So he had gone outside and had sat beneath the tree as he had sat that day when he was a child, with his hands held out, palms up, and the strange card laid across one palm. He could feel the edge of magic and could smell the new freshness of the air, but it was not right, for there were no yellow leaves falling down the sky.
He had waited for the frost and when it came had gone out again and sat beneath the tree with the leaves falling through the air like slow-paced drops of rain. He had closed his eyes and had smelled the autumn air tainted with the faintest touch of smoke, and had felt the sunlight falling warm about him and it was exactly as it had been that day so long ago. The autumn day of boyhood had not been lost; it was with him still.
He had sat there with his hands held out and with the card across one palm and nothing happened. Then, as it had failed to do that day of long ago, a leaf came fluttering down and fell atop the card. It lay there for an instant, a perfect goldenness.
Then suddenly it was gone and in its place atop the card was the object that had been printed on the card—a ball of some sort, three inches in diameter, and with prickly spikes sticking out over it, like an outsize gooseberry. Then it buzzed at him and he could feel the buzzing spreading through his body.
It seemed in that instant that there was something with him, or that he was part of something—some thinking, living, (perhaps even loving) thing that quivered somewhere very close to him and yet very far away. As if this thing, whatever it might be, had reached out a finger and had touched him, for no other purpose than to let him know that it was there.
He crouched down to dip the water with the battered, blackened pan from a pool that appeared to be just a little cleaner and a little clearer than it had seemed elsewhere.
And there had been something there, he thought. Something that through the years he had become acquainted with, but never truly known. A gentle thing, for it had dealt with him gently. And a thing that had a purpose and had driven him toward that purpose, but kindly, as a kindly teacher drives a student toward a purpose that in the end turns out to be the student’s own.
The little buzzing gooseberry was the gateway to it, so long as the gooseberry had been needed. Although, he thought, such a word as gateway was entirely wrong, for there had been no gateway in the sense that he had ever seen this thing, or come close to it or had a chance to find out what it was. Only that it was, that it lived and that it had a mind and could communicate.
Not talk—communicate. And toward the end, he recalled, the communication had been excellent, although the understanding that should have gone with communication had never quite come clear.
Given time, he thought. But there had been an interruption and that was why he must get back, as quickly as he could. For it would not know why he had left it. It would not understand. It might think that he had died, if it had a concept that would encompass a condition such as death. Or that he had deserted it. Or that somehow it had failed.
He dipped the sauce pan full of water and straightened, standing in the great hush of the morning.
He remembered now. But why had he not remembered sooner? Why had it escaped him? How had he forgotten?
From far away he heard it and, hearing it, felt the hope leap in him. He waited tensely to hear it once again, needing to hear it that second time to know that it was true.
It came again, faint, but carrying unmistakably in the morning air—the crowing of a rooster.
He swung around and ran back to the camping site.
Running, he stumbled, and the pan flew from his hand. He scrabbled to his feet and left the pan where it had fallen.
He rushed to Kitty and fell on his knees beside her.
“Just a few more miles!” he shouted. “I heard a rooster crowing. The edge of the swamp can’t be far away.”
He reached down and slid his hands beneath her, lifted her, cradling her, holding her tightly against him.
She moaned and tossed.
“Easy, girl,” he said. “We’re almost out of it.”
He struggled from his knees and stood erect. He shifted her body so that it rode the easier in his arms.
“I’ll carry you,” he said. “I can carry you all the way.”
It was farther than he’d thought. And the swamp was worse than it had ever been—as if, sensing that this stumbling, stubborn creature might slip out of its grasp, it had redoubled its trickery and its viciousness in a last attempt to seize and swallow him.
He had left the little food they’d had behind. He’d left everything behind. He had taken only Kitty.
When she achieved a sort of half consciousness and cried for water, he stopped beside a pool, carried water to her in his cupped hands, bathed her face and helped her drink, then went on again.
Late in the afternoon the fever broke and she regained full consciousness.
“Where am I?” she asked, staring at the green-blackness of the swamp.
“Who are you?” she asked, and he tried to tell her. She did not remember him, or the swamp, or Limbo. He spoke to her of Eric and she did not remember Eric.
And that, he recalled, had been the way it had been with him. He had not remembered. Only over hours and days had it come back to him in snatches.
Was that the way it would be with her? Had that been the way it had been with Eric? Had there been no self-sacrifice, no heroism in what Eric did? Had it been a mere, blind running from the pit of horror in which he awoke to find himself?
And if all of this were true, whatever had been wrong with him, whatever caused the fever and forgetfulness, was then the same as had happened to Kitty and to Eric.
Was it, he wondered, some infection that he carried?
For if that were true, then it was possible he had infected everyone in Limbo.
He went on into the afternoon and his strength amazed him, for he should not be this strong.
It was nerve, he knew, that kept him going, the sheer excitement of being almost free of this vindictive swamp.
But the nerve would break, he knew. He could not keep it up. The nerve would break and the excitement would grow dull and dim and the strength would drain from him. He’d then be an aged man carrying an aged woman through a swamp he had no right to think he could face alone, let alone assume the burden of another human.
But the strength held out. He could feel it flowing in him. Dusk fell and the first faint stars came out, but the going now was easier. It had been easier, he realized, for the last hour or so.
“Put me down,” said Kitty. “I can walk. There’s no need to carry me.”
“Just a little while,” said Alden. “We are almost there.”
Now the ground was firmer and he could tell by the rasp of it against his trouser legs that he was walking in a different kind of grass—no longer the harsh, coarse, knife-like grass that few in the swamp, but a softer, gentle grass.
A hill loomed in the darkness and he climbed it and now the ground was solid.
He reached the top of the hill and stopped. He let Kitty down and stood her on her feet.
The air was clean and sharp and pure. The leaves of a nearby tree rustled in a breeze and in the east the sky was tinged with the pearly light of a moon.
Back of them the swamp, which they had beaten, and in front of them the clean, solid countryside that eventually would defeat them. Although eventually, Alden told himself, sounded much too long. In a few days, perhaps in a few hours, they would be detected and run down.
With an arm around Kitty’s waist to hold her steady as she walked, he went down the hill to eventual defeat.