And on the Eighth Day (2 page)

He and Dyers had long since stopped speaking to each other except in command situations. Each labored within a force-field of his own purgatory. With gray-dirt faces and red-eyed as albinos they became prisoners of the war, filled with eternal, hopeless hate.

The pay-off came on Saturday, the first of April. All Fools’ Day.

Ellery had checked into the studio that morning at seven-thirty. How long he had been slogging away at the typewriter he did not know; but suddenly he felt cold hands on his, and he looked up to find Colonel Donaldson stooping over him.

“What?” Ellery said.

“I said what’s the matter with you, Queen. Look!”

Ellery sighted along the colonel’s military finger. It was trained on the paper in the typewriter.
Richard Queen Richard Queen Richard Queen
, he read.
Richard Queen Richard
…

“I spoke to you,” the colonel said. “You neither looked at me nor answered. Just kept typing
Richard Queen
. Who’s Richard Queen? Your son?”

Ellery shook his head and immediately stopped. He could have sworn something rattled inside, something with a long extension, like a chain. “My father,” he said, and pushed cautiously away from the desk. When nothing happened, he gripped the edge and changed the direction of the push from horizontal to vertical. This, he found to his surprise, was considerably harder to do. Also, his legs were quivering. Frowning, he clung to the desk.

Colonel Donaldson was frowning, too. It was a chief-of-staff-type frown, fraught with decisions for the further conduct of the war.

“Colonel,” began Ellery, and stopped. Had he stuttered? It seemed to him he had stuttered. Or was hearing things. He inhaled smartly and tried again. “Colonel …” There. That was perfect. And he was so very very very very tired. “I think I’ve had it.”

The colonel said, “I think you have.” There was no rancor in his voice. A cog in his military engine had worn out; the sensible thing to do was replace it before it snapped. Fortunes of war. “Glad it didn’t happen sooner—we’re almost to our objective. Well, well, we’ll carry on. And oh,” he said, “will you be all right, Queen?”

Will I be all right, thought Ellery. “No,” he said. “Yes.”

Colonel Donaldson nodded hastily and turned to go. But at the door he hesitated, as if he had just remembered something. “Well,” he said, and cleared his throat. “Good show, Queen, good show!” And left.

Ellery sat wondering where Charley Dyers was. Probably out for a bourbon break. Good old Charley. The hell with him.

And New York. Oh, New York, its April damps and dirt-flecked beauty. California, here I go—back home and broken—with gratitude in my heart. To the comfortable, shabby old apartment. To the end of a Gotham day and the dearly beloved father-image in the threadbare bathrobe intent on leather-bound
Decline and Fall
. To rest. To rest. Did they give squeezed-out writers Purple Hearts?

And so it was that the next morning, before the Walshes were out of their circular bed—he had made his good-byes the night before—Ellery stowed his suitcases in the Duesenberg and drove out of Hollywood, eastward bound.

The wooden building, he realized later, came into sight almost a mile away, but he had not at first identified it as such. The air was clear enough; it was the undulating ground that now revealed, now concealed it. It might have been a set from a Western film except that it was not neat enough. “Ramshackle” had probably been the word for it from the beginning. There was no sign that it had ever known a coat of paint.

But a sign—a painted sign—there certainly was. It must have been five feet across. Its lettering, more ambitious than accomplished, read:

END-OF-THE-WORLD STORE

Otto Schmidt,
Prop
.

Last Chance To Buy Gas And

Supplies. Next Chance Is

Other Side of Desert

Ellery guessed that he might not be far from the southern edge of Death Valley; but in this country guesses were sibling to disaster, and he felt in no condition to face disaster. Also, the state of his fuel gauge made a stop for gas the better part of wisdom. And while the food hamper Evelyn Walsh had pressed on him was still untouched, who knew what lay ahead? Yes, it might be a smart idea to stop and see what he could pick up in the way of additional supplies—and, of course, information.

Ellery slanted the Duesenberg toward the rickety porch, wondering vaguely why he should feel it necessary to rationalize the stop. Perhaps it was because there was something about the place, a quality of unexpectedness. It stood quite alone in the sun-baked landscape. There was no other building, not even the ruin of one; no other car.

There was a wagon, however, hitched to two animals.

At first he thought they were mules—smallish mules, to be sure, but their size was less matter for wonder than that they were there at all. He had never seen mules farther west than Texas. But then, as he turned off his ignition, he saw that they were not mules; they were donkeys. Not the stunted burros of Old Prospector fame, but a more robust variety, like the asses of the Near East—handsome beasts, well-bred and well-fed.

Ellery had never seen their like outside films and paintings, and it was only the exhaustion which rode him like the Burr-Woman of the Indians that kept him from going over for a closer look. Supplies lay heaped beside the wagon: sacks, crates, cartons.

But then he forgot the wagon and the beasts. For in the silence left by the cutting off of his motor he heard men’s voices, slow and deep. They were coming from inside the store. He backed heavily out of the Duesenberg and moved toward the porch as if he were wading through swells.

The boards of the porch wavered under his feet, and he walked even more gingerly. At the screen door he paused to rest. Then, as he was about to open it, the door opened seemingly by itself. Ellery was pondering this phenomenon when two men stepped through the doorway, two very strange and strangely dressed men.

It was the eyes of the first man, by far the elder of the two, that seized him. Later he was to think:
He has the eyes of a prophet;
but that was not his thought at the time. What came into his head at the moment of meeting were words from the Song of Songs:
Thine eyes are dove’s eyes;
and with this, instantly, the knowledge that they were not dove’s eyes at all. The eyes of an eagle? But no, there was nothing fierce or predatory about them. They were black-bright, blazing black-bright, like twin suns viewed with the naked eye. And there was something far-seeing about them. And yet non-seeing, too. It was the queerest thing. Perhaps—that was it!—they saw something that was there for only them to see.

He was tall, this strange man; bone-thin tall, and exceedingly old. In his eighties, certainly; possibly his nineties. His skin had been so worked upon by time and the sun that it was weathered almost black. From his chin fell a small sparse beard of yellowed white hair; his face otherwise was quite hairless. He was clothed in a robe, a robe with the cut and flow of an Arabian burnoose or
jallãbiyah
, made of some unsophisticated cloth whose bleach had come, not from processed chemicals, but directly from the sun. He wore sandals on bare feet; he carried a staff taller than himself. And on his shoulder he bore a keg of nails with no sign of strain.

No actor could play this man, Ellery swiftly thought (the denial reaching his mind’s surface even faster than the thought it denied—that the old man was here from Hollywood, on location for some Biblical production). He was not made up for a part; he was really aged; in any case he would be inimitable. This old man could only be, Ellery thought. He is. An original.

The old man moved by him. The extraordinary eyes had rested a moment on his face and then had gone on—not so much past him as through him.

The second man was commonplace only by contrast with the old man. He, too, was sun-black—if a shade less darkened than the ancient, perhaps only because he was half the ancient’s age. In his early forties, Ellery guessed; his beard was glossy black. The younger man’s garments were made from the same odd cloth, but they were of an entirely different character—a simple blouselike shirt, without a collar and open at the throat; and trousers that reached only far enough down to cover his calves. He carried a hundred-pound sack on each shoulder, one of salt, the other of sugar.

The eyes of this younger man were a clear-water gray, and they rested briefly on Ellery’s face with shy curiosity. The gray eyes shifted to look over at the Duesenberg, and they widened with an awe rarely inspired by that venerable vehicle except on the score of its age. The glance returned to Ellery for another shy moment; then the younger man moved after the elder and went over to the wagon and began to load the supplies.

Ellery stepped into the store. After the inferno outside, its dim coolness received him like a Good Samaritan; for a moment he simply stood there accepting its ministrations and looking about. It was a poor store, with sagging shelves scantily stocked and a dusty foliage of assorted articles hanging from the tin ceiling. The store proper was far too shallow to comprise the entire building, Ellery saw; there was a door at the rear, almost blocked by a stack of cardboard cartons imprinted
Tomatoes
, that probably led to a storeroom.

Along one side of the store ran a flaked and whittled counter; behind the counter, over a lop-eared ledger, stooped a roly-poly little man with a patch of seal mustache in the middle of his round and ruddy face—obviously the Otto Schmidt,
Prop.
, of the sign. He did not look up from his ledger.

So Ellery stood there, not so much observing as absorbing, taking a sensual pleasure in the laving coolness; and then the tall old man came back into the store, moving very quietly. He went over to the counter, his blackened hand slipping into a slit in the side of his garment; it came out with something, and this something he laid on the counter before the roly-poly proprietor.

Schmidt looked up. In that instant he spotted Ellery. He snatched the something and pocketed it. But not before Ellery saw what it was.

It was a coin, large enough to be a silver dollar, and remarkably bright and shiny, almost as if it were new. But no new silver dollars had been minted for years. Perhaps, he thought dully, perhaps it was a foreign coin. There were colonies of bearded sectarians, Old Russian in origin, in Mexico …

But dollar, or peso—whatever the coin was—the heap of supplies being loaded onto the wagon seemed far too much to be paid for by a single piece of silver.

Neither the old man nor the man behind the counter uttered a word. Evidently all arrangements had been made before Ellery came in, leaving no need for further conversation. Once more the glance shafted through him; then, incredibly erect, incredibly light on his sandaled feet, the old man left the store. The mystery was not to be resisted; and even if the will to resist had been there, Ellery was too exhausted to exercise it. He followed.

In time to see the old man set one foot on the wagon wheel and lift himself easily to the high seat, where the younger man was now perched. And to hear him speak for the second time, for one of the slow, deep voices Ellery had heard on first approaching the store had been this voice.

“Very well, Storicai.”

Storicai? At least that was how it sounded. Storicai … What a queer name! Ellery could not fix it in point of time or place. And oh, that voice, the voice that had uttered it, so rich with power, so tranquil—a voice with the strangest accent, and infinitely at peace …

Ellery sighed and shook his head as he went back into the store. Distracted now only by the memory and not the presence, he allowed the store to sink into his pores: its musty fragrance of old wood, coffee beans, kerosene, spices, tobacco, vinegar, and coolness—above all, coolness.

“Never saw anything like that before, did you?” the storekeeper said cheerfully; and Ellery agreed that no, he never had. “Well,” the storekeeper went on, “it’s a free country, and they don’t bother nobody. What can I do for you?”

He could fill the Duesenberg up with high-test was what he could do. No high-test? No call for it on a back road like this. Well, all right, regular would do. It would have to. What? Oh, yes, he had stamps for the gas … Otto Schmidt came back and took Ellery’s ten-dollar bill as if he had never seen one before, and rumpled his cowlick once or twice, and made change. Anything else?

Ellery glanced about, thinking there was something more he wanted; he ordered tobacco for his pipe, paid for it, looked around again … there was still something …

“How about some supper?” suggested Mr. Schmidt shrewdly. And all at once Ellery realized that this was exactly what he wanted. He nodded.

“Just take a seat at the table there. Ham and eggs, coffee and pie be all right? I could open a can of soup—”

“Ham and eggs, coffee and pie will do just fine.” He felt guilty about Evelyn’s still unopened box lunch, but it was not food he wanted. He sat down at the table. It was bare of cloth but quite clean; and there was a much-handled copy of the
Reese River Reveille and Austin Sun
dated the previous November.

Austin … that was in Nevada—it couldn’t be Texas. Or California. So he must be in Nevada. Or—no, that didn’t follow. Anyone coming west from Nevada could have left it just about here. He would ask Mr. Schmidt what state they were in. But Mr. Schmidt was frying ham in the kitchen; and by the time he returned, the question had left Ellery’s mind.

Ham and eggs, coffee and pie appeared on the table simultaneously. All were surprisingly good for a country store in the middle of nowhere. Even the pie had a surprise to it. In addition to a crisp, brown, flaky crust, the fruit was just the right mixture of tart and sweet, with a spicy flavor that reminded Ellery of cinnamon; but there was something else, too.

He looked up and saw that Mr. Schmidt was smiling. “It’s clove,” said Mr. Schmidt.

“Yes,” Ellery agreed. “I did smell the clove, but I thought it was from the ham. Delicious.”

The proprietor’s moon face was split by a grin. “Where I come from there are a lot of Cornishmen—Cousin Jacks, we called them—and they used to put clove in their pie instead of cinnamon. I thought to myself, Why not both?—and I’ve been putting in both ever since.”