Cemetery World

  “Don’t you see,” I said. “Cemetery has a finger in everything that happens. They can bring certain pressures. Back at the settlement someone got a case of whiskey for trying to blow up Bronco. And here are the ghouls …”

  “But the ghouls,” she said, “are different. They’re stealing from Cemetery. Cemetery is setting traps for them. They’d make no deals with Cemetery.”

  “Look,” I said, “it may be they’re only trying to curry some favor with Cemetery. They found the wolves were after us and who but Cemetery would set the wolves on us. And the wolves had failed. To the kinds of minds the ghouls have it must have seemed a rather simple thing, an opportunity. If, the wolves having failed, they could bring in our heads there might be something in it for them. It’s as simple as all that.”

  “It could be,” she said. “Heaven knows, it gets down to simple basics.”

  “In which case,” I said, “we’d best be getting on.” We went down the slope and struck another rock-littered ravine and followed it until it joined another valley, this one a little wider and easier for traveling.

  We found a tree that was almost buried beneath a great grapevine and I clambered up it. Birds and little animals had been at the grapes, but I found a few bunches that carried most of their fruit. Picking them, I dropped them through the branches to the ground. The grapes proved somewhat sour, but we didn’t mind too much. We were hungry and they helped to fill us up, but I knew that we’d somehow have to manage something other than grapes. We had no fishhooks, but I did have a jacknife and we probably could cut willow branches and rig up a brush seine that would net some fish for us. We had no salt, I remembered, but hungry enough, we could manage without salt. “Fletch,” said Cynthia, “do you think we ever will find Elmer?”

  “Maybe Elmer will find us,” I said. “He must be looking for us.”

  “We left the note,” she said.

  “The note is gone,” I reminded her. “The ghouls found the note, remember? They’d not have left it for him.”

  The valley was a little wider than the one we followed from the cave, but it had never broadened out.

  Rather, the hills seemed to get larger and move in on us. Now there were great rock cliffs that rose a hundred feet or more on either side. It became a less pleasant valley. Progressively, it grew more eerie and frightening. Not only was it stark, but silent. The creek that flowed through it was broad and deep, and there were no shallows or rapids. The water did not talk; it surged along with a look of terrible power.

  The sun was low in the west and with some surprise I realized that we had traveled through the day. I was tired, but not tired enough, it seemed, to have walked all day long.

  Ahead of us I saw a cleft cutting back into a cliff. The crest of the cliff was crowned with massive trees and occasional ragged cedars clung precariously to its face.

  “Let’s take a look,” I said. “We’ll have to find a place to spend the night.”

  “We’ll be cold,” she said. “We left the blankets.”

  “We have fire,” I said.

  She shuddered. “Can we have a fire? Is it safe to have a fire?”

  “We have to have a fire,” I told her.

  The cleft was dark. The walls of stone enclosed it and we could not see to the end of it because the dark deepened as the fissure ran back into the rock. The floor was pebbles, but off to one side, a little back from the entrance, a slab of rock was raised somewhat above the floor.

  “I’ll get wood,” I said.

  “Fletch!”

  “We have to have a fire,” I said. “We have to chance it. We’ll freeze to death without it.”

  “I’m scared,” she said.

  I looked at her. In the darkness her face was a blur of whiteness.

  “Finally I am scared,” she said. “I thought I wouldn’t be. I told myself I wouldn’t be. I said to me I’d tough it out. And it was all right as long as we were moving and out in the bright sunlight. But now night is coming, Fletch, and we haven’t any food and we don’t know where we are…”

  I moved close to her and took her in my arms and she I came into them willingly enough. Her arms went around me and clutched me tightly. And for the first time since it all had happened, since that moment I had found her sitting in the car as I walked down the steps from the administration building, I thought of her as a woman and I wondered, with some surprise, why it should have been that way. First, of course, she had been nothing but a nuisance, popping up from nowhere with that ridiculous letter from Thorney clutched tightly in her hand, and since then we’d been run ragged by the events that had come tumbling over one another and there’d been no time in which to think of her as a woman. Rather, she had been a good companion, not doing any bawling, not throwing any fits. I thought somewhat unkindly of myself for the way that I had acted. It would not have hurt me to pay her a few small courtesies along the way, and thinking back, it seemed that I had paid her none.

  “We’re babes in the woods,” she said. “You remember the old Earth fairy tale, of course.”

  “Sure, I remember it,” I said. “The birds came with leaves …”

  And let it go at that. For the tale, when you came to think of it, was not as pretty as it sounded. I couldn’t quite remember, but the birds, it seemed to me, had covered them with leaves because they were quite dead. Like so many other fairy tales, I thought, it was a horror story. She lifted her head. “I’m all right now,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  I put my fist underneath her chin and tilted up her face. I bent and kissed her on the lips.

  “Now let us go and get the wood,” she said.

  The sun was nearly gone, but it still was daylight. Lying along the foot of the cliff, we found scattered wood. A lot of it was cedar, dead branches that had fallen off the trees clinging to the bare face of the rock.

  “It’s a good place to have a fire,” I told her. “No one can see it. They’d have to be directly opposite the opening to see it.”

  “What about the smoke?” she asked.

  “This is dry wood,” I said. “There shouldn’t be much smoke.”

  I was right. The wood burned with a bright, clean flame There was scarcely any smoke. The night chill had not settled in as yet, but we huddled close beside the blaze. It was a friend and comfort. It beat back the dark. It drew us together. It warmed us and made a magic circle for us.

  The sun went down and out beyond the cleft dusk closed in rapidly. The world went dark and we were alone.

  Something stirred out beyond the circle of the fire, at the outer edge of dark. Something clicked upon the rock.

  I leaped erect and then I saw the blur of whiteness. His metal body shining in the firelight, Wolf trotted in to us.

  From his steel jaws hung the limp form of a rabbit.

  Wolf was hell on rabbits.

  Chapter 17

  O’Gillicuddy and his gang arrived when we were Finishing off the rabbit. Without salt, it was somewhat short of tasty, but it was food and the only thing we’d had all day had been grapes. Just the fact of eating made life seem a bit more stable and ourselves not entirely lost.

  Wolf lay between us, close beside the fire, stretched out, with his massive head resting on his metal paws.

  “If he’d only talk,” said Cynthia, “it would be very nice. Probably he could tell us what Was going on.”

  “Wolves don’t talk,” I said, chewing the shinbone of the rabbit.

  “But robots do,” she said. “Elmer talks. Even Bronco talks. And Wolf here really is a robot. He isn’t any wolf. He’s just made to look like one.”

  Wolf shifted his eyes around, to look first at one and, then the other of us. He didn’t say a word, but he beat hid metal tail upon the rock and it made a terrible racket. “Wolves don’t beat their tails,” she said.

  “How do you know that?”

  “I read it somewhere. Wolves don’t beat or wag their tails. Dogs do. Wolf is more like a dog than a wolf.”

 
“It bothers me,” I said. “Here he was, to start with, thirsting for our blood. Suddenly he turns around in his way of thinking and is a pal of ours. It doesn’t make much sense.”

  “I’m beginning to believe,” said Cynthia, “that nothing on the Earth really makes much sense.”

  We sat by the fire, enclosed in the magic circle. The firelight flickered and flickered yet again and there seemed to be a strange sense of motion all around.

  “We have visitors,” Cynthia said quietly.

  “It’s O’Gillicuddy,” I said. “O’Gillicuddy, are you there?”

  “We are here,” said O’Gillicuddy. “There are many of us. We come to bear you company in this wilderness.”

  “And to bear us word, perhaps?”

  “Yes, indeed. Word we have to bear.”

  “We would have you know,” said Cynthia, “word or not, we are glad to have you here.”

  Wolf flicked an ear, as if there were a fly, but there wasn’t any fly. Even if there had been, it would not have bothered Wolf.

  Ghosts, I thought. The place was full of ghosts, the principal one of which was named O’Gillicuddy. Ghosts were here, I thought, and we were accepting them as if they were people or had been people, and that was madness. Under normal circumstance, a ghost was acceptable, but here, under these conditions, they became not only acceptable, but normal.

  And, thinking of it, I became aghast at the abnormality of our condition, how awry it was from the quiet beauty of Alden, how distorted even from the mock majesty of Cemetery. For, in fact, those two places seemed abnormal now. We had become so firmly set in the reality of this mad adventure that the ordinary places we had known now seemed strange and far.

  “You are not, I fear,” O’Gillicuddy was saying, “safely beyond the clutches of the ghouls. They still trail you with much blood thirstiness.”

  “You mean,” I said, “they want our scalps for Cemetery.”

  “You have plucked forth the naked truth,” said O’Gillicuddy.

  “But why?” asked Cynthia. “Surely they are not friends of Cemetery.”

  “No,” said O’Gillicuddy, “they are not, indeed. Upon this planet, Cemetery has no friends. And yet there is no one here who would not do most willingly a favor for them, hoping a favor in return. Thus great power corrupts.”

  “But there is nothing they would want from Cemetery,” Cynthia pointed out.

  “Not at the moment, perhaps. But a favor deferred is still a favor and one that can be collected later. One can pile up points.”

  “You said no one would refuse a favor,” I said. “How about yourself?”

  “In our case,” said O’Gillicuddy, “there is a difference. Cemetery can do nothing for us, but what is perhaps of more importance, it can do nothing to us. We hope no favor and we have no fear.”

  “And you say we aren’t safe?”

  “They are hunting for you,” said O’Gillicuddy. “They will keep on hunting. You handed them defeat this morning and it lies bitter in their mouths. One the steel wolf; killed and another died …”

  “But they shot him themselves,” said Cynthia. “A bullet I meant for us. It was no fault of ours.”

  “They still count it against you. There are two dead and there must be accountability. They do not accept the blame. They lay it all on you.”

  “They’ll have a hard time finding us.”

  “Hard, perhaps,” said O’Gillicuddy, “But find you they I will. They are woodsmen of the finest. They range like hunting dogs. They read the wilderness like a book. A turned stone, a disturbed leaf, a bruised blade of grass—it says volumes to them.”

  “Our only hope,” said Cynthia, “is to find Elmer and I Bronco. If we were together …”

  “We can tell you where they are,” said O’Gillicuddy, “but it’s a long, hard way and you would be turning back into the very arms of the raging ghouls. We tried most desperately to reveal ourselves to your two companions so that we could lead them back to you, but for all that we could do they remained unaware of us. It takes a sharper-tuned sensibility than a robot can possess to discover us.”

  “It all seems pretty hopeless to me,” said Cynthia, sounding considerably discouraged. “You can’t guide Elmer and Bronco to us and you say the ghouls are sure to find us.”

  “And that isn’t all,” said O’Gillicuddy, seeming ghoulishly happy at what he had to tell us. “The Raveners are on the prowl.”

  “The Raveners?” I asked. “Are there more than one of them?”

  “There are two of them.”

  “You mean war machines?”

  “Is that what you call them?”

  “That’s what Elmer thinks they are.”

  “But that can’t mean anything to us,” protested Cynthia. “Surely the war machines are not tied in with Cemetery.”

  “But they are,” said O’Gillicuddy.

  “Why?” I asked. “What has Cemetery got they possibly could want?”

  “Lubricating oil,” said O’Gillicuddy.

  I’m afraid I groaned at that. It was such a simple thing and yet so logical. It was something that anyone should have thought of. The machines would have built-in power, more than likely nuclear, although I’d never really known, and they would be self-repairing, but the one thing they would need, perhaps the only thing they would need and would not have, would be lubricants.

  This would be something that Cemetery wouldn’t miss. Cemetery missed no bets at all. They passed up nothing that would make any other factor on the Earth in some way beholden to them.

  “And the census-taker,” I said. “I suppose he is some way tied into it as well. And, by the way, where is the census-taker?”

  “He disappeared,” said O’Gillicuddy. “He flitters here and there. He is not really part of us. He is not always with us. We don’t know where he is.”

  “Nor what he is?”

  “What he is? Why, he’s the census-taker.”

  “That’s not what I mean. Is he a human being? Perhaps a mutated human being. There would have been a lot of human mutation. Some good, mostly bad. Although I imagine that over the years a great part of the bad died out. The ghouls have telepathy and God knows what else and the settlers probably have something, too, although we don’t know what it is. Even you, for ghosts are not…”

  “Shades,” said O’Gillicuddy.

  “All right, then, shades. Shades are not a normal human condition. Maybe there aren’t any shades any place except here on Earth. No one knows what happened during those years after the people fled into space. Earth is a different place today than it was then.”

  “You got off the track,” said Cynthia. “You were asking if the census-taker was a Cemetery creature.”

  “I am sure that he is not,” said O’Gillicuddy. “I don’t know what he is. I have always thought he was a sort of human being. He is a lot like humans. Not made the way they are, of course, and there is only one of him and …”

  “Look,” I said, “you didn’t come here just to bear us company. You came here for a purpose. You wouldn’t have come just to bring us bad news. What is it all about?”

  “There are many of us here,” said the shade. “We foregathered in some strength of numbers. We sent out a call for a gathering of the clan, for we feel great compassion and a strange comradeship with you. Not in all the history of the Earth has anyone before you tweaked the tail of Cemetery in such a hearty fashion.”

  “And you like that?”

  “We like it very much.”

  “And you’ve come to cheer us on.”

  “Not cheer,” said O’Gillicuddy, “although that we would also do and most willingly. But we feel that it is in our capacity to be of the slightest help.”

  “We’re in the market,” said Cynthia, “for any help there is.”

  “It becomes a complicated matter to explain,” said O’Gillicuddy, “and in lack of adequate information, you must fill in with faith. Being the sort of things we are, we have no real co
ntact with the corporeal universe. But it seems we do have some marginal powers to interact with time and space, which are neither in the corporeal universe nor quite out of it.”

  “Now, wait a second there,” I said. “What you are talking of…”

  “Believe me,” said O’Gillicuddy, “we have wracked our mental powers and can come up with nothing else. It is little that we have to offer, but …”

  “What you propose to do,” said Cynthia, “is to move us in time.”

  “But by only the tiniest fraction,” said O’Gillicuddy. “A minute part of a second. Barely out of the present, but that would be quite enough.”

  “It’s never been done,” Cynthia objected. “For hundreds of years it has been studied and investigated and absolutely nothing has ever come of it.”

  “Have you ever done it?” I demanded.

  “No, not actually,” said O’Gillicuddy. “But we have thought about it and speculated on it and we are rather sure …”

  “But not entirely sure?”

  “You are right,” said O’Gillicuddy. “Not entirely sure.”

  “And once you’ve done it,” I asked, “how about our getting back? I would not want to live out my life a fractional part of a second behind all the universe.”

  “We have worked that out, too,” the shade said blithely. “We would set a time-trap at the entrance of this cleft and by stepping into it…”

  “But you’re not sure of that one, either.”

  “Well, fairly certain,” said O’Gillicuddy.

  It wasn’t very promising and, on top of that, I asked myself, how could we be sure that any of the rest of all he’d told was the truth? Maybe O’Gillicuddy and his gang of shades were doing no more than trying to push us into a situation where we’d serve willingly as subjects for an experiment they had cooked up. And, come to think of it, how could we be sure there were any shades at all? We had seen them, or seemed to see them, as they danced around the fire back at the settlement. But actually all we had to go on was what the census-taker had told us and this voice that said it was O’Gillicuddy.