WILLOUGHBY HAROLD GAGE LAY on the impeccably barbered lawn of a huge estate. It was a fourteenth-century chateau somewhere in the Loire. It had battlements and turrets and crenellations. The lawn was laid out in formal gardens, full of marble statuary. Elaborate topiary stood like fantastic mythological creatures, once human, now petrified under some spell or enchantment into inanimate sentinels. Nearby, an orangery, bulging and crimson with fruit, stood beside a pond. Its pagodalike shape hung inverted as if in a dream, on the still, stippled surface of the water. Beyond the chateau stretched softly rolling hills and vineyards as far as the eye could see.
There was no one in sight and the chateau in the background, apparently empty, thrust its towers assertively skyward while soft, fleecy, infinitely yielding cumuli tumbled above them.
Gladys Garvix, eyes closed, a smile of quiet pleasure on her lips, lay back on the grass, her skirts hiked above her hips, a pair of flimsy underthings drawn below her knees, and Gage’s face buried between her partially spread thighs. His mouth tasted of salt and he recalled that deep inside her she smelled of the sea. He thought of Venus, borne on ocean foam, boiling toward him on a torrent of waves.
At a certain point she turned over and he drew the filmy silken thing off. She moaned a little when he raised her on her knees and then lowered her head far down between her elbows until her cheek was cushioned on the grass. The gesture, abrupt and eloquent, caused her tawny hair to cascade forward over her shoulders. She waited on all fours with the sun streaming like a beacon between her thighs.
When at last her legs clamped hard against his ribs and he was locked securely in between, they made love in an immensely ponderous and creaky slow motion, like a pair of huge copulating spiders locked in fatal embrace. He took her in a crocus bed, trampling the cold, dewy petals beneath their tumultuous rollings.
When he woke he thought he was in his mother’s house, in his own bed beneath the sloping eaves of the musty, airless little attic room he had inhabited nearly three decades ago. It occurred to him that he was cold and damp and that he wanted to pull the blankets up around him. More fully awake, Gage sensed he was itchy and erect and damp in his underthings. He had the feeling there was a damp rag over his face. When he blinked his eyes and finally opened them he discovered it wasn’t a rag. It was a white, thick, pearly mist that hung with the weight of damp shrouds above him. The very boughs and branches of trees seemed to sag beneath the burden of it. Great rags and clots of it swaddled the trees and the tips of the mighty spruce soaring above him pierced the mist and vanished deep within it like a lance entering the soft white underbelly of a frog. Then at last he remembered where he was.
It was that neither-here-nor-there hour when the sun is not up or down and the light, devoid of any color, is a cold gunmetal gray. There was no sound. Even the birds weren’t up. Like the mist, a thick, muffled silence hung above the place. It had the quality of velvet, and so soft it was that Gage felt he might even reach out and stroke it with his hand the way one strokes a fat, comfortable cat.
The fire had died several hours before. All that was left of it was the charred, powdery shapes of burnt-out logs, and a small wispy corkscrew of smoke spiraling lazily upward.
He looked round at the others. The sour, sodden, rumpled forms all huddled there in the shadows were strewn like debris around the ashen remains of the fire. He had the sudden inexplicable conviction that they were all dead.
Was it yesterday noon they’d started out? Indeed it was, although it seemed longer ago than that. He recalled being late, rushing to Garvix’s place where they were all to gather. It was to be the starting point.
He recalled lurching and careening over a windy, pitted country road, pocked with craters and strewn with the dried-out husks of frogs mashed flat into the tar beneath automobile tires. The road curved round a stand of birch, then dipped steeply down into a dozy hamlet consisting of no more than a gas station, an IGA store, and a Post Office. He had encompassed it all in a glance and the next moment passed out of the place forever.
Several hundred yards beyond the hamlet, further on at a crossroads, he passed a small country church, standing like a toy halfway up the slope of a hill. It was immaculately white like a wedding cake, with a needlepoint steeple soaring heavenward.
Going past it, he caught a glimpse of a tiny, adjoining cemetery behind a wrought-iron fence. It too lay halfway up the hill, and was dotted with innumerable ancient stones strewn across the land like tossed dice in no perceivable pattern. Many of the stones were cracked and moss-covered. They leaned earthward. Some, over the centuries, had sunk and stood now like stunted elves, half-submerged in the ground.
For some inscrutable reason, three stumpy mounds hovered like sentinels above the cemetery. There was something oddly foreboding and atavistic about them—like druidic monuments—a grim reminder of all the wise and cautious and good of the earth at rest beneath the sod.
He looked around now at the desolation of the place in which he found himself and for the briefest moment he felt he was in a dream. All of yesterday now seemed strangely unreal. The road, the church, the tiny cemetery, even the day’s wandering through the forests, presumably his own, had a curiously intangible quality of never having been.
Then, not twenty paces from him in the gray light of the half-dawn, he saw the brown, huddled shape of Gladys Garvix. She lay sleeping in the woolly immensity of Freddy Jamison’s jacket, curled into an appealing little ball, like some small, furry animal—poised on her hip, one breast thrust jauntily skyward. Her mouth hung open, agape, and through slightly protrusive incisors he had a glimpse of gold glinting beneath the roof of her mouth. Those teeth had a slightly canine quality. He imagined they could rip and tear, shred flesh, if some force of rage behind them impelled them to do so. It struck him that he had seen some secret, hidden, intimate part of her. Then he recalled the cold dampness in his underthings and he turned abruptly away, flushed and mortified, like a man who’d been caught peering up a woman’s skirts.
Everyone else appeared to be sleeping. But off to the right he could see the phantomy silhouette of Tom Putney through a milky suspension. He was leaning against a tree, standing guard over Rogers. Gage struggled stiff-legged and wobbly to his feet. Then, shaking out the kinks and knots, he made his way in that direction.
Putney barely looked at him as he approached. There was something defiant and resentful in the boy as if he thought of Gage as an intruder. His body stiffened as Gage drew near. Now he slouched back into his former position against the tree. Gage had the impression that he’d been standing there in precisely that fashion for many hours.
“How is he?” Gage asked.
“’Bout the same.”
“Mind if I look?”
Putney shrugged, muttered something, and stepped backward several paces. Still when Gage dropped quickly to his knees beside the slumbering form, he could feel the boy’s eyes, sullen and untrusting, bearing down upon him.
Gage reached for the surveyor’s wrist. He found the pulse beat strong and regular. That in itself was encouraging. There had been, he thought, no deterioration during the night. But still, he seemed unable to waken.
Just before he had been talking to Putney in hushed tones. Now he lowered his voice to a harsh and rather forceful whisper and said: “Mr. Rogers!” This produced no answer, so he tried again. “Mr. Rogers!” He said it over and over again, like a man disconnected on the phone. But to no avail. The surveyor slept on—a reluctant sleeper in an unending night, unable to wake.
Gently, he nudged him. The eyes fluttered momentarily and blinked like a sputtering candle. He nudged him once more. This time the eyes opened wide, and Gage, startled, found himself peering into an icy blue gaze that conveyed a sense of almost preternatural intelligence. For the most fleeting moment the clouds opened and he had the impression of a dazzling clarity behind the eyes—a clarity in which he detected the old, shrewd, unshakable sanity that had so impressed him in those eyes before. He even thought, as their gazes locked, that Rogers recognized him, and he could have sworn that the old surveyor winked.
But in the next moment he knew he’d imagined it. The cloudy, dazed expression seeped back into the eyes like a scummy film across a pond. And then it was he noted the decided irregularity in pupillary size.
“Mr. Rogers!” He tried once more but he knew it was useless. Putney stirred, then came up behind him. “How is he?”
“About the same,” Gage said, but he knew otherwise. He sighed and rose.
Within an hour’s time they were all up. The sun had risen and most of the mist had burned off. The sky was pale blue and the grove rang with the squawking of crows. The air was deliriously cool with an almost pristine purity to it. The large trees, swaying gently at their tips, fanned them with the light breath of pine and wild blooming jasmine.
Gage had gone up with Putney to the small stream several hundred yards above their campsite. There they filled the canteens and, finding a thick stand of blackberry bushes, they loaded Putney’s hat to the brim with the ripe black fruit, picking and eating simultaneously till their hands were pierced with thorns and dyed purple with blackberry juice.
When they got back to the grove they found Garvix bustling about, clapping his hands, barking instructions, and hectoring everybody. “Come on. Let’s get going. Get the lead out. Time and tide wait for no man. The SEC is out there somewhere looking for me.” He laughed and swaggered round the grove with a joyful truculence. “Come on, Freddy. Off your ass.” He jostled Jamison with the tip of his boot.
“Go die, Leo,” Jamison swatted at the boot and rubbed the sleep from his puffy eyes.
Garvix laughed aloud and went churning forward through the grove on his stunted, peppery little legs, clapping his hands thunderously. “What the hell you doing there, Sibby?” He came screeching to a halt above her.
“Pulling burrs out of my hair as any fool could see if he’d take the trouble to look.” She winced as one of the prickly little things came loose in her hand. Just then she saw Gage and Putney making their way back into the grove. She smiled and waved. “Good morning, Doctor.”
Gage squinted at her through his tinted glasses, then waved good morning back.
Gladys Garvix, massaging her stiff neck, muttered something indecent under her breath. Sybil cocked an eye in her direction. “What’s that, Gladys?”
“Nothing, dear. Nothing at all.” She went on massaging the back of her neck and smirking to herself.
Gage held out a hand and pulled Sybil to her feet. “Sleep well last night?”
“Marvelously.”
“I’ll say,” Gladys agreed. “Snored like an infantry battalion.”
“Ignore her, Doctor,” Sybil said, and made a face of revulsion.
Gage extended to her the hatful of berries.
She peered into the hat, then clapped her hands with childish delight.
“A little fortification before the trek home,” Gage said.
“Aren’t they gorgeous?” She helped herself to a handful. “In Vienna we used to eat them with great gobs of cream.”
Soon the others surged around and were dipping avidly into the hat.
“What about you, Mr. Garvix?” Gage said, holding the hat toward him. “Won’t you have some berries?”
Garvix had been standing off to the side, aloof, and smiling at the scene enigmatically.
“No,” he said, waving the hat off when it came near him. “I’m saving myself for the bacon and eggs and hot coffee.”
Gladys was standing off to the side when Gage noticed her. He took the hat and carried it to her like a votive offering. She waved it aside. Then her eyes swept past his toward Rogers, silting propped up against a tree. “He’s no better, is he?”
“About the same, I’d say.”
She’d caught the guarded tone in his voice and now her eyes searched his. “I tried to talk to him just a while ago.”
“Oh? Did you?”
“He’s like a vegetable.”
Garvix clapped his hands and strutted round the grove. “Come on, come on—let’s get the lead out. We’ve blown the best part of the morning already.” He went round jostling them and hauling them rudely to their feet. When he passed Gage and Gladys he smirked broadly at them.
Gladys caught the expression on his lips.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” she cried after him. But he strode on past her, his massive head nodding and those booming handclaps ringing out through the forest. “Everyone up now. Everybody out. The early bird catches—”
“Oh, shut up, Leo.”
Then he had them all up, herding them together at the edge of the grove in preparation for the brisk march home. Gage found himself standing with Freddy Jamison. Both were feeling a little helpless in the tumult. Across the grove he saw Putney stooped over, struggling to haul the surveyor to his feet. “Here, let me give you a hand,” he said starting toward them. But the boy waved him off. “I’ll take him. He’s my responsibility.”
The brusqueness of that rebuff miffed him a bit. “Suit yourself. But he’s a big man. Holler when you need help.”
Then suddenly they were all assembled and ready to move.
“Well, which way?” Freddy said.
“Follow me!” Garvix bawled joyously. His arm shot skyward. “I’m an Aries and I’ll lead you out of this wilderness.”
Gage looked at Rogers, slumped on rubbery legs, against Putney’s trembling figure.
“The sooner the better,” he muttered.
“Which way?” Bayles said, his eyes fixed unwaveringly on Garvix.
“Straight due west,” he retorted. “With the sun burning a hole in your ass.”
Both Freddy and Putney laughed. Bayles shook his head despairingly.
“Do you have a different idea, Mr. Bayles?” Gage asked. “If you do, this is the time to say it.”
“Or forever hold your peace!” Garvix added with gleeful spite.
Bayles had a hangdog look. “I frankly don’t know where the hell we are.”
“Then shut your face and follow a man who does,” Garvix thundered happily. Bayles’ eyes fluttered. He had the look of a man who’s just been slapped. “I know damned well you don’t know either, Leo. You’re just blowing hard. But you’ll never admit it.”
Garvix winked at the others. “That’s the secret. Never admit it.”
“Do you or don’t you, Mr. Garvix?” Gage asked.
“Do I or don’t I—what?”
“Know where we are?”
Garvix smiled deeply. “On my property.”
“I thought it was mine,” Gage said, suddenly aggressive.
“Oh, ye gods,” Gladys moaned, “not properties again!”
“Well, in any case,” Gage said, “I suggest we get Mr. Rogers home as quickly as possible.”
In the next moment they were all lurching and stumbling out of the grove—stiff, rumpled, bleary-eyed, sour in their slept-in clothing—with the new sun burning comfortingly down on their backs. The little column moved like a caterpillar, in fits and starts, through the dew-wet undergrowth, snaking its way westward. Sybil Jamison, just ahead of Gage, stepped elegantly like a tall wading bird over partially buried stumps and bracken while Garvix trumpeted directions into the bright limpid morning.
When they’d been out ten minutes, Gage looked up to find Garvix striding beside him. His voice dropped to a discreet whisper. “Sorry about that little episode last night.”
“Not at all.”
“Just had a spell there. You know how it is. Feel much better now.” He took a deep breath and thumped his chest. “Like my old self.”
“Fine.”
They walked on for a bit.
“Be much obliged if we could just forget it,” Garvix added out of the side of his mouth.
“I already have,” Gage replied and could think of nothing more to say. Then, as if they’d left the matter behind them in the forest, Garvix strode on purposefully, once more trumpeting directions.
Gage marveled at the performance. The night before, slumped against a tree in the inky darkness, the man had been a panicky, hysterical little boy. He’d felt the icy grip of death about him. Now, with the sun full up, he was once more his old truculent, invincible, and wholly unlikable self. Now when he spoke it was with that deafening and irrepressible optimism. He reminded Gage of a football coach and in some curious way he was fond of him.
“How about coming for breakfast this morning, Harry?” he said. “Gladys makes marvelous flapjacks. ’Bout as big as a silver dollar and nigger brown the way I love ’em. With a yard of sausage and plenty of coffee.”
“Sounds fine,” Gage said.
“I won’t be able to spend too much time with you though,” Garvix went on importantly. “This SEC high muckey-muck is gonna take up most of my day. But I’ll have Gladys show you the gardens.” He shot Gage an impudent little grin. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Find it appealing?” His laughter shattered all about them. “You wouldn’t be the first.”
When they’d been out a half-hour and still hadn’t reached home, Garvix insisted on climbing a tree, just as he’d said he would the night before.
It had an unreal quality—Garvix embracing the gnarled, deeply fissured trunk of an immense catalpa, those short, stubby, powerful arms thrashing, flailing, the great flurry of action without his rising any more than several inches off the ground. Several times he started up, hung from a branch like quartered beef above a void of several feet or so, then slipped back down while the others hooted and howled, clapped their hands gleefully, and made jeering remarks.
The scorn of the mob was sufficient goad for Garvix. Up he went again like a performing bear executing some impossible turn with a trapeze and ball.
“What the hell do you expect to see up there?” Freddy taunted him from below.
“The SEC waiting on the porch,” Gladys said gloomily. They all laughed. Garvix grunted some obscenity and lunged for a branch. He caught it and then dangled some three or four feet above the ground, thrashing around in midair like a man just hung. Trying to hoist himself to the next branch up, his shirt crept out and parted from beneath his belt, causing a pale blue-whitish dome of belly to veer suddenly into view.
Suddenly there was a cracking sound. The branch shuddered and Garvix crumpled back to earth with a flat, resonant thud.
He sank to the ground hugging his knees to his chest and clutching his ankle, his face twisted into a rictus of pain. But he was not seriously hurt. Hoots and howls rang through the forest. Gladys fell to her knees beside him. He flung her off with a rude shove and started up again. But this time Gage prevailed and Tom Putney went up instead.
The boy shinnied effortlessly upward one hand climbing over the other, swinging from one branch to the next. Sybil Jamison watched him from directly below, studying the action of his powerful thighs locked round the trunk. She murmured and purred with a kind of naked delight. Up he went until he nested in the very crest of the tree, causing the uttermost branches to sway gently back and forth like an immense fan.
“What do you see?” Garvix bawled up into the branches through cupped hands.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?” Garvix looked a little surprised. There was a note of suspicion in his voice as if the boy had lied to him. John Bayles grinned. “That’s what he said, Leo.”
Garvix bawled up into the branches again, “Look out toward the west.”
“I am looking west.”
“Don’t you see the church steeple?”
“Nope.”
“Well for Chrissake—it’s right out there.”
“Look all round you, Tom,” Gage cried upward. “Don’t you see anything?”
There was a moment of silence while Putney, some fifty or sixty feet above them, scanned the horizons.
“Anything at all, Tom?” Sybil’s voice trilled upward through the branches.
“Nope,” came the reply with an eerie finality. “Just a lot of trees.”
A sudden wind gusted through the place in which they stood. It caused the leaves to rattle and chatter for a moment like spirits whispering through the forest, then puffed on past them toward the big woods to the north. Gage felt something like an icy fist close around his heart.
Rogers, reclining against a tree, rolled his head across his chest and sighed: “The end shall be the beginning—the beginning shall be the end—I come quickly.” He gurgled softly to himself.
By noon the little party of wanderers—dusty, puffing, and overheated—trudged into the bottom of a thickly wooded ravine and flung themselves down for a brief rest. Steep, craggy wooded slopes tumbled down upon them. There was no talk. Canteens came out and they sucked at them greedily. Some of them lay on their backs; some sat hunched and sullen or stood pawing the damp earth with a nervous foot.
Freddy Jamison was red in the face. He mopped the back of his neck with his raggy foulard. “Only fifteen minutes, ay Leo?”
“In all fairness,” said Bayles with a gleeful spite, “he did change that to half an hour.”
“That was three hours ago,” Sybil said.
“Where are we?” Ollie’s voice was a piteous bleat. “Will someone please tell me?”
“On my property,” Garvix said. “We’ve just overshot the house a bit. We’ll double back and be home in no time.” He was absolutely cheery and glowing like a lighthouse beacon.
“I doubt that,” Sybil said thoughtfully. “As a matter of fact, it looks very much like a piece of our property. Doesn’t it, Freddy?”
Jamison mumbled something.
“Your property?” Garvix scoffed.
“Yes, our back fifty.”
“The hell it does,” Leo Garvix bawled. “This is my property.”
“Everything is Leo’s property.” Gladys’ sweeping arms inscribed a universe. “And everyone. All of us and all the land.”
Freddy gnashed his teeth and wrung the silken ruin of the foulard in his fist. “Who gives a goddamn whose property it is! It’s all a lot of trees and dirt and crap to me anyway. How the hell do we get out of here? That’s what I want to know. The fastest way out. I’m famished and my gut’s killing me.” He winced and pressed his absurdly freckled hands over his stomach. “If I don’t get some food in my belly—”
Sybil turned to the doctor as if for support. “He should have something to eat.”
“He’ll have plenty to eat within the next hour,” Garvix said. “I promise you.”
“Oh, is it only an hour now, Leo?” Bayles smiled tauntingly.
“Shut your face!” Garvix snapped.
“Freddy really should put something into his stomach,” Sybil said. “He does have a condition.”
“Well, suppose we pause here for a bit,” Gage said. “We’ll see what we can scrounge up.”
In a half-hour’s time they’d all fanned out and gathered more berries plus a goodly supply of mushrooms. The floor of the forest was strewn with a certain specimen that both Sybil and Gage agreed were quite edible. Sybil had read somewhere in one of her botany books that the bark of the sassafras boiled in water made an excellent tea. Since wild sassafras was abundant in those woods it required no time at all to strip the barks of several young saplings, and soon they were drinking piping hot tea and eating mushrooms and berries.
The tea tasted strongly metallic from the lining of the canteens in which the water had been boiled, and the mushrooms, while being perfectly edible, had the moldy resinous taste of dank earth. But they all ate and drank. Only Garvix refused to take any nourishment. He insisted he would break his fast at his own table and that was only a matter of an hour or so away. He smiled tolerantly while he watched them feed.
All during that modest noonday repast Sybil warbled and trilled ecstatically. She felt suddenly important and needed. Her knowledge of things had stood her in good stead. She was a den mother taking care of her cubbies, puttering at the fire where the sassafras was boiling, cautioning everyone on how they should eat their mushrooms and berries for maximum nutrition, and full of a score of hints and tips on survival techniques in the forest. Shortly after they’d finished she stood up suddenly, an oddly stricken look on her face.
“Are you all right?” Gage said, starting toward her. Clutching a handkerchief to her mouth she waved him off, then retreated hastily into the bushes while the others stood around dismally trying not to hear the hoarse, raspy sound of her eructations splashing on the forest floor.
Shortly after, they started their climb out of the ravine. It was a tiresome climb made with the sun passing through its highest point. As Garvix had suggested, they were now doubling back, going in a direction from which they had come shortly before. Soft, fleecy cumuli tumbled above them as they wound their way like a weary snail in fits and starts up a gentle acclivity.
They appeared now to be moving into a different terrain. Harsher and more demanding. The slopes had a craggy and more precipitous look. There was more granite now and stone embedded in the earth; large slabs and abutments of it had to be circumvented. The foliage became less feminine; it was thicker and coarser; it transformed the soft undulant quality of light in the forest into a wet, dank, and strangely inhospitable green.
Dark, coniferous forests rose up ahead of them. They were on a steeply rising grade. Then suddenly there was no sun. They found themselves in damp, gnomish woods of huge oak, gnarled and bearded with moss. Ancient spruce, centuries old, towered above them. They were immense and blacked out any comforting vision of the sky. Other trees there had never grown. They were dwarfish and thick lichen clung to their stumpy boughs.
On they walked. Black, oozy earth sucked at their feet. Gorgeous trillium were strewn in profusion everywhere over the dank forest floor as if they had been scattered there in some meteoric shower of eons ago. They leapt out of the earth and spilled out of the stumps of dead, sodden logs where only bees and dragonflies murmured above them. The place appeared to be dreaming under the spell of some old enchantment. A witch or some evil sorcerer presided over those forests.
As they went on, Gage’s heart sank with the sure, almost incontrovertible knowledge that they had never passed that way before.