Fiendish (10 page)

Fisher wasn’t smiling at all anymore. His face was blank, but there was something in his eyes that I didn’t know the name of. I kept thinking of the wrong ones, shame or fear or secrets, but it was more like all of those at once.

“What’s wrong?” I said.

But he didn’t answer. He was looking past me, and whatever he was looking at had made his eyes go helpless and vacant.

Then I saw it too. The grass was dying, going yellow and brittle at my feet.

“What’s happening?” I said, and my rusty voice made everything seem a lot more dangerous. “Are the fiends coming?”

“You have to get out of here,” he whispered. “The hollow’s acting up.”

“What does that mean, acting up?”

“It means get out of here if you don’t want to be food for creatures and hell dogs! Just go!”

I’d meant to say more—to ask how the place had changed so fast, why his hands were shaking—but I was cut off by a long, grating howl, like the sound a flywheel on a tractor made when it spun too hard and too hot, dry and shrill and furious. The sound echoed through the clearing, racing up my spine and shivering in my teeth.

“God
damn
it.” Fisher grabbed me by the arm, yanking me up and pulling me along behind him in the direction of the shallow little stream and the bluff.

The suitcase swung crazily in my hand, slamming into my legs, and his fingers dug into my skin. I tried to squirm loose but he just moved his hand to my wrist, squeezing hard.

“Ow! Let—
go
!” I jerked out of his hand.

I thought he’d try to grab me again, but another howl ripped through the trees.

“
Go
.” He raked his arm in the direction of the bluff and the path back up to the pasture. “Run! Run that way and don’t stop till you get back out into the Willows!”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to make sure nothing follows you.”

He turned once in a slow circle, then began to sprint all out for the dogwood tree. All the pretty red flowers had turned black, and as soon as he reached the tree, they crumbled and fell, getting lost in the grass. He grabbed hold of a branch and broke it off.

The sun seemed brighter suddenly, like a cloud had been lifted off the world. The howl rose out of the woods, closer and more ferocious. The ground was mushy, seeping into my shoes, and I knew I should run, but the way home felt all wrong and I hesitated.

Something was happening in the air around me and suddenly, I was scared. Everything smelled sweet and chemical, and underneath that, rotten. I stopped and looked back.

Fisher stood in the middle of the clearing, with the dogwood tree behind him. He swung the branch, testing it with both hands like someone holding a baseball bat.

When the first dark creature came slinking out into the sunlight, I knew that I should run—my head knew it and my feet knew it, but something in my chest said stay, and it was stronger than everything else. I stood at edge of the meadow, waiting, wanting to make sure that I wasn’t leaving Fisher to be savaged.

They crept across the grass in a pack, moving low to the ground. The one at the front glared hungrily, ears pressed flat, lips drawn back from its teeth. It was the size of a beagle, or maybe a fox, sly and slinky and nasty. The rest of it was trickier to make out, even when it moved out of the shade and into the clearing.

The brighter the sun shone, the harder it was to see the shape of it. Stories of hell dogs never really told you what they looked like and now I understood why. The thing was so black that it seemed to be made of the shadows, or else of some soft, evil goo that changed and ran and melted like wax.

I stood holding tight to the handle of the suitcase, watching as they closed on Fisher.

His head was up and his shoulders back, and he gripped the branch like he was waiting, daring them to come on and do something. The longer he stared at the dog, the more solid it got, with a long, crooked muzzle and eyes that glowed a vicious, itchy red, flaring and pulsing so they seemed to burn like fire. Then, with no warning at all, it sprang, shoulders bunched and jaws wide.

When Fisher moved, it was quick and fearless. The branch arced high. Then came the impact, proof that the dark, oily creature was solid and real. When its back broke, the sound was dull and then sharp—thump of body, crack of bone.

It fell in the grass, crumpled and stinking. The others stepped over it like it was nothing, making a ragged circle around Fisher. He swore and then put down the second one, nearly spinning its head around.

When he showed his teeth, it was a smile that made him seem perfectly unholy. For the first time, he looked less like some in-town redneck with a flashy car and more like the descendent of whatever dark thing had graced his family with its old, fiendish blood.

I stood in the tangled weeds as he beat back the hell dogs. He was laying about himself with the branch, driving them back.

And then, he wasn’t.

As many as he put down, more were sneaking out of the trees, closing in. They swarmed him as fast as he could shake them off, ripping at his clothes and his skin, cutting long gashes down his back. He didn’t flinch or cry out, but
I
wanted to. I watched in a kind of slow horror as they clambered over him. In another second, they would bear him to the ground and tear him up if I didn’t do something to stop it.

Then, in a fast, jarring flash, it was like every leaf and twig and blade of grass became very clear.

I swung the suitcase up by the handle. For an instant, it seemed to hang in front of me, taking up space, all corners and edges, flat planes of dusty leather. I could sense the shape of it but didn’t look away from where Fisher stood, surrounded by snarling dogs, red soaking through his shirt.

Time seemed weirdly stretched, and I let the suitcase go. In the second that it hung there, I moved my hands to the corners and popped the clasps. The lid swung up and as the case fell, I caught it by the handle, dropping to my knees, the weight of it half-spinning me around.

All the clothes seemed to fly away, scattering over the grass. The dinosaur bed sheet trailed out like a flag, flapping wildly in the sunlight. I was already digging through the tangled mess to the bottom, where the tools lay, cold and sharp and waiting.

The ground around me was littered with dresses and underwear and with the bodies of the hell dogs, oozing their stinking blood.

In just a few minutes, Fisher had managed to deal with most of them, but he was staggering now, bleeding heavily down one arm. The two that were left bared their teeth and crept toward him.

He laid one out with a kick to the face, then slammed the branch down on the back of its head. Its skin broke and the black muck of its insides splattered over everything.

The last one was sly, though. It moved behind him and then, in one tightly coiled leap, went clawing up his back and over his shoulder, peeling his T-shirt open in bloody ribbons.

He yelled, but it was an odd, choked sound, like it had been jerked out of him, and then he was quiet. He thrashed and twisted, reaching around with his good hand, trying to scrape the hell dog off his back. It bit at him, tearing his shoulder in an awful, ugly way that had everything to do with pain. It sank its teeth into his arm and I began to run.

In a flash of double vision, I saw us in my head—laid out across the clearing like dropped toys. Fisher, with the branch in his hands, the blood on his back. The hell dog, slashing and clawing at his skin, laying him open.

I saw a girl with tangled red hair and a pair of wet, sloppy shoes, and in her hand, there was a crosshead screwdriver. The grass was poison-green. The woods around us were black. All the other colors were so bright they seemed to run together.

I had a sudden, sick understanding of the animal’s body, seeing it, inside it. Its dark, awful bones, the heartbeat pulsing through it, slick and thick and throbbing.

When I stabbed it in the neck, blood jetted out, not red, but a black, slippery mess, splashing my arms and the front of my dress. It whipped around, snapping at my hand. Its eyes were wild and stupid and Fisher’s blood was all over its teeth.

My next swing was aimed at its eye socket and I buried the screwdriver to the handle. I yanked it back out and black ooze gushed over my hands.

The dog went limp and landed on the grass. Its legs were still twitching, but its sides didn’t rise and fall, and its black stinking blood was all over everything.

Fisher stood in the middle of the clearing, breathing in huge gasps. He took two steps toward the naked dogwood tree, then sank to his knees, holding his shoulder with his good hand.

Blood was springing up all over his back, soaking through his shirt, running in bright streams from a gash in his arm. I dropped the screwdriver and crouched next to him. His eyes were closed and he’d begun to shake all over.

“Okay,” I said. “Okay, you’re okay. Hold still, I’m going to open your shirt so I can look.”

I ran back across the meadow and fumbled around in the suitcase for some kind of garden shears or clippers. There was a rusty pair of sewing scissors, and I grabbed them and ran back to Fisher, holding the scissors in my fist like a knife.

I scrubbed at my hands, trying to wipe them clean on the dying grass, then slit his T-shirt up the back. I peeled it off him, revealing the full shape of the tattoo I’d seen the other day. It was the outline of a tower, black and crooked, traveling the length of his spine. Blood ran from a roadmap of cuts, covering the ink. One whole side of his body was smeared with a sticky layer of blood and black poison.

It smelled bad, and I squinted against the fumes that were rising in hot clouds, burning my eyes. His skin was bruising as I watched, turning purple in huge smudges that feathered out over his back.

“You aren’t healing.” I said. “Why aren’t you healing?”

He coughed, pressing a hand to his mouth, shaking his head, but didn’t answer. He was gasping into his cupped hand like it was hard to breathe.

I cut up the bed sheet, rolling the fabric into pads, winding strips around his ribs and arm, and doing double bandages where the blood ran the fastest. My hands were jittering and the smell made me want to hold my breath.

“Do you think you need a doctor?” I said, knotting the sheet in place.

He shook his head, keeping his eyes closed.

“Maybe you don’t know this, but you’re bleeding a
lot
. I think you need to go to the hospital.”

“No.” His lips were chalky blue and his face looked gray in the weird, quiet light. “I just need to get home.”

THE WAY BACK

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I
dropped to my hands and knees in the yellowing grass, picking up my clothes. They were all over the ground and I shoved them into the suitcase.

Fisher was still on his knees, slumped sideways against the dogwood tree. His eyes were closed and he was holding his arm against his chest, breathing in long, harsh gasps. “Could you hurry up?”

His voice was tight and there was a numb, reasonable part of me that understood I was acting like a fool. That I didn’t need to be fussing with the suitcase. That I was just wasting time. I slammed it shut and hauled it over to him.

He was trying to stand and mostly failing, but when I held out my hand, he waved me off, struggling up from the ground and using the tree to steady himself.

When he touched the trunk, though, the whole side of it went black and soft under his hand. A layer of rot was spreading from his fingers, crawling up into the branches, and I darted forward and yanked his arm away.

“Stop—you’re killing it!”

For one second, his face was awful as he looked at what he’d done. Then, like a board being wiped clean, his expression went blank and he only stood there, swaying a little in the shadow of the tree.

“Here,” I said, and came in close enough that he had no choice but to let me help.

I half-expected that when he leaned his weight on me, his touch might send me to rot and ruin too, but it only left me breathless and a little off-balance.

With my help, Fisher stumbled across the meadow, toward the densest part of the thicket.

“That’s not the way we came,” I said, but he just kept on going.

I said it again, louder. “That’s not the right way. The car’s back in the Willows.”

He shook his head, still staggering in the direction of the trees. “Doesn’t matter now. This is shorter.”

So I tightened my hold on the suitcase and let him lead me into the woods.

The whole hollow seemed to be coming undone around us. The grass was dying back along the ground, and it was getting dark much too fast. The blood had dried to a sticky mess all down Fisher’s arm and soaked through the torn sheets. Along his spine, the tower stood out in a halo of bruises.

At first, it seemed like there was no path to follow. I didn’t know how we’d ever find our way out. The hollow, which was only a narrow little gully from the top of the bluff, seemed to have grown to the size of a country, no way to know how to get through, or even where the edge of the forest was. It was unnerving that a space could be so huge, when from the outside, it was just an overgrown gouge between two cow pastures.

The deeper we went, the louder the woods got, creaking and groaning around us, sending leaves and broken twigs raining on our heads. The trees tossed and shook, swaying in gusty bursts, but there was no wind, and no storm clouds to explain the black sky. Every snap and rustle sounded like footsteps creeping after us through the woods, and I held the screwdriver tight, ready for the second those hungry red eyes came glowing up at us out of the shadows.

Suddenly, there was the sound of something crashing through the treetops, and the first branch hit the ground. The woods were coming down around us, limbs breaking like gunshots.

There was chaos overhead and Fisher grabbed me around the waist with his good arm, swinging us both out of the path and into the tall grass. We landed in a tangle, deep in the weeds. Over us, deadfall branches rained down, hitting the ground with huge thumps, sending up grass and mud.

We lay there as the splintered trees landed all around. My heart was beating so hard it hurt my bones, and I could feel the rise and fall of Fisher’s chest. He was coughing, taking short, painful breaths. His whole body was shaking.

Then, as fast as it had started, it was over.

I hauled myself off of him and knelt in the weeds, feeling around for the suitcase handle, for anything to hold on to. Fisher was struggling onto his hands and knees and swearing in a steady stream. He stumbled up and I followed him, kicking a path through the underbrush.

He was a few feet ahead, using his good hand to steady himself and striking for a place where the ground began to slope up. Suddenly he stopped, crouching against the bleached trunk of a fallen tree like he was waiting for something.

I crouched next to him, staring into the shadows between the trees. “What’s wrong?”

In the dense thicket of the hollow, things were rustling. The light was so strange and dark it was almost blue, and I huddled there, listening to the sounds around us. My heart beat faster and I wondered if we were about to be food for some new ugliness, some other creature with long, dripping teeth.

And then, I saw the orange glow of flames. It moved through the trees in a ghostly rush and at the center, a woman, white as a snowdrop and wound in a ragged sheet, was running toward us through the woods at an all-out sprint.

Her arms were straight out from her sides like wings, the sheet flapping around her. She loomed down the slope at us, and then I saw her face, and I couldn’t help it—I screamed. The woman only careened toward us, screaming back, a long nightmare screech that echoed through the woods. Her hands fluttered wildly and her eyes were two black, ragged holes. Her mouth was a burning oval of light, like looking into the glow of a basement furnace.

Then she was down the hill and past us, burning a trail like a white-hot comet through the trees. The woods went dark again and I crouched in the shadow of the beech tree with my heart beating hard and wild in my ears.

Fisher was hunched over by the turned-up roots of the fallen tree, leaning against it.

“Did you see that?” I whispered, pointing into the darkness. “What was that?”

“A fiend,” he said, coughing a little, clearing his throat. “We just saw a fiend. Best thank Jesus she wasn’t interested in us, and hope we don’t see another.”

The way he said it made my skin go cold. “How many are there?”

He shook his head. “No one really knows. They’re always moving. The stories say they walk in and out of the world through the hollow the way a normal person would go through a door.”

When he straightened, I slipped my arm under his on his good side and helped him toward the bluff.

I was half holding him up, leading him through the trees, when I saw her.

She was standing in the shade by a shallow little runnel of the creek, and at first, I thought she was a girl. Then she turned, and I saw her hands. They were long and gnarled, like the hands of the woman in my grandmother’s painting of Salome. Her teeth were small, sharp, and animal.

She had on a gray dress with a wide lace collar and a square neck. The skirt hung wet around the bottom, making the cotton a darker shade that faded pale halfway up her legs.

Her eyes were gray too, but a gray that seemed to bleed out into the white part, ragged around the edge like torn paper. The way she looked at me froze me to the bone.

“You don’t belong here,” she said.

“No,” I said. “But we don’t mean any trouble. We’re trying to leave.”

She came closer, with her head cocked to one side, leaving a row of tracks in the mud that looked web-footed. I tightened my hand around the screwdriver.

“Maybe so,” she said. “But I’d wager this one causes trouble wherever he goes. He’s got this whole place in an uproar and enough vigor in him to just about tear down the world.”

I glanced at Fisher. His breathing was uneven, and when he looked up, his face was dirty-pale, like an old sheet. When he moved closer to me, he left a wobbly trail of blood sprinkled across the rocks. Vigor seemed like the last thing he had going for him.

The fiend watched, her eyes moving over his torn shoulder, her tongue darting to touch the corner of her mouth as the blood ran down his arm. “Give me some of that good red, and I’ll tell you a fortune.”

“I don’t want a fortune,” I whispered, suddenly so scared that she would tell me I was the thing that Shiny had said—the reason behind the reckoning—and then everything I was deathly afraid of would be true. It was one thing to fear and think and turn it over in my mind. It would be another to hear the words from someone else’s lips.

As soon as I said it, the fiend’s eyes went dark as bad dreams. “You called me out of the black like a genie out from someone’s lamp, and now you don’t want to know your fate?”

I shook my head. “We didn’t call you.”

She smiled a jagged, hungry smile. “Darlin’, you’ve got enough wise old blood in you to call every fiend for a hundred miles. And they’ll be here too in a minute clamoring to tell you your ending, so if it’s someone else you’re wanting, by all means wait. Otherwise, pay the charge, hear your fate, and I’ll be on my way.”

Next to me, Fisher cleared his throat. He was breathing in long gasps. “Whatever. Just do
whatever
she says so she’ll leave us alone and we can get out of here.”

The fiend turned her strange, blurry gaze on Fisher. “Give me some of that good red,” she said again. “I’ll tell you what you need to know.”

Without a word, he reached over and took the screwdriver from me, smearing his bloody hand on the bit end. He held it out and the fiend took it from him. Then, with a smile as hungry as an alligator’s, she licked the blood off.

Her tongue was long and pale, wrapping around the steel like a snake. She sucked her bottom lip and handed the screwdriver back to me.

“You’re old-family wrong,” she said to Fisher. “Crooked as they come, but that’s no secret. I don’t imagine any of the good folks up there in town ever wondered too hard or too close about what you were. I imagine they just let you be. But
you’re
not one to let things be. You’ve got a whole mess of questions in you, and the answers have been slow in coming.”

As far as fortunes went, it was county fair vague, but the way Fisher stared at her, she might has well have just looked straight into the bottom of his soul.

“Say your question,” she said. “I know you want to.”

He pressed his hand against his torn shoulder and said hoarsely, “Where is it I belong? Is it like Isola says, and I belong down here with you?”

His voice was so raw when he asked it that I wanted to drop my eyes, but the fiend only smiled, twitching her shoulder like the prettiest girl at a party.

“The look of you right now, I’d say you’d be a fool to want that.” Her smile dimpled and then got wider. “I’ve known a man to give himself to the hollow from time to time. Crooked people come down here when they lose all reason and their blood gets the best of them. I’ve known them to go back to the land when they’ve got no place else that wants them. But that way’s not for you.”

I watched Fisher’s face. I’d thought he might be grateful or relieved, but he just nodded, like a part of him had been hoping something else.

With sly, narrowed eyes, the fiend turned on me, tipping her head to the side. “And what about you, chickadee?”

“I don’t want my fortune told,” I said again, backing away with the screwdriver held against my chest. The way she had seen so deeply into Fisher frightened me. “I don’t want you to drink my blood.”

She gave a stiff little shrug. “Then how about a piece of advice?”

I wasn’t sure advice was any better, but Fisher had said to do what we had to do to get out of the hollow, so I nodded.

“It doesn’t matter what you call yourself,” the fiend said, waving a gnarled hand. “Any of these DeVores or DeWitts or Bedevils—some borrowed name your mama got somewhere, from whatever man she picked to be your daddy—I know a Blackwood when I see one. But not every crooked child is so obvious as
you
all. Take that Dalton girl. She’s a clever one, and good at hiding her craft when she ain’t using it.”

“What has Rae got to do with any of this?”

“Just that there’s five of you creatures up there in town now. Knocking around with craft in your blood and your bones. Five kinds of wrong, and that’s one wrong thing for every point on the reckoning star.”

“That’s not advice,” I said, trying to sound braver than I felt. “That might be a riddle, but it’s not advice.”

Beside me, Fisher made a groaning noise, but the fiend seemed to consider this. She stood in the shadows, under the canopy of leaves, and her hair looked very white.

“I know you think you’re the one to start up this engine, baby,” she said. “But you didn’t do anything wrong. It’s the light from the hollow—it’s coming for you, leaking out slow right now, but it won’t stay slow forever, so we got to do something. See to your blood, and I’ll see to mine, don’t you worry. Just see to your craft, keep it low when you can, and mind that reckoning star.”

Then she turned, stepping down through the shallow water, into the woods, and out of sight.

I was of half a mind to run after her and demand that she be straight with me and stop talking in riddles, but Fisher was shivering in the dark spot under the trees, nearly colorless. I got his arm around my shoulders and we started up the hill.

* * *

We made our way through the thicket, fighting through the brush until with no warning, we spilled out of the trees into a clearing that was all tall grass and fresh air and open sky.

We’d gone all the way through the dark, endless woods and come out into the bottom of Harlan Beekman’s north pasture.

The black sky of the hollow had rolled back to a dusky blue, clear as a jewel and waiting for stars. The larks had all stopped singing and the night birds hadn’t started yet. Everything was desperately quiet.

“How did it get so late?” I whispered, looking around the darkening pasture.

Fisher shook his head. “The hollow isn’t like other places. It’s got its own clock, and sometimes it eats time.”

Now that we were out in the regular world, I could see the colors again, shining around him. A haze of pain glowed red, bright as fire and worse when I closed my eyes.

“Fisher?” I took a step toward him. “Can I do something?”

He kept his face away from me. All I could make out was the paleness of his skin, the dark, shaggy mess of his hair. I blinked and saw the bright shape of him against my eyelids, throbbing with a dull, orange heat. The pain looked electrical, all razor jags of red and black, loud and sharp and ugly.