Ingathering

by Zenna Henderson

  “Either you or Marnie have a wonderful imagination,” Nils said.

  “Then it’s Marnie,” I replied. “I would never in a million years think up anything like the things she said. Only, Nils, how can we be sure it isn’t true?”

  “That what isn’t true?” he asked. “What do you think she has told you?”

  “Why—why—” I groped, “that she can read minds, Tessie’s anyway. And that this is a strange world to her. And—and—”

  “If this is the way she wants to make the loss of her family bearable, let her. It’s better than hysterics or melancholia. Besides, it’s more exciting, isn’t it?” Nils laughed.

  That reaction wasn’t much help in soothing my imagination! But he didn’t have to spend his days wrestling hand to hand with Marnie and her ways. He hadn’t had to insist that Marnie learn to make the beds by hand instead of floating the covers into place—nor insist that young ladies wear shoes in preference to drifting a few inches above the sharp gravel and beds of stickers in the back yard. And he didn’t have to persuade her that, no matter how dark the moonless night, one doesn’t cut out paper flowers and set them to blooming like little candles around the corners of the rooms. Nils had been to the county seat that weekend. I don’t know where she was from, but this was a New World to her, and whatever one she was native to, I had no memory of reading about or of seeing on a globe.

  When Marnie started taking classes in Mr. Wardlow’s one-room school, she finally began to make friends with the few children her age in Margin. Guessing at her age, she seemed to be somewhere in her teens. Among her friends were Kenny, the son of the mine foreman, and Loolie, the daughter of the boardinghouse cook. The three of them ranged the hills together, and Marnie picked up a large vocabulary from them and became a little wiser in the ways of behaving unexceptionally. She startled them a time or two by doing impossible things, but they reacted with anger and withdrawal which she had to wait out more or less patiently before being accepted back into their companionship. One doesn’t forget again very quickly under such circumstances.

  During this time, her hair grew and she grew, too, so much so that she finally had to give up the undergarment she had worn when we found her. She sighed as she laid it aside, tucking it into the bottom dresser drawer. “At Home,” she said, “there would be a ceremony and a pledging. All of us girls would know that our adult responsibilities were almost upon us—” Somehow, she seemed less different, less, well, I suppose, alien, after that day.

  It wasn’t very long after this that Marnie began to stop suddenly in the middle of a sentence and listen intently, or clatter down the plates she was patterning on the supper table and hurry to the window. I watched her anxiously for a while, wondering if she was sickening for something, then, one night, after I blew out the lamp, I thought I heard something moving in the other room. I went in barefootedly quiet. Marnie was at the window.

  “Marnie?” Her shadowy figure turned to me. “What’s troubling you?” I stood close beside her and looked out at the moonlight-flooded emptiness of hills around the house.

  “Something is out there,” she said. “Something scared and bad—frightened and evil—” She took the more adult words from my mind. I was pleased that being conscious of her doing this didn’t frighten me any more the way it did the first few times. “It goes around the house and around the house and is afraid to come.”

  “Perhaps an animal,” I suggested.

  “Perhaps,” she conceded, turning away from the window. “I don’t know your world. An animal who walks upright and sobs, ‘God have mercy!’ ”

  Which incident was startling in itself, but doubly so when Nils said casually next day as he helped himself to mashed potatoes at the dinner table, “Guess who I saw today. They say he’s been around a week or so.” He flooded his plate with brown meat gravy. “Our friend of the double mind.”

  “Double mind?” I blinked uncomprehendingly.

  “Yes.” Nils reached for a slice of bread. “To burn or not to burn, that is the question—”

  “Oh!” I felt a quiver up my arms. “You mean the man at Grafton’s Vow. What was his name anyway?”

  “He never said, did he?” Nils’s fork paused in mid-air as the thought caught him.

  “Derwent,” said Marnie shortly, her lips pressing to a narrow line. “Caleb Derwent, God have mercy.”

  “How do you know?” I asked. “Did he tell you?”

  “No,” she said, “I took it from him to remember him with gratitude.” She pushed away from the table, her eyes widening. “That’s it—that’s the frightened evil that walks around the house at night! And passes by during the day! But he saved me from the fire! Why does he come now?”

  “She’s been feeling that something evil is lurking outside,” I explained to Nils’s questioning look.

  “Hmm,” he said, “the two minds. Marnie, if ever he—”

  “May I go?” Marnie stood up. “I’m sorry. I can’t eat when I think of someone repenting of good.” And she was gone, the kitchen door clicking behind her.

  “And she’s right,” said Nils, resuming his dinner. “He slithered around a stack of nail kegs at the store and muttered to me about still compromising with evil, harboring a known witch. I sort of pinned him in the corner until he told me he had finally—after all this time—confessed his sin of omission to his superiors at Grafton’s Vow and they’ve excommunicated him until he redeems himself—” Nils stared at me, listening to his own words. “Gail! You don’t suppose he has any mad idea about taking her back to Grafton’s Vow, do you!”

  “Or killing her!” I cried, clattering my chair back from the table. “Marnie!” Then I subsided with an attempt at a smile. “But she’s witch enough to sense his being around,” I said. “He won’t be able to take her by surprise.”

  “Sensing or not,” Nils said, eating hastily, “next time I get within reach of this Derwent person, I’m going to persuade him that he’ll be healthier elsewhere.”

  In the days that followed, we got used to seeing half of Derwent’s face peering around a building, or a pale slice of his face appearing through bushes or branches, but he seemed to take out his hostility in watching Marnie from a safe distance, and we decided to let things ride—watchfully.

  Then one evening Marnie shot through the back door and, shutting it, leaned against it, panting.

  “Marnie,” I chided. “I didn’t hear your steps on the porch. You must remember—”

  “I—I’m sorry, Aunt Gail,” she said, “but I had to hurry. Aunt Gail, I have a trouble!” She was actually shaking.

  “What have you done now to upset Kenny and Loolie?” I asked, smiling.

  “Not—not that,” she said. “Oh, Aunt Gail! He’s down in the shaft and I can’t get him up. I know the inanimate lift, but he’s not inanimate—”

  “Marnie, sit down,” I said, sobering. “Calm down and tell me what’s wrong.”

  She sat, if that tense tentative conforming to a chair could be called sitting.

  “I was out at East Shaft,” she said. “My people are Identifiers, some of them are, anyway—my family is especially—I mean—” She gulped and let loose all over. I could almost see the tension drain out of her, but it came flooding back as soon as she started talking again. “Identifiers can locate metals and minerals. I felt a pretty piece of chrysocolla down in the shaft and I wanted to get it for you for your collection. I climbed through the fence—oh, I know I shouldn’t have, but I did—and I was checking to see how far down in the shaft the mineral was when—when I looked up and he was there!” She clasped her hands. “He said, ‘Evil must die. I can’t go back because you’re not dead. I let you out of a little fire in this life, so I’ll burn forever. “He who endures to the end—” ’ Then he pushed me into the shaft—”

  “Into the—” I gasped.

  “Of course, I didn’t fall,” she hastened. “I just lifted to the other side of the shaft out of reach, but—but he had pushed me so ha
rd that he—he fell!”

  “He fell!” I started up in horror. “He fell? Child, that’s hundreds of feet down onto rocks and water—”

  “I—I caught him before he fell all the way,” said Marnie, apologetically. “But I had to do it our way. I stopped his falling—only—only he’s just staying there! In the air! In the shaft! I know the inanimate lift, but he’s alive. And I—don’t—know—how—to—get—him—up!” She burst into tears. “And if I let him go, he will fall to death. And if I leave him there, he’ll bob up and down and up and—I can’t leave him there!” She flung herself against me, wailing. It was the first time she’d ever let go like that.

  Nils had come in at the tail end of her explanation and I filled him in between my muttered comforting of the top of Marnie’s head. He went to the shed and came back with a coil of rope.

  “With a reasonable amount of luck, no one will see us,” he said. “It’s a good thing that we’re out here by ourselves.”

  Evening was all around us as we climbed the slope behind the house. The sky was high and a clear, transparent blue, shading to apricot, with a metallic orange backing the surrounding hills. One star was out, high above the evening-hazy immensity of distance beyond Margin. We panted up the hill to East Shaft. It was the one dangerous abandoned shaft among all the shallow prospect holes that dotted the hills around us. It had been fenced with barbwire and was forbidden territory to the children of Margin—including Marnie. Nils held down one strand of the barbwire with his foot and lifted the other above it. Marnie slithered through and I scrambled through, snatching the ruffle of my petticoat free from where it had caught on the lower barbs.

  We lay down on the rocky ground and edged up to the brink of the shaft. It was darker than the inside of a hat.

  “Derwent!” Nils’s voice echoed eerily down past the tangle of vegetation clinging to the upper reaches of the shaft.

  “Here I am, Lord.” The voice rolled up flatly, drained of emotion. “Death caught me in the midst of my sin. Cast me into the fire—the everlasting fire I traded a piddlin’ little shed fire for. Kids—dime a dozen! I sold my soul for a scared face. Here I am, Lord. Cast me into the fire.”

  Nils made a sound. If what I was feeling was any indication, a deep sickness was tightening his throat. “Derwent!” he called again, “I’m letting down a rope. Put the loop around your waist so we can pull you up!” He laid the rope out across a timber that slanted over the shaft. Down it went into the darkness—and hung swaying slightly.

  “Derwent!” Nils shouted. “Caleb Derwent! Get hold of that rope!”

  “Here I am, Lord,” came the flat voice again, much closer this time. “Death caught me in the midst of my sin—”

  “Marnie,” Nils said over the mindless mechanical reiteration that was now receding below. “Can you do anything?”

  “May I?” she asked. “May I, Uncle Nils?”

  “Of course,” said Nils. “There’s no one here to be offended. Here, take hold of the rope and—and go down along it so we’ll know where you are.”

  So Marnie stepped lightly into the nothingness of the shaft and, hand circling the rope, sank down into the darkness. Nils mopped the sweat from his forehead with his forearm. “No weight,” he muttered, “not an ounce of weight on the rope!”

  Then there was a shriek and a threshing below us. “No! No!” bellowed Derwent, “I repent! I repent! Don’t shove me down into everlasting—!” His words broke off and the rope jerked.

  “Marnie!” I cried. “What—what—”

  “He’s—his eyes turned up and his mouth went open and he doesn’t talk,” she called up fearfully from the blackness. “I can’t find his thoughts—”

  “Fainted!” said Nils. Then he called, “It’s all right, Marnie. He’s only unconscious from fright. Put the rope around him.”

  So we drew him up from the shaft. Once the rope snatched out of our hands for several inches, but he didn’t fall! The rope slacked, but he didn’t fall! Marnie’s anxious face came into sight beside his bowed head. “I can hold him from falling,” she said, “but you must do all the pulling. I can’t lift him.”

  Then we had him out on the ground, lying flat, but in the brief interval that Nils used to straighten him out, he drifted up from the ground about four inches. Marnie pressed him back.

  “He—he isn’t fastened to the Earth with all the fastenings. I loosed some when I stopped his fall. The shaft helped hold him. But now I—I’ve got to fasten them all back again. I didn’t learn that part very well at home. Everyone can do it for himself. I got so scared when he fell that I forgot all I knew. But I couldn’t have done it with him still in the shaft anyway. He would have fallen.” She looked around in the deepening dusk. “I need a source of light—”

  Light? We looked around us. The only lights in sight were the one star and a pinprick or so in the shadows of the flat below us.

  “A lantern?” asked Nils.

  “No,” said Marnie. “Moonlight or sunlight or enough starlight. It takes light to ‘platt’—” She shrugged with her open hands.

  “The moon is just past full,” said Nils. “It’ll be up soon—”

  So we crouched there on boulders, rocks, and pebbles, holding Derwent down, waiting for the moonrise to become an ingredient in fastening him to the Earth again. I felt an inappropriate bubble of laughter shaking my frightened shoulders. What a story to tell to my grandchildren! If I live through this ever to have any!

  Finally the moon came, a sudden flood through the transparency of the evening air. Marnie took a deep breath, her face very white in the moonlight. “It’s—it’s frightening!” she said. “ ‘Platting’ with moonlight is an adult activity. Any child can ‘platt’ with sunlight, but,” she shivered, “only the Old Ones dare use moonlight and sunlight together! I—I think I can handle the moonlight. I hope!”

  She lifted her two cupped hands. They quickly filled with a double handful of moonlight. The light flowed and wound across her palms and between her fingers, flickering live and lovely. Then she was weaving the living light into an intricate design that moved and changed and grew until it hid her arms to the elbows and cast light up into her intent face. One curve of it touched me. It was like nothing I’d ever felt before, so I jerked away from it. But, fascinated, I reached for it again. A gasp from Marnie stopped my hand.

  “It’s too big,” she gasped. “It’s too powerful! I—I don’t know enough to control—” Her fingers flicked and the intricate light enveloped Derwent from head to foot. Then there was a jarring and a shifting. The slopes around us suddenly became unstable and almost fluid. There was a grinding and a rumbling. Rocks clattered down the slopes beyond us and the lip of East Shaft crumpled. The ground dimpled in around where the shaft had been. A little puff of dust rose from the spot and drifted slowly away in the cooling night air. We sorted ourselves out from where we had tumbled, clutched in each other’s arms. Marnie looked down at the completely relaxed Derwent. “It got too big, too fast,” she apologized. “I’m afraid it spoiled the shaft.”

  Nils and I exchanged glances and we both smiled weakly. “It’s all right, Marnie,” I said. “It doesn’t matter. Is he all right now?”

  “Yes,” said Marnie, “his thoughts are coming back.”

  “Everything’s fine,” muttered Nils to me. “But what do you suppose that little earth-shaking has done to the mine?”

  My eyes widened and I felt my hands tighten. What, indeed, had it done to the mine?

  Derwent’s thoughts came back enough that he left us the next day, sagging in his saddle, moving only because his horse did, headed for nowhere—just away—away from Margin, from Grafton’s Vow, from Marnie. We watched him go, Marnie’s face troubled.

  “He is so confused,” she said. “If only I were a Sorter. I could help his mind—”

  “He tried to kill you!” I burst out, impatient with her compassion.

  “He thought he would never be able to come into the Presence because
of me,” she said quickly. “What might I have done if I had believed that of him?”

  So Derwent was gone—and so was the mine, irretrievably. The shaft, laboriously drilled and blasted through solid rock, the radiating drifts, hardly needing timbering to support them because of the composition of the rock—all had splintered and collapsed. From the mine entrance, crushed to a cabin-sized cave, you could hear the murmur of waters that had broken through into, and drowned, the wreckage of the mine. The second day a trickle of water began a pool in the entrance. The third day the stream began to run down the slope toward town. It was soaked up almost immediately by the bone-dry ground, but the muddy wetness spread farther and farther and a small channel began to etch itself down the hill.

  It doesn’t take long for a town to die. The workmen milled around at the mine entrance for a day or two, murmuring of earthquakes and other awesome dispensations from the hand of God, hardly believing that they weren’t at work. It was like a death that had chopped off things abruptly instead of letting them grow or decrease gradually. Then the first of the families left, their good-bys brief and unemotional to hide the sorrow and worry in their eyes. Then others followed, either leaving their shacks behind them to fall into eventual ruin, or else their houses moved off down the road like shingled turtles, leaving behind them only the concrete foundation blocks.

  We, of course, stayed to the last, Nils paying the men off, making arrangements about what was left of the mining equipment, taking care of all the details attendant on the last rites of his career that had started so hopefully here in Margin. But, finally, we would have been packing, too, except for one thing. Marnie was missing.

  She had been horrified when she found what had happened to the mine. She was too crushed to cry when Loolie and Kenny and the Ward-lows came to say good-by. We didn’t know what to say to her or how to comfort her. Finally, late one evening, I found her sitting, hunched on her cot, her face wet with tears.

  “It’s all right, Marnie,” I said, “we won’t go hungry. Nils will always find a way to—”