Once again great waves of stupefying fatigue, so familiar now, began to break against him. He shook them off like a dog.
On the Crownsil table, for the first time since the trial of Belyar the Weaver, were set things appertaining to crime. Then there had been nothing but bolts of cloth and the stolen pieces cut therefrom. Now Ellery laid down his leather kit. It contained the accessories of his other trade ― fingerprint outfit, springback measuring tape, compass, flashlight, scissors, tweezers, small jars, rubber gloves, plastic tape, glassine envelopes, notebook, pencil, a marking pen, labels, a .38 Police Positive, a box of shells.
There had been times when he had had to call on all the contents of the kit; but on this occasion Ellery took from it only the fingerprinting equipment and the marking pen.
“What is it, Elroi,” asked the Teacher, not flinching at sight of the strange objects, although most of the kit’s contents were as mysterious to him as to the shrinking Crownsil, “what is it that you wish of us?’
“Teacher,” Ellery replied softly, “I wish to go among you and record on these pieces of paper the imprint of your fingertips ― the fingertips of all present. It is a simple thing, and there is no pain attached to it. Each of you will touch no paper but the single paper I set before you ― is that clear?”
“The thing is clear, Elroi, its meaning is not,” said the old man.
“Nevertheless, it shall be as you say. I observe that you called for fifteen pieces of paper, although ― excluding you there are only fourteen of us. Is it your wish to record the imprint of the fingertips of him who has ceased, also?”
Ellery’s head snapped back in surprise at the old man’s shrewdness.
“Storicai’s? Yes, Teacher. I shall record his first.” And this he did, under their awed eyes, to the accompaniment of their quickened breathing. When he rose to face them with his paraphernalia, their breathing ceased altogether for a moment. But their venerable leader, observing their dread, stepped forward and said in a steady voice,
“Among the living, Elroi, I shall be the first,” and he held out his corded, blackened hands.
So Ellery took the fingerprints of the Teacher, and of the Successor, and of the Superintendent, and of the eleven surviving members of the Crownsil of the Twelve; and on each paper, under the fingerprints, he marked the name of the office held by the official whose fingertips had deposited the impressions.
“And now, Quenan?”
“Now we may be alone, Teacher.”
“Do you wish him who has ceased to remain?”
“No, he may now be removed.”
The patriarch nodded. “Crownsil and Superintendent,” he addressed the officials of his people, “do you leave the holy house now, taking him who has ceased with you to be prepared for the place of peace. Tell the people to return to their homes or their tasks; while we live, the duties of life must go on. Successor, you may retire to your chambers. Blessed be the Wor’d, in grief as in joy.” He raised his hand in benediction and dismissal.
And while some were reverently removing the body of the Storesman, and others carried the Slave away, and the rest were trooping out in silence, Ellery thought: And now I’ve committed a crime, too… For in whichever state the Valley existed ― he had never thought to ask Otto Schmidt! ― there was a law-enforcement agency, at least a county sheriff, whom he should be notifying that a murder had been committed. Yet until this moment, watching the Quenanites carting off the body of the murder victim to be prepared for burial, the thought had not crossed his mind.
Well, he could not. What an enormously greater crime it would be to open the doors of the Valley of Quenan to the world as it was!
When the last of the Crownsil had left, and the door was shut again, Ellery said, “Teacher, when we first met you told me that my coming was foretold, that 1 was to be your guide through a time of great trouble that was to come upon you.”
The old man bowed deeply in assent, then raised his head so that once more it was partly hidden by his hood.
“Then you must tell me everything that happened this afternoon, and you must tell me the time that everything happened, as exactly as you know.”
The ancient lids slipped down, leaving only slits. Then each eye was wide open, seeing across time.
“So,” the prophet said. “At noon I returned from the fields and meditated in my room for the hour of the midday meal, of which I no longer partake. I knew that it was noon, for so the shadow ― by its absence ― told me. At one o’clock I went to the schoolhouse. 1 sensed it to be one o’clock ― after all these years my body had become a timepiece of itself.
And I taught the children for the space of one hour. In the schoolhouse stands a clock, and when it said two o’clock (and when I knew it to be that time) I returned here, to the Holy Congregation House.
“I should have found the Successor at his studies. Instead he was lingering in the doorway hoping to see a certain young woman go by, I am sure. Passion is natural, even holy; but it has its time and place, and these were not the proper ones. I therefore sent him to the scriptorium, and to remove temptation I locked him in and retained the key. Then someone came with a message that the Slave was ill and wished to see me ― ”
“About the Slave, later,” Ellery said gravely. “First I wish to visit the scriptorium again. Will you come with me, Teacher?” The Successor was not in the scriptorium; apparently he had retired to his sleeping chamber next door. On his original visit to the scribe’s tiny workroom, Ellery had been in no condition to observe details. Now he saw that it contained two little writing desks, two small benches, and shelves crowded with scrolls and scroll jars, piles of paper, reels of thread, bundles of quills and reed pens, jugs of ink, and other items of the scrivener’s profession.
By the side of each desk stood a tall candelabrum whose sconces held heavy brown beeswax candles.
In the two walls of the scriptorium that faced the outdoors were the same type of tall slit-windows he had seen in the Teacher’s room ― far too narrow for the passage of even a small child. Once locked in, then, the Successor would have had either to wait until the Teacher returned to unlock the door of the scriptorium or to break down the door himself.
The door showed no sign that it had been forced.
Ellery and the old man left the scriptorium as they had entered and visited it, in silence.
“Would you go on now, Teacher?” Ellery asked.
The old man continued his narrative. He had returned to his school-room, performed his duties there until the hour of three, and then gone back to the Holy Congregation House. Whereupon he had remembered the message about the Slave and his illness. Before he left, he recalled the weak leg of the table and placed the hammer on it ― in the center ― as a reminder to himself later to ask the Successor to make the repairs.
Then the prophet had set out for the Slave’s house.
Before the Slave’s house stood a sundial. The Teacher estimated that the time was about 3:15 when he passed it.
“I remained with him for an hour. I would have stayed longer; we were young men together. And I returned” ― he was speaking with the most deliberate care ― ”and I returned, then, at a time very close to a quarter past the hour of four. I… returned…” What was the old man trying to say?
“At four-twenty,” Ellery said gently, “Storicai was dead.” The Teacher made a great effort. “Yes, the Storesman was… dead.
He was lying, even as you saw him, in his blood on the floor of the meeting room here.”
“This is difficult for you,” Ellery murmured. “But you must go on, Teacher.”
“I unlocked the door of the scriptorium, released the Successor, and sent him at once to seek you out, if you had yet returned from your journey. For it had come at last ― the great trouble had come down upon the tribe of Quenan; and I knew a need for him who is called Elroi, and again Quenan. For all was as it had been written.” Ellery sighed. Theology, prophecy, soothsaying ― it was not throu
gh these that the riddle of Storicai’s murder would be solved… Storicai, who had been so enchanted by the glitter of the wrist watch, the first wrist watch he had ever seen, who had been so childishly pleased at being allowed to wear it. And who had worn it all the rest of his life…”Did you ask the Successor if he had overheard anything ― an unusual sound, voices ― while he was locked in the scriptorium?” The furrow between the brow tufts deepened. “Nay, Quenan. Let us ask him now.”
But the Successor, his angel’s face still white above its boyish beard, could gasp only, “I heard nothing, nothing!”
With another sigh, Ellery asked the Teacher to retire to his room also.
But first he obtained the key to the sanquetum.
His hand on the doorknob, he hesitated as before, feeling again that if he entered the forbidden room he would defile it. But there was no turning aside now. He slipped the key into the lock and found, to his amazement, that the door was not locked at all. Quickly Ellery slipped inside the sanquetum and shut the door behind him.
The eternal lamp hung from an old brass chain. The chain ran through a metal eye sunk into the center of the ceiling and over to a hook fixed in one of the walls, to which it was secured through one of its links.
There were enough links to leave several feet of chain dangling from the hook. Ellery nodded; it was a practical if primitive device, for after all it was easier to slip the chain off the hook in the wall and lower the lamp for refilling than to have to climb a ladder.
He unhooked the chain and let out the slack so that the lamp just cleared his head. The dark circle on the floor where the lamp’s shadow fell expanded, but the rest of the chamber became lighter. Ellery hooked the chain so that the lamp would be fixed in the lower position; and down on all fours he went.
He scanned the flooring square inch by square inch, making grotesquely shifting shadows on the walls.
He made his first discovery under the arque ― a shard of clay with a purple-glazed outer surface.
Ellery rose, looking keenly about. The huge scroll jar on his right seemed to be sitting poorly on its wooden base, canted a little as if hastily moved or set there. Yet he was sure the big urn had occupied the base properly during his morning survey of the sanquetum.
He turned his attention to the arque. The glass of the china closet was unbroken; but on a corner of the walnut frame, level with the bottom shelf, he made out a faint gleam… a stain, darkish sticky… for he touched it, and some of it came away on his finger. Blood. Blood that had not been there in the morning.
And the coins?
The two columns of silver dollars which he had left so neatly stacked in the morning, were no longer so. Each column leaned a little, and in one column a milled edge protruded.
Standing before the arque, in the flickering light, Ellery reconstructed the events of the afternoon. Clearly, it was Storicai who had secretly made the duplicate key for the sanquetum door ― Storicai who, while the Teacher was visiting the sick old Slave and while the Successor was locked in the scriptorium, had once more committed the sin of entering the Holy Congregation House without leave; Storicai, who had committed the far greater sin of entering the forbidden room for the purpose of stealing the silver treasure of the community.
Forbidden entry, sacrilege, a thieving heart ― who would have dreamed the simple Storesman capable of these?
And even as the greedy man had crouched in the sanquetum, perhaps, in the very act of laying impious hands on the coins, he had been attacked from behind. Someone had rushed into the holy room, seized the righthand prayer jar, raised it high, and brought it down on the back of the Storesman’s head. The jar must have shattered or, at the least, broken partly ― witness the overlooked shard under the arque and the bits of clay in the dead man’s hair; but this blow had not been the killing blow. The Storesman had fallen, unconscious or dazed; in falling, he had struck his head on the corner of the arque, and had stained it with his blood.
And all this in the holy of holies, in the presence of the scrolls enjoining peace and the love of brothers. Joab at the horns of the altar; a Beckett in the cathedral.
The striker of the blow must have turned and fled. And the Storesman, recovering quickly, ran after the witness to his crimes and caught up with him in the meeting room. And here they must have struggled (in panting silence, or else the Successor from behind his locked door would have heard the struggle); and Storicai must have tried to kill his assailant of the sanquetum to preserve his guilty secret ― for by the law of Quenan theft was a capital crime ― and the witness, cornered by the Crownsil table, would have had to fight for his life. The hammer being on the table where the Teacher had left it, the witness had snatched it up and struck the Storesman with it at least twice: once on the upflung wrist, shattering the crystal, denting the dial, and stopping the mechanism of the watch; and a second and lethal time, on the forehead.
Who was the witness to Storicai’s crimes and the perpetrator of the first man-slaying in the history of the Valley?
Ellery again became aware of the curious something about the coins that had been gnawing at him all day. What was it?
Their number ― that was it! In his account of the colony’s wanderings, the Teacher had said that his father had brought to the Valley silver dollars to the number of fifty; and the Chronicler had confirmed this from his records. Fifty; and according to Schmidt’s ledger, the Teacher had expended nineteen of them at the End-of-the-World Store.
Leaving thirty-one.
Ellery stared at the two columns of coins in the china closet. Each pillar was of the same height. Meaning that each contained the same number of silver dollars ― meaning that, whatever the total number of coins, it had to be an even number… Of course! There could not be thirty-one!
This was what had been nagging him since his visit to Schmidt’s store.
The number thirty-one disturbed the perfect symmetry of everything in the forbidden room; it had started some subliminal computer clicking in Ellery’s head.
How account for both columns containing the same number of coins when one of the columns should be taller than the other by the thickness of a single silver dollar? Was a silver dollar missing?
Then Ellery remembered. It was not missing; it had been expended in the time of Belyar the Weaver, when the Teacher had decreed exile for the cloth stealer instead of death. The man had been driven into the desert with sustenance for two days and a single silver dollar.
One from thirty-one gave an even number and explained the two columns of identical height.
And so Ellery reached into the arque and took out one of the pillars of coins, and counted its 1873 Carson City dollars, and he counted fifteen; and he replaced the column perfectly, and took out the other, and in this pillar he counted fifteen coins also.
It was just after he had put the second column carefully back beside its companion that he found himself holding onto the china closet with a roaring in his ears.
The Storesman had betrayed his Teacher, his faith, and his brothers of Quenan for thirty pieces of silver.
As the moment passed, Ellery came gradually to see that at the focus of his downcast eyes, on the arque’s lower shelf, lay the book. It was still there, in the same place still, still open; evidently untouched since the morning.
His eyes felt as though they had been ground in sand. At first the lines of black-letter type on the open pages persisted in shifting about in a sort of tormented mock dance. But then they stiffened and stood still; and out of nowhere came the unspeakable thought… unspeakable.
It was a dream within a dream, and evilly dark through and through; even this, this movement of his hand ― not willed, a nightmare gesture ― reaching into the china closet and raising and turning the left-hand part of the open book so that he might see the front cover, and the spine.
And he saw.
And what he saw he glared at like an idiot aroused for one lucid moment.
The mind rejected it. Unaccept
able! it cried. Except in a dream. Even in a dream.
And it was no dream. It was true.
And it was too much.
It was a long time before Ellery recovered sufficiently to withdraw his hand; and then he spent another interval, timeless, staring at the hand.
The holy book. The Book of Mk’h, the Teacher had called it.
Yes, there they were, the letters on the cover that had so fired the old man when he laid eyes on the book lying on Schmidt’s counter… that had led the patriarch to offer anything, even his entire store of silver coins, for its possession.
The “lost” book of Quenan, the Teacher had called it.
Ellery did not remember leaving the sanquetum, locking its door behind him, walking through the meeting room; he did not remember hearing the uneven echoes of his footsteps.
He remembered only standing in the open and gulping great gulps of air as if he could never gulp enough.
V THURSDAY
April 6
THE HAGS PURSUED HIM through the night; leered, gibbered, squatted on his chest mocking his pleas for breath. He knew that it was a dream, that he had only to open his eyes. But the effort was too great. He groaned, he babbled, he moaned; and so, moaning, he woke up at last.
He was chilled, numb, bone-tired; the haunted hours of sleep had brought him no surcease. Muttering, he groped for the blanket and turned over with a heave of desperation… In the corners of the room the hags were gathered, whispering. He strained to hear what they were saying, peered through the darkness. That was how he discovered his mistake ― they were not the hags at all; he had been deceived by the robes: they were the members of the Crownsil, speaking together in disquieted voices, glancing dubiously at the piece of paper each held in his hand.
And on the Eighth Day Page 10