Stories: All-New Tales

very air seemed tense with anticipation.

He chose.

So it was that Johann von Grimmelshausen, sometimes known as Jurgen, escaped the narrow and constricting confines of literature, and of the Mummelsee as well, by becoming truly human and thus subject to the whims of history. Which means that he, of course, died centuries ago. Had he remained a fiction, he would still be with us today, though without the richness of experience which you and I endure every day of our lives.

Was he right to make the choice he did? Only God can tell. And if there is no God, why, then we will never know.

Peter Straub. MALLON THE GURU

NEAR THE END OF WHAT HE later called his “developmental period,” the American guru Spencer Mallon spent four months traveling through India with his spiritual leader, Urdang, a fearsome German with a deceptively mild manner. In the third of these months, they were granted an audience with a yogi, a great holy man who lived in the village of Sankwal. However, an odd, unsettling thing happened as soon as Mallon and Urdang reached the outskirts of the village. A carrion crow plummeted out of the sky and landed, with an audible thump and a skirl of feathers, dead on the dusty ground immediately in front of them. Instantly, villagers began streaming toward them, whether because of the crow or because he and Urdang were fair-skinned strangers, Mallon did not know. He fought the uncomfortable feeling of being surrounded by strangers gibbering away in a language he would never understand, and in the midst of this great difficulty tried to find the peace and balance he sometimes experienced during his almost daily, generally two-hour meditations.

An unclean foot with tuberous three-inch nails flipped aside the dead bird. The villagers drew closer, close enough to touch, and leaning in and jabbering with great intensity, urged them forward by tugging at their shirts and waistbands. They, or perhaps just he, Spencer Mallon, was being urged, importuned, begged to execute some unimaginable service. They wished him to perform some kind of task, but the task remained mysterious. The mystery became clearer only after a rickety hut seemed almost to materialize, miragelike, from the barren scrap of land where it squatted. One of the men urging Mallon along yanked his sleeve more forcefully and implored him, with flapping, birdlike gestures, to go into the hut, evidently his, to enter it and see something-the man indicated the necessity for vision by jabbing a black fingernail at his protuberant right eye.

I have been chosen, Mallon thought. I, not Urdang, have been elected by these ignorant and suffering people.

Within the dim, hot enclosure, he was invited to gaze at a small child with huge, impassive eyes and limbs like twigs. The child appeared to be dying. Dark yellow crusts ringed its nostrils and its mouth.

Staring at Mallon, the trembling villager raised one of his own hands and brushed his fingertips gently against the boy’s enormous forehead. Then he waved Mallon closer to the child’s pallet.

“Don’t you get it?” Urdang said. “You’re supposed to touch the boy.”

Reluctantly, unsure of what he was actually being asked to do and fearful of contracting some hideous disease, Mallon extended one hand and lowered his extended fingers toward the boy’s skeletal head as if he were about to dip them for the briefest possible moment into a pail of reeking fluid drawn from the communal cesspit.

Kid, he thought, for the sake of my reputation, I hope we’re going to see a miracle cure.

At the moment of contact, he felt as though a tiny particle of energy, a radiant erg as quick and flowing as mercury, passed directly from his hand through the fragile wall of the boy’s skull.

In the midst of this extremely interesting and in fact amazing phenomenon, the father collapsed to his knees and began to croon in gratitude.

“How do these people know about me?” he asked.

“The real question is, what do they think you did?” Urdang said. “And how do they think they know it? Once we have had our audience, I suggest we put on our skates.”

Urdang, Mallon realized, had no idea of what had just happened. It was the restoration of a cosmic balance: a bird died, and a child was saved. He had been the fulcrum between death and the restoration. A perfect Indian experience had been given to him. The great yogi would embrace him as he would a son, he would open his house and his ashram and welcome him as a student of unprecedented capabilities.

Proceeding down a narrow lane in the village proper, Mallon carelessly extended two fingers and ran them along a foot or two of the mud-plastered wall at his side. He had no plan, no purpose beyond just seeing what was going to happen, for he knew that in some fashion his touch would alter the universe. The results of his test were deeply gratifying: on the wall, the two lines traced by his fingers glowed a brilliant neon blue that brightened and intensified until it threatened to sear the eyes. The villagers spun around and waved their arms, releasing an ecstatic babble threaded with high-pitched cries of joy. Along with everybody else, Mallon had stopped moving to look at the marvelous, miraculous wall. An electrical buzz and hum filled all the spaces within his body; he felt as though he could shoot sparks from his fingers.

I should touch that kid all over again, he thought. He’d zoom right up off the bed.

In seconds, the vibrant blue lines cooled, shrank, and faded back into the dull khaki of the wall. The villagers thrust forward, rubbed the wall, flattened themselves against it, spoke to it in whispers. Those who kissed the wall came away with mouths and noses painted white with dust. Only Mallon, and perhaps Urdang, had been chagrined to see the evidence of his magic vanish so quickly from the world.

The babbling crowd, not at all disappointed, clustered again around him and pushed him forward. Their filthy, black-nailed hands gave him many a fond pat and awed, stroking caress. Eventually they came to a high yellow wall and an iron gate. Urdang pushed himself through the crowd and opened the gate upon a long, lush flower garden. At the distant end of the garden stood a graceful terra-cotta building with a row of windows on both sides of its elaborately tiled front door. The dark heads of young women appeared in the windows. Giggling, the women retreated backward.

The villagers thrust Mallon and Urdang forward. The gates clanged behind them. Far away, an oxcart creaked. Cattle lowed from behind the creamy-looking terra-cotta building.

I am in love with all of India! Mallon thought.

“Come nearer,” said a dry, penetrating voice.

A small man in a dhoti of dazzling white sat in the lotus position just in front of a fountain placed in the middle of the garden. A moment before, Mallon had noticed neither the man nor the fountain.

“I believe that you, sir, are Urdang,” the man said. “But who is your most peculiar follower?”

“His name is Spencer Mallon,” Urdang said. “But, Master, with all due respect, he is not peculiar.”

“This man is a peculiarity entire unto himself,” said the little man. “Please sit down.”

They sat before him, adjusting themselves into the lotus position as well as they could, Urdang easily and perfectly, Mallon less so. He considered it extremely likely that in some deeply positive way he actually was peculiar. Peculiarity of his kind amounted to a great distinction, as the Master understood and poor Urdang did not.

Before them, the great holy man contemplated them in a silence mysteriously shaped by the harsh angles and shining curves of his shaven head and hard, nutlike face. Mallon gathered from the quality of the silence that the yogi was after all not unreservedly pleased by the homage of their visit. Of course the difficult element had to be Urdang-the presence of Urdang in this sacred place. After something like nine or ten minutes, the yogi turned his head to one side and, speaking either to the flowers or the splashing fountain, ordered sweet tea and honey cakes. These delights were delivered by two of the dark-haired girls, who wore beautiful, highly colored saris and sandals with little bells on the straps.

“Is it true that when you came into our village, a carrion crow came toppling dead from the sky?” asked the holy man.

Urdang and Mallon nodded.