Way Station

4

"Give me that pencil, please," said Lewis.

Hardwicke quit rolling it between his palms and banded it across.

"Paper, too?" he asked.

"If you please," said Lewis.

He bent above the desk and drew rapidly.

"Here," he said, handing back the paper.

Hardwicke wrinkled his brow.

"But it makes no sense," he said. "Except for that figure underneath."

"The figure eight, lying on its side. Yes, I know. The symbol for infinity."

"But the rest of it?"

"I don't know," said Lewis. "it is the inscription on the tombstone. I copied it…"

"And you know it now by heart."

"I should. I've studied it enough."

"I've never seen anything like it in my life," said Hardwicke. "Not that I'm an authority. I really know little at all in this field."

"You can put your mind at rest. It's nothing that anyone knows anything about. It bears no resemblance, not even the remotest, to any language or any known inscription. I checked with men who know. Not one, but a dozen of them. I told them I'd found it on a rocky cliff. I am sure that most of them think I am a crackpot. One of those people who are trying to prove that the Romans or the Phoenicians or the Irish or whatnot had pre-Colombian settlements in America."

Hardwicke put down the sheet of paper.

"I can see what you mean," he said, "when you say you have more questions now than when you started. Not only the question of a young man more than a century old, but likewise the matter of the slickness of the house and the third gravestone with the undecipherable inscription. You say you've never talked with Wallace?"

"No one talks to him. Except the mailman. He goes out on his daily walks and he packs this gun."

"People are afraid to talk with him?"

"Because of the gun, you mean."

"Well, yes, I suppose that was in the back of my mind. I wondered why he carried it."

Lewis shook his head. "I don't know. I've tried to tie it in, to find some reason he always has it with him. He has never fired the rifle so far as I can find. But I don't think the rifle is the reason no one talks with him. He's an anachronism, something living from another age. No one fears him, I am sure of that. He's been around too long for anyone to fear him. Too familiar. He's a fixture of the land, like a tree or boulder. And yet no one feels quite comfortable with him, either. I would imagine that most of them, if they should come face to face with him, would feel uncomfortable. For he's something they are not-something greater than they are and at the same time a good deal less. As if he were a man who had walked away from his own humanity. I think that, secretly, many of his neighbors may be a bit ashamed of him, shamed because he has, somehow, perhaps ignobly, side-stepped growing old, one of the penalties, but perhaps, as well, one of the rights of all humankind. And perhaps this secret shame may contribute in some part to their unwillingness to talk about him."

"You spent a good deal of time watching him?"

"There was a time I did. But now I have a crew. They watch on regular shifts. We have a dozen spots we watch from, and we keep shifting them around. There isn't an hour, day in, day out, that the Wallace house isn't under observation."

"This business really has you people bugged."

"I think with reason," Lewis said. "There is still one other thing."

He bent over and picked up the brief case he had placed beside his chair. Unsnapping it, he took out a sheaf of photographs and handed them to Hardwicke.

"What do you make of these?" he asked. Hardwicke picked them up. Suddenly he froze. The color drained out of his face. His hands began to tremble and he laid the pictures carefully on the desk. He had looked at only the top one; not any of the others.

Lewis saw the question in his face.

"In the grave," he said. "The one beneath the headstone with the funny writing."