Clifford Simak - Out of Their Minds

"I've seen that dog before," I said. "I know that I have seen him somewhere."

"Why," said Kathy, surprised at my nonrecognition, "it was Pluto. Mickey Mouse's dog."

I found that I was angry at myself for my stupidity. I should have recognized the dog immediately. But when one is all set to see a goblin or a fairy, he does not expect to have a cartoon character come popping out at him.

But the cartoon characters would be here, of course— the entire lot of them. Doc Yak and the Katzenjammer Kids, Harold Teen and Dagwood and, as well, all title fantastic Disney characters let loose upon my world.

Pluto had run up to see us and Mickey Mouse had whistled him away and we, the two of us, I thought, accepted it as a not unusual fact. If a man had stood off from this place, to one side of it, and had looked upon it in a logical, human manner, he never could have accepted it. Under no circumstances could he have admitted there was such a world or that he could be in it. But when he was there and could not stand aside, the doubt all dropped away, the zaniness rubbed off.

"Horton," Kathy asked, "what do we do now? Do you think the car could manage on that road?"

"We could take it slow," I said. "In low. And it might get better as we went along."

She walked around the car and got behind the wheel. She reached for the key and turned it and absolutely nothing happened. She switched it off and turned it once again and.there was no sound, not even the clunking of a balky starter.

I walked around to the front of it, unlatched the hood and lifted it. I don't know why I bothered. I am no mechanic. There was nothing I possibly could have done to get at the trouble.

I leaned over the radiator and had a look at the motor and it looked all right to me. Half of it could have been missing and it still would have looked all right to me.

A gasp and a thump jerked me upright and I banged my head against the hood.

"Horton!" Kathy cried.

I stepped quickly to one side of the car and Kathy was sitting beside the road. Her face was twisted up in pain.

"My foot," she said.

Her left foot, I saw, was wedged tightly in a rut.

"I got out of the car," she said, "and stepped back, not looking where I stepped."

I knelt down beside her and worked her foot free as gently as I could, leaving the shoe jammed in the rut. Her ankle was red and bruised.

"What a stupid thing to do," she said.

"It hurts?"

"You're damned right it hurts. I think that it is sprained."

The ankle looked as if it might be sprained. And what in hell, I wondered, did one do with a sprained ankle.in a place like this? There'd be no doctors, of course. I seemed to remember that you fixed a sprain with an elastic bandage, but there was no elastic bandage, either.

"We ought to get the stocking off," I said. "If it starts to swell…"

She hiked up her skirt and unfastened a garter, pushing the stocking down. I managed to work it down over the ankle and once it was off, there could be no doubt that the ankle was badly hurt. It was inflamed and there was some swelling.

"Kathy," I said, "I don't know what to do. If you have some idea…"

"It's probably not so bad," she said, "although it hurts. In a day or two it should be better. We have the car for shelter. Even if it won't run, it will be a place to stay."

"There might be someone who could help," I said. "I don't know what to do. If we had a bandage. I could rip up my shirt, but it should be an elastic…"

"Someone to help? In a place like this!"

"It's worth a try," I said. "It's not all ghouls and goblins. Perhaps not even many of them. They are out-of-date. There would be others…"

She nodded. "Perhaps you're right. That idea of using the car for shelter doesn't.cover everything. We'll need food and water, too. But maybe we're getting scared too soon. Maybe I can walk."

"Who's getting scared?" I asked.

"Don't try to kid me," said Kathy, sharply. "You know we're in a jam. We know nothing about this place. We're foreigners. We have no right to be here."

"We didn't ask to come here."

"But that makes no difference, Horton."

And I don't suppose it did. Someone apparently wanted us to be here. Someone had brought us here.

Thinking about it, I grew a little cold. Not for myself—or, at least, I don't think for myself. Hell, I could face anything. After rattlesnakes, sea serpent, and werewolves, there was nothing that could faze me. But it wasn't fair for Kathy to be dragged into it.

"Look," I said, "If I got you in the car, you could lock the doors and I could take a short, fast look around." She nodded. "If you'd help me."

I didn't help her. I simply picked her up and put her in the car. I eased her into the seat and reached across her to lock the opposite door.

"Roll up the window," I told her, "and lock the door. Yell if something shows up. I won't be far away."

She started to roll up the window, then rolled it down again, reaching down to the floor of the car. She came up with the baseball bat and stuck it through the window.

"Here, take this," she said.

I felt a little foolish going down the path with the bat in hand. But it made a good heft in my fist and it might be handy.

Where the path curved to go around the big oak I stopped and looked back. She was staring through the windshield and I waved at her and went on down the path.

The ground pitched sharply. Below me the forest closed in, dense and heavy. There was no breeze and the trees stood up motionless, the greenness of their leaves glinting in the sun of late afternoon.

I went on down the road and at a place where it twisted again to dodge another tree, I found the signpost. It was old and weather-beaten, but the legend still was clear. TO THE INN, it said, with an arrow pointing.

Back at the car, I told her, "I don't know what kind of inn, but it might be better than just staying here. There might be someone who could doctor up the ankle. At least we could get some cold water or some hot water—which is it you use to help a sprain?"

"I don't know," she said, "and I don't like the idea of an inn, but I suppose we can't stay sitting here. We have to get an idea of what is going on, what we should expect."

"I didn't like the idea of an inn any better than she did—I didn't like anything that was going on; but what she said was right. We couldn't stay huddled on that hilltop and wait for whatever was about to happen.

So I got her out and perched her on the hood while I locked the door and pocketed the key. Then I picked her up and started down the hill.

"You forgot the bat," she said.

"There was no way to carry it."

"I could have carried it."

"More than likely we won't need it," I told her and went on down the road, picking my way as carefully as I could so I wouldn't stumble.

Just below the signpost, the road twisted again to make its way around a massive heap of boulders and as I rounded the boulders, there on the distant ridge was the castle. I stopped dead when I saw it, shocked into immobility by the unexpectedness of the sight.

Take all the beautiful, fancy, romantic, colorful paintings of castles that you have ever seen and roll them all together, combining all their good points. Forget everything you have ever read about a castle as a dirty, smelly, unsanitary, drafty habitation and substitute instead the castle of the fairy tale, King Arthur's Camelot, Walt Disney's castles. Do all of this and you might get some slight idea of what that castle looked like.

It was the stuff of dreams; it was the old romanticism and the chivalry come across the years. It sat upon the distant ridgetop in its gleaming whiteness, and the multicolored pennants mounted on its spires and turrets rippled in the air. It was such a perfect structure that one knew instinctively that there never could be another one quite like it.