midmorning-high and the day was warming up and this sheltered corner of the
earth stood relaxed and hushed, waiting for the heat.
He looked at his watch and he had forty minutes left, so he went up the
steps and across the porch until he came to the door. Reaching out his hand,
he grasped the knob and turned-except he didn’t turn it; the knob stayed
exactly where it was and his clenched fingers went half around it in the
motion of a turn.
Puzzled, he tried again and still he didn’t turn the knob. It was as if
the knob was covered with some hard, slick coating, like a coat of brittle
ice, on which the fingers slipped without exerting any pressure on the knob.
He bent his head close to the knob and tried to see if there were any
evidence of coating, and there was no evidence. The knob looked perfectly
all right-too all right, perhaps. For it was clean, as if someone had wiped
and polished it. There was no dust upon it, and no weather specks.
He tried a thumbnail on it, and the thumbnail slipped but left no mark
behind it. He ran his palm over the outer surface of the door and the wood
was slick. The rubbing of the palm set up no friction. The palm slid along
the wood as if the palm were greased, but there was no sign of grease. There
was no indication of anything to account for the slickness of the door.
Lewis moved from the door to the clapboard and the clapboard also was
slick. He tried palm and thumbnail on it and the answer was the same. There
was something covering this house which made it slick and smooth-so smooth
that dust could not cling upon its surface nor could weather stain it.
He moved along the porch until he came to a window, and now, as he
stood facing the window, he realized something he had not noticed before,
something that helped make the house seem gaunter than it really was. The
windows were black. There were no curtains, no drapes, no shades; they were
simply black rectangles, like empty eyes staring out of the bare skull of
the house.
He moved closer to the window and put his face up to it, shading the
sides of his face, next to the eyes, with his upheld hands to shield out the
sunlight. But even so, he could not see into the room beyond. He stared,
instead, into a pool of blackness, and the blackness, curiously enough, had
no reflective qualities. He could not see himself reflected in the glass. He
could see nothing but the blackness, as if the light hit the window and was
absorbed by it, sucked in and held by it. There was no bouncing back of
light once it had hit that window.
He left the porch and went slowly around the house, examining it as he
went. The windows were all blank, black pools that sucked in the captured
light, and all the exterior was slick and hard.
He pounded the clapboard with his fist, and it was like the pounding of
a rock. He examined the stone walls of the basement where they were exposed,
and the walls were smooth and slick. There were mortar gaps between the
stones and in the stones themselves one could see uneven surfaces, but the
hand rubbed across the wall could detect no roughness.
An invisible something had been laid over the roughness of the stone,
just enough of it to fill in the pits and uneven surfaces. But one could not
detect it. It was almost as if it had no substance.
Straightening up from his examination of the wall, Lewis looked at his
watch. There were only ten minutes left. He must be getting on.
He walked down the hill toward the tangle of old orchard. At its edge
he stopped and looked back, and now the house was different. It was no
longer just a structure. It wore a personality, a mocking, leering look, and
there was a malevolent chuckle bubbling inside of it, ready to break out.
Lewis ducked into the orchard and worked his way in among the trees.
There was no path and beneath the trees the grass and weeds grew tall. He
ducked the drooping branches and walked around a tree that had been uprooted
in some windstorm of many years before.
He reached up as he went along, picking an apple here and there,
scrubby things and sour, taking a single bite out of each one of them, then
throwing it away, for there was none of them that was fit to eat, as if they
might have taken from the neglected soil a certain basic bitterness.
At the far side of the orchard he found the fence and the graves that
it enclosed. Here the weeds and grass were not so high and the fence showed
signs of repair made rather recently, and at the foot of each grave,
opposite the three crude native limestone headstones, was a peony bush, each
a great straggling mass of plants that had grown, undisciplined, for years.
Standing before the weathered picketing, he knew that he had stumbled
on the Wallace family burial plot.
But there should have been only the two stones. What about the third?
He moved around the fence to the sagging gate and went into the plot.
Standing at the foot of the graves, he read the legends on the stones. The
carving was angular and rough, giving evidence of having been executed by
unaccustomed hands. There were no pious phrases, no lines of verse, no
carvings of angels or of lambs or of other symbolic figures such as had been
customary in the 1 860s. There were just the names and dates.
On the first stone: Amanda Wallace 1821-1863
And on the second stone: Jedediah Wallace 1816-1866
And on the third stone-
4
“Give me that pencil, please,” said Lewis.
Hardwicke quit rolling it between his palms and banded it across.
“Paper, too?” he asked.
“If you please,” said Lewis.
He bent above the desk and drew rapidly.
“Here,” he said, handing back the paper.
Hardwicke wrinkled his brow.
“But it makes no sense,” he said. “Except for that figure underneath.”
“The figure eight, lying on its side. Yes, I know. The symbol for
infinity.”
“But the rest of it?”
“I don’t know,” said Lewis. “it is the inscription on the tombstone. I
copied it …”
“And you know it now by heart.”
“I should. I’ve studied it enough.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it in my life,” said Hardwicke. “Not
that I’m an authority. I really know little at all in this field.”
“You can put your mind at rest. It’s nothing that anyone knows anything
about. It bears no resemblance, not even the remotest, to any language or
any known inscription. I checked with men who know. Not one, but a dozen of
them. I told them I’d found it on a rocky cliff. I am sure that most of them
think I am a crackpot. One of those people who are trying to prove that the
Romans or the Phoenicians or the Irish or whatnot had pre-Colombian
settlements in America.”
Hardwicke put down the sheet of paper.
“I can see what you mean,” he said, “when you say you have more
questions now than when you started. Not only the question of a young man
more than a century old, but likewise the matter of the slickness of the
house and the third gravestone with the undecipherable inscription. You say
you’ve never talked with Wallace?”
“No one talks to him. Except the mailman. He goes out on his daily
walks and he packs this gun.”
“People are afraid to talk with him?”
“Because of the gun, you mean.”
“Well, yes, I suppose that was in the back of my mind. I wondered why
he carried it.”
Lewis shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ve tried to tie it in, to find
some reason he always has it with him. He has never fired the rifle so far
as I can find. But I don’t think the rifle is the reason no one talks with
him. He’s an anachronism, something living from another age. No one fears
him, I am sure of that. He’s been around too long for anyone to fear him.
Too familiar. He’s a fixture of the land, like a tree or boulder. And yet no
one feels quite comfortable with him, either. I would imagine that most of
them, if they should come face to face with him, would feel uncomfortable.
For he’s something they are not-something greater than they are and at the
same time a good deal less. As if he were a man who had walked away from his
own humanity. I think that, secretly, many of his neighbors may be a bit
ashamed of him, shamed because he has, somehow, perhaps ignobly,