? Who's she hiding from?" Tilghman looked at the revolver in the holster on Ted's belt. "You a deputy, too?"

"Uh-huh. Mr. Tilghman, reckon you can let us have a quick look around, satisfy my curiosity Marjory's not in the church or someplace else?"

"What I'm here for," the ranger said, jangling his key ring. His radio was squawking in the green sedan.

"Can you get some more help?" Ted asked him.

"Saturday night? Hard. What for?"

"We need to be sure nobody leaves the park until we know they're okay."