Sign of the Labrys Read online

  I started to back out of the cleft. My belt caught on a projection on the rock, and the flashlight stuck in it jerked up. I saw, rudely scratched on the rough rock, an outsized figure seven.

  My heart jumped. I took the flashlight from my belt and examined the sign carefully. No, it wasn’t a seven, but a much older symbol. Somebody—it must have been quite difficult to do—had drawn on the grayish stone the old, old sign of the labrys, the double-headed axe.

  I thought about it most of the way back to my new pad. The sign might have been there before, but I didn’t think so; when I had first gone fungus-hunting, I’d searched that particular cleft thoroughly. But if somebody had only recently scratched it, who? And why? As far as I knew, I was the only person who even knew of the existence of the cleft. For a moment of mental vertigo, I wondered whether I myself could possibly have drawn the sign on the rock. But I knew that I had not.

  Back at my new lodging, I washed the fronds of fungus and put them on to cook with a cube of dehydrated beef broth. But I was fated to have trouble with supper that night. When I went to my other suitcase for a food bowl, I found an oblong of paper resting on top of it.

  It was a note. The note, written in pale brown ink, was quite short: “Mr. Sewell, come to the lower gallery at about eleven tonight.” It was signed with a “D”.

  I started to crumple the paper up angrily. Ames, the FBY man, must have left it, and it must represent either an attempt to embroil me actively with the mysterious Despoina, or, more likely, a trial at forcing guilty knowledge from me.

  Then I stopped. How had Ames known where to find me? I hadn’t known, myself, that I was going to select a pad on level D until the last moment. For him to be able to find me ten minutes after I moved in must mean that the FBY was keeping me under constant surveillance. And if they were watching me that closely, they ought to know that I wasn’t in contact with Despoina, and never had been.

  I picked up the note and examined it more closely. The ink it was written in was so thick it seemed embossed on the paper, a pale brown paste that might almost have been put on with a brush. The handwriting itself was large, bold, and elegant. It was surprisingly easy to read. A woman’s writing? Yes, if she was rather egoistical.

  I ate my supper. I felt restless. I wasn’t going to go, of course. But at fifteen minutes to eleven, quite as if I had meant to go all along, I loaded fresh batteries into my flashlight and left my pad.

  The lower gallery is in its natural state. When the caves were fitted out for human habitation and the lower levels were dug, it was considered too weak structurally to be used. It remains exactly what it always was—a huge room, two hundred by three hundred feet, with a low roof and a few stalactites. It isn’t even spectacular.

  I met nobody on the way. There must be a good many other people living in the caves, but we almost never encounter each other. When we do, we look aside. It’s better that way.

  The gallery, of course, was completely dark. I shone the little beam of my flashlight as far as it would reach, and made a partial circuit of the walls… Nobody. But the place was so big a dozen people could have been lurking out of reach of my beam.

  I waited. I kept the light on and the beam moving about in the darkness. At last I heard a noise. It sounded like a step. I called, “Who’s there?”

  There was no answer. I was getting fed up, and turned to go back.

  A breath of air blew past me. It was cool and moist-smelling. And then a voice, toneless and echoless, spoke, it seemed into my very ear: “Blessed… be…”

  I wheeled around. I sent the beam of light stabbing out into the darkness. “Who’s there?” I called. “Where are you? Come out! Come out!”

  My shouts died away. There was no answer, nothing. Not even a footfall. Nothing at all.

  3

  I slept late next morning, a cold, unrefreshing sleep, and got to my new job late. It didn’t matter. I worked the rest of the day with the bulldozer. It was odd how peaceful I felt doing it. When I got back to my new pad at the end of the day, Ames was waiting for me.

  “How did you know where to find me?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “When I found you’d moved, it was just a question of guessing to which level you’d go, and of opening doors.”

  “Umm. What do you want?”

  “What I wanted last time. For you to put me in contact with Despoina.”

  “I told you, I don’t have any contact with her.”

  “Oh? Then how do you account for this?” He held out the note that had come last night. Like a fool, I had forgotten to destroy it.

  “The note was left without any action on my part. I don’t know why it was left.”

  “Did you keep the rendezvous?” he asked eagerly.

  “… Yes.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing at all? I can’t believe that.”

  “I thought I heard a footstep,” I answered unwillingly. “And then a voice said, ‘Blessed be.’ I don’t know who or where the speaker was.”

  His face had begun to glow. “‘Blessed be’!” he repeated softly. “Yes, it’s certainly she.” And then, to me, “Take me to her, Sewell.”

  “If I could—I can’t—but if I could, why do you want her?”

  “My organization—No harm will come to her.”

  I laughed. “You don’t sound as if it was an organizational matter. You seem to be personally involved.”

  “No…” he said, and then seemed to reconsider. “I’ve been infected with the plague,” he said slowly. “She can cure such things.”

  I backed away from him. “Which form?”

  “A new form. I’ll be dead in a couple of weeks.”

  “You’ve got a hell of a nerve coming here.”

  “You’re in no danger, Mr. Sewell. You don’t seem to be aware of it, but I can assure you it’s true: you’re plague-immune.”

  I eyed him appraisingly. He didn’t look sick; he looked elated. “How could she help you? You said the first time she was a sower of plague.”

  “Did I say that? She can kill plague cells just by looking at them.”

  This wasn’t absolutely impossible. I had heard stories of such things when the plagues were at their height. But somehow, I didn’t believe him. My mind put him down as a rotten liar, for all his clean-cut face and his braid-trimmed uniform.

  “It isn’t good enough,” I said finally. “If I could take you to her—I can’t—but if I could,” I said again, “I’d have to have a better reason than that.”

  His face cracked. It was like a piece of paper being crumpled, or an ice floe breaking up. “I’ve got to have her!” he cried desperately. “How long can I go on living like this?”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “Perhaps you’re so numb you don’t suffer,” he answered. “Perhaps you’re so numb that you don’t realize you’re suffering. But I was—close to her, two or three years ago. When the ice thaws a little, you realize how much our isolation from each other hurts us.”

  “That’s how everybody lives nowadays,” I replied. “We can’t stand each other’s company.”

  “Yes. But it used to be different. People could share things, work together, build and create. Everything rested on that. The ties between human beings were the basis of all societies. Now those ties have failed. And we don’t feel or think like human beings any more.”

  I was getting uneasy. It wasn’t only what he was saying; it was his mere physical presence. I wanted him to go. I said, “These are philosophical questions, Mr. Ames. Let’s keep it on a personal level. Were you in love with this girl?” The words sounded strange as they left my mouth.

  “I don’t know,” he said. He was trembling, a slight tremor that came in recurrent waves. “It doesn’t matter. She—don’t you understand, you fool?—she could take away the numbness.

  “You’re younger than I am,” he went on. “Perhaps that’s what makes you a fool. You haven’t live
d long enough to learn that there’s horror underneath the ice.”

  I sighed. “I still can’t take you to her. Since it’s a personal matter, and not an institutional interest of the FBY, perhaps you won’t mind telling me what makes you think I can.”

  “You’re one of the same kind.”

  “What do you mean by that?” I said. (I was almost at the end of my tether: in a minute or two I was going to try to throw him out bodily. We weighed about the same, but he was an inch or two taller. And he probably had had more training in hand-to-hand combat than I.) “Do you think I can give you a feeling of being ‘close,’ somehow thaw out the ice?”

  “You’re one of the same kind as she is, but you don’t know it,” he replied evasively. “You have all the signs.”

  “What signs?”

  He didn’t answer. I advanced a step or two toward him. He drew back a little, as if he felt the almost instinctive dislike of contact with another person that we all have.

  “What signs?” I repeated. “What kind of person is Despoina, if I’m like her?”

  He had stopped trembling. He smiled at me quite cheerfully. “I’ll tell you,” he said, “because it won’t make any sense to you. By the time you do realize what I mean, it will be too late.

  “You’re the same kind of person as Despoina. Despoina is a witch.”

  4

  A witch is an old woman who rides through the air on a broomstick… I was lying on my bunk, thinking, after Ames had left. If one took this definition literally, Ames’s remark was obvious nonsense. He had said Despoina was young, he had implied that she was beautiful (slender figure, very fair skin, heavy red-gold hair). And nobody, young or old, can fly through the air on a broomstick.

  A witch is a woman who has made a compact with the devil so she can harm her neighbors’ cattle and crops. But the only devil I have ever encountered has been my fellow human beings, and nobody has cattle or crops to be damaged nowadays.

  I sighed and punched up the bunk’s pillow. What had Ames meant, anyway? And he had said I was like her, I was one of the same sort.

  Lying on my back, with my arms under my head, I reviewed my past. I had been born in Peabody, a smallish town in Massachusetts, twenty-five years ago. Mother had been a kind and sensible woman; my childhood had been a happy one. The thing I remembered most vividly about those years was her wonderful baking: the slabs of salt-rising bread, malodorous but delicious, and thickly buttered; the cookies; the pies; the delicate rolls.

  When I was fifteen, the plagues had come. Only a few cases at first, baffling to the doctors; and then a flood, an overwhelming torrent, of deaths.

  I had survived. It occurred to me now that perhaps I owed my survival to my mother’s fondness for baking, to all the wild yeasts, baked into harmlessness, I had chewed and swallowed in the form of salt-rising bread. Ames had said I was immune, and perhaps I was; this was as good a way as any other to account for it.

  The plagues had been really virulent for five years, five years of increasing social disorganization and failure of contact. I had seen a lot of people die. And then, for me, five years of drifting, of aimless and indifferent wandering.

  That brought me up to the present. I couldn’t see that anything in it made me a witch.

  I got up from the bunk and made myself some supper. The simplest way of accounting for Ames’s various statements was to assume that he was self-deluded; he had made all of it, or most of it, up. The only evidence of Despoina’s existence I had had so far could have originated with him. There is nothing in the rules that says an FBY man can’t be a little mad.

  I ate, read for a while, and crawled in between the bunk’s paper sheets. I woke about two o’clock in the morning, from an indifferent dream, to a sensation of abysmal horror and hopelessness.

  It was so bad that I sat up in the darkness, shaking. At last I roused myself to turn on the light, but that didn’t help. Ames had said that there was horror under the ice; it seemed that the ice had melted a little and let some of the horror through. What bothered me as much as anything was the awareness that I could die where I lay and my body not be found for weeks—if, indeed it was ever found. There was a peculiarly blank quality to my fear, a horror of emptiness.

  At last the emotion subsided a little. I went to one of my suitcases and got out a book on set theory. I forced myself to keep my attention on the printed page.

  At first I’d have fits of shaking, when I’d stop reading and be locked in a glassy fixation on my own isolatedness. But little by little I grew interested in what the book was saying; finally, after a couple of hours, I got sleepy. I left the light on and, with the book on my chest, went back to sleep.

  I showed up at the bulldozers at the usual time next morning. The day went calmly enough until mid-afternoon. Then, as I lifted one of the big plastic-covered parcels on the blade of the bulldozer, I saw that the body inside it was moving torpidly.

  It was a man; I could make him out well enough to see the buttons on his coat. His body was still, but his arms and legs moved up and down slowly, as if he were languidly trying to swim.

  I gave a cry. I dropped the bundle back on the ground and jumped down from the seat of the bulldozer. I ran over to Jim, the small dark man who was responsible for my being on the dozer crew.

  “One of the bodies—it’s alive,” I said.

  “You think so?” He laughed. He walked over to the bulldozer with me and looked at the man.

  “Naw,” he said. “He’s dead for sure. They do that sometimes. It’s the gas. You just haven’t happened to see one before.” He walked away.

  I got back on the seat of the bulldozer. I went on with my job. But I did not disturb the man who had been moving. I buried other people for the rest of the day.

  When I got back to my pad, I was tired. I had a shower—the water was only lukewarm on this level—and then went to my suitcase for fresh paper clothes. As I raised the lid, something slid off and fell ringingly on the floor.

  What had it been? I bent over and looked for it. At last, under the bunks on the far side, I located it. It was a gold ring.

  It was set with a flat elliptical stone, carnelian I thought, engraved in intaglio. I took it under the light by my bunk to see what the subject was.

  It was a woman, naked to the waist, with her hair in long ringlets. Her hands were under her breasts, supporting them, and she wore a flounced skirt that reached to her feet. Her feet seemed to be tied together—but it was difficult to be certain about this detail—with a cord.

  Altogether, an odd gem. The woman’s costume looked Cretan. It was hard to believe I held in my hand anything that had come down through so many centuries, but the gold of the hoop and bezel seemed pitted and old.

  I tried it on. The hoop was too small for any of my fingers except the little one, and even there it had to be worked carefully over the joint. I took the ring off again and was still looking at it when there came a rap at my door.

  “Come in,” I said.

  It was Ames. His eyes were wild; he looked as if he hadn’t slept. “I came to ask—What’s that in your hand?”

  I closed my fingers over the ring. “Nothing,” I said.

  “Oh, yes it is.” A stun pistol was suddenly in his hand. “Give it to me,” be ordered.

  I hesitated. But the ring had come to me unsought, and there was really no reason why he couldn’t look at it if he wished. Silently I handed it to him.

  He drew in his breath. “It’s Despoina’s ring,” he said. “I’ve seen it on her hand a thousand times. How did you get it?”

  “It was lying on the lid of my suitcase when I got home.”

  “And no message? But I know what it means. She’s sent it to you as a passport, so you can get past the guards. She wants you to go to her.”

  “Past what guards? Where? And if she wants me to go to her, why doesn’t she just tell me so?”

  “The guards on the lower levels,” he said, as if to a child. “I ought to have
realized where she was when she told you to meet her in the lower gallery. But you couldn’t get through, of course, without something to get past the guards.”

  I looked at him. He was turning the ring over and over in his fingers, with his mouth open. “Mr. Ames,” I said, “I don’t believe a word of this. Is there any such person as Despoina? For all I know, you left the ring on my suitcase yourself.”

  He laughed. “I could have, couldn’t I?” There was a crafty gleam in his eyes. He was still fondling the ring.

  I hesitated. It was reasonable to assume that if I told him he could have the ring, that he had my permission to go in my stead on a visit to the mythical Despoina with the ring as his passport, he would go away with it, happy and satisfied, and leave me in peace. He was unbalanced, certainly, but I did not really think he had left the ring himself.

  “I—” I began, and stopped. I remembered the horror of emptiness that had come on me last night. “Give me my ring,” I said.

  He looked at me. Deliberately he slipped the ring on over his little finger; his hands were smaller than mine. “It’s mine now,” he told me. His stun pistol was covering me.

  “Oh, hell. Keep it, then, if you want it so much.” I managed a shrug. Then I jumped for his throat.

  The stun pistol went off. I felt the tingling paralysis run along my right arm. But I still had the use of my left hand, and I had taken him off guard. In a moment we were rolling on the floor.

  He was a dirty fighter, and he knew about pressure points. And I had only one arm. For a minute or two I managed to hold my own and even cut off his wind temporarily. Then he got uppermost and started to bang my head against the floor.

  Abruptly I felt his body relax. I went for his throat again; I thought it might be a trick. But he felt limp and heavy. When he didn’t move, I pushed him off me and got to my feet.

  His face was flushed and his mouth was open. I felt for his pulse, and couldn’t find any. A trickle of greenish slime ran from his mouth.