IV
Chandler didn't have much chance to study his new environment. He was hustled at gunpoint through the back of the room to what perhaps had once been a butler's pantry, and the door closed on him.
After that he had plenty of time to reflect. What was that queer thronelike thing he had seen at the front of the room, and who was the woman who seemed to occupy it? Who were all these people, anyway? Why did they have such a funny way of talking? And what was that strange business with the gun? Chandler had not had a really good chance to puzzle it out, but it seemed that as soon as his guide drew his gun, another man had also pulled a gun—but pointed it at the guide—and still a third person seemed to be holding a knife at the throat of the second. Very strange!
But what in the world was not strange these days? There must be thousands of little colonies like this, because little colonies were safer than big ones and anything at all was safer than what was left of the cities. And how many of them knew what was going on even over the next hill? With the breakdown of long-distance communications the world had been atomized. They didn't know, and it was better not to know, maybe. Certainly it was better not to try to start up large communities again, because they were lightning rods to attract possession. And the possessed were always frightening and generally lethal.
The world had changed. Oh, it was stumbling along. There was industry here and there—like the pharmaceutical plant where he had worked—there was even some trade by rail and truck and even by sea. (None by air, of course.) But the world was lame in all its members. A planetary lobotomy had stolen from it all its capacity to plan and coordinate . . . if it had ever had any.
Well, of course it had! In the old days there was every likelihood that the human race stood on the brink of blowing itself up, but even that was a sort of a plan—suicide, maybe, but at least destruction by its own hands.
Then came the possessors. The witches. The aliens. The whatever-they-were that smote the Earth that Christmas season.
For the first hours and even days of the terror there was a chronology, because communications were not yet destroyed. The satellite relays, sure, they went early; but still there were radio links and cables and microwave relays, and so the first terrible acts of the drama were played out in public. Of course, Chandler didn't see them all. He was too busy running. But the chronology, as pieced together before the dark curtain closed down on all news, went like this:
December 20th: The Kremlin is blasted by one of its own weapons. Minutes later the Pentagon is dive-bombed by an Eastern Airlines A-300 en route to Miami. Only a few hundred persons were killed, most of them on the plane itself, but the survivors lasted only half an hour. SAC scrambled its ready-state jets, and a group of them, ordered to orbit over the Atlantic to await instructions, detoured by way of Washington, D.C. and toggled every bomb over the Capital. London, Paris, Tokyo, Beijing, Frankfurt and Ottawa got similar treatment that same day. The methods varied. New York got it when the captain of the hunter-killer submarine Harp Seal, cruising off Sandy Hook, entered New York Bay and surfaced. Because it was an anti-sub sub it didn't have any Trident missiles. Its captain made do with nuclear torpedoes: one for the Statue of Liberty, one for the Manhattan tower of the Brooklyn Bridge, one in the general direction of the World Trade Center. Then, chuckling happily, he armed all the remaining torpedoes and detonated them in their launch tubes. Fallout and blast eliminated Manhattan as far north as Rockefeller Center, and most of Brooklyn, Staten Island and the bay shores of New Jersey. Another submarine dealt with San Francisco the next day; two Canadian aircraft bombed Chicago; a missile cruiser wiped out Naples; MIRVed missiles from Luxembourg and the German plains took care of forty cities from Vienna west.
Those were the large-scale events. There were plenty of smaller ones. The President of the United States died not by bomb but by a gun in his under-mountain shelter. NORAD wiped itself out with carbon monoxide from its fleet of trucks in the ventilation system, after a lieutenant general had locked and jammed the blastproof exits. A member of the corps de ballet from the Leningrad Kirov troupe suddenly leaped from the bed she was sharing with a KGB colonel and rushed to the airport, where she was flown away in an Aeroflot jet, destination not stated. In New York, an hour before the Harp Seal made it uninhabitable, a musical comedy star named Rosalie Pan leaped offstage, ran up the center aisle and vanished in a cab, wearing a beaded bra, a G-string and a six-thousand-dollar headdress. Her movements were traced as far as the TWA terminal at Newark Airport, where she took off minutes before the blast. A few other beauties vanished in the same way, along with a handful of celebrated scientists and surgeons, even four or five beauticians and a couple of master chefs. Each one interrupted his or her normal life conspicuously and queerly, and was not seen again. The word became current at once: They were "possessed." Possessed by what? No one could say. These were the first cases of "possession" that the world had seen—or at least acknowledged—since the great casting out of devils of the Middle Ages, and the world had long since abandoned its belief in such things.
The belief did not stay abandoned . . . especially when, once the large-scale events had taken place, slowly and increasingly began the terror-reign of small ones. Of rapes and murders and suicides and arsons, every one of them committed by some person who, if he survived, wound up weeping and stammering in terror and pleading for understanding that he had not been able to help himself.
"Stranger, come now," said the man named Guy, opening the door.
"All right," said Chandler, but the man shook his head.
"Say, 'Guy, all right,' " he commanded, and led Chandler out into the large room.
The people in the audience watched him silently as Guy conducted him to the front of the room. Chandler stared back, puzzled and worried by the expressions of anticipation on their faces. Puzzled even more by what was waiting for him before them. There was a platform, improvised out of plywood panels resting on squat, heavy boxes that looked like empty ammunition crates. On the dais was a dentist's chair, bolted to the plywood; and in the chair, strapped in, baby spotlights on steel-tube frames glaring on her, was a girl. She looked at Chandler with regretting eyes but did not speak.
"Stranger, get up there," said Guy, prodding him from behind, and Chandler took a plain wooden chair next to the girl.
"People of Orphalese," cried the teen-age cutie named Meggie, "we have two more brands to save from the imps!"
The men and women in the audience cackled or shrilled, "Save them. Save them!" They all had a look of invisible uniforms, Chandler saw, tike baseball players in the lobby of a hotel or soldiers in a diner outside the gate of their post; they were all of a type. Their type was something strange. Some were tall, some short; there were old, fat, lean and young among them; but they all wore about them a look of glowing excitement, muted by an aura of suffering and pain. They wore, in a word, the look of zealots.
The bound girl was not one of them. She might have been twenty years old or as much as thirty. She might have been pretty. It was hard to tell; she wore no makeup, her hair strung raggedly to her neck, and her face was drawn into a tight, lean line. It was her eyes that were alive. She saw Chandler and she was sorry for him. And he saw, as he turned to look at her, that she was manacled to the dentist's chair.
"People of Orphalese," chanted Guy, standing behind Chandler with the muzzle of the gun against his neck, "the meeting of the Orphalese Self-Preservation Society will now come to order." There was an approving, hungry murmur from the audience.
"Well, people of Orphalese." Guy went on in his singsong, "the agenda for the day is first the salvation of we Orphalese on McGuire's Mountain."
("All saved, all of us saved," rolled a murmur from the congregation.) A lean, red-headed man bounded to the platform and fussed with the stand of spotlights, turning one of them full on Chandler.
"People of Orphalese, as we are saved, do I have your consent to pass on and proceed to the next order of business?"
("Consent, consent, consent," rolled the echo.)
"And then the second item of business is to welcome and bring to grace these two newly found and adopted souls."
The congregation shouted variously: "Bring them to grace! Save them from the imps! Keep Orphalese from the taint of the beast!"
Evidently Guy was satisfied. He nodded and became more chatty. "Okay, people of Orphalese, let's get down to it. We got two new ones, like I say. Their spirits have gone wandering on the wind, or anyway one of them has, and you all know the etcetera. They have committed a wrong unto others and therefore unto themselves. Herself, I mean. Course, the other one could have a flame spirit in him too." He stared severely at Chandler. "Boys, keep an eye on him, why don't you?" he said to two men in the front row, surrendering his gun. "Meggie, you tell about the female one."
The teen-aged girl stepped forward and said, in a conversational tone but with modest pride, "People of Orph'lese, well, I was walking down the cut and I heard this car coming. Well, I was pretty surprised, you know. I had to figure what to do. You all know what the trouble is with cars."
"The imps!" cried a woman of forty with a face like a catfish. The girl nodded. "Most prob'ly. Well, I—I mean, people of Orph'lese, well, I was by the switchback where we keep the chevvy-freeze hid, so I just waited till I saw it slowing down for the curve—me out of sight, you know—and I rolled the chevvy-freeze out and it caught the wheels. Right over!" she cried gleefully. "Off the shoulder, people of Orph'lese, and into the ditch and over, and I didn't give it a chance to burn. I cut the switch and I had her! I put a knife into her back, just a little, about a quarter of an inch, maybe. Her pain was the breakin' of the shell that enclosed her understanding, like it says. I figured she was all right then because she yelled but I brought her along that way. Then Guy took care of her until we got the synod. Oh," she remembered, "and her tongue staggered a little without purpose while he was putting it on, didn't it, Guy?" The bearded man nodded, grinning, and lifted up the girl's foot. Incredulously, Chandler saw that it was bound tight with a three-foot length of barbed wire, wound and twisted like a tourniquet, the blood black and congealed around it. He lifted his shocked eyes to meet the girl's. She only looked at him, with pity and understanding.
Guy patted the foot and let it go. "I didn't have any more C-clamps, people of Orphalese," he apologized, "but it looks all right at that. Well, let's see. We got to make up our minds about these two, I guess—no, wait!" He held up his hand as a murmur began. "First thing is, we ought to read a verse or two."
He opened a purple-bound volume at random, stared at a page for a moment, moving his lips, and then read:
"Some of you say, 'It is the north wind who has woven the clothes we wear."
"And I say, Ay, it was the north wind, but shame was his loom, and the softening of the sinews was his thread.
"And when his work was done he laughed in the forest."
Gently he closed the book, looking thoughtfully at the wall at the back of the room. He scratched his head. "Well, people of Orphalese," he said slowly, "they're laughing in the forest all right, I guarantee, but we've got one here that may be honest in the flesh, probably is, though she was a thief in the spirit. Right? Well, do we take her in or reject her, O people of Orphalese?"
The audience muttered to itself and then began to call out:
"Accept! Oh, bring in the brand! Accept and drive out the imp!"
"Fine," said the teen-ager, rubbing her hands and looking at the bearded man. "Guy, let her go." He began to release her from the chair. "You, girl stranger, what's your name?"
The girl said faintly, "Ellen Braisted."
"'Meggie, my name is Ellen Braisted,'" corrected the teenager. "Always say the name of the person you're talkin' to in Orph'lese, that way we know it's you talkin', not a flame spirit or wanderer. Okay, go sit down." Ellen limped wordlessly down into the audience. "Oh, and people of Orph'lese," said Meggie, "the car's still there if we need it for anything. It didn't burn. Guy, you go on with this other fellow."
Guy stroked his beard and assessed Chandler, looking him over carefully. "Okay," he said. "People of Orphalese, the third order of business is to welcome or reject this other brand saved from the imps, as may be your pleasure."
Chandler sat up straighter now that all of them were looking at him again; but it wasn't quite his turn, at that, because there was an interruption. Guy never finished. From the valley, far below, there was a sudden mighty thunder, rolling among the mountains. The windows blew in with a crystalline crash; and, before the echoes died, there was the chatter of rapid-fire weapons from outside the building.
Frozen tableau—one heartbeat long—then the room erupted. "Flame imps!" yelled Guy. "People of Orphalese, take battle stations!" Yells from the audience, a race to stacked weapons at the door. Then everyone was running at once, heading for the broad windows, returning fire.
Chandler straightened, then sat down again. The redheaded man guarding him was looking away. It would be quite possible to grab his gun, run, get away from these maniacs. Yet he had nowhere better to go. These people might be crazy, but they seemed to have organization.
They seemed, in fact, to have worked out, on whatever crazed foundation of philosophy, some practical methods for coping with possession. He decided to stay, wait and see.
And at once he found himself leaping for the gun.
No. Chandler didn't find himself attacking the red-headed man. He found his body doing it; Chandler had nothing to do with it, It was the helpless compulsion he had felt before, that had nearly cost him his life; his body active and urgent and his mind completely cut off from it. He felt his own muscles move in ways he had not planned, observed himself leap forward, felt his own fist strike at the back of the red-headed man's ear. The man went spinning, the gun went flying, Chandler's body leaped after it, with Chandler a prisoner in his own brain, watching, horrified and helpless. And he had the gun!
He caught it in the hand that was his own hand, though someone else was moving it; he raised it and half-turned. He was suddenly conscious of a fusillade of gunfire from the roof, and a scattered echo of guns all round the outside of the house. Part of him was surprised, another alien part was not. He started to shoot the teen-aged girl in the back of the head, silently shouting, No!
His fingers never pulled the trigger.
He caught a second's glimpse of someone just beside him, whirled and saw the girl, Ellen Braisted, limping swiftly toward him with her barbed-wire amulet loose and catching at her feet. In her hands was an axe-handle club caught up from somewhere. She struck at Chandler's head, with a face like an eagle's, impersonal and determined. The blow caught him and dazed him, and from behind someone else struck him with something else. He went down.
He heard shouts and firing, but he was stunned. He felt himself dragged and dropped. He saw a cloudy, misty girl's face hanging over him; it receded and returned. Then a frightful blistering pain in his hand startled him back into full consciousness.
It was the girl, Ellen, still there, leaning over him and, oddly, weeping. And the pain in his hand was the burning flame of a kitchen match. Ellen was doing it, his wrist in one hand, a burning match held to it with the other.