Out of Their Minds

by Clifford D. Simak

  Finally he could stand it no longer.

  “You have,” he said, “your three-times charm. But there is another one who hasn’t.”

  He had me cold and he knew he had me cold and it was a lucky thing for him that he was beyond the ball bats reach.

  “You mean Miss Adams,” I said, as coolly as I could.

  “You catch on quick,” he said. “Will you, as a chivalrous gentleman, take her peril upon your shoulders? Had it not been for you, she’d not be vulnerable. I think you owe it to her.”

  “So do I,” I said.

  “You mean that?” the critter cried in glee.

  “Indeed I do,” I told him.

  “You take upon your shoulders …”

  I interrupted him. “Cut out the oratory. I have said I would.”

  Maybe I could have stretched it out, but if I did I sensed I would lose face and had a hunch that face might count for something in the situation.

  The wolves came to their feet and they quit their panting and there was now no laughter in them.

  My mind spun in a frantic whirl to snare some course of action that might give me a chance to fight my way out of this dilemma. But it was empty whirling. I got not the least idea.

  The wolves paced slowly forward, purposeful and businesslike. They had a job to do and they intended doing it and getting it over with. I backed away. With my back against the building, I might have a better chance. I swished the bat at them and they halted momentarily, then came on again. My back against the building, I stopped and waited for them.

  A fan of light caught the building opposite and swiveled swiftly to point down the street toward us. Two blinding headlights loomed out of the darkness. An engine howled its protest at swift acceleration and through the howl came the scream of tortured tires.

  The wolves whirled, crouching, held for an instant, pinpointed on the beam of light, then moved, but some of them too slowly as the car came plowing into them. There was the sickening sound of impact as metal crunched into flesh and bone. Then the wolves were gone, blinking out as the thing with the pointed head had blinked out above the water when I’d smacked it with the paddle.

  The car was slowing and I ran after it, as fast as I could go. Not that there was any danger now, but I knew that I’d feel safer once I got inside that car.

  It came to a halt and I made it to the door and climbed into the seat and slammed the door and locked it.

  “One down and two to go,” I said.

  Kathy’s voice was shaky. “One down?” she asked. “What do you mean by that?” She was trying to be casual, but not succeeding very well.

  I reached out in the darkness and touched her and I could feel that she was trembling. God knows, she had the right to.

  I pulled her close and held her and she clung to me and all around us the darkness was vibrating with an ancient fear and mystery.

  “What were those things?” she asked in a quavery voice. “They had you backed up against the wall and they looked like wolves.”

  “They were, indeed,” I said. “Very special wolves.”

  “Special?”

  “Werewolves. At least I think they were.”

  “But, Horton …”

  “You read the paper,” I said. “When you shouldn’t have. You should know by now …”

  She pulled away from me. “But that can’t be true,” she said in a tight, schoolteacherish tone. “There just can’t be werewolves and goblins and all the rest of it.”

  I laughed softly—not that I was enjoying myself, but amused by the fierceness of her protest.

  “There weren’t,” I told her, “until a flighty little primate came along and dreamed them up.”

  She sat for a moment, staring at me. “But they were there,” she said.

  I nodded. “They would have had me if you hadn’t come along.”

  “I drove too fast,” she said. “Too fast all the way for the sort of road it was. I scolded myself for doing it, but it seemed I had to. Now I’m glad I did.”

  “So am I,” I said.

  “What do we do now?”

  “We drive on. Without wasting time. Without stopping for a minute.”

  “Gettysburg, you mean.”

  “That’s where you want to go.”

  “Yes, of course. But you said Washington.”

  “I have to get to Washington. As fast as I can get there. Perhaps it would be better …”

  “If I went with you, right on to Washington.”

  “If you would. It might be a whole lot safer.”

  And wondered what I was talking about. How could I guarantee her safety?

  “Maybe we had better start then. It’s a long way to go. Would you drive, Horton, please?”

  “Certainly,” I said and opened the door.

  “No, don’t,” she said. “Don’t get out.”

  “I have to walk around.”

  “We could change seats. Slide past one another.”

  I laughed at her. I’d gotten terribly brave. “I am safe,” I said, “with this baseball bat. Besides, there’s nothing out there now.”

  But I was wrong. There was something out there now. It was clambering up the side of the car and as I stepped out it hoisted itself atop the hood. It turned around and faced me, jigging in its rage. Its pointed head was quivering and its pointed ears were flapping and the thatch of hanging hair bounced up and down.

  “I am the Referee,” it shrilled at me. “You fight very tricky. For such dirty fighting back, there must be penalty. I call a foul upon you!”

  I swung the bat in rage, two-handed. For one night I’d had enough of this strange character.

  It didn’t wait. It knew what to expect. It flickered and went away and the bat went swishing through the empty air.

  13

  I slumped in the seat and tried to sleep, but I couldn’t seem to sleep. My body needed sleep, but my brain cried out against it. I sank close to the edge of it, but never seemed quite able to drop off into it.

  A parade went marching through my brain and there was no end to it and no reason, either. It was not really thinking, for I was too played out to think. I had been at the wheel too long; all night until an early morning stop for breakfast somewhere near Chicago and then driving against the rising sun until Kathy took the wheel. I had tried to sleep then and had napped a little, but I hadn’t gotten much rest. And now, after lunch somewhere near the Pennsylvania line, I had settled down, determined to build up some sack time. But it wasn’t working out.

  The wolves came again, padding down my brain in the same nonchalant manner as they had padded down the street of Woodman. They closed in upon me as I backed against the building and, although I was watching for her and waiting for her, Kathy did not come. They closed in upon me and I fought them off, realizing that in the end I could not fight them off, while the Referee perched upon the bracket that held the creaking sign and in his piping voice was yelling foul at me. My legs and arms grew heavy and I had trouble moving them, my body aching and sweating in a desperate effort to make them move the way they should. The blows I struck with the bat seemed to be feeble blows, although I put all the strength I had into the striking of the blows and I wondered and worried most intensely why this should be so until the realization dawned upon me slowly that I held no baseball bat, but a writhing, limber rattlesnake.

  At the realization, the snake and the wolves and Woodman faded from my mind and I was talking once again with my old friend huddled in the chair that threatened to engulf him. He gestured toward the doors that opened on the patio and, following his gesture, I saw that the sky was tenanted by a fairy landscape with ancient, twisted oaks and a castle that thrust snow-white spires and turrets far into the air, while on the road that went winding up the wild and breathless crags leading to the castle marched a motley throng of assorted knights and monsters. I think that we are haunted, my old friend told me, and he had no more than said these words when an arrow came whizzing past my head and s
ank deep into his chest. Off in the wings, as if this place where I stood was some sort of stage, a sweet voice began declaiming: Who shot Cock Robin? I said the Sparrow … and looking very closely I could see with clarity that my old friend, with an arrow in his chest, was certainly no robin, but surely was a sparrow and I wondered if he’d been shot by another sparrow or if I had misunderstood and it had been a robin that had shot a sparrow. And I said to the little monstrosity with the pointed head, which was the Referee, now perching on the mantle, why don’t you yell foul, for it is, indeed, a most foul thing that a friend is done to death. Although I couldn’t be sure if he were done to death or not, for he still sat as he had before, engulfed in the chair, with a smile upon his lips and there was no blood where the arrow had gone in.

  Then, like the wolves in Woodman, my old friend and his study went away and for an instant the slate of my mind was clean and I rejoiced at it, but almost immediately I was running down an avenue and ahead of me I saw a building that I recognized and I strived mightily to reach it, for it was important that I reach it and finally I did. Sitting at a desk just inside the door was an agent of the FBI. I knew he was an agent because he had square shoulders and an angular jaw and wore a soft black hat. I leaned my mouth close to his ear and whispered about a terrible secret that must be told to no one, for it was death to anyone who knew it. He listened to me with no change of expression, without a single twitch of a muscle in his face and when I had finished, he reached for a phone. You are a member of the Mob, he told me, I can recognize one of them at a hundred paces. And then I saw that I had been mistaken, that he was no agent of the FBI, but merely Superman. His place immediately was taken by another man in another place—a tall man standing dignified and rigid, with white hair combed meticulously and a clipped, white, bristly mustache. I knew him immediately for what he was, an agent of the CIA, and I stood tall, on tiptoes, to whisper in his ear, being very careful to tell him, in its exact phraseology, what I had told the man I had thought was the FBI. The tall and rigid man stood and heard me out, then reached for a phone. You are a spy, he said. I can recognize one of them at a hundred paces. I knew then that I had imagined all of this, both the FBI and the CIA, and that I was in no building, but on a gray and darkling plain that stretched flat in all directions to a far horizon that was gray itself, so that I had some difficulty in determining where the plain left off and the sky began.

  “You ought to try to go to sleep,” said Kathy. “You need the sleep. Do you want an aspirin?”

  “No aspirin,” I mumbled at her. “I haven’t got a headache.”

  What I had, I knew, was far worse than a headache. It was no dream, for I was half awake. I knew all the time that these other things were running in my mind that I was in a car and that the car was moving. The landscape outside the car was lost on me; I was aware of tree and hill, of field and far-off village, of the other cars upon the road and of the road shimmering out into the distance, of the sound of engine and of tires. But the awareness was a background awareness only, dimmed and dulled, a surface awareness that seemed to make no impact upon the visions summoned up by a brain that had lost its governor of reason and was running wild, summoning up the fantasy of the might-have-been.

  I was back on the plain again and I saw now that it was featureless, a lonely and eternal place, that its flatness was not marred by any hill or ridge or tree, that it ran on forever in its utter sameness and that the sky, like the plain, also was featureless, without a cloud or sun or star and it was hard to tell whether it might be day or night—it was too light for night and too dark for day. It was a deep dusk and I wondered whether it might be always like this, a place where it was never anything but dusk, reaching toward the night, but never getting there. As I stood there on the plain, I heard the baying coming from far away, a sound that was unmistakable, the very sound that I had heard when I had stepped out for a breath of air and had heard the pack go crying down the notch of Lonesome Hollow. Frightened by the sound, I turned slowly, trying to determine from what direction it might come, and in my slow turning I caught sight of a thing that stumbled its way along the far horizon, its blackness dimly outlined against the grayness of the sky. Dim, but not to be mistaken, not that long sinuous neck which terminated in the ugly, darting, seeking head, not that serrated backbone.

  I ran, although there was no place to run, certainly no place that one could hide. And as I ran I knew what sort of place it was, a place that had existed forever and would exist forever, where nothing had ever happened or was about to happen. Now there was another sound, a steady, oncoming sound that could be heard in the silences which lay between the baying of the wolves—a flapping, plopping sound that had an undertone of rustling and at times a harsh, hard buzzing. I spun about and searched the surface of the plain and in a little time I saw them, a squadron of humping, wriggling rattlesnakes bearing down upon me. I turned and ran, the air pumping in my lungs, and as I ran I knew there was no use of running and no need. For this was a place where nothing had ever happened and where nothing would ever happen and because of this it was a place of perfect safety. I ran, I knew, from nothing but my fear. It was a safe place, but by that very token, a place of futility and of hopelessness. But nevertheless I ran, for I could not stop the running. I heard the baying of the wolves, no closer and no farther off than they had been at first, and the slap, slap of the hunching rattlesnakes keeping pace with me. My strength ran out and my breath ran out and I fell, then got up and ran again and fell again. Finally I fell and lay there, not caring any more, not caring what might happen, although I knew that in this place nothing at all could happen. I didn’t try to get up. I just lay there and let the hopelessness and the futility and the blackness close in upon me.

  But suddenly I became aware that something had gone wrong. There was no motor hum, no hiss of rubber on the pavement, no sense of motion. There was, instead, the sound of a quiet wind blowing and the scent of many blossoms.

  “Wake up, Horton,” Kathy’s startled voice said. “Something happened, very, very strange.”

  I opened my eyes and struggled upward. I lifted both my fists and scrubbed at sleep-smudged eyes.

  The car had stopped and we were no longer on the highway. We were on no road at all, but on a rutted cart track that went wandering down a hill, dodging boulders and trees and brightly flowering shrubs. Grass grew between the deep wheelmarks and a wildness and a silence hung over everything.

  We seemed to be on top of a high ridge or a mountain. The lower slope was heavily forested, but here, on top, the trees were scattered, although their size made up for the fewness of them—most of them great oaks, their mighty branches scarred and twisted, their boles spotted with heavy coats of lichens.

  “I was just driving along,” said Kathy, shaken, “not going too fast, not as fast as the highway limit—fifty more than likely. And then I was off the road and the car was rolling to a stop, its engine killed. And that’s impossible. It couldn’t happen that way.”

  I still was half asleep. I rubbed my eyes again, not so much to get the sleep out of them as because there was something wrong about the place.

  “There was no sense of deceleration,” Kathy said. “No jolt. And how could one get off the highway? There’s no way to leave the highway.”

  I’d seen those oaks somewhere before and I was trying to remember where I might have seen them—not the selfsame trees, of course, but others that were like them.

  “Kathy,” I asked, “where are we?”

  “We must be on top of South Mountain. I’d just passed through Chambersburg.”

  “Yes,” I said, remembering, “just short of Gettysburg.” Although when I had asked the question, that had not been exactly what I’d meant.

  “You don’t realize what happened, Horton. We might have both been killed.”

  I shook my head. “Not killed. Not here.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked, irritated at me.

  “Those oaks,” I said. �
�Where have you seen those oaks before?”

  “I’ve never seen …”

  “Yes, you have,” I said. “You must have. When you were a kid. In a book about King Arthur, or maybe Robin Hood.”

  She gasped and reached her hand out to my arm. “Those old romantic, pastoral drawings …”

  “That is right,” I said. “All oak trees in this land, most likely, are that kind of oaks, and all poplars tall and stately and all pine trees most triangular, as in a picture book.”

  Her hand tightened on my arm. “That other land. The place that friend of yours …”

  “Perhaps,” I said. “Perhaps.”

  For even knowing that it could be no other place, that it what Kathy said were true, we’d both be dead if it were not that other land, it still was a hard thing to accept.

  “But I thought,” said Kathy, “that it would be full of ghosts and goblins and other horrid things.”

  “Horrid things,” I said. “Yes, I’d think you’d find them here. But more than likely some good things as well.”

  For if this were actually the place my old friend had hypothesized, then it held all the legends and the myths, all the fairy tales that man had dreamed hard enough for them to become a part of him.

  I opened the door of the car and stepped out.

  The sky was blue—perhaps a shade too blue—a deep, intense and still very gentle blue. The grass was slightly greener, it seemed to me, than grass had the right to be, and yet in that extra-greenness there was a sense of gladness, the kind of feeling an eight-year-old boy might have in walking barefoot through the soft, new grass of spring.

  Standing there and looking at it, I realized that the place was entirely storybook. In some subtle way that I could sense, but could not really name, it was not the old and solid earth, but a bit too perfect to be any place on Earth. It looked the way that painted illustrations looked.

  Kathy came around the car to stand beside me.

  “It’s so peaceful here,” she said. “You really can’t believe it.”