by Noreen Doyle
The snow was crusted, sometimes slippery even for our web feet. We entered the woods along a tangle of tracks, including the fat tire marks of a snow scooter. “Guy from Lohman,” said Harp. “Hired the goddamn thing out to the state cops and hisself with it. Goes pootin’ around all over hell, fit to scare everything inside eight, ten miles.” He cut himself a fresh plug to last the morning. “I b’lieve the thing is a mite farther off than that. They’ll be messing around again today.” His fingers dug into my arm. “See how it is, don’t y’? They ain’t looking for what we are. Looking for a dead body to hang onto my neck. And if they was to find her the way I found—the way I found—”
“Harp, you needn’t borrow trouble.”
“I know how they think,” he said. “Was I to walk down the road beyond Darkfield, they’d pick me up. They ain’t got me in shackles because they got no—no body, Ben. Nobody needs to tell me about the law. They got to have a body. Only reason they didn’t leave a man here overnight, they figure I can’t go nowhere. They think a man couldn’t travel in three, four foot of snow . . . Ben, I mean to find that thing and shoot it down . . . We better slant off thisaway.”
He set out at a wide angle from those tracks, and we soon had them out of sight. On the firm crust our snowshoes left no mark. After a while we heard a grumble of motors far back, on the road. Harp chuckled viciously. “Bright and early like yesterday.” He stared back the way we had come. “They’ll never pick up our trail without dogs. That son of a bitch Robart did talk about borrying a hound somewhere, to sniff Leda’s clothes. More likely give ’em a sniff of mine, now.”
We had already come so far that I didn’t know the way back. Harp would know it. He could never be lost in any woods, but I have no mental compass such as his. So I followed him blindly, not trying to memorize the route. It was a region of uniform old growth, mostly hemlock, no recent lumbering, few landmarks. The monotony wore down native patience to a numbness, and our snowshoes left no more impression than our thoughts.
An hour passed, or more, after that sound of motors faded. Now and then I heard the wind move peacefully overhead. Few bird calls, for most of our singers had not yet returned. “Been in this part before, Harp?”
“Not with snow on the ground, not lately.” His voice was hushed and careful. “Summers. About a mile now, and the trees thin out some. Stretch of slash where they was taking out pine four, five years back and left everything a Christly pile of shit like they always do.”
No, Harp wouldn’t get lost here, but I was well lost, tired, sorry I had come. Would he turn back if I collapsed? I didn’t think he could, now, for any reason. My pack with blanket roll and provisions had become infernal. He had said we ought to have enough for three or four days. Only a few years earlier I had carried heavier camping loads than this without trouble, but now I was blown, a stitch beginning in my side. My wristwatch said only nine o’clock.
The trees thinned out as he had promised, and here the land rose in a long slope to the north. I looked up across a tract of eight or ten acres where the devastation of stupid lumbering might be healed if the hurt region could be let alone for sixty years. The deep snow, blinding out here where only scrub growth interfered with the sunlight, covered the worst of the wreckage. “Good place for wild ras’berries,” Harp said quietly. “Been time for ’em to grow back. Guess it was nearer seven years ago when they cut here and left this mess. Last summer I couldn’t hardly find their logging road. Off to the left—”
He stopped, pointing with a slow arm to a blurred gray line that wandered up from the left to disappear over the rise of ground. The nearest part of that gray curve must have been four hundred feet away, and to my eyes it might have been a shadow cast by an irregularity of the snow surface; Harp knew better. Something had passed there, heavy enough to break the crust. “You want to rest a mite, Ben? Once over that rise I might not want to stop again.”
I let myself down on the butt of an old log that lay tilted toward us, cut because it had happened to be in the way, left to rot because they happened to be taking pine. “Can you really make anything out of that?”
“Not enough,” said Harp. “But it could be him.” He did not sit by me, but stood relaxed with his load, snowshoes spaced so he could spit between them. “About half a mile over that rise,” he said, “there’s a kind of gorge. Must’ve been a good brook, former times, still a stream along the bottom in summer. Tangle of elders and stuff. Couple, three caves in the bank at one spot. I guess it’s three summers since I been there. Gloomy goddamn place. There was foxes into one of them caves. Natural caves, I b’lieve. I didn’t go too near, not then.”
I sat in the warming light, wondering whether there was any way I could talk to Harp about the beast—if it existed, if we weren’t merely a pair of aging men with disordered minds. Any way to tell him the creature was important to the world outside our dim little village? That it ought somehow to be kept alive, not just shot down and shoveled aside? How could I say this to a man without science, who had lost his wife and also the trust of his fellow men?
Take away that trust and you take away the world. Could I ask him to shoot it in the legs, get it back alive? Why, to my own self, irrationally, that appeared wrong, horrible, as well as beyond our powers. Better if he shot to kill. Or if I did. So in the end I said nothing, but shrugged my pack into place and told him I was ready to go on.
With the crust uncertain under that stronger sunshine, we picked our way slowly up the rise, and when we came at length to that line of tracks, Harp said matter-of-factly, “Now you’ve seen his mark. It’s him.”
Sun and overnight freezing had worked on the trail. Harp estimated it had been made early the day before. But wherever the weight of Long-tooth had broken through, the shape of his foot showed clearly down there in its pocket of snow, a foot the size of a man’s, but broader, shorter. The prints were spaced for the stride of a short-legged person. The arch of the foot was low, but the beast was not actually flatfooted. Beast or man. I said, “This is a man’s print, Harp. Isn’t it?”
He spoke without heat. “No. You’re forgetting, Ben. I seen him.”
“Anyhow there’s only one.”
He said slowly, “Only one set of tracks.”
“What d’ you mean?”
Harp shrugged. “It’s heavy. He could’ve been carrying something. Keep your voice down. That crust yesterday, it would’ve held me without no web feet, but he went through, and he ain’t as big as me.” Harp checked his rifle and released the safety. “Half a mile to them caves. B’lieve that’s where he is, Ben. Don’t talk unless you got to, and take it slow.”
I followed him. We topped the rise, encountering more of that lumberman’s desolation on the other side. The trail crossed it, directly approaching a wall of undamaged trees that marked the limit of the cutting. Here forest took over once more, and where it began, Longtooth’s trail ended. “Now you seen how it goes,” Harp said. “Any place where he can travel above ground he does. He don’t scramble up the trunks, seems like. Look here—he must’ve got aholt of that branch and swung hisself up. Knocked off some snow, but the wind knocks off so much, too, you can’t tell nothing. See, Ben, he—he figures it out. He knows about trails. He’ll have come down out of these trees far enough from where we are now so there ain’t no chance of us seeing the place from here. Could be anywhere in a half-circle, and draw it as big as you please.”
“Thinking like a man.”
“But he ain’t a man,” said Harp. “There’s things he don’t know. How a man feels, acts. I’m going on to them caves.” From necessity, I followed him . . . .
I ought to end this quickly. Prematurely I am an old man, incapacitated by the effects of a stroke and a damaged heart. I keep improving a little—sensible diet, no smoking, Adelaide’s care. I expect several years of tolerable health on the way downhill. But I find, as Harp did, that it is even more crippling to lose the trust of others. I will write here once more, and not again, that
my word is good.
It was noon when we reached the gorge. In that place some melancholy part of night must always remain. Down the center of the ravine between tangles of alder, water murmured under ice and rotting snow, which here and there had fallen in to reveal the dark brilliance. Harp did not enter the gorge itself, but moved slowly through tree-cover along the left edge, eyes flickering for danger. I tried to imitate his caution. We went a hundred yards or more in that inching advance, maybe two hundred. I heard only the occasional wind of spring.
He turned to look at me, with a sickly triumph, a grimace of disgust and of justification, too. He touched his nose and then I got it also, a rankness from down ahead of us, a musky foulness with an ammoniacal tang and some smell of decay. Then on the other side of the gorge, off in the woods, but not far, I heard Longtooth.
A bark, not loud. Throaty, like talk.
Harp suppressed an answering growl. He moved on until he could point down to a black cave-mouth on the opposite side. The breeze blew the stench across to us. Harp whispered, “See, he’s got like a path. Jumps down to that flat rock, then to the cave. We’ll see him in a minute.” Yes, there were sounds in the brush. “You keep back.” His left palm lightly stroked the underside of his rifle barrel.
So intent was he on the opening where Longtooth would appear, I may have been first to see the other who came then to the cave mouth and stared up at us with animal eyes. Longtooth had called again, a rather gentle sound. The woman wrapped in filthy hides may have been drawn by that call or by the noise of our approach.
Then Harp saw her.
He knew her. In spite of the tangled hair, scratched face, dirt, and the shapeless deer-pelt she clutched around herself against the cold, I am sure he knew her. I don’t think she knew him, or me. An inner blindness, a look of a beast wholly centered on its own needs. I think human memories had drained away. She knew Longtooth was coming. I think she wanted his warmth and protection, but there were no words in the whimper she made before Harp’s bullet took her between the eyes.
Longtooth shoved through the bushes. He dropped the rabbit he was carrying and jumped down to that flat rock, snarling, glancing sidelong at the dead woman who was still twitching. If he understood the fact of death, he had no time for it. I saw the massive overdevelopment of thigh and leg muscles, their springy motions of preparation. The distance from the flat rock to the place where Harp stood must have been fifteen feet. One spear of sunlight touched him in that blue-green shade, touched his thick red fur and his fearful face.
Harp could have shot him. Twenty seconds for it, maybe more. But he flung his rifle aside and drew out his hunting knife, his own long tooth, and had it waiting when the enemy jumped.
So could I have shot him. No one needs to tell me I ought to have done so.
Longtooth launched himself, clawed fingers out, fangs exposed. I felt the meeting as if the impact had struck my own flesh. They tumbled roaring into the gorge, and I was cold, detached, an instrument for watching.
It ended soon. The heavy brownish teeth clenched in at the base of Harp’s neck. He made no more motion except the thrust that sent his blade into Longtooth’s left side. Then they were quiet in that embrace, quiet all three. I heard the water flowing under the ice.
I remember a roaring in my ears, and I was moving with slow care, one difficult step after another, along the lip of the gorge and through mighty corridors of white and green. With my hard-won detachment I supposed this might be the region where I had recently followed poor Harp Ryder to some destination or other, but not (I thought) one of those we talked about when we were boys. A band of iron had closed around my forehead, and breathing was an enterprise needing great effort and caution, in order not to worsen the indecent pain that clung as another band around my diaphragm. I leaned against a tree for thirty seconds or thirty minutes, I don’t know where. I knew I mustn’t take off my pack in spite of the pain, because it carried provisions for three days. I said once: “Ben, you are lost.”
I had my carbine, a golden bough, staff of life, and I recall the shrewd management and planning that enabled me to send three shots into the air. Twice.
It seems I did not want to die, and so hung on the cliff-edge of death with a mad stubbornness. They tell me it could not have been the second day that I fired the second burst, the one that was heard and answered—because, they say, a man can’t suffer the kind of attack I was having and then survive a whole night of exposure. They say that when a search party reached me from Wyndham Village (eighteen miles from Darkfield), I made some garbled speech and fell flat on my face.
I woke immobilized, without power of speech or any motion except for a little life in my left hand, and for a long time memory was only a jarring of irrelevancies. When that cleared I still couldn’t talk for another long deadly while. I recall someone saying with exasperated admiration that with cerebral hemorrhage on top of coronary infarction, I had no damn right to be alive; this was the first sound that gave me any pleasure. I remember recognizing Adelaide and being unable to thank her for her presence. None of this matters to the story, except the fact that for months I had no bridge of communication with the world; and yet I loved the world and did not want to leave it.
One can always ask: What will happen next?
Some time in what they said was June my memory was (I think) clear. I scrawled a little, with the nurse supporting the deadened part of my arm. But in response to what I wrote, the doctor, the nurses, Sheriff Robart, even Adelaide Simmons and Bill Hastings, looked—sympathetic. I was not believed. I am not believed now, in the most important part of what I wish I might say: that there are things in our world that we do not understand, and that this ignorance ought to generate humility. People find this obvious, bromidic—oh, they always have!—and therefore they do not listen, retaining the pride of their ignorance intact.
Remnants of the three bodies were found in late August, small thanks to my efforts, for I had no notion what compass direction we took after the cut-over area, and there are so many such areas of desolation I couldn’t tell them where to look. Forest scavengers, including a pack of dogs, had found the bodies first.
Water had moved them, too, for the last of the big snow melted suddenly, and for a couple of days at least there must have been a small river raging through that gorge. The head of what they are calling the “lunatic” got rolled downstream, bashed against rocks, partly buried in silt. Dogs had chewed and scattered what they speak of as “the man’s fur coat.”
It will remain a lunatic in a fur coat, for they won’t have it any other way. So far as I know, no scientist ever got a look at the wreckage, unless you glorify the coroner by that title. I believe he was a good vet before he got the job. When my speech was more or less regained, I was already through trying to talk about it. A statement of mine was read at the inquest—that was before I could talk or leave the hospital. At this ceremony society officially decided that Harper Harrison Ryder, of this township, shot to death his wife Leda and an individual, male, of unknown identity, while himself temporarily of unsound mind, and died of knife injuries received in a struggle with the said individual of unknown, and so forth.
I don’t talk about it because that only makes people more sorry for me, to think a man’s mind should fail so, and he not yet sixty.
I cannot even ask them: “What is truth?” They would only look more saddened, and I suppose shocked, and perhaps find reasons for not coming to see me again.
They are kind. They will do anything for me, except think about it.
THE HERMIT GENIUS OF MARSHVILLE
Tom Tolnay
WARNING: This exclusive report is fully protected by copyright and appears in this magazine for the first time anywhere.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The documents, tape recordings, articles, and investigative accounts herein represent, to our knowledge, the first published effort to draw into an intelligible whole the emerging story of Griswold Masterson, popularly known as “The Hermit G
enius of Marshville.” While admittedly incomplete, these materials provide a framework through which our readers may gain an impression of the ideas and life of the secretive, eccentric, self-made philosopher/scientist.
EQMM (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine) became aware of the Hermit Genius the way many scientific discoveries are made—by chance. Last summer an editorial assistant, on vacation in Maine, went fishing in a ten-foot powerboat near the mouth of the Peace River. The young man got caught in a squall, and it looked as though he was going to be swamped, when a returning lobster boat spotted him and pulled his craft to safety. Afterwards, the assistant insisted the lobsterman join him for something to eat and drink. In a local tavern the two men had their tongues loosened by several mugs of ale, and that’s when the strange doings at Marshville first came up.
When the story of the Hermit Genius got back to us, naturally we were highly skeptical. But having let more than one major story get away from us over the years, we reluctantly decided to send a reporter† up to Maine to check it out. The decision proved to be well worth the investment, for she uncovered a story of international—we might even say, universal—implications.
At a very early age—three or four—legend has it that Griswold Masterson got hold of several science fiction magazines and within a period of months had taught himself to read. By five or six, it is said, he had gone through much of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells at a local lending library outside Marshville. Masterson apparently was greatly moved by the realization that each of us is stuck in our own time—that our finiteness precludes our partaking of the scientific advantages of succeeding ages. And at some point he must have made a childhood pledge to himself that one day he would overcome such limitations in his own life.
Before attaining maturity, Masterson began conducting experiments in the basement of the house in which he was born. He worked fifteen to twenty hours a day in what turned out to be a lifelong attempt to find a means by which he could experience firsthand the technological promises of ages to come. Late in his career, he apparently made a discovery that enabled him to realize his childhood dream.