He caught it in the hand that was his own hand, though someone else was moving it; he raised it and half-turned. He was suddenly conscious of a fusillade of gunfire from the roof, and a scattered echo of guns all round the outside of the house. Part of him was surprised, another alien part was not. He started to shoot the teenaged girl in the back of the head, silently shouting No!
His fingers never pulled the trigger.
He caught a second’s glimpse of someone just beside him, whirled and saw the girl, Ellen Braisted, limping swiftly toward him with her barbed-wire amulet loose and catching at her feet. In her hands was an axe-handle club caught up from somewhere. She struck at Chandler’s head, with a face like an eagle’s, impersonal and determined. The blow caught him and dazed him, and from behind someone else struck him with something else. He went down.
He heard shouts and firing, but he was stunned. He felt himself dragged and dropped. He saw a cloudy, misty girl’s face hanging over him; it receded and returned. Then a frightful blistering pain in his hand startled him back into full consciousness.
It was the girl, Ellen, still there, leaning over him and, oddly, weeping. And the pain in his hand was the burning flame of a kitchen match. Ellen was doing it, his wrist in one hand, a burning match held to it with the other.
IV
Chandler yelled hoarsely, jerking his hand away.
She dropped the match and jumped up, stepping on the flame and watching him. She had a butcher knife that had been caught between her elbow and her body while she burned him. Now she put her hand on the knife, waiting. “Does it hurt?” she demanded tautly.
Chandler howled, with incredulity and rage: “God damn it, yes! What did you expect?”
“I expected it to hurt,” she agreed. She watched him for a moment more and then, for the first time since he had seen her, she smiled. It was a small smile, but a beginning. A fusillade of shots from outside wiped it away at once. “Sorry,” she said. “I had to do that. Please trust me.”
“Why did you have to burn my hand?”
“House rules,” she said. “Keeps the flame-spirits out, you know. They can’t stand pain.” She took her hand off the knife warily, “it still hurts, doesn’t it?”
“It still does, yes,” nodded Chandler bitterly, and she lost interest in him and got up, looking about the room. Three of the Orphalese were dead, or seemed to be from the casual poses in which they lay draped across a chair on the floor. Some of the others might have been freshly wounded, though it was hard to tell the casualties from the others in view of the Orphalese custom of self-inflicted pain. There was still firing going on outside and overhead, and a shooting-gallery smell of burnt powder in the air. The girl, Ellen Braisted, limped back with the butcher knife held carelessly in one hand. She was followed by the teenager, who wore a smile of triumph—and, Chandler noticed for the first time, a sort of tourniquet of barbed-wire on her left forearm, the flesh puffy red around it “Whopped ’em,” she said with glee, and pointed a .22 rifle at Chandler.
Ellen Braisted said, “Oh, he—Meggie, I mean, he’s all right.” She pointed at his burned palm. Meg approached him with competent care, the rifle resting on her good right forearm and aimed at him as she examined his burn. She pursed her lips and looked at his face. “All right, Ellen, I guess he’s clean. But you want to burn ’em deeper’n that. Never pays to go easy, just means we’ll have to do something else to ’im tomorrow.”
“The hell you will,” thought Chandler, and all but said it; but reason stopped him. In Rome he would have to do Roman deeds. Besides, maybe their ideas worked. Besides, he had until tomorrow to make up his mind about what he wanted to do.
“Ellen, show him around,” ordered the teenager. “I got no time myself. Shoosh! Almost got us that time, Ellen. Got to be more careful, cause the white-handed aren’t clean, you know.” She strutted away, the rifle at trail. She seemed to be enjoying herself very much.
The name of the girl in the barbed-wire bracelet was Ellen Braisted. She came from Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, and Chandler’s first wonder was what she was doing nearly three thousand miles from home.
Nobody liked to travel much these days. One place was as bad as another, except that in the place where you were known you could perhaps count on friends and as a stranger you were probable fair game anywhere else. Of course, there was one likely reason for travel.
She didn’t like to talk about it, that was clear, but that was the reason. She had been possessed. When the teenager trapped her car the day before she had been the tool of another’s will. She had had a dozen sub-machine guns in the trunk and she had meant to deliver them to a party of hunters in a valley just south of McGuire’s Mountain. Chandler said, with some effort, “I must have been—”
“Ellen, I must have been,” she corrected.
“Ellen, I must have been possessed too, just now. When I grabbed the gun.”
“Of course. First time?”
He shook his head. For some reason the brand on his forehead began to throb.
“Well, then you know. Look out here, now.”
They were at the great pier windows that looked out over the valley. Down below was the river, an arc of the railroad tracks, the wooded mountainside he had scaled. “Over there, Chandler.” She was pointing to the railroad bridge.
Wispy gray smoke
