Manly Wade Wellman - John the Balladeer 02 (9 page)

 
          
“What's
there?” Mr. Ben wanted to know.

 
          
“A dead Shonokin.”

           
“Oh”
he said. "Oh.”

 
          
"Let's
sit down where we can watch out the window,” I said, "and I'll tell you
two-three things I ran into out there.”

 
          
He
poured us short drinks of blockade and I told about my walk, a-putting in some
stuff I hadn't touched on when I told the thing to
Warren
. I made a point about the dead Shonokin,
and how Altic acted scared of it.
Warren
listened again like as if it was all he had
to do in life, and he kept asking me questions. Again and again, he wrote
things on paper.

 
          
"You
tell us again, the way to Immer is straight as a bowstring, and it isn't as
much as two miles long in your estimation,” he said at last. "Let me go
get a certain book your story keeps bringing to my mind. It's in my luggage.”

 
          
He
headed up into the loft where Mr. Ben had bedded him down, and came back with
the book. It had a green paper over the dark cover of it. He looked at the back
and then leafed through.

 
          
"Here
we are,” he said, with his finger on a page.
"A
quotation from Eliphas Levi.”

 
          
"Elephant
who?” said Mr. Ben.

 
          
"Eliphas
Levi, Daddy,” Callie said the name right. "He was a French scholar more
than a hundred years ago. I heard about him when I was at college.”

 
          
"His
real name was Alphonse Louis Constant,”
Warren
told us. "Aleister Crowley claimed to
be a reincarnation of him. If that's so, Levi's great sense of humor didn’t
accomplish the transmigration—
Crowley
could be awfully pompous and heavy-handed.”

 
          
He
studied the page. "This is the passage,” he said. "It's translated by
A. E. Waite. It's a formula for bringing the dead to life.”

           
He handed the book to me and pointed
the place out. I read the thing out loud:

 
          
.
.
he
must retire at a slow pace, and count four
thousand five hundred steps in a straight line, which means following a broad
road or scaling walls. Having traversed this space, he lies down upon the
earth, as if in a coffin, and repeats in lugubrious tones: 'Let the dead rise
from their tombs!'”

 
          
Warren
took the book back and shut it.
"That's all,” he said, "except that Levi advises his readers never to
try it. Did you hear that it said four thousand five hundred steps?”

 
          
"Loud
and clear, I did,” allowed Mr. Ben. "What's it signify, son?”

 
          
Warren
brightened a somewhat when Mr. Ben called
him son, and so, I thought, did Callie.

 
          
"John,
you estimated not quite two miles to that settlement,” said
Warren
one more time. "We've heard what
Eliphas Levi says about a straight walk of four thousand five hundred steps.
How long is a step?”

 
          
"Different
lengths for different folks,” I replied, "but in the army, when they
figure out stride scales, they call the average step thirty inches—two and a
half feet.”

 
          
"Two
and a half feet,” said Callie after me. She sat by the table, and she'd taken
pencil and paper too. "Let me figure here.”

 
          
She
scribbled fast, a-sticking out her pink tongue.

 
          
"And
two and a half feet is thirty inches,” she said. Then she read out loud to us.
"Forty-five hundred steps times thirty inches comes to one hundred
thirty-five thousand inches.”

 
          
Mr.
Ben stroked his moustache. "That's a right many inches,” he said.

 
          
“Divide
by twelve,” went on Callie, “and that makes eleven thousand two-hundred and
fifty feet”

 
          
Warren
took her paper and checked the writing on
it. “Correct, Callie, your arithmetic is good,” he said. “And eleven thousand
two hundred and fifty feet is—let's see—in miles—”

 
          
“I'll
figure that, too,” said Callie, her pencil going like the wind. “A mile is five
thousand two hundred and eighty feet. Two miles are ten thousand and five
hundred sixty feet.” She looked up at us, all round. “That's six hundred and
ninety feet more than the forty-five hundred steps.
An
overage a little longer than the two-twenty stretch at a track meet.”

 
          
“By God!”
Mr. Ben hit his fist on the arm of his rocking
chair. “Then that's how come them to want my land, so's they can make their
straight track across my yard and on there beyond.”

 
          
“On
there beyond?”
Warren
repeated him.

 
          
“By God!”
Mr. Ben said again, louder. “That would carry it
onto the land of that sorry Sim Drogus. How'd you like to come with me, John,
while I go have a little talk with Sim Drogus?”

 
          
“Wait
a second,” said
Warren
. “We've got more to say about this straight track of the Shonokins.”

 
          
“What
more's to say?” Mr. Ben wondered him, and Callie, too, looked at
Warren
with questioning blue eyes.

 
          
“I'm
thinking about what's in other books of mine, books I wish I’d brought along,”
Warren
said. “For instance, Francis
Hitching's
Earth
Magic.
Considerations of the ley lines of power, in
England
and a few in this
country.”
He was as
solemn as a preacher. “They spell it 1-e-y, and that seems to be a word older
in
England
than the Anglo-Saxon.”

 
          
“Ley”
Callie repeated him. “I’ve read
books by Willy Ley, about all sorts of strange things.”

 
          
“Willy
Ley’s name was German. But ley lines—they seem to have been brought to our
attention by Alfred Watkins—are straight lines, straight as if drawn by
surveyors. Like this one from the Immer Settlement to the edge of this place,
not quite forty-five hundred steps.” “This is all plumb new to me,” I said.
“What’s a ley line supposed to do for a fellow?”

 
          
“That’s
hard to say,”
Warren
replied me. “All the discussions of them either
want
you to swallow all the wonderful theories—there’s another interesting book by
Colin and Janet Bord, they call it
Mysterious
Britain
—that seems to think the ley lines can give power to ships from
outer space. All sorts of other works sneer at these
ideas,
say that the lines are straight only by coincidence. But I’d say
,
that calls for lots and lots of coincidence.”

 
          
“You’re
a-moving several laps ahead of me, my friend,” said Mr. Ben.

 
          
“I
just don’t want to miss anything. I’ll try to make it simple. Hitchings gathers
all the evidences he can about a ley line as a power line. It runs straight,
connecting points of mystic power. He maps one out in England that’s more than
three hundred miles long, and it runs through all sorts of mystic sites like
the Cerne Abbas Giant—that’s a big figure on a hillside—on through Stonehenge,
and beyond to more and more, all the way to England’s eastern coast.” His eyes
shone at us; he was excited. “What we have here isn’t anything like that long a
line, but it seems to touch some highly interesting things. That’s including
the rocking stone that John and I saw—and felt.”

 
          
“I
don’t get
no
sense from it,” said Mr. Ben. “Anyhow,
I’m a-honing to go talk to Sim Drogus about what he’s a-trying on with me.”

 
          
“A
straight line has power anywhere,” said
Warren
. "A race course is fastest when it's
straight instead of curved, like the two-twenty stretch Callie mentioned. You
know it's true when you drive on a straight road, the sort they have out in
Kansas
. Before you know it, you're doing ninety, a
hundred miles an hour, and here comes the state trooper to slow you down.”

 
          
“That's
true enough,” put in Callie.

 
          
“Maybe
it's what you showed us in your book,” I added. “A forty-five hundred stepway
could fix things so they could raise their dead.”

 
          
“And
a very good reason for them, too,” went on
Warren
. “In any case, I judge the Shonokins want
their power track to run on the proper distance right through your land, sir.”

 
          
“If
they got to have it forty-five hundred steps long, why in the name of all
that's pure and holy don't they run it the other way from that there Immer
Settlement they've done took over?” Mr. Ben more or less spit out.

 
          
“Because
they want to use those points of power going this way,” said Callie. “I can see
that. The power must start right where they are—”

 
          
“You're
right, my dear!” broke in
Warren
, not at all polite, but you
should ought
to
have seen her light up when he called her that. “And what I showed John in
Eliphas Levi gives us the clue that John pointed out They're convinced that a
long enough straight track might make them able to call up the dead, including
that Shonokin who's
lying
on the way right now.”

 
          
“Where
he's a-laying, he holds them back,” said Mr. Ben, hard as a flint stone. “John
acts like he's sorry for that one, but me, I can't be.
Jackson
, all this you tell is right interesting.
But I'm overdue to visit Sim Drogus. John, I asked you before, how'd you like
to come along?”

 
          
"If you want me, Mr. Ben.”

 
          
"Sure
enough I want you. I might
could
be glad for a witness
to whatever happens.”

 
          
He
got up from where he sat, slow and strong all through himself. His brows
dragged themselves together in a frown I’d not have liked to mean me, and his
moustache sort of frowned, too. He walked across the room and yanked open a
drawer and took out a blue pistol. Callie watched him while he flipped out the
cylinder and spun it to check the cartridges in it, then flipped the cylinder
back and shoved the pistol down into the waistband of his suntan pants.

 
          
"Daddy,”
said Callie, in a voice you had to strain your ears for, "do you need a
gun to talk to Mr. Drogus?” "Not him, maybe, but I don't know what I'll
meet outside my door,” said Mr. Ben. "The way things have gone on today, a
man can need something to shoot with, air minute and air step.” He nodded to
me.
"Come on, John.”
He was fierce about it, but,
just as he'd said, things had gone on to make a man fierce. He tramped to his
door and out of it and down in the yard. I went with him. Together we headed
off the other way from the track, a-following that twisty road where
Warren
had driven us in the night before.