In the corridor, she nearly collided with the stooped and slow-moving porter. “Ready to sleep, now, miz?” he inquired gently.
“You sleep,” she said, and pushed past him. He slid down the wall, mouth open, eyes closed, asleep. Hawksquill, already crossing into the next car, heard Eigenblick roar out in rage and dismay. She shoved aside a heavy curtain that barred her way, and found herself in a sleeper, where at Eigenblick’s cry men had awakened and were now pulling aside the curtains on upper and lower berths and looking out, sleepy, alert, pale. They saw Hawksquill. She backed out through the curtain and into the car she had come from.
There, in a niche in the wall, she saw that cord which she had often studied in her train-going, the cord that when pulled in fun or malice set the puller up for a stiff fine. She had never really believed that these slim ropes could actually stop a train, but, hearing steps and clamor in the far car, she pulled it now, and stepped quickly to the door, and grasped its handle.
Within seconds the train came to a thrashing, crashing, jolting stop. Hawksquill, astonished at herself, wrenched open the door.
Rain struck her. They were in the middle of nowhere, amid rainy, dark woods where last hillocks of snow melted. It was fiercely cold. Hawksquill leapt to the ground with a fainting heart and a cry. She struggled up the embankment, hampered by her skirt, hurrying herself lest the impossibility of her doing this at all catch up with her.
Dawn was gray, almost in its paleness more opaque than night. At the top of the embankment, within the woods, panting, she looked back at the dark length of the stopped train. Lights were coming on inside. From the door she had left, a man jumped down, signalling behind him to another. Hawksquill, stumbling in snowobscured undergrowth, ran deeper in. She heard calls behind her. The hunt was up.
She turned behind a great tree and rested her back against it, sobbing painful cold breaths, listening. Twigs crackled, the woods were being beaten for her. A glance around showed her a dim figure, far off to the left, with something blunt, pointed and black in a gloved hand.
Done secretly to death. No one the wiser.
With trembling hands she opened the alligator purse. She clawed out from amid the loose cards a small morocco-leather envelope; Her breath condensing before her made it difficult to see, and her fingers shook uncontrollably. She pulled open the envelope and fumbled within it for the sliver of bone that it contained, one bone chosen from among the thousand-odd bones of a pure black cat. Where was the wretched thing. She felt it. She pinched it between two fingers. A crackle of brush that seemed close by startled her, she threw up her head, the tiny charm slipped from her fingers. She almost caught it as it fell catching along the stuff of her skirt, but her eager hand grasping for it brushed it away. It fell amid snow and black leaves. Hawksquill, crying a hopeless no, stepped unwittingly on the place where it had fallen.
The calling of those who followed her was soft, confident, coming closer. Hawksquill fled from her shelter, glimpsing as she did so the shade of another of Eigenblick’s soldiers, or the same one, anyway armed; and he saw her too.
She had never given much thought to what in fact might happen to her mortal body, its soul securely hidden, if fatal things were done to it; if projectiles were passed violently through it, if its blood were spilled. She couldn’t die, she was certain of that. But what, exactly? What? She turned, and saw him aim. A shot was fired, she turned to run again, unable to tell if she had been struck or only shocked by the noise.
Struck. She could distinguish the warm wetness of her blood from the cold wetness of the rain. Where was the pain? She ran on, plunging hopelessly out-of-kilter, one leg seemed not to be working. She fell against tall trees, hearing her pursuers guiding each other with brief words. They were quite near.
There were escapes from this, there were other exits she could find, she was sure of it. But just at the moment she could remember none of them.
Could not remember! All her arts were being taken from her. Well, that was just; for she had dishonored them, had lied, had stolen, had sought power with them in her height of pride; she had used powers she had forsworn, for ends of her own. It was quite just. She turned, at bay; she saw on all sides the dark shapes of her pursuers. They wanted to get quite close, no doubt, so as not to make a great fuss. One or two shots. But what would become of her? The pain she had thought not to feel was just now surging up her body, and was ghastly. Pointless to run any more; black mists were passing before her eyes. Yet she turned again to run.
There was a path.
There was a path, quite clear in the twilight. And there—well, she could go there, couldn’t she? To that little house in the clearing. A shot jolted her horribly, but as though a shaft of sunlight struck it, the house became clearer: a funny sort of house, indeed the oddest little house that she had ever seen. What house did it remind her of? Gingerbreaded and many-colored, with chimney-pots like comic hats, and cheerful firelight showing in the deep small windows, and a round green door. A welcoming, a friendly green door; a door that just then opened; a door from which a broadly grinning face looked out to welcome her.
Fifty-two Pickup
They shot her, in fact, several times, being superstitious themselves; and certainly she looked as dead as any dead person they had ever seen, the same doll-like, heedless appearance to the limbs, the same vacated face. She didn’t move. No cloud of breath condensed above her lips. Satisfied at last, one snatched up the alligator purse, and they returned to the train.
Weeping, shouting hoarse gouts of laughter, with the old cards (mixed backs and faces) pressed in a messy clutch against his bosom, at last, at last, Russell Eigenblick, the President, pulled at the cord which would start the train again. Blinded with fear and joy, he plunged through the cars of the train, almost knocked over when the train with a jolt started up again; the train plunged through his country, swept with rain, breathing clouds of steam. Between Sandusky and South Bend the rain turned unwillingly to snow and sleet and deepened to blizzard; the baffled engineer could see nothing. He cried out when there loomed up before him with great suddenness the mouth of a lightless tunnel, for he knew there could be no tunnel in this landscape, nor had ever been, but before he could take action (what action?) the train had roared into limitless darkness louder and darker even than Barbarossa’s triumph.
When it arrived, quite empty of passengers, at the following station (an Indian-named town where no train had stopped for years) the porter whom Ariel Hawksquill had shouldered aside in her haste awoke.
Now what on earth?
He arose, and, slow with forty years’ service, walked the train, as astonished at himself for having slept, and at the train for having stopped unscheduled, as at the absence of his passengers.
Midway through the silent cars, he met the white-faced engineer, and they consulted, but said little. There was no one else aboard; there had been no conductor; it was a special train, everyone aboard had known where they were going. So the porter said to the engineer. “They knew,” he said, “where they were going.”
The engineer returned to his cab, to use the radio, though he hadn’t yet decided what to say. The porter continued through the cars, feeling ghostly. In the bar car he found, amid empty glasses and crushed cigarettes, a deck of cards, old-fashioned cards, flung about as though in rage.
“Somebody playin’ fifty-two pickup,” he said.
He gathered them up—the figures on them, knights and kings and queens such as he had not seen before, seemed to plead with him from their scattered places to do so. The last one—a joker maybe, a character with a beard, falling from a horse into a stream—he found caught in the window’s edge, face outward, as though in the act of escaping. When he had assembled them all, and squared them up, he stood unmoving in the car with them in his hands, filled with a deep sense of the world, the whole world, and his place in it, somewhere near the center; and of the value which later ages would put on his standing here alone, at this moment, on this empty train, at this deserted station.