Then another kind of energy came to me from that beaming face. As it filled me, I felt light enough to walk on the air, and all the colors of the day turned so vivid that they hurt my eyes. Music welled up in my heart, and I was again drowned in sleep.
The first cool of evening woke me, and I gathered up my doll and the pack, leaving the playhouse ready for another day. Then I hurried homeward, for though my mother gave me freedom that city dwellers would never consider for their children, her one iron-clad rule was that I must be at home by dark. With that enchanted playhouse waiting for me, I wanted to take no chance of being confined to the house and yard.
Looking back now from middle age, I realize that my home was that stone circle. Not that Mama and Papa didn’t give me love and security—from them I learned independence of mind and ethical behavior—but I learned things in my playhouse that are not taught in schools.
In the center of that complex of energies, I learned to project my mind to become a spider or a lizard or a hawk, and to see the world through their alien senses. I learned to subdue my physical self until my spirit seemed to stand alone in the winds of other dimensions. I suspect that my mother knew these things—she sometimes offered a hint of such things—but I have never known another person who did. Who, after all, could teach them those skills, if they had no stone circle to offer a door through which spectral instructors might come?
By the time I was fourteen, I had finished the school that Forked Creek afforded, but we ordered books through the mail and I continued to learn everything that interested me, from history to astronomy. I still went to the playhouse, but now for other things.
There I considered my own changing body and emotions, my mother’s growing silence, my father’s worried glances as she became thinner and paler. The conclusions I drew were my own, for the faces counseled only patience and kindness. Those are hard attributes to sustain at fourteen.
There was no one in my school who was the sort of friend who could share the mysteries of growing up, far less those of becoming aware of my mother’s mortality. There were no girls of my age, and the Gadworthy boys, who came nearest to it, were repulsive to me.
George, the oldest, must have been twenty, Sam about fifteen, and Tim, the youngest, thirteen. They were all big and sandy-haired and cruel to anything or anyone smaller than they were. It never occurred to me that they might be interested in me, for I always kept a low profile at school.
They must have watched me for a long time to learn where I went. My trips to the stone circle were now infrequent, for I was busy caring for my increasingly sick mother.
However it was, they laid an ambush, just beyond the ridge above the circle.
No one ever came to the red rocks on our ranch, except for me. Never had I met anyone in my rambles, but I was not alarmed when I found them there. Men and boys went hunting at odd times of the year, when the notion struck them, I knew. I nodded and passed on the path.
They gave me no time to think—George tackled me, and we went rolling down the slope, almost under the arch itself. Whooping and grinning, his brothers came running down and grabbed me by the arms and legs. Being no fool, however young, I knew their game.
Though I was terrified, I was also angrier that ever before in my life. That made me struggle so fiercely that I kept knocking one or another loose from their grip on me. But there were three, all bigger than I was. I knew I had to lose.
Long strips of my shirt ripped away, as I looked up past George’s shoulder and his flushed face. I cried out to those faces that had come to me so long ago. “Help me! Show me the way! Give me a weapon, please!”
George’s knees were holding mine down, his rough hands pushing against my bare shoulders. But now I seemed to see inside him: lungs heaved, the webbing of veins throbbed with the passing of his blood. I sighed with relief, knowing my cry for help was answered.
I reached out with that sense I had learned to use so long ago. It meshed with his heart and squeezed it hard, stilling it in his chest. He sank on top of me, limp and heavy.
Sam was standing over us, and I stared into his pale eyes. “You might as well haul him off me, Sam. He’s dead. If you want to try what he did, you’ll end up the same way.”
The surviving Gadworthies knelt beside their brother and lifted him off me, turning him on his back. Sam felt for his heart, then turned pale. “God, Tim, he’s gone! Grab hold of him and stretch him out. Maybe we can pump some air back into him.”
Filled with unnatural strength, I rose and stood over them. “I didn’t touch his lungs, just squeezed his heart. You won’t bring him back that way.” I set my back against the stone arch, and the energy that sometimes charged that spot flooded into me. I looked down at the three without pity.
“You will take your brother and go home. You will never tell anyone what happened here, for nobody would believe you anyway, and you had no good reason for being here. Never will you come back here for any reason. Your brother had a bad heart—and that is God’s truth—that nobody suspected. You will never remember anything else...nothing else at all.”
Their eyes turned strange, as I rammed the message into their minds, using the energies that came to me from the stone itself. Then they lifted George and carried him away over the ridge. I never saw any of them again.
Still I stood in the stone circle, my heart sore, my body bruised and skinned. For the first time communication came into my mind clearly in words, and offered a measure of comfort.
“It is time to go out, Miranda. Your mother is dying and will soon be gone. Your father will need to go himself to soothe his grief. See the world with him. Learn what you can of human beings and their ways. When time turns round again, you will return to this place, as all things return at last to their origins.
“Forget your anger and your pain. Feel no guilt. Forgive those who have hurt you, for they are trapped in blind flesh. Go home now, for your mother needs you. She was ours, long ago, and she will soon return to us.”
I went away from the stone circle, my clothing in shreds, but my heart was mending already. I knew that my mother would not be gone entirely, just in a different place. As it was, I told her I had fallen over a cliff, and she smiled and understood.
We had never spoken about her illness, but now I felt bold enough to speak out. “I know something is wrong,” I told her. “It has been for months now. Tell me. Not knowing is worse than anything could be.”
My father, who had been out on the porch, came in and took my hands. His eyes filled with tears. “Your mother is dying, Miranda.”
Mama nodded, but she didn’t look sad or afraid. “I have known for months now, but I didn’t want to worry you, Miranda. Now, somehow, I feel it is time to tell you about it.” She settled back on the couch and patted the cushion beside her.
I sat and put an arm around her shoulders, which felt thin and fragile. Papa sat on the other side of her, and we each took one of her hands.
Mama went on, “I want you to take my insurance money and travel, the both of you. The hands can take care of the ranch for a few months, and you both need to get away.
“Miranda needs to learn more about the world, and who could be better than her father to show it to her?” Papa and I glanced at each other over her head and nodded gravely. I knew her wish would be granted.
* * * *
We lived for six weeks together, and we were all kind and even happy, in a strange way. When Papa and I stood together in the cemetery, while they lowered Mama into her dusty grave, I knew with certainty that she was not there. She had returned, after all those years, to the circle of stones and the waiting faces. She had gone home, as I would, one day when I had completed my life. We returned to the weathered stone house and made plans to take a tour of Europe and the Far East.
While my father went to cathedrals and Great Houses, I visited the old stone circles of Britain, which se
emed to vibrate with untapped power beneath my fingers. At such times I seemed to see dim replicas of those other faces in the lichens covering the stone, and I knew we would return home soon. A sort of chronology had been set in motion by Mama’s death, and I would follow faithfully wherever it led.
When we returned to our own country, Papa put me into a good school, where I completed high school. Then he sent me to a small college, where I acquired enough credentials to teach at the Forked Creek School. By the time I was twenty I was teaching, and I have recognized among my students some children who are of my kind, good material for encountering the faces in the arch.
I always send them to play in the circle of stones. I do not need to accompany them, for I have been there and know what will come to those with the necessary abilities.
Who knows what the final result will be? Perhaps, in generations to come, there will be enough enlightened people to turn our kind from its present course and to preserve what is good in our species. I suspect that the faces in the circle of stones will find a way to eliminate the worst traits in us, if we do not self-destruct first.
CONFLICT
Over the years, I have received many rejection slips that complained that the tales lacked conflict. I consider this an indication of immaturity and sheer ignorance. Having been a farmer for much of my life, I know all sorts of conflict that does not include fisticuffs.
MEMO
From the Desk of William Thister, Editor
Adventure Stories Magazine
New York, NY
To John Cranville
Bonterre, Louisiana
Dear Mr. Cranville:
Although we found the enclosed story extremely well written and very interesting, as we would expect from a writer with your reputation, my colleagues and I agree that it lacks conflict. As our publication specializes in tales emphasizing that quality, we feel that the lack of interpersonal friction and even violence makes your story unsuitable for our needs. We urge you to try putting two men together in this context and having them slug it out! That is what generates conflict.
Sincerely,
William Thister,
Editor
I crumpled the rejection note and flung it at the wastebasket. Conflict! If that idiot had been in my office right then he’d have had conflict to spare. How could anyone expect fist fights in a story involving a lone survivor of a plane crash, who was battling terrain, weather, and dangerous animals to reach help?
He had to be a city-bred man, without the faintest glimmer of understanding of what it means to face natural dangers, whereas I lived in swamp and river bottom country, among the predators I wrote about. Face that sucker with a water moccasin or a panther or bobcat or a hurricane ripping in off the Gulf of Mexico, and he’d get to understand conflict very quickly.
A metaphorical light bulb went on over my head, exactly the way it does in the comic strips. What use was all the money I’d saved from my very profitable travel-adventure books if I couldn’t use some of it for...educational purposes?
I picked up the phone and called my sister-in-law at the Bonterre travel agency. Before nightfall I was on the way to New York, and before noon the next day I’d enlisted my literary agent, Lon Pfisten, in my cause.
I didn’t have to twist his arm at all. He agreed that Thister was a first-class twit who badly needed a dose of reality. He had no trouble making up a dilly of a tale, which, while putting Thister into my clutches, kept his own tail out of any crack.
At four-thirty the two of them were sitting in a bar, busily talking about a promising writer who was going to be pure gold for both of them. At four forty-five they went into the restroom, where I waited with a very convincing fake automatic pistol.
Leaving Lon convincingly knocked out and insecurely tied up in a stall, I hustled Thister, his hands bound and his face muffled in his own jacket collar, down the dark hallway to the rear exit. There the used car I bought that morning waited for us.
I fastened him securely into the passenger seat and headed out of town. Every time he offered to signal for help, I nudged him with the “gun.” He had no taste whatsoever for conflict at the personal level, I found.
It’s a long drive from New York City to Bonterre, Louisiana, but I’d driven it before and knew how to stop for catnaps along the way. As Thister didn’t dare sleep while I drove, and was too tired to stay awake when I slept, it worked out just right.
We made it in two and a half days, keeping to the old U.S. Highway system instead of Interstates. Before we reached Bonterre—all three blocks of it—I blindfolded my prisoner and pushed him down onto the floor-boards.
You may wonder why the trip seems to have been made in complete silence. Actually, he asked desperate questions for a while, but once he finally understood that I was not going to answer them, he clammed up.
I timed things just right. It was after nine o’clock in the evening, which meant that the sidewalks had been rolled up and put away. By the time I pulled into the dead-end track leading to Alfonse Dupré’s fishing camp on the river, I was tired but elated.
Alfonse was away for the summer, guiding fishermen down on the Atchafalaya. I had made my preparations before starting for New York, leaving the necessary equipment neatly packed in my old pirogue, covered with plastic.
The car went into a dilapidated shed behind Alfonse’s shanty, and I hauled my terrified victim through the bushes to the ramshackle dock. Around us the river bottoms and the adjacent swamp were alive with noise; a screech owl quavered its eerie call in the distance. A whip-poor-will’s fluttering cry was answered by a shriek from some small creature falling prey to a bobcat or a mink. The croaking of frogs mingled with the chirring of crickets and the lapping of water against the sides of our craft.
The night sounds were punctuated by the chattering of Thister’s teeth. He stared wildly about, once I lit the kerosene lantern. Hundreds of bright sparks among the willows and reeds and lily pads marked the presence of frogs and other small creatures.
As the pirogue slid silently downstream, the eyes of a half-submerged alligator glowed, and my passenger ducked as low as he could and began to moan.
“No conflict, eh, Thister?” I asked. “You’re about to learn the meaning of conflict when I maroon you on the ridge in the swamp. The time will come when you’d welcome a good solid fist fight, I suspect.”
“Maroon? Swamp?” he quavered. “Cranville, have you gone insane?”
“No more than usual,” I replied. “You have to be pretty crazy to do the work I do, going places and doing things that put my neck in danger every day of my life and writing about them. Then I write a fiction piece, using real life as the basis, and you tell me I have no conflict. I finally snapped, I think. You are about...to...learn.”
A gator bellowed somewhere ahead, and I think Thister fainted. He was still out when I grounded the pirogue on the ridge. I unloaded the canned goods, making sure there was an opener. I put them onto the sleeping bag, laid it all on the tarp, and towed them through the bushes to the huge magnolia grandiflora that would offer shelter when it rained. Its hollow had held off the weather on many of my own camping trips.
By the time I had set up a reasonably good camp for him, he had come to, and I led him to the magnolia. When we reached it, the sky was lightening and he could see the gigantic column of the trunk, the great buttress roots, the triangular opening into the hollow, and the pile of equipment I had arranged beside the fire I’d lit to keep off the mosquitoes.
His eyes were wide, his face pale as milk. “What are you going to do? Leave me here to die?”
I laughed. “Nonsense. I have everything you need for survival. Plenty of canned goods and an opener. In case you never used a manual opener, this is the way to do it.” I demonstrated with a can of peaches. A good thing—I could see by his expression that he’d never used anything except an electric, and p
robably not that very often.
“I also have fresh water in this five-gallon can. This is for drinking only. You can wash in the river, but never, ever drink that river water. You’ll wind up sick as a mule if you do.”
I went over my mental checklist and continued, “Avoid all snakes. There are a few kinds down here that aren’t poisonous, but don’t count on being lucky. If you ever meet a gator on solid ground, stand still. You can’t outrun him. It’s better to stand fast and hope. And don’t go swimming. The river has treacherous currents, and contrary to folklore, a moccasin can bite under water.”
He sat suddenly, flat on the damp ground. “You mean you aren’t going to stay here and show me? You’re going to leave me here alone?”
“Keep the fire going. The bugs will eat you alive if you don’t. There’s plenty of dry wood, if you hunt around, but don’t ever put your hand where you can’t see what you’re putting it on. If it rains, get inside the tree and wrap up in the tarp. You’ll be chilled and get sick, if you let yourself get wet. Down this close to the Gulf, it rains often.”
It was already very warm, the humidity feeling as if it collected on your skin, but the editor was shaking all over. Nerves, no doubt.
“I’ll be back in a couple of days. You should have no trouble lasting until then, though you are going to learn entirely new definitions of conflict before I return. Just remember what I’ve told you, and don’t eat any wild plants or berries, because you won’t know what is good and what’s fatal.” I looked up through the treetops at the sun-streaked clouds.
“Now I’m off. Have fun, William Thister, and learn a lot about the real world.” Then I trudged off along the river bank and got into the pirogue. As I poled back upstream I could hear his frantic yells behind me. Before I was out of earshot, they had degenerated into sobs. I almost felt sorry for him.
The Second Ardath Mayhar Page 20