The candle caught and guttered, sending flickering shadows fleeing wildly. Then it steadied and its feeble glow cut a circle in the dark.
“It will soon be morning,” Kitty told him, “and then the day will come and the light of day is worse than the darkness of the night. For in the day you see and know. In the dark, at least, you can think that it is not too bad. But this is best of all—a little pool of light to make a house inside the darkness.”
She was not young, he saw. Her hair hung in dank strings about her face and her face was pinched and thin and there were lines upon it. But there was, he thought, back of the stringiness and the thinness and the lines, a sense of some sort of eternal youthfulness and vitality that nothing yet had conquered.
The pool of light had spread a little as the flame had settled down and now he could see the place in which they stood.
It was small, no more than a hut. There was the pallet on the floor and the blanket where he’d tossed it from him. There was a crazy-legged table upon which the candle stood and two sawed blocks of wood to serve as chairs. There were two plates and two white cups standing on the table.
Cracks gaped between the upright boards that formed the walls of the hut and in other places knots had dried and fallen out, leaving peepholes to the world outside.
“This was your place,” he said. “I would not have inconvenienced you.”
“Not my place,” she said. “Harry’s place, but it’s all right with Harry.”
“I’ll have to thank him.”
“You can’t,” she said. “He’s dead. It is your place now.”
“I won’t need a place for long,” said Alden. “I won’t be staying here. I’ll be going back.”
She shook her head.
“Is there anyone who’s tried?”
“Yes. They’ve all come back. You can’t beat the swamp.”
“Doc got in.”
“Doc was big and strong and well. And there was something driving him.”
“There’s something driving me as well.”
She put up a hand and brushed the hair out of her eyes. “No one can talk you out of this? You mean what you are saying?”
“I can’t stay,” he said.
“In the morning,” she told him, “I’ll take you to see Eric.”
The candle flame was yellow as it flickered in the room and again the golden leaves were raining down. The garden had been quiet and he’d held out his hands, palms upward, so the leaves would fall in them. Just one leaf, he thought—one leaf is all I want, one leaf out of all the millions that are falling.
He watched intently and the leaves went past, falling all about him, but never a one to fall into his hands. Then, suddenly, there was something that was not a leaf—a butterfly that came fluttering like a leaf from nowhere, blue as the haze upon the distant hills, blue as the smoky air of autumn.
For an instant the butterfly poised above his outstretched palms and then mounted swiftly upward, flying strongly against the downward rain of leaves, a mote of blue winging in the goldenness.
He watched it as it flew, until it was lost in the branches of the tree, and then glanced back at his hands and there was something lying in his palm, but it was not a leaf.
It was a little card, two inches by three or such a matter, and it was the color of the leaves, but its color came from what seemed to be an inner light, so that the card shone of itself rather than shining by reflected light, which was the way one saw the color of the leaves.
He sat there looking at it, wondering how he could catch a card when no cards were falling, but only leaves dropping from the tree. But he had taken it and looked at it and it was not made of paper and it had upon its face a picture that he could not understand.
As he stared at it his mother’s voice called him in to supper and he went. He put the card into his pocket and he went into the house.
And under ordinary circumstances the magic would have vanished and he never would have known such an autumn day again.
There is only one such day, thought Alden Street, for any man alive. For any man alive, with the exception of himself.
He had put the card into his pocket and had gone into the house for supper and later on that evening he must have put it in the drawer of the dresser in his room, for that was where he’d found it in that later autumn.
He had picked it up from its forgotten resting place and as he held it in his hand, that day of thirty years before came back to him so clearly that he could almost smell the freshness of the air as it had been that other afternoon. The butterfly was there and its blueness was so precise and faithful that he knew it had been imprinted on his brain so forcefully that he held it now forever.
He had put the card back carefully and had walked down to the village to seek out the realtor he’d seen the day before.
“But, Alden,” said the realtor, “with your mother gone and all, there is no reason for your staying. There is that job waiting in New York. You told me yesterday.”
“I’ve been here too long,” said Alden. “I am tied too close. I guess I’ll have to stay. The house is not for sale.”
“You’ll live there all alone? In that big house all alone?”
“There’s nothing else to do,” said Alden.
He had turned and walked away and gone back to the house to get the card out of the dresser drawer again.
He sat and studied the drawing that was on the face of it, a funny sort of drawing, no kind of drawing he had ever seen before, not done with ink or pencil nor with brush. What, in the name of God, he thought, had been used to draw it?
And the drawing itself? A many-pointed star? A rolled-up porcupine? Or a gooseberry, one of the prickly kind, many times enlarged?
It did not matter, he knew, neither how the drawing had been made, or the strange kind of stiff, silken fabric that made the card itself, or what might be represented in the drawing. The important thing was that, many years before, when he had been a child, he had sat beneath the tree and held out his hand to catch a falling leaf and had caught the card instead.
He carried the card over to a window and stared out at the garden. The great walnut tree still stood as it had stood that day, but it was not golden yet. The gold must wait for the coming of first frost and that might be any day.
He stood at the window, wondering if there’d be a butterfly this time, or if the butterfly were only part of childhood.
“It will be morning soon,” said Kitty. “I heard a bird. The birds are astir just before first light.”
“Tell me about this place,” said Alden.
“It is a sort of island,” Kitty told him. “Not much of an island. Just a foot or two above the water level. It is surrounded by water and by muck. They bring us in by heliocoptor and they let us down. They bring in food the same way. Not enough to feed us. Not enough of anything. There is no contact with them.”
“Men or robots? In the ship, I mean.”
“I don’t know. No one ever sees them. Robots, I’d suspect.”
“Not enough food, you say.”
She shook her head. “There is not supposed to be. That’s a part of Limbo. We’re not supposed to live. We fish, we gather roots and other things. We get along somehow.”
“And we die, of course.”
“Death comes to everyone,” she said. “To us just a little sooner.”
She sat crouched upon one of the lengths of wood that served as a chair and as the candle guttered, shadows chased across her face so that it seemed the very flesh of it was alive and crawling.
“You missed sleep on account of me,” he said.
“I can sleep any time. I don’t need much sleep. And, besides, when a new one comes…”
“There aren’t many new ones?”