Quicker Than the Eye Part 20

A horn blew in the snowing night. Lotte took a deep breath and said, "Shut the door."

They shut the Witch Door. There was no way to tell that a door was there.

They blew out the lamp and stood in the cold, dark house, waiting.

The cars rushed down the road, their noise loud, and their yellow headlights bright in the falling snow. The wind stirred the footprints in the yard, one pair going out, another coming in, and the tracks of Lotte's car fast vanishing, and at last gone.

"Thank G.o.d," whispered Martha.

The cars, honking, whipped around the last bend and down the hill and stopped, waiting, looking in at the dark house. Then, at last, they started up away into the snow and the hills.

Soon their lights were gone and their sound gone with them.

"We were lucky," said Robert Webb.

"But she's not."

"She?"

"That woman, whoever she was, ran out of here. They'll find here. Somebody'll find her."

"Christ, that's right."

"And she has no I.D., no proof of herself. And she doesn't know what's happened to her. And when she tells them who she is and where she came from!"

"Yes, yes."

"G.o.d help her."

They looked into the snowing night but saw nothing. Everything was still. "You can't escape," she said. "No matter what you do, no one can escape."

They moved away from the window and down the hall to the Witch Door and touched it.

"Lotte," they called.

The Witch Door did not tremble or move. "Lotte, you can come out now." There was no answer; not a breath or a whisper. Robert tapped the door. "Hey in there."

"Lotte!"

He knocked at the paneling, his mouth agitated. "Lotte!"

"Open it!"

"I'm trying, d.a.m.n it!"

"Lotte, we'll get you out, wait! Everything's all right!"

He beat with both fists, cursing. Then he said, "Watch out!" took a step back, raised his leg, kicked once, twice, three times; vicious kicks at the paneling that crunched holes and crumbled wood into kindling. He reached in and yanked the entire paneling free. "Lotte!"

They leaned together into the small place under the stairs. The candle flickered on the small table. The Bible was gone. The small rocking chair moved quietly back and forth, in little arcs, and then stood still.

"Lotte!"

They stared at the empty room. The candle flickered.

"Lotte," they said.

"You don't believe .

"I don't know. Old houses are old... old . .

"You think Lotte ... she ... ?"

"I don't know, I don't know."

"Then she's safe at least, safe! Thank G.o.d!"

"Safe? Where's she gone? You really think that? A woman in new clothes, red lipstick, high heels, short skirt, perfume, plucked brows, diamond rings, silk stockings, safe? Safe!" he said, staring deep into the open frame of the Witch Door.

"Yes, safe. Why not?"

He drew a deep breath.

"A woman of that description, lost in a town called Salem in the year 1680?"

He reached over and shut the Witch Door.

They sat waiting by it for the rest of the long, cold night.

THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE.

The talk in the village in the year 1853 was, of course, about the madman above, in his sod-and-brick hut, with an untended garden and a wife who had fled, silent about his madness, never to return.

The people of the village had never drunk enough courage to go see what the special madness was or why the wife had vanished, tear-stained, leaving a vacuum into which atmospheres had rushed to thunder-clap.

And yet ...

On a sweltering hot day with no cloud to offer shadow comfort and no threat of rain to cool man or beast, the Searcher arrived. Which is to say, Dr. Mortimer Goff, a man of many parts, most of them curious and self-serving, but also traveling the world for some baroque event, or miraculous revelation.

The good doctor came tramping up the hill, stumbling over cobbles that were more stone than paving, having abandoned his coach-and-horses, fearful of crippling them with such a climb.

Dr. Goff it turned out, had come from London, inhaling fogs, bombarded by storms, and now, stunned by too much light and heat, this good if curious physician stopped, exhausted, to lean against a fence, sight further up the hill, and ask: "Is this the way to the lunatic?"

A farmer who was more scarecrow than human raised his eyebrows and snorted, "That would be Elijah Wetherby."

"If lunatics have names, yes."

"We call him crazed or mad, but lunatic will do. It sounds like book learning. Are you one of those?"

"I own books, yes, and chemical retorts and a skeleton that was once a man, and a permanent pa.s.s to the London Historical and Scientific Museum-"

"All well and good," the farmer interrupted, "but of no use for failed crops and a dead wife. Follow your nose. And when you find the fool or whatever you name him, take him with you. We're tired of his shouts and commotions late nights in his iron foundry and anvil menagerie. Rumor says he will soon finish some monster that will run to kill us all."

"Is that true?" asked Dr. Goff.

"No, it lies easy on my tongue. Good day, Doctor, and G.o.d deliver you from the lightning bolts that wait for you above."

With this the farmer spaded the earth to bury the conversation.

So the curious doctor, threatened, climbed on, under a dark cloud which did not stop the sun.

And at last arrived at a hut that seemed more tomb than home, surrounded by land more graveyard than garden.

Outside the ramshackle sod-and-brick dwelling a shadow stepped forth, as if waiting, and became an old, very old, man.

"Well, there you are at last!" it cried.

Dr. Goff reared back at this. "You sound, sir, as if you expected me!"

"I did," said the old man, "some years ago! What took you so long?"

"You are not exactly cheek by jowl with London, sir."

"I am not," the old man agreed and added, "The name is Wetherby. The Inventor"

"Mr. Wetherby, the Inventor. I am Dr. Goff, the so-called Searcher, for I move in behalf of our good Queen, turning rocks, digging truffles, curious for stuffs that might delight her Majesty or fill her museums, shops, and streets in the greatest city in the world. Have I reached the right place?"

"And just in time, for I am now in my eightieth year and of inconsequential vigor. If you had arrived next year, you might have found me in the churchyard. Do come in!"

At this moment, Dr. Goff heard a gathering of people behind him, all with a most unpleasant muttering, so at Mr. Wetherby's beckoning, he was glad to enter, sit, and watch an almost rare whiskey being poured without invitation. When he had quaffed the gla.s.s, Dr. Goff swiveled his gaze about the room.

"Well, where is it?"

"Where is what, sir?"

"The lunatic device, the insane machine that goes nowhere but in going might run down a child, a lamb, a priest, a nun, or an old blind dog, where?"

"So I am that famous, am I?" The old man let a few crumbs of laughter fall from his toothless mouth. "Well, sir. I keep it locked in the goats' shed behind: the outhouse of machines. Finish that to strengthen your sanity when you at last behold the delight and grievance of my long inventive life. So!"

The doctor drank, was replenished and soon out the door, across a small, smooth circle of turf, and to a shed whose door was triple-kept with numerous padlocks and keys. Old Wetherby entered, lit many candles, and beckoned the good doctor in.

He pointed as to a manger. The medical Searcher looked, expecting a mother, crib, and holy babe by the way Wetherby gestured and cried: "There she be!"

"Is it female, then?"

"Come to think, she is!"

And there in the candlelight was Wetherby's mechanical pride.

Dr. Goff coughed, to hide his chagrin.

"That, sir, is but a metal frame!"

"But what a frame to hold velocities! Ha!"

And the old man, young with fevers, rushed to seize a largish wheel which he transported to fit to the front part of the frame. Then he fetched yet another circular object to fit into the frame's rear.

"Well?" he cried.

"I see two wheels, half a cart, and no horse!"

"We will shoot all horses!" exclaimed Wetherby. "My invention, by the tens of thousands, will shy off all horses and banish manures. Do you know, each day in London a thousand tons of horse clods must be cleared, fertilizer wasted, not spread on neighbor fields but dumped as sludge down-Thames. G.o.d, how I talk!"

"But, sir, continue. Those look to be spinning wheels, borrowed from nearby farms?"

"They are, but spliced and strengthened with metal to sustain" - Wetherby touched himself - "one hundred twenty pounds. And here's the saddle for that weight." Whereupon he fitted a saddle mid-frame. "And here the stirrups and ribbon to run the back wheel." So saying, he affixed a longish leather ribbon to one stirrup's rotary and tightened it on a spool at the rear.

"Do you begin to perceive, Doctor?"

"I am stranded in ignorance, sir.

"Well, then, be alert, for I now enthrone myself."

And the old man, light as a chimpanzee, slung himself in place on a leather seat mid-frame between the silent spinning wheels.

"I still see no horse, sir."

"I am the horse, Doctor. I am the horse a-gallop!"

And the old man thrust his feet in the stirrups to chum them up, around, and down; up, around, and down; as the rear wheels, provoked, did likewise, up, down, around, with a lovely hum, fastened in place on the platform planks.

"Aha." The doctor's face brightened. "This is a device to manufacture electrical power? Something from Benjamin Franklin's storm-lightning notebooks?!"

"G.o.ds, no. It could make lightnings, yes! But this, sir, not seeming one, is a horse, and I its night rider! So!"

And Wetherby pumped and wheezed, wheezed and pumped, and the rear wheels, locked in place, spun faster, faster, with a siren whine.

"All very well," snorted the good doctor, "but the horse, if it is, and the rider, if you are, seem to be going nowhere! What will you call your machine?"

"I have had many nights and years to think." Wetherby pumped and wheezed. "The Velocitor, perhaps." Pumpwheeze. "Or the Precipitor, but no, that sounds as if I might be thrown from my 'horse.' The Galvanizer, yes? Or why not-" Wheeze-pump. "The Landstride or Diminisher, for-" Wheeze-pump. "It does diminish time and distance. Doctor, you know Latin, eh? So, feet to wheel, wheel run by feet name it!"

"The Elijah, your given name, sir, the Elijah."

"But he saw a wheel way in the middle of the air and it was a wheel in a wheel, is that not so?"