The Nebraskan extracted the tape recorder from his pocket, rewound the tape, and inserted the earpiece.
Had been “like to a man, only crooked-legged an’ wry neck.” Yet it had not been a man, though the feature that separated it from humanity had not been specified. A doglike head seemed a possibility, surely, and An-uat might have changed a good deal in five thousand years.
The Nebraskan returned to his chair and reopened his book, but the sun was already nearly at the horizon. After flipping pages aimlessly for a minute or two, he joined the Thackers in their living room.
Never had the inanities of television seemed less real or less significant. Though his eyes followed the movements of the actors on the screen, he was in fact considerably more attentive to Sarah’s warmth and rather too generously applied perfume, and still more to a scene that had never, perhaps, taken place: to the dead mule lying in the field long ago, and to the marksmen concealed where the woods began. Colonel Lightfoot had no doubt been a historical person, locally famous, who would be familiar to the majority of Mr. Thacker’s hearers. Laban Creech might or might not have been an actual person as well. Mr. Thacker had—mysteriously, now that the Nebraskan came to consider it—given the Nebraskan’s own last name, Cooper, to the third and somewhat inessential marksman.
Three marksmen had been introduced because numbers greater than unity were practically always three in folklore, of course; but the use of his own name seemed odd. No doubt it had been no more than a quirk of the old man’s failing memory. Remembering Cooper, he had attributed the name incorrectly.
By imperceptible degrees, the Nebraskan grew conscious that the Thackers were giving no more attention to the screen than he himself was; they chuckled at no jokes, showed no irritation at even the most insistent commercials, and spoke about the dismal sitcom neither to him nor to one another.
Pretty Sarah sat primly beside him, her knees together, her long legs crossed at their slender ankles, and her dishwater-reddened hands folded on her apron. To his right, the old man rocked, the faint protests of his chair as regular, and as slow, as the ticking of the tall clock in the corner, his hands upon the crook of his cane, his expression a sightless frown.
To Sarah’s left, the younger Mr. Thacker was almost hidden from the Nebraskan’s view. He rose and went into the kitchen, cracking his knuckles as he walked, returned with neither food nor drink, and sat once more for less than half a minute before rising again.
Sarah ventured, “Maybe you’d like some cookies, or some more lemonade?”
The Nebraskan shook his head. “Thank you, Miss Thacker; but if I were to eat anything else, I wouldn’t sleep.”
Oddly, her hands clenched. “I could fetch you a piece of pie.”
“No, thank you.”
Mercifully, the sitcom was over, replaced by a many-colored sunrise on the plains of Africa. There sailed the boat of Ra, the Nebraskan reflected, issuing in splendor from the dark gorge called Tuat to give light to mankind. For a moment he pictured a far smaller and less radiant vessel, black-hulled and crowded with the recalcitrant dead, a vessel steered by a jackal-headed man: a minute fleck against the blazing disk of the African sun. What was that book of von Däniken’s? Ships—no, Chariots of the Gods. Spaceships nonetheless—and that was folklore, too, or at any rate was quickly passing into folklore; the Nebraskan had encountered it twice already.
An animal, a zebra, lay still upon the plain. The camera panned in on it; when it was very near, the head of a huge hyena appeared, its jaws dripping carrion. The old man turned away, his abrupt movement drawing the Nebraskan’s attention.
Fear. That was it, of course. He cursed himself for not having identified the emotion pervading the living room sooner. Sarah was frightened, and so was the old man—horribly afraid. Even Sarah’s father appeared fearful and restless, leaning back in his chair, then forward, shifting his feet, wiping his palms on the thighs of his faded khaki trousers.
The Nebraskan rose and stretched. “You’ll have to excuse me. It’s been a long day.”
When neither of the men spoke, Sarah said, “I’m ’Bout to turn in myself, Mr. Cooper. You want to take a bath?”
He hesitated, trying to divine the desired reply. “If it’s not going to be too much trouble. That would be very nice.”
Sarah rose with alacrity. “I’ll fetch you some towels and stuff.”
He returned to his room, stripped, and put on pajamas and a robe. Sarah was waiting for him at the bathroom door with a bar of Zest and half a dozen towels at least. As he took the towels the Nebraskan murmured, “Can you tell me what’s wrong? Perhaps I can help.”
“We could go to town, Mr. Cooper.” Hesitantly she touched his arm. “I’m kind of pretty, don’t you think so? You wouldn’t have to marry me or nothin’, just go off in the mornin’.”
“You are,” the Nebraskan told her. “In fact, you’re very pretty; but I couldn’t do that to your family.”
“You get dressed again.” Her voice was scarcely audible, her eyes on the top of the stairs. “You say your old trouble’s startin’ up, you got to see the doctor. I’ll slide out the back and ’round. Stop for me at the big elm.”
“I really couldn’t, Miss Thacker,” the Nebraskan said.
In the tub he told himself that he had been a fool. What was it that girl in his last class had called him? A hopeless romantic. He could have enjoyed an attractive young woman that night (and it had been months since he had slept with a woman) and saved her from … what? A beating by her father? There had been no bruises on her bare arms, and he had noticed no missing teeth. That delicate nose had never been broken, surely.
He could have enjoyed the night with a very pretty young woman—for whom he would have felt responsible afterward, for the remainder of his life. He pictured the reference in The Journal of American Folklore: “Collected by Dr. Samuel Cooper, U. Neb., from Hopkin Thacker, 73, whose granddaughter Dr. Cooper seduced and abandoned.”
With a snort of disgust, he stood, jerked the chain of the white rubber plug that had retained his bathwater, and snatched up one of Sarah’s towels, at which a scrap of paper fluttered to the yellow bathroom rug. He picked it up, his fingers dampening lined notebook filler.
Do not tell him anything grandpa told you. A woman’s hand, almost painfully legible.
Sarah had anticipated his refusal, clearly; anticipated it, and coppered her bets. Him meant her father, presumably, unless there was another male in the house or another was expected—her father almost certainly.
The Nebraskan tore the note into small pieces and flushed them down the toilet, dried himself with two towels, brushed his teeth and resumed his pajamas and robe, then stepped quietly out into the hall and stood listening.
The television was still on, not very loudly, in the front room. There were no other voices, no sound of footsteps or of blows. What had the Thackers been afraid of? The soul-sucker? Egypt’s mouldering divinities?
The Nebraskan returned to his room and shut the door firmly behind him. Whatever it was, it was most certainly none of his business. In the morning he would eat breakfast, listen to a tale or two from the old man, and put the whole family out of his mind.
Something moved when he switched off the light. And for an instant he had glimpsed his own shadow on the window blind, with that of someone or something behind him, a man even taller than he, a broad-shouldered figure with horns or pointed ears.
Which was ridiculous on the face of it. The old-fashioned brass chandelier was suspended over the center of the room; the switch was by the door, as far as possible from the windows. In no conceivable fashion could his shadow—or any other—have been cast on that shade. He and whatever he thought he had glimpsed would have to have been standing on the other side of the room, between the light and the window.
It seemed that someone had moved the bed. He waited for his eyes to become accustomed to the darkness. What furniture? The bed, the chair in which he had read—that should be beside
the window where he had left it—a dresser with a spotted mirror, and (he racked his brain) a nightstand, perhaps. That should be by the head of the bed, if it were there at all.
Whispers filled the room. That was the wind outside; the windows were open wide, the old house flanked by stately maples. Those windows were visible now, pale rectangles in the darkness. As carefully as he could he crossed to one and raised the blind. Moonlight filled the bedroom; there was his bed, here his chair, in front of the window to his left. No puff of air stirred the leaf-burdened limbs.
He took off his robe and hung it on the towering bedpost, pulled top sheet and comforter to the foot of the bed, and lay down. He had heard something—or nothing. Seen something—or nothing. He thought longingly of his apartment in Lincoln, of his sabbatical—almost a year ago now—in Greece. Of sunshine on the Saronic Gulf…
Circular and yellow-white, the moon floated upon stagnant water. Beyond the moon lay the city of the dead, street after narrow street of silent tombs, a daedal labyrinth of death and stone. Far away, a jackal yipped. For whole ages of the world, nothing moved; painted likenesses with limpid eyes appeared to mock the empty, tumbled skulls beyond their crumbling doors.
Far down one of the winding avenues of the dead, a second jackal appeared. Head high and ears erect, it contemplated the emptiness and listened to the silence before turning to sink its teeth once more in the tattered thing it had already dragged so far. Eyeless and desiccated, smeared with bitumen and trailing rotting wrappings, the Nebraskan recognized his own corpse.
And at once was there, lying helpless in the night-shrouded street. For a moment the jackal’s glowing eyes loomed over him; its jaws closed, and his collarbone snapped.…
The jackal and the moonlit city vanished. Bolt upright, shaking and shaken, he did not know where. Sweat streamed into his eyes.
There had been a sound.
To dispel the jackal and the accursed sunless city, he rose and groped for the light switch. The bedroom was—or at least appeared to be—as he recalled it, save for the damp outline of his lanky body on the sheet. His suitcase stood beside the dresser; his shaving kit lay upon it; Gods before the Greeks waited his return on the cane seat of the old chair.
“You must come to me.”
He whirled. There was no one but himself in the room, no one (as far as he could see) in the branches of the maple or on the ground below. Yet the words had been distinct, the speaker—so it had seemed—almost at his ear. Feeling an utter fool, he looked under the bed. There was nobody there, and no one in the closet.
The doorknob would not turn in his hand. He was locked in. That, perhaps, had been the noise that woke him: the sharp click of the bolt. He squatted to squint through the old-fashioned keyhole. The dim hallway outside was empty, as far as he could see. He stood; a hard object gouged the sole of his right foot, and he bent to look.
It was the key. He picked it up. Somebody had locked his door, pushed the key under it, and (possibly) spoken through the keyhole.
Or perhaps it was only that some fragment of his dream had remained with him; that had been the jackal’s voice, surely.
The key turned smoothly in the lock. Outside in the hall, he seemed to detect the fragrance of Sarah’s perfume, though he could not be sure. If it had been Sarah, she had locked him in, providing the key so that he could free himself in the morning. Whom had she been locking out?
He returned to the bedroom, shut the door, and stood for a moment staring at it, the key in his hand. It seemed unlikely that the crude, outmoded lock would delay any intruder long, and of course it would obstruct him when he answered—
Answered whose summons?
And why should he?
Frightened again, frightened still, he searched for another light. There was none: no reading light on the bed, no lamp on the night-stand, no floor lamp, no fixture upon any of the walls. He turned the key in the lock, and after a few seconds’ thought dropped it into the topmost drawer of the dresser and picked up his book.
Abaddon. The angel of destruction dispatched by God to turn the Nile and all its waters to blood, and to kill the first-born male child in every Egyptian family. Abaddon’s hand was averted from the Children of Israel, who for this purpose smeared their doorposts with the blood of the paschal lamb. This substitution has frequently been considered a foreshadowing of the sacrifice of Christ.
Am-mit, Ammit, “Devourer of the Dead.” This Egyptian goddess guarded the throne of Osiris in the underworld and feasted upon the souls of those whom Osiris condemned. She had the head of a crocodile and the forelegs of a lion. The remainder of her form was that of a hippopotamus, Figure 1. Am-mit’s great temple at Henen-su (Herakleopolis) was destroyed by Octavian, who had its priests impaled.
An-uat, Anuat, “Lord of the Land (the Necropolis),” “Opener to the North.” Though frequently confused with Anubis—
The Nebraskan laid his book aside; the overhead light was not well adapted to reading in any case. He switched it off and lay down.
Staring up into the darkness, he pondered An-uat’s strange title, Opener to the North. Devourer of the Dead and Lord of the Land seemed clear enough. Or rather Lord of the Land seemed clear once Schmit explained that it referred to the necropolis. (That explanation was the source of his dream, obviously.) Why then had Schmit not explained Opener to the North? Presumably because he didn’t understand it either. Well, an opener was one who went before, the first to pass in a certain direction. He (or she) made it easier for others to follow, marking trails and so on. The Nile flowed north, so An-uat might have been thought of as the god who went before the Egyptians when they left their river to sail the Mediterranean. He himself had pictured An-uat in a boat earlier, for that matter, because there was supposed to be a celestial Nile. (Was it the Milky Way?) Because he had known that the Egyptians had believed there was a divine analog to the Nile along which Ra’s sun-boat journeyed. And of course the Milky Way actually was—really is in the most literal sense—the branching star-pool where the sun floats.…
The jackal released the corpse it had dragged, coughed, and vomited, spewing carrion alive with worms. The Nebraskan picked up a stone fallen from one of the crumbling tombs, and flung it, striking the jackal just below the ear.
It rose upon its hind legs, and though its face remained that of a beast, its eyes were those of a man. “This is for you,” it said, and pointed toward the writhing mass. “Take it, and come to me.”
The Nebraskan knelt and plucked one of the worms from the reeking spew. It was pale, streaked, and splotched with scarlet, and woke in him a longing never felt before. In his mouth, it brought peace, health, love, and hunger for something he could not name.
Old Hop Thacker’s voice floated across infinite distance: “Don’t never shoot anythin’ without you’re dead sure what ’tis, young feller.”
Another worm and another, and each as good as the last.
“We will teach you,” the worms said, speaking from his own mouth. “Have we not come from the stars? Your own desire for them has wakened, Man of Earth.”
Hop Thacker’s voice: “Grave worms, do you see?”
“Come to me.”
The Nebraskan took the key from the drawer. It was only necessary to open the nearest tomb. The jackal pointed to the lock.
“If it’s hungered, it’ll suck on a live person, an’ he’s bound to fight or die.”
The end of the key scraped across the door, seeking the keyhole.
“Come to me, Man of Earth. Come quickly.”
Sarah’s voice had joined the old man’s, their words mingled and confused. She screamed, and the painted figures faded from the door of the tomb.
The key turned. Thacker stepped from the tomb. Behind him his father shouted, “Joe, boy! Joe!” And struck him with his cane. Blood streamed from Thacker’s torn scalp, but he did not look around.
“Fight him, young feller! You got to fight him!”
Someone switched on the light. The Ne
braskan backed toward the bed.
“Pa, DON’T!” Sarah had the huge butcher knife. She lifted it higher than her father’s head and brought it down. He caught her wrist, revealing a long raking cut down his back as he spun about. The knife, and Sarah, fell to the floor.
The Nebraskan grabbed Thacker’s arm. “What is this!”
“It is love,” Thacker told him. “That is your word, Man of Earth. It is love.” No tongue showed between his parted lips; worms writhed there instead, and among the worms gleamed stars.
With all his strength, the Nebraskan drove his right fist into those lips. Thacker’s head was slammed back by the blow; pain shot along the Nebraskan’s arm. He swung again, with his left this time, and his wrist was caught as Sarah’s had been. He tried to back away; struggled to pull free. The high old-fashioned bed blocked his legs at the knees.
Thacker bent above him, his torn lips parted and bleeding, his eyes filled with such pain as the Nebraskan had never seen. The jackal spoke: “Open to me.”
“Yes,” the Nebraskan told it. “Yes, I will.” He had never known before that he possessed a soul, but he felt it rush into his throat.
Thacker’s eyes rolled upward. His mouth gaped, disclosing for an instant the slime-sheathed, tentacled thing within. Half falling, half rolling, he slumped upon the bed.
For a second that felt much longer, Thacker’s father stood over him with trembling hands. A step backward, and the older Mr. Thacker fell as well—fell horribly and awkwardly, his head striking the floor with a distinct crack.
“Grandpa!” Sarah knelt beside him.
The Nebraskan rose. The worn brown handle of the butcher knife protruded from Thacker’s back. A little blood, less than the Nebraskan would have expected, trickled down the smooth old wood to form a crimson pool on the sheet.
“Help me with him, Mr. Cooper. He’s got to go to bed.”
The Nebraskan nodded and lifted the only living Mr. Thacker onto his feet. “How do you feel?”
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