She sat, if that tense tentative conforming to a chair could be called sitting.
“I was out at East Shaft,” she said. “My people are Identifiers, some of them are, anyway-my family is especially-I mean-” She gulped and let loose all over. I could almost see the tension drain out of her, but it came flooding back as soon as she started talking again. “Identifiers can locate metals and minerals. I felt a pretty piece of chrysocolla down in the shaft and I wanted to get it for you for your collection. I climbed through the fence-oh, I know I shouldn’t have, but I did-and I was checking to see how far down in the shaft the mineral was when-when I looked up and he was there!” She clasped her hands. “He said, ‘Evil must die. I can’t go back because you’re not dead. I let you out of a little fire in this life, so I’ll burn forever. “He who endures to the end-”’ Then he pushed me into the shaft-“
“Into the-” I gasped.
“Of course, I didn’t fall,” she hastened. “I just lifted to the other side of the shaft out of reach, but-but he had pushed me so hard that he-he fell!”
“He fell!” I started up in horror. “He fell? Child, that’s hundreds of feet down onto rocks and water-“
“I-I caught him before he fell all the way,” said Marnie, apologetically. “But I had to do it our way. I stopped his falling-only-only he’s just staying there! In the air! In the shaft! I know the inanimate lift, but he’s alive. And I- don’t-know-how-to-get-him-up!” She burst into tears.
“And if I let him go, he will fall to death. And if I leave him there, he’ll bob up and down and up and-I can’t leave him there!” She flung herself against me, wailing. It was the first time she’d ever let go like that.
Nils had come in at the tail end of her explanation and I filled him in between my muttered comforting of the top of Marnie’s head. He went to the shed and came back with a coil of rope.
“With a reasonable amount of luck, no one will see us,” he said. “It’s a good thing that we’re out here by ourselves.”
Evening was all around us as we climbed the slope behind the house. The sky was high and a clear, transparent blue, shading to apricot, with a metallic orange backing the surrounding hills. One star was out, high above the evening-hazy immensity of distance beyond Margin. We panted up the hill to East Shaft. It was the one dangerous abandoned shaft among all the shallow prospect holes that dotted the hills around us. It had been fenced with barbwire and was forbidden territory to the children of Margin-including Marnie. Nils held down one strand of the barbwire with his foot and lifted the other above it. Marnie slithered through and I scrambled through, snatching the ruffle of my petticoat free from where it had caught on the lower barbs.
We lay down on the rocky ground and edged up to the brink of the shaft. It was darker than the inside of a hat.
“Derwent!” Nils’s voice echoed eerily down past the tangle of vegetation clinging to the upper reaches of the shaft.
“Here I am, Lord.” The voice rolled up flatly, drained of emotion. “Death caught me in the midst of my sin. Cast me into the fire-the everlasting fire I traded a piddlin’ little shed fire for. Kids-dime a dozen! I sold my soul for a seared face. Here I am, Lord. Cast me into the fire.”
Nils made a sound. If what I was feeling was any indication, a deep sickness was tightening his throat. “Derwent!” he called again, “I’m letting down a rope. Put the loop around your waist so we can pull you up!” He laid the rope out across a timber that slanted over the shaft. Down it went into the darkness-and hung swaying slightly.
“Derwent!” Nils shouted. “Caleb Derwent! Get hold of that rope!”
“Here I am, Lord,” came the flat voice again, much closer this time. “Death caught me in the midst of my sin-“
“Marnie,” Nile said over the mindless mechanical reiteration that was now receding below. “Can you do anything?”
“May I?” she asked. “May I, Uncle Nils?”
“Of course,” said Nils. “There’s no one here to be offended. Here, take hold of the rope and-and go down along it so we’ll know where you are.”
So Marnie stepped lightly into the nothingness of the shaft and, hand circling the rope, sank down into the darkness. Nils mopped the sweat from his forehead with his forearm.
“No weight,” he muttered, “not an ounce of weight on the rope!”
Then there was a shriek and a threshing below us. “No! No!” bellowed Derwent, “I repent! I repent! Don’t shove me down into everlasting-I” His words broke off and the rope jerked.
“Marnie!” I cried. “What-what-“
“He’s-his eyes turned up and his mouth went open and he doesn’t talk,” she called up fearfully from the blackness. “I can’t find his thoughts-“
“Fainted!” said Nils. Then he called. “It’s all right, Marnie. He’s only unconscious from fright. Put the rope around him.”
So we drew him up from the shaft. Once the rope snatched out of our hands for several inches, but he didn’t fall! The rope slacked, but he didn’t fall! Marnie’s anxious face came into sight beside his bowed head. “I can hold him from falling,” she said, “but you must do all the pulling. I can’t lift him.”
Then we had him out on the ground, lying flat, but in the brief interval that Nils used to straighten him out he drifted up from the ground about four inches. Marnie pressed him back.
“He-he isn’t fastened to the Earth with all the fastenings. I loosed some when I stopped his fall. The shaft helped hold him. But now I-I’ve got to fasten them all back again. I didn’t learn that part very well at home. Everyone can do it for himself. I got so scared when he fell that I forgot all I knew. But I couldn’t have done it with him still in the shaft anyway. He would have fallen.” She looked around in the deepening dusk. “I need a source of light-“
Light? We looked around us. The only lights in sight were the one star and a pinprick or so in the shadows of the fiat below us.
