Badlands, he thought, that was the word he had been searching for during the last two days and that had eluded him till now. Out in the western area of the two Dakotas were stretches of such lands as these that the first explorers — French, perhaps, although he could not remember with any certainty — had called badlands, bad lands to travel through. Here, unknown years ago great freshets of water, probably originating in torrential rains, had chewed up the land, gouging it out, washing it away, with a few areas of more resistant material withstanding the raging waters to finally turn into the twisted shapes that now remained.
Here, once, in days long gone, this trail they followed might have been an artery of trade. If Sandra had been right, if this ruin once had been a caravansary, then it had been a stopping place for caravans that carried precious freight, perhaps from the city, perhaps to the city. But if to the city, where had been the origin of the caravans? Where lay the other terminus of the route?
Mary came up from behind and stood beside him. “Other nonimportant thoughts?”
“Only trying to look back into the past. If we could see the past, what this place was like some thousands of years ago, we might know somewhat better what is happening now. Sandra suggested that this once had been a stopping place for travelers.”
“It is a stopping place for us.”
“But before us? I just now was speculating that caravans could have passed this way, perhaps many centuries ago. To them it would have been a known land. To us it is unknown.”
“We’ll be all right,” she reassured him.
“We’re moving deeper into the unknown. We have no idea what’s ahead. Someday our food will come to an end. What do we do then?”
“We still have the food the Parson and the Brigadier were carrying. It’ll be a long time before we’ll run out of food. Water is our big concern right now. We must find water tomorrow.”
“Somewhere this desolate land must end,” he said. “We’ll find water when it does. Let’s go back to the fire.”
The moon came up early, a full moon or almost full, flooding the badlands with its unearthly, ghostly light. On the other side of the trail lay a mighty butte, the side presented to them still in darkness, but its shape sharply outlined by the rising moon.
Sitting close beside the fire, Sandra shivered. “It’s a fairyland,” she said, “but a vicious fairyland. It never occurred to me that a fairyland could have a vicious aspect.”
“Your viewpoint,” Lansing said, “is colored by the world you lived in.”
Sandra flared at him. “There is nothing wrong with the world I lived in. It was a beautiful world, filled with beautiful things and beautiful people.”
“That’s what I meant. You have no comparison.”
His words were blotted out by a sudden wail that seemed to come from almost on top of them.
Sandra leaped to her feet and screamed. Mary took a quick step forward, seized her by the shoulders and shook her.
“Shut up!” Mary yelled at her. “Keep quiet!”
“It followed us!” Sandra shrieked. “It is trailing us!”
“Up there,” said Jurgens, pointing toward the butte. The wail had died and for a moment there was silence.
“Up on the rim,” said Jurgens, speaking quietly.
And there it was, the thing that wailed, a monstrous creature outlined against the rising moon, a black cutout against the big face of the moon.
It was wolflike, but much too large to be a wolf, heavier, more full-bodied than a wolf and yet it held the sense of strength and agility that was the mark of wolf. It was a great shaggy beast, unkempt, as if it might have fallen on hard times, foraging desperately for the little food it found, skulking to locate a place to sleep and raked by an agony that drove it to lament against the world.
It flung back its head, lifting its muzzle, and cried again. Not a wail this time, but a sobbing ululation that wavered across the land and quivered among the stars.
Lansing felt a chill run through him and he struggled to remain erect, for his knees were buckling. Sandra was crouched upon the ground, her head shielded by her arms. Mary was bending over her. Lansing felt an arm thrown around his shoulders. Turning his head, he saw that Jurgens was beside him.
“I’m all right,” said Lansing.
“Of course you are,” said Jurgens.
The Waller howled and whimpered, bawled and brayed its grief. It went on forever, or seemed to go on forever, and then, as suddenly as it had come, was gone. The moon, swimming up the east, showed only the smooth, humped line of the looming butte.
That night, after the three humans were in their sleeping bags and Jurgens stood on watch, the Sniffler came out of the night and sniffed all about the firelit circle of the camp. Lying in their bags, they listened to the sniffling and were undismayed. After the Wailer on the butte top, he was a welcome friend come visiting.
The next afternoon they came out of the badlands into a narrow but widening green valley and found water in a stream that ran through it. As they traveled along the stream, the valley widened further and the flanking badlands’ skyline drew off and off until it was only a white smudge on the left and right horizons, finally to fade out entirely.
Just before sunset they came upon another stream, a somewhat larger one, flowing from the west, and on the point of land between the two streams, where they flowed together, the travelers came upon an inn.
22
When they pushed the door open, they found themselves in a large common room, with a fireplace at one end. Before the fireplace was a large table ringed with chairs. With their backs toward the new arrivals, two people sat in chairs, facing the fire. A dumpy little woman with a moonlike face hurried from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a checkered apron tied about her middle.
“So you are already here,” she gasped. “You catch me by surprise. You arrive sooner than I thought.”
She halted in front of them, still wiping her hands, and squinted at them out of her moon face. She put up a hand to brush a straggling lock of hair out of her face.
“My, my,” she said, in mild exclamation, “there are four of you! You lost no more than two in passing through the city. The people sitting by the fire lost four, and there are bands that are all gobbled up.”
Some small sound made Lansing glance toward the other end of the room, the shadowed area away from the fire, and there he saw the card players crouched around a table, intent upon their game and paying no attention to the arrival of the party. The noise he had heard, he realized, had been the soft slapping-down of cards upon the tabletop.
He nodded toward the players.
“When did they show up?” he asked.
“They came last night,” said the woman. “They went straight to the table and sat down. They’ve been playing ever since.”
The two who had been sitting before the fire had gotten to their feet and were advancing across the room. One of them was a woman, blond, tall and willowy; the other was a man who reminded Lansing of a bond salesman who at one time had tried to sell him a portfolio that was, at best, highly questionable.
The woman held out her hand to Mary. “My name is Melissa. I am not a human, although I may look like one. I’m a puppet.”
She made no further explanation, but shook hands all around.
“I am Jorgenson,” said the man, “and extremely glad to see you. The two of us, I must confess, are frightened. We’ve been cowering here for days, unable to convince ourselves that we should continue on this senseless journey to which we, unwillingly and unwittingly, seem to have been committed.”
“I can appreciate how you might feel that way,” said Lansing. “All of us, I think it safe to say, have felt similar touches.”
