The King's Indian: Stories and Tales

by John Gardner

  The wind. Let me see.

  We stood there in the road, watching, and it seems I fell into a momentary trance. The storm came plunging northward toward us, and it never even crossed my mind that I ought to seek shelter. Grass, birds, underbrush creatures around us were hushed and motionless, hugging the ground, waiting as they do when an eagle’s been sighted. And then, not one at a time but simultaneously, like angels arriving out of nowhere in a vision, three enormous black cyclones appeared, maybe twenty miles away, and they came along, crazily swaying like wild black savages, dancing where the scythe had passed.

  The world came awake, whispering alarm at the first little puff of wind, and old Shakespeare bolted.

  3

  In many ways horses are wiser than men, and so old Shakespeare proved that afternoon. He shot straight forward, downhill toward the storm, and just in the nick of time I saw what his plan was. Some fifty yards from where I’d paused to consider the beauty and grandeur of Nature in her rage—some fifty yards from where, no doubt, my absentminded stare would soon have plunged me headlong back into the buzzing, blooming confusion—stood two old gateposts of hand-hewn stone, which supported enormous black iron gates of the kind one sees mainly at the entrances to graveyards. The gates were wide open (they were normally locked with a padlock and a length of rusty chain), but, closed or open, no sensible creature in all southern Illinois, except a horse, would have ventured up that driveway. When I saw the turn coming, I threw myself violently left, snatching at the seat-rail and clinging, and somehow remained with the carriage, which remained with the horse. The world fell silent, as if we’d crossed from one sphere of reality to another. The carriage wheels, moving through deep, lush grass, made not even a squeak; old Shakespeare’s hooves were the hooves of a dream horse: He might have been rushing past planets toward deepest space. Above us, huge beams of old trees interlocked, and what little light there was left in the world came in needles. So we rode for what might have been hours, silent as phantoms in that silent lane. It was not, of course, hours. Two minutes, perhaps.

  I am not a man given to foolish superstitions, nor am I in the ordinary sense religious, though my father was a Presbyterian minister and I begin to suspect I will carry his habits of speech to my grave, for their inherent felicity if nothing else. Much less am I a person of easy credulity. I have heard too much gossip in my fifty-four years to give credence to even a little of it; and I have seen too often, in my chosen profession, the errors of other men’s eyes and ears and chests. I diagnose on the basis of evidence, and that which I cannot understand I respect and ponder.

  Nevertheless, as I have said, I would not personally have chosen that lane, even to escape a midwestern tornado. There were stories— nebulous, disquieting. Things had been seen, apparitions or whatever, which so bothered those who believed they’d seen them that they preferred to remain unspecific. I had treated certain patients whose physical condition suggested to me (though I would swear neither that it was true nor untrue) that something up there on that hill was decidedly wrong. I had no particular idea what it was and, believe it or not, no great interest in learning. Whatever evil the place entertained, it did not come aggressively out to us, but waited, quiet and contented, like a sleeping dragon. There were of course some who were more curious than I. Of those who went up to the house to taunt it, poke it with a stick to learn what unnatural anger they could rouse, some came back baffled, having learned and seen nothing; others came back troubled, uncommunicative. Some who swore they’d seen nothing whatever did not seem to me entirely convincing.

  “Strange business,” I’d say to myself, and I’d hook my glasses back over my ear, dismissing it. “Let him sleep with the lamp on, if the boy insists,” I would say to the mother. “We must never be overly contentious in dealing with Nature.” And I’d leave her with pills for the young philosopher’s sedation.

  Shakespeare, however, took a princely disinterest in my reasonable aversion or my reasons for it. Any port in a storm was his philosophy, and I (with the thunder now crashing above us, and the rain slamming down, bringing sticks and leaves) was in no real position to debate with him.

  4

  Then, ahead of us, there was a widening patch of sea-green sky full of lightning flashes—the world was howling, everything was churning, writhing, screaming, obscured to the vagueness of things seen under water—or things wrapped in fire—by the plunging, blood-dark rain. At the center of the patch of unnatural light stood the house we’d all of us heard of, and some, as I’ve said, had reportedly seen. Smaller, humbler than I would have expected. No work of evil men or devils is finally impressive compared with the vastness of the universe or the hopeful imagination. And yet it was a fine old house, for southern Illinois. Tall and morose, with heaven knows how many rooms, and a soaring, blunt tower that swayed like something alive in that violent wind. Beside the tower lay a graveyard, its tombstones crooked and skewbald as an old wolf’s teeth. In the house there were no lights, no signs of habitation.

  We hurtled silently toward it, alien creatures in the storm’s loud tumult. I thought nothing, smashing my hat to my head, soaked to the bone like a drowning man. Then, little by little, I became aware of the horse’s indecision. Not fear of the great, dark house, but simple bafflement. The house stood alone—one moment blazing like a jewel in the lightning’s flash, the next moment invisible, a void. Alone! No barn, no shelter for four-legged creatures, however well-meaning their hearts or adept their minds!

  I tugged at the reins and, surprisingly, he responded. The nightmarish gallop slowed down toward reason, and in a moment I was guiding him, controlling his terror. His headlong rush dropped down to mere hurry, then dropped down further to a considered trot, and finally, after a struggle of our two uncertain wills, to something resembling a walk. I snatched off my glasses so that I could help him see, folded them carefully away in my pocket, and guided him along the graveyard fence to a rough, natural wall, almost cave, defended by bedraggled hemlocks and pale, square boulders. There, where the wind whipped over us, harmless, and the rain, flying by, left us almost untouched, I jerked the reins with my stubborn human intelligence—whatever he might think, I was sure I was right—and he deferred to me and stopped. After a moment I got down. The earth felt strange, unnatural to my feet; my soaked trousers clung, chilly, to my skin; my rear end was bruised and sorrowful, and I could have drawn you, by feeling out my fiery pains, a scheme of the human muscle system. I went around to his head. He was wheezing like a steam engine, and crying. It’s not generally recognized that horses cry; but I give you the word of a medical doaor and veterinarian that more than rain was streaming down those coal-black cheeks.

  “Whoa, boy,” I said, and stroked his nose. He stood swaybacked and suffering, remorseful. “No harm,” I said, still stroking his nose. “You’ve found us a fine, safe place to wait it out.” He turned his head toward me and I moved it with my hand. I could hardly stand his sorrow. No doubt that will seem a mite strange to some. (Human arrogance is never spent.) Nevertheless, the horse was profoundly ashamed and grieved at the way he’d stolen the authority.

  In the end he was comforted and accepted my decision. I then made another, which was not altogether defensible, but I had no reasonable alternative. It was a simple fact that I had seen those twisters, and even a fatalist must cling to common sense. High wind is one thing; a twister is another. The wind that tore through the trees around us was dangerous enough—it snapped huge branches, smashed lilac bushes, even tore out boulders and rolled them as much as ten feet from their places. We were safe in our shelter if no cyclone struck. But cyclones are fanatic. No shelter can save you but the shelter designed by human ingenuity— deep in the earth, Time’s womb, as the evolutionists say. I’ve read about twisters that have raised whole houses up and sprayed human beings through four, five states. Whatever strange beings might live in that old towered house beyond the graveyard, if they were southern Illinoisans, they had a storm cellar. I couldn’t
save my horse if a twister came wrecking all life where we stood, but I could crawl to that house in the hope of encountering friendly spirits and perhaps be saved.

  “Stay here, boy,” I said, and I gave his wet, black neck a pat. “Do as I say. I’ll be back for you.”

  No point recounting what terror I felt, crawling, clinging with both hands to the earth, fighting through the open space of unmowed lawn and tearing wind, toward the house that stood, stupidly defiant, on the treeless crest. Uprooted trees came lumbering toward me, slow and unnatural, like underwater creatures, snatching at me, and with them came smaller, swifter objects I couldn’t identify. Something living struck me on its way to its doom—a woodchuck, a rabbit, I have no idea—and clung with all its power till I beat it away. The roar of the world was deafening, the dust and small stones blown like needles against my face made me cough and clamp my eyes shut. But, at last, by some miracle, I reached the porch, slippery as flesh with ancient paint, and, still lying on my stomach, I pounded at the door. I couldn’t hear myself what sound I made. Bucking the wind, I reached for the huge brass doorknob—it was shaped like a gryphon’s head—and turned it. The door shot open. I tumbled in, driven by a gust that caught me like the kick of a mule, and lay on the carpet gasping for breath. Then the room quieted. Someone or something had closed the door.

  I lay there groaning, no wiser than a horse. Then I fainted.

  5

  I came back to consciousness on an old, damp horsehair couch. I was aware, at first, only of the couch and the wallpaper, both of them thickly patterned with flowers, dark as cave walls, and scented with cat or baby urine. Little by little, I remembered what had happened, and I heard, as if in dim memory, the howl of the wind—clattering shutters against old brick walls, whistling past cornices, cracking the limbs of nearby trees. As consciousness brightened, I came to understand that the wind, the couch, the dark, flocked wallpaper, rotted by years in this thick, swampy climate, were real. There was a voice, a woman’s. It had been going, like a voice in a dream, for some time. It sharpened now. What it said, I couldn’t tell. I was dressed in warm, fresh-smelling clothes and had my spectacles on. Someone had cleaned them.

  Then there seemed to be another voice, a man’s. I opened my eyes (I had slept again), and a blurry face was craning forward, looking down at me. I was aware, at first, only of red, red hair sweeping out like some ludicrous halo on a sunday-school painting, henna-red hair as ferocious and unnatural as the hair on an antique ventriloquist’s dummy. A sharp pain went up through my sinus passages and in a moment I recognized it: smelling salts. The voice said clearly, “He’s reviving now.” And then, without transition (as it seemed to me), I was sitting up, holding a glass of hot wine, and the redheaded man sat across from me, speaking, the wind still howling. On a low walnut table beside him an oil lamp flickered in the drafts that moved, indecisive and troubled, through the room. A figure all in white withdrew from us.

  “A physician,” he said. “Interesting.”

  I’d apparently been holding conversation with him, but I had, now, no memory of it.

  He was silent for a time. Gradually his features came into focus. He had, I saw, no ordinary face. Enormous gazelle eyes as pale as glass, an uptilted nose above protruding, crooked teeth, and skin very nearly as ashen as dried-out clay. It was not necessarily an alarming face, though my first reaction was definitely alarm; but it was, emphatically, a kind of face you’d not expect to see twice on one planet. A vague uneasiness crept over me, or perhaps creeps over me now, the alarm of hindsight.

  “I’m a physician myself,” he said, “—or used to be.” His smile was as quick and unsettling as lightning. “I gave up all caring for the sick long ago—stabbing deeper, so to speak. Driving my scalpel to the heart of things. If I could make sense of my terrible discoveries—”

  Sudden as a genie, the woman dressed in white was there. I gave a little jump, in fact, she materialized so quickly. Yet her stance was casual, her pale, almost transparent hand seemed gentle and loving on his shoulder, drawing him back from me, calming him. “Surely our guest is not interested in that!” Her smile, false or not, was magnificent, transforming a plain, almost ghostly face into something radiant. Her hair was black, perhaps Italian, possibly Semitic, but some sickness (I suspected a cancer of the blood) had robbed her of the bloom one expects in Mediterraneans and had left her face moonlike, lusterless. She was twenty or twenty-five, not older. Her eyes, limpid brown, were startling if you happened to compare them with her husband’s (if he was, as I assumed, her husband)—those large eyes as cold and intellectual as death. One did not need to be a medical man to see that my host was in an extremely unhealthy psychological state and that the woman meant, subtly, to protect him from himself and me from him.

  I said quickly, in slight befuddlement, “Not at all, not at all! It’s always a pleasure to meet a fellow physician!” And, a second too late, I gave a hearty laugh. It rang out demonic in the huge, dim room. They exchanged looks swifter than lightning bolts, and the man’s lips parted and stretched back in a grin. His crooked, jammed teeth flashed. For no reason that I can explain even now, a shock of terror went through me, blasted like a deep-laid dynamite charge from my spine to my brain. And instantly, as if to confirm that warning from the pit, the ghastly little scientist hurled himself toward me and snatched my free hand—my wine went flying, and I gave, I fear, a ridiculous whoop— but then, through my terror, I heard him bleating: “God bless you, Doctor! You’ve no conception what this does for me!” Then, seeing the wine splashed all over my knees, he shrank back, eyes widened, like a terrified horse. “Forgive me!” he cried.

  “No, no!” I said. “No trouble! Mere trifle!” The pounding of my heart was dangerous, and I gasped for air, but pretended, even so, to laugh it off.

  “Mother,” he said, “a cloth, quickly!”

  She fled from the room. I stared after her, still clutching my chest. “That’s your mother?” I said, and took my glasses off. The woman was unquestionably ten years his junior. Immediately I saw my mistake— or thought I did. A mode of expression, one parent to another. Nevertheless, the sudden light in the pale man’s eyes was disquieting.

  “All in good time,” he said, and showed his teeth. The excitement in his voice was not comforting, nor was her shriek from a distant room, assuring us that she’d found a cloth. Mad as March hares, the both of them, I thought. I must step wary.

  Now the woman had returned with the cloth and was dabbing at my knees and slippers, laboring quickly and shyly, her face tipped to one side, like an often whipped dog, or like one of those wasting saints in old, old paintings. I watched her narrowly. But that moment a great jolt shook the whole house, and I remembered—amazed that I’d forgotten—what I’d come for.

  “Good heavens!” I said, “we must all hurry down to the storm cellar!”

  They looked at one another in what I’d swear was panic, then immediately smiled, disingenuous as thieves. “Impossible!” they both said at once. The doctor leaned forward and, splashing out his arms as if trying to communicate in a foreign language, said: “Out of the question! The storm cellar’s flooded!” “Flooded!” she squealed, a split second after him. They laughed, hard and sharp, as if at some ghastly gallows joke.

  “Flooded?” I said. I studied first one, then the other. “I see.” You may imagine that you, in my place, would have insisted. But I assure you, one can never be too careful with these people.

  Now the woman had poured me more hot spiced wine. It seemed to me unnaturally dark and thick. On reflection I determined to leave it untouched, though without appearing to do so.

  “But rest assured, Doctor,” she was saying as she poured. “Our house is completely invulnerable.”

  I thought of the tower I’d seen teetering in the wind, and sweat popped out on my forehead. It seemed to me now that I could hear it creaking, rocking the whole house from side to side. The woman poured wine for my host.

  And now once more t
he pale man hurled himself forward from his chair, his white hand flashing toward me like a knife. “Forgive me! I’ve failed to introduce myself! I’m Professor John Hunter.”

  I no doubt showed my surprise and, immediately afterward, my horror. “John Hunter the geneticist?” I asked, too casual.

  “The same!” he said.

  And so now I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was dangerously mad—as mad as the true Professor Hunter, dead these thirty years and entombed with his victims. “I’m glad to meet you, sir,” I said. “And I am—” I examined his face, decided to be cautious. “Dr. William Thorpe.” We shook hands. He looked at me, clinging like a monkey to my hand, clinging as if he would never let me loose, yet innocently smiling, and I knew—as surely doomed as a prisoner hearing the judge read his death sentence—that “Professor Hunter” had been through my belongings and was apprised that William Thorpe was not my name.

  6

  Who knows what drove him to talk to me? The woman did not like it, but there was nothing she could do. He sat leaning forward, his face in darkness, his red hair lighted by the flickering lamp. He talked to me of Gnostics, Albigensians. I have only the vaguest idea what he said or why the poor demented devil should be, as obviously he was, so outraged by long-dead heresies. At times, too excited to remain in his seat, the professor would leap up to pace, head and shoulders thrown violently forward, his nostrils flaring, his enormous pale eyes rolling in his head like my Shakespeare’s.

  All the world, he said, went stark, raving mad in the second century, when the Gnostics separated body and mind. And the bitter proof, perfect ikon of it all, was the twelfth-century Albigensians. His eyes grew paler and paler as he talked, or so it seemed to me, and the knuckles of his clenched fists went white, almost blue. To the Albigensians flesh was worthless and meaningless, he said. The inner circle, the old initiates, turned further and further from bodily delights, and eventually the chief of those wise old men starved themselves to death. Meanwhile, those of the outer circle, equally persuaded that flesh was irrelevant, gorged themselves and drank themselves blind—irrelevant— and organized orgies of fierce though unimportant copulation. So while the old men upstairs, in the inner sanctum, starved, indifferently abandoning life, the younger, downstairs, indifferently consumed it. Once the mind cuts reality in two, not all the king’s horses or horsemen can reassemble it. I said the opinion was interesting. What else could I say?