Beyond the Barriers of Space and Time

by Judith Merril (ed. )

  The town of Big Dog suddenly came into view. It was only a service station and post office and store all in one building and two frame houses from which the paint had blown off with the sand storms. Behind a little hill to the right of the town, kept neatly out of sight as junk yards are hidden behind high board fences, were the wickiups of the Indians who herded sheep around Big Dog.

  With the town in sight, the girl drove faster until the two big medicine drums in the back seat rumbled with the vibration. And she didn’t decrease her speed until she had to brake hard to bring the convertible into the service station, scattering the gravel with her tires.

  A man in blue denims and a red shirt, his black hair in a queue down his back, was mounting a tire on a rim. He was pressed against the wall of the station, trying to work in the narrow shade.

  “Uncle Charlie!” Taka called, “Where’s Pete?”

  Charlie looked up from his work and squinted until he made out who the girl was. He waved a tire tool in the direction of the Indian village. “Home,” he grunted. Taka drove around the service station, down the path toward the village.

  Old Pete’s wickiup was the same as it always had been—built of pieces of corrugated tin and old boards and canvas; and Old Pete was sitting on an ancient car seat by the door whittling on a gun stock.

  He looked up at the red convertible and at the finely molded, sophisticated girl who stepped out. Taka ran to her father and hugged him around the neck and kissed him.

  “Father,” she said, half-crying, “didn’t you get my telegram?”

  Old Pete grunted and scratched himself under his blue shirt. He drew a yellow envelope out of his shirt pocket. He looked at it curiously and handed it to his daughter.

  “Papa,” she said. “You didn’t even open it!” Old Pete stared at his daughter as though he were unaware of her brilliant red dress the color of the convertible, and the emerald on her finger and the big gold earrings.

  “You read,” he said.

  It had been two years since Taka had seen her father, but she knew this would be her greeting. That was Old Pete’s way. Taka laughed and tore open the envelope.

  I’m coming home, Papa. I need you. A thousand kisses. Taka.

  Old Pete grunted and took the telegram from Taka and looked at it and folded it back into his pocket. He walked over to the convertible and ran his hand over the flank of the car and patted it as though he were testing pony flesh. He grunted without pleasure.

  Taka noticed the old man still held himself straight when he walked, as a chief should, and she noticed he still wore his two braids with red ribbon on them. She had a silly feeling that he wore them to spite the smelly black asphalt highway that had come through the Indian country. Something for the tourists to stare at and photograph.

  The old man came back to Taka. “Why you come home?” he asked in his pigeon English that was his affectation.

  Taka began to cry. “Terrible things happen, Papa, when I dance on the drums!”

  Old Pete stared down at his daughter, stern lines cut into the stone of his face. “White men do this to you?”

  “Oh, no, Papa. The white people have all been good to me.” And she told him how the good people had come out in their fragile clothes and how, every time after she danced, they stood helpless under dripping awnings waiting for taxis. And she put her hands over her eyes and cried.

  “It’s those horrid paintings on the drums. Papa—but without the medicine drums I can’t dance at all. My feet are like rock!”

  “Does anyone else know, Taka, that it rains when you dance?”

  Taka shook her head. “Not yet. But they’ll find out. And then I can’t dance any more. Oh, please teach me a new dance, Papa! Please!”

  Taka went to a hotel twenty miles away, leaving the problem up to her father. Old Pete picked up his shotgun that leaned in a corner of the hut and he waded through the thorny brush and up the hill behind the village where rattlesnakes lay coiled on the rocks and stunted cactus tried to grow. At the top of the hill. Old Pete sat down on a rock and sat still for an hour with the shotgun across his knees, staring down into the valley below the mesa.

  It was true, without a doubt, that Taka was the medicine dancer. When was the last real medicine dancer? That was Old Pete’s grandfather. And before him? Old Pete couldn’t remember. But then the white men came and told the Indians dancing for rain was superstition. They still had rain dances, but it didn’t rain any more. And now here comes Taka, a true medicine dancer after three generations.

  Old Pete stared down into the valley, trying to think what it was like before the white men came—when his grandfather and all the medicine dancers before him kept the valley green with rain and the corn was thick and the valley was full of buffalo and any time you could see dust on the mesa from antelope herds. But now there was only dry waste and the sticky black highway and the dingy town. No good to make rain here now because the white cattlemen owned the valley. It could never be the Indian’s again… never…

  Old Pete sat for another hour thinking his Indian thoughts and feeling his bitterness for the white men rise up. What kind of chief would he be today if the great tribe were still here? If he had a hundred bucks in war paint and a hundred thundering ponies and a war bonnet of eagle feathers?… The fat cattle to be slaughtered on the ranches.… If it weren’t for the highway. He remembered the last pony, the buckskin—how he found him bloated and fly-blown beside the highway where a car had hit him…

  Yes, Old Pete could teach Taka another dance—one that wouldn’t bring rain. Yes…

  Suddenly he rose and walked over the hill and killed a turkey buzzard while it was gorging on a dead coyote. He found a rusty tomato can in a heap of dumped garbage and he drained the turkey buzzard’s blood into it. He went to the base of a butte where the red face-clay used to come from and he found the old pits around a dead spring. He stared awhile at the old Indian symbols painted on the rock and then he went back to the hut with the red clay and the buzzard’s blood.

  Old Pete stretched new buckskin over the drums and he painted it with the old symbols he saw on the rocks—zigzag lines with a jiggle on the end that some ancient ancestor thought of as a rattlesnake. And he painted the red fire spirit that was half a mountain and half a man with a big black mouth.

  When Taka came in her red convertible the next morning, the old man drew two circles the size of the drums on the ground and he taught her the new dance—the slow-moving, stiff-legged dance with the short steps, and then the fast leap from one circle to the next; and Taka’s bare feet pounded on the ground like buffalo hooves.

  “But I’m clumsy,” Taka complained.

  “On the drums your feet will have wings,” Old Pete said.

  “Let me try it on the drums now.”

  Old Pete shook his head. “Paint not dry,” he said.

  Taka pouted. “But Papa, I have to dance tomorrow in Los Angeles!”

  “Paint dry tomorrow,” the old man said.

  Taka was back in Los Angeles before dark the next day but it had taken fast driving to get there. Her first show went on at seven and when Taka made the drums rumble with her feet, the diners paused and some stood up, leaving their drinks and their steaks on the tables. And some of the diners stayed in the club until the last show, which was at midnight when Taka came out with her drums again.

  Taka danced on the drums, stiff-legged and jerky, her feet pounding like buffalo hooves. She knew she had never danced like this before. The drums rumbling like ponies on the warpath, like war thunder over Big Dog Mesa. It was as though she couldn’t stop dancing; her feet drew magic from the medicine drums and she danced sometimes half-crouched and sometimes bent over backward, all in the old, forgotten rhythms. She didn’t stop, even when the people in the night club, dressed in their evening clothes and silks, overturned the tables and the men fought one another with chairs and bottles and the thin women in their doll dresses screamed when their clothes were torn.

  Taka kep
t on dancing, stiff-legged and jerky like a machine. Buffalo hooves… ponies on the warpath… thunder over the mesa.

  And because of the thunder of the drums, people fighting in the night club couldn’t hear the sirens all over the city—sirens that had been tuned to scream when war missiles were launched from across the sea.

  The work of Sheridan Le Fanu is well known to fantasy readers; that of his niece, Rhoda Broughton, is almost entirely unknown. This story was first published in England in 1873, and was reprinted there, as recently as 1947 in Twilight Stories. To the best of my knowledge, it has never appeared in this country.

  Of the several stories in this collection dealing with precognition, this one is, surprisingly, the most realistic and rationalistic in treatment. The idea that the voicing of a prophecy may set in motion a chain of events that will work toward its fulfillment has been much exploited in the years since this was written—but seldom with so little elaborate contrivance, or so natural a flow of events, as here.

  Behold It Was a Dream by Rhoda Broughton

  Yesterday morning I received the following letter:

  Weston House, Caulfield, —shire.

  My dear Dinah, You must come: I scorn all your excuses, and see through their flimsiness. I have no doubt that you are much better amused in Dublin, frolicking round ballrooms with a succession of horse-soldiers, and watching her Majesty’s household troops play polo in the Phoenix Park, but no matter—you must come. We have no particular inducements to hold out. We lead an exclusively bucolic, cow-milking, pig-fattening, roast-mutton-eating, and to-bed-at-ten-o’clock-going life; but no matter—you must come. I want you to see how happy two dull elderly people may be, with no special brightness in their lot to make them so. My old man—he is surprisingly ugly at the first glance, but grows upon one afterwards—sends you his respects, and bids me say that he will meet you at any station on any day at any hour of the day or night. If you succeed in evading our persistence this time, you will be a cleverer woman than I take you for.

  Ever yours affectionately,

  Jane Watson

  August 15th.

  P.S.—We will invite our little scarlet-headed curate to dinner to meet you, so as to soften your fall from the society of the Plungers.

  This is my answer:

  My dear Jane, Kill the fat calf in all haste, and put the hake meats into the oven, for I will come. Do not, however, imagine that I am moved thereunto by the prospect of the bright-headed curate. Believe me, my dear, I am as yet at a distance of ten long good years from an addiction to the minor clergy. If I survive the crossing of that seething, heaving, tumbling abomination, St. George’s Channel, you may expect me on Tuesday next. I have been groping for hours in Bradshaw’s darkness that may be felt, and I have arrived at length at this twilight result, that I may arrive at your station at 6.55 p.m. But the ways of Bradshaw are not our ways, and I may either rush violently past or never attain it. If I do, and if, on my arrival, I see some rustic vehicle, guided by a startlingly ugly gentleman, awaiting me, I shall know, from your wifely description, that it is your “old man.” Till Tuesday, then,

  Affectionately yours,

  Dinah Bellairs

  August 17th

  I am as good as my word; on Tuesday I set off. For four mortal hours and a half I am disastrously, hideously, diabolically sick. For four hours and a half I curse the day on which I was born, the day on which Jane Watson was born, the day on which her old man was born, and lastly—but oh! not, not leastly—the day and the dock on which and in which the Leinster’s plunging, curtsying, throbbing body was born. On arriving at Holyhead, feeling convinced from my sensations that, as the French say, I touch my last hour, I indistinctly request to be allowed to stay on board and die, then and there; but as the stewardess and my maid take a different view of my situation, and insist upon forcing my cloak and bonnet on my dying body and limp head, I at length succeed in staggering on deck and off the accursed boat. I am then well shaken up for two or three hours in the Irish mail, and, after crawling along a slow byeline for two or three hours more, am at length, at 6.55, landed, battered, tired, dust-blacked, and qualmish, at the little roadside station of Caulfield. My maid and I are the only passengers who descend. The train snorts its slow way onwards, and I am left gazing at the calm, crimson death of the August sun, and smelling the sweet peas in the station-master’s garden border. I look round in search of Jane’s promised tax-cart, and steel my nerves for the contemplation of her old man’s unlovely features. But the only vehicle which I see is a tiny two-wheeled pony carriage, drawn by a small and tub-shaped bay pony, and driven by a lady in a hat, whose face is turned expectantly towards me. 1 go up and recognize my friend, whom I have not seen for two years—not since before she fell in with her old man and espoused him.

  “I thought it safest, after all, to come myself,” she says, with a bright laugh. “My old man looked so handsome this morning that I thought you would never recognize him from my description. Get in, dear, and let us trot home as quickly as we can.”

  I comply, and for the next half-hour sit (while the cool evening wind is blowing the dust off my hot and jaded face) stealing amazed glances at my companion’s cheery features. Cheery! That is the very last word that, excepting in an ironical sense, anyone would have applied to my friend Jane two years ago. Two years ago Jane was thirty-five, the elderly eldest daughter of a large family, hustled into obscurity, jostled, shelved, by half-a-dozen younger, fresher sisters; an elderly girl, addicted to lachrymose verse about the gone, and the dead, and the forever lost. Apparently the gone has come back, the dead resuscitated, the forever lost been found again. The peaky, sour virgin is transformed into a gracious matron, with a kindly, comely face, pleasure making and pleasure feeling. Oh, happiness! what powder or paste, or milk of roses, can make old cheeks young again in the cunning way that you do? If you would but bide steadily with us, we might live forever, always young and always handsome.

  My musings on Jane’s metamorphosis, combined with a tired headache, make me somewhat silent, and indeed there is mostly a slackness of conversation between the two dearest allies on first meeting after absence—a sort of hesitating shiver before plunging into the sea of talk that both know lies in readiness for them.

  “Have you got your harvest in yet?” I ask, more for the sake of not utterly holding my tongue than from any profound interest in the subject, as we jog briskly along between the yellow corn fields, where the dry bound sheaves are standing in golden rows in the red sunset light.

  “Not yet,” answers Jane; “we have only just begun to cut some of it. However, thank God, the weather looks as settled as possible; there is not a streak of watery lilac in the west.”

  My headache is almost gone, and I am beginning to think kindly of dinner—a subject from which all day until now my mind has hastily turned with a sensation of hideous inward revolt—by the time that the fat pony pulls up before the old-world dark porch of a modest little house, which has bashfully hidden its original face under a veil of crowded clematis flowers and stalwart ivy. Set as in a picture frame by the large drooped ivy leaves, I see a tall and moderately hard-featured gentleman of middle age, perhaps, of the two, rather inclining towards elderly, smiling at us a little shyly.

  “This is my old man,” cries Jane, stepping gaily out, and giving him a friendly introductory pat on the shoulder. “Old man, this is Dinah.”

  Having thus been made known to each other we shake hands, but neither of us can arrive at anything pretty to say. Then I follow Jane into her little house, the little house for which she has so happily exchanged her tenth part of the large and noisy paternal mansion. It is an old house, and everything about it has the moderate shabbiness of old age and long and careful wear. Little thick-walled rooms, dark and cool, with flowers and flower scents lying in wait for you everywhere—a silent, fragrant, childless house. To me, who have had oily locomotives snorting and racing through my head all day, its dumb sweetness seems like heave
n.

  “And now that we have secured you, we do not mean to let you go in a hurry,” says Jane hospitably that night at bedtime, lighting the candles on my dressing table.

  “You are determined to make my mouth water, I see,” say I, interrupting a yawn to laugh. “Lone lorn me, who have neither old man nor dear little house, nor any prospect of ultimately attaining either.”

  “But if you honestly are not bored you will stay with us a good bit?” she says, laying her hand with kind entreaty on my sleeve. “St. George’s Channel is not lightly to be faced again.”

  “Perhaps I shall stay until you are obliged to go away yourselves to get rid of me,” return I, smiling. “Such things have happened. Yes, without joking, I will say a month. Then, by the end of a month, if you have not found me out thoroughly, I think I may pass among men for a more amiable woman than I have ever yet had the reputation of.”

  A quarter of an hour later I am laying down my head among soft and snow-white pillows, and saying to myself that this delicious sensation of utter drowsy repose, of soft darkness and odorous quiet, is cheaply purchased, even by the ridiculous anguish which my own sufferings, and—hardly less than my own sufferings—the demoniac sights and sounds afforded by my fellow passengers, caused me on board the accursed Leinster—

  ‘Built in the eclipse, and rigged with curses dark.’

  II

  “Well, I cannot say that you look much rested,” says Jane, next morning, coming in to greet me, smiling and fresh—(yes, skeptic of eighteen, even a woman of thirty-seven may look fresh in a print gown on an August morning, when she has a well of lasting quiet happiness inside her)—coming in with a bunch of creamy gloire de Dijons in her hand for the breakfast table. “You look infinitely more fagged than you did when I left you last night!”