David Drake - Balefires

This time I got back a check for $35 and a note from Mr. Derleth saying that the story still wasn't right. He'd edit it himself; I should compare the published version with my carbon (this was in the days before copy machines were everywhere) to learn how not to write a story the next time.

I hadn't even known I was supposed to keep a carbon.

I don't think the edit was very extensive, but Mr. Derleth changed the title to the name of the central character. I don't like that style of title (which Mr. Derleth used frequently in his own work), but it was better than any of mine.

I recently reread "Denkirch" for the first time in forty years and realized it was a good pastiche of minor Weird Tales stories from about 1938. That's a positive comment on my craftsmanship, but it was a very silly thing to do in 1966.

So that was my first sale. You could call it a remarkable success story: I sold the first story I submitted to the first editor I sent it to. But I've heard of would-be writers being crushed by rejection letters. I was so devastated by my first acceptance that it was six months before I even tried to write another story.

Now I sleep only by day or when the sky is cloudy, and when the stars gleam bright in the heavens I walk little back streets, avoiding other people, for I do not care to be reminded of my humanity and my inevitable fate. My acquaintances think me odd, but they would not understand if I told them that on dear nights the stars speak to me, and that if I did not walk I would go mad. So I walk the lonely streets, and the echoing cadence of my stride helps to muffle the rhythmic whispers, but still my mind is forced back to Denkirch, who proved Man's unique place in the universe.

I met Denkirch at college when, at the end of our first semester, each of our roommates requested transfers and we found ourselves shifted together. Although he was a physics and electronics engineering major, and I was prelaw in history, we found we had a surprising amount in common. Our general outlooks were very similar, both of us vaunting pure knowledge and refusing to accept anything sacred or profane, as being beyond the grasp of human intelligence.

I was as bored by Denkirch's majors as he was contemptuous (albeit silently) of mine, but I had a tremendous respect for the work he was doing. Not only did he take staggering course loads by special permission so that he could complete both majors in four years, but he taught himself a vast assortment of foreign languages as well. These included Oriental and Oceanic dialects in addition to the normal European and classical languages, there were a few tongues of which I had never heard before. Once in particular I remember seeing an aged, oddly unpleasant-looking book bound in faded snakeskin lying on Denkirch's desk. When I asked him what it was, he had answered, "A treatise on certain antiquities, in R'lyehan."

I am a reasonably intelligent man, but Denkirch was beyond a doubt one of the most brilliant men of this or any age. He had a superb, balanced intellect-far less common than genius-and it was this that gave him the drive and the ability to turn our idle discussions into something very tangible.

Mostly we argued about the place of the individual man in the Universe, both from interest and because it was equally outside our dissimilar majors. We were both romantics, believing the universe was purposeful, but I argued that each man was only a steppingstone to that purpose, while Denkirch insisted that the individual was immortal. I based my argument on the extreme rarity of even possible spiritual manifestations and Denkirch took the other tack, pointing out the exceptions for which no other explanation was satisfactory. It was an inexhaustible topic since neither of us had concrete proof, but the question caught Denkirch's fancy and even in college he began to go deeper into the subject than I could follow.

After graduation I entered a Chicago law firm while Denkirch had no trouble getting an excellent teaching position at Cal Tech. We kept in touch, and in the mounting excitement of my friend's letters I saw that the material he was uncovering on his fancy was rapidly turning it into an obsession, After a few years he left Cal Tech for MIT, simply because it would bring him nearer to the great eastern libraries he wanted to consult and, when he stopped mentioning his project a little later, I realized that it was a result of success, not failure. He was on the brink of a great discovery but feared, like all scholars, to blurt out his suspicions until he was absolutely sure. Then one day he resigned his teaching post and moved to southern Illinois, and even without his letter I would have known that he was searching for privacy to put his theories into practice.

For six months I heard no more from Denkirch. Then a short letter came, asking me to join him and giving directions on how to reach him. I noticed that he was not actually living in any town but was several miles outside the nearest one, a tiny place called Merriam, of only three hundred souls.

It was foolish for me to leave then. I was a junior partner with great things ahead of me if I were successful in a major case to be tried within the month, but despite this I had no thought of refusal. Denkirch was my friend and to us who have few, that is no little thing, but even more convincing was the sense of overwhelming importance which clung to even that prosaic letter. It was not just that I knew the answer to a great philosophical question might be close at hand, it was more; and if I had known how much more, I would have hidden myself in a place so remote that I never again would have heard of Denkirch or he of me.

In the late afternoon of the next day I reached Merriam, which was just a straggle of houses on the highway, and then turned left on to a narrow, rutted gravel road marked by a big country-type mailbox with "Samuel Denkirch" stenciled on it. On the right side of the lane the ground was cut away in a high bank to a level above the top of the car and crowned with a wobbling barbed wire fence silhouetted against the low sun. The pasture to the left looked rocky and unpromising, an occasional clump of wild sumac standing out among the tall thistles and rank grass as a deep red blotch in the waning light and giving a frightful, blood-spattered appearance to an otherwise merely ugly landscape. The road was in as uncared-for a condition as the pasture and fences but had obviously been used much more recently. Heavy trucks seemed to have driven over it shortly after a rain, and the resultant ruts were nearly six inches deep except in places where a slab of rock underlay the sprinkling of gravel and jarred my teeth, even though I was proceeding in second gear.

Due to my slow progress the road seemed much longer than it probably was, and I began to wonder whether I had made the correct turn after all, despite the mailbox. It would have been quite impractical to try to turn around since the road itself was far too narrow and was hemmed in by the high bank and, on the left, a drainage ditch, but the feeling of portentousness that had been with me ever since I had received Denkirch's invitation was growing steadily and beginning to take on a distinctly sinister cast. The car's jouncings and scrapings were an almost welcome diversion from the formless depression that was settling over my mind, a depression not wholly to be explained by my worry that I had taken the wrong turn or even by the funereal scenery. However, just as I had decided to return to the highway even if I had to back out to avoid being lost at night amid a maze of unfamiliar country roads, I came to the top of a gently rising hill and saw what had to be Denkirch's house only a half mile beyond.

That it had to be my friend's house was quite clear from the forest of antennas sprouting from and around it. The area around the house had probably been thickly wooded before Denkirch had bought the farm; now almost a score of thick stumps ringed the worn but otherwise normal looking two-story house, the boles having been dragged into a great pile in a nearby field where, presumably, they could no longer interfere with the antennas which had usurped the grounds. Indeed, the antennas were all that kept the house from seeming as deserted as the pastures around it. The roof of the house sagged and the white paint had cracked and blistered in those places in which it had not peeled off completely. The barn and sheds had been pulled down or had simply collapsed by themselves, and the grass on the lawn was high and weed-choked,