THEY STOPPED THERE FOR the night. They had no choice but to. It was agreed upon with surprisingly little rancor but with a firm, clear resolve to make the Garvix house a little after dawn the following morning. Reminding them of the scarlet ribbon, Garvix insisted they were now only about two miles from his door.
They had an early supper. There was little else they could do. Once again it was Sybil Jamison’s ingenuity that fed them. All throughout the forest there was a profusion of wild sunflowers. The tubers of these, she explained, were edible. She called them Jerusalem artichokes. When these were boiled and mashed they turned into a runny porridge that tasted not unlike mashed potatoes.
She whipped up a batch of these and served them in canteen cups along with liberal infusions of sassafras tea and the inevitable blackberries. After the experience of lunchtime, mushrooms were quietly dispensed with.
They ate in almost total silence amid the mournful clanking of canteen cups, while dusk slowly descended upon the little clearing in the forest and the fire in their pit crackled cozily.
Sybil seemed less effusive than the night before. The thrill of being the resident dietician and recreation counselor had palled a bit. But still she tried. While the others settled glumly down to their mash of artichokes and tepid tea, she kept up a stream of cheery chatter. “Well, what do you think of it?” she said, turning eagerly to them. When she had no answer to match her enthusiasm she turned to her husband. “What do you think, dear?”
“Marvelous,” he said, and went on spooning his porridge bitterly.
“At least it quiets your ulcer.”
“Never mind my ulcer, will you please?”
“Well, don’t be so grumpy about it. It’s very nourishing,” she said. “What about you, Leo?”
Garvix had finally consented to break his fast with the artichoke mash. Now he glanced up, a look of mild astonishment on his face and a thick line of porridge clinging like a scab to his upper lip. “What about me?”
“Enjoying your supper?” Sybil inquired hopefully. His response was something midway between a grunt and a belch. Then he lowered his head to the canteen cup, lipped it back, and spooned out the dregs of the mash at the bottom. It was done with a zest she found not unflattering.
“I think it’s quite tasty,” Gage said good-naturedly. But his enthusiasm fell on deaf ears, for by that time the general despondency had even spread to Sybil.
John Bayles ate very little. Ollie Gelston ate nothing at all. Once again her eye was fixed on some indeterminate point in the forest. She was gazing at something that apparently only she could see. Whatever it was it held her with rapt absorption.
Gladys Garvix sat on her knees outside the immediate circle. She’d taken up a place beside Rogers, who’d been propped up against a tree. Gage watched her spoon small amounts of artichoke mash up into his mouth. When it dribbled back out, as for the most part it did, she’d very carefully wipe his mouth with the corners of a moistened handkerchief and start anew.
It was a curious exercise, he thought, she spooning and wiping like an indulgent mother with a monstrously overgrown and retarded infant. Unexpected to say the least. But amazingly, the surveyor took it, dazed and glassy-eyed, dribbling most of it into his beard and shirt, but nevertheless chewing, in some slow, ponderous, rudimentary way, mindless and uncaring like an ox at a trough.
Once they had finished supper there was nothing left to do but watch the shadows lengthen through the forest; see the colors turn from green to violet to indigo, then with almost a sigh, yield to the encroaching dark.
The fire in their small pit began to die down and shortly Tom Putney rose and stretched.
“Guess I’ll go get us some wood.”
Garvix’s head bobbed up. “What d’ya need it for? It’s a warm night.”
“It’s comforting to see a bit of light,” Ollie said wistfully.
“It’s not as if you had to pay for the fuel, Leo,” Gladys said. Garvix grunted disapprovingly, and Putney started out of the grove.
Gage called after him. “Want a hand, Tom?”
Putney muttered something and waved him off.
“I’ll help,” Sybil said and started up. But Freddy yanked her back down. “You stay right where you are.”
The moment was tense—and rather embarrassing. Freddy and Sybil glowering at each other, and Garvix smiling spitefully back and forth at each of them.
For a long while, Gage, seated by the fire, used its flickering illumination to read and reread the endless scroll of strange, arcane wording that was the deed to his land. Reading it over and over, as he did, for meaning and nuance, it made him think of some lost and ancient tongue scribbled on tablets in a wilderness land where itinerants, voyagers, and rogues had come and passed through centuries before.
North by land of Jackson Hubbell and Delezon Hungerford.
East by the Sealy land of Henry Briggs, Jr.
South by land of Levi Stuart and Sheba T. Osborne.
West by land of Malty G. Gelston.
Widows, Heirs, Representatives, Creditors of
Charles E. Mosher, deceased,
Sarah E. Mosher, deceased,
Jane E. Dourland, deceased,
Rachel Hungerford, deceased,
Asa Carl Bayles, deceased,
Drexel H. Calder, deceased,
Isobel Calder, deceased.
Then once again he read through the interminable pages of metes and bounds, attempting to decipher the intricate code that parceled out and divided his land from the land of other men; the code that gave shape and dimension to his land, and in some curious and indefinable way, gave definition to himself.
Being a little south of the above mentioned. Beginning at a heap of stones in the line of land formerly owned by Isaac and Sheba T. Osborne at the southwest corner of Levi Stuart’s (deceased) land; thence south 6 degrees 30 minutes east 7 chains and 30 links to a heap of stones, it being the northeast corner of land belonging to John O. Northrop; thence easterly 18 chains and 44 links to a walnut tree—and stones on a ledge; thence north 88 degrees and 40 minutes west 12 chains and 96 links to the first bound near a small birch tree.
When he looked up and saw the others strewn like wreckage around the fire, he suddenly recalled where he was again. But why he was there—in this ridiculous situation, caught in these woods that for all he knew might have been his own woods—he could not imagine. It was laughable. And a little grotesque. And why he had been cast among this dismal, quarreling, unhappy company, he did not know.
Several months ago he had been in a city hospital. In an amphitheater with three hundred pairs of eyes burning down upon him. A cold scalpel was in his hand, and beneath him, an open chest and the exposed, beating heart of a young man with an ice pick thrust into the ventricular chamber. It occurred to him there at that moment, as the scalpel slashed easily through the flesh, that the flesh meant nothing to him; the heart meant nothing to him; the life on the table beneath him—the wonder and miracle of it all—meant nothing to him. Nothing at all.
Then he received notification of his father’s death. Dr. Cornelius Gage had lived in splendid retirement on the old Stuart place for nearly thirty-five years. But after his wife’s death, some dozen years ago, the splendid retirement turned into a rather morbid isolation. He saw no one—neither friends nor relatives—least of all his son, Harry, with whom he couldn’t speak and hadn’t spoken for years.
Cornelius Gage’s death had a curiously liberating effect on his son. It wiped out years of bitter antagonism. It was like the deft, swift lancing of an old and worrisome boil. The pus ran off. The boil disappeared and in no time at all there was no memory of it.
And so he closed his office, disconnected his phones, and got into his car. He drove north for nine hours and presented himself at the agent’s office five minutes before closing time. He identified himself; showed the agent deeds and certificates of title, and an imposing letter from a lawyer with an imposing letterhead. The agent, wary and befuddled, nodded cravenly, then reluctantly surrendered to him the key and hurried him off to the house—the old Stuart place (for some inscrutable reason the Gages persisted in calling it “the old Stuart place” even three decades after they’d acquired it from the Stuarts—as if they, themselves, had been only interlopers). Harry Gage had not been back there for nearly a dozen years. When his father was alive, he could barely bring himself to cross the threshold. But then when he walked in through the large French doors opening onto the terrace, with the sense of recent death still hovering in the close air like a faintly repellent odor that clung to the sheets draped like shrouds over the furniture, it was for him like coming home.
It wasn’t a difficult thing to do. Many people have repudiated their lives, pulled up roots. Decided to try something else. For him, it was easier than for most. He had all the money he’d ever need. There was no family. No wife or children. He had never married. He was, he knew now, a man who would only love once in his life, and he didn’t realize that until she was dead. There was very little likelihood that he would love again. He had no capacity for that kind of thing.
What was it with him? He had withheld himself from all the permanent ceremonies of life, refusing to have ties that bind, to have himself fixed, petrified in amber. Even the profession at which, at an incredibly early age, he found himself on the top of the heap, had turned to ashes in his mouth. At the very moment when universities and foundations with limitless endowments were scrambling after him, he had to scuttle it all. Scrap it, before it threatened to devour him. He had to beat it fast, and the inheritance of the Stuart place was a quick way out.
Now suddenly, inexplicably, he was lost in a wilderness with eight strangers, one of them an old man dying. Who they were to him, or he to them, he didn’t know. But almost unremarkably their lives and his own had become inextricably enmeshed.
For a moment he watched the fire, with a pleasant sense of comfort. Although the circumstances were difficult, he wasn’t, oddly enough, unhappy to be there. Far happier, he thought, than in the hospital amphitheater.
He tucked the deed in his pocket, then turned on his side. Immediately he felt something cold against his leg. He reached into his pocket and withdrew Rogers’ compass. Then he recalled he’d taken it from Jamison for safekeeping.
For a while he studied it there in the shadows, holding it in the palm of his hand, rotating it, watching the needle bob and twirl slightly with the motion of his hand. It spun round the points—NW—WNW—NNW—W—then, tugged at last by the irresistible pull of polar lodestone, the needle pointed directly and unequivocably north.
He marveled at the ingenuity that had devised the little instrument which could guide mariners over seas and nomads over deserts. He wondered about the ancients who, without such instruments, could guide on stars. Celestial navigators. What sort of navigators were these modern men who, with such an ingenious little device in hand, could lose themselves so completely on their own property?
The dials on Rogers’ compass were phosphorescent and now that darkness had settled completely upon them, the small directional letters on its face began to glow with an eerie, greenish light.
The compass could even see in the dark. And yet, without knowing where they were and where it was they had to go, the miraculous little instrument could do absolutely nothing for them. He smiled a little ironically to himself.
When he looked up, John Bayles was standing above him. His face wore a curious expression.
“Anything wrong?” Gage asked.
Bayles glowered down at him, then suddenly burst into laughter. “Anything wrong?” The laughter had momentarily taken his breath away. “You’re funny. Almost as funny as he is.” He jerked his head toward the place where Rogers lay.
“I don’t find anything particularly funny about him,” Gage said, his jaws beginning to grind.
“I do. I find him very funny.”
“You blame him for all this?”
“I don’t blame him. I blame us—for being stupid enough to follow him out here.”
Gage watched the anger slowly mount in him. “Why do you dislike him so?”
“Dislike him?” Bayles gave a short, rancorous grunt of a laugh. “I don’t dislike him. I hate him.”
“That’s what I meant. Why?”
“Why?” Bayles seemed startled, as if the answer to the question were too obvious. He wavered there a moment, torn between the desire to flee and the temptation to talk. “If I answer your question, will you answer one of mine?”
“Seems fair enough.”
Bayles seemed suddenly embarrassed. He glanced round quickly to see where the others were. “Imagine then,” he said at last in a half-whisper, “a child of nine or ten or so worshipping an older man. Following him about like an adoring puppy. Picture the older man teaching the young child all the magic of the earth—how to find the North Star in the sky, how to tell monkshood from columbine, how to tap maple for the first draw of the sap, even how to face dying.”
Gage looked at him quizzically.
“When my mother died,” Bayles continued, “I was all alone in the house. There was no one there to help me—except Albert Rogers. I had no understanding of death other than a child’s belief that death is something that only happens to other people and that it terrified me—” Bayles smiled almost tenderly. His mind flashed back suddenly across the years and even as he spoke to Gage in the dancing shadows of the fire, he was standing once again at the bottom of a stairway, twenty-five years earlier, gazing upward. Albert Rogers stood beside him. Slowly they ascended the stair to the old turret bedroom at the top of the Bayles house where his mother spent her final days. He climbed steadily toward the room, led there by Rogers—his tiny trembling hand coiled entrustingly in that fine, firm, immensely gentle, reassuring grasp—to the room where his mother had expired only moments before. And there in the thick, faintly sour sickroom air, full of the odors of the dying—camphor and candy and medicinals—he saw her. Not her directly. He couldn’t bring himself to look at her directly. But in a cheval mirror opposite her bed, he saw the waxen, marblelike repose of death. “There,” said Rogers, smiling down upon the boy and turning his gaze gently toward the bed. “Now look. I want you to see what it looks like.”
Bayles glanced up at Gage, still smiling that ineffably tender smile. “Since then, I’ve never thought of death as particularly terrifying—just another stage in an unvarying biological process.”
“You’re lucky,” Gage said, chewing on the cold stem of his pipe. “Very few people can face their own extinction with that kind of serenity. I’d say Rogers did you a favor. Hardly a reason to hate a man.”
“That’s not why I hate him,” Bayles said, the anger snapping back into his voice. “He had my father committed. It was his testimony that took my father from me. That’s why I had to grow up like an orphan, in Malty Gelston’s house.” He turned with a swift, furious wheeling motion. “Now it’s time for you to answer my question.”
“Of course,” Gage said, recalling their bargain.
Indecision flickered in Bayles’ eyes momentarily, then passed. He straightened himself, threw his shoulders back, and took a deep breath. “If a person has a parent who died insane, what are the odds that the offspring of that parent will die the same way?” He’d asked the question coldly, clinically, as if he were asking it of some learned scholar in a seminar on lunacy.
“Is that what you’re afraid of?”
“Never mind what I’m afraid of. Answer the question.”
The harsh note of rebuke brought Gage up sharply. “There’s no doubt,” he said, his voice sliding too easily into professional tones, “that the etiology of some psychoses is genetic. That we know. We’ve seen it in case histories.” He spoke earnestly, wanting to answer the question without seeming to patronize. But Bayles wasn’t listening. He was staring across the velvety night to where the fire crackled brightly. In the next moment he turned and without another word walked slowly off.
Gage stretched, then rose and started to walk round the clearing. Out of the corner of his eye he had seen Gladys Garvix. She was still kneeling beside the surveyor where she had positioned herself nearly an hour before. It was in that direction now that he walked.
“How is he?” he asked when he reached there.
“You tell me,” she replied curtly without taking her eyes from Rogers.
He dropped down beside her in the darkness and took the surveyor’s wrist. She knelt on her knees, breathing heavily, her head tilted forward as if she too wanted to hear the beat of Rogers’ heart. Her arm brushed Gage’s, and for a moment he could smell the dark, mysterious musk of her body—that ineffably mingled scent of hair, skin, and secretions—and in some crude, atavistic way, he was excited.
“Well?” she said after a moment.
The heart rate had decreased from a healthy sixty-eight to approximately forty beats per minute. From the white, pasty pallor of Rogers’ face and from the attitude of his body, Gage could tell, too, that his blood pressure had dropped. Without instruments it was impossible to tell how much. The patellar reflex was abnormally slow. From observation and the other somewhat primitive tests he could perform under those conditions it was evident that Rogers’ condition was deteriorating.
“Will he be able to go on in the morning?” she asked.
“Maybe,” Gage said, with little conviction. He knew she doubted it.
She sighed, then stood up. He felt her hovering above him and sensed she was about to speak. But no words came. Instead she turned and started to walk slowly off. He rose too and in the next moment he was walking beside her, sauntering casually about the grove. They might have been two people strolling in a park.
“Tom can’t carry him anymore,” she said after a moment.
“Not by himself, obviously.”
“He’ll just have to accept some help.”
“I think he’ll be more willing to now than he has been.”
She looked up quickly, catching his meaning. Then they walked on. What he had seen she had seen as well. Over the past forty-eight hours some rather large chinks had begun to appear in that facade of loyalty Tom Putney had managed to erect around the surveyor.
“Do you think it’s wise to move him?” she asked.
“It’s not wise,” he said. “But we have no choice. Obviously we just can’t remain here.”
“And we can’t leave him behind,” she added quickly, almost urgently, as if she thought that was precisely what he was planning to do.
“Of course not,” Gage said easily, but he’d caught her meaning.
They strolled on for a while, moving around the perimeter of the clearing. Then she said: “But someone could stay behind with him.”
“Who would?” he said half-jokingly, and regretted it the moment he did. It sounded unpardonably callous. He felt her pace break, then alter beside him, and he could sense the scorn welling up in her.
They moved past the place where Freddy Jamison was seated on the ground, shoes off, pouring a thin trickle of water from a canteen over his feet and massaging them. When they passed, he looked up at them moodily, watched them for a moment, then returned to his aching feet.
“Where do you fit into all this?” he said after a moment.
“All this?”
“I mean all these people,” he said.
“What about them?”
“Where do you fit into it?”
“I don’t,” she said and laughed a little bitterly. “Or haven’t you noticed?” Her directness jarred him a bit.
“I was the poor rat from Cheapside,” she said laughingly. “The po’ white townie. Everybody says I lucked into it. Imagine lucking into Leo.” She laughed a low, husky laugh tinged with a note of bitterness. The laughter gave her eyes a sad, eager glow.
“Don’t you remember me?” she asked.
“No.”
“I remember you. We played together a couple of times.”
“Oh?” he said, smiling curiously. “When?”
“Eons ago. When you were a snotty little brat and used to come up summers.”
He laughed. “Was I snotty?”
“You would never play—always wanted to go off by yourself. My mother was Ann Bailey, the Hungerfords’ housekeeper.”
“The Hungerfords’?”
“Sybil’s family. There are Hungerfords all around here. The place is crawling with them.”
“That’s right—of course. Now I remember,” Gage said distantly.
“And my father,” she went on, “when he was sober, was their gardener. That’s how I met Sybil. My mother used to take me out there during summer vacation. We stayed in a little cottage behind the old Hungerford place, and they’d feed us in the kitchen of the big house. That’s how Sybil and I became friends. She was older than me so we really never became close. But of course it was more than just age that separated us.”
They walked on a bit. The circumstances of her childhood obviously pained her, yet she appeared to derive some curiously bitter pleasure from revealing them.
“And after that first summer,” she went on, “every Christmas and Easter, I’d have a pretty little bundle from the Hungerfords—Sybil’s old clothes.”
Leo Garvix loomed up suddenly before them, a square, hulking shadow in the darkness. “She trotting out the family skeletons, Harry?” When they came closer Gage could see the insinuating little leer on his face, as if he’d caught them in a compromising situation. “Giving you all the sordid details?”
“I was only telling him how I met Sybil,” she said wearily.
“At the Hungerfords’,” Garvix said cheerily, as if she couldn’t be trusted to tell the story correctly. “That’s where she met me, too. Sybil and I are first cousins.”
“I hadn’t realized that,” Gage said.
“Oh, yes,” Garvix said expansively. “Her family and mine were about the first settlers here. Her mother, Nell Hungerford, was my mother’s sister.”
“You don’t say?” Gage said. He had the feeling he was under some obligation to be impressed.
“And John Bayles is my second cousin,” he went on amiably. “But we don’t talk too much about that. Do we, Glad?” He winked at her.
“One big happy family,” she said with that antic ruefulness of hers.
Garvix sniggered a little. “I was the black sheep of the family. The ne’er-do-well who couldn’t finish school.” He was warming to the story with obvious relish. “I went further than all of them with an eighth-grade education.” He laughed and winked at Gage. “Did she tell you ’bout the time she undressed for me and George Buchner in Uncle Thornley’s garage?”
His laughter exploded all around them. Gage could feel her stiffen and draw back beside him. She looked at Garvix warily, and for the first time since Gage had known them she seemed frightened of her husband.
“She was only fourteen,” Garvix went on. “But she was quite a fourteen. Weren’t you, Gladdy? A handful.”
“Leo—” she started.
In the sudden illumination of the fire Gage saw her cheeks flare. Garvix laughed and winked at him.
“Look here—” Gage started to protest.
“Had no qualms about it either,” Garvix went on, determined to humiliate her. “Just asked me if I’d like to have a look and so naturally I said ‘yes!’ I asked if George Buchner could come have a look too. And she said ‘yes’—she didn’t mind. She wasn’t interested in George Buchner. She was interested in me. George just happened to be along. So he was lucky. She gave us quite a show that day. Right, Gladdy?”
Gage looked at her. So did all the others, for with Garvix’s voice booming out into the night it was impossible not to have heard everything he said.
When they passed near the fire Gage could see that her eyes were ringed with red. She was crying and suddenly Gage had a sickening sense that he could have stopped Garvix at any time but that he didn’t—and why he didn’t he could not say.
“I always thought her mamma put her up to it,” Garvix went on. “Right, Gladdy? My mother always said that, too.”
Suddenly Freddy Jamison was on his feet, wading ponderously toward Garvix. “Bastard.” His hand rose. Garvix never moved.
Gladys strode toward them through the little clearing. Gage caught the flash of her legs in the fire’s glare. She spun and twirled with a light, fierce grace. “This is all just getting to be too goddamned much!”
“It is,” Freddy said. “It damned well is!”
She was glaring at Garvix and whatever moment of weakness she’d had before she’d put behind her. “What are we doing here? Just what the hell are we—”
“I’m sure I don’t know,” Sybil said. “It was fun at first. Now it’s all—”
“Crazy?” Freddy croaked a rueful little laugh. “It’s bloody mad. When are we getting out of here, Leo?”
Garvix didn’t answer. He was smiling smugly like a man in possession of a huge and deeply satisfying secret.
Gladys folded her arms across her breast and scowled. “You don’t know a goddamned thing, Leo, so stop trying to look as if you do!”
A low, hoarse, guttural sound rose from somewhere deep within him. He was laughing.
“What the hell’s so funny?” Freddy demanded. “Are you telling the truth, Leo? Do you know where we are? For Christ sake, do you or don’t you?”
Garvix’s face turned red. His laughter had become the high, thin wheezing of fat man’s laughter.
“I want to go home!” Ollie whined. “I want to go home now!”
“We’ll be home first thing in the morning,” Gage said, so finally and emphatically it silenced, momentarily, all their clamor. John Bayles had been sitting propped against a tree, hugging his knees and peering mutely into the fire. Now suddenly he looked up at Gage: “I’ve been walking the woods around this area for the past thirty years. I know my land like the back of my hand. And I know all of your land nearly as well. And I can say without the slightest doubt I’ve never been in these woods before.” His gaze moved slowly round a half-circle, encompassing them all. “It’s about time we faced up to things.”
“Just like his father,” Garvix chuckled. “Old Jeremiah—lamentations and woe.”
“We’re lost!” Bayles voice was harsh. “And we may never be found.”
“Can that crap, will you now, John,” said Freddy. “We’re going home tomorrow. After all, there was that fresh boundary marker we saw today—”
“Of course there was,” said Sybil, brightening.
“Right,” said Ollie. “That’s right.”
The memory of the scarlet marker buoyed their spirits. It was at least an assurance that they were within their own bounds. In that moment of relief they all appeared to close forces. Bayles seemed suddenly very much alone.
“For all I know,” he said, “Leo tied that ribbon up there today.”
“Oh, good God.” Sybil’s hands flew upward in despair.
“No one was with him when he found the ribbon,” Bayles went on earnestly. “He could have got it from Tom and—”
Freddy gnashed his teeth. “I told you to can that crap. It’s just a lot of—”
“I wouldn’t put it past him,” Gladys said. “He’s perfectly capable of that.”
Ollie Gelston’s hands rose to her ears and she clasped them. “Will you stop. Will you all please stop!”
“I was only trying to say,” Bayles went on with weary patience, “that we shouldn’t kid ourselves.”
Garvix’s laughter pealed out in waves through the forest. “Look at the man. Forty-some-odd years old. Peeing his pants like a little boy.”
Bayles’ spine stiffened perceptibly. The ugly laughter increased in volume. It seemed to Gage a frightening sound, a rude intrusion into the sanctified quiet of the place.
“Scared little boy peeing his pants,” Garvix went on through the wheezing and guffawing. “Look at him, for God’s sake, will you?”
“That’s quite enough!” Gage said, starting to intervene on Bayles’ behalf. “That’s quite enough now—”
But Bayles didn’t want support. His isolation at that moment from all the others seemed to make him all the more resolute. “You’re lost, Leo.” His voice was suddenly very calm. “You’re so lost, you don’t even know you’re lost.”
“I’m not lost,” Garvix said. “You’re lost and they’re lost.” His hairy paw inscribed a broad arc encompassing the others. “But I’m not lost. I know exactly where I am. And I know exactly where I have to go. I’ve always known.”
His eyes twinkled and he grinned meanly—first at Bayles, then at the others. The effect of that grin was chilling, particularly to Gage. Ever since that morning, he’d been noticing something in Garvix, some change, subtle but significant, that had come over him during the night. Ever since the moment when they first started out and Garvix had come up to him on the path, all hushed and apologetic, and said: “Let’s forget about last night,” it appeared to Gage that he had actually put aside his fear.
There was now in Garvix, since the morning, an oddly disconcerting strength. A renewal. As if he’d had his bout with panic during the night, wrestled with it until dawn, then woke up in the morning fresh with the sun shining and the demon shriveled at his feet. Now, of them all, he was imperturbable, relaxed, boisterous, having a good time. He could mock and scorn them. As if he had a plan, and it was all working on schedule, like clockwork. And they were all in some indefinable way part of his plan. But he needed Gage’s cooperation. The others must never know about the moment of weakness the night before. For if they did, if he faltered for a moment, he’d lose them. And he couldn’t lose them. He needed Gage’s silence. And for the moment he had it.
Then Garvix had said: “I know exactly where I am. I’ve always known.” And Gage felt, for a fleeting moment, an awful chill. The thought crossed his mind that Garvix might actually be telling the truth. And that he’d deliberately lost them—led them so far astray that they couldn’t find themselves until they surrendered their souls up to him completely.
“We’ll be home tomorrow noon,” Garvix was saying jovially, and they were all agreeing even though earlier that night he’d been talking in terms of a few minutes’ walk back to the house. Now he was talking in terms of several hours and no one thought to question him. Not a peep out of any of them. He’d said it directly and with such unshakable assurance that even Gage found himself, to his horror, believing the man, wanting to succumb to him.
“Of course we will,” said Sybil. She sighed and started to collect the canteen cups on which the pasty mash of artichokes had begun to thicken and congeal.
“Is today Tuesday or Wednesday?” Freddy asked.
“Wednesday, I think,” said Gage.
“Then I’ve got a golf date,” Freddy said and scratched his head. He stood up suddenly and started to practice his swing.
“Malty’ll be home,” Ollie said with almost childish delight.
“That SEC man probably went back to Washington,” Garvix said. “I’ll have to get him by phone first thing tomorrow.”
For a moment they all seemed pleased and went about making their plans for the next day and the day after.
But John Bayles, sitting mutely, had never taken his eyes off Garvix. Now suddenly he spoke: “You’re lost, Leo.” There was an inexpressible sadness in his voice. His words provoked among the others a cold, visible annoyance. They didn’t speak. They kept busy and avoided his eyes.
“How like your father you are,” Garvix said after a moment. There was no more mirth left in his eyes. “The same frightened worm.”
Gage turned at the same moment Gladys did. He saw the alarm in her eye. Garvix was still talking.
“He was a worm. That’s why he cracked. And you’re a worm and the same thing will—”
Rising to his feet, Gage kept his eyes on Bayles. He saw the spasm in the tightening jaw. Something leapt into the eyes and fluttered there a moment. Gage was in a spot at a point midway between the two. Something caught in his breath and he dug his heels in, ready to head off the collision. But it never came. The thing that he’d seen flicker momentarily in Bayles’ eye was gone, like a wave, broken and boiling off into the distance. His face was impassive. Almost blank. And he said in a voice that was deadly calm: “If you ever dare to mention my father again in any way whatsoever, I’ll kill you.”
They faced each other silently and for a moment there was no sound but the low moaning of wind through the distant hills. Suddenly there was a crackling of twigs and leaves, and they turned in time to see Tom Putney step into the small circle of humanity. He was laden with firewood. Several canteens hung from straps around his neck and dangled at his hip. He’d been standing there unnoticed, listening to them, for some time. Now as he stepped into the circle he paused and gazed slowly around at them. Then his eyes traveled to where the huge, rumpled shape of the surveyor slumbered in the shadows.
“You’re forgettin’ him,” he said to no one in particular. “What about him? He ain’t gonna be able to go tomorrow.”
They looked at him as if he weren’t quite real, as if he were a stranger who spoke in some indecipherable tongue.
Ollie had been sitting in a kind of sullen, frozen immobility. Now, suddenly, she rose and started to move. Her body spun round in short, angry little circles—first one direction, then the next—rather like a shooting gallery duck when it’s hit.
“I’m not staying out here all night,” she said, her voice suddenly shrill. “I can’t. I’ve got to get home to my father.”
Gage took a long but cautious step toward her. He had the look of a butterfly collector stalking a rare specimen.
“I thought you said your father wasn’t home,” he queried her gently.
“He’s not,” she replied curtly. The implausibility of what she’d just said never phased her. In the next moment she bolted.
“Daddy—Daddy—Daddy—” her voice stabbed through the darkness. She darted like a bat swooping through the narrow circle of quivering light.
“Daddy—Daddy—”
“For Christ sake,” Freddy murmured.
Gage lunged at her and lost his footing. “Grab her!”
Suddenly they were all moving, hurtling and flailing through the dim shadowy circle. She swept past Garvix and he swiped at her with the huge, ponderous, impatient motion of a bear agitated by a field mouse. He caught her arm, or rather impaled it with his finger on a bit of sleeve. For a moment they gaped at each other, a little surprised to be caught in such a foolish position. A series of parries and thrusts followed while they struggled to disengage. Then slowly, while the others watched transfixed, he began to reel her in on that arm like a man struggling with a huge fish. Then she was mashed up hard against his chest, the two of them fused, doing their odd breathless dance.
“I’ve got to get home.” Her muffled cries rose out of that bearish embrace. She beat fecklessly against his chest. “I’ve got to get home. I promised Malty.”
Jamison hopped uselessly about them making odd, excited little sounds. Bayles whirled round and round, following the dancers with stricken eyes.
They spun past Gage and he flung himself on them. “Quit it!” he shouted, struggling to separate them. “Quit it, now.”
Ollie must have heard something in his voice. Suddenly she relaxed, went limp in Garvix’s embrace. She sagged against him and in that moment he slapped her.
It was a hard, vicious little blow. The effect of it didn’t subdue her; it merely made her phlegmatic. The others were stunned.
“There was no need for that,” Gage said, his cheeks flaming. “No need at all.”
Garvix was still holding her, a bit like a torn and mutilated rag doll over which children have been squabbling. “She was hysterical.”
Bayles came round and pried Garvix’s arms from her. “She’d already stopped struggling when you hit her.”
“No one else here stopped her,” said Garvix. “So I had to.” He looked back and forth from one to another of them in the flickering light. He sensed he’d made an error. “You know what she’s like,” he added, trying to redeem himself.
“You couldn’t resist an opportunity to hurt someone, could you?” Bayles said. He straightened her disheveled blouse, then led her off by the hand like a docile child.