Damon Knight - Orbit 19

First thing you know she went around a bend, and there was the house. It wasn’t the Settles’, or Dode’s shack—a big place. Like a palace, she said, but I would think that was stretching it a bit. More like the hotel, I should think. Not kept up, the paint peeling here and there, and the railing of the veranda broke; some of them have got a little careless, I think, hiding so long. Hunted things grow strange sometimes, though I don’t suppose you’ve noticed.

There was a light, she said. Not high like the one Todd saw, but on the first floor where the big front room would be. Yellow at first, she told me, but it got a rosy cast when she came closer; she thought someone had put a red shawl over it. There was music too. Happy dancing music, the kind men like. She knew what sort of house it was then, and so did I. She told me she wanted to walk up on that porch right then and never come out; but when she had the chance she was afraid.

She’s gone now, all right, but not because she found her house again. She’s dead.

I’m sorry, though there’s others I would miss more. They found her in a ditch over on the other side of Pierced Rock. Some man didn’t want to pay, very likely; her neck was broken.

Here comes Todd now. Hark to his step?

Old Man: Got company, do we? I think I know who you are—the new young woman sent out from town. What is it they call it, the Reconstruction Office? Well, I hope Nor has entertained you. We ain’t much for society out here, but we try to treat our company right, and don’t think we’re high enough to look down on a visitor just because there wasn’t no father in her making. Nor fetched you a piece of cake, I see, and I’ll pour something for us all a trifle stouter than that wine you’ve been drinking. Keep the stabbers off.

Tingles your nose, don’t it? Sweet on the tongue, though.

That’s only this old house a-creaking. Old houses do, you know, particularly by night, and this one was carpentered by Nor’s dad just after the War. It’s the cooling off when the sun sets. Drink up—it won’t hurt you.

No, I can’t say I felt a thing. Know what it is, though—Nor filling you with tales of the walking houses hereabouts.

It’s true enough, ma’am, though we don’t often mention them to your women. I’ve seen them myself—Nor will have told you, no doubt. There’s those that think them so frightful—say that anybody setting foot in one just vanishes away, or gets ate, or whatever. Well now, it’s true enough they’re seldom seen again; but seldom’s not never, now is it? I’ll tell you a tale of my own. We had a man around here called Pim Pyntey; a drinking man in his way, as a good many of us are. Everybody said no good would come to him, though drunk or sober he was about as friendly a soul as I’ve known, and always willing to pitch in and help a neighbor if it was only a matter of working—didn’t have any money, you know; that kind never does.

Still, I’ve gone fishing with him often, though I wouldn’t hunt with him—always afraid he’d burn one of these here legs of mine off by accident. I’m ‘tached to both of them, as they say.

Anyhow, Pim, he started seeing them. I’d run into him down at the Center, and he’d tell me about them. Followin’ him—that was what he always claimed. “They’re after me, Todd, I don’t know why it should be, but they are. They’re followin’ me.” You’ve got drink, I know, where you come from, ma’am; but not like here. The Firstcomers didn’t feel it was up to what they were accustomed to—said the yeasts were different or some such; at least, that’s what I’ve heard. They put other things in them to raise it up, and we use them yet. There’s—oh, maybe twenty or thirty different herbs and roots and whatnot we favor, and a little whitey-greeny worm we get out of the mud around aruum trees that’s particularly good if there’s a den in the roots, and then a fungus that grows in the mountain caves and has a picture like an autochthon’s hand in the middle sometimes and smells like haying. Those are poison when they’re old, but if you get a young one and cut it up and soak it in salt water for a week before you drop it in the crock, it’ll give you a drink that makes you feel—well, I don’t know how to put it. Like you’re young and going to live forever. Like nothing bad ever happened to you, and you’re likely to meet your mother and dad and everybody you ever liked that’s dead now just around the next turn in the road.

What I’m trying to tell you is that Pim, when his head was full— which it was most of the time—was not entirely like anybody you’re likely to have known before. Now you may say, as a lot did, that it was the drinking that made him see the houses; but suppose it worked the other way, and it was the drinking that made them see him?

Be that as it may, when he was going across the Nepo pass he saw one up on a high rock. At least, that’s what he said. Maybe it’s true; it was snowing, according to what he told me, and a house would figure—as I see it—that it would be hard for any ornithopter to see through the falling flakes, and the buildup on the roof would be no different from what it would see on the stones of the Nepo. Angled stone, you see, looking a lot like angled roofs, with the snow on both.

There were buildings up there a long time ago—I don’t know of anybody who’ll say how long. Buildings and walls that run along the crests of the mountains for as far as a man can see to either side (all tumbledown now, some of that stone will run like sand if you rub it between your fingers), and closed-in places that don’t look like they ever had roofs or floors; and doorways, or what look like them, in front of the mouths of caves. People go up there on picnics in the summer, and go back into those caves carrying torches now. You can see the smoke marks on the ceilings. But there’s whippers farther back—you know about those, I expect, because they bother your flying machines after dark; and in the winter there’s other animals that come into the caves to get out of the cold, so the picnickers find bones and broken skulls in places that were clean the year before. Some say the autochthons cut the stone and built the buildings and the walls; some say they only killed the ones who did.

I can’t believe it matters much. The builders are gone now, whether they came from off-world and tried to stay here, like us, or were earlier people of this world, or the autochthons—in happier days, as you might say. We’re dying out too, now—I mean, the old settler families. You’ll be persuading your own people to come here to live soon, just to fill the place up. Yes you will. Then we’ll see what happens.

What Pim saw was a house. Three stories and a big attic. Lights in all the windows, he said, but only just dim. For some reason—I would guess it was the drink—he didn’t feel like he could turn around and go back; he had to go forward. He’d been to Chackerville, you see, and was coming home across the pass. A man with that much in him will get to where he can’t help but sleep sometimes, and he’d been worried about that, because of the snow, before he saw the house. Well, that was one worry less, was how he put it. Seeing it woke him right up. I guess I never will forget how he told me about all the time he spent climbing up to the saddle, him keeping open his eyes all the time against the snow, afraid of losing sight of the house up there because he thought it might jump down on him. It wouldn’t do such a thing, you know. They can’t jump. They’d crack something if they tried. Still, it was strange for him, and as he said himself, it’s a wonder he went on.

If you had been there, you’d know how it is—a hollow, like, between the two mountains, with the ground falling away to front and back. The old road, built I guess by the same ones that built the buildings there, went right through the middle of it; and when the Firstcomers started to travel in this part of the world, they laid a new road over the old one. That new one’s wearing away now, and you can see the bones of the old through it. Anyway, that was where Pim was walking, on those big lava blocks. One up, one down, one side-wise—that’s the way the slant of them always seems to me to run. There’s them that will tell you every seventh one is cracked, but I won’t vouch for that.