And on the Eighth Day (22 page)

For the last time he made the trip back to his house, packed the book in his grip, and closed his luggage. And so farewell. He had been received almost as a god. There was no reason to assume that he was now held in less reverence; probably he was held in more, since awe and terror had been added. The instrument of the fulfillment of a prophecy, he had helped destroy something tender and potent and unique. Quenan might still look up to him; but it could hardly be with love.

His lips tightened as he snapped the lock on his suitcase and left.

He looked around to get his bearings. There—up that path, behind the vines. That was the way he had come down with an ageless ancient clasping a trumpet beneath his robe.

Ellery climbed the hill slowly, from time to time glancing down the inner slope. No one was in sight. No, there was one. On the farther slope, among the stones that marked the peaceful place, a misshapen little figure crept. Ellery shuddered and went on.

One last time he looked back. The grays and browns had now become a blur of dun, almost colorless.

And then he reached the crest of the hill and passed over it. The Valley of Quenan (Canaan? Kenan? What? He would probably never know now), the whole incredible site, vanished from view.

He had to laugh.

He had gone down the rocky face of the hill, trudged through the sands to his car, tossed his bags in, got behind the wheel, turned on the ignition—and nothing.

The battery was dead.

O Pioneers, ye knew not the blessings of the motorcar.

The water in his radiator had evaporated, too. That was easily remedied (easily?): he had only to go back to the village. But the battery? Dead. He looked around. Everything was dead—the desert, the hill. Nothing lived anywhere; no breath stirred; the air lay panting on the corpse, disconsolate.

Otto Schmidt sold gas, so he possibly had a battery around, or at least a booster. But how to get to Schmidt’s store? It would be a long walk in the desert; too chancy. Have to borrow a donkey from the village …

But first, the book.

Ellery dug it out of his bag.

He went off a little from the car and laid the book on the sand and began to scoop out a shallow hole with his naked fingers. The sand was powdery, and he had no trouble. Then he began tearing pages from the book, crumpling each one and tossing it into the hole. When the hollow was almost full he struck a match and dropped it in.

In the beginning he knew the paper was on fire only from the magic spread of char. But then the flames came.

Ellery watched them with a wholly new savagery of satisfaction. From time to time he crumpled more pages and flung them into the heart of the flames.

At last nothing was left of the book but its cover.

He stared at the words printed on it in black-letter German and, in spite of the heat, he shivered. In all the long history of written communication, had there ever been a sadder misreading than the old Teacher’s of this book? He had wanted so fervently to believe in the existence of the legendary “lost” book of Quenan. And then the patriarch had gone into the End-of-the-World Store one day for supplies, and there on the counter had lain a book, and on its cover he had seen three words in archaic-looking lettering, in a strange language that he could not read; but the three words lay one under another, so that their first letters were lined up vertically; and he had read the acrostic:

How the old man’s heart must have pounded! It was a wonder that it had not stopped altogether. For the “lost” book was said to have been entitled Mk’n, or

which was a difference of only one letter, and the difference was so small in appearance—and who knew, he must have thought, but that the title as handed down, Mk’n, might not originally have been Mk’h, and corrupted somewhere along the route of time?

He had wanted to believe that this was the sacred book of Quenan; and so he had believed.

And how, Ellery thought, how could I have told him that he was selling his faith of peace and brotherhood for a mess of carnage?

He gathered some twigs from a nearby bush, and he carefully ignited them, and when they were burning brightly he laid the cover on them. It caught fire; and the flames took on an evil look, as if the fire itself were corrupted by what it was consuming.

The title seemed to have a demon life of its own. Even as the cover turned to ash, the title clung to its vile substance, standing out clearly, almost coldly in the flames:

And then it, too, gave up its twisting form and died. And Ellery ground its ashes under his heel.

He had taken only a few steps back toward the Valley when he heard a rumble in the sky that grew steadily to a roar. Queer! The Potter (had it been the Potter?—it now seemed so long ago) had remarked on the increasing number of aircraft passing through Quenan’s skies, yet during his entire stay Ellery had not seen or heard one.

He stopped to scan the sky, and—yes!—there it was. A small single-seater plane, not a fighter or any military plane he knew of, was coming toward him from the south. Ellery watched it with growing anxiety. The roar was becoming irregular, erratic … staccato … and then there was an explosion and a burst of fire and in an instant the little aircraft was one great flame and the flame was flashing and tumbling as it passed almost directly overhead.

My God, the Valley, Ellery thought; if it should hit Quenan …! But he saw that it was going to crash on the slope of Crucible Hill facing the desert, falling just short of the village. And in the same thankful moment a parachute blossomed above him. Ellery began to run.

He saw the parachutist hit the sands only a short way off. For an instant the man lay still, as if stunned; but by the time Ellery reached him he was on his feet, tugging at the silk, unbuckling himself.

“Are you all right?” Ellery cried.

The man looked up from his harness. He smiled and said, “Just fine,
amigo
.”

Ellery blinked. The voice was deep and strong, and yet it had a gentle quality; it sounded familiar. But it was not so much the voice. The flyer was a young man, tall and slender and dark, with curly black hair and aquiline features, quite handsome in an odd way; although he had obviously shaved that morning, his gaunt cheeks showed the foreshadows of a heavy beard. I’ve seen this fellow somewhere, Ellery thought; he certainly looks as familiar as he sounds. And then he stood very still, in the wash of an icy wave. The young man looked like … looked like …

Ellery shook his head, feeling foolish. Yet it was true. The young man looked as the Teacher must have looked when he was thirty years old.

“Talk about luck,” the stranger said, stepping out of the harness. “Imagine conking out over the desert and coming down at the feet of a Good Samaritan with a car.”

“Not such a Good Samaritan, I’m afraid,” Ellery said. “My battery’s dead.”

The stranger smiled again. “We’ll make out,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”

“All right,” Ellery said, smiling back. “I won’t.” As they began to walk slowly toward the car, he asked, “Where were you heading?”

“North—up Pyramid Lake way,” the young man said. “Crop-dusting. I’m a CO., you know.”

“CO.? The only thing that means to me is ‘Commanding Officer.’ ”

“Hardly,” and the stranger laughed.

“Oh,” Ellery said. “You mean a conscientious objector.”

“Yes.” He said it quite calmly—quite, Ellery thought, as the old Teacher might have said it; and smiled faintly at his fantasy. “I got an agricultural deferment. The funny part of it is, I learned to fly in the cadet program. I was on the wild side, I’m afraid. Rich father, plenty of money, out for thrills and kicks. Then one day a buddy of mine had the same thing happen to him that just happened to me. Only he didn’t get to bail out.”

“I see.”

“I saw, too. For the first time, I guess. And I began to think—you know, man and God, man and fellow-man, man and his eternal soul, all that. Well, I hauled myself out of the cadet program and began to read and study. Found myself after a while. And knew one thing for sure—no killing for me. I wrestled with
that
one for a long, long time. But that’s the way it is. I couldn’t do it. No matter how they tag me.”

“It must be rough,” Ellery said.

“Not so rough,” the young stranger said. “Not if you know why you’re doing it. You find yourself, and you live by what you find. That’s why I don’t think I’ll keep on with this job after the war is over. I’ve been thinking of social work of some kind. Well, we’ll see.” They had reached the car, and the stranger opened the hood and poked around. “Dead, all right. Any idea where the nearest town is? Say!” He had straightened up and was staring at the nearby hill. “Look at that.”

Ellery looked. And he saw on the ridge of Crucible Hill, in a long line of black figures against the sky, like paper cutouts, the people of Quenan. And it suddenly came to him what had happened, and the icy wave washed over him once more. They had heard the coughing death of the plane, run out of their houses and seen it come down in a streak of flame from the sky.
Like a burning chariot
…
like a chariot of fire
…

They had seen the man fall from the burning plane.

No. They had seen the man descend from out the ineffable heavens.

And they had come to him.

“May I ask your name?” Ellery murmured.

“What? Oh.” The young stranger kept staring at the people. “Manuel—”

And they shall call his name Emmanuel
… Ellery felt a quiver ripple through him. His knees actually began to tremble. I won’t fall down, he told himself fiercely, I won’t; it’s weakness, the awful fatigue I’ve been gripped by …

“—Aquina,” the young man finished.

It’s too much, the other Ellery insisted wildly in his head—too much, too much, too much; it’s more than reason can bear.
Aquina
,
Quenan
. Too much, an infinite complexity beyond the grasp of man. Acknowledge. Acknowledge and depart.

“Those people on the ridge,” Manuel Aquina said in a slow, not-quite-puzzled way. “Is there a town beyond that hill?”

The setting sun touched the strange young eyes, and they began to blaze.

“There is a new world beyond that hill,” Ellery heard a slow, not-quite-puzzled voice respond—his own? “And I think … I think … its people wait for you.”

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

copyright © 1964 by Ellery Queen