Cemetery World (19 page)

We went on down the valley, not really going anywhere, going without purpose. The hills fell back a little and the valley widened and ahead of us other hills ranged blue into the sky. We could see that the valley we were traveling joined another valley and in a mile or so we reached the river into which the stream we had been following poured its waters. It was a wide river, running very fast, its waters dark and oily with their speed and as it ran it talked in a growling undertone. It was somehow a little frightening to look upon that river.

“There’s something over there,” said Cynthia.

I looked where she was pointing.

“It looks like a house,” she said.

“I don’t see a house.”

“I just saw the roof. Or what looked like a roof. It’s hidden in the trees.”

“Let us go,” I said.

We reached the field before we really saw the house. A thin, scraggly stand of corn, knee-high or less, grew in uneven rows that were choked with weeds. There was no fence. The field stood on a small bench above the river and was hemmed in by trees. Here and there the rows were broken by standing stumps. Off to one side of the field bare skeletons of trees were piled in ragged clumps. Someone, not too long ago, had cleared a patch to make a field, hauling off the trees once they had been cut down.

The house stood across the field, on an elevation slightly higher than the patch of corn. It was a ramshackle affair even from a distance; it became more ramshackle as we approached it. A weedy garden lay off to one side of it and behind it was another structure I took to be a barn. No livestock was in sight. In fact, nothing living was in sight. The place had a vacant feel about it, as if someone had been there just a while ago, but now was gone. A sagging bench stood in front of the house, beside the open door, and beside it was a chair, with the legs cut down, the back ones shorter than the front so that anyone who sat in it would be tilted back. In the yard, a battered pail lay on its side, rolling a little in the wind. A sawed-off section of a large tree bole sat on its end, apparently a chopping block, for its upper end was scarred in places where an axe had struck. A cross-cut saw rested on two pegs or nails on the cabin wall. A hoe leaned against the wall.

The smell struck us when we came up to the chopping block—a sweetish, terrible smell that hit us with a slight shifting of the wind, or perhaps only the swirling of an air current that carried it to us. We backed away and the odor lessened and then, as suddenly as it had come, was gone, although it seemed that some of it still stuck to us, that we had been contaminated by it. ‘

“In the house,” said Cynthia. “There is something in there.”

I nodded. I had the horrible feeling that I knew exactly what it was.

“You stay here,” I said.

For once she didn’t argue with me. She was quite content to stay there.

There was no air current this time and I got almost to the door before it came at me again. As I moved forward, it came rolling out at me, overpowering in its fetidness. I cupped a hand over my mouth and nose and went through the door.

The interior was dark and I paused for a moment, gagging, fighting down the urge to vomit. My knees were wobbly and all strength seemed to have been drained from me by the stench. But I hung in there—I had to know. I thought I knew, but I must be sure, and I told myself that the poor creature who lay somewhere in that darkened room had the right to expect that a fellow human would not turn away from him even under conditions such as these.

My eyes became more accustomed to the darkness. There was a fireplace, crudely made of native stone; a makeshift, drunken table stood to one side of it with two pans and a skillet standing on it. A chair was tipped over in the center of the room, a heap of junk lay piled in a corner, the dark shape of clothing hung from a wall. And there was a bed.

There was something on the bed.

I drove myself forward until I could see what lay upon the bed. It was black and swollen and out of the blackness two eyeballs glared back at me. But there was something wrong about it all, something terrifying, more terrifying than the dreadful stench, more frightful than the black and swollen flesh.

Two heads, not one, lay upon the pillow.

I drove myself again. Leaning over the thing upon the bed, making sure that I really saw what I thought I saw, establishing beyond doubt that both the heads belonged to the single body, shared the single neck.

Then I reeled away, half-blinded. Now I doubled up and vomited.

Still retching, I staggered toward the door, but out of the corner of my eye, I saw the drunken table, with the two pans and the skillet standing on it, and I lurched at them. I got a grip on all three and, bumping against the table, knocked it over. Then I went reeling out the door, with two pans clutched in one hand, the skillet in the other.

I made it across the yard and suddenly my knees gave way and I sat down hard upon the ground. I put up a hand and wiped my face and it still felt dirty. All of me felt dirty.

“Where’d you get the pans?” Cynthia asked. What a crazy thing to ask. Where did she think I’d gotten them?

“Is there a place to wash them?” I asked. “A pump or anything?”

“There’s a little stream down by the garden. Maybe there’s a spring.”

I stayed sitting. I used a hand to wipe my chin and there was vomit on it when it came away. I wiped it on the grass. “Fletch?”

“Yes.”

“Is there a dead man in there?”

“Days dead. A long time dead,” I said.

“What are we going to do?”

“What do you mean—what are we going to do?”

“Shouldn’t we bury him or something?”

I shook my head. “Not here. Not now. What difference does it make? He’d not expect us to.”

“What happened to him? Could you tell what happened?”

“Not a chance,” I said.

She stood looking at me as I got unsteadily to my feet. “Let’s go and wash the pans,” I said. “And I’d like to wash my face. Then let’s pick some vegetables out of that garden …”

“There’s something wrong,” she said. “More wrong than just a dead man.”

“You said back there,” I told her, “that we should find out when we were. I think I have just found out.”

“You mean the man?”

“He was a monster,” I said. “A mutation. A man who had two heads, a two-headed man.”

“But I don’t see …”

“It means we are thousands of years back. We should have suspected it. Fewer trees. The yellow color of the grass. The Earth is only now groping back from war. A mutant such as a two-headed man would have no survival value. There may have been many such people in the years following the war. Physical mutants. A thousand years or so and they’d all be gone. And yet there’s one lying in that house.”

“You must be mistaken, Fletch.”

“I hope I am,” I said. “I’m fairly sure I’m not.”

I don’t know if I just happened to look up at the looming hillside or if some flicker of motion had alerted me, but when I looked, high up I caught a glimpse of something running, not running, really, for you could not see its feet, but something floating rapidly along, a cone-shaped thing that was moving very fast. I saw it for an instant only, then it was gone from sight. But I couldn’t be mistaken. I knew I simply couldn’t be.

“Did you see it, Cynthia?” 

“No,” she said, “I didn’t. There was nothing there.”

“It was the census-taker.”

“It couldn’t be,” she said. “Not if we’re as far back as you say we are. Unless …”

“That is it,” I said. “Unless.”

“You’re thinking what I’m thinking?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised. The census-taker could be your immortal man.”

“But the manuscript said the Ohio.”

“I know it did. But look at it this way: Your ancestor was an old, old man when he wrote the letter. He relied on memory and memory is a tricky thing. Somewhere he had heard about the Ohio. Maybe the old man who told him the story might have mentioned it, not as the river where the incident had happened, but as a river in the area. Through the years it would have been simple for him to come to think the story had happened on the Ohio.”

She sucked in her breath, excited. “It fits,” she said. “All of it. There is the river and there are hills. This could be the place.”

“If it weren’t the Ohio,” I said, “if he was mistaken about the Ohio, it could be any one of a thousand places. A river and some hills. That’s not much to go on, is it?”

“But he said the man was a man.”

“He said that he looked like a man, but he knew he was no man. Something strange about him, something unhuman. That was when he first saw him. The thing he first thought was not a man could later have appeared to him very much a man.”

“You think this could be it?”

“I suppose I do,” I said.

“If it was the census-taker, why should he run from us? He would know us—no, that’s wrong. Of course he wouldn’t know us. He hasn’t met us yet. It will be centuries yet. Do you think that we can find him?”

“We can try,” I said.

We went plunging up the hillside. We forgot about the pans. We forgot about the garden and the vegetables. I forgot about the vomit on my chin. The way was steep and rough. There were trees and clumps of tangled bushes. There were great ledges of rock we could not climb, but had to skirt. In places we clawed our way, hanging onto trees or brush to pull ourselves ahead. There were times when we went on hands and knees.

As I climbed I asked myself, far in the back of my mind, why there should be so much urgency in the situation as to send us clawing madly up the hill. For if the house of the immortal man was somewhere on the hilltop, we could take our time and it still would be there when we reached the crest. And if it were not, then there was no sense in it at all. If it were only the census-taker that we sought, he could even now be well-hidden or very far away.

But we kept on climbing up that tortuous slope of ground and finally the trees and brush thinned out and ahead of us we saw the bald top of the hill and the house that sat on top of it—a weather-beaten house with the weight and sense of years upon it, but in no way the sort of house in which I’d found the dead man. A neat picket fence, newly painted white, ran across its front and all around it, and there was a flowering tree, a blaze of pink, beside the door and roses that ran along the fence.

We flopped down on the ground and lay there, panting. The race was won and the house was there.

Finally we sat up and looked at one another. Cynthia said, “You’re a sight. Let me clean you up.” She took a handkerchief out of her jacket pocket and scrubbed my face.

“Thanks,” I said when she was through. We got to our feet and walking side by side, sedately, as if we might have been invited guests, we went up to the house.

As we went through the gate we saw that a man was waiting for us at the door.

“I had feared,” he said, “that you might have changed your mind, that you weren’t coming.”

Cynthia said, “We are truly sorry. We were somewhat delayed.”

“It’s perfectly all right,” said the man. “Lunch just reached the table.”

He was a tall man, slender, dressed in dark slacks and a lighter jacket. He wore a white shirt, open at the throat. His face was deeply tanned, his hair was wavy white, and he wore a grizzled moustache, neat and closely clipped.

We went into the house, the three of us. The place was small, but furnished with a graciousness that would not have been expected. A sideboard stood against one wall and upon it sat a jug. A table stood in the center of the room, covered with a white cloth and set with silver and sparkling crystal. There were three places. There were paintings on the wall and a deep-pile carpet on the floor.

“Miss Lansing, please,” said our host, “if you will sit here. And Mr. Carson opposite you. Now we can begin. The soup’s still hot, I’m sure.”

There was no one else. There were just the three of us. And surely, I thought, someone other than our host must have prepared the luncheon, although there was no evidence of anyone who had, nor of a kitchen, either. But the thought was a fleeting one that passed away almost as soon as it had occurred, for it was the kind of thought that did not fit in with this room or with the tables. The soup was excellent, the salad crisp and green, the chops were done to a perfect turn. The wine was a pure delight. “It may interest you to know,” said our gracious host “that I have given some very close thought to the possibilities of the suggestion you made, not entirely flippantly, I hope, the last time that we met. I find it a most intriguing and amusing thing that it might be possible to package the experiences, not only of one’s self, but of other people. Think of the hoard we might then lay up against our later, lonely years when all old friends are gone and the opportunity for new experiences had withered. All we need do then is to reach up to a shelf and take down a package that we have bottled or preserved or whatever the phrase might be, say from a hundred years ago, and uncorking it, enjoy the same experience again, as sharp and fresh as the first time it had happened.”

I heard all this and was surprised, of course, but not as surprised as I should have been, somewhat after the fashion of a man who dreams a fantasy and knows even as he dreams it that it is a fantasy, but one that seems beyond his power to do anything about.

“I have tried to imagine,” said our host, “the various ingredients one might wish to compound in such a package. Beside the bare experience itself, the context of it, one might say, he should want to capture and hold all the subsidiary factors which might serve as a background for it—the sound, the feel of wind and sun, the cloud floating in the sky, the color and the scent. For such a packaging, to give the desired results, must be as perfect as one can make it. It must have all those elements which would be valuable in invoking the total recall of some event that had taken place many years before. Would you not say so, Mr. Carson?”

“Yes,” I said, “I suppose I would.”

“I have wondered, too,” he went on, “by what criterion one should select the experiences to be packaged. Would it be wise to pick only the joyful ones or should one mix in a few that are somewhat less than joyful? Perhaps it might be well to preserve a few that carried a keen embarrassment, if for no other reason than to remind one’s self to be humble.”