“Do you think I should look?” Nolon asked back.
Grissul stared at the table, allowing moments to accumulate, then said, “I don’t care, Mr. Nolon, I have to say that what happened tonight was very unpleasant.”
“Something like that would have happened sooner or later,” Nolon replied. “He was too much the dreamer, let’s be honest. Nothing he said made any sense to speak of, and he was always saying more than he should. Who knows who heard what.”
“I’ve never heard screaming like that.”
“It’s over,” said Nolon quietly.
“But what could have happened to him?” asked Grissul, gripping the shallow glass before him, apparently without awareness of the move.
“Only he could know that for certain,” answered Nolon, who mirrored Grissul’s move and seemingly with the same absence of conscious intent.
“And why did he scream that way, why did he say it was all a trick, a mockery of his dreams, that ‘filthy thing in the earth’? Why did he scream not to be ‘buried forever in that strange, horrible mask’?”
“Maybe he became confused,” said Nolon. Nervously, he began pouring from the thin bottle into each of their glasses.
“And then he cried out for someone to kill him. But that’s not what he wanted at all, just the opposite. He was afraid to you-know-what. So why would he—”
“Do I really have to explain it all, Mr. Grissul?”
“I suppose not,” Grissul said very softly, looking ashamed. “He was trying to get away, to get away with something.”
“That’s right,” said Nolon just as softly, looking around. “Because he wanted to escape from here without having to you-know-what. How would that look?”
“Set an example.”
“Exactly. Now let’s just take advantage of the situation and drink our drinks before moving on.”
“I’m not sure I want to,” said Grissul.
“I’m not sure we have any say in the matter,” replied Nolon.
“Yes, but—”
“Shhh. Tonight’s our night.”
Across the street a shadow fidgeted in the frame of a lighted window. An evening breeze moved through the little park, and the green glow of a candleflame flickered upon two silent faces.
The Shadow at the Bottom of the World
Before there occurred anything of a truly prodigious nature, the season had manifestly erupted with some feverish intent. This, at least, was how it appeared to us, whether we happened to live in town or somewhere outside its limits. (And travelling between town and countryside was Mr. Marble, who had been studying the seasonal signs far longer and in greater depth than we, disclosing prophecies that no one would credit at the time.) On the calendars which hung in so many of our homes, the monthly photograph illustrated the spirit of the numbered days below it: sheaves of cornstalks standing brownish and brittle in a newly harvested field, a narrow house and wide barn in the background, a sky of empty light above, and fiery leafage frolicking about the edges of the scene. But something dark, something abysmal always finds its way into the bland beauty of such pictures, something that usually holds itself in abeyance, some entwining presence that we always know is there. And it was exactly this presence that had gone into crisis, or perhaps had been secretly invoked by small shadowy voices calling out in the midst of our dreams. There came a bitter scent into the air, as of sweet wine turning to vinegar, and there was an hysteric brilliance flourished by the trees in town as well as those in the woods beyond, while along the roads between were the intemperate displays of thornapple, sumac, and towering sunflowers that nodded behind crooked roadside fences. Even the stars of chill nights seemed to grow delirious and take on the tints of an earthly inflammation. Finally, there was a moonlit field where a scarecrow had been left to watch over ground that had long been cleared yet would not turn cold.
Adjacent to the edge of town, the field allowed full view of itself from so many of our windows. It lay spacious beyond tilting fenceposts and under a bright round moon, uncluttered save for the peaked silhouettes of corn shocks and a manlike shape that stood fixed in the nocturnal solitude. The head of the figure was slumped forward, as if a grotesque slumber had overtaken its straw-stuffed body, and the arms were slackly extended in a way that suggested some incredible gesture toward flight. For a moment it seemed to be an insistent wind which was flapping those patched-up overalls and fluttering the worn flannel of those shirt sleeves; and it would seem a forceful wind indeed which caused that stitched-up head to nod in its dreams. But nothing else joined in such movements: the withered leaves of the cornstalks were stiff and unstirring, the trees of the distant woods were in a lull against the clear night. Only one thing appeared to be living where the moonlight spread across that dead field. And there were some who claimed that the scarecrow actually raised its arms and its empty face to the sky, as though declaring itself to the heavens, while others thought that its legs kicked wildly, like those of a man who is hanged, and that they kept on kicking for the longest time before the thing collapsed and lay quiet. Many of us, we discovered, had been nudged from our beds that night, called as witnesses to this obscure spectacle. Afterward, the sight we had seen, whatever we believed its reason, would not rest within us but snatched at the edges of our sleep until morning.
And during the overcast hours of the following day we could not keep ourselves from visiting the place around which various rumors had hastily arisen. As pilgrims we wandered into that field, scrutinizing the debris of its harvest for augural signs, circling that scarecrow as if it were a great idol in shabby disguise, a sacred avatar out of season. But everything upon that land seemed unwilling to support our hunger for revelation, and our congregation was lost in fidgeting bemusement. (With the exception, of course, of Mr. Marble, whose eyes, we recall, were gleaming with illuminations he could not offer us in any words we would understand.) The sky had hidden itself behind a leaden vault of clouds, depriving us of the crucial element of pure sunlight which we needed to fully burn off the misty dreams of the past night. And a vine-twisted stone wall along the property line of the farm was the
