The Perfect Host (44 page)

“Why do they call it the Camel’s Grave?”

“
I
don’t know. Some say the magician was an Egyptian who used to ride a camel around. Some say it comes from some Indian name. The nearest I can find in the library to ‘Camel’ is ‘ko-mai’ which means the green stick they used to spit meat over a fire. But that’s Winnebago, and there were no Winnebagos around here.”

“Wait. You mean there were Indian legends about this?”

“Oh, sure. I dug those out. There are all sorts of stories. Some of them are shocking—I mean in a nice way.” She giggled. “But they all have one thing in common—the imprisoned magician, who, by the way, was old, old as the hills. He wasn’t an Indian either. They made that quite clear. And always Camel, or ‘Grave of the Camel.’ Just to mix that up even more for you, I looked up ‘camel’ in the dictionary and found out that the word is derived from ‘Djemal,’ which is Arabic, or ‘Gamal,’ which is Hebrew.”

“Fine,” I said bitterly. “Much progress. So go on with your little trip out here.”

“That first time? Oh, nothing happened. I brought some chow and stayed out here about four days at the full moon, which is supposed to be the time when the Forbidden Valley can be found. I didn’t see a soul but old Goo-goo running his traps. No one pays attention to Goo-goo.”

“Not even people who step into one of his bear-traps? You’re lucky you didn’t bed down in it.”

“Oh, don’t blame him, Thad! He’s a sweet old man, really. He’s deaf and dumb, you know. He keeps out of people’s way as much
as he can. Comes in with a few skins every now and then and lives off the land. He could tell us a thing or two about Forbidden Valley if he could talk. But he can’t even write. They say he doesn’t mind the haunted hills because no one ever found a way to tell him about them. What he doesn’t know can’t hurt him. As for the trap, he put it where he thought it might do him some good, among the birches where bears sometimes come to hunt for bugs under the bark. Practically no one ever comes out here. When they do, it’s their lookout, not Goo-goo’s.”

“Hey.” I straightened up. “How can you be so casual about bunking out here with a wildcat or two and an occasional bear wandering around? There are copperheads too, to say nothing of a trapper who must be lonesome, to put it mildly.”

“Why I—” She paused, wonderingly. “I never thought about it, I guess. Thad—nothing ever hurt me. I mean it. No dog ever bit me, no cat ever scratched me. I don’t seem to be very tempting to mosquitoes. Once when I was a little girl a bull gored a hired man who was walking across a field with me. The bull bellowed and jumped and capered all around me, but he didn’t touch me. I’ve never even been stung by a bee.”

“You don’t say.” I considered her thoughtfully. “I begin to see why I asked you out for a beer the night of the meeting.”

“Why, Thad?”

“Now don’t get ideas. I just pegged you as being—different, that’s all. Not better—different. You puzzled me. I’ve been a lot of places, Claire. Tropics. At sea. Construction jobs. I’ve met a lot of people, but no one like you.”

“That again,” she snorted. “People are always telling me that, one way or another. And what’s it get me? The very first time I fall for a big dead-pan stranger, he doesn’t know I’m alive. All large muscles and bad taste.”

“What do you mean bad taste?”

“Luana.”

“Now look. I won’t bandy her about. Stay off the subject, see?”

Surprisingly, she laughed. “Temper—temper,” she cautioned. “My, you roar purty. But back to the subject at hand. I was out here
four days and nights, wandering around, trying to find the Forbidden Valley. Once I thought I had it. It was about midnight. The moon was bright, like tonight. I was near here somewhere. There was a little swag in the ground with a high bluff at one end. I went up to it. I tripped over something. I don’t know what it was. I almost
never
fall over things but I sure did that time. I fell right on top of some little animal. I hope I didn’t hurt it. I don’t know what it was. It wriggled out from under me and whizzed away fast as a deer-fly. I never saw anything move so fast; a blur and it was gone. It was about as big as a chipmunk, but longer—oh, three times as long. I got a vague impression of pointed ears and the funniest broad, flat tail. It was like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

“I thought nothing happened in those four days.”

“Well—that couldn’t be important. Oh; I see what you mean.
Anything
might be important. All right. Now—what else?”

“Goo-goo.”

“Oh. I saw him once. Twice. The first time he was setting a whip-snare in a clearing in the woods. I waved at him and smiled and he nodded and gurgled the way he does and smiled back. The second time I don’t think he saw me. He was out in the open. Early morning. He was tramping round and round in a circle in the grass. Then he stopped and faced the sun. He did something with his knife. Held it out, sort of, and touched himself on the shoulders and chin with it. I don’t remember very clearly. It didn’t last long. And that’s all.”

“Hmp.” I plucked some grass and skinned it with my front teeth, to get the juice. “Then you came back to town and your foot went haywire.”

“Yes. It only took about six days to get the way it is. It was awful at first. The toes gathered, and the whole foot began to get pointed. It was longer at first. I mean, my foot straightened out like a ballet dancer’s and I couldn’t get my heel down. Then the whole thing thickened up and grew shorter, and the tip turned black and hardened and—”

I interrupted, “I know, I know. Had one once myself. Now, how many people did you tell about it?”

“Oh, nobody. I mean, Dr. Ponder, of course, and then you. Dr. Ponder was so—so—”

“Wonderful,” I submitted.

“Shut up. So
understanding
, I mean.”

“That’s an odd word to use.”

“Is it? Anyway, he said I had a—a—”

“Chitinous podomorphia.”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“You told me, right after he told you. Only
I
remembered it. Mine began shortly afterward, and I remembered it again.” I spit out my grass and selected another stem. “A brilliant diagnosis.”

“Thad … you—sometimes you say things in a way I don’t understand.”

“Do I?” In the growing predawn darkness, I could feel her sharp swift gaze on me. I said, “Go on. He treated the foot?”

“He bound it. It was very clever. As the foot changed shape from day to day he changed the bandages, so that it never looked any worse than a slightly sprained ankle. He seemed to know all about the trouble. He predicted the course of the trouble as it developed, and told me that it would go just so far and stop, and he kept me from getting frightened, and explained why I should keep it a secret.”

“What did he say?

“He harked back to the meeting, and the things that had been said. Especially about the readiness of people to believe in so-called mystical events. He said there was enough residual superstition in town to make life miserable for a girl with a cloven hoof. Especially for me.”

“Why you especially?”

“Didn’t I ever tell you? I thought I had … See, my mother and father … they were engaged. I mean, they were each engaged to someone else. Dad came from Scoville way. That’s eight miles or more on the other side of these woods. He didn’t know Mother at all. He took to coming out here at night. He didn’t know why. He couldn’t help it. And Mother—she was about eighteen at the time—Mother jumped up from the dinner table one night and ran. She
just
ran
out here. It’s a long way. Granddad tried to follow her, but she ran like a deer. When he finally came huffing and puffing into the wood—it was a white night like tonight—and stopped to get his breath back, he heard a man calling, ‘Jessica! Jessica!’ That was Mother’s name. Granddad followed the sound. It was out here in the open somewhere. Granddad climbed a rise and looked down and saw this young man standing with his arms out, calling and calling, turning every which way as he called. Granddad was going to yell at him but then he saw Mother. She was going down the slope ahead of him, walking slowly—he used to say ‘as if the meadow was a grand marble stair, and she in a gold dress, for all she was tattered with thorns.’

“The two of them stopped two yards apart and stood there staring at one another for longer than it took Granddad to get to them. He had to yell twice or three times before she even knew he was there. She kept her eyes on the young man’s face and just said, ‘Yes, Father.’ And Granddad bellowed at her to come home. She stepped to the young man—that was my dad—and she put a hand on his arm and said, ‘He’ll come too.’ Granddad said, ‘The hell he will!’ He wouldn’t talk to my dad, he was so upset and angry. ‘I don’t even know his name!’ and Mother said quietly, ‘No more do I. You’d better ask him, Father.’ And that was how it was.”

I sat up and crossed my legs, entranced. “You mean that was the first time they saw each other?”

She nodded, though by now I could barely see her, for the moon was gone and only its cold loom stood in the sky over the western hills. “The very first time,” she said. “And they were together every minute they could be after that. They were married right away.”

“How?”

She shifted uncomfortably as I asked it, and said, “By a judge. It wasn’t a church wedding. It was quicker. People talked. They still talk. They have lots of ideas about what went on out here, but what I’m telling you is the truth. Anyway, Granddad got used to the idea very soon, though he was against it at first. Even the talk didn’t bother him; those two lived in a world of their own. Nothing touched them. Dad made wood-carvings—clock cases and newel-figurines
and so on, and Mother was with him almost every minute. Granddad used to say if you pinched the one, the other’d say ‘Ouch.’ He said nobody could stay mad in that house; he knew because he tried. So … it didn’t matter what people said.” She paused, and I just waited. Later, questions.

Presently she said sleepily, “And it
doesn’t
matter. My mother and dad are like that now. They always will be. Nothing can change what you remember.”

I waited again. This was a long time. Finally I asked, gently, “Where are they?”

“They died.”

She slept. Somehow the moon had moved around to the east again. No: it wasn’t the moon. It was a cloudless dawn, a dilution; light staining the hem of the sky. I sank back with my elbow in the hole I had dug and my armpit on the me-shaped hummock, and looked at the sleeping girl. I knew now what the single thing was that made her different. She was as changeable as bubble-colors; she felt, immediately and noticeably, all the emotions except one. And that was her difference. She was absolutely fearless.

That story … so simply told, and then, “They died.”

Cloven hooves.

“They died.” People like that … for a time I was angrier at such a death than I was, even, at the ugly excrescence that was once a foot. Dr. Ponder seemed to know a lot about these things. “Chitinous podomorphia.” Oh, fine. That meant, “change of a foot into chitin—hoof, horn, and fingernail material.” I hadn’t gone to Ponder. I couldn’t really say why. Maybe Luana was the reason for that. Somehow I couldn’t take the idea of Luana writing up my case history on her neat file-cards. And there was no other doctor in town. Here was Claire with the same trouble, and I’d been in on that from the word go. I just did for my foot what Ponder had done for Claire’s, and hoped that Luana would never hear about it. What girl would give a tumble to a man with a cloven hoof?

The sun poked a flaming forehead over the wall of hills. By its light I studied Claire’s relaxed face. She was not beautiful, by any
means. She had a round, pleasant face. When she laughed, a transverse crease appeared under her nose; she was the only human being with that particular upper lip that I had ever liked. Her lashes were thick but not long, and now, with her eyes closed, half the beauty she had was cloaked, for she had the most brilliant eyes I had ever seen. Her jaw was round and small, slightly cleft. She missed being square and stocky by fractional proportions.

“I must be out of my mind,” I muttered. Claire was a wonderful person … a wonderful person. Genuine, honest, full of high humor, and, for me, no fireworks.

But Luana, the beautiful secretary of Dr. Ponder, now, that was a different story. She had an odd, triangular face and a skin that seemed lit softly from underneath. Her cheeks were a brighter rose than the sides of her neck but you couldn’t tell just where the gradations began. Her hair was the extremely dark but vivid red of black-iron in a forge just beginning to heat. Her hands were so delicate and smooth you’d think they’d break on a typewriter, and her canine teeth were a shade too long, so that her head looked like a flower with fangs. She had one expression—complete composure. Her unshakable poise made me grind my teeth; some way, somehow, I wanted it broken. I don’t think she had brain-one and I didn’t care; it wasn’t her brains I was after. Her face floated before me on the flames of the fireworks she generated in me, and there wasn’t a thing in the world I could do about it. When I was in town I’d date her, when I could. On the dates we didn’t talk. She danced sedately and watched movies attentively and ate pineapple frappés with delicacy and thoroughness, and I’d just sit there and bask, and count the seconds until, after I walked her to her gate, she closed it between us and leaned across for a demure kiss. Her lips were cool, smooth, and taut. Pneumatic. Then I’d stride away snarling at myself. “You’re a bumpkin,” I’d say. “You’re all feet and Adam’s apple.” I’d tell myself I had a hole in the head. I called myself forty kinds of a fool. “There’s no future in it,” I’d say. I’d tell myself, “You know that ten years from now, when the bloom is off, she’ll look like something the cat dragged in, her and her teeth.” And thinking about the teeth would make me visualize those lips again, and—so cool!

Often, those nights, I’d run into Claire, who just happened to be in Callow’s Friendly Drug and Meat Market buying a whodunit, and we’d get a soda or something and talk. Those were the talks where everything came out. I never got so thick with anyone so fast. Talking to Claire is like talking to yourself. And she told me, somehow or other, about the foot, right from the first. She didn’t tell anyone else. Except Dr. Ponder, of course.…