Clifford Simak - Time is the Simplest Thing

It was repulsive and obscene. It was bleak and raw. It was everything that was the opposite of humanity. It gibbered and it squawled and howled. It leered with an alien death’s-head. There was nothing clear or clean; there was no detail, but an overriding sense of abysmal evil.

Blaine jerked away with a scream exploding in his brain, and the scream wiped out the central core of horror.

But there was another thought — an incongruous, fleeting thought.

The thought of Halloween.

Blaine grabbed tight hold of it, fighting to keep the core of alien horror from being added to the footage of the endless film.

Halloween — the soft October night with the thin layers of leaf smoke floating in the street, lighted by the street lamps or the great full moon which hung just above the naked tree tops, larger than one ever had remembered it, as if it might have drawn a little closer to the Earth to spy on all the fun. The high, shrill, childish voices rang along the street and there was the continual patter of little racing feet as the goblin bands made their merry round, shrieking with delight or calling back and forth. The lights above the doors were all turned on in genial invitation to the trick-or-treaters, and the shrouded figures came and went, clutching bags which bulged the bigger and the heavier as the evening passed.

Blaine could remember it in detail — almost as if it were only yesterday and he was a happy child running in the town. But it was, in actuality, he thought, very long ago.

It was before the terror had grown foul and thick — when the magic still was a fading fad and there still was fun in it and Halloween was happy. And parents had no fear of their children being out at night.

Today such a Halloween would be unthinkable. Now Halloween was a time for the double-barring of the doors, of the tight-stuffed chimney, of the extra-potent hex sign nailed above the lintel.

It was too bad, he thought. It had been such a lot of fun. There had been that night he and Charlie Jones had rigged up the tick-tack beside Old Man Chandler’s window and the old man had come roaring out in simulated anger with a shotgun in his hand and they had got out of there so fast they’d fell into the ditch back of the Lewis house.

And there had been that other time — and that other time — hanging to it hard so he could think of nothing else.

He woke cramped and cold and confused, not remembering where he was. For the branches intertwined above him and were like nothing he’d ever seen before. He lay with his body aching from rough ground and the cold, staring at the branches, and slowly the knowledge soaked into him — who he was and where.

And why.

And the thought of Halloween.

He sat bolt upright and bumped his head upon the branches.

For now there was more than just the thought of Halloween.

There was the plot of Halloween!

He sat cold and frozen, while the fury and the fear raged inside of him.

It was diabolic and so simple — it was the very kind of gambit a man like Lambert Finn would plan.

It was something that could not be allowed to happen. For if it did, a new onslaught of public animosity would be roused against the parries and once the fierce reaction had worn off, there’d be new restrictive laws. Although the laws might not be needed, for it might set off a pogrom that would wipe out thousands of the parries. Such a plan of Halloween would result in a storm of public outrage such as the world had seldom known.

There was just one chance, he knew. He had to get to Hamilton, for it was the nearest place where he could find some help. Surely the folks of Hamilton would help him, for Hamilton was a parry village that lived by suffrance alone. If a thing like this should happen, then Hamilton would die.

And Halloween, unless he had lost count, was the day after tomorrow. No, that was wrong, for this was tomorrow. Starting now, there were just two days to stop it.

He crawled out of the thicket and saw that the sun was no more than a handsbreadth above the eastern hills. There was a sharp, clean tang in the morning air, and the sloping bluff ran smooth, with the blond of sun-cured grass, down to the brown flood of the river. He shivered in the chill and beat his hands together to try to get them warm.

Hamilton would be north along the river, for The Plainsman motel had been on the road that ran north from Belmont, and Hamilton, from there, had been only a mile or two away.

He went angling down the slope, and the movement of his body drove away the chill. The climbing sun seemed to gather strength and there was more warmth in it.

He reached a sand bar that ran out into the river and walked out on it. The water was brown with sand and clay and it rumbled angrily as it swirled around the sand bar’s end.

Blaine walked to the edge of the bar and squatted down. He put down cupped hands and dipped, and the trapped water came up roiled with sand. He raised the cupped hands to his face and drank and the water had a dark brown taste — the taste of silted clay and of ancient vegetation. When he closed his mouth, his teeth gritted on the sand.

But it was water. It was wet. He dipped and drank again, the water running through his fingers, no matter how tightly pressed together, leaving little for his throat.

He squatted in the stillness and sensed the loneliness and peace, as if this moment might be no later than the next day after the world had first been made — as if the earth lay new and clean and there’d been as yet no time to build up the historic backlog of worry and of greed and of all the other things which plagued the race of Man.

A splash broke the silence and he rose swiftly to his feet. There was nothing to be seen, either on the shore or on the river itself or the willow island which lay just beyond the sand bar. An animal, he thought. A mink or muskrat, an otter or a beaver, or perhaps a fish.

The splash came again, and a boat nosed around the island and came toward the bar. In its stern sat a man muffled in a cloak, swinging the paddle with an awkwardness that was embarrassing to watch. The bow was raised out of the water by the weight of the man and the canted outboard motor fastened to the stern.

The boat came lumbering around and there was something hauntingly familiar in the man who swung the paddle. Somewhere, sometime, Blaine knew, he had met this man; somehow their lives had touched.

He walked out into the shallows and grabbed the bow as the craft drew close and dragged it onto the sand.

“God be with you,” said the boatman. “And how are you this morning?”

“Father Flanagan!” cried Blaine.

The old priest grinned, a very human, almost sunny grin.

“You,” Blaine told him, “are very far from home.”

“I go,” said Father Flanagan, “where the good Lord sends me.”

He reached forward and patted the seat in front of him. “Why don’t you come and sit awhile?” he invited. “God forgive me, but I’m all beat up and weary.”

Blaine pulled the boat up harder on the sand and got into it. He took the seat the priest had patted and held out his hand. Father Flanagan took it in both his arthritis-crippled but very gentle paws.

“It’s good to see you, Father.”

“And I,” the Father told him, “am covered with confusion. For I must confess that I’ve been following you.”

“It would seem to me,” Blaine said, half amused, half frightened, “that a man of your persuasion might find better things to do.”

The priest put Blaine’s hand away, not forgetting to give it a placid pat.

“Ah, my son,” he said, “but that is it. There can be, for me, no better occupation than keeping on your trail.”

“I’m sorry, Father. I don’t quite understand.”