Out of Their Minds (20 page)

They were getting just a bit too curious. Friendly still, of course, but too curious. But they didn't follow it up. There were too many other things they wanted to talk about.

“When you write your piece,” asked Mike, “what do you intend to say of Meade?”

“Why, I don't really know,” I said. “I haven't thought that much about it. He fought a splendid battle here, of course. He made the Southerners come to him. He played their game for once. A strong defense and …”

Jed spat. “That may all be so,” he said. “But he hasn't got no style. Now Mac—there's a man who really had some style.”

“Style, sure,” said Asa, “but he was always letting us get licked. It feels right good, I tell you, to be on the winning side for once.” He looked across the fire at me. “You think we won this one, don't you?”

“I'm sure of it,” I said. “Lee will be pulling out tomorrow. Maybe he's pulling out right now.”

“Some of the men don't think so,” said Mike. “I was talking to some of the Minnesota troops. They figure them crazy Rebs will make another try.”

“I don't think so,” said Jed. “We broke their backs this afternoon. Hell's fire, they came walking up that hill as if they were on parade. They walked right up to us; they walked right into the cannon's mouth. And us blasting away at them the way you'd blast away at targets. We're always being told what a smart general this Lee is, but I tell you there ain't no general smart who will march his men up a pasture slope into the cannon's mouth.”

“Burnside did it at Fredericksburg,” said Asa.

Jed spat. “Burnside wasn't smart. No one ever said he was.”

I finished my coffee, swirled the little that was left in the bottom of the cup to stir up the grounds, and tossed it at the fire. Jed reached out and lifted the pot.

“No more, thanks,” I said. “I must be getting on.”

I didn't want to be getting on. I wanted to stay right where I was and yarn away another hour or so with the three around the fire. The blaze was comfortable and the gully snug.

But I had a deep, underlying hunch that I had best get out when I could. Get away from these men and this battlefield before something else could happen. That bit of flying iron had been close enough. Theoretically, of course, I was in the clear, but I had no confidence in this land, nor in the Referee. The quicker out the better.

I rose to my feet. “Thanks for the food and coffee. It was something that I needed.”

“Where you going now?”

“I think, first of all, I'll hunt up that doctor.”

Jed nodded. “I would if I were you,” he said.

I turned about and walked away, expecting each second that they would call me back. But they didn't and I went stumbling down the gully in the dark.

I had a crude, half-remembered map in mind and as I walked I figured out what I would do. Not the Taneytown Road that would keep me too close to the battlefield. I'd cross the Taneytown Road and keep on the east until I hit the Baltimore Pike and I'd follow that southeast. Although just why I bothered, I don't know. One place probably was as good as another in this weird place. I wasn't going anywhere, actually; I was just moving around. The Devil had said that Kathy was safe, back in the human world again, but there had been no hint from him as to how a man could get back into the human world and I wasn't downright sure that I could believe what the Devil said of Kathy. He was a shifty critter and not one to be trusted.

I reached the end of the gully and came out in a valley. Ahead of me lay the Taneytown Road. There were camp-fires here and there and I veered around them. But stumbling through the dark, I fetched up against a warm body that had hair and that snorted at me. I backed away and, squinting, made out it was a horse, tied to a stillstanding section of a small rail fence.

The horse slanted its ears forward and nickered softly at me. It probably had been standing there a long time and it may have been frightened and I got the feeling that it was glad to see a human being. It wore a saddle and was tied to the fence by a bridle rein.

“Hi, horse,” I said. “Howsa fellow?”

It whuffled at me and I walked up and stroked its neck. It swung its head around and tried to nuzzle me.

I stepped back and had a look around and there was no one near. So I untied the reins and got them over the horse's neck and straightened out, then rather awkwardly climbed into the saddle. The horse seemed pleased to be untied and swung obediently as I reined it.

There was a tangle of wagons on the Taneytown Road, but I managed to get through them without anyone hailing me and once clear of the road, I headed the horse southeast and he took off at an easy lope.

We met small groups of men, plodding off somewhere, and had to swing around a battery of guns, but gradually the traffic cleared and the horse finally reached the Baltimore Pike and we went pounding down it, away from Gettysburg.

16

A few miles out of Gettysburg the road came to an end, as I should have known it would, for back there on South Mountain, where Kathy and I had landed in this place, there had been only a cart track and nothing like a road. The Pike and Taneytown Road and all the other roads. perhaps even Gettysburg itself, had been no more than a stage setting for the battle, and once one left the battle area, there was no need of roads.

Once the road gave out, I gave up any attempt to pick a route and let the horse go as it pleased. There was really no point to keeping on at all. There was no place I had in mind to go, but I let the horse keep on. For some reason, it seemed that it might be a good idea to build up a little distance.

Riding under the stars, in soft summer weather, I had the first chance since I'd come into the land to try to do some thinking. I reviewed in my mind all that had happened since I'd turned off the freeway onto the winding road that led to Pilot Knob and I asked a lot of questions about all the things that had happened after that, but there seemed no ready answers. When that became apparent, I realized that I was searching for answers that would serve my human logic and I knew that was a fruitless search. In the face of all I knew, there was no reason to believe that human logic had a thing to do with what was going on. I admitted to myself that the only possible explanation must be based upon the speculation in my old friend's manuscript.

Therefore there was a place, and I was in it, where the force-substance (a very awkward term) of imagination became the basic stuff from which matter, or a semblance of matter, or a new concept of matter, might be formed. I worked for quite a while to work out a statement which would cover the situation, to reduce the
maybe
's and the
if
's to a workable proportion, but it was a hopeless job and, finally, for working purposes, I labeled this place that I was in the Land of Imagination and let it go at that. It was a cowardly way to. do it, but maybe later on someone could work out a definition for it.

So here was this land, forged of all the fantasy, all the make-believe, all the fairy tales and folk stories, all the fictions and traditions of the race of Man. And in this land stalked and lurked and ran all the creatures and all the situations the ever-busy minds of all the flighty little primates had ever given birth. Here (on any night, or just on Christmas Eve?) Santa Claus went storming through the skies in his reindeer-drawn sleigh. Here, somewhere (on any night, or only of a Hallowe'en?) Ichabod Crane whipped his jaded mount down a rocky road in a desperate effort to reach a magic bridge before the Headless Horseman could hurl the pumpkin that hung at his saddle-horn. Here Daniel Boone stalked Kentucky meadows with his long rifle slung across his arm. Here the Sandman roamed and foul and grinning things danced jigs upon the ridgepole. And here the battle of Gettysburg was fought (again and yet again, or only for special purposes?), but not the battle as it had been fought, but fought in the polite and glorious and almost bloodless fashion in which the public mind in later years had conceived of its being fought. And other battles, too, perhaps, the great and bloody battles that loomed large in significance and larger in tradition. Waterloo and Marathon, Shiloh, Concord Bridge and Austerlitz, and in the days to come, when they'd become embedded in tradition, the mindless and mechanical and humanly agonizing battles of World Wars I and II, or Korea and Vietnam. In other years, as well, the fabulous Roaring Twenties, with the raccoon coats, the hip flasks and the flappers, the Stutz Bearcat and the gangsters, with machine guns comfortably ensconced in violin cases, would become a part of this land as well—perhaps already were.

All of these, all that man could think of or had thought of long enough—all the madness and the wit, all the buffoonery and the viciousness, all the lightness and the sadness which all men, in all ages, from the cave up to the present moment, had fashioned in their minds were in this very place.

It was madness, surely, when viewed in the cold light of human logic, but there it was, all around me. I rode through a landscape that was not the kind of landscape that one would find on earth, but a fairy landscape frosted by the starlight that came from stars among which was not recognizable a single one of the constellations that one saw on the human earth. A land of the impossible, where silly saws were laws, where there could be no such thing as logic since it all was built of imagination, which knew no kind of logic.

The horse kept on going, taking it at a walk where the going was uncertain, loping along quite smartly when the way was clear. My head ached a little and when I put my hand up to the wound, my fingers still were sticky, but a scab, I could feel, was beginning to form and it seemed that everything was all right. Otherwise, I felt better than I had imagined that I might and I rode along content, through the frosty landscape, beneath the glitter of the stars.

I expected that at any moment we might meet some of the strange denizens of this fantastic land, but none of them showed up. The horse finally struck a trail somewhat better traveled than the one he had been following and settled down into a lope. The miles went spinning out behind me and the air grew somewhat chilly. At times, far in the distance, I saw occasional habitations that were difficult to recognize, although one of them looked a good deal like a palisaded fort, the kind of place that the westward-trending pioneers had built when they'd shoved for the new lands of Kentucky. At times, distant lights glowed through the star-struck darkness, but there was no way of telling what the lights might signify.

Suddenly the horse came to a jarring stop and it was only by sheer luck that I didn't keep on going, sailing straight above his head. He had been loping along, unconcernedly, like a contented rocking horse, and his halt came without warning, a stiff-legged skidding to a stop. His ears were slanted forward and his nostrils flared, as if he might be searching for something in the dark ahead.

Then he screamed in terror and leaped sidewise off the path, pivoting on his hind legs and heading at a frenzied gallop straight into the woods. I stayed on his back only by throwing myself upon his neck and grabbing at his mane and it was well I did, for there were occasional low branches that certainly would have brained me if I'd been upright in the saddle.

His senses must have been considerably sharper than mine, for it was not until he was off the path and running in the woods that I heard the mewling sound that ended with a slobber and caught a hint of the carrion odor that rode along the wind, while back of us there were crashing, crunching sounds, as if some huge, ungainly, terrible body was making its rapid way along the direction of our flight.

Hanging desperately to the horse's mane, I stole a brief glance backward and saw, out of the corner of one eye, the sickly greenness of some sort of shape that floundered in our wake.

Then, so quickly that I had no inkling of it until after it had happened, the horse was gone out from under me. He went out from under me as if he'd never been there and I fell straight down, landing first upon my feet, then falling backward and skidding on my bottom through the forest loam for a dozen feet or so before I shot out over the lip of a declivity and went rolling to its foot. I was shaken up and battered somewhat superficially, but I was able to stagger to my feet and face the cloud of sickly green that was plowing through the woods behind me.

I knew exactly what had happened and I should have expected it and been ready for it, but it had seemed so commonplace and ordinary, riding on the horse, that I'd never thought of the probability that at any moment the re-enactment of Gettysburg would come to an end. And now it had come to an end and back on those ridges and on the round-topped hills the still-living men and the huddled bodies scattered on the field, the shattered cannon, the now-spent cannon balls, the battle flags and all the other things that had been formed and gathered for the battle had simply disappeared. The play was over and the actors and the scenery had been whisked away and since the horse I had been riding had been a part of it, he'd also been whisked away.

I was left alone in this little sloping valley that ran through the woods to face the revolting greenishness that was raging on my trail—green in color and green, too, in the terrible smell of rottenness that went ahead of it. It was mewling more fiercely now and between the sounds of mewling were the sounds of slobbering and an eerie chittering that grated on my soul and as I stood there, facing back toward it, I finally knew exactly what it was—the creature dreamed by Lovecraft, the ravener of the world, the thing out of the Cthulhu mythos, the Old One that had been barred from Earth and now was back again, festering with a ghoulish, hideous hunger that would strip more than mere flesh from off the bones, that would numb the soul and life and mind of the one it captured with a nameless horror.

I felt the horror—I felt the hairs rising on my nape and my guts were churning and there was a sickness in me that made me somewhat less than human; but there was an anger, too, and it was the anger, I am sure, that kept me sane. That goddamned Referee, I thought, that dirty little double-crossing stinker! He hated me, of course—he had a right to hate me, for I had beaten him not only once, but twice, and I had turned my back and walked away from him, contemptuously, while he, squatting on the wheel of the ruined cannon, had tried to call me back. But rules were rules, I told myself, and I'd played those rules the way that he had called them and now I should, by right, be beyond all jeopardy.