Margaret St. Clair: The Best of Margaret St. Clair

At last he appeared to have finished. Mazda nodded for the last time. “Um-hum,” she said. “But you know what I think, Clem? I think you just don’t like lights. When it’s dark, you want it to be dark. It’s reasonable enough—you’re a different guy once the sun goes down.”

“I don’t like the false lights of modernity,” the Reverend said with a touch of stiffness. “As I intend to make abundantly clear in my sermon tomorrow.”

“Um-hum. You’re a wonderful talker… I never thought I’d get fond of somebody who didn’t like light.”

“I like some kinds of light,” said the Reverend Adelburg. “I like fires.”

Mazda drew a deep breath. “You’d better wash up before supper, Clem,” she said. “You’ve got rosin on you from the apple tree.”

“All right, dear.” He kissed her on the cheek and then—she had seductive shoulders, despite her ranginess—on the upper arm.

“Mmmmmmmm,” Mazda said.

When he had gone into the pantry to wash, she looked after him slantingly. Her caramel-colored eyebrows drew together in a frown. She had already scalded out the teapot. Now she reached into the drawer of the kitchen table and drew out a handful of what looked like small mushrooms. They were, as a matter of fact, mescal buttons, and she had gathered them last week from the top of a plant of Lophophora Williamsii herself.

She cut them up neatly with a paring knife and dropped them into the teapot. She put the mistletoe berries in on top of the mescal buttons. Then she filled the teapot with boiling water. When the Reverend got back from his washing, the teapot was steaming domestically on the table beside the string beans.

He said grace and poured himself a cup of the tea.

“Goodness, but it’s bitter,” he observed, sipping. “Not at all like it was the first time. What a difference putting in more mistletoe has made!”

Mazda looked down. She passed him the sugar bowl. He sweetened the tea lavishly. “You haven’t set a cup for yourself, dear,” he said, suddenly solicitous.

“…There isn’t much tea. You said to make it strong.”

“Yes, honey, but if there’s any good in the tea, I want you to share it. Get another cup.”

He looked across the table at her, brightly and affectionately. There was a faint flush in Mazda’s cheeks as she obeyed.

Supper was over and Mazda was washing the dishes when the Reverend Clem said suddenly, “How fast you’re moving, Mazda! I never saw anything like the way you’re getting through those dishes. I can hardly see your hands, they’re moving so fast.”

“Fast?” Mazda echoed. She sounded bewildered. She held up a spoon and polished its bowl languidly in the light of the oil lamp. “Why, I’m not moving fast. I’ve been standing here by the sink for hours and hours, washing one dish. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I wish I could move fast.”

There was a silence. Mazda had finished the dishes. She took off her apron and sat down on the floor, her feet out straight in front of her. Almost immediately the Reverend Adelburg slid off the chair where he had been sitting, and flopped down on the floor parallel to her. Both their legs were stretched out.

“What lovely hands you have, Mazda,” he said. He picked up one of those members from her lap, where it was languidly lying, and turned it about admiringly. “Your fingers remind me of the verse in the Canticles—‘Fair are my love’s palms as an eel that feedeth among lilies. And the coals thereof hath a most vehement flame.’ They’re even colored like eels, purple and gold and silver. Your nails are little dark rainbows.

“The Lord bless you, Mazda. I love you very much.” He put his arm around her. She let her head decline on his shoulder, and they both leaned back against the wall. “Are you happy, dear?” he asked her anxiously. “As happy as I am? Do you have a dim sweet sense of blessings hovering over you?”

“Um-hum,” Mazda answered. It was obviously difficult for her to talk. “Never felt better.” A grin zig-zagged across her face. “Mus’ be the mistletoe.”

The effects of peyote—mescal button—intoxication are predictable. They run a definite course. None the less, the response to a drug is always somewhat idiosyncratic. Thus it was that the Reverend Clem Adelburg, who had drunk enough peyote infusion to keep a cart horse seeing beatific visions for twenty-four hours, reached, about six o’clock in the morning, the state of intense wakefulness that succeeds to the drug trance. By the time the copter came from Los Angeles to take him to the Temple, a little after eight, he had bathed, shaved, and dressed, and was reading over his sermon notes.

He went into the bedroom where Mazda was lying to bid her good-bye. Sometime during the night they had managed to get to bed. He bent over and kissed her tenderly on her loosened mouth. “Good-bye, dear. Our little experiment certainly had results, didn’t it? But I feel no ill after-effect, and I trust that you will not, either. I’ll be back a b out eleven tonight.”

Once more he kissed her. Mazda made a desperate effort to rouse herself from the rose and opal-hued heaven she was currently floating in. She licked her lips. “Clem…” she said. “Yes, dear?”

“ Be careful.”

“Certainly, dear. I always am. Yes.”

He patted her on the shoulder. He went out. Even in her paradise, which was at the moment blue and silver, she could hear the noise of the copter as it bore him away.

Mazda’s drug dreams came to an end with a bump about twelve o’clock. She sprang out of bed and ran to the window. The Reverend Adelburg was gone, of course. And there wasn’t a raven in sight.

Over in Los Angeles, the Reverend’s sermon was going swimmingly. From his first words, which had been the arresting sentence, “The lights are going out again all over the world,” he had riveted the attention of his listeners as if with stainless steel rivets. Even the two troops of Archer Eagle Scouts in the front rows, who, with their scoutmaster Joe Buell, were today’s Honor Guests, had been so fascinated that they had stopped twanging their bowstrings. The Reverend had swung thunderously from climax to climax; by now at least half his audience had resolved to disconnect its radio when it got home, and throw away the electric lights on its Christmas tree. Now the Reverend was approaching the climax of climaxes.

“In the sweet night of the spirit—bless us, O Lord! Yes, Lord, it’s good to be dark—in the sweet silence of the stable let the little flame of—bless us, Lord!—let the little flame—My Gosh! Good Lord!”

Forthright Temple is ventilated, and partly lighted, by a clerestory in the middle part of the building. Through this clerestory eight large black birds flew rapidly.

Two of them headed straight for the Reverend Adelburg’s eyes. Four of them attacked the Temple’s not very bright electric lights. The other two made dive after dive on the helpless congregation’s head.

Women were screaming. Handkerchiefs waved. Hymnbooks rocked and fluttered through the air. The organist burst into a Bach chorale. The bewildered choir began singing two different songs.

When the ravens had first swooped down upon him, the Reverend Adelburg had dived under the lectern. From thence—he was a man who was used to authority—he began shouting orders to the troops of Archer Eagle Scouts in a clarion, stentorian voice.

“Young men! Listen! Shoot at the birds! Shoot… at… the… birds!”

There was a very slight hiatus. Then bowstrings began to twang and arrows to thud.

Eight pagan ravens are no match at all for the legitimate weapons of two troops of Archer Eagle Scouts. The ravens dived valiantly, they cawed and shrieked. In vain. Inside five minutes after the shooting started, there remained no trace of the birds’ incursus except a black tail feather floating in an up-draft, eight or ten hymnbooks with ruffled pages, and some arrows on the floor.