The Investigations of Avram Davidson (16 page)

“I was even recognized on the street by a newspaper photographer from
The Daily Mail,
” Captain Stone continued bitterly. “I packed my belongings and fled into the night, obtaining passage on a sea junk engaged in the pearl shell and bêche-de-mer trade.” A single tear slipped down into his red beard. He plucked a large handkerchief from his sleeve and blew his rufous nose resoundingly. “Need I say,” he concluded, “that the man who had brought all this about was the infamous scribbler and penny-a-line spy, Robert Pepper?”

The somber silence which followed was finally broken by the soft voice of the hostess. “I was born and raised in Canada,” she said, “and had an uneventful but rather happy life, particularly with my husband and only child. I lost them both—under tragic and well-publicized circumstances which I cannot bear to describe. You must excuse me.

“Most of my income perished with my husband. I had and have no commercial talents. Not caring much what happened to myself, but being under the necessity of sustaining life and finding some occupation or preoccupation, I went to Newfoundland, and settled in the smallest, most remote community I could find which offered some minimum of amenities.

“The place was called Little York Cove. The people fished for cod, hunted seal, raised potatoes. In the nearby rivers were salmon and trout. It was a rather severe life, but it was simple and clean. I became an amateur fisherwoman of some skill, and I learned to make the most of the brief winter days as well as the long, long ones of summer. I could not afford to buy a house, but I rented one for a moderate sum and gradually fixed it up to my liking. I was happy.”

Happy, that is, until a brief but searching visit by a man she did not know. His visit resulted in a series of newspaper and magazine articles describing Little York Cove as a Fisherman's Paradise and a New Low-Priced Vacationland. The village was not adequate to house and supply the swarms of people attracted by the articles. So new buildings were erected, but even so there was an inevitable increase in rents.

Helen's landlady informed her, regretfully, that she could no longer let her have the house for its current price as she had been offered five times that amount by a Montreal Sporting Club. And then a story appeared in the St. John's newspaper (which circulated locally), describing the boom at Little York Cove, and incidentally mentioning that among the residents was a woman who had lost her husband and child under tragic and once well-known circumstances, which it proceeded to recapitulate in gory detail.

Helen left the next week.

The name of the writer whose report had worked these far-reaching changes was Robert Pepper.

*   *   *

T
HE STORY TOLD
—slowly, painfully—by Don and Donna Smith was not too dissimilar. All their lives they had suffered from extreme shyness. They had met, in fact, at a party to which they had been dragged by different sets of friends, and found each other huddling diffidently in the same corner.

After their marriage they acted on a mutual resolve to avoid crowds, and believing that in a country of a different language their bashfulness would be less obvious and hence less troublesome, they moved to a town in the Cape Verde Islands. They obtained a lease, at a most moderate sum, on one of the many splendid old houses that dated from the period when the town was an outpost of Portuguese empire. Food was equally inexpensive; they kept several horses and they swam a good deal. Also resident in the town were an Indo-Chinese ex-King and a family of exiled Balkan nobles.

The shy Smiths smiled politely at them in passing and were in turn politely smiled at. They did not so much invite Robert Pepper into their
facienda
as suffer his presumptive presence; they were infinitely relieved when he left.

Pepper thoughtfully sent them clippings in several languages which commended the Smiths for their “hospitality” and spared no detail, however slight, about San Jao—Hideway Home of Princes and Potentates and Sun-kissed Shangri-la.

At first it meant little to the Smiths. Bewildered when the flowering tree-lined streets of the old town began to swarm with visitors, they retreated behind their walls, refusing in terror to answer the repeated calls of the bell, or—when the bell was disconnected—trying not to hear the constant pounding on the gate. Isolation proved impossible when they were informed that their sea-near
facienda
had been sold as a nucleus of a posh residential hotel to be erected by a syndicate of Scotch herring smokers in search of a better climate and a more diversified portfolio.

The last to tell his story was a thin dry grayish man who in a thin dry grayish voice briefly related a like account.

Arthur Clay had settled in the neighboring Republic of Santa Anna “before”—as he put it—“any of these countries had signed extradition treaties with the United States.” Making botany his new interest, he had classified over 1,800 species of plant life unknown to taxonomical science before the questing eye of R. Pepper had lighted on the pleasant piedmont area called Las Mesas, where Mr. Clay was making his home.

Enlarging on the picturesqueness of the native costumes and festivals, the fertility of the soil, the amiability of the population, and the low tax policy of the Santa Anna government, Pepper's widely syndicated column had brought such an influx of new people to Las Mesas that before long Arthur Clay beheld, vanishing before his eyes, the wild plant life he could no longer afford to study and catalogue.…

Captain Stone's deep and angry voice jerked them out of their profound silence.

There was, he declared, a sort of fourfold pattern visible in this whole ironic business.
First
(he counted on a huge hairy finger), a group of people who, for one good reason or another, were unable to live in their original homes and societies.
Second,
this same group of people had the useful talent of being able to locate little-known, remote, and pleasant places in which they
were
able to live.
Third,
this filthy swine, Robert Pepper, seemed to possess a similar talent for nosing out such places, but only after they had originally been discovered by the same group.

“
Fourth,
and most damnable,” the Captain trumpeted, “is that every ‘discovery' he makes is—for everyone except himself—utterly self-defeating! He writes about places which are little-known; directly they become famous! He writes about places which are cheap; immediately they become expensive! He advertises places which are unspoiled, and in a short time they are spoiled into corruption. He is, in short, a cuckoo laying his cockatrice's eggs in nests which he invariably fouls as a reward for hospitality!”

When the echo of his voice had died away Helen said, hopeless beyond despair, “And there is nothing we can do about it.”

“Yes, there is! There is!” cried Captain Stone. “We can at least refuse to help the rogue! We can refuse to assist him in spying out the land! We can—”

He fell into a fit of coughing, toward the subsidence of which Richard Stanley was heard to say, “But I promised.”

“Promised what?” Arthur Clay asked.

Promised to show Pepper the ruins of the Temple of Achichihuatzl, Richard Stanley said. The next morning.

In vain it was pointed out to him, in tones most urgent, that this was just the sort of thing on which Pepper doted. Ruins! Temples! Picturesque antiquities! He would lap it up, spread the news far and wide.

“What do you think will happen to all of us when he gets done?” Captain Stone demanded, face redder than his beard. “What do you suppose will happen to
you?
You told me yourself that you live on the $750 a year you get from two non-amortizing mortgages your sister gave you. Could you live on that anywhere else in the world?

“Do you know how much Coca-Cola a thousand tourists a month can drink? They won't be satisfied to drink it
tempo
as the locals do, they'll want it
frio
—and not from an ice bucket, either, because they'll be afraid of bugs in the ice. No, they'll want it chilled in a refrigerator, and nice old Don Nestor will have to buy one—he'll have to buy a big one—he'll have to borrow money to pay for it—and he won't be able to go on lodging you and feeding you at the bargain-basement rates he's charging now.

“What will you do when he raises your rent, Richard? Where will you go? How will you live?”

They all looked at him—the furious Captain Stone, the hopeless Helen, the grim Arthur Clay, and the terrified Smiths.

He had no answer. All he could say, over and over again, was, “But I promised, I promised…”

The next morning he met Bob Pepper, already bubbling over with enthusiasm. “How far are these ruined temples of yours, Dicky-boy? Very far?” He was festooned with cameras and such impedimenta.

“Not really. Not if you don't mind a rather long walk.”

“
I
don't mind! I'll take lots of shots on the way. Love that scenery! Hey, see that
muchacha?
What a pair of legs! Hey?”

He did not take many shots after all, for the trail along which Stanley led him was a narrow track between thick growths of trees; so Pepper began to ask questions about the ruins and who built them. Stanley warmed to the subject.

The local Indians (he said), though not comparable in the level of their culture and technology with the Aztecs, Mayas, or Incas, had nevertheless achieved a rather high degree of both. They worked well in stone and metal, had a complex and extremely interesting code of manners, and were opposed to shedding human blood.

“Red-skin Quakers!” Pepper exclaimed, pushing aside an obtrusive branch. “You must have made quite a study of all this, huh?”

“Oh, I have. For years. And I've learned things which—it sounds romantic but it's true—no other living white man knows.”

Bob Pepper grinned happily. He'd have to get all this down on paper. No other living white man—great! Simply great! Such as what?

They had come now to the ruins themselves. Stone statues green with moss leaned at crazy angles, and native pines grew in the courtyard, thrusting up great slabs of stone and covering others with a thick layer of pine needles.

“Well,” said Stanley, shy and proud at the same time, “legend refers to The Three Sacred Wells of the Temple. But only two of them—the locations of only two of them, I mean—are known.”

“Sacred Wells! Great!”

One—Stanley pointed it out—was The Well of Good Wishes. The other was The Well of Secret Sorrows. And the third—

“It took me over ten years of consulting old accounts and very old maps, and gaining the confidence of the Indians. But in the end, Mr. Pepper—Bob—I finally found it.”

Past the area of stone floors and statues they went, and finally stopped under a huge and stately old pine. With his feet Stanley scraped and scraped. The pine needles fell away in heaps to reveal a circular stone engraved with petroglyphs.

“Don't try to lift it—you couldn't,” said Stanley. “But
I
can.”

Deftly Stanley pressed down at a certain point. Smoothly the stone lid swung up on its pivot. The well gaped ancient and black. Bob Pepper rubbed his hands and peered down.

“Won't the schoolteachers from Des Moines go for this!” he exclaimed. “What's this one called?—don't tell me—it's The Well of the Virgins, right?”

“No,” said Stanley. “It isn't. It's called The Well of the Messenger of Evil Tidings.”

And Stanley put his right foot diagonally behind Pepper's ankles at the Achilles tendons, and pushed. The irrepressible journalist went straight down without touching the sides. There was no outcry, and only after a long time, a muffled, echoing splash.

Richard Stanley scuffed back the heaps of pine needles and brushed them with a handy fallen branch. Once again the stone cover lay hidden from sight.

He turned and began to walk briskly back to town. If he did not dawdle along the way he would be just in time for lunch. Don Nestor's lunches were as enormous as they were delicious. And, perhaps not least of all, they were so very, very cheap.

T
HE
L
ORD OF
C
ENTRAL
P
ARK

“T
HE
L
ORD OF
C
ENTRAL
P
ARK
” was first published in 1970. It is a playful story that shows Davidson's skill as a prose stylist. In an introduction to an earlier Davidson Collection (
The Redward Edward Papers,
Doubleday, 1978), author Michael Kurland explained:

“Some of you who read this collection are venturing into the arcane, erudite world of Avram Davidson for the first time. Probability theory insists that, despite the acres of trees cut down to provide the wood pulp, the scores of dragons killed and bled to provide the ink, some of you will not have read any of the earlier published works of Don Avram. For that few I issue the following warning: breathe steadily through the nose, if possible, proceed slowly and examine the foliage. Do not search for meanings, as they are scattered like empty oyster shells around the Walrus. I hope that helps. The prose itself will be purely and indisputably Davidson.

“Avram Davidson is the master of the parenthetical phrase. Many's the time I've seen a parenthetical phrase groveling before Avram's stern hand, begging for mercy. But he takes them and twists them to his will. In the spirit of the true explorer, Avram is ever pushing and prodding at the bounds of language.”

—GD

 

This all took place a while back.…

It was a crisp evening in middle April.

Cornelius Goodeycoonce, the river pirate, headed his plunder-laden boat straight at an apparently solid wall of pilings, steering with the calm of a ferryboat captain nearing a slip, and cut his motor.