The Doomsday Men

by J. B. Priestley

  “What’s that up there?” asked Malcolm pointing forward at a speck near the place where this road curved out of their sight.

  Hooker examined it, then handed the glasses over. “Looks like a miner’s cabin or a small ranch-house to me. Not their place, of course, not big enough. The fellow in Barstow whose brother had worked up there told me that this Castello of the MacMichaels was an elaborate affair, towers and what not, with room for plenty of people. But if anybody’s living in that shack, they’ll be able to tell us something. Let’s get on.”

  They rushed through the valley at a smart pace, and then climbed the rather stiff gradient at the other side, where the road showed traces of the battles that the heavy motor-trucks had fought there. Towards the top of the road the slopes on each side were much steeper, until at the very top, where the road vanished from view, they were almost like the jaws of a gorge.

  “If they do live somewhere on the other side,” said Malcolm, “they’ve a fine natural entrance. Almost like a gateway. That hut there is bigger than I thought, and I think I can see smoke, so there must be somebody there. It’s a little off the road.”

  As they neared the top, his excitement mounted too. Was this the enchanted place, the castle of the sleeping princess? Would he, in another minute or two, be looking down on the mysterious towers her father had built in this wilderness? Was this the end of so many, many hours, since they had stood together looking down on the glittering Riviera, hours of confused thinking and dreaming, vast vague hopes, self-reproaches, idiotic determinations?

  “I believe we’re here,” he cried, in his excitement.

  “Take it easy, boy,” Hooker replied, with a grin.

  Leaving the shack a little to the right, where it was perched above the road, with a fine look-out down into the valley, they swept forward to the summit of the road, but only to find the way barred, and barred just short of the summit, so that they could not see into the valley or canyon beyond. It was a thorough job too, and a recent one. A high and strong fence, made of both plain and barbed wire, came down at each side, descending from each wall of rock, and these fences met at a high and new metal gate, covering the width of the road. On this gate was a notice as new and bold as itself: Lost Lake. Strictly Private. And they soon discovered, on getting out, that the gate was securely locked. Standing there, they looked at one another in a mixed fashion, a trifle disappointed at being held up, but still triumphant at having found the place.

  Hooker looked about him shrewdly, and Malcolm tried to follow his example, although he was still too excited to be very observant.

  “There go the pylons,” said Hooker, pointing. “There’s a telephone line too. See it, just by the shack there. I suppose the fellow up there thought he might as well be on the telephone while they were about it.” He went nearer the gate and fences, looked closely at them, and then turned. “If you ask me, they can electrify this little outfit, and give it plenty of juice too. If you walked into that on a dark night and they had the current turned on, you might be fried in no time. But they can turn lights on.” And he pointed up to two powerful lights above the gate that Malcolm had not noticed before.

  “I don’t like this, y’know, Darbyshire,” Hooker continued, returning from his inspection and lighting a cigarette, “I don’t like it at all. Down there in Barstow—in fact, a long time before I arrived in Barstow—I’d begun to think I was imagining things, like our mysterious pal last night. Now I’m not so sure.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” protested Malcolm. “After all if they want to be private, y’know, Hooker—why shouldn’t they keep people out?”

  “If it was back East I could understand it. But they don’t do things like this in the West. People don’t shut themselves up and tell you to keep out. Why should they? A place like this isn’t just off Main Street. And look at the expense and trouble they’ve gone to—I tell you, it’s screwy.” He looked thoughtfully at Malcolm.

  The latter was not sure what “screwy” meant, but he could see what Hooker, not given to imagining things, was driving at. And now there came, not to subdue his excitement but to change its colour and flavour, a sudden sense of the inexplicable and sinister. This quality of things had been there, he had already felt dimly, in Andrea’s mysterious background, and now that he had crossed the world and at last come within a mile or two of the girl herself, with the very country of that background piled up round him, he realised it very sharply and unpleasantly. And somehow here, standing in front of a fence that could easily annihilate an intruder, it did not seem absurdly improbable that their acquaintance of last night, Edlin, should have disappeared so mysteriously. Now there seemed to be nothing to prevent this and even stranger things happening. The dream through which he had moved all day was taking on something of a nightmare aspect. Rather impatient with himself, he looked round again, then pointed up at the shack.

  “There’s somebody outside now,” he remarked, trying to be casual. “We’d better go up and ask him what happens here.”

  They ran the car up to the tiny porch of the shack, for there was an uneven but easily passable track up from the road, and as they covered the few hundred yards there, Hooker observed: “Looks like a typical Western old-timer. We’ll go easy with him. They’re queer, slow old cusses, most of these chaps. Comes from having spent most of their lives in places like this.”

  The old-timer, dressed in a faded maroon shirt and blue jeans, was an oldish fellow with an unruly thatch of hair, very white against his leathery brown wrinkled face, which also set in relief his clear-blue, candid eyes. He was enjoying a corncob pipe, with an immense sense of leisure. He appeared to come out of a deep and very agreeable reverie in order to observe their existence and address them; and both his appearance and manner suggested the Will Rogers type of homely philosopher and humorist. He was almost too good to be true.

  “Well, folks,” he remarked, without malice and quite simply, “you’ll have taken the wrong road, I reckon.”

  Malcolm was about to reply, but felt a nudge from Hooker, who replied casually: “We didn’t know this road was closed here.”

  “Shorely is. Then again it ain’t, ’cos it don’t go no place, bein’ private.” He said this very slowly, almost tasting his words, as if they all had unlimited time for this chat and might as well make the most of it. “But didn’t you see the notice ’long there at Blackwater where she turns off the public highway, tellin’ you this don’t lead nowhere?” There was nothing sharp, cross-questioning about this query: he seemed to ask out of mild curiosity.

  “No, we didn’t come that way,” Hooker explained carefully. “We struck this road just over the other side—there was a rough track, and I’d lost my way before that, and had to take several of these tracks—so we never saw any notice. It must have been much farther along.”

  The old-timer thought a moment or two, then said slowly, keeping his candid blue gaze fixed on Hooker: “I reckon you must ha’ been out Five Buzzards way.” When he had heard that they had eaten their lunch near the old mine, he nodded in slow-motion, and continued: “You were smart, I’m thinking, not to have lost yourselves under Five Buzzards, but mebbe if you’d been smarter you’d not ha’ been out that way at all. Ain’t prospectin’? No, I figured you weren’t prospectin’.”

  “Just looking round, that’s all,” replied Hooker.

  “Easterners, I reckon?”

  “I am. He’s an Englishman.”

  The old-timer turned his candid blue gaze now on Malcolm, who felt he was being examined—though with no intentional rudeness—as a new specimen.

  “That so? Well, I ain’t seen an Englishman this long time. Worked with one once, though, out at Bullfrog.” He paused, shook the mouthpiece of his pipe, wiped it on his jeans, then resumed. “So you’re two young fellers just lookin’ round, eh? And now you’re at the top o’ the wrong road, an’
a long way to go back to anywhere. Well, I reckon that comes of bein’ in a hurry—even when you don’t know where you’re goin’, you young fellers now’s in a mighty hurry—and comes of not lettin’ her run just natural. That’s what I’m always saying to Maw. ‘Now then, Maw,’ I says, ‘just let her run natural, that’s all.’”

  As if waiting for her name to be mentioned as a cue to enter the scene Maw now came out of the shack. She was the feminine counterpart of her husband, a small leathery elderly woman, though younger than he was and grimmer, more suspicious, as if life under these conditions was harder for the female than for the male. She hardly glanced at the newcomers, and Malcolm felt that she did not need to because she had already had a good look at them through the window.

  “What’s this you’re sayin’, Paw?” she enquired.

  Paw winked all round. “I’m just a-tellin’ how I asks you to let everything just run natural.”

  “You and your run natural!” she replied, with scorn. “And have you come far?”

  “From Barstow,” said Hooker.

  “Take a powerful lot o’ gasoline to get back to Barstow,” observed the old-timer.

  Hooker replied vaguely that it would, and now changed the subject. “No, we didn’t see the notice. Who does this belong to?” He tried to be as casual as possible, but Malcolm could not help fancying that he had not been quite successful.

  The old-timers, however, did not appear to notice anything. Maw left the answer to Paw, but did not leave them.

  “Some folks by the name o’ MacMichael.”

  “MacMichael.” Hooker repeated the name as if he had never heard it before. Malcolm tried to look uninterested.

  “What’s the idea—wiring themselves in like this?” asked Hooker, not disguising his curiosity in this matter.

  “Eastern ways, I reckon. What would you say, Maw? Maw’s folks came from back East, an’ there’s times when she lets me know it—eh, Maw?”

  Maw did not reply and Malcolm, suddenly looking up, was rather disconcerted to find she was staring hard at him.

  “That power line,” said Hooker, pointing, “must join the one coming from Boulder Dam. The people here must have arranged to have a sub-station specially for them. That must have cost them something.”

  “Mebbe it did, but I couldn’t rightly say. Seems you know more about it than I do, but then you might be in the electrical line o’ business yourself, eh?”

  Hooker replied that he wasn’t, but knew something about it. There was now a long pause. Maw rocked herself vigorously in a little chair; Paw smoked peacefully; and the two young men stood in front of them feeling rather awkward. Around them the afternoon waned, with magnificent blue shadows.

  “Jove—I’m thirsty,” Malcolm announced, not merely to break the silence or out of policy but simply because he was thirsty.

  “So am I,” said Hooker, giving the old-timer a glance.

  He responded amiably. “You bet! You can have a pitcher o’ good water—cold as ice water it is, straight out o’ the mountain—or Maw might make us all a cup o’ coffee.”

  “I wish,” said Hooker, not without tact, “you’d sell us a jug of good strong coffee.”

  Maw nodded, then looked at Paw, who also nodded. “What Maw means by that is that we ain’t sellin’ no coffee—but you can have a cup with us an’ welcome—so long as we let it all run natural and put it on a proper straight visitin’ footing. My name’s Larrigan, which makes Maw Mrs. Larrigan, though she ain’t none too proud of it, far as I’ve seen. And what may yours be?”

  They were only too glad to humour the old fellow, and gave him their names and told him where they came from, and, when he asked a further question, what they did when they were at home.

  “There, Maw,” he announced, with a twinkling sort of humorous pride, very much in character, “you can set to makin’ your coffee an’ know who’s visitin’ with you this afternoon—Mr. Darbyshire, who builds houses over there in England, and Dr. Hooker, a scientific professor from back East.”

  Maw smiled and nodded. “Shorely, Paw! An’ if you’ll just show ’em what there is to see, I’ll have everything ready when you come back.”

  Mr. Larrigan, in his own leisurely fashion, now joined them, while his wife went bustling indoors, and drawling away he took them at an easy pace up the steep ground at the back of the shack, past several outhouses, to a spot where he said they would have the best view. Here they stood and gazed at the distant shining peaks and down into the valley, already deep in shadow though there were one or two shafts of golden light still finding their way into it, and Mr. Larrigan carefully pointed out this peak and that, exchanged geological information with Hooker, who found him more knowledgeable than he had expected, and told them one or two mining stories. He said nothing more about the MacMichaels, and never even referred again to the road below, which to Malcolm had MacMichael traced all along it. Indeed, Malcolm found it hard not to keep his eyes fixed on that road, and once or twice Mr. Larrigan had caught him at it, when he ought to have been looking where Mr. Larrigan’s finger was pointing, and Malcolm fancied that the old chap had then given him a sharp look. But then the old gossip probably didn’t like to think he was not succeeding in entertaining his visitors. And Malcolm felt it a pity he could not explain that he was looking down there because every moment he hoped he would see a girl in a car; for he liked Mr. Larrigan and hated to hurt his feelings. Evidently Mrs. Larrigan was as leisurely as her husband, for she took a long time preparing that coffee. At last, even Mr. Larrigan himself had to acknowledge that.

  “Maw don’t seem to be lettin’ things run natural down there,” he observed, in his own vein of grave waggery. “Seems to me we bin waitin’ some time for that coffee. But it’ll be good when it comes. Maw’s shore slow when she’s in that humour, but she don’t do no sloppin’ an’ messin’ about, same as so many womenfolk, an’ call it cookin’. An’ I’m hopin’ there might be a slice o’ pie for us, the way things is goin’. Reckon we’ve all earned a slice o’ pie waitin’ this long. Now there she is—wavin’ an’ screechin’ as if she’d bin doin’ the waitin’ an’ not us. Come an’ get it. All right, Maw,” he called down, in his thin high voice, “just let her run natural—we’re comin’. This way, folks, it’s shorter by a step or two.”

  The shack faced west, and some of the gold piling up magnificently in the sky spilled in, to show them as they entered a neat cosy living-room, as unpretentious and homely as the Larrigans themselves, and a table rich with pie and cookies and the heavenly smell of good coffee.

  “Everything runnin’ natural, Maw?” asked Mr. Larrigan.

  “Yes, Paw, but before you set down to your coffee, you better come round an’ help me with the water—that pump’s stickin’ again. No,” as Hooker and Malcolm offered to help, “you set right down an’ help yourselves. Me an’ Paw can fix this in no time.”

  The coffee was very good. The apple pie looked very good too: it was not one of those pies in which the crust and the fruit are still leading separate existences and continue being at odds inside the eater; you could see at once that in this artful golden confection the pastry had probably shared its essential fat goodness with the fruit, which had immediately responded by covering the hollows in the crust with its own jellied sweetness. Malcolm and Hooker looked at that pie, and then at one another.

  “Have a piece of pie, Darbyshire?”

  “Thanks, Hooker. But after you.”

  “No, here you are.”

  Mr. Larrigan had done only the barest justness to his wife’s capacity as a creator of pies. There might be something rather grim and formidable about Mrs. Larrigan; she might be too little aware of the easier feminine graces, too contemptuous of womanly charm; she might be disinclined at times—in Mr. Larrigan’s great phrase—to let things run natural; but she could make a pie.

>   “Hooker,” said Malcolm, rather sternly, “we must insist upon paying for this.”

  “I doubt if they’ll take anything. These old Westerners have their own pride.”

  “I know. And I appreciate it. But unless we agree that they must be paid, I don’t like taking another piece of pie.”

  “We must pay them then, Darbyshire, because I’m going to have another piece.”

  After a further interval, Malcolm said dreamily: “I don’t ever remember eating pie and drinking coffee at this time of day before, but there’s something to be said for it. I believe I could stay here a week or two, just sitting out there, staring at the mountains and dropping a philosophical remark now and then, and coming in three or four times a day for more coffee and pie. Not a bad life at all. Nothing to worry about. That’s what’s the matter with us, Hooker. Look at these people. They don’t care.”

  “Not a hoot, I guess. They’ve enough to live on, and plenty of space, and peace and quietness,” said Hooker. “If I hadn’t some work to do, this would be the kind of life I’d like to lead. Think of all these business men worrying themselves sick and silly, into the grave—and all for what? Pa Larrigan here is better off than any of them.”

  “Nice old boy, Pa Larrigan. I took to him at once.”

  “Typical old-timer. I’ve met lots of ’em.”

  “Didn’t tell us much about the MacMichaels, did he?”

  “No. Wasn’t interested, I guess. And these Western folks, though they seem to say anything that comes into their heads, are inclined to be cautious really.”

  “I was amused at the way in which they insisted upon knowing our names and a bit more about us, before they’d ask us in for coffee.” And Malcolm smiled.