It was a warm, bright, silent day. Nothing moved. From his height he could see the Diesel at the front of the train and the caboose at its rear. No people. “The train was halted a quarter-mile from where the tracks swooped across the river on a suspension bridge. Away from the river, the side of the tracks that had been hidden from him before, was an uneven rock cut and, above it, the slope of a mountain.
By looking carefully he could spot the signs of a number of homes within half a mile or sothe corner of a roof, a glassed-in porch built to command a river view, a twenty-foot television antenna poking through the trees.
There was also the curve of a higher road along which the homes were strung.
Chandler took thought. He was alive and free, two gifts more gracious than he had had any right to expect.
However, he would need food and he would need at least some sort of bandage for his forehead. He had a wool cap, stolen from the high school, which would hide the mark, though what it would do to the burn on his skin was something else again.
Chandler climbed down the ladder. With considerable pain he gentled the cap over the great raw “H” on his forehead and turned toward the mountain.
A voice from behind him said, “Hey. What’s that you’ve got on your head?”
Chandler whirled, mad and scared. There was a man at the open doorway of the next boxcar, kneeling and looking out at him. He was a small man, by no means young.
He wore a dirty Army officer’s uniform blouse over chi-nos. His face was dirty and unshaven, his eyes were red-rimmed and puffy, but his expression was serenely interested.
“Now, where the hell did you come from?” demanded Chandler. “I didn’t see you.”
“Perhaps you didn’t look,” the man said cheerfully, untangled his legs and slipped down to the crushed gravel at the side of the roadbed. He caught Chandler’s shoulder.
to steady himself. From twenty inches away his breath was enough to knock Chandler down.
But the man did not seem drunk. He didn’t even seem hung over, though he walked awkwardly, like a man who is just on his feet after a long illness, or a toddling child.
“Excuse,” he said, pushing past Chandler and walking a step or two toward the head of the train, staring toward the engine.
As Chandler watched) the little man lurched, recovered himself and spun to face him. The change in him was instant; one moment he was staring reflectively down the track, unhurried and calm; the next he was in a flap of consternation and terror. His eyes were wide with fright. His lips worked convulsively.
Alarmed, Chandler snapped, “What’s the matter with you?”
“I” The man swallowed, and stared about him. Then his eyes returned to Chandler. He took a step, put out a hand and said, “I”
Then his expression changed again.
His hand dropped. In a tone of friendly curiosity he said, “I asked you what you had on your head. Fall against a hot stove?”
Chandler was now thoroughly jumpy. He didn’t understand what was going on, but he understood that he didn’t like it. And he didn’t like the subject of their conversation.
He snapped, “It’s a brand. I got it for committing murder and rape, all right?”
“Oh?” The man nodded reflectively.
“Yeah. I was possessed … but they didn’t believe me.
So they put this ‘H’ on me. It stands for ‘hoaxer.’ “
“Too bad.” The man returned to Chandler and patted his shoulder. “Why didn’t they believe you?”
“Because it happened in a pharmaceutical plant. I don’t know how it is where you come from, buddy, but where I livelivedthat sort of thing didn’t happen in that kind of place. Only it does now! Look at this train.”
The man smiled brightly. “You think the train is possessed?”
“I think the engineer is.”
The man nodd6d, and glanced impatiently toward the bridge again. “Would that be so bad?”
“Bad? Where’ve you been?”
The little man apologized, “I mean, do all thewhat do you call them? Do all the cases of possession have to be wicked?”
Chandler took a deep breath. He couldn’t believe the little man was for real. He could feel the short hairs at the back of his neck prickling erect. Something smelled wrong.
Nobody asked questions like that… . He said weakly, “I never heard of any that weren’t. Did you?”
“Yes, maybe I did,” flared the man defensively. “Why not? Nothing is evil. It’s all what you make of it… and I could imagine times when that sort of affair could be good. I can imagine it carrying you up to the stars! I can imagine it filling y6ur brain with a mind grand enough to crack your own. I can”
His voice tapered off as he noticed Chandler’s popeyed stare.
“I was only saying maybe,” he apologized, hesitated, seemed about to speak again.. . and then turned and started off toward the head of the train at a dead run.
Chandler stared after him.
He scratched the area of skin around the seared place on his forehead, then turned and began to climb the mountain.
Twenty yards uphill he stopped as though he had run into a brick wall.
He turned and looked down the tracks, but the man was out of sight. Chandler stood staring down the empty line of crushed rock, not seeing it. There was a big question in his mind. He was wondering just who he had been talking to.
Or what.
By the time he reached the first shelving roadway he had put that particular puzzle away in the back of his mind. He knocked on the first door he came to, a great old three-storey house with well tended gardens.
Half a minute passed. There was no answer and no sound. The air smelled warmly of honeysuckle and mown grass, with wild onions chopped down by the blades of the mower. It was pleasant, or would have been in happier times. He knocked again, peremptorily, and the door was opened at once. Evidently someone had been right inside, listening.
A man stared at him. “Stranger, what do you want?” He was short, plump, with an extremely thick and unkempt beard. It did not appear to have been grown for its own sake, for where the facial hair could not be coaxed to grow his skin had the gross pits of old acne.
Chandler said glibly: “Good morning. I’m working my way east. I need something to eat, and I’m willing to work for it.”
The man withdrew, leaving the upper half of the Dutch door open. As it looked in on only a vestibule it did not tell Chandler much. There was one curious thinga lath and cardboard sign, shaped like an arc of a rainbow, lettered:
WELCOME TO ORPHALESE
He puzzled over it and dismissed it. The entrance room, apart from the sign, had a knickknack shelf of Japanese carved ivory and an old-fashioned umbrella rack, but that added nothing to his knowledge. He had already guessed that the owners of this home were well off. Also it had been recently painted; so they were not demoralized, as so much of the world had been demoralized, by the coming of the possessors. Even the elaborate sculpturing of its hedges had been maintained.
The man came back and with him was a girl of fifteen or so. She was tail, slim and rather homely, with a large jaw and an oval face. “Guy, he’s not much to look at,”
she said to the pockmarked man. “Meggie, shall I let him in?” he asked. “Guy, you might as well,” she shrugged, staring at Chandler with interest but not sympathy.
“Stranger, come along,” said the man named Guy, and led him through a short hall into an enormous living room, a room two storeys high with a ten-foot fireplace.
Chandler’s first thought was that he had stumbled in upon a wake. The room was neatly laid out in rows of folding chairs, more than half of them occupied. He entered from the side, but all the occupants of the chairs were looking toward him. He returned their stares; he had had a good deal of practice lately in looking back at staring faces, he reflected.
“Stranger, go in,” said the man who had let him in, nudging him, “and meet the people of Orphalese.”
Chandler hardly heard him. He had not expected anything like this. It was a meeting, a Daumier caricature of a Thursday Afternoon Literary Circle, old men with faces like moons, young women with faces like hags. They were strained, haggard and fearful, and a surprising number of them showed some sort of physical defect, a bandaged leg, an arm in a sling or merely the marks of pain on the features.