Manly Wade Wellman - John the Balladeer 05
Page 17
“You ready for the start down, Myrrh?” I said.
She came to my side and we headed for the gate.
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The gate. Gentlemen, it wasn't aught to call a gate when we got to it.
The gate had been part of the whole conjure stockade that Ruel Harpe had raised up. Now it was all fallen down. Its rails and stakes were come apart and lay like a bundle of lumber logs that waited for somebody to come and stack them. I looked amongst the rails, and there lay something round and dull white. I picked it up.
“Ohh!" Myrrh wailed.
“This is Zeb Plattenburg s head," I said. “I'm a-going to carry it down to put with his other bones. He deserves that much. He had the sand in his craw to come up here and see what was what. Come on, we head down thisaway.”
I helped her along ledge after ledge I'd come up. I steadied her to climb down from one to another. The water flowed with us as we went down. And Cry Mountain was silent no more. A towhee slid over us, a-singing its name, towhee towhee. Off amongst some trees on one ledge, a chickadee said tsee-tsoo. I recollected how no birds had spoken when I was a-climbing up.
Myrrh was hushed and careful as she came along with me, but we were a-going faster on the way down than I'd been a-making the journey up. Once Myrrh looked below, where the face of Cry Mountain fell like a wall, and again she moaned, “Ohh!"
“Just don’t look down there, Myrrh," I said. “Let me be honest to tell you, there’s no future in a-looking down from a mountain height. Edgar Allan Poe says that, somewhere in his tales.”
“Poe?” she repeated the name. “I read a poem of his one time, about a raven. Said the raven, nairmore.”
“Nairmore do we have to come up Cry Mountain,” I said, to comfort her.
We worked along and along, and there was the weedy place where Zeb Plattenburg’s skeleton lay strung out. I put his skull down at the head of it.
“Shouldn’t he be fetched down and buried?” Myrrh asked me.
“I don’t rightly know how to answer that,” I had to confess. “Maybe right here is the place for him. He came up where he wanted to come.”
“Yes,” she said, so softly I could barely hear.
Then:
“HEY!” sounded a voice from below, loud as the blast of a railroad engine, and we looked down.
Somebody was a-coming up, a-coming on a run. I flung down my guitar and my gear, and stood a-waiting. No telling who it might could be, what he might figure to do to us. But then we could both see who it was.
“TOMBS!” cried out Myrrh, as loud in the voice as he’d been.
That’s who it was, Tombs McDonald, a-scrambling ledges there below us. We waited as he came along and got to where we were, got there a-heaving and a-sweating and a-puffmg. His beard was wet from the climb. He put out a hand to us.
“John,” he said. “And—why, Myrrh.”
“Yes, Tombs, yes.”
And they were in one another’s arms, shoved against one another from knee to face, and they were a-kissing one another and a-telling one another “Oh, oh, oh.”
Tombs dropped a sort of satchel he'd fetched up with him.
“How come you come to be up here, too?” he asked Myrrh finally, and he put his eyes on me as he asked.
“I was witched here, but John got me out,” she said against the shoulder of his sweaty shirt. “I'll tell you about it, but it's a long story,” and then she kissed him again. “I love you,” she said, with all the meaning a woman could put into it.
“I love you, Myrrh,” he said, and looked past her at me. “John, I be damned but I figured I'd better come see why you nair come back.”
That was a friend a-talking to me, but I didn't know what to say, so I said nair word.
“I reckoned you to be in trouble, a-climbing yonder,” he said. “I got two-three fellows to come with me. We're camped down at the foot of this here mountain, we fetched along a box of rations and all like that. Let's go back down. Myrrh, you can tell me about a-being here.”
“I'll tell you,” she promised him, and his arms went round her again. Then he looked up the way we'd come.
“Who’s them?” he asked. “Them folks there, a-heading down to us.”
Myrrh and I looked, too. There they came, far away, but we could tell who they were. Scylla and Alka and Tarrah.
“They’re all right, Tombs,” said Myrrh. “They're friends of mine.”
About the Author
Manly Wade Wellman has been writing award-winning tales of fantasy, horror, and science fiction since 1931, In addition to his highly acclaimed series of novels about Silver John—The Hanging Stones, The Lost and the Lurking, After Dark, and The Old Gods Waken—he is also the author of two novels featuring the adventurer John Thunstone, What Dreams May Come and the forthcoming The School of Darkness. He has won the Gandalf Award for Lifetime Achievement from the World Fantasy Convention. Mr. Wellman lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.