Wisp of a Thing: A Novel of the Tufa (Tufa Novels) (35 page)

A moment later, Bliss appeared behind Rockhouse and put a restraining hand on the old man’s shoulder.

Hicks was clean-shaven now, and Rob saw the outlines of the man who’d lured him here in the old man’s face. Meeting Hicks’s hate-filled glare with his own, Rob continued:

With wings too weak for soul’s last flight

The dying tyrant perceived a sight

Death would not take him this night

Instead a wonder did appear.

Anticipation now hung in the air like cigar smoke. His voice trembled a little as he began the final stanza.

Around him stood the myriad fae

Whose love had grown to hate’s decay—

“You little piss-ant
bastard
!” Hicks screamed. He grabbed the microphone off the riser and swung the heavy base at Rob like a club.

Rob blocked it, wrapped his arm around it, and yanked it easily from the old man’s hands. A great squeal of feedback shrieked through the room as the microphone fell from its holder and landed near the speakers. Hicks stumbled back, off balance.

“You goddam Yankee shitwad!” Hicks yelled as he charged forward. “You fuckin’ jackrabbit cornholing—”

Bliss stepped in front of Rockhouse, her back to Rob, and made a forceful gesture with her hand. The room instantly fell silent. “No more,” Bliss said carefully to Rockhouse; then she turned to Rob. “Stop.”

“It’s up to him,” he said, and pointed at Stoney with the microphone stand. “He knows why I’m here.”

All eyes moved from Rob to Stoney.

“Let her talk to him,” Bliss ordered Stoney. “Then we can all get back to our lives.”

Rockhouse started to say something, but Bliss whirled on him. “If you so much as open your mouth, old man,” she hissed, “I will get on that stage myself.”

Rockhouse slammed his mouth shut like an angry red-faced bullfrog. Bliss went over to Stoney and took Stella’s hand. The woman looked like she’d been told the worst news in the world, but put up no resistance as she was led to the bandstand.

Rob stepped down and looked in her eyes. “Terry’s worried to death about you, Stella, and the police think he might’ve even killed you. I don’t want to force you to do anything, but if you want to go back, I’ll take you.”

She looked as frightened as anyone he’d ever seen. “I … can’t … leave,” she whispered, although it sounded more like a plea than a statement.

“Do you
want
to leave?” he pressed. “Because if you do, not a Tufa in this place is going to stop us.”

She looked back at Stoney as if she were a starving woman and he the only meal in town. She sobbed, and in the expectant silence it echoed around the room. Then she looked back at Rob, her eyes wet with tears. “Yes,” she said in a soft voice, “I want to leave.”

He grabbed her hand. “Then we’re leaving.”

He’d barely turned away when he felt a big, meaty hand on his shoulder, and Stoney Hicks spun him around, yanking Stella from his grasp. “She’s
my
girlfriend now,” Stoney said.

That did it. Months of choked-down rage, stronger even than what he’d unleashed at the ambush on the road, surged up from the pit of Rob’s stomach, exploded in his solar plexus, and poured out in a scream as he threw himself at Stoney.

His momentum drove the bigger man back against the edge of the stage, and they fell together onto the wooden platform with a thud like a cannon shot. Rob was in full berserker mode, astride the bigger man’s chest and still incoherently roaring. He smashed Stoney in his smug face once, twice, three times with fast little snap punches, enjoying the wet crunching sound he got with the third one. His knuckles were smeared with crimson.

Then
everything
went red, followed by gray, followed by a roaring pain from the battered lump on the back of his head. He fell off Stoney and sprawled limp on the riser. Something wet and warm spread under his hair. His vision blurred and sparkled around the edges, and he had a momentary sense of total disconnection from the world around him. Then his eyes gradually refocused and the pain roared back. He looked up.

Rockhouse stood over him, brandishing the mike stand like a spear; no, like a king’s scepter. Blood—Rob’s blood—dripped from the weighted base that had slammed into the back of his head. Rockhouse looked different, too. He had immense batlike wings, tattered at the edges, and huge pointed ears that rose almost higher than the top of his head. His eyes, previously sun-narrowed to slits, were big and black, like an insect’s. Rob saw his own face, slack-jawed and dazed, reflected in their shiny surfaces.

Rob turned his head slightly. Bliss stood behind Rockhouse, one hand reaching in slow motion for the microphone stand. She had graceful, curving butterfly wings and an expression of infinite sadness.

Almost everyone in the crowd now sported wings, in fact, along with sparkly skin and smooth, youthful faces. He wanted to laugh, it was so beautiful, but the impulse got lost somewhere between his brain and his voice. What an amazing sight: a room full of hillbilly fairies, all watching him.

Then he realized they weren’t watching him. They were watching Rockhouse. With great effort, Rob turned his head back to the old man.

The microphone stand rose above Rob like a dark moon in a white sky. Big and solid, it would smash his skull if it came down hard enough. And one look at Rockhouse’s face told him it would come down that hard. He wanted to move, to react, but he had to lie there and watch this weird TV show playing out in slow motion all around him.

Then he blinked, everything snapped back to reality, and he realized he was about to
die.
Desperately he shouted the last line of the song:

They bound him to the spot he lay

YOU CAN DO NO HARM WHILE YOU BE HERE
!

33

Rockhouse’s raspy breathing was the room’s only sound. He looked down at Rob, his eyes actually brimming with tears. Rob felt a throb of regret that he’d hurt this ancient, petty, pathetic tin god.

Then Rockhouse screamed in rage, drew back his arm, and drove the microphone stand’s base down at Rob’s head.

Something shrieked like a wild animal as it flew over Rob and slammed into Rockhouse. The mike stand hit the ground an inch from his cheek, dropped rather than thrown. Rob pulled his blood-sticky head free of the riser.

Curnen was wrapped around the old man, hissing and screeching as she clawed his face, his hands, his clothes. Where had
she
come from? The tattered dress tangled around his hands as he tried to grab hold of her. She ripped into his skin, and blood splattered those nearest the fight. Rockhouse staggered toward the crowd, hands reaching blindly for help, but people moved out of his way. No one, not even Bliss, offered any aid.

They thrashed in the middle of the dance floor in a display of Grand Guignol flatfooting.
“Help!”
Rockhouse yelled.
“Get her off me!”
But no one answered his cries.

Curnen bent the old man’s head to one side. Her suddenly-pointed teeth gleamed when she opened her mouth, and her head darted snakelike to the soft flesh of his neck. He howled in renewed pain and fury. An arterial jet of unnaturally bright red blood shot straight up and splattered on the ceiling. It was only for an instant, but Rob swore he saw Curnen with a fist-sized chunk of flesh in her teeth, ripped whole from her father’s neck. Then they fell backwards into the crowd, which moved to surround them.

Rob tried to organize his rattled thoughts. For the moment, everyone had forgotten him. He rolled off the riser onto the floor, then got first to his knees and finally to his feet. Dizziness spun the room around him, and blood trickled down the back of his neck. Teeth gritted against the pain, he shook his head to clear it, which almost sent him to the floor again. But he stayed upright, and the last of the dazed sensation vanished. He looked around for Stella.

She huddled against the wall behind Stoney, her arms wrapped around her body as if she’d been punched in the stomach. Stoney watched the fight with slack-jawed amusement and surprise, smiling even as he wiped his own bloody face.

A shriek that could shatter glass cut through all the other noise. Berklee charged across the room, Doyle’s pocketknife in her hand. Before he could react, she stabbed Stoney in the groin, holding the knife there and twisting it. He screamed, too, but she held the knife in place, using her whole body to push it deeper. He fell to the floor with Berklee on top of him, screaming a lifetime’s worth of torment into his contorted face. His spells were broken, too.

Rob stumbled across the room and grabbed Stella by the arm. He looked around for Curnen, but the crowd still blocked any view of the fight between father and daughter. Doyle pulled a still-screaming Berklee off Stoney, and together the four of them made for the door. Then they were outside in the still-roaring wind, running for their vehicles.

Suddenly Stella yanked free of Rob’s grasp. “I
can’t
—!” she tried to say, her face distorted with panic.

“Goddammit!” Rob said, and grabbed her by the shoulders. “Listen to me! Your husband is worrying himself sick about you! Doesn’t that count for
anything
?”

“But … what I
did
!”

“It wasn’t your fault! It’s over now!”

Her mouth moved, but the words wouldn’t come. Instead, she wrenched away from him and ran, not back into the Pair-A-Dice, but across the highway into the forest. He started after her, but a wave of nausea made him clutch at the nearest car, and by the time his head cleared, she’d vanished.

He looked at the huge wall of green and wood before him, as solid in its way as any fortress. Stella, rather than face either her husband or her lover again, had chosen to burst through that wall and disappear into whatever lay beyond. And Rob knew he could not follow; these woods belonged to the Tufa, and anyone who ventured into them gave themselves over to Tufa rules.

Doyle was suddenly next to him. “We’re going,” he said urgently. “You need a ride?”

Rob shook his head, but the movement made him dizzy again. By the time it passed, he heard Doyle’s car roaring off down the highway.

He stumbled to his own car, managed to get the keys into the ignition and start the engine. In the rearview mirror, he watched the Pair-A-Dice entrance, but no one emerged. He considered going back for Curnen, but a fresh wave of nausea hit him.

Finally he put the car into gear and gunned it out of the parking lot. He headed back toward Needsville alone.

*   *   *

Moments later, Bliss burst out the door, dragging Curnen by one wrist. The younger woman snapped and snarled like a mad dog at the people inside. Her ripped white dress was streaked with Rockhouse’s blood. None of them attempted to stop or follow the women. Rockhouse’s high, keening moans carried over all the other noise.

The door slammed shut, and Bliss threw Curnen to the ground between two trucks. Curnen skidded on the gravel, then glared up defiantly. The dust raised by the wind surrounded her like the smoke of her fury. Blood soaked her face and upper torso. She growled, low and menacing, like a coyote.

Bliss gathered her hair and held it back against the wind. The dream she’d had the day before she met Rob included an image just like this. It had seemed ludicrous then. Then again, so had the dream’s other warnings.

Curnen growled again. “You don’t have to do that anymore,” Bliss said wearily.

Slowly, Curnen got to her feet. She wiped her mouth with the back of her arm. It left a bright red streak across one cheek. She stood upright and faced her sister.

“How does it feel?” Bliss asked.

Curnen, in a whisper made raw and thin by disuse, said, “I don’t know yet. Is he dead?”

“In all the important ways. What will you do now?”

She licked her lips and looked off, searching for words. “I think … I’ll leave.”

“Needsville?”

She nodded.

“Good God, Curnen, haven’t you learned anything? That’s what started all this. You
can’t
leave. None of us can.”

Curnen struggled to form the words. “Not for good. Just … until people remember me. Until I become myself again.”

“You think you can do that better somewhere else? You’re a Tufa. A
full-blood
Tufa. What better place than here?”

She shook her head. “No. Here I almost became—” Again she paused to search for the words. “—a wisp of a thing. I want to be more.”

“You’re all the family I have left,” Bliss said.

Curnen stepped closer. “I will be back. I will.”

They hugged. Then Curnen turned and looked up. The Widow’s Tree was totally bare now, its limbs like black veins against the sky. She began to laugh. After a moment, Bliss joined her. Curnen’s laughter became a howl, the only cry she’d been allowed for so long.

Bliss stared at her, and laughed at the absurdity. Then, above the roaring wind, the Overbay sisters howled together, expressing their amusement and triumph at the world. The sound reached every part of Cloud County.

34

Rob went directly to his room, pulled off his shoes, and put a folded towel on his pillow. He gave no thought to seeking medical attention, or to the common warning that those with head injuries shouldn’t sleep. He slept for thirteen straight hours, the wind roaring outside. If he dreamed, he recalled none of it.

*   *   *

When he awoke the next day, it was almost noon, and the wind had gone silent. Dried blood stuck the towel to his hair. Without getting out of bed, he called Deputy Darwin and told him he’d seen Stella Kizer alive and well at the Pair-A-Dice in the company of Stoney Hicks. He said Doyle Collins could confirm it, and gave him the service station’s phone number. Then he sent Terry Kizer an e-mail stating the same thing. He didn’t try to sugarcoat it.

He took a shower, letting the warm water rinse the dried blood from his hair. The lump seemed bigger and more tender, probably due to the blow from the mike stand, but miraculously, the stitches still held. He’d get a real doctor to look at it as soon as he reached Kansas City. He shampooed around it, and felt much better as the sense of cleanliness spread. More than just the previous day’s blood and dirt had washed away; for the first time since Anna’s death, he felt
content.