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Authors: Gene Wolfe

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HOUSEGUESTS
THE TELEPHONE rang as Sally shut the bedroom door. She picked it up, recalling that Tom had ordered it installed so that the third shift supervisor could wake him when there was trouble at the plant. “Hello?”
“It’s me, Sally.”
She sat down on the bed. “Hi, Mom.”
“Kate and I have been conferring about you.” Kate was her sister. “And we thought it might be nice if you came over here to sleep.”
“I have to stay here, Mom—Seth’s not home yet. What would be nice would be if Dad could come over and stay with me.” She waited, tense and expectant.
“I’m afraid he can’t do that, Sally. I could come.”
A weight settled upon her heart; she had thought she could not feel worse, yet she did. “He isn’t with you, is he? They haven’t found him.”
“I’m sure it’s just some mixup, Sally. I didn’t know you knew about it.”
“There was a deputy here. He asked about Dad.” It struck her that the deputy had never really finished talking with her, that she had not told him about her father’s friends; she added, “He’s coming back, I think. Have you called the hospital?”
“I just did, again. They still don’t have him, but there’s been
a terrible accident out on the highway, and they thought he might’ve been in that. They say the ambulance should be getting in with some of those people soon. I don’t see how he could be one of them, though.”
“I don’t either,” Sally agreed. “Will you phone as soon as he gets home?”
“You’re sure you don’t want to come over?”
“Maybe I will, when Seth brings back the car.” She thought of asking Kate to come, but that would leave Mom home alone and worrying. Besides, little Judy would be sleeping now, and Kate wouldn’t come without Judy.
“I’ll call just as soon as I can, Sally. But for now we’d better hang up. He might be trying to call me.”
“Good night, Mom. Don’t worry about Dad—he’s all right.” Sally remembered an expression he sometimes used. “He’s an old cat that always lands on its feet.” Cat—tomcat. Only Tom had not landed on his feet this time.
“Good-bye, Sally.”
She hung up, staring at the bedroom door. It had moved—or at least had appeared to move—a trifle when her mother had said good-bye. Without turning the white china knob, she tugged it; the door was still latched. Like every other interior door in the house, it could at least in theory be locked with an old-fashioned square-warded key, although it had not been locked since Seth was a toddler. Tom kept a skeleton key in his desk that fit all the doors.
The house seemed very quiet tonight with Seth and Tom gone. They had often been off fishing, or Seth at school while Tom was at the plant; but this seemed different.
She went into Tom’s study, a room only slightly larger than her pantry. There were inventories, still, in the basket on his desk, flimsy pink sheets weighed down with a bright casting; she would have to take them to the plant on Monday. Something there might be important, information that the new manager would need.
The skeleton key was not in the flat drawer, where she had
expected to find it. She pulled out the drawer labeled
Files,
finding (as she had known she would) several steel files—flat, triangular, round, and half round. Tom’s little joke. The next drawer had a shallow tray in front; the key lay in it with a few yellow pencils and a ball-point pen. She picked it up and was about to shut the drawer when her glance was caught by the dusky gleam of blued steel: Tom’s pistol.
Hesitantly, she took it out, reassured by its weight in her hand. It was only a twenty-two, but it had a long, heavy barrel and a big adjustable sight. It looked dangerous, Sally thought, as of course it was. Her finger well away from the trigger, as her father had taught her, she pulled back the slide and looked into the chamber and at the clip. Both were empty—but what if Kate brought little Judy over, and Judy got into Tom’s desk? If she found Tom’s pistol, wasn’t there a chance she’d find the box of cartridges as well? Judy was too young, perhaps, to load the pistol. But in a year? Two years?
Sally reached under the tray that had held the key and took out the small, heavy box.
The slide had stayed back; there was a catch that kept it there, she remembered. She looked for it and found it, but did not push it down to free the slide. Not yet.
A rough button on one side of the handle—the grip—held the clip in place. She pressed it, and the clip slid out into her hand; she pushed shiny brass cartridges from the box into the ctip—one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Tom had always shoved the clip back with the heel of his hand; Sally did the same. When she pressed down the little catch, the slide sprang forward, shouldering a cartridge from the clip into the chamber. Carefully and very firmly, she pushed up the safety so that the pistol would not fire.
With the blue cartridge box and the key in one hand and the pistol in the other, she started back toward the bedroom.
At the end of the hall, the wide front door seemed somehow menacing; she felt that the doorbell would ring before she left the hall, rung by something horrible.
And because she did, she did not leave it at all, going to the door instead, peering out through the thick glass panes and at last opening it and stepping out onto the long porch. Would the neighbors call the sheriff if they saw her come out onto her porch with the pistol in her hand? It wasn’t very likely, Sally decided, nor were they very likely to see her at this hour. But if they did and they called the sheriff, so much the better—she would have someone there.
Fee’s car—or had Fee come in a car? Fee’s car was gone if such a car had ever existed. The rain had stopped at last, and for a moment at least an orange harvest moon bathed the lawn in mysterious light through a break in the clouds.
Slowly, she went down the porch steps. It seemed a fearful thing to do, to go around the house with a gun in her hand; she told herself firmly that there was nothing there, and that once she had made a circuit of the whole house she would no longer be frightened. She would be able to weep for Tom again, and worry about Seth and her father, because she would no longer have to worry about herself.
A wide strip of grass barred the big oaks and maples from her carefully-tended borders. She trod it slowly, cautiously, grateful for the moonlight when it came and sorry when it left. The annuals were brave still, though they would be dead so soon. The perennials were losing their leaves. The hybrid teas would have to be covered next month; she would try to get Seth to do it, or do it herself.
As she remembered the tall white Styrofoam rose cones in the cellar, she realized she was not going to sell the house, that she would never deposit Fee’s check. Never! There would be some life insurance. They had saved some money for Seth’s education, and she was still an attractive woman—or so Tom had always said. She knew it to be true. Let Seth get a football scholarship. She might (she would) find another man, a man who would take care of her and their home, and be a father to Seth. Just as there were so many lonely women, surely there were many lonely men in the world, many of them good men.
Her index finger had curled around the trigger in a frenzy of determination; if it had not been for the safety, the pistol would have fired. She smiled at herself and relaxed—plenty of time for all this in the morning. No, plenty of time when poor Tom had been decently laid to rest.
In the back yard, Rexy’s dog house stood in a little island of tall grass, the grass left after Seth had ridden the mower as close as he could. Seth was supposed to trim that with the Weed Eater, though he seldom did. She remembered that the deputy had wanted her to get another dog and she had promised to consider it. Another dog seemed like a good idea, now that she had quite definitely decided to keep the house. The dog house ought to be cleaned out first, she thought—cleaned out and sprayed to kill fleas. Was Rexy’s old bedding still in there?
Automatically she bent to look, and Rexy stuck his head out of the little door and licked her face.
Sally yipped and dropped everything—the skeleton key, the little box of cartridges, and the pistol.
Rexy said
“Woof!”
in a happy sort of way and danced around her in the dark.
“My God,” Sally said. And then, “Oh, my God! Rexy is it really you?”
His answer was to jump up (something Seth had been trying to train him not to do), punching her in the stomach with his big front paws, and lick her face again.
“But you got run over—that’s what Tom said. You were run over, and Tom and Seth buried you in the woodlot.” She ruffled his ears, and he licked her hand.
Was it possible? Really possible? Suppose there had been another dog, a dog who looked a great deal like Rexy.
That
was certainly possible: half German shepherd and half Irish setter, Rexy had been born two blocks over, one of a sizable litter. So suppose that dog—the one who just looked like Rexy, probably a littermate—had been run over and mangled terribly. And suppose that on
that same day
Rexy himself had run away or been stolen.
It could have happened just like that, Sally told herself. In fact, it
must
have happened about like that.
But now Rexy was back, having found his way home or perhaps having escaped from some ghastly laboratory, and no doubt he was hungry and thirsty. Sally squatted, ran her fingers through the grass near her feet (getting one of her ears thoroughly kissed), and found the pistol, but neither the key nor the cartridge box. Rexy could have scattered them with his paws, and no doubt had.
“Come on, Rexy,” she said. “We’ll fix you a snack and get the flashlight.” Wouldn’t Seth be surprised!
Her hand was on the knob before she recalled that the back door was locked, the key in her brown purse in the bedroom. Out of habit, she twisted the knob anyway; it turned easily, and the door swung back.
When she switched on the lights, her kitchen appeared naked and innocent. Rexy sniffed in all the corners, emitting muffled snorts of pleasure, happy to be home; if he caught the scents of Fee or the deputy, or even old Mrs. Cosgriff, he gave no sign of it. The putrid stench that had drifted through the hole in the window had dissipated.
Sally glanced at that window and saw that it was open. Not merely broken, but wide open; somebody had (presumably) reached through the broken pane, turned the simple catch, and lifted the sash.
“We’d better phone the sheriff, Rexy,” she said. But she knew the sheriffs deputy would find nothing, as he had found nothing before. He had searched the house, with Fee in it and searching too—by his own account at least—without finding Fee. She lowered and locked the empty sash, though she told herself that it would not keep even a child out.
Rexy’s old dog food had been distributed among various dog-owning friends. Sally decided that Cheerios and milk would make a satisfactory supper for a previously lost dog, and prepared a bowlful for him that he accepted eagerly.
There was a three-cell flashlight beneath the sink, kept in
good working order in anticipation of the inevitable winter ice-storm and power outage. She carried it into the back yard and found the skeleton key and the little box of cartridges without much difficulty.
As she stepped onto the back porch, the kitchen door swung toward her, softly and slowly, as though it had been caught by a vagrant breeze she could not feel. Quickly she put the key and the little box of cartridges on the old table beside the door. Her hand reached for the knob; but the door closed, with a click of the latch, as she touched it.
Frantically she rattled the knob, but it was useless. The door was locked.
“This is silly,” Sally said under her breath. “It’s really completely silly. Take what you want and get out.” It was not until she felt her own hot tears on her cheeks that she realized she was crying.
She gathered up the things again—the cartridge box in one hand, the skeleton key and flashlight in the other—and finished her circuit of the house. The front door stood wide open, just as she had left it. The lights in her living room still burned. She went inside, blew her nose on a tissue, and shut and locked the front door behind her.
Rexy was no longer in the kitchen; she whistled and called, but he did not come. Tom’s pistol lay on the drainboard where she had left it. The blue plastic cereal bowl from which Rexy had eaten had been licked clean. She washed it and put it away, returned the flashlight to its place under the sink, and put the little box of twenty-twos on a high shelf.
With the skeleton key in one hand and Tom’s pistol in the other, she returned to the bedroom. The lights were out; she could not recall whether she had turned them off herself. With her left hand, the one that grasped the skeleton key, she groped the wall for the switch.
Something lay in the bed, in Tom’s place.
LUCIE
SOMEONE WAS sitting on the passenger’s side in the front seat of the Buick.
Ann had parked up the street; Shields had left the Cherokee in the little lot behind the restaurant. They had parted at the entrance, Shields saying, “Meet you at the dealership, in back. Don’t forget.” And Ann, “I bet I beat you.”
As she had walked back to the car, she had tried to tug her girdle down without making a spectacle of it. She had eaten too much orange duck—
entirely
too much orange duck, as she had told herself. She would sleep like a log now for ten or twelve hours, provided Willie and Mercedes let her, and wake up a good three pounds heavier. After all her tugging, the girdle still cut her tummy, and she had ruefully admitted to herself that these days there was entirely too much tummy there to cut. She had burped and muttered, “Damn!”
Then she saw her.
Ann opened the door, and Lucie said,
“Bon soir.
”
“I thought it was you.” With some slight difficulty, Ann slid behind the wheel. “Didn’t I lock the car?”
“No, madame.” Lucie looked demure. “And so I have chosen to protect it for you.”
“Where’d you go, anyway?”
“From that hospital? To speak to my friend, but of course—it
was for it that I came into this village. First, I thanked you for your so-gracious help, though you did not perhaps hear. You were then so very much concerned for our injured Wrangler,
non?
I could no longer be of help to you; men from the hospital had come for him.”
“You said something,” Ann fumbled in her purse for her car keys, “that I meant to tell Willie a minute ago. But I forgot. They were laying him on the stretcher, and you said,
‘Pullalue.’
It sounded insulting. Is it French?”
“It is no insult, madame. It is the wailing for the dead. You were at that time busy with concern.”
“Well, I took a semester of French,” Ann declared, “and it didn’t sound like French to me.”
“It is merely the custom of
Normandie,
that is true. But I am a French person, madame. French is that tongue from which we French persons speak,
mais non?”
“Well, anyway, Wrangler wasn’t dead, thank God. They have him in intensive care.”
“Hélas!
One cannot be correct always. You have not begun the engine, madam.”
“No.” Ann shook her head. “Not until you’ve told me what you want.”
“Certainly it is plain—to be driven once more to
la
Meadow Grass. Or if that may not be, that you will provide me a place in which to sleep this night.”
Ann pumped the accelerator and twisted the key. “Well, as it happens, Willie and I are going to Meadow Grass. There’s no reason you shouldn’t ride along.”
Lucie’s mouth formed a momentary little
O
that Ann regarded with some satisfaction.
 
Boomer shied at a big clump of brush, and Lisa pointed her flashlight at it; Boomer was not much given to shying as a rule. There was nothing there—or anyway there appeared to be nothing there.
The rain had started again, and a cold drip from the brim of her hat was nicely positioned to dribble into the neck of her raincoat whenever she looked down. She whispered, “All right, boy, let’s go on,” and nudged Boomer with her heels. The lanky gelding moved off at a quick trot that would rapidly become his jumping canter if she permitted.
A siren wailed from the direction of the main gate. There had been sirens there, coming and going, almost ever since Lisa had gone out this time—a wreck on the interstate, or perhaps on the old state highway. For the twentieth time it struck her that Lucie or Wrangler—or both—might be there and hurt. Nineteen times she had pushed the thought aside; this time she slackened reins and let Boomer have his head.
 
Shields was waiting when Ann pulled up; he grinned at her and said, “I thought you were going to beat me.”
“I had complications, Willie, so it doesn’t count. This is Lucie, the girl from the camp I was telling you about. Lucie, this is my husband, Will Shields.”
Lucie had gotten out of the Buick as Ann spoke. She said,
“Comment allez-vous?”
and held out a hand as though she expected it to be kissed.
Shields obliged, taking it briefly in his own and brushing the cool backs of her fingers with his lips. “I’m afraid that I don’t speak French,” he said, “or any other language except for English.”
“But that is sufficient. I comprehend English when it is spoken slowly and loudly—does not everyone?”
“I’ve heard otherwise. You’re going back to the camp with us?”
“If you will be so kind. This thing—this old truck. This is yours now?”
Ann told her, “It belongs to the dealership. We own the dealership, don’t we, Willie?”
“The bank lets us say so.” Shields opened the rear door for Lucie, then the door in front for Ann.
“But this is
très comique!
Do you not know whose this is?” Shields shook his head and walked around to get in on the driver’s side.
“It is that woman’s! She would drive this here to gain the supplies, but she was made to sell it because of a trouble about the payment of me.”
Ann asked, “What woman?” craning her neck to look back.
“Mademoiselle Solomon, that Jewess. She loves this, though always it was Wrangler who draws away the soiled oil. Now it is gone—now it comes back!”
Lucie laughed, and it seemed to Shields as they pulled out onto the street that he had caught a note in her laughter that he had encountered earlier that evening—something frightening, with the soul of a lonely wind.
“Do not expect her to be gracious,” Lucie added.
Ann said, “I’m sure she’ll understand. Did she get a good price for it, Willie?”
He shrugged. “Offhand, I wouldn’t know—I didn’t make the deal.” He chuckled. “I certainly hope not.”
“Isn’t it a good car?”
“It runs fine, but it’s got seventy thousand on the clock.”
“You always say that doesn’t matter,” Ann pointed out.
“That’s what I say when I’m trying to sell them,” Shields told her, “not when I’m buying them.” He stopped for a light. “Where did you find Lucie again?”
“She was waiting for me at the car.” It seemed best to Ann not to mention that she had forgotten to lock the doors. “And naturally I told her we’d give her a lift back. Lisa’s probably worried to death about her.”
Shields nodded as they pulled away from the intersection. “We should have phoned.”
“Well, we had a lot of things to talk about. Besides, it’s their business to keep track of these kids, not ours.” Over her shoulder Ann added, “Isn’t that right, Lucie?”
There was no response from the back seat.
Shields glanced at the rear-view mirror. “I think she must be lying down. She’s probably tired.”
“She’s
tired? What about me? Willie, I could just drop. Would you mind very much if I laid my head on you for a little nappy?”
“Of course not,” he said.
The streetlights and the traffic signals were already well behind them. They were passing dark houses with bright windows now, living rooms in which men, women, and children sat reading in front of a television set or discussing the weather.
“Make yourself comfortable,” he whispered, knowing that Ann was already almost asleep, perhaps truly sleeping. As gently as he could, he put his arm around her shoulders. The Cherokee was in third; he might not need to shift for some time, perhaps not until they reached this camp, whatever it was.
He found he had forgotten its name, but he felt certain Ann had said you got on the interstate and took the exit for Sixty-eight. Probably there would be a sign; Ann had said it was the main gate, the one that wasn’t locked, the one she had gone out with the injured whoosis bleeding all over the back of their new car.
Not really new, Shields reminded himself—nearly two years old at this point. He ought to trade it in. He should drive a brand-new car all the time from here on, the newest model, top of the line—and not a GM either, though he had sold Buicks and Cadillacs for just about fourteen years.
Ann snored softly, and he wanted to hug her. He imagined the two of them in bed, Ann warm and soft, full of spicy-sweet duck. Sex was always best when Ann had eaten a big dinner and was ready for sleep, impossible when she was dieting.
You couldn’t have everything, Shields told himself.
A white sign shone briefly in his headlights, informing him that he was on Sixty-eight already. Had he turned off onto the interstate automatically and exited it the same way? Or had he reached Sixty-eight by another route? That seemed more likely. Sixty-eight, he knew, was around Castleview someplace,
though it did not go through the town itself, or perhaps merely grazed it now that Castleview had grown a trifle.
He found he liked Castleview still, despite everything that had happened in the museum. That had not been the town’s fault, he felt certain, had not been local people. He should take Ann there to see the big calliope that had started to play while he was looking for Bob, to see the old kitchen and the carvings she had been so interested in.
And he would, he decided, when they had found out what had happened to Bob, when this was all over—would most of all just because he was a little afraid to, and he should not be afraid. What had the biggest carving been? The sword in the stone, of course—the sword Arthur had drawn when no one else could, the sword that had made Arthur King of Britain.
Something nagged him about that. There was—surety there was—some connection he was not making.
“Let’s see,” he muttered. “It was a sword stuck completely through an anvil (which is pretty silly, on the face of it), and down into the boulder the anvil stood on. This whole affair had fallen from the sky, so it was a sign of some sort from God.”
Ann stirred at the sound of his voice, and he fell silent.
The carved oak in the museum had been virtually black. Had the sword itself actually been black? There was no mention of that in Malory, or anyway none that Shields could remember. The anvil would have been black, though; anvils always were.
And the stone had probably been black, too, he thought; the stone had fallen from Heaven, so it had pretty obviously been a meteorite. In fact, the whole legend was clearly the gussied-up history of a king in the Dark Ages who had gotten his throne by learning to extract meteoritic iron, from which weapons could be forged. Thus Arthur had in a very real sense drawn a sword from a stone that had fallen from the heavens. And furthermore, he’d drawn it through an anvil. Metallurgists still talk of
drawing the temper of steel; drawing the temper makes steel tough instead of brittle.
But why should all that have fascinated the old doctor so? He’d been a physician, not a blacksmith or a mining man, though there were worked-out mines hereabout—lead mines, mostly. His name, Dunstan, that was it! He had been Dr. Dunstan, or so Bob had said, and Dunstan was
dun-stone,
dark stone or black stone, as those things had been said in Scotland and in the borderlands along the northern edge of England. King Arthur had fathered at least one Scottish son, by Queen Margawse. Quite possibly there had been others. If the old doctor’s first name had been James, he might have imagined himself Prince James of the Dun Stone, or whatever.
Shields chuckled softly, recalling how he had romanticized his own name as a boy. After a minute or two, he began to sing under his breath.
‘Twas just about a year ago,
I went to see the Queen;
She decked me out in medals,
An’ the trimmin’s, they was green.
She decked me out in medals,
But they was made of tin.
“Be off wit ya, ya rascal,
Yer the mayor of Magheralin.”
Flashing lights glittered ahead, and there was the wail of a siren, coming fast. He pulled onto the shoulder and stopped.
Ann lifted her head. “Are we there, Willie?”
“No. Emergency vehicle.”
It was a big white ambulance, rocking as it rushed toward them, the driver hunched over the wheel.
“Okay, it’s past,” Shields told Ann. He put the Cherokee in four-wheel drive, glad to have it, and pulled back onto the road.
Ann inquired, “How’s Lucie?” without taking her head from his shoulder.
“Don’t know—sound asleep, I guess. I haven’t heard a peep out of her.”
A pickup went past them in the wake of the ambulance, its driver shaking his head and jerking his thumb over his shoulder.
“Was he saying we can’t get through, Willie?”
“I think so. An accident has the road blocked, but they’ll have tow trucks out pretty soon.”
He could see it already. There were two firetrucks there, three police cars, and a girl on a horse.

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