V
Chandler yelled hoarsely, jerking his hand away.
She dropped the match and jumped up, stepping on the flame and watching him. She had a butcher knife that had been caught between her elbow and her body while she burned him. Now she put her hand on the knife, waiting. "Does it hurt?" she demanded tautly.
Chandler howled, with incredulity and rage:
"God damn it, yes! What did you expect?"
"I expected it to hurt," she agreed. She watched him for a moment more and then, for the first time since he had seen her, she smiled. It was a small smile, but a beginning. A fusillade of shots from outside wiped it away at once. "Sorry," she said. "I had to do that. Please trust me."
"Why did you have to burn my hand?"
"House rules," she said. "Keeps the flame-spirits out, you know. They don't like pain." She took her hand off the knife warily. "It still hurts, doesn't it?"
"It still does, yes," nodded Chandler bitterly, and she lost interest in him and got up, looking about the room. Three of the Orphalese were dead, or seemed to be from the casual poses in which they lay draped across a chair on the floor. Some of the others might have been freshly wounded, though it was hard to tell the casualties, from the others in view of the Orphalese custom of self-inflicted pain. There was still firing going on outside and overhead, and a shooting-gallery smell of burnt powder in the air. The girl, Ellen Braisted, limped back with the butcher knife held carelessly in one hand. She was followed by the teen-ager, who wore a smile of triumph—and, Chandler noticed for the first time, a sort of tourniquet of barbed-wire on her left forearm, the flesh puffy red around it. "Whopped 'em," she said with glee, and pointed a .22 rifle at Chandler.
Ellen Braisted said, "Oh, he—Meggie, I mean, he's all right." She pointed at his burned palm. Meg approached him with competent care, the rifle resting on her good right forearm and aimed at him as she examined his burn. She pursed her lips and looked at his face. "All right, Ellen, I guess he's clean. But you want to burn 'em deeper'n that. Never pays to go easy, just means we'll have to do something else to 'im tomorrow."
"The hell you will," thought Chandler, and all but said it; but reason stopped him. In Rome he would have to do Roman deeds. Besides, maybe their ideas worked. Besides, he had until tomorrow to make up his mind about what he wanted to do.
"Ellen, show him around," ordered the teen-ager. "I got no time myself. Shoosh! Almost got us that time, Ellen. Got to be more careful, 'cause the whitehanded aren't clean, you know." She strutted away, the rifle at trail. She seemed to be enjoying herself very much.
The name of the girl in the barbed-wire anklet was Ellen Braisted. She came from Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, and Chandler's first wonder was what she was doing nearly three thousand miles from home.
Nobody liked to travel much these days. One place was as bad as another, except that in the place where you were known you could perhaps count on friends and as a stranger you were probably fair game anywhere else.
Of course, there was one likely reason for travel. Chandler's own reason.
She didn't like to talk about it, that was clear, but that was the reason. She had been possessed. When the teen-ager trapped her car the day before she had been the tool of another's will. She had had a dozen submachine guns in the trunk and she had meant to deliver them to a party of hunters in a valley just south of McGuire's Mountain. Chandler said, with some effort, "I must have been—"
"Ellen, I must have been," she corrected.
"Ellen, I must have been possessed too, just now. When I grabbed the gun."
"Of course. First time?"
He shook his head. For some reason the brand on his forehead began to throb.
"Well, then you know. Look out here, now." They were at the great pier windows that looked out over the valley. Down below was the river, an arc of the railroad tracks, the wooded mountainside he had scaled. "Over there, Chandler." She was pointing to the railroad bridge.
Wispy gray smoke drifted off southward toward the stream. The freight train Chandler had ridden on had been stopped, all that time, in the middle of the bridge. The explosion that blew out their windows had occurred when another train plowed into it—evidently at high speed—it seemed that one of the trains had carried some chemicals. The bridge was a twisted mess.
"A diversion, Chandler," said Ellen Braisted. They wanted us looking that way. Then they attacked from the mountain."
"Who?"
Ellen looked surprised. "The men that crashed those trains . . . if they are men. The ones who possessed me and you—and the hunters. They don't like these Orphalese, I think. Maybe they're a little afraid of them. I think the Orphalese have a pretty good idea of how to fight them."
Chandler felt a sudden flash of sensation along his nerves. For a moment he thought he had been possessed again, and then he knew it for what it was. It was hope. "Ellen, I never thought of fighting them. I thought that was given up two years ago."
"So maybe you agree with me? Maybe you think it's worthwhile sticking with the Orphalese?"
Chandler allowed himself the contemplation of what hope meant. To find someone in this world who had a plan! Whatever the plan was. Even if it was a bad plan. He didn't think specifically of himself, or the brand on his forehead or the memory of the body of his wife. What he thought .of was the prospect of thwarting—not even defeating, merely hampering or annoying was enough!—the imps, the "flame creatures," the pythons, devils, incubi or demons who had destroyed a world he had thought very fair.
"If they'll have me," he said, "I'll stick with them, all right. Where do I go to join?"
It was not hard to join at all.
Meg chattily informed him that he was already practically a member. "Chandler, we got to watch everybody strange, you know. See why, don't you? Might have a flame spirit in 'em, no fault of theirs, but look how they could mess us up. But now we know you don't, so—What do you mean, how do we know? Cause you did have one when you busted loose in there."
"I don't get it," said Chandler, lost. "You're saying that you know I don't have a, uh, flame spirit now because I did have one then?"
"Chandler, you'll catch on," said Meggie kindly, suppressing a smile. "Can't have two at a time, you see? So if you're the fella you are now, and the same fella you were before, you got to be honest-in-the-flesh yourself."
Chandler nodded thoughtfully. "Anyway, Chandler," the girl added, "we're going to take time off to eat now. You just make yourself at home. Soon's we start the synod up again we'll see 'bout letting you in."
Ellen Braisted asked, "Can I help with the food?" Meggie looked at her patiently and she corrected herself: "Meggie, can I help with the food?"
"Not this time, Ellen. Just stay out of the way a little."
Ellen took Chandler's arm and led him to a sunporch. All over the house the Orphalese were putting themselves back together again after the fight.
They didn't seem terribly upset, neither by their wounds nor their losses. They had, Chandler thought, a collective identity. The survival of the community was more important than any incidental damage to its members.
After three years of increasing alienation from a life he could not understand or accept, Chandler found that trait admirable. He liked their style.
"Sorry about your hand," said Ellen Braisted.
He had not realized that he was rubbing it. "Oh, that's all right. I understand why you had to do it."
"Come over here." She opened a chest of first-aid supplies and took out cotton gauze. "Let me put this on it. You don't want it to stop hurting—that's the whole idea. But you don't want it getting infected. What's that business on your head?"
He touched the scar with his free hand. He had almost forgotten it.
He found it easy to tell her about it. When he was through she patted his arm. "Tough world. You say you were married?"
"Yes." He told her about Margot. Arid about Margot's death. She nodded, her face drawn.
"I was married too, Chandler," she said after a moment. "Lost my husband two years ago."
"Murdered?"
"Well," she said thoughtfully, "depends on what you mean by that. It was his own hand that did it. Got up one morning, went into the kitchen, came back looking like—I don't know—like his own evil nature. You know those cartoons? The Good You in white, the Bad You in black, whispering suggestions into your ear? He looked the Bad Him. And he cut his throat with a breadknife."
"Oh, God!" The words were jerked out of him. "Did he—didn't he say anything?"
"Yes, Chandler, he did. But I don't want to tell you what, because it was dirty and awful."
There was a smell of coffee percolating from inside the house, and sounds of dishes and silverware. "Let's sit down over here," said Chandler, pointing to a chained swing that looked out over the darkening valley. "I guess your husband was possessed. Or as they say here, he had a flame spirit—"
"Ellen."
"Ellen, I mean," he corrected.
"Chandler," she said thoughtfully, "well, I don't quite go along with them on that. I've had quite a lot of experience with them, ever since my husband—ever since two years ago. They used me."
"For what?" Chandler demanded, startled. The concept of being used by the things was new, and peculiarly frightening. It was bad enough to view them as strange diabolic elements out of a hostile universe; to give them purpose was terrifying.
"You name it, Chandler," said the girl. "I did it. I've been practically all over the world in two years, because they used me for a messenger and—other things. They used me for all sorts of things, Chandler," she said very temperately, "and some of them I don't intend to discuss."
"Of course."
"Of course." Then she brightened. "But it wasn't all bad. You wouldn't believe some of the things—I flew a jet airplane to Lisbon once. Chandler! Would you believe it? And as a matter of fact, I don't even know how to drive a car very well. When I'm myself, I mean. I've been in Russia and England. I think I was in Africa once, although nobody ever mentioned the name and I wasn't sure. Just now, I came up from San Diego driving a great big truck, and—Well, it's been interesting. But I don't agree with the 'flame spirit' idea. They aren't ghosts or witches. They aren't creatures from outer space. Anyway, one of them is a man named Brad Fenell."
Chandler's heels dropped to the floor. The swing stopped with a clatter of its chains.
"A man?"
Ellen nodded soberly. "Or he was at one time, anyway," she corrected after a moment. "I used to go out with him when he lived next door to me in Catasauqua."
"But," cried Chandler, "what—How—How could he—"
She shook her head. "Now you're asking hard questions, Chandler. But I know this one—thing—was Brad Fenell. Brad asked me to marry him, and when I told him I wouldn't he—said those words I heard from my husband, just before he killed himself."
She stood up and turned toward the house. "And now," she said, "Meggie's calling us to eat. I hope I haven't spoiled your appetite."
All through the meal Chandler was preoccupied. He had to be spoken to twice before he responded, and then he had to be reminded to address the Orphalese by name.
He was trying to understand what Ellen had told him, and he was not succeeding. Real human beings? The monsters who had done such things?
It was, he thought somberly, more incredible to think of them as men than as demons from the pits of hell. . . .
The interrupted meeting was resumed after the place had been tidied up. The community had counted its losses and buried its dead.
There had been four of the attacking hunters. Even without their submachine guns, they had succeeded in killing eight Orphalese. But it was not all loss to the Orphalese, because two of the hunters were still alive, though wounded, and under the rules of this chessboard the captured enemy became a friend.
Guy had suffered a broken jaw in the scuffle and another man presided, a fat youth who favored a bandaged leg. He limped to his feet, grimacing and patting his leg. "O Orphalese and brothers," he said, "we have lost friends, but we have won a test. Praise the Prophet, we will be spared to win again, and to drive the imps of fire out of our world. Meggie, you going to tie these folks up?" The girl proudly ordered one of the hunters into the spotlighted dentist's chair, another into a wing chair that was hastily moved onto the platform. The men were bleeding and hurt, but they had clearly been abandoned by their possessors. They watched the Orphalese with puzzlement and fear.
"Walter, they're okay now," Meg reported as others finished tying up the hunters. "Oh, wait a minute." She advanced on Chandler. "Chandler, I'm sorry. You sit down there, hear?"
Chandler suffered himself to be bound to a camp chair on the platform and Walter took a drink of wine and opened the ornate book that was before him on the rostrum.
"Meg, thanks. Guy, I hope I do this as good as you do. Let me read you a little. Let's see." He put on his glasses and read:
"'Much in you is still man, and much in you is not yet man, but a shapeless pigmy that walks asleep in the mist searching for its own awakening.'"
He closed the book, looked with satisfaction at Guy and said: "Do you understand that, new friends? They are the words of the Prophet, who men call Kahlil Gibran. For the benefit of the new folks I ought to say that he died this fleshly life quite a good number of years ago, but his vision was unclouded. Like we say, we are the sinews that batter the flame spirits but he is our soul." There was an antiphonal murmur from the audience and Walter flipped the pages again rapidly, obviously looking for a familiar passage. "People of Orphalese, here we are now. This's what he says. 'What is this that has torn our world apart?' The Prophet says: 'It is life in quest of life, in bodies that fear the grave.' Now, honestly, nothing could be clearer than that, people of Orphalese and friends! We got something taking possession of us, see? What is it? Well, he says here, People of Orphalese and friends, 'It is a flame spirit in you ever gathering more of itself.' Now, what the heck! Nobody can blame us for what a flame spirit in us does! So the first thing we got to learn, friends—and people of Orphalese—is, we aren't to blame. And the second thing is, we are to blame!"
He turned and grinned at Chandler kindly, while the chorus of responses came from the room. "Like here," he said, "people of Orphalese, the Prophet says everybody is guilty. "The murdered is not unaccountable for his own murder, and the robbed is not blameless in being robbed. The righteous is not innocent of the deeds of the wicked, and the white-handed is not clean in the doings of the felon.' You see what he's getting at? We all got to take the responsibility for everything—and that means we got to suffer—but we don't have to worry about any special things we did when some flame spirit or wanderer, like, took us over.
"But we do have to suffer, people of Orphalese." His expression became grim. "Our beloved founder, Guy, who's sitting there doing a little extra suffering now, was favored enough to understand these things in the very beginning, when he himself was seized by these imps. And it is all in this book! Like it says, 'Your pain is self-chosen. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.' Ponder on that, people of Orphalese—and friends. No, I mean really ponder, he explained, glancing at the bound "friends" on the platform. "We always do that for a minute. Ada there will play us some music so we can ponder."