Free Live Free

Egyptian Darkness

They might, perhaps, have been a princess and a magician hunted by the white trolls of deadly winter; and indeed the ancient Packard, lumbering and high-wheeled, seemed rather an enchanted carriage—perhaps a funeral carriage—than a car, as it trundled between banks of snow, leaving the hunched, white, black-windowed masses of the city’s buildings behind.

The largest of them seemed also the slowest in pursuit, their towering forms now hardly to be glimpsed against the night sky. Smaller structures still clawed at the Packard’s sides with signs half defaced with snow. Ahead lay empty fields where only a few farmhouses kept watch over the road. Ahead too, a 747 droned out of the low clouds, its landing lights blazing like fireworks.

Illingworth appeared to watch it with satisfaction, nodding to himself. “They are flying,” he said. “I had feared they would not be. The snow and so on.”

“Is that where we’re going?” the witch asked. “To the airport?” She had a lap robe over her legs, and she was smoking one of his cigarettes.

He nodded.

“I had thought from what you said that these were local people.”

“You must learn above all—do you wish me to call you Madame Serpentina? Your King called you Marie.”

“The former.”

“As you wish. I was saying, Madame Serpentina, that you must learn above all not to ask questions. One looks. One listens. One observes. Perhaps on rare occasions one asks some favor. But one does not question, ever.”

“I know that. I asked you, not them.”

A chain-link fence had appeared on their right, seeming to guard miles of mere empty ground.

“But it is a habit that must be broken,” Illingworth told her. “Who can say what is near, or what is far? Perhaps we will fly—perhaps only you—perhaps neither of us. Watch. Observe and learn. Leave questions to the owl, that wise bird of Minerva, who asks the only important one.”

“Very well, I do not ask. I merely comment. If the airport is our destination, we might have reached it more swiftly on the Interstate Highway.”

“Indeed we might.” Illingworth chuckled. “You are wise, at least, in the ways of the city, Mademoiselle. But is the shortest path thereby the best? Especially when it is also the plainest? I ask only as a matter of information.”

The witch said nothing, grinding out her cigarette in the Packard’s rusty, narrow ashtray. A gate appeared in the fence, flanked by a small metal sign:

Illingworth heaved at the Packard’s wheel. Skidding a bit, the big car turned up the gateway and creaked to a halt.

“I should do this, Mademoiselle, and not you. But perhaps you will indulge an old man?” He held out a complicatedlooking key.

The witch took it and stepped onto the running board, and from there to the ground. Illingworth had switched off the Packard’s headlights, but the trifles of moonlight that leaked through the clouds were reflected by the snow that lay everywhere. The phrase darkness made visible floated into her consciousness from some source she could not identify.

She drew her coat more tightly about her, wishing she had put on her gloves. The snow creaked beneath her high-heeled boots, but they did not sink into it—it had been packed, then, by other visitors since it had fallen earlier that day. The military of the sign? Those who were said to hold Ben Free? There seemed no way of knowing.

The gates were closed with a heavy chain. Pulling the lock toward her, she found herself outside herself, viewing everything (the old-fashioned car, the high gate with its sinister crest of barbed wire, the endless snow, the lowering structures she could now see beyond the fence, and her own dark figure) as an Edward Gorey drawing. The people in those drawings seemed always bent upon dismal errands toward bad ends. Was that her own fate? To seek Truth not in a well but down a black tunnel that wound on forever?

The key turned easily, or perhaps she had only twisted it with more force than she realized. The lock and the heavy chain were bitterly cold. She let them drop and pushed one side of the gate back; as she did so, a faint blue light kindled far behind one of the dark windows of one of the dark buildings. It should have cheered her, but it did not.

Illingworth’s old Packard crept forward with snow breaking like rabbit bones under the wheels. The car had seemed cold to the witch when she had ridden in it; now in memory it was a haven of warmth and comfort, possibly even of safety. She wanted to get back in at once, but she knew the entrance to such a place could not be left open. Laboriously she closed the gate and snapped the icy lock. When she looked for the blue light again, it was gone.

Despite the size of the Packard, the high front seat was cramped. Illingworth leaned across it easily to throw wide the door for her, then held out an age-spotted, enormously long hand. “Thank you, Mademoiselle,” he said.

She was seized by a desire to retain the key, but she gave it to him as though no such wish had entered her mind, carefully noting the pocket—the right outer pocket of his overcoat—into which he put it.

His sharp knee came up, then subsided as he pushed down the long clutch pedal. The hand that had taken the key settled on the cracked bone knob of the vertical gear-shift and pulled it back with a solid chunk! “Like a tractor,” she said, surprising herself. She had spoken too softly for him to hear, or he was too intent on steering the big car into the narrow space between two of the dark buildings. He should have been a farmer, she thought. That is a farmer’s face, those are farmer’s hands. He would have sons by now and grandsons, red cattle upon wide green fields, plantations of yellow corn. Something went wrong, many years ago, for him.

Then she recalled that she had entertained similar thoughts about Ben Free, an old man so clearly rural confined to a rotting house in a city slum. She tried to recall just how Free had looked on that rainy evening when they had sat staring at his flickering TV, but the face that rose in her mind was not Free’s but the King’s. She realized for the first time that something had gone wrong many years ago for him too, and for all his dark, singing, swindling people.

The Packard ground to a stop. “Wait a moment, Mademoiselle, before you get out,” Illingworth said. “I have given you very little advice on our drive, if only because I have so little to give. I know,” he hesitated for a long moment. “I know hardly more of what you face tonight than you do yourself.”

“You have advised me not to ask questions,” she reminded him.

“I have, yes, and it was good advice; I stand by it still. Do not question—observe. Accept what you see and try to learn from it. You are aware, I hope, that there were races upon this earth before our own.”

“Certainly.”

“Good, though in the light of so much physical evidence—However suppressed, and in my opinion, as I have said so very many times in the pages of Hidden Science and Natural Supernaturalism, it cannot remain suppressed much longer, if only because of our Government’s drive to increase coal production. You are aware, I hope, that a vast amount of evidence has been found in Devonian coal, the very best souvenir—you know French?—we have of the Carboniferous Period? Where was I?”

“You were speaking of physical evidence.”

“Of course I was. Nails, knives, jewelry, all sorts of things we are prone to assume can be created only by human beings—folly, all of it. The world is so much older than we suppose, and since the Elder Days certain Powers have striven with the most admirable patience to enlighten our race, our little band—I will not say band of brothers save as Cain and Abel were brothers, but of cunning apes.”

The witch nodded. She felt almost certain the old man’s sudden loquacity was intended to give those within the dark buildings time to prepare, and she listened with less than half her attention.

“They have appeared to us in many forms; if there has been one constant among them, it is that we have most often thought them cruel. If Moloch demanded the immolation of children, yet Jehovah was a God of Wrath. The rites of Isis were called unspeakable, and perhaps not only because they were not to be spoken of. Yet they offer us everything—wealth, power, life prolonged. Most of all healing and serenity of mind. It may be that they are terrible only because they are good.”

“I know all this, Mr. Illingworth,” the witch said. “In fact, I could deliver your lecture myself; but the powers you speak of are not here. I would sense them if they were. These can be no more than the acolytes of the acolytes. If they hold Free, they are nevertheless a great deal further from the truth, from the center of Authority, than he is.”

“My dear—”

“As for all those things you say they offer us, you have not so much as touched upon the crux. Wealth and power we have already too much of—we suffocate. Longer life? We outstay the lion and the elephant. Hardly a day passes that we do not meet some man or woman who should be dead, who has outlasted his own time by decades; you are such a one yourself, Mr. Illingworth. As for healing, it is not we who require it but the world, which requires to be cured of us. Serenity would indeed be a benefit, but we do not seek it; if we did, we might find it required us to abandon wealth and power, and we love them too much. No, what we require from whatever Powers may be entitled to give it is some indication of how far we may go. Like tigers, we must kill to live, and like rats destroy; but we do not know what is permitted to us, and that ignorance paralyzes those who might otherwise refrain, while the worst of us kill every living thing and ruin all they reach.” I have been inspired, she thought. I myself sought power and never knew a word of that.

“Mademoiselle,” Illingworth said softly, “look about you.”

Tall figures stood at the right side of the Packard, some almost at her elbow. They wore ankle-length capes, and their heads were the heads of jackals.

“Goodbye,” Illingworth said. “Need I tell you, Mademoiselle, that I wish you well?”

The witch nearly surrendered to a wild urge to lock herself in. “You are not going with me? Did I not hear you say you would not miss this for gold?”

“Perhaps I shall see you later tonight.”

One of the jackal-headed figures opened the Packard’s door.

“I know you,” the witch said. “Are you not the servants of Upuaut, the Pathfinder? Or should I call him here Khenti Amenti, the Ruler of the West?”

The jackal-headed figures said nothing, staring boldly into her face with bright eyes, then looking away. Their jaws moved, and it seemed for a moment that, even in the faint light reflected by the snow, she could see scarlet tongues caressing white teeth and hairy lips. She was no longer certain the jackal heads were masks and wondered if she had been drugged. She had eaten nothing, drunk nothing; yet perhaps some odorless gas had been released in the Packard, perhaps the cigarettes Illingworth had given her had contained some hallucinogen.

“You are of good omen, I know,” she said. “You lead the procession of Osiris.”

At that, the jackal-headed figures turned from her, falling into single file as they walked between the dark buildings. They were very tall, and their footprints in the snow seemed the tracks of beasts. The witch hesitated for a moment, then stepped from the running board to follow the last.

Standing motionless beside his car, Illingworth watched her go. I could never give it up, he thought vaguely. The old Packard; but soon nobody will be able to fix it for me. I could get a Ford. (He still thought of Fords as small, cheap cars, the coupes and hunchbacked sedans of his youth.) Ford be damned! I’ll get a Buick.

He took out his old-fashioned silver cigarette case again and lit a Player with the lighter built into the end. Someone had given him the case, and he tried to recall whom. Dion Fortune? When its flame was snuffed, the night was too dark for him to admire the art-deco design. Very modern though, he thought. More modern than anything they make these days. But smoking in the cold was bad for your heart; he had read that someplace.

He dropped the unconsumed cigarette into the snow and entered one of the dark buildings. A young man at a desk nodded to him. He nodded in return and went past him into another office where a duffle coat hung on a hook and an older man (though Illingworth thought of him as young) sat behind a larger desk.

Illingworth tossed the key onto the desk. “Well, sir,” he said, “I’ve done it.”