“Sorry about your hand,” said Ellen Braisted.
He had not realized that he was rubbing it. “Oh, that’s all right. I understand why you had to do it.”
“Come over here.” She opened a chest of first-aid supplies and took out cotton gauze. “Let me put this on it.
You don’t want it to stop hurtingthat’s the whole idea.
But you don’t want it getting infected. What’s that business on your head?”
He touched the scar with his free hand. He had almost forgotten it.
He found it easy to tell her about it. When he was through she patted his arm. “Tough world. You say you were married?”
“Yes.” He told her about Margot. And about Margot’s death. She nodded, her face drawn.
“I was married too. Chandler,” she said after a moment.
“Lost my husband two years ago.”
“Murdered?”
“Well,” she said thoughtfully, “depends on what you mean by that. It was his own hand that did it. Got up one morning, went into the kitchen, came back looking like1
don’t knowUke his own evil nature. You know those cartoons? The Good You in white, the Bad You in black, whispering suggestions into your ear? He looked the Bad Him. And he cut his throat with a breadknife.”
“Oh, God!” The words were jerked out of him. “Did hedidn’t he say anything?”
“Yes, Chandler, he did. But I don’t want to tell you what, because it was dirty and awful.”
There was a smell of coffee percolating from inside the house, and sounds of dishes and silverware. “Let’s sit down over here,” said Chandler, pointing to a chained swing that looked out over the darkening valley. “I guess your husband was possessed. Or as they say here, he had a flame spirit”
“Ellen.”
“Ellen, I mean,” he corrected.
“Chandler,” she said thoughtfully, “well, I don’t quite go along with them on that. I’ve had quite a lot of experience with them, ever since my husbandever since two years ago. They used me.”
“For what?” Chandler demanded, startled. The concept of being used by the things was new, and peculiarly frightening. It was bad enough to view them as strange diabolic elements out of a hostile universe; to give them purpose was terrifying.
“You name it, Chandler,” said the girl. “I did it. I’ve been practically all over the world in two years, because they used me for a messenger andother things. They used me for all sorts of things, Chandler,” she said very temperately, “and some of them I don’t intend to discuss.”
“Of course.”
“Of course.” Then she brightened. “But it wasn’t all bad. You wouldn’t believe some of the things1 flew a jet airplane to Lisbon once, Chandler! Would you believe it?
And as a matter of fact, I don’t even know how to drive a car very well. When I’m myself, I mean. I’ve been in Russia and England. I think I was in Africa once, although nobody ever mentioned the name and I wasn’t sure. Just now, I came up from San Diego driving a great big truck, and Well, it’s been interesting. But I don’t agree with the ‘flame spirit’ idea. They aren’t ghosts or witches. They aren’t creatures from outer space. Anyway, one of them is a man named Brad Fenell.”
Chandler’s heels dropped to the floor. The swing stopped with a clatter of its chains.
“A man?”
Ellen nodded soberly. “Or he was at one time, anyway,”
she corrected after a moment. “I used to go out with him when he lived next door to me in Catasauqua.”
“But,” cried Chandler, “what How How could ho-”
She shook her head. “Now you’re asking hard questions, Chandler. But I know this onethingwas Brad Pencil. Brad asked me to marry him, and when I told him I wouldn’t hesaid those words I heard from my husband, just before he killed himself.”
She stood up and turned toward the house. “And now,” she said, “Meggie’s calling us to eat. I hope I haven’t spoiled your appetite.”
All through the meal. Chandler was preoccupied. He had to be spoken to twice before he responded, and then he had to be reminded to address the Orphalese by name.
He was trying to understand what Ellen had told him, and he was not succeeding. Real human beings? The monsters who had done such things?
It was, he thought somberly, more incredible to think of them as men than as demons from the pits of hell… .
The interrupted meeting was resumed after the place had been tidied up. The community had counted its losses and buried its dead.
There had been four of the attacking hunters. Even without their submachine guns, they had succeeded in killing eight Orphalese. But it was not all loss to the Orphalese, because two of the hunters were still alive, though wounded, and under the rules of this chessboard the captured enemy became a friend.
Guy had suffered a broken jaw in the scuffle and another man presided, a fat youth who favored a bandaged leg. He limped to his feet, grimacing and patting his leg. “0 Orphalese and brothers,” he said, “we have lost friends, but we have won a test. Praise the Prophet, we will be spared to win again, and to drive the imps of fire out of our world. Meggie, you going to tie these folks up?” The girl proudly ordered one of the hunters into the spotlighted dentist’s chair, another into a wing chair that was hastily moved onto the platform. The men were bleed-ing and hurt, but they had clearly been abandoned by their possessors. They watched the Orphalese with puzzle-ment and fear.
“Walter, they’re okay now,” Meg reported as others finished tying up the hunters. “Oh, wait a minute.” She advanced on Chandler. “Chandler, I’m sorry. You sit down there, hear?”
Chandler suffered himself to be bound to a camp chair on the platform and Walter took a drink of wine and opened the ornate book that was before him on the rostrum.
“Meg, thanks. Guy, I hope I do this as good as you do.
Let me read you a little. Let’s see.” He put on his glasses and read:
” ‘Much in you is still man, and much in you is not yet man, but a shapeless pigmy that walks asleep in the mist searching for its own awakening.’ “
He closed the book, loojced with satisfaction at Guy and..
said: “Do you understand that, new friends? They are t~ee words of the Prophet, who men call Kahlil Gibran. Foi’
the benefit of the new folks I ought to say that he died this fleshly life quite a good number of years ago, but his vision was unclouded. Like we say, we are the sinews that batter the flame spirits but he is our soul.” There was an antfphonal murmur from the audience and Walter flipped the pages again rapidly, obviously looking for a familiar passage. “People of Orphalese, here we are now. This’s what he says. ‘What is this that has torn our world apart?’
The Prophet says: It is life in quest of life, inbodies that fear the grave.’ Now, honestly, nothing could be clearer than that, people of Orphalese and friends! We got something taking possession of us, see? What is it? Well, he says here, People of Orphalese and friends. It is a flame spirit in you ever gathering more of itself.’ Now, what the heck! Nobody can blame us for what a flame spirit in us does! So the first thing we got to learn, friendsand people of Orphaleseis, we aren’t to blame. And the second thing is, we are to blame!”
He turned and grinned at Chandler kindly, while the chorus of responses came from the room. “Like here,” he said, “people of Orphalese, the Prophet says everybody is guilty. ‘The murdered is not unaccountable for his own murder, and the robbed is not blameless in being robbed.
The righteous is not innocent of the deeds of the wicked, and the whitehanded is not clean in the doings of the felon.’ You see what he’s getting at? We all got to take the responsibility for everythingand that means we got to sufferbut we don’t have to worry about any special things we did when some flame spirit or wanderer, like, took us over.
“But we do have to suffer, people of Orphalese.” His expression became grim. “Our beloved founder, Guy, who’s sitting there doing a little extra suffering now, was favored enough to understand these things in the very beginning, when he himself was seized by these imps. And it is all in this book! Like it says, ‘Your pain is self-chosen.
It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.’ Ponder on that, people of Orphaleseand friends. No, I mean really ponder,” he explained, glancing at the bound “friends” on the platform.
“We always do that for a minute. Ada there will play us some music so we can ponder.”