Out of Their Minds (14 page)

“Kathy,” I asked, “where are we?”

“We must be on top of South Mountain. I'd just passed through Chambersburg.”

“Yes,” I said, remembering, “just short of Gettysburg.” Although when I had asked the question, that had not been exactly what I'd meant.

“You don't realize what happened, Horton. We might have both been killed.”

I shook my head. “Not killed. Not here.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, irritated at me.

“Those oaks,” I said. “Where have you seen those oaks before?”

“I've never seen …”

“Yes, you have,” I said. “You must have. When you were a kid. In a book about King Arthur, or maybe Robin Hood.”

She gasped and reached her hand out to my arm. “Those old romantic, pastoral drawings …”

“That is right,” I said. “All oak trees in this land, most likely, are that kind of oaks, and all poplars tall and stately and all pine trees most triangular, as in a picture book.”

Her hand tightened on my arm. “That other land. The place that friend of yours …”

“Perhaps,” I said. “Perhaps.”

For even knowing that it could be no other place, that it what Kathy said were true, we'd both be dead if it were not that other land, it still was a hard thing to accept.

“But I thought,” said Kathy, “that it would be full of ghosts and goblins and other horrid things.”

“Horrid things,” I said. “Yes, I'd think you'd find them here. But more than likely some good things as well.”

For if this were actually the place my old friend had hypothesized, then it held all the legends and the myths, all the fairy tales that man had dreamed hard enough for them to become a part of him.

I opened the door of the car and stepped out.

The sky was blue—perhaps a shade too blue—a deep, intense and still very gentle blue. The grass was slightly greener, it seemed to me, than grass had the right to be, and yet in that extra-greenness there was a sense of gladness, the kind of feeling an eight-year-old boy might have in walking barefoot through the soft, new grass of spring.

Standing there and looking at it, I realized that the place was entirely storybook. In some subtle way that I could sense, but could not really name, it was not the old and solid earth, but a bit too perfect to be any place on Earth. It looked the way that painted illustrations looked.

Kathy came around the car to stand beside me.

“It's so peaceful here,” she said. “You really can't believe it.”

A dog came pacing up the hill toward us—pacing, not trotting. He was a crazy-looking dog. His ears were long and he tried to hold them upright, but the upper half of them folded over and hung down. He was big and ungainly and he carried his whiplike tail straight up in the air like a car antenna. He was smooth-coated and had big feet and was unbelievably skinny. He held his angular head high and he was grinning, with a fine display of teeth, and the funny thing about it was that they were human instead of canine teeth.

He moved up close to us and then stopped and stretched his front paws out on the ground and put his chin down on them. His rear end was elevated and his tail went round and round, revolving in a circle. He was very glad to see us.

Far down the slope someone whistled sharply and impatiently. The dog sprang to his feet, swinging around in the direction from which the whistle had come. The whistle sounded again and with an apologetic backward look at us, the caricature of a dog went swarming down the hill. He ran awkwardly, his back feet reaching forward to overlap his front feet, and his tail, canted at an angle of forty-five degrees, swung furiously in a circle of overwhelming happiness.

“I've seen that dog before,” I said. “I know that I have seen him somewhere.”

“Why,” said Kathy, surprised at my nonrecognition, “it was Pluto. Mickey Mouse's dog.”

I found that I was angry at myself for my stupidity. I should have recognized the dog immediately. But when one is all set to see a goblin or a fairy, he does not expect to have a cartoon character come popping out at him.

But the cartoon characters would be here, of course—the entire lot of them. Doc Yak and the Katzenjammer Kids, Harold Teen and Dagwood and, as well, all the fantastic Disney characters let loose upon my world.

Pluto had run up to see us and Mickey Mouse had whistled him away and we, the two of us, I thought, accepted it as a not unusual fact. If a man had stood off from this place, to one side of it, and had looked upon it in a logical, human manner, he never could have accepted it. Under no circumstances could he have admitted there was such a world or that he could be in it. But when he was there and could not stand aside, the doubt all dropped away, the zaniness rubbed off.

“Horton,” Kathy asked, “what do we do now? Do you think the car could manage on that road?”

“We could take it slow,” I said. “In low. And it might get better as we went along.”

She walked around the car and got behind the wheel. She reached for the key and turned it and absolutely nothing happened. She switched it off and turned it once again and there was no sound, not even the clunking of a balky starter.

I walked around to the front of it, unlatched the hood and lifted it. I don't know why I bothered. I am no mechanic. There was nothing I possibly could have done to get at the trouble.

I leaned over the radiator and had a look at the motor and it looked all right to me. Half of it could have been missing and it still would have looked all right to me.

A gasp and a thump jerked me upright and I banged my head against the hood.

“Horton!” Kathy cried.

I stepped quickly to one side of the car and Kathy was sitting beside the road. Her face was twisted up in pain.

“My foot,” she said.

Her left foot, I saw, was wedged tightly in a rut.

“I got out of the car,” she said, “and stepped back, not looking where I stepped.”

I knelt down beside her and worked her foot free as gently as I could, leaving the shoe jammed in the rut. Her ankle was red and bruised.

“What a stupid thing to do,” she said.

“It hurts?”

“You're damned right it hurts. I think that it is sprained.”

The ankle looked as if it might be sprained. And what in hell, I wondered, did one do with a sprained ankle in a place like this? There'd be no doctors, of course. I seemed to remember that you fixed a sprain with an elastic bandage, but there was no elastic bandage, either.

“We ought to get the stocking off,” I said. “If it starts to swell …”

She hiked up her skirt and unfastened a garter, pushing the stocking down. I managed to work it down over the ankle and once it was off, there could be no doubt that the ankle was badly hurt. It was inflamed and there was some swelling.

“Kathy,” I said, “I don't know what to do. If you have some idea …”

“It's probably not so bad,” she said, “although it hurts. In a day or two it should be better. We have the car for shelter. Even if it won't run, it will be a place to stay.”

“There might be someone who could help,” I said. “I don't know what to do. If we had a bandage. I could rip up my shirt, but it should be an elastic …”

“Someone to help? In a place like this!”

“It's worth a try,” I said. “It's not all ghouls and goblins. Perhaps not even many of them. They are out-of-date. There would be others …”

She nodded. “Perhaps you're right. That idea of using the car for shelter doesn't cover everything. We'll need food and water, too. But maybe we're getting scared too soon. Maybe I can walk.”

“Who's getting scared?” I asked.

“Don't try to kid me,” said Kathy, sharply. “You know we're in a jam. We know nothing about this place. We're foreigners. We have no right to be here.”

“We didn't ask to come here.”

“But that makes no difference, Horton.”

And I don't suppose it did. Someone apparently wanted us to be here. Someone had brought us here.

Thinking about it, I grew a little cold. Not for myself—or, at least, I don't think for myself. Hell, I could face anything. After rattlesnakes, sea serpent, and werewolves, there was nothing that could faze me. But it wasn't fair for Kathy to be dragged into it.

“Look,” I said, “If I got you in the car, you could lock the doors and I could take a short, fast look around.”

She nodded. “If you'd help me.”

I didn't help her. I simply picked her up and put her in the car. I eased her into the seat and reached across her to lock the opposite door.

“Roll up the window,” I told her, “and lock the door. Yell if something shows up. I won't be far away.”

She started to roll up the window, then rolled it down again, reaching down to the floor of the car. She came up with the baseball bat and stuck it through the window.

“Here, take this,” she said.

I felt a little foolish going down the path with the bat in hand. But it made a good heft in my fist and it might be handy.

Where the path curved to go around the big oak I stopped and looked back. She was staring through the windshield and I waved at her and went on down the path.

The ground pitched sharply. Below me the forest closed in, dense and heavy. There was no breeze and the trees stood up motionless, the greenness of their leaves glinting in the sun of late afternoon.

I went on down the road and at a place where it twisted again to dodge another tree, I found the signpost. It was old and weatherbeaten, but the legend still was clear. TO THE INN, it said, with an arrow pointing.

Back at the car, I told her, “I don't know what kind of inn, but it might be better than just staying here. There might be someone who could doctor up the ankle. At least we could get some cold water or some hot water—which is it you use to help a sprain?”

“I don't know,” she said, “and I don't like the idea of an inn, but I suppose we can't stay sitting here. We have to get an idea of what is going on, what we should expect.”

“I didn't like the idea of an inn any better than she did—I didn't like anything that was going on; but what she said was right. We couldn't stay huddled on that hilltop and wait for whatever was about to happen.

So I got her out and perched her on the hood while I locked the door and pocketed the key. Then I picked her up and started down the hill.

“You forgot the bat,” she said.

“There was no way to carry it.”

“I could have carried it.”

“More than likely we won't need it,” I told her and went on down the road, picking my way as carefully as I could so I wouldn't stumble.

Just below the signpost, the road twisted again to make its way around a massive heap of boulders and as I rounded the boulders, there on the distant ridge was the castle. I stopped dead when I saw it, shocked into immobility by the unexpectedness of the sight.

Take all the beautiful, fancy, romantic, colorful paintings of castles that you have ever seen and roll them all together, combining all their good points. Forget everything you have ever read about a castle as a dirty, smelly, unsanitary, drafty habitation and substitute instead the castle of the fairy tale, King Arthur's Camelot, Walt Disney's castles. Do all of this and you might get some slight idea of what that castle looked like.

It was the stuff of dreams; it was the old romanticism and the chivalry come across the years. It sat upon the distant ridgetop in its gleaming whiteness, and the multicolored pennants mounted on its spires and turrets rippled in the air. It was such a perfect structure that one knew instinctively that there never could be another one quite like it.

“Horton,” Kathy said, “will you put me down. I'd like to sit awhile and simply look at it. Did you know it was there all the time and you never said a word …”

“I didn't know it was there,” I told her. “I came back when I saw the sign about the inn.”

“We could go to the castle, maybe,” she said. “Not the inn.”

“We could try,” I said. “There must be a road.”

I put her down upon the ground and sat down beside her.

“I think the ankle may be getting better,” she said. “I think that I could manage even if I had to walk a ways.”

I took a look at it and shook my head. It was red and shiny and had swollen quite a lot.

“When I was a little girl,” she said, “I thought castles were shining and romantic things. Then I took a couple of courses on the society of medieval days and I learned the truth about them. But here is a shining castle with all its pennons flying and …”

“It's the kind of place,” I said, “that you thought about, the kind of castle that you and a million other little girls formed within their romantic little minds.”

And it wasn't only castles, I reminded myself. Here in this land resided all the fantasies that mankind had developed through the centuries. Here, somewhere, Huckleberry Finn floated on his raft down a never-ending river. Somewhere in this world Red Ridinghood went tripping down a woodland path. Somewhere Mr. Magoo blundered along on his near-blind course through a series of illogical circumstances.

And what was the purpose of it, or did there have to be a purpose? Evolution was often a blind sort of operation, appearing on the surface to be of no great purpose. And humans, perhaps, should not attempt to find the purpose here, for humans were too entirely human to conceive, much less understand, any manner of existence other than their own. Exactly as the dinosaurs would have been incapable of accepting the idea (if dinosaurs ever had ideas) of the human intelligence which was to follow them.

But this was a world, I told myself, that was a part of the human mind. All things, all creatures, all ideas in this world or this dimension or this other place were the products of the human mind. This was, in all likelihood, an extension of the human mind, a place that took the thought the human mind had formed and used that thought as raw material by which a new world and a new evolutionary process had been fabricated.