Страница 15 из 54
“And it is not evil?”
“Certainly. Wrongly used, it’s evil. And it was wrongly used by a lot of people, a lot of amateurs who never took the time to understand or to analyze the power they had. But Man has misused his hands, as well. He killed, he stole—”
“And you are not a warlock?”
Blaine wanted to laugh — the laugh was rising in him — but he could not laugh. There was too much terror for a man to laugh.
“No, Father, I swear to you. I am not a warlock. Nor a werewolf. Nor a—”
The old man raised his hand and stopped him.
“Now, we’re even,” he declared. “I, too, said something I should not have said.”
He rose stiffly from the bunk and held out his hand, the fingers twisted by arthritis or whatever it was that might be wrong with them.
“Thank you,” he said. “God help you.”
“And you’ll be here tonight?”
“Tonight?”
“When the people of this town come to take me out and hang me? Or do they burn them at the stake?”
The old man’s face twisted in revulsion. “You must not think such things. Surely not in this—”
“They burned down the Trading Post. They would have killed the factor.”
“That was wrong,” said Father Flanagan. “I told them that it was. For I am certain members of my parish participated. Not that they were alone in it, for there were many others. But they should have known better. I have worked for years among them against this very sort of thing.”
Blaine put out his hand and grasped the hand of Father Flanagan. The crippled fingers closed with a warm, hard grip.
“The sheriff is a good man,” said the priest. “He will do his best. I will talk to some of them myself.”
“Thank you, Father.”
“My son, are you afraid to die?”
“I don’t know. I have often thought I wouldn’t be. I’ll have to wait and see.”
“You must have faith.”
“Perhaps I will. If ever I can find if. You’ll say a prayer for me?”
“God watch over you. I’ll pray away the blessed afternoon.”
TEN
Blaine stood at the window and watched them gather in the dusk — not quickly, but slowly; not boisterously, but quietly, almost nonchalantly, as if they might be coming into town for a program at the schoolhouse or a meeting of the grange or some other normal and entirely routine function.
He could hear the sheriff stirring quietly about in the office across the corridor and he wondered if the sheriff knew — although assuredly he did, for he had lived in this town long enough to know what it was apt to do.
Blaine stood at the window and reached up and grasped the metal bars, and out beyond the bars, somewhere in the unkempt trees on the courthouse lawn, a bird was singing his last song of evening before cuddling on a branch and going fast asleep.
And as he stood there watching, the Pinkness crept out of its corner and floated in his mind, expanding until it filled his mind.
I have come to be with you, it seemed to say. I am done with hiding. I know about you now. I have explored every nook and cra
No more foolishness? asked that part of the strange duality that continued to be Blaine.
No more foolishness, said the other. No more screaming, no more ru
Except there was no death. There was no such thing as death; for the ending of a life was inexplicable. It simply could not happen, although dimly, far back in memory, there seemed there had been others it might have happened to.
Blaine left the window and went back to sit down on the bunk and he was remembering now. But the memories were dim and they came from far away and from very long ago and one could not be sure at once if they were truly memories or if they were no more than quaint imagining.
For there were many planets and many different peoples and a host of strange ideas and there were jumbled bits of cosmic information that lay all helter-skelter like a pile of ten billion heaped-up jackstraws.
“How are you feeling?” asked the sheriff, who had come so quietly across the corridor that Blaine had not heard him coming.
Blaine jerked up his head. “Why, all right, I suppose. I have just been watching your friends out across the street.”
The sheriff chuckled thinly. “No need to fear,” he said. “They haven’t got the guts to even cross the street. If they do, I’ll go out and talk with them.”
“Even if they know that I am Fishhook?”
“That’s one thing,” the sheriff said, “that they wouldn’t know.”
“You told the priest.”
“That’s different,” said the sheriff. “I had to tell the father.”
“And he would tell no one?”
“Why should he?” asked the sheriff.
And there was no answer; it was one of those questions which could not be answered.
“And you sent a message.”
“But not to Fishhook. To a friend who’ll send it on to Fishhook.”
“It was wasted effort,” Blaine told him. “You should not have bothered. Fishhook knows where I am.”
For they’d have hounders on the trail by now; they would have picked up the trail many hours ago. There had been but one chance for him to have escaped — to have traveled rapidly and very much alone.
They might be in this very town tonight, he thought, and a surge of hope flowed through him. For Fishhook would scarcely let a posse do him in.
Blaine got up from the bunk and crossed over to the window.
“You better get out there now,” he told the sheriff. “They’re already across the street.”
For they had to hurry, naturally. They must get what they had to do done quickly before the fall of deeper night. When darkness fell in all obscurity, they must be snug inside their homes, with the doors double-locked and barred, with the shutters fastened, with the drapes drawn tight, with the hex signs bravely hanging at every opening. For then, and only then, would they be safe from the hideous forces that prowled the outer darkness, from banshee and werewolf, from vampire, goblin, sprite.
He heard the sheriff turning and going back across the corridor, back into the office. Metal scraped as a gun was taken from a rack, and there was a hollow clicking as the sheriff broke the breech and fed shells into the barrels.
The mob moved like a dark and flowing blanket and it came in utter silence aside from the shuffling of its feet.
Blaine watched it, fascinated, as if it were a thing that stood apart from him, as if it were a circumstance which concerned him not at all. And that was strange, he told himself, knowing it was strange, for the mob was coming for him.
But it made no difference, for there was no death. Death was something that made no sense at all and nothing to be thought of. It was a foolish wastefulness and not to be tolerated.
And who was it that said that?
For he knew that there was death — that there must be death if there were evolution, that death was one of the mechanisms that biologically spelled progress and advancement for evolutionary species.
You, he said to the thing within his mind — a thing that was a thing no longer, but was a part of him — it is your idea. Death is something that you can’t accept.
But something that in all truth must surely be accepted. For it was an actuality, it was an ever-presence, it was something that everything must live with through the shortness of its life.
There was death and it was close — much too close for comfort or denial. It was in the mumble of the mob just outside the building, the mob that now had passed from sight and quit its shuffling, that even now was massed outside the courthouse entrance, arguing with the sheriff. For the sheriff’s booming voice came clearly through the outer door, calling upon those outside to break up and go back to their homes.