"It's an Ancient!" Reed Barnitt yelled, and the thing growled, deep and hungry and ugly.
Clay dropped his spade. I heard the clink and jangle of metal pieces on the floor pebbles. He gave back, and Mr. Hoje and Mr. Eddy gave back with him. I stood where I was, putting down my hoe. Reed Barnitt was the only one that moved forward.
"Stay away from us," he sort of breathed out at the ragged-gray thing.
It just pushed out the skull at him, and the skull's eye-lights blinked and glared. Reed Barnitt backed up.
"Let's get out of here," he choked, "before that Ancient—"
He didn't know we'd found the treasure, his eyes had been on whatever the thing was. He was for running, but I wasn't.
In my mind I saw the peculiar things I'd faced before this. The Ugly Bird . . . One Other . . . Mr. Loden who might have lived three hundred years but for me ... Forney Meechum whose dead ghost had fled from me. I'd even seen the Behinder that nobody's ever reckoned to see, and I'd come back to tell of it. I wouldn't run from that gray-raggedy thing that held a skull like a lantern.
I shrugged my guitar in front of me. My left hand grabbed its neck and my right spread on the silver strings, the silver that's sure sudden death to witch-stuff. I dragged a chord of music from them, and it echoed in there like a whole houseful of guitar-men helping me. And I thought the thing up there above shuddered, and the skull it held wabbled from side to side, trying maybe to say no to me.
"You don't like my music?" I said to it, and swept out another chord and got my foot on the bottom step-stone.
"John!" came Reed Barnitt's sick voice. "Take care—"
"Let that thing take care!" I told him and moved up on the rocks.
The gray thing flung the skull at me. I dodged, and felt the wind of the skull as it sailed grinning past, and I heard it smash like a bottle on the floor behind me. For a moment that flinging hand stuck out of the gray rags.
I knew whose hand it was, black-furry like a spider.
"Aram Harnam!" I yelled out, and let my guitar fall to hang by its string, and I charged up those stairs of stones.
Reed Barnitt was after me as I got to the top.
"It's a put-up show!" I was shouting, and grabbed my hands full of rags. Reed Barnitt clamped onto my arm and flung me down the step-stones so I almost fell flat on the floor. But rags had torn away in my grip, and you could see Aram Harnam's face, all a thicket of hair and beard, with hooked nose and shining eyes.
"What's up?" hooted out Mr. Eddy.
"Aram Harnam's up!" I yelled to him and the others. "Sold us that candle-thing, then came here to scare us out!" I pointed. "And Reed Bamitt's in it with him!"
Reed Barnitt, on the top stone beside Aram Harnam, turned around, his eyes big in his white face. I got my feet under me to charge back up at those two.
But then I stopped, the way you'd think roots had sprung from my toes into the rock. There were three up there, not two.
That third one looked at first glimpse like a big, big man wearing a fur coat; until you saw the fur was on his skin, with warty muscles bunching through. His head was more like a frog's than anything else, wide in the mouth and big in the eye and no nose. He spread his arms and put them quiet-like round the shoulders of Reed Barnitt and Aram Harnam, and took hold with his hands that had both webs and claws.
The two men he touched screamed out like animals in a snap-trap. I sort of reckon they tried to pull free, but those two big shaggy arms just hugged them close and hiked them off their feet. And what had come to fetch them, it fetched them away, all in a blink of time, back into that darkness no sensible soul would dare.
That's when we four others up and ran like rabbits, dropping the lantern.
We got back to Mr. Hoje's, and lighted a lamp there, and looked at those two handfuls of metal pieces Clay and Mr. Eddy had grabbed and never turned loose.
"I reckon they're money," said Mr. Hoje, "but I never seen the like."
None of us had. They weren't even round. Just limpy-edged and flattened out. You could figure how they'd been made, a lump of soft gold put between two jaws of a die and stamped out. The smallest was bigger and thicker than a four-bit piece. They had figures, like men with horned heads and snaky tails, and there were what might be letters or numbers, but nothing any of us could name in any language we'd ever heard tell of.
We put all those coins into an old salt-bag, and sat up the rest of the night, not talking much but pure down glad of each other's company. We had breakfast together, cooked by Sarah Ann, who had the good sense not to question. And after that, came up a young man who was sheriff's deputy.
"Gentlemen," he said to us, "has ary one of you seen a fellow with a white face and a broad build?"
"What's up with such a one?" asked Mr. Hoje.
"Why, Mr. Hoje," said the sheriff's deputy, "they want him bad at the state prison. He was a show-fellow, doing play-magic tricks, but he took to swindling folks and got in jail and then got out again, and the law's after him."
"We've seen such a man," allowed Mr. Eddy, "but he's gone from here now."
When we were left alone again, we told each other we could see how it was. Reed Barnitt did his false magic tricks, like setting the light on the star and making words show on the white paper by heating it. And he'd planned it with Aram Harnam to furnish us that black candle, to get hold of the property of Mr. Hoje and Mr. Eddy—scaring them afterward, so bad they'd never dare look again, and forfeit their home places.
Only: There was treasure there, the way those two swindlers never guessed. And there was something left to watch and see it wasn't robbed away.
I don't call to mind which of us said that all we could do was take back the gold pieces, because such things could never do anybody good. We went back that noon to Black Pine Hollow, where the sun sure enough didn't shine. We shivered without ary wind blowing.
Inside the mine-mouth, we picked up the lantern and lighted it. Clay had the nerve to pick up the broken skull Aram Harnam had flung, and we saw why the eyes had shone—pieces of tin in them. We found our spade and hoe. Into the hole we flung the gold pieces, on top of what seemed a heap more lying there. Then we put back the dirt, tamped it down hard, and we all heaved and sweated till we put the piece of rock in place again.
"There, the Ancients got their treasure back," said Mr. Hoje, breathing hard.
Then, noise up on those stepstones. I held up the lantern.
Huddled and bent they stood up there, Reed Barnitt and Aram Harnam.
They sort of leaned together, like tired horses in plow harness, not quite touching shoulders. Their hands—Reed Barnitt's white ones, Aram Harnam's shaggy ones—hung with the fingers bent and limp.
They looked down at us with tired eyes and mouths drooped open, the way you'd think they had some hope about us, but not much.
"Look," said Clay, just behind my neck. "We gave back the gold. They're giving back those two that they dragged away last night."
But they looked as if they'd been gone more than a night.
The hair on Reed Barnitt's hatless head was as white as his face. And Aram Harnam's beard, and the fur on his hands—black no more, but a dirty, steamy gray. Maybe it had changed from fear, the way folks say can happen. Or maybe there'd been time for it to change, where they were.
"Go fetch them, John," Mr. Hoje asked me. "And we'll get a doctor for them when we get them to my house."
I started up over the stones with the lantern.
Their eyes picked up the lantern light and shone green, like the eyes of dogs. One of them, I don't know which, made a little whimpering cry with no words in it. They ran from me into the dark, and I saw their backs, bent more than I'd thought possible.
I ran up to the top stone, holding out the lantern.
As I watched they sort of fell forward and ran on hands and feet. Like animals. Not quite sure of how to run that way on all fours; but something told me, mighty positive, that they'd learn better as time went by. I backed down
again, without watching any more.
"They won't come out," I said.
Mr. Hoje spit on the pebbles. "From what I saw, maybe it's just as well. They can live in there with the Ancients."
"Live?" repeated Clay. "The Ancients are dead. Way I figure, what's in there isn't Ancients—just something Ancients left behind. I don't want any part of it."
From Black Pine Hollow we went to Aram Harnam's empty shanty and there we found the papers he'd tricked Mr. Hoje and Mr. Eddy into signing, and we burned them up. On the way back, the two old men made it up between themselves to spare Clay and Sarah Ann a few acres from both places. As to the cabin, neighbors would be proud to help build it.
"One thing wonders me," said Clay. "John, you didn't have any notion night before last of singing about the girl with golden slippers?"
"Not till I struck the strings and piped up," I told him.
"Then how did Reed Barnitt just happen to take them from under his coat for Sarah Ann?" Clay asked us. "Stage-show magician or not, how did he just happen to do that?"
None of us could guess.
But Sarah Ann kept the golden slippers, and nobody could see any reason why not. She wore them to marry up with Clay, and danced in them while I played song after song—"Pretty Fair Maid," and "Willie From the Western States," and "I Dreamed Last Night of My True Love, All In My Arms I Had Her." Preacher Miller said the service, what God hath joined together let no man put asunder. I kissed the pretty-cheeked bride, and so did many a kind friend, but the only man of us she kissed back was long tall Clay Herron.
Walk Like a Mountain
Once at Sky Notch, I never grudged the trouble getting there. It was so purely pretty, I was glad outlanders weren't apt to crowd in and spoil all.
The Notch cut through a tall peak that stood against a higher cliff. Steep brushy faces each side, and a falls at the back that made a trickly branch, with five pole cabins along the waterside. Corn patches, a few pigs in pens, chickens running round, a cow tied up one place. It wondered me how they ever got a cow up there. Laurels grew, and viney climbers, and mountain flowers in bunches and sprawls. The water made a happy noise. Nobody moved in the yards or at the doors, so I stopped by a tree and hollered the first house.
"Hello the house!" I called. "Hello to the man of the house and all inside!"
A plank door opened about an inch. "Hello to yourself," a gritty voice replied me. "Who's that out there with the guitar?"
I moved from under the tree. "My name's John. Does Mr. Lane Jarrett live up here? Got word for him, from his old place on Drowning Creek."
The door opened wider, and there stood a skimpy little man with gray whiskers. "That's funny," he said.
The funnyness I didn't see. I'd known Mr. Lane Jarrett years back, before he and his daughter Page moved to Sky Notch. When his uncle Jeb died and heired him some money, I'd agreed to carry it to Sky Notch, and, gentlemen, it was a long, weary way getting there.
First a bus, up and down and through mountains, stop at every pig trough for passengers. I got off at Charlie's Jump—who Charlie was, nor why or when he jumped, nobody there can rightly say. Climbed a high ridge, got down the far side, then a twenty-devil way along a deep valley river. Up another height, another beyond that. Then it was night, and nobody would want to climb the steep face above, because it was grown up with the kind of trees that the dark melts in around you. I made a fire and took my supper rations from my pocket. Woke at dawn and climbed up and up and up, and here I was.
"Funny, about Lane Jarrett," gritted the little man out. "Sure you ain't come about that business?"
I looked up the walls of the Notch. Their tops were toothy rocks, the way you'd think those walls were two jaws, near about to close on what they'd caught inside them. Right then the Notch didn't look so pretty.
"Can't say, sir," I told him, "till I know what business you mean."
"Rafe Enoch!" he boomed out the name, like firing two barrels of a gun. "That's what I mean!" Then he appeared to remember his manners, and came out, puny in his jeans and no shoes on his feet. "I'm Oakman Dillon," he named himself. "John—that's your name, huh? Why you got that guitar?"
"I pick it some," I replied him. "I sing." Tweaking the silver strings, I sang a few lines:
By the shore of Lonesome River Where the waters ebb and flow, Where the wild red rose is budding And the pleasant breezes blow,
It was there I spied the lady That forever I adore, As she was a-lonesome walking By the Lonesome River shore. . . .
"Rafe Enoch!" he grit-grated out again. "Carried off Miss Page Jarrett the way you'd think she was a banty chicken!"
Slap, I quieted the strings with my palm. "Mr. Lane's little daughter Page was stolen away?"
He sat down on the door-log. "She ain't suchy little daughter. She's six foot maybe three inches—taller'n you, even. Best-looking big woman I ever seen, brown hair like a wagonful of home-cured tobacco, eyes green and bright as a fresh-squoze grape pulp."
"Fact?" I said, thinking Page must have changed a right much from the long-leggy little girl I'd known, must have grown tall like her daddy and her dead mammy, only taller. "Is this Rafe Enoch so big, a girl like that is right for him?"
"She's puny for him. He's near about eight foot tall, best I judge." Oakman Dillon's gray whiskers stuck out like a mad cat's. "He just grabbed her last evening, where she walked near the fall, and up them rocks he went like a possum up a jack oak."
I sat down on a stump. "Mr. Lane's a friend of mine. How can I help?"
"Nobody can't help, John. It's right hard to think you ain't knowing all this stuff. Don't many strangers come up here. Ain't room for many to live in the Notch."
"Five homes," I counted them with my eyes.
"Six. Rafe Enoch lives up at the top." He jerked his head toward the falls. "Been there a long spell—years, I reckon, since when he run off from somewhere. Heard tell he broke a circus man's neck for offering him a job with a show. He built up top the falls, and he used to get along with us. Thanked us kindly for a mess of beans or roasting ears. Lately, he's been mean-talking."
"Nobody mean-talked him back? Five houses in the Notch mean five grown men—couldn't they handle one giant?"
"Giant size ain't all Rafe Enoch's got." Again the whiskers bristled up. "Why! He's got powers, like he can make rain fall—"
"No," I put in quick. "Can't even science men do that for sure."
"I ain't studying science men. Rafe Enoch says for rain to fall, down it comes, ary hour day or night he speaks. Could drown us out of this Notch if he had the mind."
"And he carried off Page Jarrett," I went back to what he'd said.
"That's the whole truth, John. Up he went with her in the evening, daring us to follow him."
I asked, "Where are the other Notch folks?"
"Up yonder by the falls. Since dawn we've been talking Lane Jarrett back from climbing up and getting himself neck-twisted. I came to feed my pigs, now I'm heading back."
"I'll go with you," I said, and since he didn't deny me I went.
The falls dropped down a height as straight up as a chimney, and a many tunes taller, and their water boiled off down the branch. Either side of the falls, the big boulder rocks piled on top of each other like stones in an almighty big wall. Looking up, I saw clouds boiling in the sky, dark and heavy and wet-looking, and I remembered what Oakman Dillon had said about big Rafe Enoch's rain-making.
A bunch of folks were there, and I made out Mr. Lane Jarrett, bald on top and bigger than the rest. I touched his arm, and he turned.
"John! Ain't seen you a way-back tune. Let me make you known to these here folks."
He called them their first names—Yoot, Ollie, Bill, Duff, Miss Lulie, Miss Sara May and so on. I said I had a pocketful of money for him, but he just nodded and wanted to know did I know what was going on.
"Looky up against them clouds, John. That pointy rock. My girl Page is on it."
The rock stuck out like a spur on a roos
ter's leg. Somebody was scrouched down on it, with the clouds getting blacker above, and a long, long drop below.
"I see her blue dress," allowed Mr. Oakman, squinting up. "How long she been there, Lane?"
"I spotted her at sunup," said Mr. Lane. "She must have got away from Rafe Enoch and crope out there during the night. I'm going to climb."
He started to shinny up a rock, up clear of the brush around us. And, Lord, the laugh that came down on us! Like a big splash of water, it was clear and strong, and like water it made us shiver. Mr. Oakman caught onto Mr. Lane's ankle and dragged him down.
"Ain't a God's thing ary man or woman can do, with him waiting up there," Mr. Oakman argued.
"But he's got Page," said Mr. Lane busting loose again. I grabbed his elbow.
"Let me," I said.
"You, John? You're a stranger, you ain't got no pick in this."
"This big Rafe Enoch would know if it was you or Mr. Oakman or one of these others climbing, he might fling down a rock or the like. But I'm strange to him. I might wonder him, and he might let me climb all the way up."
"Then?" Mr. Page said, frowning.
"Once up, I might could do something."
"Leave him try it," said Mr. Oakman to that.
"Yes," said one of the ladyfolks.
I slung my guitar behind my shoulder and took to the rocks. No peep of noise from anywhere for maybe a minute of climbing. I got on about the third or fourth rock from the bottom, and that clear, sky-ripping laugh came from over my head.
"Name yourself!" roared down the voice that had laughed.
I looked up. How high was the top I can't say, but I made out a head and shoulders looking down, and knew they were another sight bigger head and shoulders than ever I'd seen on ary mortal man.
"Name yourself!" he yelled again, and in the black clouds a lightning flash wiggled, like a snake caught fire.
"John!" I bawled back.
Manly Wade Wellman - John the Balladeer SSC Page 12
