The wind sang in passing.
The Superintendent’s flat voice took on a certain contour. “In the fifth row from the top, at the eleventh place from the right, lies my father, and seven places from him lies my mother,” he said. “One row below and fifteen places from the right lie my wife and our child. And blessed be the Wor’d which sustains us all, here and forever.” He said no more words aloud, but Ellery saw that he was praying.
My wife, he had said. Our child. Not my first wife, or Our eldest child, or our youngest child.
Time passed.
Ellery said “I’m sorry.” The words were not intended as a concession to death; they were an apology for having judged a man to be a robot.
Voices from below made him turn his head. Two figures were coming toward them, one slowly, one quickly; but the slower reached them first, having started sooner.
It was the guardian of the place of peace, a gnomelike old man with marked cretin features. His speech was too thick for Ellery to follow, but from the gleeful gestures of the small scythe in his blackened hand it appeared that he was describing his work in trimming the grass that grew upon the thousand graves. Was that pride shining from his dim eyes?
Ellery felt his flesh crawl.
And the Superintendent said “He does a work that must be done, and so he justifies his bread. Also, if he and the very few like him who are born to us teach us the love which is difficult, it cannot be said that they were born in vain.”
The love which is difficult…
Once more Ellery said, “I’m sorry.”
By now the second man had reached him.
It was the Successor, as it had been the previous morning.
And his message was the same.
The old Teacher said, “This morning the bracelet with the key was on the other side of the table.”
Ellery examined the key again. It looked like something used for a medieval keep, for it was fashioned from a single huge slab of metal on one plane. It still smelled, though less strongly, of the dark and unbleached beeswax into which it had been pressed.
Suddenly the Teacher said, “You have seen something.” Ellery nodded. (A bit of nonsense jumped out of his memory: The old lady asking the storekeeper if he had a “signifying” glass, and at the storekeeper’s negative, saying with a sigh, “Well, it don’t magnify.”) He fished in his pocket for the powerful little lens he always carried with him, unfolded it, and looked intently through it at the key. Then he handed the lens to the old man.
“I see marks of a sort,” said the Teacher. “Here, and here, and here on the edges of the bit. Scratches.” He looked up. “I do not understand.”
“File marks,” Ellery said. “And fresh ― they weren’t there yesterday. It seems clear, Teacher, that whoever borrowed your key to the sanquetum and took a wax impression, for the purpose of making a duplicate key, found that his first work was faulty. Therefore he had to correct the fault.
He worked on the duplicate key with a file, after fitting the duplicate over your key ― this original ― for guidance.”
The old man seemed uncertain of his meaning. But Ellery had already left the Teacher’s room and was striding toward the door of the sanquetum. The old man followed.
Ellery tried the door. “Locked,” he said.
“As it should be.”
Ellery stooped for a close look at the lock. “Will you observe this, Teacher?”
The old man stooped. By the lock were fresh scratches in the time-polished surface of the wood.
“It means,” Ellery said, “that an attempt was made to open the sanquetum door with a key that did not fit.”
The old man shook his head. “I am confused,” he confessed. “He who made the key worked over it with a file to correct it, and still the key did not fit?”
“You’re reversing the probable order of events. It must have happened like this:
“Two nights ago, while you were asleep, someone reached in through one of your slit-windows with a long reed or pole, lifted the key ring off your table, took it away, and in a safe place made a wax impression of the key. The key itself he then returned to your table by the same method, not knowing that you always placed it in the mathematical center of the table top.
“From the wax impression he made a duplicate key, and with this duplicate he stole into the holy house last night and tried to unlock the door of the sanquetum. The duplicate key did not work.
“He realized that the copy he had made was not sufficiently accurate.
But to correct it he needed your key again. Thereupon he stole out of the Holy Congregation House and around to one of the windows of your room in the wing, and with a pole or reed he again took possession of your key, and again he went off with it ― this time to correct the inaccuracies in his duplicate with a file. He then returned your key on its bracelet to your table with his pole, once more failing to realize that it should be placed in the exact center of the table. Have you investigated the sanquetum, Teacher, to see if anything is missing this morning?”
“Nothing is missing,” said the old man with difficulty.
“Then I suppose the coming of dawn or some other reason kept him from using the corrected key on the sanquetum door in the early hours of this morning.”
The bearded face was set in a multitude of fine hard lines, like an etching.
“It is to be expected, then…” The words stuck in the old man’s throat.
“I’m afraid so,” said Ellery gravely, pitying him. “He will make another attempt to enter the sanquetum, undoubtedly tonight, and undoubtedly this time the duplicate key will work.”
There was no one else in the holy house.
The Teacher had given grim assent to Ellery’s request that he be permitted to examine the interior of the forbidden room alone. Then the old man had left, wrapped in silence, and since the Successor was off on an errand somewhere, Ellery had the sacred building to himself.
He found himself squaring his shoulders. If the leader of this curious flock permitted him to set foot in their holy of holies, why should he hesitate? Yet hesitant he did feel, as if he were about to commit sacrilege ― a “profanation of the mysterie.”
Still, it had to be done. He inserted the big key in the lock, felt the heavy tumblers turning over, pushed the door open, and stood on the threshold of the forbidden room.
It was really no larger than a large closet. There were no windows.
The only light came from what he took to be an eternal lamp ― an oddly shaped oil lamp of some time-crusted metal hanging from the precise center of the ceiling. The draft caused by the opening of the door had set the lamp in motion; it swung now, slightly, back and forth, like a censer, scattering shadows instead of smoke.
And in the shifting light Ellery saw:
To either side of him, each in a near corner, a very tall and slender jar of pottery, purple in color, resting on a wooden base and surmounted by a bowl-like cover. Jars, bases, bowls were identical.
Directly facing him: an old-fashioned walnut china closet, glass-fronted. On the bottom shelf lay a book, open. And on the upper shelf were two perfectly stacked columns of silver coins of equal height, in accordance with the fundamental principles of symmetry ― ”the purest of esthetic forms.”
Nothing else.
When the eternal lamp had come to rest and his eyes had grown accustomed to the light, Ellery removed one of the jar covers and looked in. It contained many rolled papers ― scrolls ― each secured with a bit of purple thread. He replaced the cover and looked into the other jar; it, too, was full of scrolls.
He turned his attention to the cabinet.
It reminded him so strongly of the china closet that had stood in his grandmother’s dining room during his childhood that he half expected to find the shelves filled with the same blue-and-white willow-pattern dishes.
But this one contained nothing except the open book and the two columns of coins. Through the glass front he studied the b
ook. It seemed printed in the black-letter type called Old English (the phrase “Cloister Black” flickered in Ellery’s memory), or at any rate in some font with a close resemblance to it. It was difficult to make out in the poor light, so Ellery put off for the moment the task of deciphering it and turned his attention to the two columns of coins. They were remarkably bright and shining.
He opened the china closet. Old silver dollars in mint condition!
He dipped into his store of numismatic knowledge. Some of the old
“cartwheels,” he recalled, were quite rare.
Was this the reason for the duplicate key and someone’s plan to invade the sanctuary? Was the would-be thief concerned with the monetary value of the “treasure” of Quenan?
There was the almost legendary silver dollar minted in San Francisco in ― when? yes! ― 1873, the same year the Quenanite sect had probably left that city in its quest for a new settlement. Only seven hundred had been minted, and all but the proof copies held by the mint had disappeared.
Speculations about their fate had run from the theory that they had been buried somewhere and the secret of the hiding place lost through sudden death to the equally unprovable hypothesis that they had wound up in China as payment for lead-lined chests of green unfermented tea or even opium. But suppose everyone was wrong, and these ― these two neat pillars of coins, as perfect as on the day they were minted ― were the “lost” 1873
San Francisco dollars? A single specimen would be worth a fortune! And there were ― how many?
With shaking fingers Ellery lifted one of the coins from the left-hand column and peered closely. The face of the coin depicted Liberty seated, and the date… 1873! He turned it over, holding his breath. The obverse showed the American eagle (“a verminous bird,” Ben Franklin had called it disdainfully, “a stealer of other birds’ catches,” in urging the adoption of the turkey as the national emblem instead). If there was an S below the eagle ― signifying the San Francisco Mint…
Ellery took out his little magnifying glass and searched out the mint mark. Disappointment washed over him. It was not S. It was CC.
Of course ― CC, Carson City. The capital of Nevada had had its own mint in those days, when a flood of silver poured out of the nine-year-old state’s rich mines. And then as now Nevadans had favored hard coin over paper money… He checked the other coins. All bore the CC mint mark.
Ellery restacked them with great care in the same two perfect columns and closed the glass door of the china closet.
While not the priceless silver dollar of the 1873 San Francisco mintage, the 1873 CC was valuable enough. Each specimen, he guessed, would be worth about two hundred dollars now ― perhaps more, considering their perfect condition. But again the question was: Who in Quenan would even think of stealing money? And what good would it do him if he succeeded? That the would-be thief had any knowledge of the coins’ numismatic value he discounted at once. No, to the Quenanite thief the coins would have, at the most, their face value. And to steal a handful of dollars invested with the taboo of sacred objects… Ellery shook his head.
Whatever value these coins represented to the thief, it was not material.
But what? He could not even guess.
He left the sanquetum, its shadows shifting weirdly with his movements, and locked and tried the door. Then he went seeking the Teacher at the school.
Gravely, Ellery returned the key.
“Where,” he asked the old man, “is the Chronicler to be found?”
The Chronicler provided an antic note to Ellery’s sojourn in the Valley. The old Quenanite sported a crop of curly, grizzled whiskers, rather short. No hair grew on his upper lip, which had sunken into his upper jaw from the long-time absence of incisors. This gave the lip a remarkable flexibility. He would suck it in with a rather startling noise, a combination smack-click; this caused his lower lip to shoot forward, so that the total effect was of a sort of spitting, intelligent old monkey. The old man’s shoulders were frail and bowed; his head was bald except for a matted gray fringe, like a tonsure. I know, Ellery thought suddenly: he looks like that bust of Socrates.
For the occasion the Chronicler fished out of his robe an extraordinary device. Two pieces of glass had been fitted into a wooden frame, the ends of which were pierced for leathery thongs that ended in loops. Only when the old man fitted them to his eyes and slipped the loops over his ears did Ellery realize that they were hand-crafted spectacles. He seemed to have greater difficulty seeing through them than without them, so obviously the lenses had been salvaged from some mysterious out-world source and fitted into homemade frames. Perhaps they went with the office.
“Do I have your meaning, Elroi?” the Chronicler asked in a cracked tremolo. “Whence you come, the years have numbers, not names?”
“Yes.”
“Thunderation! And do the people (smick!) have numbers as well?”
“No, names, unless they misbehave. Yes, this is our year 1944.”
“(Smick!) 1944 what, Elroi?”
“a.d. That stands for Anno Domini. In the Year of Our Lord. Of the Christian era.”
“Ne-e-e-ever (smick!) heard-of-it.”
“Which year is it, Chronicler, according to the Quenan calendar?” The Chronicler had been peering into a scroll taken at Ellery’s request from its repository jar in his record room. He looked up from the scroll at Ellery’s question, amazed.
“The year it is now? (Smick!) Blessed be the Wor’d! How should I know?”
Half amused, half confused, “Who, then, should know?” Ellery asked.
“Why, no one! No one at all! (Smick!) A year’s got no name till it’s over, you know. How could it? The Crownsil meets on Lastday and decides which name to give it. The year that has just gone past was recently named The Year the Black Ewe Had Twins. Before that there was The Year of the Big Plums. Then The Year of the Caterpillars. Then The Year of the Great Wind. Then…”
Ellery followed him back, back, back… through The Year of the Lost Harvest, The Year the Earth Shook, The Year of the Great Rains, The Year the Teacher Took Barzill to Wife, and so on; until, finally, The Year of the Eastern Pilgrimage, when the Quenanites had made their exodus from San Francisco. Which, indeed, had been 1873.
“So you see (smick!), we have been in our Valley years to the number… seventy, yes! (smick!) seventy. That’s how many years I have counted for you. And the number may be confirmed by the old writings.” The Chronicler gestured toward the scroll. The writing was in the same strange “Chancery hand” Ellery had seen the Successor employ in the scriptorium. Was it possible that some Teacher or Successor in a long-gone generation had been employed by a London law firm ― perhaps even before the days when Dickens was reporting parliamentary debates?
Possible? In this place, Ellery thought, anything was possible.
“The old writings,” Ellery murmured. “Do they record anything, Chronicler, about the fifty silver dollars?”
Up jumped the Chronicler, stuffing the scroll into its jar and replacing the cover. “They do, they do!” He trotted back, replaced the jar on its shelf, took down another jar, and trotted back with it. “Let me see (smick!)
‘Year of the Last Pilgrimage’ ― yes, hmm, hmm.” He ran his finger down a column, failed to find what he sought, rolled the scroll up on one side, unrolled it on another. “Hah! Look ― ”
There it was, in the same archaic writing, on the yellowed paper, this year the crownsil debated what to do with the fifty silver dollars, which some suggested that, we possessing greater wealth than this which needs be counted, it be buried and forgotten, but instead the crownsil voted that it be deposited in the sanquetum, there to lie until such time as may be otherwise decided.
The strange letters danced before his eyes. Ellery drooped. He was exhausted again. What was the matter with him? He struggled with his thoughts.
Fifty… He had failed to count the coins in the two columns. But surely they hadn’t been as many as fifty?
“Yes, the holy book. What does its title mean?”
“The Book of Mk’n?”
“Mk’n? I thought the Teacher called it Mk’h?”
The Chronicler frowned at his own error. “According to the old writings ― and all is written with the pen of remembrance ― the lost book was thought to be the Book of Mk’n. That is, by those who held that there was such a book. Others (smick!) have held that there was not. But so the Teacher called it, and his father before him ― Mk’n. Then, five years ago, in The Year of Many Birds, the Teacher found the lost book; and after he had studied the old writings again, he believed that we had always misread or miswritten the title ― that it was Mk’h and not Mk’n. And since then we have called it the Book of Mk’h. For all is as the Teacher says.”
“But what does the title mean?”
The old man shrugged. “Who knows? Do names always have a meaning?”
After a while Ellery left and sought out the Teacher. He asked if he might borrow a donkey and take a brief leave of the Valley.
“You will be back,” the patriarch said. It was neither a question or a request.
“Of course.”
“Then go, Elroi, and the Wor’d go with you.”
Ellery had not been certain of his motives in fixing on a Quenanite beast for his journey instead of taking his car, and the long, uncomfortable donkey ride did not make them quite clear. Finally he decided that he had been moved simply by a sense of fitness. In the land of the prophet one went mounted in the manner of the prophet. (And a rude manner it was: no proper saddle, only a worn felt pad; a frayed grass rope for bridle and bit; and a long reed in place of whip or quirt.) He was also undecided whether Otto Schmidt, Prop., was more surprised to see his customer of a few days before come “riding on the foal of an ass” than to see him again at all. At last the storekeeper’s mouth closed and a delighted smile spread so widely across his moon-face that his smudge of mustache threatened to reach his ears.
And on the Eighth Day Page 8