And on the Eighth Day (10 page)

“Ah,” said Ellery. “Thank you.” What was the use?

In the course of their tour his guide pointed out the laundry (“That is the laundry. Clothes are washed there”), the wool washery (“I will point out to you the wool washery. It is there. That is where we wash the wool”), the donkey stable (“—where donkeys are stabled”), an alfalfa field (“—field. Alfalfa is grown there. Animals eat it”), a peach orchard (“A peach orchard. On those trees peaches grow. They are good to eat”), and other landmarks of Quenan.

“And this is the northernmost part of the Valley. Here is the peaceful place.”

“The peaceful place?” Ellery repeated, perplexed.

“The place of peace. It occupies the entire valleyside slope of the northern hill,” the Superintendent explained, as if Ellery were stone-blind. Ellery decided to be charitable. After all, it
was
the first time in his life that the Superintendent had been called upon to fill the role of tourist’s guide. “There are almost one thousand places here, Elroï. Or perhaps more than one thousand; early records are faulty. Each has the same stone. The dimensions of the stone are: at the base, one foot square; in height, two feet; at the top, three-quarters of a foot square.”

“Do you mean—?”

“Each place at the top of the slope is six feet in depth, at the bottom five. The widths vary.”

Ellery stood in silence.

A thousand headstones, each marked with the same strange carving. As if a tree were to be reduced to its essential structure. There was no writing.

The wind sang in passing.

The Superintendent’s flat voice took on a certain contour. “In the fifth row from the top, at the eleventh place from the right, lies my father, and seven places from him lies my mother,” he said. “One row below and fifteen places from the right lie my wife and our child. And blessed be the Wor’d which sustains us all, here and forever.”

He said no more words aloud, but Ellery saw that he was praying.

My wife
, he had said.
Our child.
Not
my first wife
, or
our eldest child
, or
our youngest child
.

Time passed.

Ellery said, “I’m sorry.” The words were not intended as a concession to death; they were an apology for having judged a man to be a robot.

Voices from below made him turn his head. Two figures were coming toward them, one slowly, one quickly; but the slower reached them first, having started sooner.

It was the guardian of the place of peace, a gnomelike old man with marked cretin features. His speech was too thick for Ellery to follow, but from the gleeful gestures of the small scythe in his blackened hand it appeared that he was describing his work in trimming the grass that grew upon the thousand graves. Was that pride shining from his dim eyes? Ellery felt his flesh crawl.

And the Superintendent said, “He does a work that must be done, and so he justifies his bread. Also, if he and the very few like him who are born to us teach us the love which is difficult, it cannot be said that they were born in vain.”

The love which is difficult
…

Once more Ellery said, “I’m sorry.”

By now the second man had reached him.

It was the Successor, as it had been the previous morning.

And his message was the same.

The old Teacher said, “This morning the bracelet with the key was on the other side of the table.”

Ellery examined the key again. It looked like something used for a medieval keep, for it was fashioned from a single huge slab of metal on one plane. It still smelled, though less strongly, of the dark and unbleached beeswax into which it had been pressed.

Suddenly the Teacher said, “You have seen something.”

Ellery nodded. (A bit of nonsense jumped out of his memory: The old lady asking the storekeeper if he had a “signifying” glass, and at the storekeeper’s negative, saying with a sigh, “Well, it don’t magnify.”)

He fished in his pocket for the powerful little lens he always carried with him, unfolded it, and looked intently through it at the key. Then he handed the lens to the old man.

“I see marks of a sort,” said the Teacher. “Here, and here, and here on the edges of the bit. Scratches.” He looked up. “I do not understand.”

“File marks,” Ellery said. “And fresh—they weren’t there yesterday. It seems clear, Teacher; that whoever borrowed your key to the sanquetum and took a wax impression, for the purpose of making a duplicate key, found that his first work was faulty. Therefore he had to correct the fault. He worked on the duplicate key with a file, after fitting the duplicate over your key—this original—for guidance.”

The old man seemed uncertain of his meaning. But Ellery had already left the Teacher’s room and was striding toward the door of the sanquetum. The old man followed.

Ellery tried the door, “Locked,” he said.

“As it should be.”

Ellery stooped for a close look at the lock. “Will you observe this, Teacher?”

The old man stooped. By the lock were fresh scratches in the time-polished surface of the wood.

“It means,” Ellery said, “that an attempt was made to open the sanquetum door with a key that did not fit.”

The old man shook his head. “I am confused,” he confessed. “He who made the key worked over it with a file to correct it, and still the key did not fit?”

“You’re reversing the probable order of events. It must have happened like this:

“Two nights ago, while you were asleep, someone reached in through one of your slit-windows with a long reed or pole, lifted the key ring off your table, took it away, and in a safe place made a wax impression of the key. The key itself he then returned to your table by the same method, not knowing that you always placed it in the mathematical center of the table top.

“From the wax impression he made a duplicate key, and with this duplicate he stole into the holy house last night and tried to unlock the door of the sanquetum. The duplicate key did not work.

“He realized that the copy he had made was not sufficiently accurate. But to correct it he needed your key again. Thereupon he stole out of the Holy Congregation House and around to one of the windows of your room in the wing, and with a pole or reed he again took possession of your key, and again he went off with it—this time to correct the inaccuracies in his duplicate with a file. He then returned your key on its bracelet to your table with his pole, once more failing to realize that it should be placed in the exact center of the table. Have you investigated the sanquetum, Teacher, to see if anything is missing this morning?”

“Nothing is missing,” said the old man with difficulty.

“Then I suppose the coming of dawn or some other reason kept him from using the corrected key on the sanquetum door in the early hours of this morning.”

The bearded face was set in a multitude of fine hard lines, like an etching.

“It is to be expected, then …” The words stuck in the old man’s throat.

“I’m afraid so,” said Ellery gravely, pitying him, “He will make another attempt to enter the sanquetum, undoubtedly tonight, and undoubtedly this time the duplicate key will work.”

There was no one else in the holy house.

The Teacher had given grim assent to Ellery’s request that he be permitted to examine the interior of the forbidden room alone. Then the old man had left, wrapped in silence, and since the Successor was off on an errand somewhere, Ellery had the sacred building to himself.

He found himself squaring his shoulders. If the leader of this curious flock permitted him to set foot in their holy of holies, why should he hesitate? Yet hesitant he did feel, as if he were about to commit sacrilege—a “profanation of the mysterie.”

Still, it had to be done. He inserted the big key in the lock, felt the heavy tumblers turning over, pushed the door open, and stood on the threshold of the forbidden room.

It was really no larger than a large closet. There were no windows. The only light came from what he took to be an eternal lamp—an oddly shaped oil lamp of some time-crusted metal hanging from the precise center of the ceiling. The draft caused by the opening of the door had set the lamp in motion; it swung now, slightly, back and forth, like a censer, scattering shadows instead of smoke.

And in the shifting light Ellery saw:

To either side of him, each in a near corner, a very tall and slender jar of pottery, purple in color, resting on a wooden base and surmounted by a bowl-like cover. Jars, bases, bowls were identical.

Directly facing him: an old-fashioned walnut china closet, glass-fronted. On the bottom shelf lay a book, open. And on the upper shelf were two perfectly stacked columns of silver coins of equal height, in accordance with the fundamental principles of symmetry—“the purest of esthetic forms.”

Nothing else.

When the eternal lamp had come to rest and his eyes had grown accustomed to the light, Ellery removed one of the jar covers and looked in. It contained many rolled papers—scrolls—each secured with a bit of purple thread. He replaced the cover and looked into the other jar; it, too, was full of scrolls.

He turned his attention to the cabinet.

It reminded him so strongly of the china closet that had stood in his grandmother’s dining room during his childhood that he half expected to find the shelves filled with the same blue-and-white willow-pattern dishes. But this one contained nothing except the open book and the two columns of coins. Through the glass front he studied the book. It seemed printed in the black-letter type called Old English (the phrase “Cloister Black” flickered in Ellery’s memory), or at any rate in some font with a close resemblance to it. It was difficult to make out in the poor light, so Ellery put off for the moment the task of deciphering it and turned his attention to the two columns of coins. They were remarkably bright and shining.

He opened the china closet. Old silver dollars in mint condition!

He dipped into his store of numismatic knowledge. Some of the old “cartwheels,” he recalled, were quite rare.

Was this the reason for the duplicate key and someone’s plan to invade the sanctuary? Was the would-be thief concerned with the monetary value of the “treasure” of Quenan?

There was the almost legendary silver dollar minted in San Francisco in—when? yes!—1873, the same year the Quenanite sect had probably left that city in its quest for a new settlement. Only seven hundred had been minted, and all but the proof copies held by the mint had disappeared. Speculations about their fate had run from the theory that they had been buried somewhere and the secret of the hiding place lost through sudden death to the equally unprovable hypothesis that they had wound up in China as payment for lead-lined chests of green unfermented tea or even opium. But suppose everyone was wrong, and these—these two neat pillars of coins, as perfect as on the day they were minted—were the “lost” 1873 San Francisco dollars? A single specimen would be worth a fortune! And there were—how many?

With shaking fingers Ellery lifted one of the coins from the left-hand column and peered closely. The face of the coin depicted Liberty seated, and the date … 1873! He turned it over, holding his breath. The obverse showed the American eagle (“a verminous bird,” Ben Franklin had called it disdainfully, “a stealer of other birds’ catches,” in urging the adoption of the turkey as the national emblem instead). If there was an
S
below the eagle—signifying the San Francisco Mint …

Ellery took out his little magnifying glass and searched out the mint mark. Disappointment washed over him. It was not
S
. It was
CC
.

Of course—
CC
, Carson City. The capital of Nevada had had its own mint in those days, when a flood of silver poured out of the nine-year-old state’s rich mines. And then as now Nevadans had favored hard coin over paper money … He checked the other coins. All bore the
CC
mint mark.

Ellery restacked them with great care in the same two perfect columns and closed the glass door of the china closet.

While not the priceless silver dollar of the 1873 San Francisco mintage, the 1873
CC
was valuable enough. Each specimen, he guessed, would be worth about two hundred dollars now—perhaps more, considering their perfect condition. But again the question was: Who in Quenan would even think of stealing money? And what good would it do him if he succeeded? That the would-be thief had any knowledge of the coins’ numismatic value he discounted at once. No, to the Quenanite thief the coins would have, at the most, their face value. And to steal a handful of dollars invested with the taboo of sacred objects … Ellery shook his head. Whatever value these coins represented to the thief, it was not material. But what? He could not even guess.

He left the sanquetum, its shadows shifting weirdly with his movements, and locked and tried the door. Then he went seeking the Teacher at the school.

Gravely, Ellery returned the key.

“Where,” he asked the old man, “is the Chronicler to be found?”

The Chronicler provided an antic note to Ellery’s sojourn in the Valley. The old Quenanite sported a crop of curly, grizzled whiskers, rather short. No hair grew on his upper lip, which had sunken into his upper jaw from the long-time absence of incisors. This gave the lip a remarkable flexibility. He would suck it in with a rather startling noise, a combination
smack-click
; this caused his lower lip to shoot forward, so that the total effect was of a sort of spitting, intelligent old monkey. The old man’s shoulders were frail and bowed; his head was bald except for a matted gray fringe, like a tonsure. I know, Ellery thought suddenly: he looks like that bust of Socrates.

For the occasion the Chronicler fished out of his robe an extraordinary device. Two pieces of glass had been fitted into a wooden frame, the ends of which were pierced for leathery thongs that ended in loops. Only when the old man fitted them to his eyes and slipped the loops over his ears did Ellery realize that they were hand-crafted spectacles. He seemed to have greater difficulty seeing through them than without them, so obviously the lenses had been salvaged from some mysterious out-world source and fitted into homemade frames. Perhaps they went with the office.