Sorcerers!, page 13
"Sure, there's a pretty good dirt road, and it's a lot wider than it looks from the top. I got a bunch of green bills in an old night charley in the shack. Let me get them, and then I'll clear out for a while. The shack hasn't been cleaned out for seven years, since the last time this happened. I'll show you the road to the top, and you can bring your car down it."
"Hey, you old Indian, you lied!" Cecilia Rampart shrilled from the doorway of the shack. "You do have a war bonnet. Can I have it?"
"I didn't mean to lie, I forgot about that thing," Clarence Little-Saddle said. "My son Clarence Bare-Back sent that to me from Japan for a joke a long time ago. Sure, you can have it."
All the children were assigned tasks carrying the junk out of the shack and setting fire to it. Nina Rampart and Clarence Little-Saddle ambled up to the rim of the valley by the vehicle road that was wider than it looked from the top.
"Nina, you're back! I thought you were gone forever," Robert Rampart jittered at seeing her again. "What—where are the children?"
"Why, I left them down in the valley, Robert. That is, ah, down in that little ditch right there. Now you've got me worried again. I'm going to drive the camper down there and unload it. You'd better go on down and lend a hand too, Robert, and quit talking to all these funny-looking men here."
And Nina went back to Dublin's place for the camper.
"It would be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for that intrepid woman to drive a car down into that narrow ditch," the eminent scientist Dr. Velikof Vonk said.
"You know how that camel does it?" Clarence Little-Saddle offered, appearing of a sudden from nowhere. "He just closes one of his own eyes and flops back his ears and plunges right through. A camel is mighty narrow when he closes one eye and flops back his ears. Besides, they use a big-eyed needle in that act."
"Where'd this crazy man come from?" Robert Rampart demanded, jumping three feet in the air. "Things are coming out of the ground now. I want my land! I want my children! I want my wife! Whoops, here she comes driving it. Nina, you can't drive a loaded camper into a little ditch like that! You'll be killed or collapsed!"
Nina Rampart drove the loaded camper into the little ditch at a pretty good rate of speed. The best of belief is that she just closed one eye and plunged right through. The car diminished and dropped, and it was smaller than a toy car. But it raised a pretty good cloud of dust as it bumped for several hundred yards across a ditch that was only five feet wide.
"Rampart, it's akin to the phenomenon known as looming, only in reverse," the eminent scientist Arpad Arkabaranan explained as he attempted to throw a rock across the narrow ditch. The rock rose very high in the air, seemed to hang at its apex while it diminished to the size of a grain of sand, and then fell into the ditch not six inches of the way across. There isn't anybody going to throw across a half-mile valley even if it looks five feet. "Look at a rising moon sometimes, Rampart. It appears very large, as though covering a great sector of the horizon, but it only covers one-half of a degree. It is hard to believe that you could set seven hundred and twenty of such large moons side by side around the horizon, or that it would take one hundred and eighty of the big things to reach from the horizon to a point overhead. It is also hard to believe that your valley is five hundred times as wide as it appears, but it has been surveyed, and it is."
"I want my land, I want my children. I want my wife," Robert chanted dully. "Damn, I let her get away again."
"I tell you, Rampy," Clarence Little-Saddle squared on him, "a man that lets his wife get away twice doesn't deserve to keep her. I give you till nightfall; then you forfeit. I've taken a liking to the brood. One of us is going to be down there tonight."
After a while a bunch of them were off in that little tavern on the road between Cleveland and Osage. It was only half a mile away. If the valley had run in the other direction, it would have been only six feet away.
"It is a psychic nexus in the form of an elongated dome," said the eminent scientist Dr. Velikof Vonk. "It is maintained subconsciously by the concatenation of at least two minds, the stronger of them belonging to a man dead for many years. It has apparently existed for a little less than a hundred years, and in another hundred years it will be considerably weakened. We know from our checking out folk tales of Europe as well as Cambodia that these ensorcelled areas seldom survive for more than two hundred and fifty years. The person who first set such a thing in being will usually lose interest in it, and in all worldly things, within a hundred years of his own death. This is a simple thanato-psychic limitation. As a short-term device, the thing has been used several times as a military tactic.
"This psychic nexus, as long as it maintains itself, causes group illusion, but it is really a simple thing. It doesn't fool birds or rabbits or cattle or cameras, only humans. There is nothing meteorological about it. It is strictly psychological. I'm glad I was able to give a scientific explanation to it or it would have worried me."
"It is a continental fault coinciding with a noospheric fault," said the eminent scientist Arpad Arkabaranan. "The valley really is half a mile wide, and at the same time it really is only five feet wide. If we measured correctly, we would get these dual measurements. Of course it is meteorological! Everything including dreams is meteorological. It is the animals and cameras which are fooled, as lacking a true dimension; it is only humans who see the true duality. The phenomenon should be common along the whole continental fault where the earth gains or loses half a mile that has to go somewhere. Likely it extends through the whole sweep of the Cross Timbers. Many of those trees appear twice, and many do not appear at all. A man in the proper state of mind could farm that land or raise cattle on it, but it doesn't really exist. There is a clear parallel in the Luftspiegelungthal sector in the Black Forest of Germany which exists, or does not exist, according to the circumstances and to the attitude of the beholder. Then we have the case of Mad Mountain in Morgan County, Tennessee, which isn't there all the time, and also the Little Lobo Mirage south of Presidio, Texas, from which twenty thousand barrels of water were pumped in one two-and-a-half-year period before the mirage reverted to mirage status. I'm glad I was able to give a scientific explanation to this or it would have worried me."
"I just don't understand how he worked it," said the eminent scientist Willy McGilly. "Cedar bark, jack-oak leaves, and the word 'Petahauerat.' The thing's impossible! When I was a boy and we wanted to make a hideout, we used bark from the skunk-spruce tree, the leaves of a box-elder, and the word was 'Boadicea.' All three elements are wrong here. I cannot find a scientific explanation for it, and it does worry me."
They went back to Narrow Valley. Robert Rampart was still chanting dully: "I want my land. I want my children. I want my wife."
Nina Rampart came chugging up out of the narrow ditch in the camper and emerged through that little gate a few yards down the fence row.
"Supper's ready and we're tired of waiting for you, Robert," she said. "A fine homesteader you are! Afraid to come onto your own land! Come along now; I'm tired of waiting for you."
"I want my land! I want my children! I want my wife!" Robert Rampart still chanted. "Oh, there you are, Nina. You stay here this time. I want my land! I want my children! I want an answer to this terrible thing."
"It is time we decided who wears the pants in this family," Nina said stoutly. She picked up her husband, slung him over her shoulder, carried him to the camper and dumped him in, slammed (as it seemed) a dozen doors at once, and drove furiously down into the Narrow Valley, which already seemed wider.
Why, that place was getting normaler and normaler by the minute! Pretty soon it looked almost as wide as it was supposed to be. The psychic nexus in the form of an elongated dome had collapsed. The continental fault that coincided with the noospheric fault had faced facts and decided to conform. The Ramparts were in effective possession of their homestead, and Narrow Valley was as normal as any place anywhere.
"I have lost my land," Clarence Little-Saddle moaned. "It was the land of my father Clarence Big-Saddle, and I meant it to be the land of my son Clarence Bare-Back. It looked so narrow that people did not notice how wide it was, and people did not try to enter it. Now I have lost it."
Clarence Little-Saddle and the eminent scientist Willy McGilly were standing on the edge of Narrow Valley, which now appeared its true half-mile extent. The moon was just rising, so big that it filled a third of the sky. Who would have imagined that it would take a hundred and eight of such monstrous things to reach from the horizon to a point overhead, and yet you could sight it with sighters and figure it so.
"I had a little bear-cat by the tail and I let go," Clarence groaned. "I had a fine valley for free, and I have lost it. I am like that hard-luck guy in the funny-paper or Job in the Bible, Destitution is my lot."
Willy McGilly looked around furtively. They were alone on the edge of the half-mile-wide valley.
"Let's give it a booster shot," Willy McGilly said.
Hey, those two got with it! They started a snapping fire and began to throw the stuff onto it. Bark from the dog-elm tree—how do you know it won't work?
It was working! Already the other side of the valley seemed a hundred yards closer, and there were alarmed noises coming up from the people in the valley.
Leaves from a black locust tree—and the valley narrowed still more! There was, moreover, terrified screaming of both children and big people from the depths of Narrow Valley, and the happy voice of Mary Mabel Rampart chanting "Earthquake! Earthquake!"
"That my valley be always wide and flourish and such stuff, and green with money and grass!" Clarence Little-Saddle orated in Pawnee chant style, "but that it be narrow if intruders come, smash them like bugs!"
People, that valley wasn't over a hundred feet wide now, and the screaming of the people in the bottom of the valley had been joined by the hysterical coughing of the camper car starting up.
Willy and Clarence threw everything that was left on the fire. But the word? The word? Who remembers the word?
"Corsicanatexas!" Clarence Little-Saddle howled out with confidence he hoped would fool the fates.
He was answered not only by a dazzling sheet of summer lightning, but also by thunder and raindrops.
"Chahiksi!" Clarence Little-Saddle swore. "It worked. I didn't think it would. It will be all right now. I can use the rain."
The valley was again a ditch only five feet wide.
The camper car struggled out of Narrow Valley through the little gate. It was smashed flat as a sheet of paper, and the screaming kids and people in it had only one dimension.
"It's closing in! It's closing in!" Robert Rampart roared, and he was no thicker than if he had been made out of cardboard.
"We're smashed like bugs," the Rampart boys intoned. "We're thin like paper."
"Mort, ruine, ecrasement!" spoke-acted Cecilia Rampart like the great tragedienne she was.
"Help! Help!" Nina Rampart croaked, but she winked at Willy and Clarence as they rolled by. "This homesteading jag always did leave me a little flat."
"Don't throw those paper dolls away. They might be the Ramparts," Mary Mabel called.
The camper car coughed again and bumped along on level ground. This couldn't last forever. The car was widening out as it bumped along.
"Did we overdo it, Clarence?" Willy McGilly asked. "What did one flat-lander say to the other?"
"Dimension of us never got around," Clarence said. "No, I don't think we overdid it, Willy. That car must be eighteen inches wide already, and they all ought to be normal by the time they reach the main road. The next time I do it, I think I'll throw wood-grain plastic on the fire to see who's kidding who."
Sleep Well of Nights
by
Avram Davidson
An inexplicably underrated writer, Avram Davidson is one of the most eloquent and individual voices in modern SF and fantasy. During his thirty-year career, he has produced a long sequence of erudite and entertaining novels—including Masters of the Maze, Rogue Dragon, Peregrine: Primus, Rork!, The Enemy of My Enemy, Clash of Star Kings, and the justly renowned The Phoenix and the Mirror—and also firmly established himself as one of the finest short-story writers of our times. Davidson's stylish, witty, and elegant stories have been collected in The Best of Avram Davidson, Or All the Seas with Oysters, Strange Seas and Shores, The Redward Edward Papers, and the World Fantasy Award-winning The Enquiries of Doctor Esterhazy. Davidson had also won a Hugo and an Edgar Award. His most recent books are Collected Fantasies, a collection, and, as editor, the anthology Magic For Sale . Upcoming is a sequel to The Phoenix and the Mirror, entitled Vergil in Avemo.
In recent years, Davidson had been producing some of his best work ever in a series of stories (as yet uncollected, alas) detailing the strange adventures of Jack Limekiller. The Limekiller stories are set against the lushly evocative background of "British Hidalgo," Davidson's vividly realized, richly imagined version of one of those tiny, eccentric Central American nations that exist in near-total isolation on the edge of the busy twentieth-century world . . . a place somehow at once flamboyant and languorous, where strange things can—and do—happen, and magic is never very far away.
In "Sleep Well of Nights," probably the best of the Limekiller stories, he shows us that death need not necessarily deter the strong of will, and that even something as simple as a good night's sleep must somehow be earned. . . .
"Are those lahvly young ladies with you, then?" the Red Cross teacher asked.
Limekiller evaded the question by asking another, a technique at least as old as the Book of Genesis. "Which way did they go?" he asked.
But it did not work this time. "Bless me if I saw them gow anywhere! They were both just standing on the corner as I went by."
Limekiller gave up not so easily. "Ah, but which corner?"
A blank look. "Why . . . this corner."
This corner was the corner of Grand Arawack and Queen Alexandra Streets in the Town of St. Michael of the Mountains, capital of Mountains District in the Colony of British Hidalgo. Fretwork galleries dripping with potted plants and water provided shade as well as free shower baths. These were the first and second streets laid out and had originally been deer trails; Government desiring District Commissioner Bartholomew "Bajan" Bainbridge to supply the lanes with names, he had, with that fund of imagination which helped build the Empire, called them First and Second Streets: it was rather a while before anyone in Government next looked at a map and then decided that numbered streets should run parallel to each other and not, as in this instance, across each other. And as the Grand Arawack Hotel was by that time built and as Alexandra (long-suffering consort of Fat Edward) was by that time Queen, thus they were renamed and thus had remained.
"St. Michael's" or "Mountains" Town, one might take one's pick, had once been a caravan city in miniature. The average person does not think of caravan cities being located in the Americas, and, for that matter, neither does anyone else. Nevertheless, trains of a hundred and fifty mules laden with flour and rum and textiles and tinned foods coming in, and with chicle and chicle and chicle going out, had been common enough to keep anyone from bothering to count them each time the caravans went by. The labor of a thousand men and a thousand mules had been year by year spat out of the mouths of millions of North Americans in the form of chewing gum.
So far as Limekiller knew, Kipling had never been in either Hidalgo, but he might have thought to have been if one ignored biographical fact and judged only by his lines.
Daylong, the diamond weather,
The high, unaltered blue—
The smell of goats and incense
And the mule-bell tinkling through.
Across from the hotel stood the abattoir and the market building. The very early morning noises were a series of bellows, bleats, squeals, and screams which drowned out cockcrow and were succeeded by the rattle and clatter of vulture claws on the red-painted corrugated iron roofs. Then the high voices of women cheapening meat. But all of these had now died away. Beef and pork and mutton (sheep or goat) could be smelled stewing and roasting now and then as the mild currents of the air alternated the odors of food with those of woodsmoke. He even thought he detected incense; there was the church spire nearby.
But there were certainly no young ladies around, lovely or otherwise.
There had been no very lengthy mule trains for a very long time.
There had been no flotillas of tunnel boats at the Town Wharf for a long time, either, their inboard motors drawn as high-up in "tunnels" within the vessels as possible to avoid the sand and gravel and boulders which made river navigation so difficult on the upper reaches of the Ningoon. No mule trains, no tunnel boats, no very great quantities of chicle, and everything which proceeded to and from the colonial capital of King Town and St. Michael's going now by truck along the rutted and eroded Frontier Road. No Bay boat could ever, in any event, have gotten higher up the river than the narrows called Bomwell's Boom; and the Sacarissa (Jno. Limekiller, owner and Master and, usually—save for Skippy the Cat—sole crew) was at the moment Hired Out.
She had been chartered to a pair of twosomes from a Lake Winnipeg boat club, down to enjoy the long hours of sunshine. Jack had been glad enough of the money but the charter had left him at somewhat of a loss: leisure to him had for so long meant to haul his boat up and clean and caulk and paint her: all things in which boatmen delight. Leisure without the boat was something new. Something else.
To pay his currently few debts had not taken long. He had considered getting Porter Portugal to sew a new suit of sails, but old P.P. was not a slot machine; you could not put the price into P.P.'s gifted hands and expect, after a reasonable (or even an unreasonable) period of time, for the sails to pop out. If Port-Port were stone sober he would not work and if dead drunk he could not work. The matter of keeping him supplied with just the right flow of old Hidalgo dark rum to, so to speak, oil the mechanism, was a nice task indeed: many boat owners, National, North American, or otherwise, had started the process with intentions wise and good: but Old Port was a crazy-foxy old Port and all too often had drunk them under the table, downed palm and needle, and vanished with the advance-to-buy-supplies into any one of the several stews which flourished on his trade.("A debt of honor, me b'y," he would murmur, red-eyed sober, long days later. "Doesn't you gots to worry. I just hahs a touch ahv de ague, but soon as I bettah. . . .")
