III
They hadn't stopped with branding him. They had given him another beating—probably more than one, in fact, although Chandler wasn't sure because he had kept losing consciousness. It was a surprise to him, each time, to wake up, because he had been pretty sure each time that there were a number of his oppressors who thought the best thing to do was put him out of his misery. He had a blurry memory of being thrown into an empty boxcar and a clearer one, hours later, of waking long enough to discover that he was moving and to realize just how much he hurt. But he was also physically exhausted. He slept again, regardless of pain, regardless of the jolting of the slow-moving train, and when he awoke again it was daylight.
He was very thirsty, but there was no water to drink. His burned forehead was searingly painful; he wished he had a bandage for it, not to mention a couple of aspirin. But those were out of reach as well. He half crawled to the open door of the car, unable to walk normally because of the swaying and jolting, and sat down with his legs dangling over the side, breathing deeply.
He was traveling through forested mountains—the Cascades, no doubt—and the air was sweet and cool. The railroad was following the course of a narrow, bright river, and there was neither a human being nor a building in sight.
For the first time since he had found himself attacking the screaming young girl, Chandler began to look toward a future. There might still be one! Wherever this train was taking him it would be better than what he was fleeing from. On the other side of the mountains was the broad interior valley of California, and maybe a new life. Maybe a place where the brand on his forehead would be meaningless, maybe even a place where the terror that had consumed the world had not cut so deep.
He closed his eyes, wincing, as the contraction of the brows made the brand stab him with pain. Then, without warning, the train jolted to a stop, each consecutive car crashing against the couplings of the one ahead.
Then there was silence. It endured.
Chandler, who had been slowly waking after a night of very little sleep, sat up against the wall of the boxcar and wondered what was wrong.
It seemed remiss to start a day without signing the Cross or hearing a few exorcismal verses. It was mid-morning, time for work to be beginning at the plant. The lab men would be streaming in, their amulets examined at the door. The chaplains would be wandering about, ready to pray a possessing spirit out. Chandler, who kept an open mind, had considerable doubt of the effectiveness of all the amulets and spells—certainly they had not kept him from committing a brutal crime—but he felt uneasy without them. . . . The train was still not moving. In the silence he could hear the distant huffing of the engine.
He went to the door, supporting himself with one hand on the wooden wall, and looked out.
The tracks followed the roll of a river, their bed a few feet higher than an empty three-lane highway, which in turn was a dozen feet above the water. As he looked out the engine brayed twice. The train jolted, then stopped again.
Then there was a very long time when nothing happened at all.
From Chandler's car he could not see the engine. He was on the convex of the curve, and the other door of the car was sealed. He did not need to see it to know that something was wrong. There should have been a brakeman running with a flare to ward off other trains; but there was not. There should have been a station, or at least a water tank, to account for the stop in the first place. There was not. Something had gone wrong, and Chandler knew what it was. Not the details, but the central fact that lay behind this and behind almost everything that went wrong these days.
The engineer was possessed. It had to be that.
Yet it was odd, he thought, as odd as his own trouble. He had chosen this train with care. It contained eight refrigerator cars full of Pharmaceuticals, and if anything was known about the laws governing possession, as his lawyer had told him, it was that such things were almost never interfered with.
Chandler jumped down to the roadbed, slipped on the crushed rock and almost fell. He had forgotten the wound on his forehead. He clutched the sill of the car door, where an ankh and fleur-de-lis had been chalked to ward off demons, until the sudden rush of blood subsided and the pain began to relent. After a moment he walked gingerly to the end of the car, slipped between the cars, dodged the couplers and climbed the ladder to its roof.
It was a warm, bright, silent day. Nothing moved. From his height he could see the Diesel at the front of the train and the caboose at its rear. No people. The train was halted a quarter-mile from where the tracks swooped across the river on a suspension bridge. Away from the river, the side of the tracks that had been hidden from him before, was an uneven rock cut and, above it, the slope of a mountain.
By looking carefully he could spot the signs of a number of homes within half a mile or so—the corner of a roof, a glassed-in porch built to command a river view, a twenty-foot television antenna poking through the trees. There was also the curve of a higher road along which the homes were strung.
Chandler took thought. He was alive and free, two gifts more gracious than he had had any right to expect. However, he would need food and he would need at least some sort of bandage for his forehead. He had a wool cap, stolen from the high school, which would hide the mark, though what it would do to the bum on his skin was something else again.
Chandler climbed down the ladder. With considerable pain he gentled the cap over the great raw "H" on his forehead and turned toward the mountain.
A voice from behind him said, "Hey. What's that you've got on your head?"
Chandler whirled, mad and scared. There was a man at the open doorway of the next boxcar, kneeling and looking out at him. He was a small man, by no means young. He wore a dirty Army officer's uniform blouse over chinos. His face was dirty and unshaven, his eyes were red-rimmed and puffy, but his expression was serenely interested.
"Now, where the hell did you come from?" demanded Chandler. "I didn't see you."
"Perhaps you didn't look," the man said cheerfully, as he untangled his legs and slipped down to the crushed gravel at the side of the roadbed. He caught Chandler's shoulder to steady himself. From twenty inches away his breath was enough to knock Chandler down.
But the man did not seem drunk. He didn't even seem hung over, though he walked awkwardly, like a man who is just on his feet after a long illness, or a toddling child. "Excuse," he said, pushing past Chandler and walking a step or two toward the head of the train, staring toward the engine.
As Chandler watched, the little man lurched, recovered himself and spun to face him. The change in him was instantaneous; one moment he was staring reflectively down the track, unhurried and calm; the next he was in a flap of consternation and terror. His eyes were wide with fright. His lips worked convulsively.
Alarmed, Chandler snapped, "What's the matter with you?"
"I—" The man swallowed, and stared about him. Then his eyes returned to Chandler. He took a step, put out a hand and said, "I—"
Then his expression changed again.
His hand dropped. In a tone of friendly curiosity he said, "I asked you what you had on your head. Fall against a hot stove?"
Chandler was now thoroughly jumpy. He didn't understand what was going on, but he understood that he didn't like it. And he didn't like the subject of their conversation. He snapped. "It's a brand. I got it for committing murder and rape, all right?"
"Oh?" The man nodded reflectively.
"Yeah. I was possessed . . . but they didn't believe me. So they put this 'H' on me. It stands for 'hoaxer.'"
"Too bad." The man returned to Chandler and patted his shoulder. "Why didn't they believe you?"
"Because it happened in a pharmaceutical plant. I don't know how it is where you come from, buddy, but where I live—lived—that sort of thing didn't happen in that kind of place. Only it does now! Look at this train."
The man smiled brightly. "You think the train is possessed?"
"I think the engineer is."
The man nodded, and glanced impatiently toward the bridge again. "Would that be so bad?"
"Bad? Where've you been?"
The little man apologized. "I mean, do all the—what do you call them? Do all the cases of possession have to be wicked?"
Chandler took a deep breath. He couldn't believe the little man was for real. He could feel the short hairs at the back of his neck prickling erect. Something smelled wrong. Nobody asked questions like that. ... He said weakly, "I never heard of any that weren't. Did you?"
"Yes, maybe I did," flared the man defensively. "Why not? Nothing is evil. It's all what you make of it . . . and I could imagine times when that sort of affair could be good. I can imagine it carrying you up to the stars! I can imagine it filling your brain with a mind grand enough to crack your own. I can—"
His voice tapered off as he noticed Chandler's pop-eyed stare.
"I was only saying maybe," he apologized, hesitated, seemed about to speak again . . . and then turned and started off toward the head of the train at a dead run.
Chandler stared after him.
He scratched the area of skin around the seared place on his forehead, then turned and began to climb the mountain.
Twenty yards uphill he stopped as though he had run into a brick wall.
He turned and looked down the tracks, but the man was out of sight. Chandler stood staring down the empty line of crushed rock, not seeing it. There was a big question in his mind. He was wondering just who he had been talking to.
Or what.
By the time he reached the first shelving roadway he had put that particular puzzle away in the back of his mind. He knocked on the first door he came to, a great old three-story house with well tended gardens.
Half a minute passed. There was no answer and no sound. The air smelled warmly of honeysuckle and mown grass, with wild onions chopped down by the blades of the mower. It was pleasant, or would have been in happier times. He knocked again, peremptorily, and the door was opened at once. Evidently someone had been right inside, listening.
A man stared at him. "Stranger, what do you want?" He was short, plump, with an extremely thick and unkempt beard. It did not appear to have been grown for its own sake, for where the facial hair could not be coaxed to grow his skin had the gross pits of old acne.
Chandler said glibly: "Good morning. I'm working my way east. I need something to eat, and I'm willing to work for it."
The man withdrew, leaving the upper half of the Dutch door open. As it looked in on only a vestibule it did not tell Chandler much. There was one curious thing—a lath and cardboard sign, shaped like an arc of a rainbow, lettered:
WELCOME TO ORPHALESE
He puzzled over it and dismissed it. The entrance room, apart from the sign, had a knickknack shelf of Japanese carved ivory and an old-fashioned umbrella rack, but that added nothing to his knowledge. He had already guessed that the owners of this home were well off. Also it had been recently painted; so they were not demoralized, as so much of the world had been demoralized, by the coming of the possessors. Even the elaborate sculpturing of its hedges had been maintained.
The man came back and with him was a girl of fifteen or so. She was tall, slim and rather homely, with a large jaw and an oval face. "Guy, he's not much to look at," she said to the pockmarked man.
"Meggie, shall I let him in?" he asked.
"Guy, you might as well." She shrugged, staring at Chandler with interest but not sympathy.
"Stranger, come along," said the man named Guy, and led him through a short hall into an enormous living room, a room two stories high with a ten-foot fireplace.
Chandler's first thought was that he had stumbled in upon a wake. The room was neatly laid out in rows of folding chairs, more than half of them occupied. He entered from the side, but all the occupants of the chairs were looking toward him. He returned their stares; he had had a good deal of practice lately in looking back at staring faces, he reflected.
"Stranger, go in," said the man who had let him in, nudging him, "and meet the people of Orphalese."
Chandler hardly heard him. He had not expected anything like this. It was a meeting, a Daumier caricature of a Thursday Afternoon Literary Circle, old men with faces like moons, young women with faces like hags. They were strained, haggard and fearful, and a surprising number of them showed some sort of physical defect, a bandaged leg, an arm in a sling or merely the marks of pain on the features.
"Stranger, go in," repeated the man, and it was only then that Chandler noticed the man was holding a pistol, pointed at him.