Manly Wade Wellman - John the Balladeer 05

by The Voice of the Mountain (v1. 1)

  “He just let me touch it,” I cut him off, for I'd heard enough to be mad with what happened. “He nair thought I’d steal it. You tricked him and you tricked me. That’s a natural fact, and I don’t like it one bit.”

  He walked to the table in the middle of the room and put the bundle down on it, and stood with one hand on the bundle.

  “You’re angry, John,” he said. “I see the veins stand out on your temples. But don’t try anything foolish now, and don’t try anything foolish later. Yes, I admit I watched you and Yakouba at the window yonder. When the exact second arrived, I just tugged the rope to bring you and the book, the way I’d bring a ham or a sack of meal or anything else. And if you didn’t understand, you helped. Now—”

  Behind the green curtain that led to where the women had their places rose a scream and another scream, loud enough to jangle your ears. Next instant, Alka came a-dashing into sight, and Tarrah a-dashing behind her.

  “Scylla!” screamed Alka, her eyes a-bugging out behind her glasses. “She’s dead—she’s killed herself!”

  11

  “Killed herself?” roared out Harpe, so loud that the curtains moved.

  And he was off at a dead run for the door where Alka and Tarrah had come out. I ran after him, and the two women followed us, both of them a-moaning and a-sobbing.

  Another long, rock-walled hallway there, like the one to my room, with some sort of light in it. Harpe headed straight for a swung-open door at the far end. In he went, and so did I.

  The room in there was as bare as a cell in a jailhouse. Tan rock walls with naught on their blankness, and a tan rock floor with no carpet. A wooden chair, the kind you call a kitchen chair, a wooden table, a cot bed with a blanket of a dead gray color, and on that lay Scylla, lay Scylla as absolutely quiet as a rag doll, her sharp face squinched up with the wrinkles a-show- ing like scars, her eyes clamped tight shut.

  “We saw her take something and swallow it,” Tarrah chattered behind us.

  “So she did,” said Harpe, beside the bed. He stooped down and picked up a little bottle as long as your thumb. “So she did,” he said again. “This was a poison I developed. It had certain plant juices in it—never mind what plants. It can kill you quicker than prussic acid, than the bite of a black mamba.”

  He was as calm in his voice as a lecturer. I looked at Scylla. No doubt she was stone dead. I’d seen enough dead folks in my time to know death when I saw it.

  “She took that bottle from a shelf in my room,” Harpe said, and tucked the bottle into a pocket of his white jacket. “She wanted to die—die instantly.”

  “Wh-why?” stuttered one of the two women, I couldn't rightly say which. Harpe swung round to look at each of us in turn. His face was as calm and steady as a stone face.

  “She hated you, John,” he said to me. “Thought you were getting in her way, here. That’s why she killed herself.”

  “Is that aught of a reason for suicide?” I asked him.

  “A good proportion of suicides are committed to make people sorry you’re dead,” he allowed, still calm, still off-hand. “Don’t say that’s a silly reason, we all know it’s silly. But that’s what happens. And Scylla hated you so much, she couldn’t stand it another minute to be in the same world with you.” Back at the bed, he drew the two edges of the blanket up and clear over Scylla, so that she was cloaked and swaddled where she lay, from her head to her toes. When he turned back to us again, he still didn’t seem to care a shuck.

  “So you two ladies saw her do it?” he inquired them.

  “Yes, we saw,” Tarrah quavered out. “She called us in here to see. She said that she’d been forsaken—been snubbed.”

  “She said it was John’s fault,” Alka added on. “And she swallowed whatever was in that bottle, and she shouted out a curse on John.”

  Tarrah shuddered her shoulders. “It was the most terrible curse I ever heard. What she said was—”

  “Shut up, Tarrah!” Harpe pure down blared at her, and flung up his hand. “Don’t repeat a word of that curse, it will double it. Did she curse me, too?”

  “No, sir,” said Tarrah. “It was only John she spoke against, she wanted to hurt him. That goes back to the first hour John was here.”

  “That’s right,” Alka put in. “The first time you talked to him, we were all back in here together, the three of us. Scylla had some dried leaves. She crumbled them and blew them in the air and said a spell. It was to call John to come to her and hear what she had to say.”

  “Hear what she had to say?” Harpe repeated her. “Here in her room, is that right? John was to come to her, not me?”

  “I can't tell what her thought was, but John didn't come,” said Alka. “Scylla was furious. She spit on the floor because he didn't obey her. That's when she began to hate him.”

  Maybe she'd begun before that, I told myself. While Alka talked on, I recollected something into my mind. I started in to whisper it to myself, under my breath. Harpe stared at me. “What’s that you say, John?” he asked. “Speak up.”

  I said the rest of the business out loud: “. . . I do charge you upon pain and peril of your present and everlasting damnation that you, neither air other wicked witch, do at air time hereafter to the end of the world, meddle or make any more, but you let be this man John in peace and quiet.”

  Harpe nodded his head at me. “Those words should protect you,” he said. “I know that spell for warding off the curse of a witch. It's in The Nine Tomes of Magic. I have that with the books in there on my shelf.”

  Where I'd seen it was in Thompson's book The Mysteries and Secrets of Magicf but I didn't see why I'd need to mention that. All I said was, “I reckoned it was a good enough one to commit to memory.”

  He gazed down to where Scylla lay like a log, all wrapped up in her gray blanket.

  “Well, so I've lost her.” He said it with no more bother in his voice than he’d have shown if he'd lost a quarter dollar. “She shouldn't have been so hasty.”

  “She must have been crazy,” I said.

  “Scylla was always a little crazy,” he returned. “Alka and

  Tarrah have been more or less sane, but not Scylla/’ He drew him a long breath. “Now,” he said, “we have to bury her.”

  “Don’t we have to report this thing to the courthouse?” I asked.

  “No, we certainly don’t.” He shook his head hard, from side to side. “That law doesn’t come up here on Cry Mountain. Alka, Tarrah, will you go to the storehouse and bring out the spade and mattock? John, you come along with me.”

  All of us went out of that room where Scylla lay so dead, and along the hall and out through the main room and the tunnel to the outside. Harpe led me to pace round under the dark, shadowy trees.

  “No grave near the stockade anywhere,” he said. “I don’t know what effect a grave close there might have on those outside. Here, John, this way.”

  He didn’t speak air word more till he’d led me right close to the big gash where Cry Mountain’s voice waited to be heard. He studied the ground next to some laurel.

  “Here,” he said, “this place will do.”

  Yonder came Alka and Tarrah to join us. One had a big spade, the other a mattock with two good grubbing blades on it. Harpe took the spade and laid it to the mossy ground and measured with it, measured again. He drove in the edge of the blade all round an oblong in the ground.

  “Six feet long, I judge, and two wide,” he said to us. “Big enough for Scylla and to spare. John, would you use the mattock?”

  The mattock—Tarrah held it out to me. I took it in my both hands, a good grip on it, and set my feet the right way. Up I swung it and brought it down, swoop! and slammed it deep into the earth. I heard the pop of a root I’d cut through. I upped it and swung it again. Again. It loosened the ground for Scylla’s grave. As I moved along the side of the oblong Harpe had marked out, to loosen more, he was behind me with the spade. He brought up dark, pebbly earth in big chunky jobs. I looked at
his big, bunchy forearms in the short sleeves of his bush jacket. He'd be a right strong man, you could judge. I wondered myself for about the sixth time, how he'd be to fight with.

  We cleared out that six-by-two stretch, a shovelful deep. I picked away again, beneath where we’d worked the one time. Alka and Tarrah just stood and looked on, eyes stretched wide in their faces. Deeper I drove the mattock, to make more loosening for Harpe to shovel out. He was a-sweating at his work, and so was I, a little bit. We kept on, and kept on a-keeping on. We deepened Scylla’s grave. Finally, it was near about three feet deep. Harpe stood up and stuck his shovel in the big heap of dirt and wiped his face with a big white handkerchief.

  “That will do,” he decided. “Room enough for her.”

  And you could be dead certain sure in your mind that not a damn did Ruel Harpe care for what Scylla had done to herself.

  “Come on, John,” he said to me. “Let’s fetch her out.”

  He and l went back in and along the hall to where Scylla lay a-waiting to be fetched out. I slid an arm under her shoulders where she was all wrapped up, and Harpe took hold of her by the ankles. We lifted her. She wasn’t stiffened for all that time we’d taken to dig her grave; that thing doctors call rigor mortis hadn’t truly set in as yet. We carried her out, all the way into the shadowed open and to the side of the grave. Alka and Tarrah sort of moaned as we lowered her down to the damp, dark bottom.

  I smoothed the blanket over her the best I could. Harpe was a-going over to get his shovel.

  “Wait,” I said. “Wouldn’t it be all right to say some words over her?”

  “Words?” he repeated me, still a-holding the shovel in his big hands. And he grinned me, like as if we were at a play- party. Plainer than plain, you could know that he nair thought of this as a funeral, he only thought of it as a burying, what you might could do for a dead dog or dead mule.

  “What sort of words do you mean, John?” he asked.

  “Air man or woman who dies should ought to have some words said at the grave,” I said to him, and looked him betwixt the eyes to say it. “I meant some words of comfort for Scylla here.”

  He wagged his head, and grinned betwixt his mustache and his knife of a beard. “Why,” he said, “she hated you, and you know it.”

  “Sure I know it,” I admitted to him, “but I didn’t hate her. Sometimes she pestered me, how she looked on me, how she talked, but nair once did I hate her. She’s dead now and I hope she can have peace, and maybe a chance to think on what’s truly right and wrong.”

  “Of course, of course. You believe in a life after death. You believe in heaven and hell.”

  “Sure I believe in heaven and hell, the both of them. And I’m here to say, either which of the two you go to, you’re a-going to be right surprised at who you meet there.”

  At that he laughed, laughed a hearty laugh, as at a big joke. “Come now, John, don’t be sardonic. It doesn’t become you, when you wish to be the man of good will in this world.” He looked past me. “What’s your thought on the subject, you two ladies?”

  “I agree with John,” said Alka, so soft you could barely hear her, and “Yes,” said Tarrah, no louder than Alka.

  Harpe snickered all over. “Well, all right,” he said. “Go ahead with your burial service, John. But I warn you as the personal friend I want to be, be careful of what names you use.

  I reckoned I’d do well to hark at his warning. What he meant was, leave out the name of God. I set down the mattock and thought for a second of time.

  I knew the burial service, I knew it well. A couple of times in my life, I'd even said it myself for somebody, there a-being there was no preacher handy to do it. I thought over the thing, and then I moved to the edge of the grave and spoke:

  “We bring nothing into this world, and it is certain we carry nothing out,” I said the words and searched my mind for what to say next. Harpe and Alka and Tarrah stood still and harked at me.

  “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills; from whence cometh my help?” I said another bit I remembered. Where we were right then, no hill was higher up than Cry Mountain. I studied on through what the service should ought to be, and came up with another bit of it:

  “We commit her body to the ground,” I said then. “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

  I stooped down and took up a handful of the loose dark dirt we’d dug away there. I looked down into the grave, at Scylla wrapped up in her blanket. She looked so little, so little, down in that hole. It struck me that dead folks always look littler than when they’re alive. I trickled the dirt in on her. I straightened up.

  “I hope that’s enough,” I said. “It’s all I’m a-going to say.”

  “I rejoice to hear it,” said Harpe, and stooped for his shovel.

  “Wait, wait,” called out Alka. “Wait just a little moment.”

  “Why?” asked Harpe, the shovel in his hand.

  “Tarrah and I want to do something, too,” said Alka. “Come on, Tarrah.”

  The two of them came to the edge of the grave. “Here,” said Alka. She held in her hand something that looked like a little silver heart on a ribbon. “You admired this once, Scylla,” she said. “I give it to you.”

  She tossed it down on the old gray blanket. It shimmered there.

  “And here,” said Tarrah. Her hands were at her neck, a-working to unfasten the necklace she wore. I saw the strange little images on it. She flung it down into the grave.

  “Yours, Scylla,” she said. “Maybe to help you.”

  “Are you both done?” asked Harpe.

  “No,” said Alka, and shook her head. “No, not quite.”

  She started to dance there. She moved off along the edge of the open grave, along to her right. Counterclockwise, what I’ve heard named widdershins, the witch direction. Tarrah danced after her. They single-footed it on the rough ground, with a twinkle to their feet. They began to whisper some kind of song, so low I couldn't make it out. Away they went, widdershins.

  For a second, just a little bitty second, I thought of falling in behind Tarrah and dancing with them. But I did no such thing. It's a known fact that if you join in with witches, you get to be a witch yourself. And that was sure enough a witch dance, a witch song. I wasn't about to take up air part of it.

  They rounded the grave, Alka with Tarrah behind her, a-muttering the song. Once or twice they made a turn so that they danced back to back, do-si-do as the dance callers say. Then they danced round again. And then a third time, till they came back to the place where they'd started, and stood still. Tarrah was a-shedding tears. I couldn't tell about Alka, with those big glasses. Harpe had watched them, all the three times round, while he leant on his shovel.

  “All finished?” he inquired them. “Then let's put her under.”

  He bent down and scooped him up a big high spadeful of earth and flung it in. I heard the damp clods plop. He bent to spade up more.

  "Wait a second,” I said. "Reach me that shovel.” And I put out my hand for it.

  "What’s the idea?” he asked, but he gave me the shovel. I hiked up my own load of dirt.

  "Just mountain-style doings,” I told him. "At a burying, the folks all take turn and turn about.”

  I flung my own bunch in, and held out the shovel to Alka. She stared, but she dug in and threw in what she dug. "Now Tarrah?” she asked me.

  "Now Tarrah,” I replied her, and Tarrah took her turn. "Give it back to him,” I said to Tarrah, and nodded at Harpe.

  He shoveled some in and passed it to me and I did likewise, and round and round the four of us the shovel went. The hole filled up fast, until it was to the top. It looked as dark and moist as a new flower bed. Harpe patted the dirt with the flat of the blade.

  "A mountain custom, you called it,” he said to me. "It’s a sensible custom. Many hands make light work. Nobody does the biggest share of it and gets tired while others watch. What are you looking for, John?”

  I stepped here an
d yonder amongst the trees, till I saw a rock, smoothed out by time. A sort of gray in color, like Scylla’s blanket. It looked sort of like a pillow.

  "This,” I said.

  I bent and grabbed it. That was a considerable weight to lift, but I muscled it up and wagged it to where I could chunk it down just above where Scylla’s head would be underground.

  "That was good of you, John,” breathed Tarrah.

  "Very good of you,” Harpe seconded her, not with a sneer this time. "My friends, perhaps you feel that I’ve been matter- of-fact about Scylla.”

  Matter-of-fact, he’d said. Sure enough, we all felt that about him.

  “If that’s true, it’s been my way of doing things, all the years of my life,” he said. “You make me feel embarrassed.”

  But he nair looked nor talked like as if he was embarrassed. He sighed.

  “I’ll miss Scylla, but she’s dead,” he said. “And the dead don’t care.”

  “I beg to differ with you,” I said. “The dead care a heap, or why do they rise up and talk to people, time and time again?”

  “I won’t offer you an argument there,” he drawled. “But now, since all of you have contributed to Scylla’s funeral, I’ll do something to tell her a long goodbye.”

  He went to the hollow tree beside the cleft in the top of Cry Mountain, put in his hand, and fetched out that carved ivory horn.

  “Let this be like the bugler’s call of Taps for her,” he said, and set the horn to his mouth and blew.

  The peal rang out, clear and long, and I felt the ground tremble and shake under my feet, saw the trees round about as they tossed and pitched. Their leaves snarled in the air, like as if a high wind blew.

  Harpe sounded him another blast. Another heave of the ground, and I staggered like as if a blanket was a-being pulled under me. He blew a third time. All the top of Cry Mountain moved and staggered with it, then went quiet again. Harpe slid the horn back into its hollow.

  “I should say that we’ve done our best with these obsequies,” he allowed. “Let’s go back inside. All my blowing may have stirred up a storm overhead.”