Why, he asked that little skulking man, why did you never let me see your face? Why did you keep turning from me, why did you keep your face in shadow so that I could not know you? And that, he thought, that was a part of it as well, that was the way it had to be. For this little furtive man sought no glory for himself; all would have been for naught if he had sought the glory. He must remain, forever, the truly faceless man.
Duncan thrust his hand into the pouch, his fingers closing on the manuscript, bringing it out, the crinkling, crackling mass of it. Rising to his feet, he held it high above his head and with a bellow of triumph, charged the looming swarm.
Ahead of him the great, dark, shifting ball of the swarm flared with its many lightning strokes and with each stride he took, the flares grew ever brighter, but staying within the swarm itself, never reaching out. The same flaring strokes that had run the length of the rolling fog on the slope above the castle mound, flares such as the one that had reached out to turn Andrew into a smoking torch, but now they did not reach out.
Suddenly the flaring all came together and when that happened the swarm was turned into a ball of exploding fire. It burst apart and there were many smoldering fragments flying in the air, falling all about him, smoking and shriveling as they struck the ground, to lie there for a moment, writhing as if in agony, then going quiet and dead.
The Horde was gone and in the twilight that came creeping in with the going of the sun there came a putrid stench that rolled like a fog over everything.
Duncan let his arm fall to his side, still clutching the wrinkled manuscript, wrinkled from being clutched too tightly.
A wailing scream rose in the twilight, not the wailing for the world, but another wailing, a wailing very close.
Duncan turned and saw Meg crouched above the stinking mound that had been Andrew and knew that the wailing came from her.
"But why?" asked Diane, coming up beside him. "A hermit and a witch?"
"He gave her a bite of cheese that first day we found her," Duncan said. "He offered her his arm to help her along the forest trail. He stood side by side with her to witch a path out of the forest clearing. Is that not enough?"
32
So the manuscript would not now be authenticated. With Bishop Wise dead in Oxenford, there was no one now to put the stamp of truth upon it. It would be returned to Standish Abbey and for years it would lie there, perhaps housed in an ornate coffer, unannounced to the world and unknown because there'd be no one who could say it was true or false, an actual document or a pious fraud.
And yet, Duncan told himself, so far as he was concerned it had been authenticated. For it had been the truth of it, the authenticity of it, the proven words and acts of Jesus, that had brought about the Horde's destruction. Anything less than that, he told himself, would have made no mark upon the Horde.
He touched his fingers to the pouch at his side and beneath the pressure heard the reassuring rustle of it. So many times, he thought, he had done this very thing and listened to the crackle of the parchment, but never with the thankfulness and the surety that he felt now.
Diane stirred at his side, and when he put an arm around her she came close to him.
The fire blazed high, and off to one side Scratch had raked off a bed of coals and was engaged, with Conrad's help, in frying fish that he and Conrad had caught out of a little stream after begging the loan of Duncan's shirt to improvise a net.
"Where is Ghost?" asked Duncan. "He was around for a while, but now he's disappeared."
"You won't see him," said Diane. "He's off to haunt a castle."
"A castle. Where did he find a castle?"
"The castle mound," said Diane. "He came to me to ask for my permission."
"And you gave it to him?"
"I told him it was not mine to give, but to go ahead. I told him that I couldn't see any way to stop him."
"I told him that very thing," said Duncan, "when he wanted to go to Oxenford with us. I'm surprised he would settle for a castle. He wanted to go to Oxenford so badly."
"He said that he wanted a home. He wanted a place to haunt. Said he had been hanged to a small-sized tree and you couldn't haunt a tree, especially a little bitty one."
"It seems to me I've heard that plaint before. What would Cuthbert think of it?"
"I think that Cuthbert, if he knew, might be rather pleased. But Ghost, poor thing, he wanted it so badly. He said he had no home…"
"If you listen to him," Duncan said, "he will wring your heart. I'm glad to be shut of him. He was nothing but a pest."
"How about Scratch?" Diane asked. "What will happen to him?"
"He is coming along with us. Conrad invited him."
"I'm glad of that," said Diane. "He and Conrad have gotten to be pals. And that is good. Scratch, despite being a demon, is not too bad a being."
"He saved Conrad's life back there in the clearing," Duncan said. "Conrad is not about to forget such an act as that."
"And Conrad was nice to him back there at the castle," said Diane. "So were you. Everyone else, up to that time, had treated him absolutely rotten."
Meg brought them fish on birch bark platters and squatted down in front of them.
"Don't eat too soon," she warned them. "Let it cool a bit."
"And you?" asked Diane. "What are you going to do now that the adventure's over? Scratch is coming with us."
"Standish House," said Duncan, "could use a resident witch. We've not had one for years."
Meg shook her head. "I've been thinking. I've wanted to talk with you about it. I have no hut, you see; no place at all to live. I have not a thing at all. But Andrew had a cell. Do you suppose he'd mind? I think I know where it is. If not, Snoopy said he'd show me."
"If that is what you want," said Duncan, "I think Andrew might be happy to know that you were there."
"I think," said Meg, "that he might have liked me just a little bit. Back, that first time we met, he took this piece of cheese out of his pocket. It had lint upon it from the pocket and there were teeth marks on it, for he'd been nibbling on it and he gave it to me and he…"
Her voice broke and she could speak no more. She put her hands to her eyes and, swiftly rising, hobbled off into the darkness.
"She was in love with Andrew," Diane said. "Strange, that a witch and hermit…"
"We all were in love with him," said Duncan, "cross-grained as he might have been."
Cross-grained and a soldier of the Lord. A soldier of the Lord to the very last, insisting that he was a soldier of the Lord when he still was a hermit. Rushing to his death as a soldier of the Lord. Andrew and Beauty, Duncan thought—a soldier of the Lord and a little patient burro.
I'll miss them both, he thought.
From far off, faint in a vagrant wind, came the keening of the wailing for the world. Now, Duncan told himself, as the years went on, there'd be less wailing for the world. Still some misery in the world, but with the Horde no longer on the Earth, less and less of it. Less for the she-vultures on the island to wallow in, less for them to smear upon themselves.
Diane set the plate of fish down upon the ground, plucked at Duncan's sleeve.
"Come with me," she said. "I can't do this all alone. I must have you standing by."
He followed her around the fire to where Snoopy sat eating fish. Diane walked to a place in front of him. She held out the naked sword, cradled in her hands.
"This is too precious a blade," she said, "to belong to any human. Would you take it back into the custody of the Little People? Keeping it until there's need of it again."
Snoopy carefully wiped his hands, held them out to take the sword. Tears stood in his eyes.
"You know, then, milady, who it once belonged to?"
She nodded, not trusting herself to speak.
"Willingly, then," said Snoopy, "we will take it back. We will guard it well and reverence it. Someday it may be there'll be another hand that is worthy to hold it. But no one ever more than yours, milady."
"You will tell the Little People," said Diane, "how much they honored me."
"It was because we trusted you," said Snoopy. "You were not unknown to us. You'll be found at Standish House?"
"Yes," said Diane. "We're leaving in the morning."
"Someday we'll come and visit you," said Snoopy.
"We'll be waiting for you," said Diane. "There'll be cakes and ale. There'll be dancing on the green."
She turned away and went back to Duncan. She took him by the arm. "And now," she said, "I'm ready for tomorrow."
Galactic Chest
Original copyright year: 1956
I had just finished writing the daily Community Chest story, and each day I wrote that story I was sore about it; there were plenty of punks in the office who could have ground out that kind of copy. Even the copy boys could have written it and no one would have known the difference; no one ever read it — except maybe some of the drive chairmen, and I'm not even sure about them reading it.
I had protested to Barnacle Bill about my handling the Community Chest for another year. I had protested loud. I had said: "Now, you know, Barnacle, I been writing that thing for three or four years. I write it with my eyes shut. You ought to get some new blood into it. Give one of the cubs a chance; they can breathe some life into it. Me, I'm all written out on it."
But it didn't do a bit of good. The Barnacle had me down on the assignment book for the Community Chest, and he never changed a thing once he put it in the book.
I wish I knew the real reason for that name of his. I've heard a lot of stories about how it was hung on him, but I don't think there's any truth in them. I think he got it simply from the way he can hang on to a bar.
I had just finished writing the Community Chest story and was sitting there, killing time and hating myself, when along came Jo Ann. Jo Ann was the sob sister on the paper; she got some lousy yarns to write, and that's a somber fact I guess it was because I am of a sympathetic nature, and took pity on her, and let her cry upon my shoulder that we got to know each other so well. By now, of course, we figure we're in love; off and on we talk about getting married, as soon as I snag that foreign correspondent job I've been angling for.
"Hi, kid," I said.
And she says, "Do you know, Mark, what the Barnacle has me down for today?"
"He's finally ferreted out a one-armed paperhanger," I guessed, "and he wants you to do a feature…"
"Its worse than that," she moans. "It's an old lady who is celebrating her one hundredth birthday."
"Maybe," I said, "she will give you a piece of her birthday cake."
"I don't see how even you can joke about a thing like this," Jo Ann told me. "It's positively ghastly."
Just then the Barnacle let out a bellow for me, so I picked up the Community Chest story and went over to the city desk.
Barnacle Bill is up to his elbows in copy; the phone is ringing and he's ignoring it, and for this early in the morning he has worked himself into more than a customary lather. "You remember old Mrs. Clayborne?"
"Sure, she's dead. I wrote the obit on her ten days or so ago."
"Well, I want you to go over to the house and snoop around a bit."
"What for?" I asked. "She hasn't come back, has she?"
"No, but there's some funny business over there. I got a tip that someone might have hurried her a little."
"This time," I told him, "you've outdone yourself. You've been watching too many television thrillers."
"I got it on good authority," he said and turned back to his work.
So I went and got my hat and told myself it was no skin off my nose how I spent the day; I'd get paid just the same!
But I was getting a little fed up with some of the wild-goose chases to which the Barnacle was assigning not only me, but the rest of the staff as well. Sometimes they paid off; usually, they didn't. And when they didn't, Barnacle had the nasty habit of making it appear that the man he had sent out, not he himself, had dreamed up the chase. His "good authority" probably was no more than some casual chatter of someone next to him at the latest bar he'd honored with his cash.
Old Mrs. Clayborne had been one of the last of the faded gentility which at one time had graced Douglas Avenue. The family had petered out, and she was the last of them; she had died in a big and lonely house with only a few servants, and a nurse in attendance on her, and no kin close enough to wait out her final hours in person.
It was unlikely, I told myself, that anyone could have profited by giving her an overdose of drugs, or otherwise hurrying her death. And even if it was true, there'd be little chance that it could be proved; and that was the kind of story you didn't run unless you had it down in black and white.
I went to the house on Douglas Avenue. It was a quiet and lovely place, standing in its fenced-in yard among the autumn-colored trees.
There was an old gardener raking leaves, and he didn't notice me when I went up the walk. He was an old man, pottering away and more than likely mumbling to himself, and I found out later that he was a little deaf.
I went up the steps, rang the bell and stood waiting, feeling cold at heart and wondering what I'd say once I got inside. I couldn't say what I had in mind; somehow or other I'd have to go about it by devious indirection.
A maid came to the door.
"Good morning, ma" am," I said, "I am from the — Tribune-. May I come in and talk?"
She didn't even answer; she looked at me for a moment and then slammed the door. I told myself I might have known that was the way it would be.
I turned around, went down the steps, and cut across the grounds to where the gardener was working. He didn't notice me until I was almost upon him; when he did see me, his face sort of lit up. He dropped the rake, and sat down on the wheelbarrow. I suppose I was as good an excuse as any for him to take a breather.
"Hello," I said to him, "Nice day," he said to me. "Indeed it is."
"You'll have to speak up louder," he told me; "I can't hear a thing you say."
"Too bad about Mrs. Clayborne," I told him.
"Yes, yes," he said. "You live around here? I don't recall your face."
I nodded; it wasn't much of a lie, just twenty miles or so.
"She was a nice old lady. Worked for her almost fifty years. It's a blessing she is gone."
"I suppose it is."
"She was dying hard," he said.
He sat nodding in the autumn sun and you could almost hear his mind go traveling back across those fifty years. I am certain that, momentarily, he'd forgotten I was there.
"Nurse tells a funny story," he said finally, speaking to himself more than he spoke to me. "It might be just imagining; nurse was tired, you know."
"I heard about it," I encouraged him.
"Nurse left her just a minute and she swears there was something in the room when she came back again. Says it went out the window, just as she came in. Too dark to see it good, she says. I told her she was imagining. Funny things happen, though; things we don't know about."
"That was her room," I said, pointing at the house. "I remember, years ago…"
He chuckled at having caught me in the wrong. "You're mistaken, sonny. It was the corner one; that one over there."
He rose from the barrow slowly and took up the rake again.
"It was good to talk with you," I said. "These are pretty flowers you have. Mind if I walk around and have a look at them?"
"Might as well. Frost will get them in a week or so."
So I walked around the grounds, hating myself for what I had to do, and looking at the flowers, working my way closer to the corner of the house he had pointed out to me.
There was a bed of petunias underneath the window and they were sorry-looking things. I squatted down and pretended I was admiring them, although all the time I was looking for some evidence that someone might have jumped out the window.
I didn't expect to find it, but I did.
There, in a little piece of soft eart
h where the petunias had petered out, was a footprint-well, not a footprint, either, maybe, but anyhow a print. It looked something like a duck track-except that the duck that made it would have had to be as big as a good-sized dog.
I squatted on the walk, staring at it and I could feel spiders on my spine. Finally I got up and walked away, forcing myself to saunter when my body screamed to run.
Outside the gate I — did- run.
I got to a phone as fast as I could, at a corner drugstore, and sat in the booth a while to get my breathing back to normal before I put in a call to the city desk.
The Barnacle bellowed at me. "What you got?"
"I don't know," I said. "Maybe nothing. Who was Mrs. Clayborne's doctor?"
He told me. I asked him if he knew who her nurse had been, and he asked how the hell should he know, so I hung up.
I went to see the doctor and he threw me out.
I spent the rest of the day tracking down the nurse; when I finally found her she threw me out too. So there was a full day's work gone entirely down the drain.
It was late in the afternoon when I got back to the office. Barnacle Bill pounced on me at once. "What did you get?"
"Nothing," I told him. There was no use telling him about that track underneath the window. By that time, I was beginning to doubt I'd ever seen it, it seemed so unbelievable.
"How big do ducks get?" I asked him. He growled at me and went back to his work.
All Flesh Is Grass and Other Stories Page 82