Clifford Simak - The Ghost of a Model T - And Other Stories

He stood in the darkness, with the treetops outlined by the lighter sky and the white ghost fog that lay close above the water, and tried to swim against the tide of time back to that first beginning, back to where it all had started. It was far away, he knew, much farther than he’d thought, and it had to do, it seemed, with a late September butterfly and the shining gold of falling walnut leaves.

He had been sitting in a garden and he had been a child. It was a blue and wine-like autumn day and the air was fresh and the sun was warm, as anything only can be fresh and warm when one is very young.

The leaves were falling from the tree above in a golden rain and he put out his hands to catch one of the falling leaves, not trying to catch any single one of them, but holding out his hands and knowing that one of them would drift into a palm—holding out his hands with an utter childish faith, using up in that single instant the only bit of unquestioning faith that any man can know.

He closed his eyes and tried to capture it again, tried to become in this place of distant time the little boy he had been on that day the gold had rained down.

He was there, but it was hazy and it was not bright and the clearness would not come—for there was something happening, there was a half-sensed shadow out there in the dark and the squish of wet shoes walking on the earth.

His eyes snapped open and the autumn day was gone and someone was moving toward him through the night, as if a piece of the darkness had detached itself and had assumed a form and was moving forward.

He heard the gasp of breath and the squish of shoes and then the movement stopped.

“You there,” said a sudden, husky voice. “You standing there, who are you?”

“I am new here. My name is Alden Street.”

“Oh, yes,” the voice said. “The new one. I was coming up to see you.”

“That was good of you,” said Alden.

“We take care of one another here,” the voice said. “We care for one another. We are the only ones there are. We really have to care.”

“But you…”

“I am Kitty,” said the voice. “I’m the one who fed you soup.

She struck the match and held it cupped within her hands as if she sought to protect the tiny flame against the darkness.

Just the three of us, thought Alden—the three of us arraigned against the dark. For the blaze was one of them, it had become one with them, holding life and movement, and it strove against the dark.

He saw that her fingers were thin and sensitive, delicate as some old vase fashioned out of porcelain.

She bent with the flame still cupped within her hand and touched it to a candle stub thrust into a bottle that, from the height of it, stood upon a table, although one could not see the table.

“We don’t often have a light,” said Kitty. “It is a luxury we seldom can afford. Our matches are so few and the candles are so short. We have so little here.”

“There is no need,” said Alden.

“But there is,” said Kitty. “You are a new one here. We cannot let you go stumbling in the dark. For the first little while we make a light for you.”

The candle caught and guttered, sending flickering shadows fleeing wildly. Then it steadied and its feeble glow cut a circle in the dark.

“It will soon be morning,” Kitty told him, “and then the day will come and the light of day is worse than the darkness of the night. For in the day you see and know. In the dark, at least, you can think that it is not too bad. But this is best of all—a little pool of light to make a house inside the darkness.”

She was not young, he saw. Her hair hung in dank strings about her face and her face was pinched and thin and there were lines upon it. But there was, he thought, back of the stringiness and the thinness and the lines, a sense of some sort of eternal youthfulness and vitality that nothing yet had conquered.

The pool of light had spread a little as the flame had settled down and now he could see the place in which they stood.

It was small, no more than a hut. There was the pallet on the floor and the blanket where he’d tossed it from him. There was a crazy-legged table upon which the candle stood and two sawed blocks of wood to serve as chairs. There were two plates and two white cups standing on the table.

Cracks gaped between the upright boards that formed the walls of the hut and in other places knots had dried and fallen out, leaving peepholes to the world outside.

“This was your place,” he said. “I would not have inconvenienced you.”

“Not my place,” she said. “Harry’s place, but it’s all right with Harry.”

“I’ll have to thank him.”

“You can’t,” she said. “He’s dead. It is your place now.”

“I won’t need a place for long,” said Alden. “I won’t be staying here. I’ll be going back.”

She shook her head.

“Is there anyone who’s tried?”

“Yes. They’ve all come back. You can’t beat the swamp.”

“Doc got in.”

“Doc was big and strong and well. And there was something driving him.”

“There’s something driving me as well.”

She put up a hand and brushed the hair out of her eyes. “No one can talk you out of this? You mean what you are saying?”

“I can’t stay,” he said.

“In the morning,” she told him, “I’ll take you to see Eric.”

The candle flame was yellow as it flickered in the room and again the golden leaves were raining down. The garden had been quiet and he’d held out his hands, palms upward, so the leaves would fall in them. Just one leaf, he thought—one leaf is all I want, one leaf out of all the millions that are falling.

He watched intently and the leaves went past, falling all about him, but never a one to fall into his hands. Then, suddenly, there was something that was not a leaf—a butterfly that came fluttering like a leaf from nowhere, blue as the haze upon the distant hills, blue as the smoky air of autumn.

For an instant the butterfly poised above his outstretched palms and then mounted swiftly upward, flying strongly against the downward rain of leaves, a mote of blue winging in the goldenness.

He watched it as it flew, until it was lost in the branches of the tree, and then glanced back at his hands and there was something lying in his palm, but it was not a leaf.

It was a little card, two inches by three or such a matter, and it was the color of the leaves, but its color came from what seemed to be an inner light, so that the card shone of itself rather than shining by reflected light, which was the way one saw the color of the leaves.

He sat there looking at it, wondering how he could catch a card when no cards were falling, but only leaves dropping from the tree. But he had taken it and looked at it and it was not made of paper and it had upon its face a picture that he could not understand.

As he stared at it his mother’s voice called him in to supper and he went. He put the card into his pocket and he went into the house.

And under ordinary circumstances the magic would have vanished and he never would have known such an autumn day again.

There is only one such day, thought Alden Street, for any man alive. For any man alive, with the exception of himself.

He had put the card into his pocket and had gone into the house for supper and later on that evening he must have put it in the drawer of the dresser in his room, for that was where he’d found it in that later autumn.

He had picked it up from its forgotten resting place and as he held it in his hand, that day of thirty years before came back to him so clearly that he could almost smell the freshness of the air as it had been that other afternoon. The butterfly was there and its blueness was so precise and faithful that he knew it had been imprinted on his brain so forcefully that he held it now forever.