Manly Wade Wellman - John Thunstone 01 (5 page)

 
          
“That
sounds like good advice," said Thunstone. “I’ll try to follow it.
To meet him."

 
          
“Yus,"
said Porrask. He swigged down the remainder of his beer, got powerfully to his
feet, and tramped away.

 
          
Thunstone,
too, sipped the last of his own drink, picked up his cane, and went out at the
door.

 
          
A
bus had stopped. People got out and moved away purposefully, bound here or
there for the homes that waited for them after the day’s work somewhere else.
He lifted his wrist and looked at his watch.
Half past six
, but the sun still up there. Evenings
lasted late in
England
this time of year. He would have time this evening to explore something
of Claines.

 
          
Carefully
he threaded his way through the traffic on Trail Street and on the far side he
turned to his left and walked east in front of the small, neatly kept cottages
with flowers in the frontyards. Beyond these rose huge, dark-stoned Chimney
Pots, with a side street running between its grounds and those of the nearest
cottage. That side street ran southward toward the great rise of ground they
called Sweepside. Thunstone walked that way, swinging his cane.

 
          
The
street was gravel-strewn, not paved, with deep ruts. The path on which he
walked beside it was set with flat stones like cobbles. He strolled to another
graveled street beyond, crossed that, and passed more cottages. A dog came and
trotted with him, then abruptly ran into an alley. From afar off came the
voices of children, seemingly at play, but he saw no human being.

 
          
He
passed still more cottages. They looked shabbier than the ones on
Trail Street
. They were old, subdued in color. One was
of crumbling brown brick, another of stone cut long ago. A tawny cat was seated
on the thatched roof of that one, looking down at Thunstone with the intent
appraisal of cats. The next cottage seemed to have no visible foundation. It
might have been washed up on a beach. Thunstone studied the houses. How old
were they?
Of what century?
Claines was old, old.

 
          
Overhead
swooped
a bird, lean and dark, seeming to glide on its
unmoving wings. He did not know what bird it was. As it skimmed above him, it
emitted a grating caw of sound.

 
          
Now
he had come to what must be the edge of Claines. The dwellings here looked
primitive, almost. He wondered what sort of people lived in them. Nobody was
visible, in the yards or at the doors or windows. Yet, he told himself, there
must be something inside some of the houses. Perhaps the something, the
somethings, watched him.

 
          
Before him, between the houses and the coarse grass of the slope,
ran a wire fence, breast high.
A wooden sign was hung to it:

 
          
PRIVATE
PROPERTY
 
DO NOT ENTER
 
WITHOUT PERMISSION OF
 
G. ENSLEY

           
Just the other side of the fence ran
a nimble stream of water, a brook perhaps four feet across. It sang happily and
scuttled away eastward somewhere. He could not see where it began on Sweepside.

 
          
He
stepped close against the fence and gazed up the spacious rise of Sweepside to
where sprawled the great, uncouth image of Old Thunder.

 
          
The
white blotch of the figure lay somewhat on a slant. Two men did something at
the edge of the thing, perhaps cutting away the turf from the chalk as Gates,
the curate, had said. They were dwarfed by Old Thunder. Old Thunder had a round
pale blank of a head. This was set without benefit of neck on an
awkward-looking oblong body, and below the body extended two thin, unjointed
legs that terminated in big flat feet. Primitive, thought Thunstone. Naturally
it would be primitive, since its origin must go back to the most primitive of
men, or so Gates believed.

           
Thunstone let his eyes roam over the
great green slope. He saw there, singly or in huddles, woolly sheep that
cropped at the grass. Two spotted dogs lay at strategic points. Plainly they
were there to supervise the flock, guard and govern it.

 
          
Sheep,
mused Thunstone.
Old, old companions of man.
Dogs may
have been the first animals to join the ancient primitive stone-chip- pers, but
sheep were ancient in the relationship. Some scholars thought they had been
tamed as long ago as eight thousand years. Thunstone wondered if the original
tamers might not have been children, lugging the little toddling wild
lambs
home to play with. Wasn’t Abel, second son of Adam,
called a keeper of sheep in the Book of Genesis? And there was a religious
symbolism, too; “The Lord is my shepherd,” said the best known of the Psalms.
And here on Sweepside above Claines, sheep still were kept and companioned by
man as in the long ago, the so long ago.

 
          
He
turned and looked back along the way he had come.

 
          
On
the footpath in front of the row of houses toward
Trail Street
, at a point two crossings back from the
fence,
stood a motionless figure. It looked as black as a
silhouette in ink. It seemed to be dressed in a square, sooty-dark coat despite
the warm weather, and drawn low on its head was a broad, slouched hat of the
same color. Thunstone started to walk toward it.

 
          
At
once the figure swiveled around and headed back toward
Trail Street
. It moved fast, faster than Thunstone. He
quickened his own pace. The sooty figure was almost scurrying now. It cut
across the street, toward where trees grew in a clump behind Chimney Pots. It
vanished among those trees like a shadow.

 
          
Thunstone
took his own way back to Mrs. Fothergill’s. Beside the steps stood a squat
black motorcycle, chained to immobility. Another guest had come, then. As he
entered the hall, Mrs. Fothergill’s ringing voice hailed him from her front
room.

 
          
“Oh, Mr. Thunstone.
A note was left for you.”

 
          
She
came and gave him an unsealed envelope. “Thank you,” he said, and opened it.

 
          
A
small card inside, with smooth script upon it:

           
Mr. Gram Ensley would esteem it as a
favor if Mr. Thunstone would call at Chimney Pots at any convenient time
tomorrow morning.

 
          
Mrs.
Fothergill waited expectantly. “Good news, I hope?” she said. “IPs from
somebody who wants to talk to me,” he said, and mounted the steps to his own
room.

           
He filled a straight-stemmed pipe
from a leather pouch, tamped the tobacco carefully, and struck a match to light
it. Then he sat down at the little desk. Swiftly he wrote two letters, one to
Professor Leslie Spayte at the
University
of
London
, the other to Judge Pursuivant in
America
. Then he searched out his notebook and
began to write down yet more of his observations. On one page he set down a
list of names:

 
          
ELWAIN
HAWES, landlord of the Moonraven, a pleasant public house. Food is good there.
Hawes is friendly, ditto Mrs. Hawes. They may have information.

 
          
DAVID
GATES, the curate who presides at St. Jude's.
Oxford
graduate, young, athletic
and proud of it, somewhat intense.
Ambitious to be a vicar.
Studies the history
and prehistory of Claines, wants to write about it, will talk of it.

 
          
----------
DYMOCK, the local constable, only officer of the law in Claines. Also young,
also a university man (
Reading
), also ambitious.
Seems the sort to rise in his
profession.
Talks readily, though officially.
Must talk to him again.

 
          
MRS.
ALMA FOTHERGILL, my landlady.
Cordial, a trifle gushing.
Somewhere in her forties, very ready to tell that once she was on the stage.
May or may not know a lot about Claines, though she says she was bom here.

 
          
CONSTANCE BAILEY, who works for Mrs. Fothergill.
A rather good-looking girl, black hair, green eyes.
Calls herself a white witch.
Seems to have something to
tell, and seems afraid to tell it.
Suggests that Claines has
secrets.
Must try to find what she’s holding back, and why.

 
          
ALBERT PORRASK, who operates a garage and machine shop.
Big, rough-mannered, truculent.
Seems to
resent my presence here.
Would like to be thought
dangerous.
Is he? He and others mentioned the name of GRAM ENSLEY, who
owns the biggest house in Claines, and apparently much of Claines besides. Who
and what is he?

           
Thunstone stopped writing and read
through all his notes. Then he added a last few words:

 
          
Who
followed me as I walked through Claines to Sweepside Ridge, and why did he run
away?

           
He closed the notebook and slid it
back into his jacket pocket. It had grown dark outside while he had written. He
felt tired, though it was not really late as yet. After all, he had been busy
in
London
before he had taken the bus to Claines and
had busied himself here.

 
          
He
stripped off his clothes, hung them up, and from his big suitcase took a light
robe and put it on. In the bathroom at the end of the hall he scrubbed his
teeth industriously, then turned on a hot shower and soaped his brawny body
well from head to foot and rinsed off the suds. Back in his room, he freed the
silver blade from his cane and carefully wiped it with a silk handkerchief and
sheathed it again. After that, he filled his pipe out of a different pouch from
the one he had left in the pocket of his jacket. Without lighting it, he sat to
look out at the window.

 
          
A
wind blew outside, for the ivy-cloaked tree at the side of the house seemed to
hunch and weave, seemed almost to walk. The sky overhead was black velvet,
spangled all over with winking stars. In one quarter of it stood the moon,
pallidly yellow, greatening lopsidedly from its first quarter a few nights ago.

 
          
Thunstone
sniffed at the bowl of his pipe. It had a special odor, for the tobacco he had
stuffed into it was blended with kinnikinnick and the crumbled bark of the red
willow. Long Spear, an Indian friend, had told him that to smoke that mixture
was a strong guard against all evil magic. He turned toward the window again.

 
          
There
was no window, only a blurred dimness.
And no wall.
In
just that instant, it was as if Thunstone were somewhere in the open. He
strained his eyes to see.

           
No window, no room. He did not sit
in a
chair,
he perched on a sort of hummock of earth.
He moved a foot. Under it turned something like a pebble. He was not in the
room he had rented, not anymore. He did not know where he was.

 
          
And
no moon, no stars.
Perhaps no sky.
He gathered a sense
of a stretch of land, tufted here and there with trees and brush. There was no
Trail Street
over there, certainly no lights. Far in the
distance he sensed, rather than saw, deeply dark hills. Among the tufts moved
things, stealthy things, darker than the dimness around them, things perhaps as
large as men. They seemed to approach.

 
          
Thunstone
jammed his pipe into his mouth, rummaged a pack of matches. He struck one
alight, and in its glow he saw his room again —the bureau, the door, the bed.
He set the flame to his pipe and it glowed redly. He blew puffs of smoke, to
the north, the west, the south,
the
east, then upward
and downward. Six puffs in all, as Long Spear had taught him, to the four winds
and the two directions, the ancient Dakotah way.