Silverlock (Prologue Books)

  “But which way was it pointing?” I repeated.

  He oriented himself, slow-motion. “Along an old trail that runs up the shoulder of that peak behind the house.”

  At that moment a dejected-looking woman came in with a bowl of stew. In response to Job’s request she brought me a dish of it, as well as the pair of sandals he had offered.

  “Have you ever been up that trail?” I asked when she had left us.

  “No farther than my boundary, which ends half a mile above timber line.” He sipped painfully. “I used to ride there pretty regularly when I had stock — and when I could ride.”

  I had too many troubles of my own to be concerned with his, but I thought I ought to show a bread and butter interest in his hard luck story. “You’ve sure been striking it tough,” I said with a great show of sympathy, “haven’t you, old timer?”

  Once more I was aware of the barely checked anger in his eyes. “I’m merely experiencing the common misfortune of being alive.”

  It made no difference that I felt the same way. There is an idiotic streak in men that makes them want to encourage others to make the best of their circumstances, even though they claim the privilege of making the worst of their own.

  “Oh,” I said, “it can’t be that bad.”

  At this, his passion broke loose. Glaring at me, he commenced speaking with such furious speed that a froth of saliva gathered at each corner of his mouth.

  We are born, and we suffer until we go;

  We live till we die, and than all we know,

  Neither what the purpose nor whose the game

  To make us and break us with pain and shame.

  We are brought to a board where there’s all we wish —

  But the cook’s gone mad and has fouled each dish:

  We can plan and make; we can think and do —

  But the prize is a husk, worm-eaten, too;

  Our minds are a marvel, as all agree,

  And our bodies as well, but the two don’t gee,

  So they live in a permanent tug of war,

  To each the other a scab and a bore;

  And we have two sexes, fashioned to mate

  In the flesh so well, but their spirits hate,

  So the joy of the body is no part

  Of the soul’s delight and dies in the heart

  Of a gangrenous blight. Yet we plant the seed

  For the force of our lust and callously breed

  A brood to inherit our rotten lot

  And to scorn and hate us, as why should they not

  When we act the lunatic Judas goat

  For the miserable get on whom we dote;

  Though they are as silly and warped as we,

  As doomed to despair and futility,

  As bound to be robbed of whatever they crave,

  As lucky in finally finding a grave.

  But we blather to them what was blithered to us

  And babble our praise of the barbarous,

  So that they in turn can swindle their kith

  With a pitiful, sniveling, coward’s myth

  Of the wisdom and plan behind it all.

  “Sing praise and let the hosannas fall!”

  Is the constant bellow of dupe to dupe,

  The idiot maundering of the group,

  All bleating their fables in coined belief —

  But leave an adult to his knowledge and grief.

  As quickly as he had flared up, he ceased to flame. He returned to his food in such silence as might be expected of a man in the death house.

  I on my part had nothing further to say. Some of the things he had said expressed the more or less disconnected feelings and thoughts which had dispirited me since leaving Castle Nigramous. But he had gone much further in his thinking; and in his tirade he had assembled the whole into an indictment which clarified my own case for me. At the base of my woe had been the realization that I had grown for half of my natural life without sinking any roots or putting forth any leaves — without finding a man or a woman who valued my society. Now I saw plainly that it was worse than that. It was not merely I alone who had nothing of value. Nothing worth-while was obtainable under the terms of our being.

  I had intended to ask Job to let me rest there a few hours; but sleep had become unthinkable. The only urge left to me was akin to the fascination that a man’s own wounds and sores hold for him. I had to try to find the full dimensions of evil, and I was fatally sure I knew the place where it could be measured and plumbed.

  My host had been paying no attention to me, but he looked up when I rose. “Do you still want to go there?” he asked, gesturing toward the charred signboard. “It won’t do any good. You can’t escape.”

  “I know.” I spoke as quietly as he. “I’m just going toward something before it comes and gets me.”

  It was a hard pull climbing through the steep grazing land, the tall firs above it, and finally over the bare rock in the clouds on the crest. There I lost the trail, but down on the other side I picked up it or another one. This led me through a belt of scrub balsam, and thence through a hemlock forest to a road.

  Emerging soon from the woods, I found myself in a country of bleak vistas. The overcast sky had the aspect of a natural attribute. Although it was fairly warm, it did not appear possible that sunshine had ever softened that rugged region. Yet it was a land which had once been settled. There was hay dying on the stalk among the patches of juniper and outcropping rocks with their dirty lichen pelts. Some of the trees, leafless for the season, and long past their prime, had obviously been planted to throw shade. Now their rotting branches hung over the holes in the ground which were all that remained of what had once been homes. Occasionally there was a fence of roughly piled stones. What they had been built to keep out was not clear. They hadn’t kept out desolation.

  Except that the country looked more and more forbidding as the afternoon wore on, there was no change in the state of things until sundown. Descending one of the ridges over which the road humped on its way to the next range of Titans, I saw I was approaching a crossroad. It would be a misuse of words to say I hoped for anything, but I thought I might find another sign there. When this expectation was disappointed, I simply stood where I was, gazing vacantly up and down the highway.

  My first intimation that I wasn’t alone was a curious sound behind me. Pulling myself together, I turned to see a man fitting to the region. The peculiar noise which had startled me was the sound of his crutch thudding and dragging in the dust of the road.

  In the habit of connecting tattered cripples with beggars, I snapped at him as automatically as I would have if he had intercepted me while I was hustling along the Loop. “What do you want?”

  His smile was unpleasant as my tone. “Maybe you’d better tell me what you want,” he said in a rasping voice. “From the way you acted when you hit the intersection here, I’d say you were lost.”

  Everything about him irritated me, but as he might prove helpful, I made an effort to be civil. “Well, I didn’t find any signpost.”

  He spat and shuffled his crutch. “Which way’re you heading?”

  A desire to thwart his curiosity was struggling with an anxiety to get my bearings. “I’m not sure of the direction,” I temporized.

  He hitched nearer and thrust a dirty face up toward mine. “You know where you want to go, don’t you?”

  “Naturally.” My hand forced, and resenting it, I paused. “I’ve got several places in mind,” I said finally, “but the Dark Tower will do.”

  He gave a cackle of laughter. “Small fry with big ideas, eh? And what do you think you’re going to do there?”

  My fist clenched, then relaxed as I remembered his condition. “None of your damned business! Do you know where it is, or don’t you?”

  “Sure, I know.” Not the least disconcerted by my anger, he continued to look at me with amused malice. “You mean the old place by the tarn.”

  I had thought he was lying to me, but at
this sign that he knew what he was talking about, I cooled down. “Yes, that’s it.”

  For a moment he scratched in the dust with his crutch, as if he was doing something mean that he enjoyed. “I asked him,” he said then, looking up slyly, as if addressing some third party, “but I couldn’t get an answer out of him.”

  “Oh, all right.” Seeing that he knew as much as he seemed to, I was willing to find out what he could tell. “I don’t know what I’m going to do at the tower myself. What I have to, I guess. Now do you know anything about a hole called Gnipa Cave?”

  He looked down again, but his crutch didn’t move. When he glanced up again, his eyes were fiercely intent.

  “Are you going there — inside?”

  For the moment the complexity of my problem was squeezing bad temper out of my mind. “I don’t know that, either. Maybe I just have to touch base. You see, my ultimate goal is Hippocrene.”

  “Then it’s in the cave for you,” he said with a crispness his voice hadn’t owned before, “but you’ll never get in by yourself — not alive, at least.”

  He spoke with such certainty that I more than half believed him. I lifted my hands from my sides and dropped them again.

  “But I’ve got to go there.”

  “It’s the only reason anyone does,” he declared. “Look at me!”

  With the words he let go of his crutch and straightened up. In that position he was taller than I, a lithe figure with a hard, confident face which no longer seemed dirty. Next he tossed away his tattered cloak to disclose a leather jacket belted over neat-fitting tights.

  “I’m Faustopheles,” he said, in answer to my stare of amazement, “and I’ll take you to the tower and beyond — for a price.”

  “Of course, for a price.” I shrugged, then gazed around while I tried to make up my mind. I wasn’t sure I liked the fellow any better for his transformation, but I certainly needed some sort of guide. Twilight had just so long to go before it was followed by a night such as only heavy clouds can bring about. “What’s your bargain?” I asked, turning back to where he was eyeing me alertly. “I haven’t any money.”

  “And I don’t wish any,” he said. “I’m going to put it to you straight, because I don’t want to waste my time on you unless you mean business. What I’m asking is a pledge I think you’ll be afraid to make.”

  Actually I felt beyond the fear of anything at that moment, but my professional instincts made me wary of being flim-flammed. I narrowed my eyes.

  “Unwrap it and let’s take a look at it.”

  “Right. I want your word — and once you give it, I’ll see to it that you keep it — that you’ll go where I lead you if it’s to the Abyss itself.” He tapped me on the shoulder, and a shock went through me. “And just between you and me, it will be.”

  “Will where you lead me be on the way to the place I want to go?” I pinned him down, when I had thought his proposition over.

  “As far on the way as I can go,” he nodded, “and the contract cancelled the instant I deviate.”

  On the brink of decision, I did know doubt and fear. But more compelling was the realization that if I turned down his offer, I would have no idea what to do or where to go.

  “Done,” I said, then with a feeble attempt at humor: “Do you want it in writing?”

  “In blood,” he replied. “Hold that arm still!”

  Before I knew what he was about, he had drawn a knife and nicked a wrist I wasn’t strong enough to wrench from his grasp. Dipping a finger in the welling blood, he wrote something on the air.

  “Come along,” he then ordered, and I fell in step with him as he swung down the left-hand road.

  If the country had looked forlorn before, it was now despair modeled in landscape. The trees we passed had an agonized throw to their branches, and their knots were so many eyes washed hollow by grief. Most disturbing of all was something I saw uphill and ahead of us. Even after I was sure it was merely the crossed trunks of two birch trees, it still looked like a naked man spread-eagled in pain.

  Precisely at this birch formation a path left the road. Without troubling to warn me, Faustopheles switched into it.

  “Don’t trip over the skeletons, Silverlock.”

  I didn’t ask how he had come to use the nickname Golias had once picked for me. As for his advice, it was good but inadequate. To my mind the whole district into which we now stepped was a skeleton which hadn’t quite lost all its hide and hair.

  The evening being oppressively warm for the season, I was sweating. Yet, possibly because Faustopheles willed it so, I did not experience hunger or weariness. He walked at a tremendous pace, and I kept a step behind him, losing ground only when I jibbed at fording a vile-looking stream. When I did plunge in at my guide’s command, I was aghast to feel unknown objects stir in the slime beneath my feet.

  “The inlet to Usher’s Tarn,” Faustopheles explained. “We’ll see it in a minute.”

  We were almost on it before I did see it. The water of that rank pond didn’t pick any light out of the dusk, as lakes usually do. I could guess at the shore line only by noting its broken fringe of trees. We stopped under one of them, a thing made monstrous in the half dark by the vines which were throttling it.

  “There’s your tower,” Faustopheles said, and I found I had been looking at it without perceiving what it was.

  I had been expecting something vaguely on the lines of the Washington Monument. What I saw was a dim, squat structure, whose top looked like it had been bashed in, rising above the mass of trees surrounding it. Its very simplicity of outline left you free to guess what it contained. Within limits my mind had no question though. That place might hold many things but never one that contributed to joy or confidence.

  I would have spoken less airily than I did, but I was conscious that Faustopheles was watching me to see if I would wince. “Anybody live in that box?”

  “That’s debatable,” he said.

  There had been rumblings of unseasonal thunder when we approached the pond. As he led the way around its rim, the storm swooped near, then broke. For me that completed the darkness.

  “Do you know where you’re going?” I demanded, when my companion jeered at me for suggesting a halt until the rain had stopped.

  “Yes. I’ve been there for a long time.” There was a quality in his voice to match the strangeness of his phrase. “Put your hand on my shoulder if you can’t see to follow.”

  How he himself could find the way I don’t know. My own eyes were no good to me except when the great jags of lightning cracked the night and whipped earthward. Then I could see the tarn and the structure toward which we were moving.

  The tower, I eventually made sure, stood on a little island just off shore at the far end of the pond. A short bridge connected the isle with the mainland. That relieved me, for I felt I could never nerve myself to plunge into the foul-looking water even to achieve a goal and to find shelter. Of the two the latter had become temporarily the most important. It was not only the torrential rain. I had never been uneasy about storms before, but that lightning was hunting to kill. I saw one tree blasted and heard other crashes which meant that bolts had wrought destruction.

  Then at last we were within a few yards of the bridge. The flash which showed us that was unusually big; but it was just a pilot fish for the shark of a bolt that followed it. Hurtling out of the sky, it plunged directly at the tower.

  There was a detonation at impact which deafened and blinded me. More frightening, however, was the shriek of a panic-stricken man. For a few seconds after my vision felt clear again I gazed helplessly into the blackness before a third flash came to my aid. There was no tower any longer, nor was that all I discovered. A wild runner, his features twisted and fixed by horror, was dashing over the bridge away from the ruin.

  That was our only sight of him. The stunning roll of thunder made it futile to call out, and I don’t believe he saw us. When the next flash came, he had vanished.

 
I couldn’t decide whether he was better off to be lonesome in his terror than I was to have company in mine. Faustopheles could either see my expression, the darkness notwithstanding, or he could read my mind. When the cloven welkin had rattled together again, I heard him chuckle.

  “You asked me whether anybody lives there. I now feel in a position to tell you ‘no.’”

  “What are we going to do?” I asked, too shaken to take offense at his sarcasm.

  “Cross the bridge.”

  It did not matter that neither motive which had once made me willing to do so was left to me. I was past thinking in logical terms. What did concern me was the face of the fleeing man we had seen. It had taken more than the threat of physical destruction to smear his features with a fear close to madness. There are disintegrations more dreadful than that of the tower; and a man who looked as he did had either seen them in others, sensed them in himself, or both. I loathed the idea of approaching the place where he had experienced — whatever it was — and hung back.

  “We’d better not.”

  “Do you think I’ll let you do what I did not do for myself?” A flash showed me his face, but even distorted by the rain, it was less harsh than usual; brooding rather. “Suppose I freed you of your oath: could you go back whence you came? I have reason to know you cannot.”

  Overcome by a sense of inevitability, I argued no more. “Well, if we’re going, lead the way. Let’s see if there’s a shed or something left to give us shelter.”

  “The weather is the one thing you will be sheltered from,” he told me.

  We had stepped on and off the little bridge and had made some progress beyond it before another flash of lightning came. I then had a view of the rubble which was all that remained of the tower. There was scattered masonry on the ground; but most of it was below ground level, as if the structure had tumbled into some great hole beneath it.

  “Even that disappeared when I tried to reach for it,” I muttered.

  Faustopheles said nothing until, a moment later, he halted me. “Face this way. No, a trifle more to the left. Now keep looking somewhat in front of your feet.”