“Yes, Dad.”
“First, when you come out of here, I want you to believe the song—the one on the tape. Then, for your mother, obey the book—the one she’s given you. Will you say those things over and over again, Josh?”
Josh began to say the words. “Believe the song, obey the book.”
As he repeated them, he heard his father say quietly, “Good night, Josh. I’ll be near you.”
Then the lid closed, and there was a sound of escaping gas. Josh began to dive down into a deep sleep.
He found himself saying again, “Believe the song … obey the book …” just as he dropped off into a strange sleep. He heard himself murmur, “Good night, Dad. I’ll see you …”
Then he became part of the darkness that was all about.
2
The First Sleeper
Someone far off was calling his name over and over, but Josh tried to close his ears and slip back into the comfortable cocoon of warm darkness.
“Joshua—awake!” the faint voice insisted. “Awake, Joshua, awake!”
As he slowly came to full consciousness, Josh thought at first that one of his parents was calling him for breakfast. He slowly opened his eyes, expecting to see his familiar bedroom.
Instead, there was nothing but white overhead. At the same time, he realized that he could hear none of the familiar wake-up noises—kitchen sounds, someone in the shower singing, early morning traffic—none of these. All he heard was a quiet hiss, like a huge tire leaking air.
Josh turned his head and looked around wildly. There was only one very small light in the room, but when he saw the bare walls and remembered suddenly his last moment awake, his mouth went dry with fear.
He began to shout, “Dad! Mom!” He tried to sit up, but his forehead struck the clear plastic shell that covered the bed. “Ow,” he cried, and then, before he could utter another sound, the plastic cover swung back, and he was free.
Quickly he scrambled off the bed and peered into the semidarkness. He saw nothing and cried out more loudly than before.
“Dad! Mom!”
But not even an echo stirred in the darkness.
Where’s the door? His thoughts were in a swirl. He had to get out of here!
He moved to the wall, groping until he found the single door into the room. He fumbled for the knob. There was no knob, no handle … nothing.
Panic grabbed him, and he began to beat on the door with his fists.
“Someone let me out! Please! Let me out! Please, let me out!”
He never remembered afterward how long this went on, but when he finally slumped down on the floor, his voice was worn thin and his fists hurt.
Then Josh recalled a story he had read about a man who had been walled up, buried alive. Buried alive! He huddled in the dim light, his mind racing to seek some answer, but nothing came. Then, just as he was about to begin crying out again, the hissing noise stopped. The room was totally silent. Silent, that is, except for—
Except for what? He held his breath, and then he heard it—a faint, raspy wheezing.
Now Josh, who had been desperately crying for someone to come, was terrified at the knowledge that someone was with him! He scrunched himself into the smallest possible shape, peering blindly into the dark corners. Again he heard the steady wheeze of someone’s breath.
Moments passed. He had almost decided that the noise was some sort of machinery or perhaps the wind, when out of the darkness a voice said, “Don’t be afraid, young man.”
It was a high, scratchy voice, to which Josh managed to whisper a question. “Who are you?”
“My name, you mean?” the scratchy voice asked. “Well, I haven’t used a name in so long I’ve almost forgotten. But you can call me—Crusoe.” The voice laughed softly. “I guess I’ve been marooned long enough to have that name.”
Josh got to his feet and asked, “Isn’t there more light? I can’t see you.”
“Well, there is, but I didn’t turn it on before because—well, you might have been a little frightened at the sight of me. But here we are.”
There was a quiet click, and the room suddenly grew bright. Josh gazed fearfully at the small figure across the room. He had been expecting something terrible—a gorilla-like form or something like Frankenstein’s monster. What he saw was different, but certainly not frightening.
Crusoe, as he called himself, reminded Josh of a very old kangaroo, perhaps because of the way he hopped across the room, holding his hands together in front of him.
His face was a little frightening—wrinkled like a dried prune, with several white scar patches across his cheeks. He had a pointed nose and big front teeth that stuck out. But the brown eyes peering from the scarred and wrinkled face were warm and friendly.
Crusoe was bent over almost like a hunchback, and he had to twist his head to look up at the taller Josh. Softly he asked, “Are you hungry?”
All of a sudden Josh realized that he was hungry, hungrier than he could ever remember. But questions overwhelmed him. He hurriedly began to ask, “What’s happened? Where is everyone? And what—”
“Later! Later!” Crusoe wheezed. “First, eat! Then we can talk. Come, come!”
Crusoe pulled Josh toward the door, then stopped and said something in a language Josh did not understand. The door swung smoothly open. In his queer hopping gait, Crusoe pulled and pushed Josh down the hall into a room that looked and smelled like a kitchen.
“Sit here, Joshua,” Crusoe said, pushing him into a chair.
Josh noticed that the old man knew his name, but before he could ask how, he found hot food in front of him. It smelled delicious, though he didn’t recognize any of it.
“What is it?” he asked between bites.
“It’s good! That’s what it is,” Crusoe said. “Just eat, and don’t ask questions.”
Crusoe kept hopping off his high stool to refill Josh’s plate with food and his own cup with some sort of red drink.
Finally, Josh could not eat another bite. “It was very good, Mr. Crusoe. Now can I ask some questions?”
“Yes.” Crusoe nodded. “However, you may not like my answers.”
Josh asked the first question that flew into his mind. “Where are my mother and father?”
Even as he spoke, he saw something in Crusoe’s eyes that made his heart turn cold.
Crusoe looked steadily at Josh for a long moment, then spoke gently, “You must begin to be brave, Joshua.”
He put one thin hand, almost like a tiny claw, on Josh’s arm and said, “They’re gone, my boy.”
A wave of pain and fear engulfed Josh. Tears welled into his eyes, but he held them back as he saw Crusoe watching him, nodding his head in sympathy. He swallowed hard, trying to choke back the sobs.
“Later, Joshua—” Crusoe nodded again “—later, you will mourn your parents as you should. For now, don’t be ashamed of honest tears,” he added, as Josh tried to blink them away. “I think you can see much farther through a tear than you can through a telescope.”
Josh managed a small smile. Then he asked, “How did it happen?”
Hopping off his stool, Crusoe pulled out a large map. The terrain on the map seemed unfamiliar to Josh, though part of it, he thought, did look a little like something he had seen somewhere else.
“What place is that?” he asked.
“This is the world,” Crusoe said, “as it is now— Nuworld is its name.”
“But—it’s all different!” Josh protested. “What happened?”
“There was a war, and terrible weapons were used,” Crusoe said. “It wasn’t like other wars. The bombs melted the ice caps and flooded whole nations. Florida and California both disappeared. And the bombs set off earthquakes, pushing up mountains. There are deserts now where there were once fertile fields. Your world is gone, Joshua.”
“But it can’t be,” Josh protested. “It’s only been a little while—” He paused, seeing Crusoe shake his head sadly. “How long has it been?”
he asked slowly. He was somehow hoping that it had not been too long, no more than a few months or even a year or two. Perhaps he hoped that, if it had not been too long, he might find someone he had known.
“You have been asleep for fifty years, Joshua.”
Josh felt as if he had been hit in the stomach. “Fifty years!” he whispered. “They’re all dead then! Everyone I knew.”
Crusoe reached up and took a small brown bottle from a cabinet. Then he poured some clear liquid into a glass and handed it to Joshua, saying. “Drink this.”
Josh swallowed it obediently. The liquid burned his throat like fire, but it also drove away his faintness. “I’m all right now.”
“Good boy, Joshua.” Crusoe capped the bottle and put it back in the cabinet. “Now, perhaps we’d better—” Here he was interrupted as the door swung open and two dwarfs walked in.
At least they looked like dwarfs, those in the books that Josh had always loved. They were short, not much more than three feet tall, and fat as sausages. Their bellies gave promise of exploding any minute were it not for their broad black leather belts with shiny brass buckles. Both had fat red cheeks with small black eyes peering out from under impossibly bushy eyebrows. Both also had beards that came down almost to their belt buckles. The pair stared at Josh, mouths open, and he stared back at them, speechless.
“Joshua, this is Mat, and this is Tam,” Crusoe said.
“Why, you’re twins!” Josh said. “How can I tell you apart?”
The dwarf on the left sniffed and said, “That won’t be hard. Just listen, and the one who talks a lot of happy nonsense without a grain of common sense—that one’ll be him, Tam.” With a thick forefinger, he prodded his brother, who was smiling broadly.
“Greetings!” the other dwarf said. “And if you hear anyone talking about doom and funerals and calamities —why, it’ll be him, brother Mat.”
Crusoe interrupted to say, “That’s often the case with two like those. They’re Gemini twins, Joshua.”
“What’s that?”
“After the Terror—the war, I mean—many sets of twins were born—”
“And many worse things!” Mat grumped.
“—and for some reason, many of these twins, though they looked exactly alike, were just the opposite in every other way. If one was rather happy, the other would be sure to be sad. If one was timid, the other would be a fighter—”
Mat interrupted. “And if one was foolish and always looked for pie-in-the-sky—” he poked Tam again “—the other would have to have enough caution and common sense for two.”
“Ho!” Tam grinned. “And if one of them—” here he glanced slyly at his brother “—was sour and gloomy enough to curdle milk, why the other would have to have enough fun for both!”
“Don’t get them started.” Crusoe groaned. “They never agree on anything, and they can never in this world get away from one another.”
“Why not?” Josh asked in surprise.
“Because there’s something in them—nobody knows what it is—that makes it necessary for them to stay close. You never see one Gemini. If they get separated, the farther apart they get the weaker they become. And if they get too far apart, they both just die.”
“Yep,” Tam agreed cheerfully. “And when one goes —the other goes. Pop—off the other pops too! Dead as a bucket.”
“If it weren’t so,” Mat muttered under his breath, “I’d have knocked this cheerful idiot in the head years ago!”
“You’ll learn to trust them soon enough,” Crusoe said. “They fight all the time, but they are always truthful. They also know a lot more than it appears they might.”
At that moment, the brothers began to quarrel and seemed nearly ready to attack each other. But Crusoe got between them, trying to calm them down.
As Josh looked at the two dwarfs and the hunchbacked form of Crusoe, a lump rose again in his throat.
“What’s wrong, Joshua?” Crusoe asked.
“I feel so—so foreign!” Josh said. “My whole world is gone, and all I see is dwarfs and—” He paused abruptly, for he had been about to say something about hunchbacked kangaroos. “Well, I just wish I could see some—normal people!”
“Normal people!” Mat suddenly roared. “Normal people, indeed! I like that! Haven’t you told him yet, Crusoe?”
“Told me what?” Josh asked anxiously.
“Why, we’re normal,” Mat said loudly, pointing at Tam and himself. “You’re the freak around here!”
“Now, Mat, that’s no way to talk,” Tam said.
“It’s the truth, and that’s what he needs to know. You can’t feed him on sugar candy forever,” Mat said grimly.
“What does he mean?” Josh asked Crusoe.
“Well, most of the ‘normal’ people like yourself were killed during the Terror. And those that were born afterward were different—like the Gemini twins.”
“And a lot better off we are too,” Tam cried. “Why, in the old days almost everybody looked pretty much alike. Now you got lots of variety!”
“Ho!” Mat sneered at his brother. “We’ve got variety all right! Giants to stomp you, Wolfpeople to tear your throat out, those nice Serpent-folk from the north to sink their fangs into you—”
He would have gone on, but Crusoe broke in. “Now, now, that’s enough, Mat! It’s true that strange effects resulted from the Terror, but you can find people to love and trust here, just as in Oldtime.”
Even as Crusoe was talking, something was happening to Josh. In the din of the argument, a peculiar quiet had fallen on him, as if he were somehow surrounded and shut off from the outside world. And this quiet brought a peace that rushed into his troubled mind, blocking off all his fears.
Out of the silence came a faint voice, both familiar and loving. The voice was singing a song with words that he had never heard. Yet he knew that the words were true. And he began singing them softly as they came to him out of the silence.
“Some sleep beneath the heavy earth,
Some higher than the sky,
All waiting for a timely birth,
The Seven Sleepers lie.
“The house of Goél will be filled,
The earth itself will quake!
The beast will be forever stilled,
When Seven Sleepers wake!”
Josh finished the song and was startled at himself. It was as if he had heard another voice and not his own.
Crusoe, he saw, was smiling.
But suddenly Mat threw his soft cap on the floor and stomped it angrily. “Just what we need!” he snarled. “A fanatic to play keeper to. You don’t believe that crazy nonsense?” he asked Josh.
“What do you mean?” Josh asked in confusion.
The dwarf sniffed. “Don’t give me that.”
“Wait a minute, brother,” Tam interrupted. “Maybe there is something to the stories.”
“There’s something to it, all right—foolish superstition!” Mat stomped his cap again. “No one with any sense believes any of that ancient drivel.”
“I don’t understand,” Josh protested.
“That old hunk of hokum about Seven Sleepers— that’s what I mean.”
Crusoe came and stood close to Josh. “Be quiet, Mat. You must remember that Joshua is somewhat like a baby. He doesn’t know anything about the Promise.”
“What promise?” Josh asked.
“Why, the Promise!” Tam cried. “The promise that one day there’ll be an end to all the evil in the world—and things will be good again like they never were, and—”
“And that’s the kind of talk that will get us all put in the Tower!” Mat grunted.
“But think of the old stories and the old songs all telling about the Seven Sleepers. What about all that?” Tam asked.
“Moonshine and applesauce,” Mat snapped. “Who in his right mind believes all that garbage?”
“I do!” Tam answered cheerfully.
“Well, I don’t,” Mat returned.
“Well,” Mat asked suspiciously, “what about you?”
“He means,” Crusoe said wheezily, “how can you explain his being here? We’ve all known that he’s been asleep—all your lives you’ve known that. Now he’s awake—just as I told you he would be one day.”
“That’s right!” Tam shouted excitedly. “Remember, brother, Crusoe always said the Sleeper would awake. You always said it could never be. Now there he is!” And in his excitement, Tam turned a cartwheel.
“Be still, you fool!” Mat looked hard at Joshua as if weighing him in his mind. Then he said, “Seven, eh? Well, where are they—the other six? You don’t know. How will you find them? You don’t know. What will you do after you find them? Don’t know, do you?” He glared triumphantly at Tam, then pounded the map with his stubby fist. “Show me the places on the map!” he demanded.
Crusoe held up his hand for silence. “True places are never shown on a map. Joshua, do you believe the song you just sang? Because if you do believe, you have to do something about it, don’t you? And if you don’t believe, you can never make anyone else believe.”
Once again the strange stillness fell over Josh, and he thought he heard a voice say, “I’ll be near you.” Then he looked at the misshapen figures before him. They reminded him of creatures from a nightmare.
Almost to himself Josh said, “Maybe this is all a dream. But I didn’t dream the song. I don’t even know what most of it means. But somewhere I think there are six other people just like me. And I’m either going to find them and wake them up—or else die trying.”
“Hooray!” shouted Tam and turned another cartwheel.
“Humbug!” snorted Mat and stomped his cap.
Crusoe touched Josh’s arm and whispered so low that Josh alone could hear him. “I’ll help you, Joshua.”
3
The Squire
Josh did little for the next two days but eat and sleep. During the hours he was awake, he listened over and over again to the tape that his father had left for him in the brown case.
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