Manly Wade Wellman - John Thunstone 01 (9 page)

 
          
“Thank
you.”

           
Ensley took a bottle from a sideboard
and poured into two glasses. Then he spurted soda from a siphon—a gasogene,
that was called by Holmes and Watson in the old stories—and handed one to
Thunstone. “Cheers,” he said, lifting his own drink.

 
          
“Cheers,”
Thunstone echoed him, and sipped. It was scotch, of course. When the English
said whiskey, they meant scotch. It was good scotch.

 
          
“You
say you came here for curiosity's sake,” said Ensley. “With someone like you,
though, that means research. How does your research come on?”

 
          
“I
don't know if it’s truly research,” smiled Thunstone. “I can only say that I'm
glad I visited Claines. As for what I'm after, suppose I just call myself a
truth seeker.”

 
          
“Truth
seeker,” repeated Ensley, and took another swallow of his drink. “A looker into
the nature of reality, is that it? Well, perhaps I’m a truth seeker, too. What
is truth?”

 
          
“Pontius
Pilate asked that once, and didn't wait for Jesus to answer him,” said
Thunstone. “It’s a pity he didn't wait; Jesus was apt to give interesting
answers to questions. The nature of reality, you say. The demonstrated fact is,
when strange things are examined, the strangeness goes out of them. They become
workaday facts. The impossible is always happening.”

 
          
“I
like that,” said Ensley, wagging his head over it. “You're right, Mr.
Thunstone; you have a way of being right. For instance,
an
impossibility
like space travel has become a familiar thing, almost a
commonplace. The splitting of the atom—I suggest it's too bad that we made a
reality out of that. What else? What story that's called impossible today?
The vampire?
The werewolf?
The dead rising to haunt us?”

 
          
Thunstone
did not remark that he had in his time encountered vampires, werewolves, and
ghosts of the dead, all three. “What you mean,” he did say, “is that rationalization
can take the super out of supernatural.”

 
          
“True
again,” applauded Ensley. “You've finished your drink; will you take another?
No? Then let's go into the dining room and see what Mrs. Sayle has for us.”

           
The room behind had a long table of
dark, polished wood, set with lacy mats and silver and plates. A woman waited
there, pudgy and round-faced, with red-dyed hair. She wore an apron worked in
blue yam with stars. As Ensley came in, she looked at him almost
apprehensively. Plainly she feared him.

 
          
“This
is Mr. Thunstone, Mrs. Sayle, and I hope you've done us justice today,"
Ensley said loftily.

 
          
“Ow,"
she said, “quite simple, I fear, but I hope
good
. I'll
just fetch it in."

 
          
And
she bustled out.

 
          
Ensley
sat at the head of the table, and Thunstone at a place beside him. There were
glasses of cold white wine. Mrs. Sayle scurried in again with something in an
oval china tureen, and held it for them to help themselves. It turned out to be
a creamy Newburg of shrimp, and with it she served them small potatoes and
greens cooked with tiny slivers of ham. There was also a salad of lettuce,
sauced with something mustardy. Then she brought a straw tray with slices of
crusty bread. Nothing simple about this lunch, thought Thunstone as he ate with
a good appetite. He wondered why Mrs. Sayle sounded nervous.

 
          
“Those
greens are picked here and there on my property," Ensley told Thunstone.
“Wild greens. Hob gathers them; he knows which are good."

 
          
“Delicious,"
said Thunstone, eating a forkful.

 
          
“I
take leave to observe how impressed you are with evidences of antiquity in and
around Claines," said Ensley, refilling Thunstone’s wineglass from a
carafe.

 
          
“Naturally
I am," agreed Thunstone. “In America, we date antiquities back no further
than, say, Jamestown and Plymouth Rock. Oh yes, and in Spanish America, to
Columbus and the various conquests. Earlier than these things, we’re
prehistoric.
Though we’re not young in our prehistory,
either.
Some paleontologists reckon that men have been in America for
forty thousand years, maybe even longer than that."

 
          
“Forty
thousand years makes my researches here seem only of yesterday," said
Ensley. “I mentioned, as I remember, that I incline to date Old Thunder at ten
thousand years ago, the late Stone Age. But to that modest yesterday I pay very
much attention.”

           
Thunstone was silent for a moment,
then
decided to say what he had in mind. “I wondered why you
were so short and sharp with that pathetic little girl on Sweepside,” he said.

           
“Constance Bailey.” Ensley grimaced
and glared above his wineglass. “That little poseur, that trickster,” he
snarled out. “With her pretense of being a witch, what she calls the Old Religion.
How old is witchcraft?”

           
“It’s prehistoric, I suppose,” said
Thunstone.

           
“It’s a newcomer,” pronounced
Ensley. “There are some oldish things in it, but for the chief part it’s just a
mockery of various established faiths. Here, and in Europe generally, it’s a
mockery of Christianity, apes Christianity and rebels against it. Among the
Jews, it sneers at the Talmud. It's anti-Koran among Moslem peoples, and so on.
And this Bailey wench, she coos her promises to ignorant people in Claines,
tricks them into thinking she can help them.” He furrowed his face. “Those are
some of the things I hold against her. Her witchcraft is parvenu, a lot newer
than my yesterday we talked about.”

 
          
“Does she do harm?”
Thunstone asked.

 
          
“She’s
a nuisance. I don’t have time for nuisances in Claines.” Thunstone changed the
subject. “You feel confident that you can refer the Old Thunder image to times
ten thousand years ago.” “Well, as to that, stone tools have been turned up in
the chalk of the outline. A couple of those points I showed you came from
there. I suggest that Paleolithic people first dug Old Thunder out of the turf
and down to the chalk for all to see.”

           
They finished their lunch, and
Thunstone reflected that it had been a fine one, that Mrs. Sayle had not needed
to apologize for it. Or had she? He and Ensley left the table, and in the front
room Ensley chose another decanter from the sideboard and poured them small
snifters of brandy. It was excellent brandy.

 
          
“I’ve
decided to show you something else I’ve dug up hereabouts,” said Ensley.
“Something I don’t show everyone.”

 
          
He
pulled open a drawer in a desk and took out what seemed to be a bone, slender
and brown with age, and perhaps eight inches long. He handed it to Thunstone.
“What do you make of it?” he asked. “I’d say it came from the wing of a large
bird,” said Thunstone. “From the wing of an eagle, I’d hazard. And look at it;
it's been worked.”

           
Thunstone turned the bone over and
over in his big hands. At the large end appeared a deep notch, and along the
length showed six small holes that must have been made by a drill. There were
scratched lines here and there, in triangles and squares.

 
          
“It
seems to have been a flute,” said Thunstone, handing it back. “Did men of the
Old Stone Age have those?”

 
          
“To
judge from this one, they did. Probably they made some of their flutes from
wood or reeds, long ago gone to dust. And undoubtedly they had drums, too,
drums that have perished. But this is of bone. It has survived the thousands of
years.”

 
          
Ensley
set the notched end to his pursed lips, arranged his fingertips on the holes.
Blowing, he achieved a trill of sound, and the
movement of
his fingers made it turn
into a strange, minor melody. Thunstone felt a
current within himself, like the current he had known when he had touched the
Dream Rock, the outline of Old Thunder. Ensley lowered the flute and grinned.

 
          
“They
could make music of a sort, right enough,” he said. “What else interests you,
Mr. Thunstone?”

 
          
“These
paintings of yours,” said Thunstone.

 
          
He
took time to study the paintings. Two of them were so blurry as to defy
critical appraisal. Another seemed to be a view of Sweepside, complete with Old
Thunder, but there was an impression of fog. The last of the display was clear
enough. It showed a prone cross with a human figure spiked to it, and around
this danced a dozen smaller figures, grotesquely proportioned.

 
          
“Who
did these?” he asked Ensley.

 
          
“My
friend who's staying here,” Ensley replied, stowing the bone flute back in its
drawer.
“Talented at painting and other things.
But
from time to time she turns to me for guidance.”

 
          
She,
Ensley had said. His guest, then, was a woman who could paint, could play the
piano. Why hadn’t she appeared for lunch? Thunstone did not ask.

           
The two talked about trifles in
Claines, and finally Thunstone took up his cane and said his good byes and
thanks.

 
          
“Not
at all,” said Ensley. “I’ve come to the conclusion that your presence here has
its certain importances. Now, let’s see; tomorrow is Saturday the third, and I
fear I’ll be fairly well occupied. What are your plans for Sunday?”

 
          
“I’ve
been asked to come to church, and I’ll do that.”

 
          
“Well
then, after church, would you care to come here for noon dinner and some more
talk?”

 
          
“I'd
be very glad to come.”

 
          
He
walked out. Hob Sayle, at his work in the frontyard, stared after him but said
nothing.

 
          
He
strolled past the cottages to the west of Chimney Pots and to Mrs.
Fothergill’s. Entering, he mounted the stairs. In the hall above, Constance
Bailey plied a broom.

 
          
“Do
you ever ride that broom?” he teased her.

 
          
“I
just sweep with it,” she said shyly.

 
          
From
his pocket he brought the envelope with the Saint-John’s- wort.

 
          
“Here,”
he said, “these are the plants Mr. Ensley made you throw away. I picked them up
and saved them to give to you.”

 
          
“Oh!”
she half-gasped and reached out for the envelope. Her slender fingers trembled
against his thick ones. “Oh,” she said again. “I thank you, Mr. Thunstone.”

 
          
“I
didn’t think that a plant called Saint-John’s-wort could be an evil one.” He
smiled down at her.

 
          
“No,
it’s good,” she said. “Mix its juice with olive oil and wine, and it’s good for
cuts and bruises. You can rub it in for arthritis. It’s a holy plant.”

 
          
“And,
being a white witch, you try to do
good
.”

 
          
“Yes,
yes, and I know poor people in Claines who can be helped by this. Thank you
again.”

 
          
He
went into his room, sat down, and brought out his notebook to write down a
number of things that had occurred to him during his visit with Ensley. After
that he wrote a letter to Judge Pursuivant in America.

           
Outside in the hall, Constance
Bailey bustled at her work. She began to sing, in a rather tuneful voice.
Thunstone knew it was an old song, one he had heard when he was a little boy: