Wykeham and I had never been intimate; but we had met occasionally at conventions or at publishers’ parties and had (I think) liked and respected each other. Now he grunted a reply to my greeting and muttered, “Wish I could remember things better. I—I’m not quite all there. Nor all here either. There’s a long speech by the Ghost in Hamlet explaining just how and why the hell he got back to . . . well, call it ‘earth.’ Look it up and take it for read.”
“I don’t think I’ve seen you,” I said, “since Playboy published that beautiful chiller about—”
“I haven’t much time.” His voice was flat and toneless. “The Ghost puts it better but that’s the trouble, you have to say so much and there just isn’t time. And you don’t remember things too damn well either, for that matter.”
I paused, and then I made a speech that I have cut out of a large number of manuscripts, by myself and others. I made the half-strangled noise that is indicated by “you” followed by a dash. Like this:
“You—”
I could dimly see a nod. “Yes. Off the Queen Anne on her maiden voyage. Never recovered. Oh, they arrange fancy ends for some of us. Look at Ambrose Bierce. And wait till you see what they have cooked up for Ray Bradbury. But look: The glowworm gins to glimmer like the fretful porpentine or something. I have to make this clear.”
There was a licorice backwash of Pernod in my mouth. I tried to play it straight. “Make what clear?”
“What they’re doing. What they’re making us do. Can’t you see?”
I could see nothing but the cocooning fog and the shape in the next deck chair. In some kind of glimmer against all laws of optics I could sometimes catch a glimpse of the face, and it was not always Everard Wykeham’s. The Wilkes Booth tragic mask of Poe was there and the arrogant white mane of Bierce. And hints of other faces, living faces that I knew and loved, the gentle-satyr glint of Theodore Sturgeon, the warm japery of Robert Bloch, the ageless eagerness of Ray Bradbury . . .
“We’re all one to them,” he/they/something said. “We’re what they use. To soften the people up and make them fear. You can’t really make people fear real things. Look at Britain under bombardment. Oh, they have used killers. They had a good run of fear in London in the 1880’s and Cleveland in the 1930’s. But mostly they use us, the writers, the ones that can suggest the unspeakable, that can put the very essence of fear, like the old boy from Eton, into a bundle of dirty linen.”
“They . . .” I said slowly, and thinking of a hundred science fiction stories. “They live off of these—these sweats of fear?”
“I don’t know. Not for sure. I think it’s more like—well, an aperitif, like your Pernod. (No, I’m not mind-reading; I can smell it.) It’s something that they . . . savor. So they let us have hints and glimpses, just a touch of the way their world impinges on ours. Where time and space are—well, not quite so disciplined as we like to think. And we use these hints and build them and—”
The fog was thicker. So was his speech, almost to being unintelligible. I caught something about the glowworm and the porpentine again, and then something about impinges and the Opera and the Tower and then the deck was silent.
Then it was as if a sudden wind roared about my head and shouted god help me the damned thing is of such a color nervous very dreadfully nervous lam and have been a negotio perambulante in tenebris oh whistle and I’ll come to you peter quint the ceremony of innocence ibi cubavit lamia now we’re locked in for the night but who is that on the other side of you?
The deck was empty. The fog had thinned to admit a moon pouring its fecund gold down on the Danae sea.
I went below.
Sometimes I think I remember words from that thick unintelligibility, words that must have been answers to questions I cannot recall asking.
“Why do we serve them even when we know? (And most of us do know.) There are so many reasons, especially for an author in middle life. The children, medical expenses, maybe the cost of a divorce—who turns down a fast check?”
And:
“Where am I now? Put ‘where’ in quotes. And ‘when.’ (See Rodgers and Hart.) And look up that Ghost speech again. And there’s something in Matthew, I think. One of the parables—about the unjust steward and how it’s a good idea to make friends out of wicked powers. Because . . .”
It was the Pernod. And whatever the—the Pernod said about middle-aged reasons, I shall not sell this story. I checked the parable of the unjust steward.
. . .for they shall receive you into their everlasting dwellings.
They Bite
There was no path, only the almost vertical ascent. Crumbled rock for a few yards, with the roots of sage finding their scanty life in the dry soil. Then jagged outcroppings of crude crags, sometimes with accidental footholds, sometimes with overhanging and untrustworthy branches of greasewood, sometimes with no aid to climbing but the leverage of your muscles and the ingenuity of your balance.
The sage was as drably green as the rock was drably brown. The only color was the occasional rosy spikes of a barrel cactus.
Hugh Tallant swung himself up onto the last pinnacle. It had a deliberate, shaped look about it—a petrified fortress of Lilliputians, a Gibraltar of pygmies. Tallant perched on its battlements and unslung his field glasses.
The desert valley spread below him. The tiny cluster of buildings that was Oasis, the exiguous cluster of palms that gave name to the town and shelter to his own tent and to the shack he was building, the dead-ended highway leading straightforwardly to nothing, the oiled roads diagramming the vacant blocks of an optimistic subdivision.
Tallant saw none of these. His glasses were fixed beyond the oasis and the town of Oasis on the dry lake. The gliders were clear and vivid to him, and the uniformed men busy with them were as sharply and minutely visible as a nest of ants under glass. The training school was more than usually active. One glider in particular, strange to Tallant, seemed the focus of attention. Men would come and examine it and glance back at the older models in comparison.
Only the corner of Tallant’s left eye was not preoccupied with the new glider. In that corner something moved, something little and thin and brown as the earth. Too large for a rabbit, much too small for a man. It darted across that corner of vision, and Tallant found gliders oddly hard to concentrate on.
He set down the bifocals and deliberately looked about him. His pinnacle surveyed the narrow, flat area of the crest. Nothing stirred. Nothing stood out against the sage and rock but one barrel of rosy spikes. He took up the glasses again and resumed his observations. When he was done, he methodically entered the results in the little black notebook.
His hand was still white. The desert is cold and often sunless in winter. But it was a firm hand, and as well trained as his eyes, fully capable of recording faithfully the designs and dimensions which they had registered so accurately.
Once his hand slipped, and he had to erase and redraw, leaving a smudge that displeased him. The lean, brown thing had slipped across the edge of his vision again. Going toward the east edge, he would swear, where that set of rocks jutted like the spines on the back of a stegosaur.
Only when his notes were completed did he yield to curiosity, and even then with cynical self-reproach. He was physically tired, for him an unusual state, from this daily climbing and from clearing the ground for his shack-to-be. The eye muscles play odd nervous tricks. There could be nothing behind the stegosaur’s armor.
There was nothing. Nothing alive and moving. Only the torn and half-plucked carcass of a bird, which looked as though it had been gnawed by some small animal.
It was halfway down the hill—hill in Western terminology, though anywhere east of the Rockies it would have been considered a sizable mountain—that Tallant again had a glimpse of a moving figure.
But this was no trick of a nervous eye. It was not little nor thin nor brown. It was tall and broad and wore a loud red-and-black lumberjacket. It bellowed, “Tallant!” in a cheerful and lusty v
oice.
Tallant drew near the man and said, “Hello.” He paused and added, “Your advantage, I think.”
The man grinned broadly. “Don’t know me? Well, I daresay ten years is a long time, and the California desert ain’t exactly the Chinese rice fields. How’s stuff? Still loaded down with Secrets for Sale?”
Tallant tried desperately not to react to that shot, but he stiffened a little. “Sorry. The prospector getup had me fooled. Good to see you again, Morgan.”
The man’s eyes narrowed. “Just having my little joke,” he smiled. “Of course you wouldn’t have no serious reason for mountain climbing around a glider school, now, would you? And you’d kind of need field glasses to keep an eye on the pretty birdies.”
“I’m out here for my health.” Tallant’s voice sounded unnatural even to himself.
“Sure, sure. You were always in it for your health. And come to think of it, my own health ain’t been none too good lately. I’ve got me a little cabin way to hell-and-gone around here, and I do me a little prospecting now and then. And somehow it just strikes me, Tallant, like maybe I hit a pretty good lode today.”
“Nonsense, old man. You can see—”
“I’d sure hate to tell any of them Army men out at the field some of the stories I know about China and the kind of men I used to know out there. Wouldn’t cotton to them stories a bit, the Army wouldn’t. But if I was to have a drink too many and get talkative-like—”
“Tell you what,” Tallant suggested brusquely. “It’s getting near sunset now, and my tent’s chilly for evening visits. But drop around in the morning and we’ll talk over old times. Is rum still your tipple?”
“Sure is. Kind of expensive now, you understand—”
“I’ll lay some in. You can find the place easily—over by the oasis. And we . . . we might be able to talk about your prospecting, too.”
Tallant’s thin lips were set firm as he walked away.
The bartender opened a bottle of beer and plunked it on the damp-circled counter. “That’ll be twenty cents,” he said, then added as an afterthought, “Want a glass? Sometimes tourists do.”
Tallant looked at the others sitting at the counter—the red-eyed and unshaven old man, the flight sergeant unhappily drinking a Coke—it was after Army hours for beer—the young man with the long, dirty trench coat and the pipe and the new-looking brown beard—and saw no glasses. “I guess I won’t be a tourist,” he decided.
This was the first time Tallant had had a chance to visit the Desert Sport Spot. It was as well to be seen around in a community. Otherwise people begin to wonder and say, “Who is that man out by the oasis? Why don’t you ever see him anyplace?” The Sport Spot was quiet that night. The four of them at the counter, two Army boys shooting pool, and a half-dozen of the local men gathered about a round poker table, soberly and wordlessly cleaning a construction worker whose mind seemed more on his beer than on his cards.
“You just passing through?” the bartender asked sociably.
Tallant shook his head. “I’m moving in. When the Army turned me down for my lungs, I decided I better do something about it. Heard so much about your climate here I thought I might as well try it.”
“Sure thing,” the bartender nodded. “You take up until they started this glider school, just about every other guy you meet in the desert is here for his health. Me, I had sinus, and look at me now. It’s the air.”
Tallant breathed the atmosphere of smoke and beer suds, but did not smile. “I’m looking forward to miracles.”
“You’ll get ’em. Whereabouts you staying?”
“Over that way a bit. The agent called it ‘the old Carker place.’ ”
Tallant felt the curious listening silence and frowned. The bartender had started to speak and then thought better of it. The young man with the beard looked at him oddly. The old man fixed him with red and watery eyes that had a faded glint of pity in them. For a moment, Tallant felt a chill that had nothing to do with the night air of the desert.
The old man drank his beer in quick gulps and frowned as though trying to formulate a sentence. At last he wiped beer from his bristly lips and said, “You wasn’t aiming to stay in the adobe, was you?”
“No. It’s pretty much gone to pieces. Easier to rig me up a little shack than try to make the adobe livable. Meanwhile, I’ve got a tent.”
“That’s all right, then, mebbe. But mind you don’t go poking around that there adobe.”
“I don’t think I’m apt to. But why not? Want another beer?”
The old man shook his head reluctantly and slid from his stool to the ground. “No thanks. I don’t rightly know as I—”
“Yes?”
“Nothing. Thanks all the same.” He turned and shuffled to the door.
Tallant smiled. “But why should I stay clear of the adobe?” he called after him.
The old man mumbled.
“What?”
“They bite,” said the old man, and went out shivering into the night.
The bartender was back at his post. “I’m glad he didn’t take that beer you offered him,” he said. “Along about this time in the evening I have to stop serving him. For once he had the sense to quit.”
Tallant pushed his own empty bottle forward. “I hope I didn’t frighten him away.”
“Frighten? Well, mister, I think maybe that’s just what you did do. He didn’t want beer that sort of came, like you might say, from the old Carker place. Some of the old-timers here, they’re funny that way.”
Tallant grinned. “Is it haunted?”
“Not what you’d call haunted, no. No ghosts there that I ever heard of.” He wiped the counter with a cloth and seemed to wipe the subject away with it.
The flight sergeant pushed his Coke bottle away, hunted in his pocket for nickels, and went over to the pinball machine. The young man with the beard slid onto his vacant stool. “Hope old Jake didn’t worry you,” he said.
Tallant laughed. “I suppose every town has its deserted homestead with a grisly tradition. But this sounds a little different. No ghosts, and they bite. Do you know anything about it?”
“A little,” the young man said seriously. “A little. Just enough to—”
Tallant was curious. “Have one on me and tell me about it.”
The flight sergeant swore bitterly at the machine.
Beer gurgled through the beard. “You see,” the young man began, “the desert’s so big you can’t be alone in it. Ever notice that? It’s all empty and there’s nothing in sight but, there’s always something moving over there where you can’t quite see it. It’s something very dry and thin and brown, only when you look around it isn’t there. Ever see it?”
“Optical fatigue—” Tallant began.
“Sure. I know. Every man to his own legend. There isn’t a tribe of Indians hasn’t got some way of accounting for it. You’ve heard of the Watchers? And the twentieth-century white man comes along, and it’s optical fatigue. Only in the nineteenth century things weren’t quite the same, and there were the Carkers.”
“You’ve got a special localized legend?”
“Call it that. You glimpse things out of the corner of your mind, same like you glimpse lean, dry things out of the corner of your eye. You encase ’em in solid circumstance and they’re not so bad. That is known as the Growth of Legend. The Folk Mind in Action. You take the Carkers and the things you don’t quite see and you put ’em together. And they bite.”
Tallant wondered how long that beard had been absorbing beer. “And what were the Carkers?” he prompted politely.
“Ever hear of Sawney Bean? Scotland—reign of James First, or maybe the Sixth, though I think Roughead’s wrong on that for once. Or let’s be more modern—ever hear of the Benders? Kansas in the 1870s? No? Ever hear of Procrustes? Or Polyphemus? Or Fee-fi-fo-fum?
“There are ogres, you know. They’re no legend. They’re fact, they are. The inn where nine guests left for every ten that arrived, the m
ountain cabin that sheltered travelers from the snow, sheltered them all winter till the melting spring uncovered their bones, the lonely stretches of road that so many passengers traveled halfway— you’ll find ’em everywhere. All over Europe and pretty much in this country too before communications became what they are. Profitable business. And it wasn’t just the profit. The Benders made money, sure; but that wasn’t why they killed all their victims as carefully as a kosher butcher. Sawney Bean got so he didn’t give a damm about the profit; he just needed to lay in more meat for the winter.
“And think of the chances you’d have at an oasis.”
“So these Carkers of yours were, as you call them, ogres?”
“Carkers, ogres—maybe they were Benders. The Benders were never seen alive, you know, after the townspeople found those curiously butchered bones. There’s a rumor they got this far west. And the time checks pretty well. There wasn’t any town here in the eighties. Just a couple of Indian families, last of a dying tribe living on at the oasis. They vanished after the Carkers moved in. That’s not so surprising. The white race is a sort of super-ogre, anyway. Nobody worried about them. But they used to worry about why so many travelers never got across this stretch of desert. The travelers used to stop over at the Carkers’, you see, and somehow they often never got any farther. Their wagons’d be found maybe fifteen miles beyond in the desert. Sometimes they found the bones, too, parched and white. Gnawed-looking, they said sometimes.”
“And nobody ever did anything about these Carkers?”
“Oh, sure. We didn’t have King James Sixth—only I still think it was First—to ride up on a great white horse for a gesture, but twice Army detachments came here and wiped them all out.”
“Twice? One wiping-out would do for most families.” Tallant smiled.
The Compleat Boucher Page 69