The Complete Serials

by Clifford D. Simak

  “If I have any truck left.”

  “You didn’t,” Blaine pointed out, “have very much to start with.” Riley mopped his face with a faded handkerchief that at one time had been turkey red.

  “It’s not only the truck and all the work,” he said. It’s the wear and tear on a man himself.”

  For Riley was a frightened man—and the fright, Blaine saw, went down to the bone and core of him.

  It was not, Blaine told himself, watching the man, the simple emotional mechanics of a man frightened by the horrific menagerie of mischief and of evil from which, because he had believed in it for his entire life, he could conjure up with no effort whatsoever the terrible fantasies of an age gone past. It was something more than that; it was more immediate than latent nighttime fears.

  To Blaine the man was an oddity, a human specimen out of some medieval museum; a man who feared the dark and the imagined forms with which he peopled it; a man who placed reliance in a painted hex sign and in a shotgun loaded with a charge of silver buckshot. He had heard of men like this, but had never met one. If there had been any such as this among the people that he met in Fishhook, they had kept it closely hidden behind a sophisticated mask.

  But if Riley was a man of curiosity to Blaine, Blaine was likewise one to him.

  “You are not afraid?” he’d ask.

  Blaine would shake his head.

  “You do not believe these things?”

  “To me,” Blaine would tell him. “they have always seemed just a little foolish.”

  Riley would protest: “They are not foolish, friend. I can assure you that I’ve known too many people. I’ve heard too many tales that I know are true. There w-as an old man when I was a boy back in Indiana. He was found tangled in a fence with his throat ripped out. And there were tracks around the body and the smell of sulfur.”

  If it were not this particular story, then it was another, just as gruesome, just as starkly mystic, just as ancient-dark.

  And what could one do with that. Blaine wondered. Where would one find an answer? For the belief was engrained deeply in the human fiber, not entirely, either, in the matrix of the present situation, but in the blood and bone of Man clear back to the caves. There was in the soul of Man a certain deadly fascination with all things that were macabre. The situation as it stood had been grasped willingly, almost eagerly, by men for whom the world had become a rather tame and vapid place with no terror (in it beyond the brute force terror of atomic weapons and the dread uncertainty of unstable men in power.

  It had all begun quite innocently as the people grabbed at the new principles of PK for their entertainment and their enjoyment. Almost overnight the fact of mental power had become a fad that had over-whelmed the world. Nightclubs had I changed their names, there had been startling fashion trends, new teen-age cants had risen, it had gone over-board with its horror films and the presses had poured out billions of volumes dealing with the supernatural. There had been new cults and older cults had flourished. The ouija board came back after two centuries of hiding in the mists of an earlier age which had played with ghosts for kicks, but had given up when it had found that you could not play with the spirit world. You either believed in it or you didn’t and there was no middle ground.

  There had been quacks and there had been earnest men, considerably deluded, who had made names and fortunes from the fad. Manufacturers had turned out carload after carload of novelties and equipment for the pursuance of this new fad, or new hobby, or new study or religion—the Specific term would apply in direct proportion to the seriousness with which each individual might consider it.

  It all had been wrong, of course—for paranormal kinetics was not supernatural. Nor was it macabre, nor did it deal with ghost or devil or any of the other of the hordes of forgotten things which came charging happily out of the Middle Ages. It was, instead a new dimension to Man’s abilities—but the enamored people, agog at this new toy, had adopted it wholeheartedly in all misinterpretation.

  As they always did, they had overdone it. They had played so hard at their misinterpretation that they had forgotten, despite warning after warning, that it was misinterpretation. They finally had come to believe in all the weirdness and all the fantasy; they finally regarded it as the gospel truth. Where there had been fun there now were leering fauns; where there had been gags there now were goblins and ghosts.

  So the reaction had set in, the inevitable reaction of fanatical reformers, accompanied by the grim, horse-faced cruelty and blindness that goes with all fanatical reform. Now a grim and frightened people hunted down, as a holy mission, their paranormal neighbors.

  There were a lot of these, but they were in hiding now or in masquerade. There had always been a lot of them through all the human ages, but mostly unsuspecting, never dreaming that they had powers within themselves fit to reach the stars. They were the people who had been just a little queer, a bit discomboobolated and had been regarded tolerantly as harmless by their neighbors. There had been a few, of course, who had been in part effective, but even in their effectiveness they had not believed, or believing, they had used their strange powers poorly, for they could not understand them. And in the later years, when they might have understood it, none of them had dared, for the tribal god of Science had called it all foolishness.

  But when the stubborn men in Mexico had demonstrated that it was not all foolishness, then the people dared. Those who had the abilities then felt free to use them, and developed them by use. Others who never suspected that they had them found to their surprise they did and they used them, too. In some cases the abilities were used to good and solid purpose, but in other cases they were wrongly used or used for shallow purpose. And there were those, as well, who practiced this new-found art of theirs for unworthy ends, and a very few, perhaps, who used it in all evil.

  Now the good gray moralists and the pulpit-pounding, crag-browed, black-attired reformers were out to quash PK for the evil it had done. They used the psychology of fear; they played upon the natural superstitions; they used the rope and brand and the quick shot in the night and they spread a fear across the land that one could smell in the very air—a thick, foul scent that clogged the nostrils and brought water to the eyes.

  “You are lucky,” Riley said to Blaine. “Not fearing them, you may be safe from them. A dog will bite a man who is afraid of it, but lick the hand of one who is not afraid.”

  “The answer’s easy, then,” Blaine told him. “Do not be afraid.”

  But it was impossible advice to a man like Riley.

  Night after night he sat on the right-hand seat as Blaine drove through the darkness, shivering in terror like a spooky hound, grasping the gun loaded with its silver buckshot.

  There were alarms and frights—the swoop of owl, the running of a fox across the road, an imagined roadside shadow, all became an evil out of some darker night, while the howling of coyotes became the wailing of a banshee, hunting for a victim.

  But there was more than imagined terror. There was the shadow shaped like a man, but a man no longer, twisting and turning in a lazy dance from a high branch above the thicket; there was the blackened ruins of the roadside farm, with the smoke-streaked chimney standing like an accusing finger pointing up to heaven; there was the smoke from the tiny campfire that Blaine stumbled on as he followed up a creek hunting down a spring while Riley wrestled with the balky spark plugs. Blaine had been moving quietly, and they had heard him just too late to vanish before he caught sight of them, fleeing like wraiths up the timbered slopes of the looming mountain spur.

  He had stepped into the tiny, cramped-down circle of the campsite, With its small cooking fire and the skillet on its side, with four half-cooked trout lying in the trampled grass, with the wadded blankets and the comforter that had served as beds, with the rudely-built brush shelter as refuge from the rain.

  He had knelt beside the fire and righted the skillet. He had picked up the fish and brushed the twigs and grass off them
and replaced them in the pan.

  And he had thought to call out to the hiders, to try to reassure them, but he knew that it was useless, for they were past all trust.

  They were hunted animals. Hunted animals in this great United States which for years had valued freedom, which in its later years had stood as a forthright champion before the entire world for the rights of man.

  He had knelt there, torn by an anger and a pity, and he felt the smarting of his eyes. He bunched up his fists and rubbed at his eyes and the moist knuckles smeared streaks of dirt across his face.

  He had stayed there for a while, but finally he had risen and went down the creek again, forgetting that he had hunted for a spring, which no doubt had been only a few feet from the camp.

  When he got back to the truck he did not mention what he’d found to Riley.

  They drove across the deserts and labored across the mountains and finally came to the great high plains where the wind came knifing down without a hill to stop it, without a tree to break it, a naked stretch of land that lay flat and hard to a far horizon.

  And to Blaine, for the first time in his life, the land was more than desert, more than mountains, more than plain. It was a living record of the past. It lay clear—not before his eyes, but, rather, before some new sense, some fresh-sprung comprehension which he did not understand, nor did he attempt to understand, for it seemed as natural as if he’d had it all his life.

  He saw the land in making, through the geologic ages. Each strata of twisted rock, each enfolded ridge and hill, each streambed cut into the surface spelled a message for him. He did not really see it; there were no strips of temporal film unwinding in his brain. But he sensed it and he knew it and in the knowing of it, there was no room for doubt.

  It was as if he had an X ray in his mind that took him inside the mountains and through time as well and it seemed no great thing to him; it was entirely casual. He looked at the land as it spread before him and at the same time knew it as it once had been. But it was only a fleeting glance that barely impinged upon his present consciousness, although the ability was there for him to use, the ability to probe into the past, through the shifting ages, back to the primal hell when Earth was a boiling cloud of energy, coalescing into something that in time would be called a planet.

  But he could only see the inanimate, he could only see the dead, and he knew the reason for it—there was no living past; life floated on the surface of the time tide and it left no trace and no shadow of its passing.

  He rode in the seat alongside Riley, slouched and relaxed against the jolting of the truck. The sun beat down and the wind was dry and off to the north dust devils rose and spun above a dried-up river bed.

  Riley drove hunched tight against the wheel, with his arms braced against the chuck holes and the ruts. His face was tense and at times a nervous tic twitched the muscles of his cheek.

  Even in the daytime, Blaine thought, the man is still afraid, still runs his endless race with darkness.

  Had it to do, he wondered, with the cargo in the truck? Not once had Riley said what he was hauling, not once had he inspected it. There was a heavy padlock on the rear door of the rig and the padlock clanged and jangled as the truck lumbered on road.

  There had been a time or two when Blaine had been on the verge of asking, but there had been a certain reticence that had prevented it. Not anything, perhaps, that Riley had said or done or any way he’d acted, but, rather, his studied casualness in all these areas.

  And after all, Blaine told himself, it was none of his affair. He did not care what might be in the truck. His only interest was in the truck itself; with every turn of a wheel it was carrying him where he had to go.

  He slumped lower in the seat and closed his eyes and tried to catch some sleep. But he was not tired enough. He’d had some sleep earlier in the morning and to sleep in the bouncing truck one had to be fagged out.

  He quit trying after a while, opening his eyes a slit and watching the area ahead. A jack rabbit went across the swale off to the right and far up in the sky a hawk sailed.

  Riley said: “If we get a good run tonight, we’ll reach the river in the morning.”

  “The Missouri?”

  Riley nodded. “If we don’t break down again. If we make good time.”

  But that night they met the witches.

  XIV

  The first they saw of them was a flicker in the fan of light the headlamps threw out along the road and then they saw them flying in the moonlight. Not flying, actually, for they had no wings, but moving through the air as a fish would move through water, and graceful as only flying things can be.

  There was a moment when they might have been moths flying in the lights or night-swooping birds diving in the sky, but once the mind had its instant of utter disbelief and after that, of human rationalization, there was no doubt of what they were.

  They were humans flying. They were levitators. They were witches and there was a covin of them.

  In the seat beside him, Blaine saw Riley thrust the shotgun out the open window. Blaine slammed on the brakes.

  The gun went off, the sound of the report blasting in the cab like a thunderbolt.

  The car skidded to a halt, slant-wise across the road. Blaine grabbed Riley’s shoulder and jerked him off his balance. With the other hand he jerked the gun away.

  He caught a glimpse of Riley’s face and the man was yammering. His jaw went up and down in a devil’s tattoo and there were little flecks of foam at each corner of his mouth. His eyes were wild and rolling and His face was stiff, with the muscles bunched and tensed, like a grotesque mask. His hooked fingers made clawing motions to get back the gun.

  “Snap out of it!” roared Blaine. “They’re only levitators.”

  But the word meant nothing to a man like Riley. All reason and all understanding were lost in the roll of fearful thunder that hammered in his brain.

  And even as he spoke to Riley, Blaine became aware of voices in the night—soundless voices reaching out to him, a medley of voices that were talking to him.

  Friend—One of us is hit (a line of oozing red across a shapely shoulder)—Not bad—He has (a gun with its muzzle limp and drooping and turning suddenly into a rather melancholy and very phallic symbol) Safe—Our friend has the gun. Let us get the other (a snarling dog backed into a corner, a skunk with its tail, uplifted, a rattler coiled and set to strike)

  Wait, yelled Blaine. Wait! Everything’s all right. There’ll be no more shooting.

  He pressed down with his elbow against the door latch and the door swung open. He pushed Riley from him and half fell out of the cab, still clutching the gun. He broke the weapon and the shells jumped out; he threw the gun into the road and backed against the truck.

  Suddenly the night was deadly silent except for the sounds of moaning and of wailing that came from Riley in the cab.

  Everything is clear, said Blaine. There is no more danger.

  They came plunging down out of the sky, as if they might be jumping from some hidden platform, but they landed lightly on their feet.

  They moved slowly forward, catfooted in the night, and they were silent now.

  That was a fool thing to do, Blaine told them. Next time one of you will get your head blown off (a headless human walking casually with the stump of neck frothing furiously.)

  He saw that they were young, not out of their teens, and that they wore what appeared to be bathing suits and he caught the sense of fun and the scent of prank.

  They moved in cautiously and he sought for other signs, but there were no other signs.

  Who are you? one asked.

  Shepherd Blaine of Fishhook.

  And you are going?

  Up to South Dakota.

  In this truck?

  And with this man, said Blaine.

  I want him left alone.

  He took a shot at us. He hit Marie.

  Not bad, said Marie. Just a scratch is all.

  He’s a frig
htened man, said Blaine. He’s using silver shot.

  He sensed the merriment of them at the thought of silver shot.

  And caught the weirdness of the situation, the moonlit night and the deserted road, the car slewed across the highway, the lonely wind that moaned across the prairie, and the two of them, he and Riley, encircled, not by Sioux nor by Comanches nor by Blackfeet, but by a ring of paranormal kids out on a midnight lark.

  And who was there to blame or censure them, he asked himself. If in this small action of defiance they found some measure of self assertion in their hunted lives, if in this manner they snatched at something resembling human dignity, it was then no more than a very human action and not to be condemned.

  He studied the faces, the ones that he could see, indistinct in the moon- and headlamp-light, and there was indecision in them—faces on hair trigger.

  From the cab still came the moaning of a man in mental agony.

  Then: Fishhook? (The towered buildings on the hill, the acre upon acre of them, massive, majestic, inspiring . . .)

  That is right, said Blaine.

  A girl moved out of the huddled group and walked close to Blaine. She held out her hand.

  Friend, she said. We had not expected one. All of us are sorry that we troubled you.

  Blaine put out his hand and felt the firm, strong pressure of young fingers.

  We do not often find someone on the road at night, said another one.

  Just having fun, another said. There’s little chance for fun,

  I know how little chance, said Blaine. I’ve seen how little chance.

  We Halloween, still another said.

  Halloween? Oh, yes, I see. (a fist banging on a closed shutter, a garden gate hanging in a tree, a hex sign upside down)

  It’s good for them. They’ve got it coming to them.

  I agree, said Blaine. But it’s dangerous.

  Not very. They are all too scared.

  But it doesn’t help the situation.