Slowly he felt his way along them and came at last to the place they ended. Groping, he made out that he had found a doorway, but there was no door.
He thrust a foot over the sill, seeking for the ground outside, and found it, almost even with the sill.
Quickly, as if he might be escaping, he swung his body through the door and now, for the first time, there was a break in darkness. The lighter sky etched the outline of mighty trees and at some level which stood below the point he occupied he could make out a ghostly whiteness that he guessed was ground fog, more than likely hanging low above a lake or stream.
He stood stiff and straight and took stock of himself. A little weak and giddy, and a coldness in his belly and a shiver in his bones, but otherwise all right.
He put up a hand and rubbed it along his jaw and the whiskers grated. A week or more, he thought, since he had shaved—it must have been that long, at least. He tried to drive his mind back to find when he’d last shaved, but time ran together like an oily fluid and he could make nothing of it.
He had run out of food and had gone downtown, the first time in many days—not wanting to go even then, but driven by his hunger. There wasn’t time to go, there was time for nothing, but there came a time when a man must eat. How long had it really been, he wondered, that he’d gone without a bite to eat, glued to the task that he was doing, that important task which he’d now forgotten, only knowing that he had been doing it and that it was unfinished and that he must get back to it.
Why had he forgotten? Because he had been ill? Was it possible that an illness would make a man forget?
Let’s start, he thought, at the first beginning. Let’s take it slow and simple. One step at a time, carefully and easily; not all in a rush.
His name was Alden Street and he lived in a great, high, lonely house that his parents had built almost eighty years ago, in all its pride and arrogance, on the mound above the village. And for this building on the mound above the village, for the pride and arrogance, his parents had been hated, but for all the hate had been accepted since his father was a man of learning and of great business acumen and in his years amassed a small-sized fortune dealing in farm mortgages and other properties in Mataloosa county.
With his parents dead, the hate transferred to him, but not the acceptance that had gone hand-in-hand with hate, for although he had a learning gathered from several colleges, he put it to no use—at least to no use which had made it visible to the village. He did not deal in mortgages nor in properties. He lived alone in the great, high house that now had gone to ruin, using up, bit by bit, the money his father had laid by and left him. He had no friends and he sought no friends. There were times when he did not appear on the village streets for weeks on end, although it was known that he was at home. For watching villagers could see the lights burning in the high and lonesome house, come nights.
At one time the house had been a fine place, but now neglect and years had begun to take their toll. There were shutters that hung crooked and a great wind years before had blown loosened bricks from the chimney top and some of the fallen bricks still lay upon the roof. The paint had peeled and powdered off and the front stoop had sunk, its foundation undermined by a busily burrowing gopher and the rains that followed. Once the lawn had been neatly kept, but now the grass grew rank and the shrubs no longer knew the shears and the trees were monstrous growths that almost screened the house from view. The flower beds, cherished by his mother, now were gone, long since choked out by weeds and creeping grass.
It was a shame, he thought, standing in the night. I should have kept the place the way my mother and my father kept it, but there were so many other things.
The people in the village despised him for his shiftlessness and his thoughtlessness which allowed the pride and arrogance to fall into ruin and decay. For hate as they might the arrogance, they still were proud of it. They said he was no good. They said that he was lazy and that he didn’t care.
But I did care, he thought. I cared so very deeply, not for the house, not for the village, not even for myself. But for the job—the job that he had not selected, but rather that had been thrust upon him.
Or was it a job, he wondered, so much as a dream?
Let’s start at the first beginning, he had told himself, and that was what he had meant to do, but he had not started at the first beginning; he had started near the end. He had started a long way from the first beginning.
He stood in the darkness, with the treetops outlined by the lighter sky and the white ghost fog that lay close above the water, and tried to swim against the tide of time back to that first beginning, back to where it all had started. It was far away, he knew, much farther than he’d thought, and it had to do, it seemed, with a late September butterfly and the shining gold of falling walnut leaves.
He had been sitting in a garden and he had been a child. It was a blue and wine-like autumn day and the air was fresh and the sun was warm, as anything only can be fresh and warm when one is very young.
The leaves were falling from the tree above in a golden rain and he put out his hands to catch one of the falling leaves, not trying to catch any single one of them, but holding out his hands and knowing that one of them would drift into a palm—holding out his hands with an utter childish faith, using up in that single instant the only bit of unquestioning faith that any man can know.
He closed his eyes and tried to capture it again, tried to become in this place of distant time the little boy he had been on that day the gold had rained down.
He was there, but it was hazy and it was not bright and the clearness would not come—for there was something happening, there was a half-sensed shadow out there in the dark and the squish of wet shoes walking on the earth.
His eyes snapped open and the autumn day was gone and someone was moving toward him through the night, as if a piece of the darkness had detached itself and had assumed a form and was moving forward.
He heard the gasp of breath and the squish of shoes and then the movement stopped.
“You there,” said a sudden, husky voice. “You standing there, who are you?”
“I am new here. My name is Alden Street.”
“Oh, yes,” the voice said. “The new one. I was coming up to see you.”
“That was good of you,” said Alden.
“We take care of one another here,” the voice said. “We care for one another. We are the only ones there are. We really have to care.”
“But you…”
“I am Kitty,” said the voice. “I’m the one who fed you soup.
She struck the match and held it cupped within her hands as if she sought to protect the tiny flame against the darkness.
Just the three of us, thought Alden—the three of us arraigned against the dark. For the blaze was one of them, it had become one with them, holding life and movement, and it strove against the dark.
He saw that her fingers were thin and sensitive, delicate as some old vase fashioned out of porcelain.
She bent with the flame still cupped within her hand and touched it to a candle stub thrust into a bottle that, from the height of it, stood upon a table, although one could not see the table.
“We don’t often have a light,” said Kitty. “It is a luxury we seldom can afford. Our matches are so few and the candles are so short. We have so little here.”
“There is no need,” said Alden.
“But there is,” said Kitty. “You are a new one here. We cannot let you go stumbling in the dark. For the first little while we make a light for you.”