by Fritz Leiber
He would have liked to get away early for lunch with Ben Shelley at Beltonville, but he needed this reading to finish off the oil survey. He had not been able to spot the sandstone-limestone contact he was looking for anywhere but near the top of this particular hill. So he picked up the altimeter, stepped out of the cool shadow of the barn behind which the bench mark was located, and trudged off. He figured he would be able to finish this little job properly and still be in time for Ben. A grin came to his big, square, youthful face as he thought of how they would chew the fat and josh each other. Ben, like himself, was on the State Geologic Survey.
Fields of shoulder-high corn, dazzlingly green under the broiling Midwestern sun, stretched away from the hill to the flat horizon. The noonday hush was beginning. Blue-bottle flies droned around him as he skirted a manure heap and slid between the weather-gray rails of an old fence. There was no movement, except a vague breeze rippling the corn a couple of fields away and a farmer's car raising a lazy trail of dust far off in the opposite direction. The chunky, competent-looking figure of Tom Digby was the only thing with purpose in the whole landscape.
When he had pushed through the fringe of tall, dry-stalked weeds at the base of the hill, he glanced back at the shabby one-horse farm where the bench mark was located. It looked deserted. Then he made out a little tow-headed girl watching him around the corner of the barn, and he remembered having noticed her earlier. He waved, and chuckled when she dodged back out of sight. Sometimes these farmer's kids were mighty shy. Then he started up the hill at a brisker pace, toward where the bit of strata was so invitingly exposed.
When he reached the top, he did not get the breeze he expected. It seemed, if anything, more stiflingly hot than it had been down below, and there was a feeling of dustiness. He swabbed at his face again, set down the altimeter on a level spot, carefully twisted the dial until the needle stood directly over the middle line of the scale, and started to take the reading from the pointer below.
Then his face clouded. He felt compelled to joggle the instrument, although he knew it was no use. Forcing himself to work very slowly and methodically, he took a second reading. The result was the same as the first. Then he stood up and relieved his feelings with a fancy bit of swearing, more vigorous, but just as good-natured as the blast he had let off at the bench mark.
Allowing for any possible change in barometric pressure during the short period of his climb up from the bench mark, the altimeter still gave the height of the hill as under four hundred fifty. Even a tornado of fantastic severity could not account for such a difference in pressure.
It would not have been so bad, he told himself disgustedly, if he had been using an old-fashioned aneroid. But a five-hundred dollar altimeter of the latest design is not supposed to be temperamental. However, there was nothing to do about it now. The altimeter had evidently given its last accurate gasp at the bench mark and gone blooey for good. It would have to be shipped back east to be fixed. And he would have to get along without this particular reading.
He flopped down for a breather before starting back. As he looked out over the checkerboard of fields and the larger checkerboard of sections bounded by dirt roads, it occurred to him how little most people knew about the actual dimensions and boundaries of the world they lived in. They looked at straight lines on a map, and innocently supposed they were straight in reality. They might live all their lives believing their homes were in one county, when accurate surveying would show them to be in another. They were genuinely startled if you explained that the Mason-Dixon line had more jags in it than a rail fence, or if you told them that it was next to impossible to find an accurate and up-to-date detail map of any given district. They did not know how rivers jumped back and forth, putting bits of land first in one state and then in another. They had never followed fine-looking, reassuring roads that disappeared into a weedy nowhere. They went along believing that they lived in a world as neat as a geometry-book diagram, while chaps like himself and Ben went around patching the edges together and seeing to it that one mile plus one mile equaled at least something like two miles. Or proving that hills were really hills and not pits in disguise.
It suddenly seemed devilishly hot and close and the bare ground unpleasantly gritty. He tugged at his collar, unbuttoned it further. Time to be getting on to Beltonville. Couple glasses of iced coffee would go good. He hitched himself up, and noticed that the little girl had come out from behind the barn again. She seemed to be waving at him now, with a queer, jerky, beckoning movement; but that was probably just the effect of the heat-shimmer rising from the fields. He waved too, and the movement brought on an abrupt spell of dizziness. A shadow seemed to surge across the landscape, and he had difficulty in breathing. Then he started down the hill, and pretty soon he was feeling all right again.
"I was a fool to come this far without a hat," he told himself. "This sun will get you, even if you're as healthy as a horse."
Something was nagging at his mind, however, as he realized when he got down in the corn again. It was that he did not like the idea of letting the hill lick him. It occurred to him that he might persuade Ben to come over this afternoon, if he had nothing else to do, and get a precise measurement with alidade and plane table.
When he neared the farm, he saw that the little girl had retreated again to the corner of the barn. He gave her a friendly, "Hello." She did not answer but she did not run away, either. He became aware that she was staring at him in an intent, appraising way.
"You live here?" he asked.
She did not answer. After a while, she said, "What did you want to go down there for?"
"The State hires me to measure land," he replied. He had reached the bench mark and was automatically starting to take a reading, before he remembered that the altimeter was useless. "This your father's farm?" he asked.
Again she did not answer. She was barefooted, and wore a cotton dress of washed-out blue. The sun had bleached her hair and eyebrows several degrees lighter than her skin, giving something of the effect of a photographic negative. Her mouth hung open. Her whole face had a vacuous, yet not exactly stupid expression.
Finally she shook her head solemnly, and said, "You shouldn't of gone down there. You might not have been able to get out again."
"Say, just what are you talking about?" he inquired, humorously, but keeping his voice gentle so she would not run away.
"The hole," she answered.
Tom Digby felt a shiver run over him. "Sun must have hit me harder than I thought," he told himself.
"You mean there's some sort of pit down that way?" he asked quickly. "Maybe an old well or cesspool hidden in the weeds? Well, I didn't fall in. Is it on this side of the hill?" He was still on his knees beside the bench mark.
A look of understanding, mixed with a slight disappointment, came over her face. She nodded wisely and observed, "You're just like Papa. He's always telling me there's a hill there, so I won't be scared of the hole. But he doesn't need to. I know all about it, and I wouldn't go near it again for anything."
"Say, what the dickens are you talking about?" His voice got out of control, and he rather boomed the question at her. But she did not dart away, only continued to stare at him thoughtfully.
"Maybe I've been wrong," she observed finally. "Maybe Papa and you and other people really do see a hill there. Maybe They make you see a hill there, so you won't know about Them being there. They don't like to be bothered. I know. There was a man come up here about two years ago, trying to find out about Them. He had a kind of spyglass on sticks. They made him dead. That was why I didn't want you to go down there. I was afraid They would do the same thing to you."
He disregarded the shiver that was creeping persistently along his spine, just as he had disregarded from the very beginning with automatic scientific distaste for eeriness, the coincidence between the girl's fancy and the inaccurate altimeter readings.
"Who are They?" he asked cheerfully.
The little girl
's blank, watery blue eyes stared past him, as if she were looking at nothing – or everything.
"They are dead. Bones. Just bones. But They move around. They live at the bottom of the hole, and They do things there."
"Yes?" he prompted, feeling a trifle guilty at encouraging her. From the corner of his eye he could see an old Model-T chugging up the rutted drive, raising clouds of dust.
"When I was little," she continued in a low voice, so he had to listen hard to catch the words, "I used to go right up to the edge and look down at Them. There's a way to climb down in, but I never did. Then one day They looked up and caught me spying. Just white bone faces; everything else black. I knew They were thinking of making me dead. So I ran away and never went back."
The Model-T rattled to a stop beside the barn, and a tall man in old blue overalls swung out and strode swiftly toward them.
"School Board sent you over?" he shot accusingly at Tom. "You from the County Hospital?"
He clamped his big paw around the girl's hand. He had the same bleached hair and eyebrows, but his face was burnt to a brick red. There was a strong facial resemblance.
"I want to tell you something," he went on, his voice heavy with anger but under control. "My little girl's all right in the head. It's up to me to judge, isn't it? What if she don't always give the answers the teachers expect. She's got a mind of her own, hasn't she? And I'm perfectly fit to take care of her. I don't like the idea of your sneaking around to put a lot of questions to her while I'm gone."
Then his eye fell on the altimeter. He glanced at Tom sharply, especially at the riding breeches and high, laced boots.
"I guess I went and made a damn fool of myself," he said swiftly. "You an oil man?"
Tom got to his feet. "I'm on the State Geologic Survey," he said.
The farmer's manner changed completely. He stepped forward, his voice was confidential. "But you saw signs of oil here, didn't you?"
Tom shrugged his shoulders and grinned pleasantly. He had heard a hundred farmers ask that same question in the same way. "I couldn't say anything about that. I'd have to finish my mapping before I could make any guesses."
The farmer smiled back, knowingly but not unfriendly. "I know what you mean," he said. "I know you fellows got orders not to talk. So long, mister."
Tom said, "So long," nodded good-bye to the little girl, who was still gazing at him steadily, and walked around the barn to his own car. As he plumped the altimeter down on the front seat beside him, he yielded to the impulse to take another reading. Once more he swore, this time under his breath.
The altimeter seemed to be working properly again.
"Well," he told himself, "that settles it. I'll come back and get a reliable alidade reading, if not with Ben, then with somebody else. I'll nail that hill down before I do anything."
Ben Shelley slupped down the last drops of coffee, pushed back from the table, and thumbed tobacco into his battered brier. Tom explained his proposition.
A wooden-bladed fan was wheezing ponderously overhead, causing pendant stripes of fly paper to sway and tremble.
"Hold on a minute," Ben interrupted near the end. "That reminds me of something I was bringing over for you. May save us the trouble." And he fished in his briefcase.
"You don't mean to tell me there's some map for this region I didn't know about?" The tragic disgust in Tom's voice was only half jocular. "They swore up and down to me at the office there wasn't."
"Yeah, I'm afraid I mean just that," Ben confirmed. "Here she is. A special topographic job. Only issued yesterday."
Tom snatched the folded sheet.
"You're right," he proclaimed, a few moments later. "This might have been some help to me." His voice became sarcastic. "I wonder what they wanted to keep it a mystery for?"
"Oh, you know how it is," said Ben easily. "They take a long time getting maps out. The work for this was done two years ago, before you were on the Survey. It's rather an unusual map, and the person you talked to at the office probably didn't connect it up with your structural job. And there's a yarn about it, which might explain why there was some confusion."
Tom had pushed the dishes away and was studying the map intently. Now he gave a muffled exclamation which made Ben look up. Then he hurriedly reinspected the whole map and the printed material in the corner. Then he stared at one spot for so long that Ben chuckled and said, "What have you found? A gold mine?"
Tom turned a serious face on him. "Look, Ben," he said slowly, "This map is no good. There's a terrible mistake in it." Then he added, "It looks as if they did some of the readings by sighting through a rolled-up newspaper at a yardstick."
"I knew you wouldn't be happy until you found something wrong with it," said Ben. "Can't say I blame you. What is it?"
Tom slid the map across to him, indicating one spot with his thumbnail. "Just read that off to me," he directed. "What do you see there?"
Ben paused while he lit his pipe, eyeing the map. Then he answered promptly, "An elevation of four hundred forty-one feet. And it's got a name lettered in – 'The Hole.' Poetic, aren't we? Well, what is it? A stone quarry?"
"Ben, I was out at that very spot this morning," said Tom, "and there isn't any depression there at all, but a hill. This reading is merely off some trifle of a hundred and forty feet!"
"Go on," countered Ben. "You were somewhere else this morning. Got mixed up. I've done it myself."
Tom shook his head. "There's a five-hundred-eleven-foot bench mark right next door to it."
"Then you got an old bench mark." Ben was amusedly skeptical. "You know, one of the pre-Columbus ones."
"Oh, rot. Look, Ben, how about coming out with me this afternoon and we'll shoot it with your alidade? I've got to do it some time or other, anyway, now that my altimeter's out of whack. And I'll prove to you this map is chuck-full of errors. How about it?"
Ben applied another match to his pipe. He nodded. "All right, I'm game. But don't be angry when you find you turned in at the wrong farm."
It was not until they were rolling along the highway, with Ben's equipment in the back seat, that Tom remembered something. "Say, Ben, didn't you start to tell me about a yarn connected with this map?"
"It doesn't amount to much really. Just that the surveyor – an old chap named Wolcraftson – died of heart failure while he was still in the field. At first they thought someone would have to re-do the job, but later, when they went over his papers, they found he had completed it. Maybe that explains why some of the people at the office were in doubt as to whether there was such a map."
Tom was concentrating on the road ahead. They were getting near the turn-off. "That would have been about two years ago?" he asked. "I mean, when he died?"
"Uh-huh. Or two and a half. It happened somewhere around here and there was some kind of stupid mess about it. I seem to remember that a fool country coroner – a local Sherlock Holmes – said there were signs of strangulation, or suffocation, or some other awful nonsense, and wanted to hold Wolcraftson's rodman. Of course, we put a stop to that."
Tom did not answer. Certain words he had heard a couple of hours earlier were coming back to him, just as if a phonograph had been turned on: "Two years ago there was a man come up here, trying to find out about Them. He had a kind of spyglass on sticks. They made him dead. That's why I didn't want you to go down there. I was afraid They would do the same thing to you."
He angrily shut his mind to those words. If there was anything he detested, it was admitting the possibility of supernatural agencies, even in jest. Anyway, what difference did her words make? After all, a man had really died, and it was only natural that her defective imagination should cook up some wild fancy.
Of course, as he had to admit, the screwy entry on the map made one more coincidence, counting the girl's story and the cockeyed altimeter readings as the first. But was it so much of a coincidence? Perhaps Wolcraftson had listened to the girl's prattling and noted down "The Hole" and the reading for it as a k
ind of private joke, intending to erase it later. Besides, what difference did it make if there had been two genuine coincidences? The universe was full of them. Every molecular collision was a coincidence. You could pile a thousand coincidences on top of another, he averred, and not get Tom Digby one step nearer to believing in the supernatural. Oh, he knew intelligent people enough, all right, who coddled such beliefs. Some of his best friends liked to relate "yarns" and toy with eerie possibilities for the sake of a thrill. But the only emotion Tom ever got out of such stuff was a nauseating disgust. It cut too deep for joking. It was a reversion to that primitive, fear-bound ignorance from which science had slowly lifted man, inch by inch, against the most bitter opposition. Take this silly matter about the hill. Once admit that the dimensions of a thing might not be real, down to the last fraction of an inch, and you cut the foundations from under the world.
He'd be damned, he told himself, if he ever told anyone the whole story of the altimeter readings. It was just the silly sort of "yarn" that Ben, for instance, would like to play around with. Well, he'd have to do without it.
With a feeling of relief he turned off for the farm. He had worked himself up into quite an angry state of mind, and part of the anger was at himself, for even bothering to think about such matters. Now they would finish it off neatly, as scientists should, without leaving any loose ends around for morbid imaginations to knit together.
He led Ben back to the barn, and indicated the bench mark and the hill. Ben got his bearings, studied the map, inspected the bench mark closely, then studied the map again.
Finally he turned with an apologetic grin. "You're absolutely right. This map is as screwy as a surrealist painting, at least as far as that hill is concerned. I'll go around to the car and get my stuff. We can shoot its altitude right off the bench mark." He paused, frowning. "Gosh, though, I can't understand how Wolcraftson ever got it so screwed up."
