Clifford Simak - All Flesh Is Grass and Other Stories

Duncan had the feeling that they were walking in the bottom of a well, isolated from the world outside, cut off from all that might be happening there—cut off, perhaps, but not protected, for the place, he knew, could be a trap.

They had routinely taken up their accustomed order of march, and while that might have been all right in more open country, Duncan realized that it was wrong here. With room to maneuver, Daniel, bringing up the rear, could swing about to face any danger that might come up behind him. Here he had little room to maneuver; there were places on the trail where he would have been unable to turn around. Duncan squeezed himself against the right hand wall of rock and when Daniel, seeing him stop, also stopped, his master urged him ahead. "It's all right, boy," he told the horse. "I want to take up the rear." If danger presented itself at the head of the march, he told himself, Tiny and Conrad could hold it off until he could manage to join them.

Stepping carefully, almost daintily, Daniel walked past him, his hairy body pressing Duncan hard against the rock wall. Duncan said to Meg, "Keep close watch ahead. If anything appears to be happening up there, let me know at once."

Overhead the wind moaned and screamed. Except for that, however, the only sounds were the ring of Daniel's iron-shod hoofs against the rock, the pitter-patter clacking of Beauty's little hoofs as she hurried along.

Plodding along behind Daniel, Duncan put his hand down to the belt pouch, which he had retrieved and resewn onto his belt, felt beneath his fingers the yielding crackle of the manuscript. Shifting his hand down, he encountered the small bulk of Wulfert's amulet, recovered from the Reaver's pocket. At the feel of it he felt reassured. Something had operated to bring them safely through all the dangers they had faced, and he felt certain that it could not have been happenstance alone. Could it have been the amulet? Might it not, through the years that it had lain in Wulfert's tomb, have reinforced its magic, as a good brandy might acquire better flavor and bouquet from aging? But magic or not, he told himself, potent or weak, he felt the better for having it again.

Time went on and the shadow crept slowly up the left wall of the rock. There was no sign that the rift was coming to an end; no daylight loomed ahead. They perforce were going at a slow rate, but by this time they should be nearing the end. What was it Snoopy had said, only five miles or so? Although, as Andrew insisted, one probably could not place much reliance upon anything that the goblin said. If the goblin were anywhere close to right, even at their slow rate they should have covered the distance by this time. For a moment Duncan entertained the fantasy that the rift would never end; that there was a magic laid upon it that would keep it going on forever; that they would never reach the end of it.

For considerable time it had seemed to him that the sounds made by the wind in the upper part of the chasm had been changing, becoming no longer merely the sound of wind, but the sound of voices, as if a congress of damned souls might be screeching and shrieking, yelling back and forth in unintelligible words.

A lull came in the wind and the sound ceased and for a long moment all was deathly quiet. To Duncan it seemed that the silence was more terrifying than the howling and the shrieking. The hoofbeats of Daniel and Beauty rang out sharp and clear, like the beating of a drum by which they marched to an unknown, but a certain doom.

Again the wind took up and the voices came once more, if they were voices and not his imagination. And now above the shrieks of fear and the screams of agony one voice boomed out, drowning all the others. The voice kept saying, "Holy! Holy! Holy!" the one word repeated over and over again, each repetition of it embodying an ecstatic and terrifying fervor. At times it seemed to Duncan that the one word was quite clear, and at other times he could not be entirely certain of it, although a moment later he would be convinced that he had heard the word correctly. But whether clear or uncertain, it carried in it that unsettling, almost embarrassing fervor of euphoric rapture—the kind of rapture to which a condemned soul might give expression should it suddenly and unexpectedly be raised from the torture of Purgatory to the very gates of Heaven.

Duncan put his hands to his ears to shut out the sound of that joyous paean, and when he took them away a few moments later, Conrad was shouting up ahead.

"Light!" he was yelling. "I can see light. We are coming to the end."

Staring fixedly ahead, Duncan could see no light, although that was not greatly to be wondered at, for here the trail was exceptionally narrow and Daniel's big body filled the most of it, blocking his view. But in a short while he could distinguish a faint glimmer that made the walls of stone a little brighter. The ecstatic voice still was shouting "Holy! Holy! Holy!" but as the light grew stronger, the sound lost its strength and some of its ecstasy and finally faded out entirely. The shrieking of the wind came to be no more than a mumble and the damned souls grew silent and ahead he could see a glimpse of the green and pleasant land that Snoopy had told them of.

It was, in all truth, a green and pleasant land, a wide sweep of valley backdropped by the hills through which they had come. Before them lay the ruins of the castle against which they had been warned by the goblin.

The castle was little more than the mound that Ghost had described. Two crumbling turrets still stood guard at each end of it, but between the turrets, the stone lay heaped in an untidy pile, the rough edges of the fallen stones rounded and modified by weather. But the thing that caught Duncan's attention was the well-spaced standing stones, no longer upright, but canting at various angles. At one time, it was apparent, the entire castle had been surrounded and fenced in by a circle of massive stones of the kind that one might see, or so it was said, at Stonehenge and on a smaller scale in many other places. But this circle was larger than the one at Stonehenge, if traveler's tales could be credited, perhaps a great deal larger, for this castle circle once had enclosed many acres. In an earlier day, Duncan thought, it must have been an impressive sight, but now, like the castle, it was considerably dismantled. The lintel stones, with the slow canting of the uprights, had fallen from their places and lay half buried on the surface, or, not falling entirely free, still lay with one end propped against a standing stone.

The sun was no more than a few minutes above the western horizon, and shadows were lengthening and growing deeper in the valley. Just beyond the castle ran a quiet river, unhurried in its flow, with small flocks of ducks flying above it, and others floating on its surface. Behind him Duncan could hear the subdued mumble of the wind blowing through the rift.

He walked forward to join Conrad. Tiny had trotted on ahead, quartering the slope of hillside below them, nosing out the land.

"I would say we should go down to the river and camp the night," said Duncan. "Get an early start, come morning."

Conrad nodded his agreement. "It will be good," he said, "to have some open land. Now we can make better time."

"We need to," Duncan said. "We have wasted a lot of time."

"If we could have caught some of the Reaver's horses."

"We tried," said Duncan. "They were having none of us."

"We still can make good time," said Conrad. "We have good legs."

"The hermit will hold us up."

"We could put him up with Meg on Daniel. That horse could carry both of them and never notice."

"We'll see about it," said Duncan. "The hermit would raise hell. He wants to be the same as you and I."

"I'll grant him that," said Conrad, "if he'd just keep up with us." They started down the slope, the others trailing along behind them. They had reached the bottom of the slope and started out across the valley when Meg let out a shriek.