And on the Eighth Day (3 page)

Ellery indicated the chair opposite him. “How about joining me in a cup of coffee?”

“Well, say. Thank you!” beamed Otto Schmidt; and he brought a cup of coffee from the kitchen and sat down and began to talk as if Ellery had opened a stop-valve. His delight in company and conversation was that of a man who did not often get much of either.

He was from Wisconsin originally, it seemed—a small city in the northern part of the state—where he had run his father’s neighborhood grocery store.

“Just about gave me a living,” Schmidt said. “After Pop died I had no family in the United States, so I was kind of lonesome as well as scraping along. Then two bad things happened more or less together …”

The depression had settled on the land, and Schmidt’s health had broken down. His doctor had advised a warm, dry climate; the growing inability of his customers to pay their grocery bills had put an end to the matter.

“The store had been owned by my family for over forty years,” the stout little man said, “but I had no choice. Paid my suppliers, marked down everything, cleared off the shelves, and found myself heading west with five hundred dollars in my pockets and not an idea in the world where I was going or what I was going to do. Then my jalopy ran out of gas about a mile from here. I hiked in and found a fellow named Parslow running this store. He was fed up with it and I offered him the five hundred for the place, lock, stock, and barrel, half in cash. He held out for three hundred down. ‘Tell you what I’ll do,’ I told him. ‘My car’s a mile up the road and it doesn’t need a thing but gas. You can have her for the other fifty.’ ‘Done!’ he says. We closed the deal and he filled up a can with gasoline and was all set to start walking. ‘Haven’t you forgotten something?’ I ask. ‘What?’ he says, patting his pockets. ‘That’ll be fifty cents for the gasoline,’ I says. Well, he swore at me, but he paid. And that was how I came to be here, and I’ve been here ever since.”

And he chuckled with satisfaction. He would never go back, he assured Ellery. He made very little money, but even on his once-a-year trips to Los Angeles he was always glad to get back. It was … He hesitated, his pudgy hands making exploratory circles in the air. It was so clean out here on the edge of the desert. You could see for miles in the daytime, and at night … oh, you could see for
millions
of miles.

“How about those two fellows who were here when I arrived?” Ellery asked suddenly. “Who are they?”

“Oh, they live out in the desert somewhere. Hermits.”

“Hermits?”

“Sort of. Don’t know what they do for grub generally—they come to the store here only a couple times a year. Nice folks, though. Queer, maybe, but like I said, they don’t bother nobody. Everybody’s got a right to go his own way, so long as he don’t bother nobody, is what I always say.”

Ellery remarked that he couldn’t agree more, and rose. Mr. Schmidt swiftly suggested more pie and coffee in a transparent maneuver to detain him. Ellery smiled faintly, shook his head, settled his bill, and then said that he had better get some directions before going on.

“Directions for where?” the little man asked. Ellery looked pained. Where indeed?

“Las Vegas,” he said.

Schmidt took Ellery by the arm and marched him to the door. Here, with many gestures, corrections, and repetitions, he described a route. Boiled down—as nearly as Ellery could remember afterward—it came to this: “Follow this road along the edge of the desert. Don’t take any of the roads that go off to the left. When you come to the first fork, bear right. That’s the road that leads you onto the main highway for Las Vegas.”

Ellery waved good-bye and drove off. He expected never to see the End-of-the-World Store or Otto Schmidt,
Prop.
, again.

Once again he drove off toward home, reversing the path of the pioneers—for that matter, of the sun itself. The hot meal had added its own inducement toward drowsiness to his exhaustion, and he had to fight a running battle with it.

He kept his eyes open for the “first fork” in the road, where he was to bear right for the highway that led to Las Vegas. Once—perhaps twice, he was not sure—he noticed a wide path (it seemed little more) which he took to be one of the roads that “go off to the left,” and he avoided it with a minor sense of triumph. He had forgotten to ask Otto Schmidt how far away Las Vegas was and how long he might have to be on the road.

The day was settling into its decline, and he began to entertain an only half-amusing fantasy that he was not going to reach any recognizable destination that night. It made him think of the legend of Peter Rugg. The Missing Man, New England’s version of The Flying Dutchman, who defied the heavenly elements and for punishment was condemned to gallop in his phantom chaise forever with a thunderstorm at his back, trying to reach a Boston that forever eluded him. Perhaps, Ellery thought, future travelers would repeat the tale of the ancient Duesenberg and its phantom driver, eternally stopping to inquire if he was on the right road to Las Vegas!

Try as he would to keep not only his sleepy eyes but his drifting mind on the road (“…
first fork
…
turn right
…”), Ellery’s thoughts kept circling back to the old man with the curious speech, the curious costume, the curiously powerful serenity. Funny old bird to meet in the year 1944, of the independence of the United States the 168th, even in a timeless desert. Was there ever an age when that old man would not have commanded attention, a fascination not far removed from awe?

A clump of desert willows pink with blossoms caught his eye; in the next moment he had forgotten them, but perhaps they sparked his mental leap backward over whole millennia to another time and desert and
jallãbiyah
-clad people among whom moved men like that old man—men called patriarchs, or prophets, or apostles.

That old man of the wagon and his “
Very well, Storicai
,” in an English flavored with that strange accent—no, not of those Russian sectarians in Mexico after all … It was not his accent, or his voice, or his face, or his garb that was so remarkable, although together they were remarkable enough. Rather it was his ineffable composure, a certain extraordinary aura of … grandeur? No, no! What was the word?

Righteousness
, that was it. Not self-righteousness, but righteousness … unswerving rectitude … acceptance with God … It blazed from his eyes. That was it! How very, very remarkable were the eyes of that old man …

Much later, recalling the dreamlike journey, Ellery came to believe that in his half-hallucinated state, while reflecting on the eyes of the old man, his own eyes had failed to see the fork in the road of which Otto Schmidt had spoken. Certainly he had not borne right, as Schmidt had instructed him. He must have borne left instead.

He was to remember how, floating between reflection and exhaustion, he realized that the road he was traveling had definitely stopped skirting the desert and had crept into it. Joshua trees thrust their spiky limbs every which way, as if groping blindly for something; the frail scent of sand verbena kept touching his nostrils …

… until it was replaced gently and slowly and, thus, imperceptibly, until all at once the verbena scent was gone, blocked out by something stronger, heavier, more recently familiar …

… the smoke of sagebrush burning.

Again.

He frowned, blinked, noticed—consciously for the first time—how the road had changed. The graded dirt had given way to ungraded dirt, then to sand. Before he could think this out, he noticed that it was little more than a weedy trail embraced by two narrow ruts. He did not even then think: I am on the wrong road, and I had better turn around now while there is still enough light. He thought: It must be a very old automobile that uses this road, perhaps a Model T … And then: No, no automobile uses this road, because there is not a trace of oil on the weeds running down the middle of it.

With that, Ellery stopped the car and looked around. There was nothing but desert on all sides—creosote bushes, the grayish humps of burro-weed, the thorny crowns of yuccas, rocks, boulders, sand. He had stopped the car providentially. The road came to an end just ahead of him, on a rise. What was on the other side he preferred not to dwell on. Perhaps a sheer drop—a cliff.

The light was beginning to pale, and Ellery hastily stood up in the car and craned.

He saw at once that the rise was part of the rim of a low circular hill—a hill with a valley inside; or so it seemed in the failing light. A valley like the bottom of a shallow bowl, hence not really a valley at all, but a basin. Geological niceties, however, were far from his thoughts. As
valley
it first came into his tired mind; as
valley
it was to remain there.

While he stood in the rising heat of the motor, gazing at the rim of hill, a figure suddenly rose from the crest to become fixed in silhouette between the lemon-yellow sky and the hill beyond, already deepening from pink to rose-red … while he watched, to purple. Hooded robe from which emerged gaunt profile and jutting beard, long staff in one hand, and in the other … It was, it had to be, it could be no other than the old man of the wagon at the End-of-the-World Store.

For a timeless interval Ellery stood there, in the Duesenberg, half convinced that he was the victim of a desert mirage, or that the appearance of this archetype of all father-figures was related in some way to his recent withdrawal from awareness of the world, characterized by the senseless repetition of his father’s name on the studio typewriter … He saw the curiously thin-looking figure on the hill—as sharp against the sky as if there were no thickness to him at all—raise something to his lips.

A trumpet?

In the silence (literally breathless for him, for he was holding his breath) Ellery heard, or fancied he heard, an unearthly sound. It was at once alien yet hauntingly familiar. Not the long, archaic silvern trumpets that had heralded the proclamation of the British king (and, eight months later, of his brother); not the harsh, yet tremendously stirring ram’s horn, the shofar of the synagogue, confuting Satan as it jarred slumbering sinners to repentance; nor the baroque
boo-boo
ing of the conch shell whereby the hundred thousand avatars of Brahma are summoned to compassion; not the horns of Elfland, faintly blowing; nor the sweet-cracked melancholy jazz of the cornet at an old-time New Orleans funeral … it was like none of these, yet it evoked something of all these …

If, indeed, he had heard anything. At all.

As in a dream, Ellery turned off the ignition and got out of his car and walked in the direction of the silhouette, the long strange echo of the trumpet still in his ears. (Or was it only the singing silence of the sands?)

He began to climb the low hill.

And as he climbed, the tall figure achieved a third dimension and turned toward him. The hand that did not grasp the staff was not visible now; it was buried in the folds of the robe … holding the trumpet? Ellery could not tell. What he could tell, however, and surely, was that this was indeed the old man of the wagon. And as Ellery reached the summit, the old man began to speak.

He spoke in English, as before, the same curiously accented English that struck the ear with such unfamiliarity. Or it might be not so much an accent as an intonation. What was the old man saying? Ellery frowned, concentrating.

“
The Word be with you.
”

That must have been what he said. And yet … Perhaps it had not been word at all, but
ward
. Or
Lord
. There had been a distinct cadenced hesitation in the pronunciation, almost as if it were
Wor’d
. Or—

“World?” Ellery thought aloud.

The old man looked at him with a kindling eye. “Who are you?” he asked Ellery.

And again uncertainty followed. Surely there was a glottal stop after the
r
in
are
, the way the old man pronounced it? Or had he actually asked, Who art
thou
?—speaking the thou after the fashion of the British Quakers, so that it sounded more like
thu
?

In these uncertainties Ellery was certain of only one thing—that he felt queerly light-headed. Had he gained enough altitude since leaving the store so that a thinning atmosphere was affecting him? Or was it the exertion of the climb up the hill in his ever-mounting fatigue? He planted his feet apart for better support (how silly if he should faint now!) and he was aware with annoyance how slurred the words sounded as he said, “My name is Ellery—”

Before he could finish, an astounding thing happened. The old man bent double and began to fall. Instinctively Ellery reached out both hands to catch him, thinking that he was fainting, or even dying. But the old man slipped through his hands and landed on both knees on the sand, and he plucked the dusty cuff of Ellery’s trouser, and he kissed it.

And while Ellery stared down open-mouthed, convinced that he was in the presence of senility, or madness, the old man prostrated himself; and he said something; and he said it again as he raised his head.

“Elroee.”

That was how his name sounded in the old man’s curious accent. And Ellery felt his flesh ripple and chill. For wasn’t there mention somewhere in the Bible of
Elroi
, or
Elroy
? Which meant …
God Sees
? Or
God Sees Me
? …

All this happened in seconds—his pronouncement of his Christian name, the old man’s instant genuflection and repetition of the name in his own version—so that automatically Ellery went on to add his surname.

“—Queen.”

And once more the astounding thing happened. For at the sound of Queen the old man again kissed the cuff of Ellery’s trouser (the hem of my garments! Ellery thought, half angrily), again prostrated himself in the dust; and again he repeated what Ellery had said, again giving it a curious and unfamiliar quality.

“Quenan,” the old man was saying. “Quenan … Quenan …”

But this version of his surname brought no shock of recognition.
Quenan
…?

And the old man, still on his knees, went on and on; but what he was saying was meaningless to Ellery, whose own train of thought wandered afield. The hand he had reflexively extended to catch the old man, he was amazed to find, was resting on the old man’s cowled head. How had it got there? Surely by accident. Good Lord! he thought. The old boy will think I’m blessing him. And he stifled an impulse to grin. He could make out nothing of what the bearded patriarch was saying—a swift mutter of unrecognizable words that might even have been a prayer.