They Walked Like Men

  I handed back the bottle and he sat there with it in one hand, while with the other he scratched the skunk underneath its chin.

  “I’m glad to have you come,” he said, “for any reason or for none at all. I’m not the lonesome sort and I get along all right, but even so the face of a fellowman is a welcome sight. But you got something in your craw. You came here for a reason. You want to get it off ~your chest.”

  I looked at him for a moment and I made the big decision. It went against all reason and everything that I had planned to do. I don’t know why I did it. Maybe the peacefulness that rested on that hillside, maybe the calmness of the old man and the comfort of the chair, maybe a lot of different things had a hand in it. If I’d taken time to think it over, I doubt I would have done it. But something inside of me, something in the afternoon, told me I should do it.

  “I lied to Higgins to get him to tell me the way out here,” I said. “I told him that I wanted to help you write your book. But I’m through with lying now. One lie is enough. I’m not going to lie to you. I’ll tell you the story just exactly as it stands.”

  The old man looked a little puzzled. “Help me with my book? You mean about the skunks?”

  “I’ll still help you, after all of this is over, if you want me to.”

  “I guess it’s only fair to say that I could use some help. But that’s not the reason you are here?”

  “No,” I said. “It isn’t.”

  He took a deep drink and handed me the bottle. I took another drink myself.

  “All right, friend,” he said, “I’m settled and all ears. Get about your telling.”

  “When I get started,” I pleaded, “don’t break in and stop me. Let me tell it to the end. Then you can ask your questions.”

  “I’m a good listener,” said the old man, cuddling the bottle, which I had handed back to him, and petting the skunk. “You may find it hard to believe.”

  “Leave that up to me,” he said. “Just go ahead and tell me.” So I went ahead and told him. I did the best job that I could, but I was honest about it. I told it just the way it happened and I told him what I knew and what I had conjectured and how no one would listen to me, for which I didn’t blame them. I told him about Joy and Stirling, about the Old Man and the senator and about the insurance executive who couldn’t find a place to live. I didn’t leave out a single thing. I told him all of it.

  I quit talking and there was a silence. While I had talked the sun had disappeared and the woods had filled with the haze of dusk. A little wind had come up and it was a chilly wind and there was the heavy smell of fallen leaves hanging in the air.

  I sat there in the chair and thought what a fool I’d been. I had thrown away my chance by telling him the truth. There were other ways I could have gone about getting him to do what I wanted done. But, no, I’d had to do it the hard way the honest way and truthful.

  I sat and waited. I’d listen to what he had to say and then get up and leave. I’d thank him for his whiskey and his time and then would walk, through the deepening dusk, up the wagon track through the woods and field to where I’d parked my car. I’d drive back to the motel and Joy would have dinner waiting and be sore at me for being late. And the world would go crashing down, just as if no one had ever tried to do a thing to stop it.

  “You came to me for help,” the old man said out of the dusk. ‘Tell me what I can do to help.” I gasped. “You believe me!”

  “Stranger,” said the old man, “I don’t amount to nothing. Unless what you told me happened to be true, you’d never bothered with me. And, besides, I think that I can figure when a man is lying.”

  I tried to speak and couldn’t. The words bubbled in my throat and would not come out. I think I was as close to tears as I had been in a long, long time. And within me I felt a surging sense of thankfulness and hope.

  For someone had believed me. Another human had listened and believed and I no longer was a fool or crackpot. I had regained, in this mystery of belief, all of the human dignity that had been slipping from me.

  “How many skunks,” I asked, “could you get together?”

  “A dozen,” said the old-man. “Perhaps a dozen and a half. These rocks are full of them, all along the ridge. They’ll be coming in all night to-visit me and to get their handouts.”

  “And you could box them up and have some way to carry them?”

  “Carry them?”

  “In to town,” I said. “Into the city.”

  “Tom—he’s the farmer where you parked—he has a pickup truck. He would loan it to me.”

  “And he wouldn’t ask you questions?”

  “Oh, sure he would. But I could think up answers. He could bring the truck partway through the woods.”

  “All right, then,” I said, “this is what I want you to do. This is the way that you can help …”

  I told him swiftly what I wanted him to do.

  “But my skunks!” he cried, dismayed.

  “The human race,” I answered. “You remember what I told you …”

  “But the cops. They’ll grab me. I couldn’t—”

  “Don’t worry about the cops,” I said. “We can take care of them. Here .. .”

  I reached into my pocket and brought out the wad of bills.

  “This will pay any fines they’ll want to throw at you, and there’ll still be a lot of it left over?”

  He stared at the money”

  “That’s the stuff you got at the Belmont house!”

  “Part of it,” I said. “You better leave it in the cabin. If you took it with you, it might disappear. It might turn back into what it was before.”

  He dumped the skunk out of his lap and stuffed the money in his pocket. He stood up and handed me the bottle.

  “When should I get started?”

  “Can I phone this Tom?”

  “Sure, any time. I’ll go up after a while and tell him I’m expecting a call. When he gets it, he can bring down the truck. I’ll explain it to him. Not the truth, of course. But you can count on him.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Thanks an awful lot.”

  “Go ahead and have a drink,” he said. “Then give it back to me. I could stand a drink myself.”

  I had the drink and gave him back the bottle and he had a snort.

  “I’ll start right in,” he said. “In another hour or two, I’ll have a batch of skunks”

  “I’ll call Tom,” I said. “I’ll go back and check to see that everything’s all right. Then I’ll call Tom—what is his last name?”

  “Anderson,” said the old man. “I’ll have talked to him by then.”

  “Thanks again, old-timer. I’ll be seeing you.”

  “You want another drink?”

  I shook my head. “I have work to do.”

  I turned and left, tramping down the hillside through the dusk and up the slanting trace that led to the clover field.

  There were lights in the farmhouse when I got to where I’d parked my car, but the barnyard itself was quiet.

  As I walked over to the car, a growl came from the darkness. It was a vicious sound that brought the hair bristling on my head. It hit me like a hammer and left me cold and limp. It was filled with fear and hatred and it had the sound of teeth.

  I reached out and found the handle of the door and the growl went on-^-a sobbing, choking growl, an almost incessant rumbling torn from the throat.

  I jerked the car door open and tumbled on the seat and slammed the door behind me. Outside the growling still went on, slobbering in and out.

  I started the motor and switched on the lights. The cone of brightness caught the thing that had been growling. It was the friendly farm dog that had greeted my arrival and had begged to go along with me. But the friendliness had vanished. His hackles stood erect and his bared teeth were a white slash across his muzzle. His eyes were glowing green in the flare of light. He retreated, moving sidewise slowly, with his back humped high and his tail between his legs. br />
  Terror rose within me and I hit the accelerator. The wheels spun, whining, as the car leaped forward, brushing past the dog.

  XXXVI

  He had been a friendly dog and a laughing dog when I first had seen him. He had liked me then. It had taken quite a lot of trouble to get him to stay home.

  What had happened to him in a few short hours?

  Or, perhaps, more to the point, what had happened to me?

  I puzzled on it, while something with wet and hairy feet crawled up and down my back.

  Perhaps it was the dark, I thought. Probably in the daylight he was a friendly pooch, but with the fall of night he became the vicious watchdog, setting up a guard for the family acres.

  But the explanation had a false ring to it. There was, I was certain, more involved than that.

  I glanced at the clock on the instrument panel and the time was six-fifteen. I’d go back to the motel and phone Dow and Gavin to find out what they knew. Not that I expected to find that anything had changed, but to make sure it hadn’t. Then I’d phone Tom Anderson and the wheels would begin to turn; for good or bad, the fat was in the fire.

  A rabbit ran across the road in front of the car and popped into the weeds in the roadside ditch. In the west, where the dying glow of the departed sun painted the edge of the sky a cloudy shade of green, a small flock of birds was flying, outlined like blown fragments of soot against the colored sky.

  I came to the main highway and stopped, then proceeded out into the right-hand lane and headed back for town.

  The things with wet, cold feet had stopped running on my spine and I began to forget about the dog. I started to feel good again about someone believing in me—even if it were no more than an old, eccentric hermit buried in the woods. Although that old, eccentric hermit probably was the one man in all the world who could help me most. More convincingly, perhaps, than the senator or the Old Man or any other person. That is, if the plan came off, if it didn’t backfire.

  The wet, cold feet had stopped, but now I got an itchy ear. Jumpy, I thought—all tied up and jumpy.

  I tried to take a hand off the wheel to scratch my ear and I couldn’t take it off. It was glued there, stuck there, and I couldn’t get it loose.

  At first I thought I had imagined it or that I was mistaken— that somehow I’d meant to lift the hand and then had failed to do it because of some peculiar lapse of my brain or body. Which, if I’d stopped to think of it, would have been fearsome in itself.

  So I tried again. The muscles in the arm strained at the hand and the hand stayed where it was, and panic came charging out of the darkened world to wash over me.

  I tried the other hand and I couldn’t move it either. And

  now I saw that the wheel had grown extensions of itself and had enclosed my hands, so that the hands were manacled to the wheel.

  I stamped my foot hard upon the brake—too hard, I knew, even as I hit it. But it did no good. It was as if there had been no brake. The car didn’t even falter. It kept on going as if I had not touched the brake.

  I tried again and there was no braking power.

  But even so, with my foot off the accelerator, even if I had not used the brake, the car should have been slowing down. But it wasn’t slowing down. It still kept on, at a steady sixty miles an hour.

  I knew what was the matter. I knew what had happened. And I knew as well why the dog had growled.

  For this was not a car; it was an alien simulation of a car!

  An alien contraption that held me prisoner, that could hold me there forever, that could take me where it wanted, that could dp anything it wished.

  I wrenched savagely at the wheel to free my hands, and in doing so I turned the wheel halfway round and then swiftly swung it back again, sweat breaking out on me at the thought of what a twist on that wheel could do at sixy miles an hour.

  But, I realized, I had turned the wheel and the car had not responded and I knew there was now no need to worry about what I did with the wheel. For the car was out of my control entirely. It did not respond to brake or wheel or accelerator.

  And that, of course, was the way it would be. For it was not a car at all. It was something else, a fearsome something else.

  But, I was convinced, it once had been a car. It had been a car that afternoon when the thing that followed me had gone to pieces on the hillside at the whiff of skunk. It had gone to pieces, but the car had stayed there; it had not changed into a hundred bowling balls charging for the swale to gambol in the scent.

  Somehow, in the last few hours, there had been a switch— probably in that time I had been sitting at the shack, telling Charley Munz my story. For the dog had not objected to the car when I’d driven in the yard; he had been growling out of the darkness at it when I had returned.

  Someone, then, had driven into the farmyard in this car in which I now was trapped, this car which was not a car, and had left it there and driven the actual car away. It would not have been hard to do, for when I had arrived there’d been no one around the place. And” even, later, if there had

  been, perhaps such a substitution might have gone unnoticed or, at the very most, occasioned only some mild wonderment for someone who was watching.

  The car had been real to start with; of course, it had been real. For they probably had guessed that I would go over it and perhaps they had been afraid that I might have been able to spot some wrongness in it. And they couldn’t take the chance, for they had to have a trap for me. But once I had examined it, once I’d convinced myself that it was an actual car, then, they must have reasoned, it would be safe to switch it, for having once satisfied myself, I’d have no further doubt.

  Perhaps they had limitations and were well aware of them. Perhaps the best that they could do was to ape externals. And perhaps, even then, they had certain blind spots. For the car I had wrecked with gunfire on the road had its headlight in the middle of the windshield. But that had been, of course, a quick and sloppy job. They could have done much better, and perhaps they knew they could, but there still might have been a doubt about their competence, or perhaps a fear that there were ways they did not know about in which a bogus car might be identified.

  So they had played it safe. And playing safe had paid off. For they had me now.

  I sat there, helpless, frightened at my helplessness, but not fighting any longer, for I was convinced that no physical effort could free me from the car. There might be other ways, short of physical, and I tried to think of how I might go about ‘it. I might, for example, try talking with the car— which sounded silly on the face of it, of course, but still made a kind of sense, for this was not a car but an enemy which undoubtedly was very much aware of me. But I shrank from doing it, for I doubted that the car, which probably could have heard me, was equipped to answer. And carrying on a one-sided conversation with it would have been akin to pleading, in which the words I said would seem to be disregarded with a disdain that would spell out humiliation. And I, despite the situation in which I found myself, was not reduced to pleading or to humiliation.

  I felt regret, of course, but not regret that touched upon myself. Regret, rather, that my plan would not go through, that now nothing would be done, that the one slim chance I’d had to beat the aliens at their game must now be lost by default.

  We met other cars and I shouted at them, hoping to attract attention, but the windows of my car were closed, and I suppose the windows of the other cars were closed as well, so I was not heard.

  We went for several miles and then the car slowed down and turned off on another road. I tried to figure where we were, but I’d lost track of landmarks and I had no idea. The road was narrow and crooked and-it wound through heavy woods and here and there it skirted great humps of rock that shouldered out of the contour of the land.

  Watching the roadside, I guessed, rather than recognized, where we might be headed. I watched more closely after that and became convinced that the guess was right. We were going to the Belmo
nt house, back to where all of this had started, where they would be waiting for me, grim-lipped, perhaps, and angry—if things like these could be grim-lipped and angry.

  And this was the end of all of it, quite naturally. This closed out the chapter. Unless, of course, there might be someone else, perhaps in some other place, who was working on the problem—and working alone because no one would believe him. It was, I told myself, entirely possible. And where I had finally failed, he might somehow succeed.

  I knew, in the back of my mind, just how slim the chance of such a thing might be, but it was the only hope I had, and in a moment of fantasy I grabbed it close and held it and tried to make it true.

  The car swung round a curve and did not quite make the curve, and ahead of us was a picket fence of trees. We were hurtling toward them, and the wheels came off the road. The car began to tilt, nose downward, as it took the dive.

  Then, suddenly, there was no car and I was in the air alone, in the darkness without a car around me, flying toward the trees.

  I had time for a single scream of terror before I hit the tree that seemed to come rushing at me through the dark.

  XXXVII

  I was cold. There was a cold wind blowing down my back and it was dark—so dark I couldn’t see a thing. There was a chill dampness underneath me and 1 was sore all over and there was a dismal sound, a strange keening coming from somewhere in the dark.

  I tried to move, and when I moved I hurt, so I quit moving and just lay there, in the chill and dampness. I didn’t wonder who I was or where I was, for it didn’t make much difference. I was too tired and I hurt too much to care.

  I lay there for a while and the sound and dampness went away and the darkness closed in on me, and then, after a long time, I was me again and it still was dark and even colder than it was before.

  So I moved again, and again it hurt me, but when I moved I reached out my hand, with the fingers open—reaching, seeking, grasping. And when the fingers closed, they closed on something that I recognized, something soft and pulpy that I squeezed inside my hand.

  Moss and fallen leaves, I thought. I’d reached out into the darkness and my hand had grabbed moss and fallen leaves.