“Talking to yourself. Not a good sign,” he remarked. “
The man was a study in black, white, and gray. In fact, from the cast of the darkness upon his right-hand side and the lay of the light on his left, he might have been the first wielder of the sacrificial dagger. I’d no real way of telling. Whoever or whatever he or it was, I’d no desire to become acquainted.
So I shrugged.
“The only sign I care about here has ‘exit’ written on it,” I told him as I brushed past him.
His hand fell upon my shoulder and turned me back easily in his direction.
Again the chuckle.
“You must be careful what you wish for in this place,” he told me in low and measured tones, “for wishes are sometimes granted here, and if the granter be depraved and read ‘quietus’ for your ‘exit’-why, then, poof! You may cease to be. Up in smoke. Downward to the earth. Sideways to hell and gone.”
“I’ve already been there,” I answered, “and lots of points along the way.”
“What ho! Look! Your wish has been granted,” he remarked, his left eye catching a flash of light and reflecting it, tapetumlike, in my direction. No matter how I turned or squinted, however, could I find sight of his right eye. “Over there,” he finished, pointing.
I turned my head in the direction he indicated, and there upon the top stone of a dolmen shone an exit sign exactly like the one above the emergency door at a theater I used to frequent near campus.
“You’re right,” I said.
“Will you go through it?”
“Will you?”
“No need,” he replied. “I already know what’s there.”
“What?” I inquired.
“The other side.”
“How droll,” I answered.
“If one gets one’s wish and spurns it, one might piss off the Powers,” he said then.
“You have firsthand knowledge of this?”
I heard a grinding, clicking noise then, and it was several moments before I realized he was gnashing his teeth. I walked away then toward the exit sign, wanting to inspect whatever it represented at nearer range.
There were two standing stones with a flat slab across the top. The gateway thus formed was large enough to walk through. It was shadowy, though….
You going through it, boss?
“Why not°? This is one of the few times in my life that I feel indispensable to whoever is running the show.”
I wouldn’t get too cocky…Frakir began, but I was already moving.
Three quick paces were all that it took, and I was looking outward across a circle of stones and sparkling grass past a black-and-white man toward another dolmen bearing an exit sign, a shadowy form within it. Halting, I took a step backward and turned. There was a black-and-white man regarding me, a dolmen to his rear, dark Form within it. I raised my right hand above my head. So did the shadowy figure. I turned back in the direction I had initially been headed. The shadowy figure across from me also had his hand upraised. I stepped on through.
“Small world,” I observed, “but I’d hate to paint it.”
The man laughed.
“Now you are reminded that your every exit is also an entrance,” he said.
“Seeing you here, I am reminded even more of a play by Sartre,” I responded.
“Unkind,” he answered, “but philosophically cogent. I have always found that hell is other people. Only I have done nothing to rouse your distrust, have I?”
“Were you or were you not the person I saw sacrifice a woman in this vicinity?” I asked.
“Even if I were, what is that to you? You were not involved.”
“I guess I have peculiar feelings about little things-like the value of life.”
“Indignation is cheap. Even Albert Schweitzer’s reverence for life didn’t include the tapeworm, the tsetse fly, the cancer cell.”
“You know what I mean. Did you or did you not sacrifice a woman on a stone altar a little while ago?”
“Show me the altar.”
“I can’t. It’s gone.”
“Show me the woman.”
“She is, too.”
“Then you haven’t much of a case.”
“This isn’t a court, damn it! If you want to converse, answer my question. If you don’t, let’s stop making noises at each other.”