Out of Their Minds (7 page)

I believe that man, with his imagination, with his love of story telling, with his fear of time and space, of death and dark, working through millenia, has created another world of creatures which share the earth with him—hidden, invisible, I do not know, but I am sure that they are here and that some day they may come out from their concealment and enter upon their heritage.

Scattered throughout the literature of the world and through the daily flow of news events are strange happenings too well documented to be mere illusions in each and every case …

6

The writing ended in the middle of the page, but there were many other pages and when I flipped the sheet over I saw that the next page was crammed with a jumble of what appeared to be a mass of notes. Written in the crabbed calligraphy of my friend, they were jammed into the page as if the sheet of paper had been the only one he'd had and he had schemed and planned to use every inch of it to cram in his fact and observation. The notes marched in a solid phalanx down the center of the page and then the margins of the page were filled with further notes and some of the writing was so pinched and small that there would have been difficulty, in many instances, in making out the words.

I riffled through the other pages and each one was the same, filled and crammed with notes.

I flipped the pages back and clipped the note from Philip onto the front of the sheaf of pages.

Later, I told myself, I would read the notes—read them and attempt to puzzle through them. But for the moment I had read enough, far more than enough.

It was a joke, I thought—but it could not be a joke, for my old friend never joked. He did not need to joke. He was filled with gentleness and he was vastly erudite and when he talked he had more use for words than to employ them in telling stupid jokes.

And I remembered him again as he had been that last time I had seen him, sitting like a shrunken gnome in the great lounge chair which threatened to engulf him, and how he said to me, “I think that we are haunted.” He had been about to tell me something that night, I was convinced, but he had not told it, for when he'd been about to tell it Philip had come in and we'd talked of something else.

I felt sure, sitting there in the motel room by the river, that he had meant to tell me what I had just read—that we are haunted by all the creatures that man has ever dreamed of, that mankind's mind has served an evolutionary function through its imagination.

He was wrong, of course. On the face of it, his belief encompassed an impossibility. But even as I thought that he must be wrong, I knew deep inside myself that no man such as he could be lightly wrong. Before he had committed to paper what he had, if for no reason than to outline his thinking for himself, he had arrived at his conclusions only after long and thoughtful study. Those pages of appended notes were not, I was certain, the only evidence he had. Rather they would be the condensation and the summary of all the evidence he'd gathered, all the thinking he had done. He still could be wrong, of course, and very likely was, but still with enough evidence and logic that his idea could not be summarily dismissed.

He had meant to tell me, to test out his theory on me, perhaps. But because of Philip's showing up, he had put it off. And it was then too late, for in a day or two he'd died, his car crumpled up and the life smashed out of him by an impact with another car that had not been found.

Thinking of it, I felt myself growing cold with a terrible kind of fear, a new kind of fear I'd never felt before—a fear that crept out of another world than this, that came from some far corner of an old ancestral mind many times removed, the cold, numbing, gut-squeezing fear of a man who crouched inside a cave and listened to the sound made by the ghoulish shape that was prowling in the outer dark.

Could it be, I asked myself, could it be that the mind-force of this other world of prowling things has reached such a point of development and efficiency that it could assume any shape at all, a shape for any purpose? Could it become a car that smashed another car and, having smashed it, return to that other world or dimension or invisibility from which it had emerged?

Had my old friend died because he had guessed the secret of this other world of mind-created things?

And the rattlesnakes, I wondered. No, not the rattlesnakes, for I was sure that they had been real. But had the Triceratops, the house and the other buildings, the jacked-up car beside the woodpile, Snuffy Smith and his wife not been real? Was this the answer that I needed? Could all of these things have been made up of a masquerading mind-force that lay in ambush for me, that fooled me into accepting the improbable even when I had felt it was all improbable, that had escorted me, not to the couch in the living room, but to the rocky floor of a snake-infested cave?

And if so, why? Because this hypothetical mind-force knew that the manila envelope from Philip awaited my arrival at George Duncan's store?

It was insanity, I told myself. But so had missing the turn in the road been insanity, so had been the Triceratops, so had been the house where there was no house, so had been the rattlesnakes. But not the snakes, I said, for the snakes were real. And what was real? I asked. How could one know that anything was real? At this late day, if my old friend had been right, was anything for real?

I was shaken deeper than I knew. I sat in the chair and stared at the wall, and the sheaf of papers fell from my hand and I did not move to pick them up. If this were so, I thought, our old and trustworthy world had been jerked from beneath our feet, and the goblins and the ghouls were no longer something for mere chimney-corner tales, but existed in the very solid flesh—well, not perhaps in solid flesh, but they anyhow existed; they were not illusions. A product of imagination, we had said of them, and we had been entirely right without our knowing it. And again, if this were so, Nature, in the process of evolution, had made a long, long jump ahead, from living matter to intelligence and from intelligence to abstract thought and from abstract thought to some form of life at once shadowy and real, a life, perhaps, that could take its choice of being either shadowy or real.

I tried to imagine what sort of life it might be, what might be its joys and its sorrows, what could be its motives; I could not imagine any of it My blood and bone and flesh would not allow me to. For it would have to be another form of life and the gap was much too great. As well, or better, to ask a trilobite to imagine the world of the dinosaurs. If Nature were seeking for survival values in its continual winnowing of species, here finally it should have found a creature (if it could be called a creature) with a fantastically high survival value, for there would be nothing, absolutely nothing, in the physical world that could get at it.

I sat there, thinking of it, and the thoughts bounced in my skull like the mutterings of distant thunder and I was getting nowhere in my thinking. I wasn't even going around in circles. I was just bouncing back and forth, like a half-demented Yo-Yo.

With an effort I jerked myself out of all this crazy thinking and once again I heard the gurgle and the laughter and the chuckling of the river as it went running down the land in the splendor of its magic.

There was unpacking to be done, getting all the bags and boxes out of the car and hauled into the room; there was fishing waiting for me, with the canoe at the dock and the big bass lurking in the reeds and among the lily pads. And after that, getting settled down, a book that must be written.

And there was, as well, I recalled, the program and the basket social at the school tonight. I would have to be there.

7

Linda Bailey spotted me as soon as I walked through the school house door and came bustling over to me like a self-important hen. She was one of the few people there that I remembered and there was no way one could fail to remember her. She and her husband and her brood of grubby children had lived on the farm next door to ours and there had been few days during the entire time that we were there that Linda Bailey had not come traipsing up the road or across the fields to borrow a cup of sugar or a dab of butter or any one of a dozen other items of which she continually found herself short and which, incidentally, she never seemed to get around to paying back. She was a large, raw-boned, horsey woman and she had aged, it seemed to me, but little.

“Horace Smith!” she trumpeted. “Little Horace Smith. I'd knowed you anywhere.”.

She flung her arms about me and she pounded me on the back with resounding thumps while, embarrassed, I struggled to remember just what bond of affection there had been between my family and the Bailey family to justify this kind of greeting.

“So you came back again,” she yelped. “You couldn't stay away. Once Pilot Knob gets into your blood, there can't no one stay away. And after being to all those places, too. To all them heathen countries. You were in Rome, weren't you?”

“I spent some time in Rome,” I told her. “It's not a heathen country.”

“The purple iris that I have down against the pigpen,” she declared, “is from the Pope's own garden. It's not so much to look at. I've seen lots better iris—a whole lot prettier. Any other kind of iris no better than that I'd dug up and throwed out long ago. But I kept it because of the place it come from. It ain't everybody, I can tell you, that has iris from the Pope's own garden. Not that I hold with the Pope and all that foolishness, but it does make the iris sort of distinctive, don't you think it does?”

“Very much,” I said.

She grabbed me by the arm. “For goodness' sake,” she said, “let's go over and sit down. We have so much to talk about.”

She dragged me to a row of chairs and we sat down together.

“You said Rome wasn't no heathen country,” she said, “but you been in heathen countries. What about them Russians? You spent a lot of time in Russia.”

“I don't know,” I said. “Some of the Russian people still believe in God. It's the government …”

“Land sakes alive,” she said, “you sound as if you liked them Russians.”

“Some of them,” I said.

“I heard,” she said, “that you were up Lonesome Hollow and came driving down the road past the Williams place this morning. What in the world would you be doing there?”

Was there anything, I wondered, that she didn't know about, that all Pilot Knob didn't know about? Better than tribal drums, more efficient than radio, the news went thrumming through the community—every bit of gossip, every supposition.

“I turned up the road on impulse,” I told her, lying very feebly. “When I was a boy, I went squirrel hunting up there sometimes in the fall.”

She looked at me suspiciously, but she didn't follow up the reason for my being there. “Maybe it's all right in daylight,” she declared, “but I wouldn't, for all the money in the world, go up there after dark.” She leaned closer to me and her braying voice sank to a scratchy whisper. “The place is haunted,” she said, “by a pack of dogs, if you want to call them dogs. They come baying down across the hills, snarling and yapping, and when they go past there is a cold wind going with them. It's enough to freeze your soul …”

“You've heard these dogs?” I asked.

“Heared them? On many a night I've heared them, howling down the hills, but I've never been that close to them that I've felt the wind. Nettie Campbell told me. You remember Nettie Campbell?”

I shook my head.

“Oh, of course you wouldn't. She was Nettie Graham before she married Andy Campbell. They lived at the end of the road up Lonesome Hollow. The house is deserted now. Just walked away and left. Them dogs drove them off. Maybe you saw it—saw the house, I mean.”

I nodded, not too positively, for I'd not seen the house. I'd only heard of it from Lowizie Smith the night before.

“There are strange things in these hills,” said Linda Bailey. “Things a body, in his right mind, would not believe. It comes, I suppose, from being such wild country. A lot of other places are all settled down, with not a tree left standing and all the land in fields. But this is still wild country. I guess it will always be.”

The schoolroom was beginning to fill up now and I saw George Duncan making his way through the crowd toward me. I stood up to greet him and held out my hand.

“I hear you got settled in all right,” he said. “I knew you'd like the place. I phoned Streeter and told him to look after you. He said you were out fishing. Catch anything worthwhile?”

“A couple of bass,” I told him. “I'll do better once I get to know the river.”

“I think the program is about to start,” he said. “I'll see you later on. There are a lot of people here you should say hello to.”

The program got underway. The teacher, Kathy Adams, played the old delapidated organ and different groups of kids came up and sang some songs and others spoke their pieces and a bunch of eighth grade pupils put on a little play that Kathy Adams proudly announced they had worked out themselves.

It all, in its stumbling way, was entirely delightful and I sat there remembering when I had gone to school in this very building and had taken part in exactly such a program. I tried to remember the names of some of the teachers I had had and it was only toward the end of the program that I remembered one of them had been named Miss Stein, a strange, angular, flighty person with an abundance of red hair and most easily upset by some of the pranks we were always thinking up. I wondered where Miss Stein might be this very evening and how life had treated her. Better, I hoped, than some of us kids had treated her when we had gone to school.

Linda Bailey tugged at my jacket sleeve and spoke in a grating whisper. “Them kids are good, ain't they?”

I nodded that they were.

“This Miss Adams is a right good teacher,” Linda Bailey whispered. “I'm afraid that she won't stay here long. This little school of ours can't expect to keep someone as good as her.”