The Potter of Firsk and Other Stories

by Jack Vance

  Jean calmly shook her head. “I don’t believe any of it.”

  “I see.” Art Marsile nodded thoughtfully. “Who’s going with you?”

  “Don Berwick. And—” Jean named others of the party.

  Hugh spoke from across the room, his voice rich with disgust. “They call it a weenie-roast. All they do is go up there and neck.”

  Jean performed an impudent dance-step. “We’ve got to neck somewhere.”

  Art Marsile grunted. “Just don’t get in a jam.”

  “Father!”

  “You’re human, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, but I’m—well…”

  Hugh said, “They go out in the country and drink beer.”

  “I don’t either!”

  “The guys do.”

  “I know they do,” growled Art Marsile. “And you know how I know? Because I used to do the same thing. And I’d do it again if I could get some pretty young girl to go with me.”

  “Father!” cried Jean. “You’re bad!”

  “Probably no worse than Don Berwick. So you be careful.”

  “Yes, Father!”

  The door-bell rang; Don Berwick, a stocky square-shouldered lad of seventeen, entered, spent a few minutes in civil small-talk with Art Marsile and Hugh; then he and Jean went to the door. Art followed them out on the porch. “Look here, Don. I don’t want no boozing. Not when you’re driving a car with Jean inside. Understand?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Okay. Have yourself a good time.” He went back inside the house. Hugh was standing near the door, at eighteen already taller than his father. He was big-jointed and thin, with hands the size of steaks, his long bony face sour and mulish. “I don’t see why you let her get away with it.”

  “She’s only young once,” said Art Marsile evenly. “Let her have her fun…You should be out yourself, instead of staying home complaining about other people.”

  “I’m not complaining. I’m saying what ought to be.”

  “What ‘ought’ she be doing?” asked Art in a dry voice.

  “There’s schoolwork.”

  “She can’t do much better than straight A’s, Hugh.”

  “There’s the revival meeting tonight.”

  “That’s where you’re going?”

  “Yes. It’s Walter Mott preaching. He’s a great inspirational leader.”

  Art Marsile turned back to his magazine. “Walter Mott the Devil-Buster.”

  “That’s what they call him.”

  “If you get a kick out of hell-fire and damnation,” said Art Marsile, “that’s your business. I wouldn’t go, I wouldn’t make Jean go.”

  “If I had anything to say, she’d go, and like it. It would do her good.”

  Art Marsile looked at Hugh in a wonder which had grown rather than lessened over the years. “It would do you good to drink some beer and kiss a few girls yourself. But I wouldn’t make you do it. I’m damned if I’ll make anybody do anything for their own good.”

  Hugh left the room, presently reappeared wearing limp gray slacks and a black sweater with the block letter he had won at basketball. “I’m going,” he said.

  Art Marsile nodded, Hugh departed. Art read his magazine, switched on television, watched a late movie, his mind more on his children than the superannuated flickerings. Hugh might or might not be his own flesh and blood; Jean was the child of his second wife. His first wife had decamped with a hillbilly musician shortly after Hugh’s birth. Hugh resembled the musician more than Art. Art knew nothing for certain, but tried to give Hugh the benefit of the doubt. The second wife had died in an automobile collision, returning from the New Year’s Day Rose Parade in Pasadena. If Art felt grief, no one knew it. He worked his orange grove with all-consuming intensity; he prospered; he bought new land, he made money which he showed no disposition to spend. Jean and Hugh grew into adolescence, treated with as much fairness as Art was capable of. Since Art could not bring himself to show affection to Hugh, he tried to conceal his love for Jean. But Jean would not be fooled. She hugged and kissed Art, rumpled his hair, and had no secrets from him.

  Hugh lived in a different world. Hugh played basketball with tremendous zeal, joined all the school’s organizations, became an officer in most of them. He bought a manual of parliamentary procedure, studied it with much more thoroughness than his mathematics texts. At sixteen Hugh had gone to an open-air evangelist rally, and from this time forward, whatever faint linkage existed between his mind and Art Marsile’s disappeared.

  Hugh worked summers in the orange grove. Art Marsile paid him scale for whatever work he did, and got his money’s worth: Hugh was a hard and tireless worker. With his wages he bought a car, and then a portable loud-speaker: a megaphone-shaped instrument, powered by a battery. “What on Earth do you want that thing for?” asked Art. Hugh looked at the device as if he were seeing it for the first time. He made a list of the uses to which the instrument could be put: messages across the orange grove, emergencies and rescues, announcements at basketball games, talking to people in general. Art made the request that the implement should not be employed to address him, nor used at the dinner table to say grace—an innovation which Hugh recently had introduced into the household, and which Art tolerated with non-committal patience. Jean was less complacent and teased Hugh unmercifully, until Art quieted her. “If he feels he wants to say grace, it’s his business.”

  “Why can’t he say it to himself then? God doesn’t need to be thanked every time we eat a meal.”

  “That’s irreverent,” Hugh remarked.

  “It’s not either. It’s sense. If God hadn’t arranged that we become hungry, we wouldn’t have to eat. Why should we give thanks for doing something we have to do to stay alive? You don’t say grace every time you breathe.”

  Art let them wrangle: why stop a good argument? It’s something everybody’s got to work out for himself, he thought. The argument had continued sporadically, Hugh’s growing religiosity colliding with Jean’s skepticism. Art kept his views to himself, intervening only when the argument became name-calling. And tonight, Hallowe’en, Hugh was off to a revival meeting and Jean to a weenie-roast at a haunted house.

  Art expected Jean home around midnight, but at eleven she burst in the door, eyes glowing in excitement. “Father! We saw the ghost!”

  Art rose to his feet, turned off the television.

  “You think I’m fooling! We saw it! We really did! As close as from here to you!”

  Don Berwick came in. “It’s true, Mr. Marsile!”

  “You kids been drinking?” Art inquired suspiciously.

  “No, sir!” said Don. “I promised you I wouldn’t.”

  “Well, what happened?”

  Jean reported. They had driven up Indian Hill to the Freelock house, a desolate weather-beaten hulk, shrouded among cypress and ragged cedar, the doors hanging on their hinges, the windows broken. The original plan had been to build a fire in the fireplace, but the inside of the house was so dirty and unpleasant that the girls objected. The fire was built in the backyard, on a patch of gravel still bare of weeds. The supplies were unloaded, the girls spread blankets; the normal processes of a weenie-roast got under way.

  Jean reminded Art of the Freelock murder: beyond question, a horrible affair. Benjamin Freelock, a crabbed old man of sixty, suspected his young wife, twenty-eight years old, of carrying on with his nephew. He gagged her, hung her by her wrists from a beam in the living room, presently brought in the corpse of the nephew, which he hung by the wrists six feet in front of her. He stripped both bodies, the living and the dead, of their clothes, then went about his normal business as a real-estate agent. Two days later he revived the barely-conscious wife, inquired if she were ready to confess. She was unable to speak coherently. He poured kerosene over her, set her afire, and departed the house.

  The house smouldered and smoked but failed to catch fire. A Mexican living in a shack a hundred yards down the road called the fire department. Freelock, appreh
ended, made a sober and detailed confession and later died at a home for the criminally insane.

  The affair had occurred five years previously. The house was abandoned and—perhaps inevitably—there was talk of haunting. Jean explicitly corroborated these reports. The group had been jocular, skylarking, inviting ghosts to the feast: all ostensibly casual and careless, but all inwardly thrilling to the spooky look of the house, and the memory of the macabre killing. Jean had noticed a flickering of red light at the window of the living room. She had assumed it to be a reflection of the fire, then had looked again. There was no glass in the window. Others noticed; there were squeals and squeaks from the girls. All rose to their feet. Inside the living room, clearly visible, hung a body, twisting and writhing, clothed in flames. And from within came a series of agonized throat-wrenching sobs.

  At this point Art snorted. “Somebody was playing a trick.”

  “No, no!” Jean and Don both protested.

  “We’re not that dumb,” said Jean indignantly. “Betty Hall and Peggy were hysterical—I admit that—and Johnny Palgrave wasn’t any better. The rest of us were perfectly sensible!”

  Don laughed shortly; Jean turned an indignant look on him. “We were excited,” she explained. “Of course! Who wouldn’t be? But it didn’t interfere with our eyesight. Not mine! Anyway, that’s not all. Don went inside.”

  “What?” Art was truly surprised. “You went inside? What for?”

  “To investigate.”

  “You thought it was a trick, eh?”

  “No. It couldn’t have been a trick. All of us knew that. It wasn’t only the flames and the groans—they were real but not quite real. It was a feeling. A kind of—well, I can’t describe it. A sad lonely feeling, deep as a pit. A coldness—golly, I can’t describe it. But it must have been what the woman felt while she was hanging, during the night. That place is haunted, Mr. Marsile!”

  “So you went inside. Wasn’t that kinda rash?”

  “Maybe…But all my life I’ve told myself if I ever saw a ghost, I was going to walk right up to him, and check him. Tonight I got the opportunity.” Don grinned. “It was like jumping into cold water.”

  “What did you see? You kids keep a man in suspense!”

  “Well, we’d run back a ways, and were standing by the car. These two girls were still yelling, and Johnny Palgrave had fled. I came to life and went to the front door. I was scared. It was so strong I could hardly move my legs—but it seemed as if most of it was outside of me. The atmosphere of the place. I went up the front door, and told Jean to wait—”

  “Oh,” said Art. “You were there too.”

  “Certainly. I wanted to know too.”

  “Go on.”

  “We looked through the door. It wasn’t quite as bright as it had seemed through the window. A double-exposure sort of thing. But the fire was bright enough to see the other body hanging there.”

  “He was naked,” said Jean primly, as if the apparition should have exhibited a greater sense of propriety than at that moment.

  “We stood watching. Nothing happened. I went inside, picked up a stick, tried to touch the burning thing. The stick went right through.”

  “And then,” said Jean, “everything faded. The groans and the fire. Everything.”

  “Hmmf. You’re telling me the truth? You’re not pulling your old dad’s leg?”

  “No, Father! My word of honor!”

  “Hmmf…Then what did you do? High-tail it for home?”

  “Heavens no! We hadn’t eaten yet. We went back to the fire, and ate, and then we came home. Don’s going back tomorrow night with a camera.”

  Art looked at Don speculatively. He cleared his throat, then said gruffly, “Mind if I come along?”

  “No, Mr. Marsile. Of course not.”

  “You want to go back right now?”

  “Sure, if you like.”

  “Can I come, Father?”

  Art nodded. “You got clear once. I guess whatever’s there ain’t gonna hurt you.”

  II

  They stopped by Don’s house for his camera, then drove south into the country, through sweet-smelling orange groves, past dim white houses. At the edge of the desert, they turned up Indian Hill. The road twisted and wound, through sagebrush, half-wild oleander, scrub-oak. Ahead, in the light of a late-rising moon, stood the Freelock house.

  “It’s spooky enough,” said Art.

  He turned into the overgrown driveway. “There’s where we parked,” said Jean. “There’s where we had our fire.” The headlights picked out the circle of dead gray ash. Art stopped the car, set the brakes, took his flashlight from the glove-compartment.

  They sat in the dark a few moments, watching and listening. Cricket sounds came out of the night; the half-moon rode pale and lonely through the ragged black trees. Art opened the door, got out. Don and Jean followed. They went to the patch of gravel, wan and gray in the moonlight. The rocks crunched under their feet. They halted, disinclined to make sounds so incongruous and intrusive.

  “We were right here,” Jean whispered. “See that window there? That’s the living room.”

  They stood staring at the dark old house. Far away a dog barked, lonesome and mellow. Art muttered. “I’ve always heard that if you come out looking for these things, they never happen. They come when you don’t expect them…I’m gonna take a look inside.”

  He went around to the front porch. The yard was a waste of dead milk-weed stalks and feathery fox-tail, bone-color in the moonlight. Jean and Don came behind. Art mounted the steps, paused.

  Jean and Don stopped. After a moment Don asked, “Do you feel it, Mr. Marsile? Something cold and lonely?”

  “Yeah. Something like that.”

  Art continued more slowly. The feeling of grief, of desolation, of precious remembrance lost and gone, grew stronger.

  They entered the house. The room was dark. Was that a glow? A flicker of red? A whimper, a sob? If so, it came and went; the woe vanished abruptly. Art drew a deep breath. “That’s how it was before,” whispered Jean. “Only worse.”

  Art flicked on his flashlight. Don pointed. “That’s the stick I used. That’s where the thing hung.”

  Outside a car turned into the driveway: the State Highway Patrol. A searchlight swept up the steps, picked up Art Marsile on the porch with Don and Jean close behind him.

  A trooper got out of the car. “Hello Art…What’s going on?”

  “I’m trying to find out.”

  “We got a report of a disturbance up here, thought we’d take a look.”

  “I thought I’d look too.”

  “See anything?”

  “Nothing I’d swear to. It’s quiet now, that’s for sure.”

  “Yeah. Well, sergeant told me to check.” The trooper climbed the steps, flashed his light around the room. He turned back to Jean and Don. “You kids were in the bunch up here tonight?”

  “Yes.”

  “You saw those ghosts?”

  Don told him what they’d seen. The trooper listened without comment, flashed his light around the room once again. He shook his head. “Looks to me like somebody was playing a trick.” He went to the patrol car. Hisses, crackling, a voice from the radio. He spoke into the microphone, made his report. “Well, I checked. I’ll be on my way.”

  The patrol car backed out, drove away. Art, Jean and Don went to their own car, followed. They drove down the hill in silence.

  “What do you think, Dad?” Jean asked presently.

  Art made a non-committal sound. “Lots of funny things happen in the world. I guess this is another of them.”

  “But you believe us, don’t you?”

  “I believe you, all right.”

  “But why?” asked Don. “Why should there be ghosts?”

  Art shook his head. “Nobody knows, nobody seems to care. It’s not fashionable to believe in ghosts. Let alone see them.”

  “I know what I saw,” said Don. “It was there.”

&nbs
p; “But what was it?” asked Jean. “A spirit? A ghost? A memory?”

  “It’s just one of the things nobody knows the answers to—and doesn’t want to know.”

  “I want to know,” said Don. “There’s got to be a reason. Nothing happens without a reason. Some kind of reason.”

  Art agreed. “That’s what we’re brought up to believe. But whenever there’s something out of the ordinary, people shrug their shoulders and pretend it didn’t happen. Miracles, things being thrown around a house, ghosts, apparitions, spirit messages—you read about ’em all the time. The newspaper prints the news, people read it, then go back about their business. I don’t understand it. There’s a big field of knowledge here—as big as all of science, maybe bigger. And nobody dares to look into it. There’s thousands of people digging for pots in Egypt and counting the field-mice in Afghanistan…Why don’t a few look into this stuff? Is it because it’s too big, too scary? Maybe they’re afraid to be laughed at. I don’t know.”

  “I never knew you thought that way, Daddy,” said Jean.

  “Think what way?” asked Art. “I’m just a hard-headed working-man. When I see something I want to know why. And when something funny happens, I don’t try to kid myself it doesn’t exist…I’ll tell you kids something I never told no one else. I don’t want you spreading it either, you hear?”

  “I won’t say anything.”

  “I won’t either.”

  “Well, you know what a dowser is? Some people call ’em water-witches.”

  “Sure,” said Don. “They find water with a forked stick.”

  “Yeah. Well, I own quite a bit of land. Some good citrus land, some not so good. There’s one tract I got out at the edge of the desert, about four hundred acres, dry as ashes. If I could get water, I might grow something, but it’s out of the irrigation district. One day I heard of this dowser and hired him to walk over the four hundred acres. He walked back and forth and his stick bumped and jumped. He was kinda puzzled at first, then he said, ‘Mr. Marsile, you drill here. You’ll get water. It’s about two hundred feet down, you should be able to draw about twenty gallons a minute.’ Then he said, ‘Over here, if you drill, you’ll hit oil. It’s deep, it’ll cost you money to reach it, but it’s there. Lots of it.’”