Free Live Free

“Is that where we’re going?” the witch asked. “To the airport?” She had a lap robe over her legs, and she was smoking one of his cigarettes.

He nodded.

“I had thought from what you said that these were local people.”

“You must learn above all—do you wish me to call you Madame Serpentina? Your King called you Marie.”

“The former.”

“As you wish. I was saying, Madame Serpentina, that you must learn above all not to ask questions. One looks. One listens. One observes. Perhaps on rare occasions one asks some favor. But one does not question, ever.”

“I know that. I asked you, not them.”

A chain-link fence had appeared on their right, seeming to guard miles of mere empty ground.

“But it is a habit that must be broken,” Illingworth told her. “Who can say what is near, or what is far? Perhaps we will fly—perhaps only you—perhaps neither of us. Watch. Observe and learn. Leave questions to the owl, that wise bird of Minerva, who asks the only important one.”

“Very well, I do not ask. I merely comment. If the airport is our destination, we might have reached it more swiftly on the Interstate Highway.”

“Indeed we might.” Illingworth chuckled. “You are wise, at least, in the ways of the city, Mademoiselle. But is the shortest path thereby the best? Especially when it is also the plainest? I ask only as a matter of information.”

The witch said nothing, grinding out her cigarette in the Packard’s rusty, narrow ashtray. A gate appeared in the fence, flanked by a small metal sign:

MILITARY AREA

KEEP OUT

Illingworth heaved at the Packard’s wheel. Skidding a bit, the big car turned up the gateway and creaked to a halt.

“I should do this, Mademoiselle, and not you. But perhaps you will indulge an old man?” He held out a complicatedlooking key.

The witch took it and stepped onto the running board, and from there to the ground. Illingworth had switched off the Packard’s headlights, but the trifles of moonlight that leaked through the clouds were reflected by the snow that lay everywhere. The phrase darkness made visible floated into her consciousness from some source she could not identify.

She drew her coat more tightly about her, wishing she had put on her gloves. The snow creaked beneath her high-heeled boots, but they did not sink into it—it had been packed, then, by other visitors since it had fallen earlier that day. The military of the sign? Those who were said to hold Ben Free? There seemed no way of knowing.

The gates were closed with a heavy chain. Pulling the lock toward her, she found herself outside herself, viewing everything (the old-fashioned car, the high gate with its sinister crest of barbed wire, the endless snow, the lowering structures she could now see beyond the fence, and her own dark figure) as an Edward Gorey drawing. The people in those drawings seemed always bent upon dismal errands toward bad ends. Was that her own fate? To seek Truth not in a well but down a black tunnel that wound on forever?

The key turned easily, or perhaps she had only twisted it with more force than she realized. The lock and the heavy chain were bitterly cold. She let them drop and pushed one side of the gate back; as she did so, a faint blue light kindled far behind one of the dark windows of one of the dark buildings. It should have cheered her, but it did not.

Illingworth’s old Packard crept forward with snow breaking like rabbit bones under the wheels. The car had seemed cold to the witch when she had ridden in it; now in memory it was a haven of warmth and comfort, possibly even of safety. She wanted to get back in at once, but she knew the entrance to such a place could not be left open. Laboriously she closed the gate and snapped the icy lock. When she looked for the blue light again, it was gone.

Despite the size of the Packard, the high front seat was cramped. Illingworth leaned across it easily to throw wide the door for her, then held out an age-spotted, enormously long hand. “Thank you, Mademoiselle,” he said.

She was seized by a desire to retain the key, but she gave it to him as though no such wish had entered her mind, carefully noting the pocket—the right outer pocket of his overcoat—into which he put it.

His sharp knee came up, then subsided as he pushed down the long clutch pedal. The hand that had taken the key settled on the cracked bone knob of the vertical gear-shift and pulled it back with a solid chunk! “Like a tractor,” she said, surprising herself. She had spoken too softly for him to hear, or he was too intent on steering the big car into the narrow space between two of the dark buildings. He should have been a farmer, she thought. That is a farmer’s face, those are farmer’s hands. He would have sons by now and grandsons, red cattle upon wide green fields, plantations of yellow corn. Something went wrong, many years ago, for him.

Then she recalled that she had entertained similar thoughts about Ben Free, an old man so clearly rural confined to a rotting house in a city slum. She tried to recall just how Free had looked on that rainy evening when they had sat staring at his flickering TV, but the face that rose in her mind was not Free’s but the King’s. She realized for the first time that something had gone wrong many years ago for him too, and for all his dark, singing, swindling people.

The Packard ground to a stop. “Wait a moment, Mademoiselle, before you get out,” Illingworth said. “I have given you very little advice on our drive, if only because I have so little to give. I know,” he hesitated for a long moment. “I know hardly more of what you face tonight than you do yourself.”

“You have advised me not to ask questions,” she reminded him.

“I have, yes, and it was good advice; I stand by it still. Do not question—observe. Accept what you see and try to learn from it. You are aware, I hope, that there were races upon this earth before our own.”