The Vile Village Read online

  “Hey, get away from there,” a voice suddenly called out, and Stone saw the dog turn and then a hand pushing it down off the bed he lay tied down on.

  “You’re awake,” the same soft voice asked. Stone saw another half-focused shape right above him. Only this face wasn’t bald or fairy at all. It was beautiful. “That dog been messin’ with you since it woke up yesterday morning,” the flush-cheeked, blond-haired female said with a little snort of derisive laughter. “How you feelin’, mister?” she asked with a smile. Slowly Stone’s eyes were coming into focus, and the more he saw, the more he felt like living. He dimly remembered some battle he had had with gray, amorphous things. But as he had returned to the world of the living and the memory was of the dead, it quickly faded from his skull, popping like a bubble even as he reached with his mind to contain it.

  “Tara said you was goin’ to die,” she said, reaching down and stroking his forehead with a cool, wet cloth. It felt good. “But I said no—this man’s got guts inside that burned body. I tell you—”

  “What—what do you mean, burned?” Stone asked with puffed lips, which trembled as he spoke. Nothing on him felt like it was in very good shape.

  “Pa thinks it was the rains that came by five days ago. Burned you and your damn dog, I’ll tell you that. You should see yourself, mister—maybe you shouldn’t.” She giggled. “You got bumps and sores and boils and all kinds of nasty things all over yourself. I been working on you with my own hands.” She held up two small, but strong-looking, hands, callused fingers used to working, and hard. “Undertaker let me stay up here with you once he saw you had a real chance, which was mighty nice of him, all things considered—I mean, since it’s peak coffin season right now.”

  Stone’s mind reeled with questions that just gave him a jarring headache as little armies of mental porcupines paraded around in a gallop through his brain.

  “Am I going—goin’ to make it?” Stone managed to stutter out. If he had such a wall-to-wall carpeting of ugly bumps and couldn’t move a muscle, it seemed like a logical question.

  “Pa—Undertaker—thinks so. And damned if he ain’t the most smart doctor type in these parts. Not a real doctor, of course,” she said with a shy smile, which Stone managed to return with his own. She couldn’t have been over eighteen or nineteen years old but was in the full bloom of womanhood. Long reddish-blond hair flowed down each shoulder like little waterfalls of fire, and the blush on her cheeks was like the pink tips of a freshly bloomed mountain rose. Her lips were moist, and Stone felt an insane desire to reach up and kiss them hard. Her face was like a mirror for her inner feelings—her very soul reflected in those twinkling eyes, in her constantly changing expression. Somehow, in a world of death, she was incredibly, wonderfully alive.

  “Why can’t I move?” Stone asked, trying to raise his hand to scratch something that itched fiercely on his stomach.

  “Pa’s treatment, mister,” the farmgirl went on. “Got so many burns all over your skin, it’s all red and tight and dry. We been treating it with all kinds of mud baths that Pa mixed up from his secret recipes. Won’t even tell us what they is. But he said if you moved at all, it would break the skin, rupture it, so’s we got you all tied down, mister. Sorry about that. You do look funny, though. Tied down like Gulliver in the land of the Lilliputians. And all naked the way you are—and all covered with white mud with ground-up junk and herbs in it. You look a little like”—she put her hand over her mouth, trying not to laugh, for it was surely impolite to laugh at the radioactively impaired—“an ice-cream cone with sprinkles all over it.” She couldn’t contain it, and a series of girlish giggles escaped from around her hand.

  Stone somehow managed to crane his neck just a little, just enough to see how completely and horribly ridiculous he looked. Like a mud-caked slug all tied down at arms and legs with leather thongs. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The sheer conflict of the two emotions sent his mind reeling again, and he fell back down the black pit into which many tumble but from which few emerge.

  Chapter

  Five

  * * *

  When next he awoke, the very first thing Stone did was try his arms, which he found to his intense happiness were no longer strapped down. Though he was still naked and on the bed with a thick white goo over every square inch of him, like the Pillsbury Doughboy saturated with icing. It felt sticky and quite wretched, but figuring that these people knew what the hell they were doing or he wouldn’t even still be around, Stone didn’t try to start madly wiping it off with the sheets that lay sweat-soaked beneath him.

  He glanced around the attic room he was in, the thin light of a silvery dawn just starting to streak in through the cracked windows. He could see that he was in a narrow but long room that came to a single joint at the top in an Aframe. Across from him, lying atop a bed without blankets or pillows, was Excaliber, all sprawled out on his back, looking as happy as a goddamn pig in shit. But Stone could see in the slowly brightening morning that the dog was all flea-bitten, with little patches or missing hair all over its coat, its tail swollen to twice its normal size. The mutt looked like it had been through the wringer—and the washer and the dryer—and they had all been set on “Extra Heavy Wash.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Stone muttered, and he could feel that his own lips had swollen to nearly the size of sausages.

  “Ah—it lives, it breathes,” the same sweet voice that had been the last thing he heard said from a chair in a still darkened corner of the room. “You slept another two days. What’sa matter, mister?” the girl asked, her face bright with a pearly smile as she walked over to him. “Ain’t you never slept before you came to the Hanson Farm and Undertaking Palace?”

  “As a matter of fact,” Stone replied, managing to rise up to his elbows, though the effort sent sharp little jolts of pain all through his arms and stomach, “no. Never. Not before here. I think I like it.” He let himself fall backward, then let out a sharp little bark as his whole back seemed to light up like a roman candle of pain. Stone remembered when he had let himself get badly sunburned a few times when he had been a stupid kid. His back had erupted in little water-filled bubbles and had turned beet-red. It had hurt him so much that he had clutched the wet sheets through the night with tears in his eyes. But this was a different level of pain, a hundred times worse. Still, in front of someone with whom he wouldn’t have minded being stranded on a desert island, Stone didn’t betray a bit of the pain he was feeling, other than a little quiver of his lower lip from time to time.

  “Well, enough sleep,” she said firmly, leaning over and grabbing hold of his elbow. It felt like her fingers were hot pincers as they dug into him. “Undertaker says if you ain’t dead, it’s time for you to get up and contribute something to the work here—as he’s spent a fortune on you already.” She said the words as if quoting him, then giggled. Again Stone was struck by the way her eyes glistened, how her lips moved as she spoke. He could feel himself heading for another fall—perhaps worse than the one he had just taken.

  “All right,” Stone said weakly, “but you’ll have to help me. I feel like a worm that’s been in a blender.”

  “Sure,” she said with a shy smile, and reached forward to help him. Only as Stone started to sit up did he realize again that he was still completely naked and covered by the white paste.

  “Wait, I’m sorry—I—” Stone began to stutter, not even sure what the hell it was he was trying to say.

  “Don’t worry, mister, I been seeing you stark naked for days now. Who you think been coating you with that slop, turning you over to air you out in the breeze—like some ol’ mattress. So don’t start getting all shy and blushing on me now.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Stone said dumbly, his brain not functioning clearly enough to make or even think of anything clever to say. She helped him into his clothes as Stone walked around, fuming a deeper shade of red than he already was. There was something about a woman helping you into your drawers that could rattle
a man’s whiskers.

  At last, with repressed groans by Stone here and sorrys by her there whenever she pulled too hard on a piece of clothing or scratched his leg as she poked it through his pant leg, he was dressed. Stone walked stiffly to the dog, trying not to fall down from the rubberiness in his legs and the dizziness that tan through him in waves of nausea. He felt like a rubber band in the sun.

  “What’s the matter, boy? You don’t look too good.” Stone said with concern, standing over the disheveled and partially shaven animal, which opened its eyes like the slits of pillboxes and looked at him.

  “In fact, you look like shit,” Stone went on as he saw all the bumps and lumps that covered the creature, though he knew he didn’t look great himself.

  “Been giving him basically the same treatment as you,” the girl said. “And I must say he was a better patient than you too. You was always groaning and trying to punch me when I had to change your dressings—but him, he would just lie back, get this dumb sorts smile on his face, and wait for me to scratch his belly.

  “That’s because he’s more of a hedonist than me.” Stone smirked.

  “A what?” she asked, standing on the other side of the feather mattress on top of the bed frame on which the pitbull lay.

  “Someone who loves pleasure,” Stone answered, scratching the dog behind the ears so that he let out a little squeal of satisfaction.

  “Ain’t nothing wrong with pleasure,” she said, looking Stone directly in the eyes with a bold, unmistakable sexual energy. “Anyway,” she went on as he looked away first, his heart starting to beat too fast, sending the blood to his head like the mercury in a thermometer set over a flame. “I think he’s going to be all right too. He was up two, three days ago—but he ate so damn much as soon as we fed him that his stomach got distended and he’s been bedridden for two more days now. We’re not even going to let the sucker eat next time.”

  “Good idea,” Stone said, looking down at the dog, which would eat itself right into death like a goldfish if it could.

  “Goldfish,” Stone muttered under his breath as he patted the still bloated guts of the animal hanging down like the pig-stuffed stomach of an anaconda. The animal made a dreadful sound, like a burp, yawn, and howl all at once, and Stone pulled his palm away from the creature’s white-furred belly.

  “Let’s go,” the girl said as she came around to Stone’s side and took him by the arm. “They’ll all be eatin’ downstairs—be a good time to meet the whole crew if you can stand it. What’s your name?” she asked suddenly. “I been rubbin’ you down naked, but I don’t even know what the world calls you.” She laughed, and again Stone couldn’t help but notice how her teeth sparkled like pearls in the golden rays of the half-risen sun.

  “I’m Stone,” he said. “Martin Stone. And this here’s my dog—well, he’s not really my dog, but he’s chosen to travel with me for the moment. The name he answers to is Excaliber.”

  “Name’s LuAnn, but they all call’s me Lou, on account of I look like my dead brother, Louis.” She helped him to the door, supporting him on one shoulder, as she could see that he was having a bit of trouble walking, though she knew he would never at it.

  They’d hardly reached the second-floor landing when Stone could hear them—voices, lots of them. By the time they got to the first floor, to the back, and through the swinging doors into the huge kitchen, it became deafening. There must have been thirty people—from little babies suckling at their mother’s breast to eighty-year-old, shriveled-up biddies with toothless mouths sucking on spoons with cereal in them. All of them were eating breakfast as huge buckets of steaming porridge were carried over on long poles and set down atop one of three long wooden tables that filled the ramshackle space, thick with the scents and steam of the foods and the odors of farmers who hadn’t taken too many baths recently.

  They turned as one as Stone came through the swinging oak doors—and they laughed, a great, thunderous sound that Stone wouldn’t forget until his last day. And they pointed at him.

  “You look like a snowman who got covered with icing,” one of the dirty faces with unkempt hair screamed above the din of human ridicule and canine barking.

  “Oh, shut up, all of you!” a bald, fat man screamed out from the head of the biggest table as he reached out with a long hickory stick he had hidden in his sleeve and began bouncing it off the nearest heads with sharp little snaps.

  “Now get back to your food—and be happy you got any,” the man shouted out, pounding his meaty fist on the table so that all the bowls filled with gruel danced up an inch or two and came down hard, jiggling their contents in little splashes onto the tabletop. “’Cause you got work to do—and ’cause this man is our guest and will be treated accordingly.”

  The place seemed to quiet down—for a few seconds, anyway—though all eyes remained on Stone even as the mouths below them continued to chew ravenously at the cereal in their bowls. The place reminded Stone of the movie Oliver Twist, which he’d seen years before. The general slovenliness of the kitchen and the filthy appearance of the people in it—ripped shirts and pants, the shoelessness of most of those present, the gap-toothed smiles—all brought to mind nothing less than Fagin’s pickpocket gang of little thieves who he had trained to rob and swindle. But aside from the appearance of things, everyone seemed to be relatively happy and well W. It was a hell of a lot better than most of the hovels Stone had seen in his travels around the cesspool that was now America.

  “Here, come sit here,” the bald face bellowed, and LuAnn led Stone over to the table, helping him right to the long bench seat, where he plopped down hard when she let go.

  “Ah, you look like hell,” the ruddy face said. “But you’ll live. Believe me, I know—I’ve seen a lot of ’em go out that way. You’d be dead already, my friend, if it was your time.”

  “Well, that’s good to know,” Stone intoned without much energy. He felt like he hardly existed, like he was hardly more substantial than the creatures he had been battling with the nights before. While those around him seemed incredibly, painfully alive as they laughed and ate and banged their forks on the tables, as they hit one another and played dumb children’s games. “But I sure as hell feel dead.”

  “Food, man—you need food. Look at me,” Hanson said with pride. He slapped his great girth, and every part of him sort of jiggled around like too much taffy on the end of a stick. “I eat my fill, and I never get sick. Plague—radiation, it can’t get through a filled stomach. Dammit” he shouted again, sounding like an elephant horn cutting through the mayhem of the kitchen. “When a man needs food, goddamn it, he’d better get food.” Three pairs of children had been carrying the pots back and forth from the roaring hearth that took up one whole end of the kitchen. They rushed even faster, trying to keep up with the insatiable demands of the birdlike mouths that kept opening and snapping shut, gulping down everything that they carried over.

  “Name’s Hanson. Bradley “Undertaker” Hanson. I’m farmer, undertaker, preacher, doctor. You name it, I can do it, or it can’t be done. Pleased to meet you, boy. What’s your name?”

  “Stone,” he replied, taking a bite of the steaming oatmeal that sat on the table in front of him, which sent up a mouthwatering funnel of sugary wheat flavor. “Martin Stone. And I sure as hell want to thank you for saving my damn ass. My dog too. Not too many men would have done that. Not from what I’ve seen out there.”

  “Well, I ain’t like no other man you’re likely to meet, and you can bet your aunt’s balls on that.” The man laughed. A dog suddenly got hold of a piece of meat on the far side of the room, which resulted in quite a commotion, with food flying and animals leaping across tables. But apparently it was a fairly common occurrence, for though Stone looked up, startled, the rest hardly paid it any mind at all.

  Suddenly Undertaker leapt up and snapped out his hickory hitting one of the youngsters at the table about six feet away. The blond, buck-toothed lad jumped straight up in the air with a
scream, as if he’d been goosed with an electric prod. A butter knife clanked down onto the table from one of his sleeves.

  “Bastard son,” Undertaker shouted, his face growing red with an apoplectic rage. “You steal from your own father?”

  “I’m s-sorry Pa,” the lad stuttered as he stood at rigid attention, shaking like a leaf. “I just wanted to have a knife like all my brudders, here.” He motioned with his head around the table. “It ain’t fair that I got to wait till I’m sixteen. Already got cut up twice by the Bronson boys in town.”

  “That’s just why I didn’t give you a damn knife. If I did, you would have stabbed one of them Bronson—and now we’d have us a shooting feud going with ’em. Your father knows best, boy. Always remember that.” He squinted closely at the lad and scratched his bald head. “Which one are you, anyway? Name, lad, name?” He snapped his finger impatiently, and the teen stuttered again, as if he couldn’t quite remember his own name.

  “Andy, s-sir,” he at last spat out. “In charge of chickenfeed, wheelbarrow oiling, duck herding, compost, dog feeding, nail straightening—”

  “All right, all right,” Hanson said, waving his hand and slamming his huge frame back down in his seat. “Come see me later, boy, and we’ll talk at punishment. I’m still eating my breakfast.” The youth sank down and looked terrified as he sat paralyzed at his place, unable to take another bite of the oatmeal.

  “I’ve sired a lot of children,” Hanson said, looking proudly at Stone. “Can’t remember them all sometimes. You know how it is.” Stone nodded appreciatively, as if he had exactly the same problem. “Paul, John, Ted, Ed, Fred—who the hell can keep up with it? I just make ’em,” he said with a laugh, “I don’t keep track of ’em.” Stone looked quickly around the room and saw an ungodly number of snot-nosed brats chomping down on breakfast—and quite a number of wives, as well, with newborns attached to them. Could they all be Hanson’s? Stone wondered. The man looked to be in his sixties—perhaps even his seventies—but he was still powerful, virile. Although huge, Stone knew that within those folds of fat was great strength, and beneath that bald dome, a high intelligence.