"A man?"
Ellen nodded soberly. "Or he was at one time, anyway," she corrected after a moment. "I used to go out with him when he lived next door to me in Catasauqua."
"But," cried Chandler, "what, how, how could he-"
She shook her head. "Now you're asking hard questions, Chandler. But I know this one thing was Brad Fenell. Brad asked me to marry him, and when I told him I wouldn't he said those words I heard from my husband, just before he killed himself."
She stood up and turned toward the house. "And now," she said, "Meggie's calling us to eat. I hope I haven't spoiled your appetite."
All through the meal. Chandler was preoccupied. He had to be spoken to twice before he responded, and then he had to be reminded to address the Orphalese by name. He was trying to understand what Ellen had told him, and he was not succeeding. Real human beings? The monsters who had done such things?
It was, he thought somberly, more incredible to think of them as men than as demons from the pits of hell ... The interrupted meeting was resumed after the place had been tidied up. The community had counted its losses and buried its dead.
There had been four of the attacking hunters. Even without their submachine guns, they had succeeded in killing eight Orphalese. But it was not all loss to the Orphalese, because two of the hunters were still alive, though wounded, and under the rules of this chessboard the captured enemy became a friend.
Guy had suffered a broken jaw in the scuffle and another man presided, a fat youth who favored a bandaged leg. He limped to his feet, grimacing and patting his leg. "Orphalese and brothers," he said, "we have lost friends, but we have won a test. Praise the Prophet, we will be spared to win again, and to drive the imps of fire out of our world. Meggie, you going to tie these folks up?"
The girl proudly ordered one of the hunters into the spotlighted dentist's chair, another into a wing chair that was hastily moved onto the platform. The men were bleeding and hurt, but they had clearly been abandoned by their possessors. They watched the Orphalese with puzzlement and fear.
"Walter, they're okay now," Meg reported as others finished tying up the hunters. "Oh, wait a minute." She advanced on Chandler. "Chandler, I'm sorry. You sit down there, hear?"
Chandler suffered himself to be bound to a camp chair on the platform and Walter took a drink of wine and opened the ornate book that was before him on the rostrum.
"Meg, thanks. Guy, I hope I do this as good as you do. Let me read you a little. Let's see." He put on his glasses and read:
" 'Much in you is still man, and much in you is not yet man, but a shapeless pigmy that walks asleep in the mist searching for its own awakening.' "
He closed the book, looked with satisfaction at Guy and.. said: "Do you understand that, new friends? They are the words of the Prophet, who men call Kahlil Gibran. For the benefit of the new folks I ought to say that he died this fleshly life quite a good number of years ago, but his vision was unclouded. Like we say, we are the sinews that batter the flame spirits but he is our soul." There was an antiphonal murmur from the audience and Walter flipped the pages again rapidly, obviously looking for a familiar passage. "People of Orphalese, here we are now. This is what he says. 'What is this that has torn our world apart?' The Prophet says: It is life in quest of life, in bodies that fear the grave.' Now, honestly, nothing could be clearer than that, people of Orphalese and friends! We got something taking possession of us, see? What is it? Well, he says here, 'People of Orphalese and friends. It is a flame spirit in you ever gathering more of itself.' Now, what the heck! Nobody can blame us for what a flame spirit in us does! So the first thing we got to learn, friends and people of Orphaleseis, we aren't to blame. And the second thing is, we are to blame!"
He turned and grinned at Chandler kindly, while the chorus of responses came from the room. "Like here," he said, "people of Orphalese, the Prophet says everybody is guilty. 'The murdered is not unaccountable for his own murder, and the robbed is not blameless in being robbed. The righteous is not innocent of the deeds of the wicked, and the white-handed is not clean in the doings of the felon.' You see what he's getting at? We all got to take the responsibility for everything and that means we got to suffer but we don't have to worry about any special things we did when some flame spirit or wanderer, like, took us over.
"But we do have to suffer, people of Orphalese." His expression became grim. "Our beloved founder, Guy, who's sitting there doing a little extra suffering now, was favored enough to understand these things in the very beginning, when he himself was seized by these imps. And it is all in this book! Like it says, 'Your pain is self-chosen. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.' Ponder on that, people of Orphalese and friends. No, I mean really ponder," he explained, glancing at the bound "friends" on the platform. "We always do that for a minute. Ada there will play us some music so we can ponder."
CHANDLER SHIFTED uncomfortably, while an old woman crippled by arthritis began fumbling a tune out of an electric organ. The burn Ellen Braisted had given him was beginning to hurt badly. If only these people were not such obvious nuts, he thought, he would feel a lot better about casting his lot in with them. But maybe it took lunatics to do the job. Sane people hadn't accomplished much.
And anyway he had very little choice ...
"Ada, that's enough," ordered the fat youth. "Meg, come on up here. People of Orphalese, now you can listen again while Meg explains to the new folks how all this got started, seeing Guy's in no condition to do it."
The teen-ager marched up to the platform and took the parade-rest position learned in some high school debating society in the days when there were debating societies and high schools.
"Ladies and gentlemen, well, let's start at the beginning. Guy tells this better'n I do, of course, but I guess I remember it all pretty well too. I ought to. I was in on it and all. " She grimaced and said, "Well, anyway, ladies and gentlemen, people of Orphalese, the way Guy organized this Orphalese self-protection society was, like Walter says, he was possessed. The only difference between Guy and you and me was that he knew what to do about it, because he read the book, you see. Not that that helped him at first, when he was took over. He was really seized.
Yes, people of Orph'lese, he was taken and while his whole soul and brain and body was under the influence of some foul wanderer fiend from hell he did things that, ladies and gentlemen of Orph'lese, I wouldn't want to tell you. He was a harp in the hand of the mighty, as it says. Couldn't help it, not however much he tried. Only while he was doing the things he happened to catch his hand in a gas flame and, well you can see it was pretty bad."
With a deprecatory smile Guy held up a twisted hand. "And, do you know, he was free of his imp right then and there! Now, Guy is a scientist, people of Orph'lese, he worked for the telephone company, and he not only had that training in the company school but he had read the book, yon see, and he put two and two together. Oh, and he's my uncle, of course. I'm proud of him. I've always loved him, and even when he when he was not one with himself, you know, when he was doing those terrible things to me, I knew it wasn't Uncle Guy that was doing them, but something else. I didn't know what, though.
And when he told me he had figured out the Basic Rule, I went along with him every bit. I knew Guy wasn't wrong, and what he said was from Scripture. 'Imps fear pain! So we got to love it.' That one I know by heart, all right: 'Could you keep your heart from wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy.' That's what it says. So that's why we got to hurt ourselves, people of Orph'lese and new brothers, because the Wanderers don't like it when we hurt and they leave us alone. Simple's that."