The Very Best of F & SF v1

by Gordon Van Gelder (ed)

  IX

  In the morning she cooked him grits which he ate without comment. He shoveled them into his mouth without thinking about her, hardly seeing her. He knew he should go. Every minute he sat here the man in black was further away— probably into the desert by now. His path had been undeviatingly south.

  “Do you have a map?” he asked suddenly, looking up.

  “Of the town?” She laughed. “There isn’t enough of it to need a map.”

  “No. Of what’s south of here.”

  Her smile faded. “The desert. Just the desert. I thought you’d stay for a little.”

  “What’s south of the desert?”

  “How would I know? Nobody crosses it. Nobody’s tried since I was here.” She wiped her hands on her apron, got potholders, and dumped the tub of water she had been heating into the sink, where it splashed and steamed.

  He got up.

  “Where are you going?” She heard the shrill fear in her voice and hated it.

  “To the stable. If anyone knows, the hostler will.” He put his hands on her shoulders. The hands were warm. “And to arrange for my mule. If I’m going to be here, he should be taken care of. For when I leave.”

  But not yet. She looked up at him. “But you watch that Kennerly. If he doesn’t know a thing, he’ll make it up.”

  When he left she turned to the sink, feeling the hot, warm drift of her grateful tears.

  X

  Kennerly was toothless, unpleasant, and plagued with daughters. Two half-grown ones peeked at the gunslinger from the dusty shadows of the barn. A baby drooled happily in the dirt. A full-grown one, blonde, dirty, sensual, watched with a speculative curiosity as she drew water from the groaning pump beside the building.

  The hostler met him halfway between the door to his establishment and the street. His manner vacillated between hostility and a craven sort of fawning— like a stud mongrel that has been kicked too often.

  “It’s bein’ cared for,” he said, and before the gunslinger could reply, Kennerly turned on his daughter: “You get in, Soobie! You get right the hell in!”

  Soobie began to drag her bucket sullenly toward the shack appended to the barn.

  “You meant my mule,” the gunslinger said.

  “Yes, sir. Ain’t seen a mule in quite a time. Time was they used to grow up wild for want of ’em, but the world has moved on. Ain’t seen nothin’ but a few oxen and the coach horses and... Soobie, I’ll whale you, ’fore God!”

  “I don’t bite,” the gunslinger said pleasantly.

  Kennerly cringed a little. “It ain’t you. No, sir, it ain’t you. “He grinned loosely. “She’s just naturally gawky. She’s got a devil. She’s wild.” His eyes darkened. “It’s coming to Last Times, mister. You know how it says in the Book. Children won’t obey their parents, and a plague’ll be visited on the multitudes.”

  The gunslinger nodded, then pointed south. “What’s out there?”

  Kennerly grinned again, showing gums and a few sociable yellow teeth. “Dwellers. Weed. Desert. What else?” He cackled, and his eyes measured the gunslinger coldly.

  “How big is the desert?”

  “Big.” His grin was serious, Kennerly endeavored to look serious. But the layers of secret humor and fear and ingratiation vied beneath the skin in a moiling confusion.

  “Maybe three hundred miles. Maybe a thousand. I can’t tell you, mister. There’s nothing out there but devil-grass and maybe demons. That’s the way the other fella went. The one who fixed up Norty when he was sick.”

  “Sick? I heard he was dead?”

  Kennerly kept grinning. “Well, well. Maybe. But we’re growed-up men, ain’t we?”

  “But you believe in demons.”

  Kennerly looked affronted. “That’s a lot different.”

  The gunslinger took off his hat and wiped his forehead. The sun was hot, beating steadily. Kennerly seemed not to notice. In the thin shadow by the livery, the baby girl was gravely smearing dirt on her face. “You don’t know what’s after the desert?”

  Kennerly shrugged. “Some might. The coach ran through part of it fifty years ago. My pap said so. He used to say ’twas mountains. Others say an ocean... a green ocean with monsters. And some say that’s where the world ends. That there ain’t nothing but lights that’ll drive a man blind and the face of God with his mouth open to eat them up.”

  “Drivel,” the gunslinger said shortly.

  “Sure it is.” Kennerly cringed again, hating, fearing, wanting to please. “You see my mule is looked after.” He flicked Kennerly another coin, which Kennerly caught on the fly. “Surely. You stayin’ a little?”

  “I guess I might.”

  “That Allies pretty nice when she wants to be, ain’t she?”

  “Did you say something?” the gunslinger asked remotely. Sudden terror dawned in Kennerly’s eyes, like twin moons coming over the horizon. “No, sir, not a word. And I’m sorry if I did.” He caught sight of Soobie leaning out a window and whirled on her. “I’ll whale you now, you little slut-face! ’Fore God! I’ll—”

  The gunslinger walked away, aware that Kennerly had turned to watch him, aware of the fact that he could whirl and catch the hostler with some true and untinctured emotion distilled on his face. He let it slip. It was hot. The only sure thing about the desert was its size. And it wasn’t all played out in this town. Not yet.

  XI

  They were in bed when Sheb kicked the door open and came in with the knife.

  It had been four days, and they had gone by in a blinking haze. He ate. He slept. He made sex with Allie. He found that she played the fiddle and he made her play it for him. She sat by the window in the milky light of daybreak, only a profile, and played something haltingly that might have been good if she had been trained. He felt a growing (but strangely absent-minded) affection for her and thought this might be the trap the man in black had left behind. He read dry and tattered back issues of magazines with faded pictures. He thought very little about everything.

  He didn’t hear the little piano player come up—his reflexes had sunk. That didn’t seem to matter either, although it would have frightened him badly in another time and place.

  Allie was naked, the sheet below her breasts, and they were preparing to make love.

  “Please,” she was saying. “Like before, I want that, I want—”

  The door crashed open and the piano player made his ridiculous, knock-kneed run for the sun. Allie did not scream, although Sheb held an eight-inch carving knife in his hand. Sheb was making a noise, an inarticulate blabbering. He sounded like a man being drowned in a bucket of mud. Spittle flew. He brought the knife down with both hands, and the gunslinger caught his wrists and turned them. The knife went flying. Sheb made a high screeching noise, like a rusty screen door. His hands made fluttering marionette movements, both wrists broken. The wind gritted against the window. Allies glass on the wall, faintly clouded and distorted, reflected the room.

  “She was mine!” He wept. “She was mine first! Mine!”

  Allie looked at him and got out of bed. She put on a wrapper, and the gunslinger felt a moment of empathy for a man who must be seeing himself coming out on the far end of what he once had. He was just a little man, and gelded.

  “It was for you,” Sheb sobbed. “It was only for you, Allie. It was you first and it was all for you. I—ah, oh God, dear God—” The words dissolved into a paroxysm of unintelligibilities, finally to tears. He rocked back and forth, holding his broken wrists to his belly.

  “Shhh. Shhh. Let me see.” She knelt beside him. “Broken. Sheb, you donkey. Didn’t you know you were never strong?” She helped him to his feet. He tried to hold his hands to his face, but they would not obey, and he wept nakedly. “Come on over to the table and let me see what I can do.”

  She led him to the table and set his wrists with slats of kindling from the fire box. He wept weakly and without volition, and left without looking back.

  She came back to t
he bed. “Where were we?”

  “No,” he said.

  She said patiently, “You knew about that. There’s nothing to be done. What else is there?” She touched his shoulder. “Except I’m glad that you are so strong.”

  “Not now,” he said thickly.

  “I can make you strong—”

  “No,” he said. “You can’t do that.”

  XII

  The next night the bar was closed. It was whatever passed for the Sabbath in Tull. The gunslinger went to the tiny, leaning church by the graveyard while Allie washed tables with strong disinfectant and rinsed kerosene lamp chimneys in soapy water.

  An odd purple dusk had fallen, and the church, lit from the inside, looked almost like a blast furnace from the road.

  “I don’t go,” Allie had said shortly. “The woman who preaches has poison religion. Let the respectable ones go.”

  He stood in the vestibule, hidden in a shadow, looking in. The pews were gone and the congregation stood (he saw Kennerly and his brood; Castner, owner of the town’s scrawny dry-goods emporium, and his slat-sided wife; a few barflies; a few “town” women he had never seen before; and, surprisingly, Sheb). They were singing a hymn raggedly, a cappella. He looked curiously at the mountainous woman at the pulpit. Allie had said: “She lives alone, hardly ever sees anybody. Only comes out on Sunday to serve up the hellfire. Her name is Sylvia Pittston. She’s crazy, but she’s got the hoodoo on them. They like it that way. It suits them.”

  No description could take the measure of the woman. Breasts like earthworks. A huge pillar of a neck overtopped by a pasty white moon of a face, in which blinked eyes so large and so dark that they seemed to be bottomless tarns. Her hair was a beautiful rich brown and it was piled atop her head in a haphazard, lunatic sprawl, held by a hairpin big enough to be a meat skewer. She wore a dress that seemed to be made of burlap. The arms that held the hymnal were slabs. Her skin was creamy, unmarked, lovely. He thought that she must top three hundred pounds. He felt a sudden red lust for her that made him feet shaky, and he turned his head and looked away.

  “Shall we gather at the river,

  The beautiful, the beautiful,

  The riiiiver,

  Shall we gather at the river,

  That flows by the Kingdom of God.”

  The last note of the last chorus faded off, and there was a moment of shuffling and coughing.

  She waited. When they were settled, she spread her hands over them, as if in benediction. It was an evocative gesture.

  “My dear little brothers and sisters in Christ.”

  It was a haunting line. For a moment the gunslinger felt mixed feelings of nostalgia and fear, stitched in with an eerie feeling of déjà vu—he thought: I dreamed this. When? He shook it off. The audience—perhaps twenty-five all told—had become dead silent.

  “The subject of our meditation tonight is The Interloper.” Her voice was sweet, melodious, the speaking voice of a well-trained soprano.

  A little rustle ran through the audience.

  “I feel,” Sylvia Pittston said reflectively, “I feel that I know everyone in The Book personally. In the last five years I have worn out five Bibles, and uncountable numbers before that. I love the story, and I love the players in that story. I have walked arm in arm in the lion’s den with Daniel. I stood with David when he was tempted by Bathsheba as she bathed at the pool. I have been in the fiery furnace with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. I slew two thousand with Samson and was blinded with St. Paul on the road to Damascus. I wept with Mary at Golgotha.”

  A soft, shurring sigh in the audience.

  “I have known and loved them. There is only one—one—” she held up a finger—“only one player in the greatest of all dramas that I do not know. Only one who stands outside with his face in the shadow. Only one that makes my body tremble and my spirit quail. I fear him. I don’t know his mind and I fear him. I fear The Interloper.”

  Another sign. One of the women had put a hand over her mouth as if to stop a sound and was rocking, rocking.

  “The Interloper who came to Eve as a snake on its belly, grinning and writhing. The Interloper who walked among the Children of Israel while Moses was up on the Mount, who whispered to them to make a golden idol, a golden calf, and to worship it with foulness and fornication.”

  Moans, nods.

  “The Interloper! He stood on the balcony with Jezebel and watched as King Ahaz fell screaming to his death, and he and she grinned as the dogs gathered and lapped up his life’s blood. Oh, my little brothers and sisters, watch thou for The Interloper.”

  “Yes, O Jesus—” The man the gunslinger had first noticed coming into town, the one with the straw hat.

  “He’s always been there, my brothers and sisters. But I don’t know his mind. And you don’t know his mind. Who could understand the awful darkness that swirls there, the pride like pylons, the titanic blasphemy, the unholy glee? And the madness! The cyclopean, gibbering madness that walks and crawls and wriggles through men’s most awful wants and desires?”

  “O Jesus Savior—”

  “It was him who took our Lord up on the mountain—”

  “Yes—”

  “It was him that tempted him and shewed him all the world and the world’s pleasures—”

  “Yesss— “

  “It’s him that will come back when Last Times come on the world... and they are coming, my brothers and sisters, can’t you feel they are?”

  “Yesss—”

  Rocking and sobbing, the congregation became a sea; the woman seemed to point at all of them, none of them.

  “It’s him that will come as the Antichrist, to lead men into the flaming bowels of perdition, to the bloody end of wickedness, as Star Wormwood hangs blazing in the sky, as gall gnaws at the vitals of the children, as women’s wombs give forth monstrosities, as the works of men’s hands turn to blood—”

  “Ahhh—”

  “Ah, God—”

  “Gawwwwwwww—”

  A woman fell on the floor, her legs crashing up and down against the wood. One of her shoes flew off.

  “It’s him that stands behind every fleshly pleasure... him! The Interloper!”

  “Yes, Lord!”

  A man fell on his knees, holding his head and braying.

  “When you cake a drink, who holds the bottle?”

  “The Interloper! “

  “When you sit down to a faro or a Watch Me table, who turns the cards?”

  “The Interloper! “

  “When you riot in the flesh of another’s body, when you pollute yourself, who are you setting your soul to?”

  “In—”

  “The—”

  “Oh, Jesus... Oh—”

  “— loper—”

  “— Aw... Aw... Aw...”

  “And who is he?” She screamed (but calm within, he could sense the calmness, the mastery, the control, the domination. He thought suddenly, with terror and absolute surety: he has left a demon in her. She is haunted. He felt the hot ripple of sexual desire again through his fear. )

  The man who was holding his head crashed and blundered forward.

  “I’m in hell!” He screamed up at her. His face twisted and writhed as if snakes crawled beneath his skin. “I done fornications! I done gambling! I done weed! I done sins! I—” But his voice rose skyward in a dreadful, hysterical wail that drowned articulation. He held his head as if it would burst like an overripe cantaloupe at any moment.

  The audience stilled as if a cue had been given, frozen in their half-erotic poses of ecstasy.

  Sylvia Pittston reached down and grasped his head. The man’s cry ceased as her fingers, strong and white, unblemished and gentle, worked through his hair. He looked up at her dumbly.

  “Who was with you in sin?” she asked. Her eyes looked into his, deep enough, gentle enough, cold enough to drown in.

  “The... The Interloper.”

  “Called who?”

  “Called Satan.
” Raw, oozing whisper.

  “Will you renounce?”

  Eagerly: “Yes! Yes! Oh, my Jesus Savior!”

  She rocked his head; he stared at her with the blank, shiny eyes of the zealot.

  “If he walked through that door—” she hammered a finger at the vestibule shadows where the gunslinger stood—“would you renounce him to his face?”

  “On my mother’s name!”

  “Do you believe in the eternal love of Jesus?”

  He began to weep. “Your fucking-a I do—”

  “He forgives you that, Jonson.”

  “Praise God,” Jonson said, still weeping, unaware of what he had said or done.

  “I know he forgives you just as I know he will cast out the unrepentant from his palaces and into the place of burning darkness.”

  “Praise God.” The congregation, drained, spoke it solemnly.

  “Just as I know this Interloper, this Satan, this Lord of Flies and Serpents will be cast down and crushed... will you crush him if you see him, Jonson?”

  “Yes and praise God!” Jonson wept.

  “Will you crush him if you see him, brothers and sisters?”

  “Yess...” Sated.

  “If you see him sashaying down Main St. tomorrow?”

  “Praise God...”

  The gunslinger, amused and unsettled at the same time, faded back out the door and headed for town. The smell of the desert was clear in the air. Almost time to move on. Almost.

  XIII

  In bed again.

  “She won’t see you,” Allie said. She sounded frightened. “She doesn’t see anybody. She only comes out on Sunday evenings to scare the hell out of everybody.”

  “How long has she been here?”

  “Twelve years or so. Let’s not talk about her.”