Monsters and Magicians

  fling him up onto a tree limb a score of feet above the ground, whereupon he had lost consciousness.

  Yancey had not come to until after sunup, brought back to a conscious state by the repeated shouts and threats and baseless insults of Collingwood, standing on the ground below. Stung to the quick by the old man's slanders of his two darling sons, Yancey had tried to quit the limb, only to lose his balance and find himself hanging beneath it by his belt, which somehow had been lapped around both his own skinny waist and the oak limb. It had taken a brace of sheriffs deputies and a stepladder to at last get him down.

  He had told them all the true story, right from the beginning. The arresting deputies had laughed at him, then thrown him into the tank with the rest of the preceding night's collection of drunks. Upon arrival, Sheriff Vaughan had heard him out, then shaken his head and said, with a wolfish smile, "Yancey, I think you done vi'lated your parole, las' night. Didn' I warn you 'bout thet? 'Bout behavin' yourse'f and all, boy? Well, you'll be back on the farm lickety-split, this time. You oughta get there jest about in time for the plowin' and plantin', too."

  Turning to his accompanying deputies and the turnkey, he had ordered, "Take Yancey out'n here and put him upstairs, heah. One you read him his rights and let him make any phone calls he wants to, too. Judge Hanratty, he's due in . . . lessee, Monday of nex' week; Yancey should oughta be over the shakes by then.

  "I'll let Missus Pugh know 'bout this so she can go out and put Welfare back on pore Char'ty Mathews

  and them two hellions Yancey got on her. I'll call Mike Mills over to the Courthouse, too, and see 'bout gettin' another free lawyer, a P.D. for Yancey, you know damn well he could pay one no way . . . 'cept in empty beer cans."

  The young lawyer the county finally turned up for him had heard him out, too, then just sat across the table from him for long minutes, staring at him and rolling a yellow pencil between the slender fingers of his butter-soft, hairless hands. At length the sallow-skinned lawyer had nodded his head of modishly-long black hair once, leafed through the papers contained in a manila file folder until he found what he sought, pulled out that sheet and used the yellow pencil to underline some things on it.

  Returning his brown eyes to stare at Yancey, where he had sat cold sober, shaky, haggard and clad in ill-fitting jail clothing, he had asked, "How much had you had to drink that night, Mr. Mathews?"

  As Yancey had begun to shake his head, the young man—almost a boy, Yancey thought—had warned in a cold voice that had snapped like a bullwhip, "And don't try to lie to me. If you do, I'll know and you can then just find yourself another attorney ... if you can. You're not exactly any good attorney's dream of a client, you know.

  "Now, how much did you have to drink that night? How many beers?"

  "I ... I don't remember all that good, Mistuh Klein," Yancey had half-whined, avoiding that icy, penetrating gaze as best he might. But that fearsome gaze had finally trapped his bloodshot eyes and he had felt compelled by cruel circumstance to add,

  "Not much. Mebbe four . . . five ..." The lawyer had said not a word, but his thin lips had become thinner and those terrible brown eyes had bored like a cold-steel star drill powered by a twelve-pound sledgehammer, and so Yancey was constrained to add, "Six-packs. Four, mebbe five six-packs . . . but they was all pony-cans, Mistuh Klein, little 'uns, all of em.

  "Holy shit" exclaimed David Klein, most feelingly, "Even if those were all pony-cans—which I do not believe for one minute, but never mind that, for now—that would be over a gallon and a half of beer. After drinking that much, a man as skinny and fleshless as you are, I don't see why you weren't comatose. I can't imagine how you were able to stagger a block or so over level ground, much less climb up into an oak tree, before you passed out."

  Yancey had snuffled, then, whining dolefully, "You don' b'lieve me neethuh. An' I swear awn the Holy Bible, Mistuh Klein, suh, I done tole you the whole, gospul truth, 'bout whatall happuned thet night. Thet Fitzgilbert bastid, he flang me up in thet tree. I dint climb up, I couldn' of, I alius been pow'ful afeered of heights, is why. Jest you ast, ast enybodys' done done construcshun work with me. I'm scairt of high places."

  By the time Yancey had finished he was sobbing, and tears were trickling down through his three days' worth of stubble.

  To Sheriff Vaughan, David Klein had said, "My client swears to the truth of his story about this Fitzgilbert having thrown him up into that tree, after jumping over the fence and attacking him without

  any provocation whatsoever. Has anyone yet talked to Mr. Fitzgilbert about it?"

  After pouring himself another mug of coffee from his office silex, the sheriff sat back down, sipped, then set aside the mug and sighed. "Mr. Klein, no, suh, nobody's talked to Mistuh Fitzgilbert, 'cause nobody can, not 'round here. Mistuh Fitzgilbert ain't even in the country, ain't been for weeks. He travels around a lot and, last I heered, he's in Africa, huntin' elephants or suthin."

  "Well, then," probed Klein, doggedly, "could someone who might have resembled Fitzgilbert to my client in his somewhat intoxicated condition have jumped over that fence and ..."

  Vaughan had shaken his greying head vehemently. "Cous'luh, couldn't nobody of jest jumped ovuh thet fence, I tell you! Thet fence is a almost-new, twelve-foot cyclone fence with three strands of bob-wire at the top. It can be climbed—Yancey, he's climbed it afore and so has his two sons—and that's all . . . lest you can fly.

  "B'sides of the fact thet Mistuh Fitzgilbert, he's 'bout your height, though with a bit of a heftier build, but no ways strong enough for to th'ow a ridge-runnuh size of Yancey twenty foot up into no tree, nor carry him up, neethuh.

  "You are gonna represent Yancey, then?"

  It was David Klein's turn to sigh. Nodding slowly, he said, "Yes, I told the poor man I would . . . and I will, for all that you've just blown the defenses I was putting together out of the water. You must like him, despite everything, to . . ."

  Slamming a horny palm onto his desktop with such

  force as to set all on it into motion, Vaughan burst out, "Like him? Mistuh Klein, I purely hate Yancey Mathews's pickled guts! He's made life a pure, unholy hell for that pore little gal he conned into marryin' up with him and he's set his boys such a bad example and let 'em both run so lawless and hog-wild for so damn long of their lives I don't think enything's goin' to ever straighten the two of 'em out, lest it's a bullet or a load of buckshot.

  "Cold sober—which he ain't often, ain't never if he can help it—Yancey is mean as a snake, connivin', thievin' and I don' know whatall; drunk, he's a murder just awaitin' a time and place to happen at. I think ... I knows, the bestest place, the onliest place cut out to his measure for him to be, to spend the rest his natcherl life at, is on the county farm, where he knows if he lets eny his white-trash meanness come out, he'll purely get the shit kicked out of him and thet damned quick-like, too.

  "The reason I made sure Mistuh Mills sent for you is I don't want nobody to never be able to say or make it look like I got even a no-good hillbilly scumbag like of a Yancey Mathews to get railroaded by this county jest 'cause of he was a troublemaker and dint nobody like him. Heah?"

  As it happened, on the very evening of the day Yancey first met Attorney David Klein, Public Defender, Circuit Judge Harold Hanratty put his big, seal-brown thoroughbred at one fence too many and wound up in surgery for his trouble. It was more than a month before an adequate substitute judge could make his way to that county and Klein made good use of the time, having Yancey thoroughly ex-

  amined, physically, mentally and emotionally, by competent specialists.

  All of these specialists were located in the city and, although Sheriff Vaughan hated the expenses of deputy-drivers and transport f
or the handcuffed, shackled prisoner, he gritted his teeth and bore it as best he could, solacing himself with pleasant reveries of rawboned Yancey Mathews, working his skinny butt off on the county farm, with nothing to drink except water, coffee, tea and orange juice for the next several years ... at the least. Hopefully, poor little Charity Mathews would use the absence of her spouse and his knobby knuckles to recognize the error of staying his wife, divorce the miscreant and find herself a good, decent, sober, law-abiding, God-fearing man with a good job, like she deserved.

  But the sheriffs daydreams were not to be, this time.

  orangish fangs had gotten close enough to rend his flesh, but it had proven itself more than fast enough to pace his bike across the broken terrain and had absorbed far and away too many of the .44-magnum slugs spat out by Fitz's carbine to suit the man.

  He still bore the carbine and his revolver, but he also now carried an old but well-kept Holland and Holland double rifle, an elephant gun—its gaping bores bigger than more modern shotguns' bores and its two chambers containing custom-made cartridges that looked of a size more likely to be made for an automatic cannon than a hunting piece. Despite the best recoil pad that the gunsmith had been able to obtain and carefully fit to the butt of the rare, very expensive gun, despite its world-heavy but recoil-absorbing weight, Fitz had experienced from it an unremittingly brutal kick. However, the things that the thumb-thick lead-alloy slugs would do to even the weather-hardened wood of the ancient, partially wrecked dromon in the dunes back near the beach gave him a sense of near confidence in the rifle's ability to put down even a Teeth-and-Legs with one ... or, at most, two shots.

  Still, he had no slightest desire to have to test the capabilities of the massive weapon. If he could cross the plain to the wooded hills without encountering a Teeth-and-Legs, he would be pleased. With a hill or two between him and the plain, he knew that he could unload and case the double-barreled rifle; for some reason the monsters never came into the hills.

  Recalling how the thing he had had to kill the last time had tried to ambush him, he paused on each available elevation to scan the terrain ahead, behind,

  and on either flank with his binoculars, and he travelled well clear of the thicker clumps of vegetation and the verges of the gullies, where possible.

  In the times before he had become aware of the existence of the terrible Teeth-and-Legs, he had spent much time—both by day and by night—on the Pony Plain. He had ridden the bike, walked, and camped out on it, observing the singular varieties of wildlife, some very similar to the beasts he had either seen in the flesh or at least in pictures in the world in which he had grown to his present fifty-five years of age. But there were others which he had never seen or even imagined.

  "This Teeth-and-Legs, now," he thought to himself, "not even my set of the Encyclopedia Britannica describes anything remotely resembling the things. The closest beast I can think of would be a baboon of some land, but monstrously distorted and vastly oversized. The one I shot had a head as big as a full-grown lion's, a body almost as big as a gorilla's, legs longer and thicker than mine ending in feet more like human feet—adapted to running, obviously, not to climbing—and arms that hung past its knees with hands like hams; it had a long muzzle like a huge dog or a bear and a full complement of orangish-whitish teeth with fangs that a Bengal tiger wouldn't have been ashamed to show. Oh, and a shortish tail, too, as I recall.

  "God, but that thing was fast; it could have run down any antelope, no sweat, or outraced even a cheetah. From the look of the body it must have been as strong as the proverbial ox, too. Looking back, though, I shouldve realized that something

  out of the ordinary was going on that day when I set out and saw so very little of any of the other animals on my route across. They keep as much distance as possible between them and the Teeth-and-Legs, wisely.

  "The ponies are odd in many ways, too. I don't know all that much about the various kinds of equines, but I'm still not sure that these are ponies at all. Yes, they're pony-height, big-headed for their size, thicker-legged than most horses, but their necks don't have real manes, just short bristles like a zebra or Pre . . . Prz . . . that weird-named wild horse some Russians found in Asia years ago after everyone thought it was extinct. Their coloring is way different, too—solid red-roan, most of them, with chocolate-brown neck bristles, tails and a broad stripe of it down the length of their spines. Some few of them look to have very faint stripes running around their lower legs, too.

  "Danna says that she recalls reading somewhere, some time, an account by some naturalist or other of a small number of horses or ponies some place on one of the larger Caribbean islands that she thinks she recalls were colored like these . . . but she admits that she read it only once and long ago and can't be sure.

  "But both of us are stumped as to just what these things I call rat-tailed ostriches could be. They're most about the size of an ostrich, they live and feed and move about in herds or flocks or whatever you call them like ostriches, they have legs and feet like an ostrich and they lay humongous eggs like ostriches, their heads and long necks look like ostriches', but there the similarities end. Now comes

  the weird parts: they don't have any feathers where ostriches have feathers, rather hair—fine, thick, downy hair—and instead of wings, they have a pair of spindly arms and hands or paws or whatever with three long fingers and a shorter one that is semi-opposed, like my thumb, almost. And then there's their tails—a long, tapering, scaly tail—they can move them, but rather stiffly, and seem to use them mostly for balance.

  "I've not seen any of the flying lizards close enough to get a good idea of the details of them; I don't even know if the various sizes and colors of them are sexual dimorphism, stages of growth of the same animals or different animals altogether.

  "Then there's those weird birds with claws on their wing joints, that like to clamber in the thorn trees and eat the berries and any strange bugs they can catch. They have beaks like birds, but I think they have small teeth, too. But they at least do have feathers, not fur like the ostriches.

  "Most of the smaller, furry animals, look fairly much like the small furry beasts anywhere else. But then there's the flying rabbits. The grown ones are about the size of a prairie jack-rabbit, though they look to have much thicker bodies at first glance, when you see them moving about on the ground. It's not until they get spooked and jump that you see that what you thought was a thick body is actually folds of furred skin that stretches from the forelegs to the hind legs and allows them to glide when extended, so that they can cover distances that would be incredible if not flatly impossible for rabbits back where I came from.

  "There's also some kind of horned animal that I've

  only seen from a distance with the binoculars—and that only once, so there must not be too many of them or they are just rare in this area, one or the other. They're as big as the ponies or bigger, look kind of antelopish and all have a pair of long, curving, pointed horns with raised ridges around the shafts of them. The herd I saw wasn't at all large, smaller than some of the pony herds, in fact; but if there's any prey animal out here that could take on a Teeth-and-Legs with a chance of winning, I'd put my money on those great big antelopes or whatever, with their size and their horns.

  "Something lives in the bigger lake over to the east that's big enough to take paddling birds the size of a duck; I saw it happen, twice, when I was camped beside that lake once. It may be just a largish fish, like a muskellunge or a pike, but I don't know, I never saw anything but ripples and the birds being pulled underwater. Nonetheless—he chuckled aloud at the memory—I stopped swimming in that particular lake.

  "I know damned good and well there're other predators—large and small—around out here. I've found several shed snakeskins and seen feline paw-prints of a number of sizes on the muddy banks of the ponds and lakes; but the only snake I have actually seen was in process of being eaten by a small eagle perched atop a big thornbrush. Apparently, the rap
tors and the Teeth-and-Legs are the only real predators out here that hunt by day—them and the terrestrial lizards, none of which are all that big."

  Atop another rise of ground, the man paused as usual and swept his immediate surroundings on all

  sides carefully with his eyes before using the big binoculars. Some mile ahead, a herd of ponies had converged along the nearer fringes of a reedy pond to drink and graze on the short, tender red-green grasses that grew there and in the hills beyond, but not out on the more arid plain.

  Fitz recognized the herd stallion, a big one for his weedy breed—between fourteen and fifteen hands. The equine was missing part of his near-side ear, and the cheek below that eye bore three long furrows of scar tissue, quite dissimilar to his other battle scars. Fitz had often wondered at the origin of the facial scars in times past while roaming the plains among the herds. Now he thought he knew: the big stallion had at some time faced and fought a Teeth-and-Legs and survived the encounter. One tough pony!

  Unslinging his two-quart waterbag, Fitz drank to the courageous pony stallion in the bottled mineral water which, its provenance not withstanding, still harbored an unpleasant, vaguely-chemical undertaste and aftertaste as compared to the fresh waters of this place. Disgusted, he upended both of the waterbags and poured the otherworldly liquid out onto the sandy soil at his feet; he could refill them shortly when he reached the pond ahead, with water, real water.

  In the deep-cut, steep-sided gully that dropped away from the rise on which he sat his idling machine, lizards of a plethora of sizes and shapes and many different iridescent colors scuttled among the rounded pebbles of the seasonal stream bed seeking insects and worms. They and the scattering of small birds obviously set to the same mission all ignored

  him and his noisy transportation, not considering him a threat.

  He had cased his binoculars and was just about to proceed when, with the speed of insanity, everything happened at once. With a wild blur of fluttering wings and squawks of alarm, all the birds in the dry stream bed took flight, the lizards abruptly flicked out of sight, and suddenly there was one of the huge, pithecoid Teeth-and-Legs standing on the dry, round pebbles, its fierce, feral gaze locked upon him and its orangy teeth and fangs displayed in an utterly unhu-morous grin. With a howl, the thing raised its over-long arms and ran two steps, then leaped upward.