That did it. The magic went away. The nothingness went away. We were back in the Lodge, standing beside the strange contraption. We still were holding hands, and she dropped my hand and turned to face me. Her face was white with fury, her voice cold.
«Remember this,» she said. «No woman will ever be quite the same again.»
Charles, still standing where he had been before, picked up the nearly empty whiskey bottle. He laughed, a knowing and insulting laugh. «I promised you a drink,» he said. «You probably need one now.»
«Yes, you did,» I said. I started across the room toward him, and he picked up the glass that Angela had been using and began to pour the drink.
«We are short of glasses,» he said. «Under the circumstances, I don’t imagine you will mind.»
I let him have it, squarely in the face. He was not expecting it, and when he saw the fist coming in it was too late for him to duck. I caught him in the mouth and he went back and down as if he had been sledged. The glass and bottle fell from his hands and rolled across the carpeting, both of them spewing whiskey.
I felt good about belting him. I had wanted to do it ever since I saw him for the first time that morning. Thinking that, I was aghast that so little time had passed.
He didn’t try to get up. Maybe he couldn’t; maybe he was out. For all I cared he might as well be dead.
I turned and walked toward the door. As I opened it, I looked back.
Angela was standing where I’d left her, and she didn’t stir when I looked at her. I tried to think of something I should say to her, but nothing came to mind. I suspect it was just as well.
My car was standing in the driveway and the sun was far down the western sky. I took a deep breath—I suppose, unconsciously, I was trying to wipe away any clinging odor of the fog of nothingness, although, to tell the truth, I had never noticed any odor.
When I got into the car and put my hands on the wheel, I noticed that the knuckles of my right hand were bleeding. When I wiped the blood off on my shirt, I could see the toothmarks.
Back at the cabin I parked the car and, climbing to the porch, sat down in a chair. I didn’t do a thing, just stayed sitting there. The Galloping Goose came over, heading south. Robins scratched in the leaves underneath the brush beyond our patch of lawn. A sparrow sang as the sun went down.
When it was dark and the lightning bugs came out, I went indoors and made myself some supper. After I had eaten I went out on the porch again, and now I found that I could think a bit, although the thinking made no sense.
The thing that stuck closest to my mind was that brief glimpse I’d gotten of the bleak, dark landscape. It had only been a glimpse, a flashing on and off, but it must have been impressed deeply on my brain. For I found that there were details I had not been aware of, that I would have sworn I had never seen. The plain had seemed level in its blackness, but now I could recall that it was not entirely level, that there were mounds upon it and here and there jagged spears extending upward that could be nothing else than the stumps of shattered masonry. And I knew as well, or seemed to know, that the blackness of the plain was the blackness of molten rock, frozen forever as a monument of that time when the soil and rock beneath had bubbled in a sudden fire.
It was the future, I was certain, that Angela had shown me, the future from which she and the other scavengers had come, probing back across unknown centuries to find out not only what their far forebears had known, but as well those things they might have uncovered or discovered, but had not really known. Although I wondered, as I thought of it, what could possibly have been the so-far-unrecognized significance of a man like Villon? A poet, sure, an accomplished medieval poet who had a modern flair and flavor, but as well a thief and a vagabond who must at many times have felt the shadow of the hangman’s noose brush against his neck.
What had we missed in Villon, I wondered, what might we have missed in many other events and men? What could be the significance that we had missed and which had been recognized and now was sought by our far descendants in that black and frozen world up ahead of us? Sought by those who now came back among us to sift through the dustbins of our history, seeking what we unknowingly might have thrown away.
If we could only talk with them, I thought, if only they would talk with us—and even as I thought it, I knew how impossible it was. There was about them a supercilious quality that would not allow them to, that we would never stand for in that it scarcely masked the contempt that they felt for us.
It would be akin to a radio astronomer going back to ancient Babylon to talk with a priest-astronomer. In both cases, I knew, the gulf would not be only one of knowledge but of attitude.
A faithful whippoorwill that clocked in every evening shortly after dusk began his haunted chugging. Listening to it, I sat and let the woodland peace creep in. I’d forget it all, I told myself, I’d wipe it from my mind—I had a book to write. There was no purpose and no need to fret about something that would not happen for God knows how many millennia from now.
I knew, of course, that I was wrong. This was not something that could be forgotten. Too much had happened, too much remained unsaid for the incident to be ignored. There probably was, as well, too much at stake, although when I tried to sort out what specifically might be at stake, I had no luck at all. There were questions that needed answering, explanations to be given, a fuller story to be told. And there was just one place to get those questions answered.
I went down off the porch and got into the car. The Lodge was dark when I pulled into the driveway. There was no answer to my knock; when I tried the latch the door came open. I stepped inside and stood in the dark, not calling out. I think I knew there was no one there. My eyes became somewhat accustomed to the dark. Moving cautiously, alert to chairs that might trip me up, I went into the room. My foot crunched on something and I stopped in midstride. Then I saw it—the shattered wreckage of the time-map. I found a pack of matches in my pocket and struck one of them. In the brief flaring of its light I saw that the cubicle had been smashed. Someone, I guessed, had taken a maul, or perhaps a rock to it.
The match burned down and I shook it out. I turned about and left, shutting the door behind me. And now, I thought, the people of the hills would have another mystery about which to speculate. There was the shattered time-map, of course, which when it was found would be a topic of conversation for a year or more at most. The real mystery, however, would be the question of what had happened to the people of the Lodge—the story of how one summer they had disappeared, leaving the Cadillac standing in the garage, and had not come back again. The unpaid taxes would pile up, and at some time in the future someone might pay up the taxes and get title to the place, but that would make no difference to the legend. Through many years to come the story would be told at the Trading Post, and given time the Lodge might become a haunted house and thus the story would be ensured a special kind of immortality.
Back at the cabin, with the fireflies winking in the woods and the faithful whippoorwill chunking from across the hollow, I tried to console myself by thinking I had done everything that a man could do, although I had the horrid feeling I had failed. And I realized, as well, that now I had lost any chance I might have to do anything at all. This, then, had to be the end of it.
The best thing for me, I told myself, was to get back to the book in the hope that as I worked I might forget—or, if not forget, ease the sharpness of the memory.