Specimens Part 1

Specimens.

Fred Saberhagen.

ONE.

Looking from the high narrow windows in the southeastern bedroom, Dan Post could see a vague crescent of daytime moon. Far below it, on the horizon and some twenty-five miles from where he stood, the tallest building in the world was plainly visible along with two slightly lesser G.o.ds of Chicago's Loop. The eaves on the old suburban house were narrow, and even the high-lat.i.tude sun of summer could strike in under them to get at the gla.s.s in the old windows. The gla.s.s, mottled with wavy distortions, might be as old as the house itself. Dan thought he could see how the panes had begun to purple, like desert gla.s.s, from decade upon decade of the sun hurling its fire at them across ninety million miles of s.p.a.ce.

He leaned back a little from the window and s.h.i.+fted his weight meditatively on the wide, solid planks of the old floor, which squeaked just very slightly as he did so. Dan was rather heavy but solid, a muscular man in is mid-thirties. A slightly concave nose gave him a somewhat boyish look. His hair was darkly unruly above a pale, tan-resistant face. Today he was dressed in doubleknit slacks and sport s.h.i.+rt for looking at old houses in mid-June; he had to admit, though, that the upper floor of this vacant, air- conditionerless place wasn't as unmercifully hot as he had expected. There was an attic above, which helped, and the windows had been left slightly open. The place must catch every breeze: it was on the top of a fairly steep hill.

"So," he asked, "this house is supposed to be a hundred and forty years old?"

"That's right." Ventris, the real estate agent, was standing relaxed in the bedroom doorway. It was a big bedroom by modern standards, and the house had three more like it on its second floor, not one of them smaller than twelve feet by thirteen. A room or so away Nancy and the kids were discussing something in low voices.

''They say," Ventris continued, ''that it used to be a way station on the Underground Railroad. You know, before the Civil War, when slaves were being smuggled north to Canada."

"Well, I suppose that's possible." Dan's interest was no more than polite. The house did not strike him as likely to be historically interesting, or even extremely old. The walls and woodwork in this bedroom had been painted light green not long ago, determinedly made new-looking by interior latex put on somewhat carelessly with a roller, leaving a few spatters on the worn but solid floor. Anyway, the railroad Dan was concerned about, the commuters' kind, ran through Wheatfield Park about half a mile to the north of here, and according to Ventris the station was just over a mile away. Dan supposed that if he got up early every day and walked, it would help him keep in shape. Of course he could ride into the city with Nancy, who would be driving in anyway, as long as she kept her job . . . they would have to see how that worked out.

"Of course," Ventris added, "people tend to say that about any house this old, at least in this part of the country." While leading Dan and Nancy through two other houses earlier in the day, Ventris had shown himself to be very much the low-pressure type of salesman. Sandy-haired and paunchy, he seemed on the way to aging gracefully in the real estate business. He didn't look old enough to have got into it after retirement from something else.

"What was that about the Underground Railroad?" Nancy, wearing slacks and a summery blouse, now came with Dan's two children to join him in the southeast bedroom. The two kids were somewhat silent and thoughtful today, as if this business of looking at houses brought home to them forcefully the fact mat their good pal Nancy was soon going to a.s.sume the office of motherhood over them. Millie was eleven and Sam was nine, and both of them had their father's st.u.r.dy frame and wild dark hair. But often, as now, when they were quiet and thoughtful, he could see their mother in their eyes. Cancer, a year and a half ago. The wounds of the survivor healed, the children changed and grew. Life went on, and the gonads like all the other organs kept working away, and now here he was, picking out another home in which to settle a new bride.

"My girl, the history nut." Dan put an arm around Nancy and squeezed her shoulders.

"Mr. Ventris was just saying that this might have been a station, or whatever they called their stopping places. But never mind that; how would you like to live here?"

"There's certainly lots of room." Nancy brushed back her straight black hair. "But oh, it's such a hodgepodge." She was a rather tall girl, who towered over her little j.a.panese- born mother in Chicago, and was almost of a height with her American father and her husband-to-be. She was in her early twenties, years younger than Dan. "The downstairs looks like some decorator's sample case."

Today Nancy was evidently not going to be distracted by historical discoveries, but others might. Millie took her father's hand and looked around, and pondered aloud: "I wonder where they hid the slaves."

"Maybe the bas.e.m.e.nt or the attic." This reminded Dan of another point he meant to check, and he walked out into the s.p.a.cious upstairs hall and stood looking up at a closed trapdoor in the ceiling. "Is there a chair around somewhere?" he asked Ventris. "I'd like to take a look at the attic now if possible."

"I think there is. Let me check." Ventris moved away to rummage in a closet, and Dan rejoined Nancy and the kids in the southeast bedroom, where they were enjoying the view from the window.

"This is neat, being up on a hill," young Sammy commented.

''Not bad,'' Dan agreed. From up here one could see a lot of treetops, and several of their prospective neighbors' roofs. From this place, in mid-June, it seemed a hot, green land in which they dwelt. Of the great metropolis that sprawled around them not much was visible except for part of the highway that ran past a block to the east, the shopping center on the highway's other side, and the three towers looming over the horizon to mark the location of the central city.

This house would be wind-blasted in the winter (one reason Dan wanted to go up into the attic was to check the insulation) but the summer breezes were certainly pleasant, and the occupant would never have to worry about a flood, even in the wettest spring.

The hill that the house stood on was perhaps the highest place in the generally flat terrain for a mile or more around.

The settler who had built this place had doubtless a wide choice of sites - and like many others of his time he had chosen high. At the time from which the house supposedly dated, well before the Civil War, the surrounding land must have been largely virgin prairie. Chicago, then far beyond and below the horizon to the east, would have been a small collection of frame buildings, a booming but otherwise unremarkable town, perhaps not yet incorporated as a city. From this window one neighboring farmhouse may have been visible; on the next mile-distant hill, and maybe not. Dan wondered if there had been a road. And Indians ... in what year had the Black Hawk War been fought? He would ask Nancy sometime.

Now of course pavement was everywhere beneath the green suburban canopy of trees, and automobiles had managed to proliferate rapidly enough to keep the ever- extending acres of concrete and asphalt crowded. Not many sidewalks around here, in the better suburban neighborhoods' best tradition. Main Street, a princ.i.p.al thoroughfare of Wheatfield Park and also a numbered state highway, ran north and south one block to the east of the old house Nancy and Dan were looking at. The house itself faced south, its irregular half-acre lot fronting on Benham Road, which cut west from Main to lose itself a few blocks farther west in residential meanders and cul de sacs. As Ventris had already pointed out, Benham at no time of day sustained a very heavy flow of traffic, and the kids would not be running out of their yard directly into a busy highway. They were still young enough for that to be important.

Across Benham, the land sloped downhill into the large back yards of the next street's houses. To the east on Benham, the nearest house was a contemporary four-bedroom- sized brick ranch; Dan was looking down now upon its elegant tile roof. On the next lot to the west stood a green-vinyl-sided Georgian, with a wide immaculate lawn and a well- manicured flower garden in the back; the back yard of the house beyond that was graced by a large in-ground swimming pool. The house on the hilltop had the look of a poor relation amid its much newer neighbors.

Not that it was a ruin, or seemed abandoned. It had been vacant, according to Ventris, for only a few weeks. "Rundown" was not exactly the right word, either; the white stucco mat now covered the outside walls seemed reasonably solid, and there were no other obvious signs of deterioration. The plumbing, as Dan had already satisfied himself, was in working condition, and the wiring was modern enough. Standing now on the folding chair that Ventris had finally unearthed from the back of a closet, and thrusting his head up through an obviously little-used trapdoor into the dimness of the attic, Dan saw nothing horrifying. It was hot, of course, though louvered vents in opposite gables allowed air circulation as well as admitting a little light. But there was no sign of leaks in the roof. The ancient wooden beams and joists looked hand-hewn, and the nearest of them felt as solid as a young oak when Dan jabbed at it with the smallest and sharpest blade of his little pocketknife. The attic was largely unfloored, but there was at least some kind of insulation between the joists.

He would check it out more thoroughly, later, if they really got serious about the place. "Looks dry, at least,'' he said, getting down off the chair and brus.h.i.+ng the dust of decades from his hands. He looked at Nancy, trying to gauge what she was really feeling about the place, and saw his own thoughtful uncertainty mirrored in her face; they could take another turn around, but essentially they had seen it all now, from top to bottom.

Ventris was being un.o.btrusive in the background, and the children were rapping on a bedroom wall in quest of hollow places that might have been used as hidey-holes for escaping slaves. ''I would say the owners have tried to keep it up," Dan offered, probing for his woman's opinion.

Nancy shook her head and frowned. "I would say they've tried too hard."

That was it, Dan thought. The owners down through the years, or at least some of the most recent of them, had seemingly worked on the place too much, and too often at cross purposes. It was no longer apparent to the casual eye that the house, or a large part of it at least, might date from well before the Civil War. It had been added to, sided, remodeled, stuccoed, re-sided, re-remodeled, re-stuccoed, modernized and remodernized until even its original outlines had disappeared and it was hard to tell where the original walls stood, or of what they had been made.

Someone with more imagination and energy than talent, doubtless the present owner or an ambitious do-it-yourselfer in his family, had recently completed the latest a.s.sault.

This had been sustained mainly by the kitchen and the downstairs bath. Besides the refrigerator and regular stove, which were to stay, an off-brand oven had been built into the kitchen wall at shoulder height, surrounded by panels of unconvincing brick and stone whose corners were already starting to peel back from the wall. What appeared to be a new window in the downstairs bath would not close quite all the way, and the fancy new medicine cabinet wiggled tike a loose tooth in its socket when you slid the mirrored door open, and dribbled a little plaster dust from around its edges. Also downstairs, in the living room, a real fireplace had at some time had its flue bricked up and been made to look artificial. And then there was the way the one-car frame garage clung to the side of the house, almost like a lean-to glued on with filets of siding and stucco. No door led directly from house to garage, though there were four (count'em four) doors leading from the ground floor to outside. Every kind of wall covering ever devised by the mind of man seemed to be findable somewhere on the interior walls in at least one of the multiplicity of rooms. All in all, as Nancy had protested, a real hodgepodge.

And yet - and yet. On the plus side, there was all that room, the four bedrooms for a family perhaps to be enlarged, since Nancy had said she wanted a baby of her own.

There was the basic structural soundness, the fireplace to resurrect when time and money permitted, the tall old windows with their ancient gla.s.s. And who knew what buried glories of original woodwork, floors, and paneling were waiting to be uncovered?

Besides the house itself there was the external s.p.a.ce that came with it, a vast irregular plot of lawn or rather yard, that showed permanent-looking worn spots in the form of a children's impromptu softball diamond, and was otherwise mostly luxuriant crabgra.s.s somewhat in need of mowing. No well-kept garden like the neighbors', but plenty of room for kids to play and things to grow.

One might plant vegetables here, or keep a dog, or both.

They looked into each bedroom once more, then went downstairs and walked through all the ground floor rooms again. When they finally stood outside, with Ventris locking the place up, Nancy stood frowning up at the old place in a way that had nothing to do with the bright sun in her eyes. "It's a hodgepodge," she repeated.

"It sure is," Dan agreed. But then, instead of herding the children right back to Ventris' car, the two of them continued gazing at the place, as they might have looked at some objectionable relative with whom they had been stuck by fate and who therefore had to be gotten on with at almost any cost. The children meanwhile were making themselves right at home in the yard, arguing about where the exact highest point of the hilltop was. They were both wrong, it was right under the house. Sometimes Dan wondered if they were really as bright as their teachers had sometimes indicated.

"They're only asking sixty-two five," Dan said to himself, meditating aloud. And then he kicked himself mentally for that only, which Ventris could not have failed to hear.

"I would say it's no great bargain," Nancy commented, giving her fiancee a sharp look. "Children, I think that's supposed to be some kind of flowerbed near the porch, please stay out of it." She was easing into the Mother role somewhat ahead of time, with Dan's full approval.

"Well, I suppose there are two schools of thought about that," said Ventris, standing patiently beside them now. ''The house itself is not the prettiest or the most convenient, but those things can always be changed. The land itself, in this area ..."

Allowing himself to be tugged along by the soft sell, Dan knew a growing feeling of rightness about the place. The taxes were reasonable, at least in terms of suburban taxes in general, good schools were supposedly nearby; (that was another thing to be checked out more closely), and he had a theory that it was better to own the cheapest house on the block, any block, rather than the best. Let your neighbors' property pull the value of your own property up, not down. And after a couple of days of house-looking he had seen enough to realize that he was not going to be able to afford, for example, that four- bedroom brick ranch next door.

"Do you think the owners might come down a little bit?" Nancy was asking the agent.

"If we should decide to buy this place, it would take quite a bit of money to fix it over to what we want.'' Dan had earlier suffered occasional pangs of private fear that an offwhite wife with eyes adorned by a trace of epicanthic folds might be made to feel unwelcome in suburbia, where folk of Oriental descent seemed almost as rare as blacks or poverty. So far no problems, though, not even a funny look, at least as far as Dan had been able to observe. And, judging by Nancy's demeanor, the idea that there might be racial problems for her had never entered her head.

Ventris compressed his lips and answered her cautiously. "I'm not sure. I rather suspect they might be open to an offer, though the price is already low for this area. Did I mention before mat the family has been having personal problems?"

"No, you didn't," said Nancy. "Nervous breakdowns, I suppose, from the look of that remodeling in the kitchen."

"Something like that. The man of the house suffered some kind of breakdown, and then he did away with himself."

''Oh, I 'm sorry.'' She really was. ''I was trying to be funny, in my own stupid way. I didn't have any idea.''

"Come on, kids, let's get in the car," Dan called. To Ventris he said: "We're going to have to think about this place."

"Maybe the joint is haunted," Dan commented a minute later, without really knowing why, looking back at the vacant and intriguing house one more time before he got into the car and closed the door.

Ventris just shook his head and gave a little laugh. "That's one thing I haven't heard anybody say."

TWO.

By the time he pulled the rented van off Benham Road Dan had gotten pretty well used to driving it. He backed up into his yard - his yard! - with some dexterity, minimizing the carrying distance between truck and house.

Nancy's Volkswagen was in the small garage, whose doors she had managed to prop open with some bricks. Nancy herself, in jeans and with a kerchief tied round her head, was standing in the shade-mottled yard, talking with a stoutish lady in gardening clothes.

Nancy's brother Larry, chuncky in his junior college sweats.h.i.+rt, called out to her from the van to get to work; men Larry and Dan's friend Howie, who had been following in Dan's Plymouth, got the rear door of the van open and immediately began to struggle to get some of Dan's furniture unloaded. Nancy's father Ben, who had kept Dan and Larry entertained with Navy stories all the way out from the city, got out of the right seat beside Dan and went to pitch right in.

Millie and Sam, who had ridden out with Nancy earlier, now came running from the backyard to get under the movers' feet and be yelled at, and Dan, as soon as he had the chance, went to check in with Nancy. Her companion proved to be Mrs. Follett, their next-door neighbor to the west, of the vinylsided Georgian with all the flowers. Mrs.

Follett had at first glance a plump look that Dan considered natural for a suburban matron at the end of middle age, but then you noticed her hands, which were shamelessly hardened by outdoor work, and a certain weathered toughness in her face that made her smile somehow much more attractive.

He would have to forgive poor Nancy here for not doing any other work, Mrs. Follett said, because getting to know the neighbors was a big part of the job of moving in. "Yes, and I've also introduced myself to Millie and Sam already. They're going to have a fine big yard to play in here, and Patrick and I won't mind a bit if they chase a ball or something over into our gra.s.s from time to time. I think fences are rather ugly. Don't set up your baseball diamond on my side of the line, is all I asked them." The unfenced property line was certainly plain enough, with rude crabgra.s.s and dandelions on one side, prim civilized lawn in a meek carpet on the other. "And do try to stay out of the flowers!" This last was sent in a slightly raised voice toward the children, who were just coming out of the house again in a race to see who could carry some prize in from the van. They glanced over as if they might have heard the warning with at least half an ear.

"The poor Stanton children. I bawled them out sometimes and now I'm sorry for it.

Little did I know what trouble they were having in their family ... I suppose you've heard something of that."

Dan and Nancy exchanged glances. Nancy said: "We only saw Mrs. Stanton once, and very briefly. In the lawyer's office, when we were closing on the house."

"Well, he put an end to his own life." Mrs. Follett looked hard toward the old house for a moment, but then away again. "After a brief period of mental disturbance. But let's not dwell on the unhappiness of the past. You're getting a fine piece of property. You can be very happy with it - now look at those clouds. I hope it doesn't start to rain before you can get your furniture inside."

A ma.s.s of gray-white c.u.mulo-nimbus blowing over from the southwest had pa.s.sed the zenith and now shadowed Wheatfield Park, and grumbled threats at the poor creatures on the ground, who for the most part no doubt took calmly their situation beneath those kilotons of water. I wonder what room he did it in, Dan thought, turning away and walking over to help the other men unload his furniture. And how? Gunshot?

A couple of the rooms had been repainted very recently. But no, he didn't really want to know.

The unloading and carrying everything in was, not surprisingly, just as big a job as loading had been. Despite all the stuff he had sold or given away before moving, the truck's cargo seemed remarkably vast to be only the belongings of one small family. And Nancy's stuff wasn't even included, of course. Her things would come later, when she moved out of her apartment in the city just before the wedding, which was to be in mid- August. Dan was taking a week of vacation starting now, from his engineering job in a Chicago architect's office, to get himself and the kids settled in here. He would take another later for a quick honeymoon while the kids spent a week in camp; then they would all settle in here as a family shortly before Labor Day, after which the youngsters would have to get started in their new school. It had been, and was, and would be, a hectic summer, and so far the days and weeks of it had flown by with almost bewildering speed.

The truck was unloaded before the rain began. Nancy meanwhile had taken the Volks to get a bag of hamburgers from a nearby drive-in. When she got back, it fell to Dan to walk over to the Folletts' and tell Nancy's father that lunch was ready. Mr. Patrick Follett, a graying and wiry retiree with steel-rimmed gla.s.ses, had dropped over to say h.e.l.lo and hit it off at once with Ben, to whom he was now demonstrating his automatic lawn sprinkling system. Mrs. Follett answered Dan's tap at their French doors with evident" relief; she appeared to have some genuine fear of what the neighbors might think and say should they see the sprinklers operating in the rain.

When all the laborers had been refreshed with food and cooling drink, Larry and Howie and Ben boarded the truck to return it to the rental service in the city, and the Post family, including Nancy, got back to work. Dan, headed for the second floor with an armload of his clothes that had somehow been left misplaced in the kitchen and were blocking operations there, had just taken the first two ascending steps and turned on the low landing when the smell hit him. It was an odd, powerful odor, that reminded him of rancid grease. The impact was so strong and sudden that he stopped in his tracks and turned around, trying to get a bearing on the source. But he had time for only a couple of sniffs before the smell faded away as fast as it had come.

When he had finished stowing the clothes upstairs, in the closet of what he now thought of as the master bedroom, and had come down again bringing some lamps that had earlier been taken up by mistake, he mentioned the smell to Nancy.

She was laboring in the kitchen, sorting pots and pans and non-perishable food items from moving boxes into the freshly washed cabinets. "I noticed a smell earlier. Sort of fishy and rotten."

"This wasn't fishy, exactly. It couldn't have been those drive-in hamburgers, could it?

I hope we didn't poison anybody."

She shook her head. "I ate one and it seemed no worse than usual."

"Yeah, me too."

"I noticed the smell when I was carrying things down into the bas.e.m.e.nt. I wish you'd go down and check those drains sometime soon."

''All right, I'll take a look,'' he agreed, humoring his bride. It was not the first time she had voiced suspicion of the drains, and Dan had come to realize that Ben's att.i.tude toward bas.e.m.e.nts, one of keeping a very taut s.h.i.+p with regard to pipes and drains and waterproofing, had left its mark upon his daughter. ''Though I don't think we're likely to have any of that sort of trouble, up on a hill like this."

Shortly, loaded with another armful of miscellany (on moving day, no one goes anywhere emptyhanded), he went down into the bas.e.m.e.nt. It was true that he had neglected to look at the drains, and he supposed that a trap could be plugged up, or some such thing. There never seemed to be enough time these days to do everything that had to be done, and his previous time in the bas.e.m.e.nt had been spent mainly in checking out the old hot-water heating system as best he could, and in deciding where his wine cellar - that is, a couple of plastic racks for wine bottles - would best be located.

He flicked the light on as he came down now. The day had turned dark with the rain and the bas.e.m.e.nt windows were small and blocked by shrubbery.

The whole bas.e.m.e.nt, which extended under less than the whole area of the house above, was floored with smooth and reasonably new concrete, but the walls were a different story. In one section they were as modern as the floor, but elsewhere they were of yellow Illinois limestone. Dan stacked his miscellany against an unoccupied section of the wall and crouched there for a moment staring at its masonry. Comparing them to certain old buildings only a few score miles away where he had grown up, he would guess that these limestone walls might have been set in place sometime before the turn of the century. He sniffed over the nearest floor drain, sniffed again, then felt around for dampness in the shadowed corner; he could detect nothing but dust. Thunder grumbled outside. The past two days had been quite rainy but the whole bas.e.m.e.nt looked perfectly dry. It was also cleaner than he had expected.

From where he stood now in the shadowed corner he could see behind the furnace, and there, just as he had noticed them when making his inspection of the heating system, were a new sledgehammer and a wrecking bar. The tools looked unused, and he had made a mental note on discovering them to find out who they belonged to and hand them over - and then had promptly forgotten his mental note in the press of other business. Now it looked as if they were going to be his, though it didn't seem that they were likely to be of any immediate use.

As he looked behind the furnace along the limestone wall his attention was caught by the wall that it met farther on; this cross-wall was like nothing he had seen in a house before. Earlier he had had no time to pay it more attention than a brief check for dryness and solidity. Now he walked around the furnace for a closer examination.

This was the bas.e.m.e.nt's oldest-looking wall, and extended the width of the house, which beyond this wall had only a low crawl s.p.a.ce beneath it. The wall was made of smooth, round stones, such as might have been picked up from a creek- or river-bed somewhere. The stones were mostly about fist-size, cemented together with solid- looking mortar. Dan sc.r.a.ped at a mortar joint with a finger, and a single particle the size of a sand grain came off. All dry as dust. No evil smells. Dan took a final look around and then went up the stairs and back to work.

On that Sat.u.r.day night, his first night in the old house, Dan experienced for the first time what he later came to think of as the Indian dream. On this first night the dream began with him, or rather with some stranger's body in which he had inexplicably come to dwell, striding across a seemingly endless prairie. He was surrounded by gra.s.s the color of golden toast, which in places grew higher than his head. Dan was completely without influence over the movements of his (or rather the stranger's body) in the dream, which was extraordinarily vivid and self-consistent, at least in its earlier part.

Whether because this peculiar vividness gave the dream a semblance of reality, or for some other reason, the anxiety of incipient nightmare was building and had been from the start, though he knew he was asleep, and so far the dream, had recounted nothing horrible.

The eyes of his dream-self turned down briefly and frequently to gauge the footing on the uneven ground beneath the trackless gra.s.s. The first time it happened Dan had observed with some surprise that the body he inhabited was brown skinned, hairlessly smooth, and almost entirely naked. He wore mocca.s.sins, and a small loincloth of some rough fabric. Around his neck an amulet or ornament of sh.e.l.l swung on a fragile-looking string of gra.s.s. His bare brown chest and wiry arms were painted with stripes and circles of white and ocher. In its right hand the dream-body carried a small box or cup that seemed to have been made by folding some material that looked and felt like smooth tree-bark. The fingers that held the cup were thin and dark, and the whole body was taut with sharply delineated muscle. The smell of rancid grease was in the air.

Dan had been inhabiting the body, in a state of surprise and mounting anxiety, for some six or eight of its strides before he interpreted certain steadily recurrent sounds as being made by the feet of at least two other people walking with him, keeping just behind him and to each side, as if they were either giving a formal escort or perhaps guarding him as a prisoner. The sounds were evidently familiar to the man whose body he tenanted; the body did not turn its head to see who followed. Though he was looking through its eyes, Dan could not alter the direction of the body's gaze by so much as a fraction of a millimeter.

The dream-body raised its arms and Dan felt the light scratching of gra.s.s blades across them as it pushed through a screen of gra.s.s somewhat taller than most of the field, and now with this obstacle past a somehow familiar hill was plainly visible. At the same time there came into his view a distant line of bent and brown-skinned toilers, a file of laboring people that began somewhere far off on the gra.s.sy plain to his right and extended up the entire slope of the gra.s.s-covered hill ahead, to a new mound of bare grayish earth that crowned its top. The line of workers a hundred yards or so ahead was part of an endless chain of men and women wearing loincloths and little else. They ascended the hill under the weight of large wicker baskets that appeared to be overflowing with earth, each basket held on its bearer's bent back by a tumpline going round the forehead. Another line of workers came steadily downhill at an easy pace, walking tall with baskets empty, going back off to the right across the prairie.

Around the top of the hill there hung a small cloud of dry dust, floating against a lightly overcast sky. Besides the carriers bringing up earth, other men and women were at work up there, toiling and tamping with what seemed to be hoes and mauls and shovels in their hands. One in a feathered headdress seemed to be giving orders. The distance was still too great for Dan to observe the work in detail. But he was being taken closer.

Dan had plenty of time to think about this experience even as it was happening, and he understood that it was some kind of dream. Yet he did not wake up, and his sense of anxiety increased somewhat. The body in which he dwelt continued to advance with steady paces that shortened somewhat as it began to climb the hill. The feet that walked behind him and to his sides maintained their own steady sounds and relative positions.

Together the walkers went on up the hill, Dan's baseless fear increasing as they climbed. He had the feeling that it might be his host's fear as well as his own. The eyes through which he saw remained fixed directly ahead, toward the work proceeding on the hilltop. Now he saw that another crew was busy there, a little to one side of those heaping earth. The second group of laborers, fewer in number, had erected a framework of freshly cut and trimmed logs; it was like a giant picture frame with nothing in it.

As Dan and his escort neared the top of the hill, the nature of the construction there became more readily observable. Basically it was the piling up of a tremendous mound of earth, in successive hard-packed layers. A narrow, bending pa.s.sageway open at the top led into the mound between high, straight earthen walls. Atop the walls a score of workers were raking and stamping and pounding down the dirt as quickly as the slow but endless chain of bearers could dump the contents of their baskets out. Others added water to the dirt, enough to give it some cohesion without making mud. The picture- frame of logs stood isolated to one side, and although the corner of his host's vision brought Dan the view of some people moving about there, he could not see what they were doing. All around the top of the hill the gra.s.s had been worn away by human feet.

Dan would have described the people around him, including his host, as American Indians, though of what time or tribe he could not have begun to guess. At his host's approach workers ceased working, and they and their overseer in the feathered headdress stepped back deferentially when they found they were in his path. Several men spoke to Dan's host, most of them repeating the same words, in a language totally unfamiliar to Dan. Each was given the same reply.

His host's path led toward the opening in the mound, to the narrow gateway that led in through raw earthen walls, to . . .to what could not yet be seen. Just as it reached the gateway his host body stopped, and raised the cup it carried in what was evidently a ritual gesture. At the same time it faced around, and Dan could for the first time see those who had come walking through the tall gra.s.s with him and up the hill. They were a pair of young men painted as Dan somehow knew his host was. Each carried a bark bucket larger than his, and their eyes like all others' were on Dan's host as he, the medicine man, held up his bark cup toward the sun and chanted loud words meaningless to Dan.

When the shaman lowered his eyes again and looked about him at his world, Dan got his first good look at the country round the hill. Here and there were small groves of trees Dan could recognize as white pines, and what appeared to be some kind of autumn-foliaged oaks. The ocean of tall gra.s.s, spotted with such groves and clumps of trees, stretched out to the rolling horizon. Now Dan marked how the long line of bearers that wound down from the hill traversed perhaps half a mile of prairie to another hillock from which dry earth was evidently being dug. Somewhat closer, and in the direction from which the body he inhabited had just walked, a village lay near a tree-marked watercourse, a collection of round-topped huts with people moving about them. It was a wilderness, a world almost unmarked by man except for the one small village and the few footpaths about the hill and the earthen construction rising up its top.

Dan's host now spoke briefly to his people once again. And then he turned, slowly, as if reluctant to face what must now be faced atop the hill, inside the walls of earth on which his people labored so. Not walls, perhaps, at all, but more accurately a monolith or pyramid of rammed earth through which a single roofless pa.s.sage had been left.

The fear was certainly the dream-body's now, as well as Dan's, for now the wiry arms and legs were quivering with it. But despite his fear, and with his trembling a.s.sistants now following perforce in single file, the shaman entered the pa.s.sageway that led into the ma.s.s of compacted earth. The pa.s.sageway was not long, but twice turned at right angles.