"Oh G.o.d!" she cried, and seized up the hammer.

"Don"t, Martha!"

She smashed his head in and beat at his chest and his thrashing arms and wild legs. She beat at the soft head until steel shone through, and sudden explosions of wire and bra.s.s coggery showered about the room with metal tinkles.

"I love you," said the man"s mouth. She struck it with the hammer and the tongue fell out. The gla.s.s eyes rolled on the carpet. She pounded at the thing until it was strewn like the remains of a child"s electric train on the floor. She laughed while she was doing it.

In the kitchen she found several cardboard boxes. She loaded the cogs and wires and metal into these and sealed the tops. Ten minutes later she had summoned the houseboy from below.

"Deliver these packages to Mr. Leonard Hill, 17 Elm Drive," she said, and tipped the boy. "Right now, tonight. Wake him up, tell him it"s a surprise package from Martha."

"A surprise package from Martha," said the boy.

After the door closed, she sat on the couch with the gun in her hand, turning it over and over, listening. The last thing she heard in her life was the sound of the packages being carried down the hall, the metal jingling softly, cog against cog, wire against wire, fading.

THE DRAGON.

THE NIGHT BLEW IN THE SHORT GRa.s.s on the moor; there was no other motion. It had been years since a single bird had flown by in the great blind sh.e.l.l of sky. Long ago a few small stones had simulated life when they crumbled and fell into dust. Now only the night moved in the souls of the two men bent by their lonely fire in the wilderness; darkness pumped quietly in their veins and ticked silently in their temples and their wrists.

Firelight fled up and down their wild faces and welled in their eyes in orange tatters. They listened to each other"s faint, cool breathing and the lizard blink of their eyelids. At last, one man poked the fire with his sword.

"Don"t, idiot; you"ll give us away!"

"No matter," said this second man. "The dragon can smell us miles off anyway. G.o.d"s breath, it"s cold. I wish I was back at the castle."

"It"s death, not sleep we"re after. . . ."

"Why? Why? The dragon never sets foot in the town!"

"Quiet, fool! He eats men traveling alone from our town to the next!"

"Let them be eaten and let us get home!"

"Wait now; listen!"

The two men froze.

They waited a long time, but there was only the shake of their horses" nervous skin like black velvet tambourines jingling the silver stirrup buckles, softly, softly.

"Ah." The second man sighed. "What a land of nightmares. Everything happens here. Someone blows out the sun; it"s night. And then, and then, oh, sweet mortality, listen! This dragon, they say his eyes are fire. His breath a white gas; you can see him burn across the dark lands. He runs with sulfur and thunder and kindles the gra.s.s. Sheep panic and die insane. Women deliver forth monsters. The dragon"s fury is such that tower walls shake back to dust. His victims, at sunrise, are strewn hither thither on the hills. How many knights, I ask, have gone for this monster and failed, even as we shall fail?"

"Enough of that!"

"More than enough! Out here in this desolation I cannot tell what year this is!"

"Nine hundred years since the Nativity."

"No, no," whispered the second man, eyes shut. "On this moor is no Time, is only Forever. I feel if I ran back on the road the town would be gone, the people yet unborn, things changed, the castles unquarried from the rocks, the timbers still uncut from the forests; don"t ask how I know; the moor knows and tells me. And here we sit alone in the land of the fire dragon, G.o.d save us!"

"Be you afraid, then gird on your armor!"

"What use? The dragon runs from nowhere; we cannot guess its home. It vanishes in fog; we know not where it goes. Aye, on with our armor, we"ll die well dressed."

Half into his silver corselet, the second man stopped again and turned his head.

Across the dim country, full of night and nothingness from the heart of the moor itself, the wind sprang full of dust from clocks that used dust for telling time. There were black suns burning in the heart of this new wind and a million burned leaves shaken from some autumn tree beyond the horizon. The wind melted landscapes, lengthened bones like white wax, made the blood roil and thicken to a muddy deposit in the brain. The wind was a thousand souls dying and all Time confused and in transit. It was a fog inside of a mist inside of a darkness, and this place was no man"s place and there was no year or hour at all, but only these men in a faceless emptiness of sudden frost, storm and white thunder which moved behind the great falling pane of green gla.s.s that was the lightning. A squall of rain drenched the turf; all faded away until there was unbreathing hush and the two men waiting alone with their warmth in a cool season.

"There," whispered the first man, "Oh, there . . ."

Miles off, rushing with a great chant and a roar-the dragon.

In silence the men buckled on their armor and mounted their horses. The midnight wilderness was split by a monstrous gushing as the dragon roared nearer, nearer; its flashing yellow glare spurted above a hill and then, fold on fold of dark body, distantly seen, therefore indistinct, flowed over that hill and plunged vanishing into a valley.

"Quick!"

They spurred their horses forward to a small hollow.

"This is where it pa.s.ses!"

They seized their lances with mailed fists and blinded their horses by flipping the visors down over their eyes.

"Lord!"

"Yes, let us use His name."

On the instant, the dragon rounded a hill. Its monstrous amber eye fed on them, fired their armor in red glints and glitters. With a terrible wailing cry and a grinding rush it flung itself forward.

"Mercy, mercy!"

The lance struck under the unlidded yellow eye, buckled, tossed the man through the air. The dragon hit, spilled him over, down, ground him under. Pa.s.sing, the black brunt of its shoulder smashed the remaining horse and rider a hundred feet against the side of a boulder, wailing, wailing, the dragon shrieking, the fire all about, around, under it, a pink, yellow, orange sun-fire with great soft plumes of blinding smoke.

"Did you see it?" cried a voice. "Just like I told you!"

"The same! The same! A knight in armor, by the Lord Harry! We hit him!"

"You goin" to stop?"

"Did once; found nothing. Don"t like to stop on this moor. I get the w.i.l.l.i.e.s. Got a feel, it has."

"But we hit something!"

"Gave him plenty of whistle; chap wouldn"t budge!"

A steaming blast cut the mist aside.

"We"ll make Stokely on time. More coal, eh, Fred?"

Another whistle shook dew from the empty sky. The night train, in fire and fury, shot through a gully, up a rise, and vanished away over cold earth toward the north, leaving black smoke and steam to dissolve in the numbed air minutes after it had pa.s.sed and gone forever.

LET"S PLAY "POISON"

"WE HATE YOU!" CRIED THE SIXTEEN BOYS and girls rushing and crowding about Michael in the school room. Michael screamed. Recess was over, Mr. Howard, the teacher, was still absent from the filling room. "We hate you!" and the sixteen boys and girls, b.u.mping and cl.u.s.tering and breathing, raised a window. It was three flights down to the sidewalk. Michael flailed.

They took hold of Michael and pushed him out the window.

Mr. Howard, their teacher, came into the room. "Wait a minute!" he shouted.

Michael fell three flights. Michael died.

Nothing was done about it. The police shrugged eloquently. These children were all eight or nine, they didn"t understand what they were doing. So.

Mr. Howard"s breakdown occurred the next day. He refused ever again, to teach! "But, why?" asked his friends. Mr. Howard gave no answer. He remained silent and a terrible light filled his eyes, and later he remarked that if he told them the truth they would think him quite insane.

Mr. Howard left Madison City. He went to live in a small nearby town, Green Bay, for seven years, on an income managed from writing stories and poetry.

He never married. The few women he approached always desired-children.

In the autumn of his seventh year of self-enforced retirement, a good friend of Mr. Howard"s, a teacher, fell ill. For lack of a proper subst.i.tute, Mr. Howard was summoned and convinced that it was his duty to take over the cla.s.s. Because he realized the appointment could last no longer than a few weeks, Mr. Howard agreed, unhappily.

"Sometimes," announced Mr. Howard, slowly pacing the aisles of the school room on that Monday morning in September, "sometimes, I actually believe that children are invaders from another dimension."

He stopped, and his shiny dark eyes snapped from face to face of his small audience. He held one hand behind him, clenched. The other hand, like a pale animal, climbed his lapel as he talked and later climbed back down to toy with his ribboned gla.s.ses.

"Sometimes," he continued, looking at William Arnold and Russell Newell, and Donald Bowers and Charlie Hencoop, "sometimes I believe children are little monsters thrust out of h.e.l.l, because the devil could no longer cope with them. And I certainly believe that everything should be done to reform their uncivil little minds."

Most of his words ran unfamiliarly into the washed and unwashed ears of Arnold, Newell, Bowers and Company. But the tone inspired one to dread. The little girls lay back in their seats, against their pigtails, lest he yank them like bell ropes, to summon the dark angels. All stared at Mr. Howard, as if hypnotized.

"You are another race entirely, your motives, your beliefs, your disobediences," said Mr. Howard. "You are not human. You are-children. Therefore, until such time as you are adults, you have no right to demand privileges or question your elders, who know better."

He paused, and put his elegant rump upon the chair behind the neat, dustless desk.

"Living in your world of fantasy," he said, scowling darkly. "Well, there"ll be no fantasy here. You"ll soon discover that a ruler on your hand is no dream, no faerie frill, no Peter Pan excitement." He snorted. "Have I frightened you? I have. Good! Well and good. You deserve to be. I want you to know where we stand. I"m not afraid of you, remember that. I"m not afraid of you." His hand trembled and he drew back in his chair as all their eyes stared as him. "Here!" He flung a glance clear across the room. "What"re you whispering about, back there? Some necromancy or other?"

A little girl raised her hand, "What"s necromancy?"

"We"ll discuss that when our two young friends, Mr. Arnold and Mr. Bowers, explain their whispers. Well, young men?"

Donald Bowers arose. "We don"t like you. That"s all we said." He sat down again.

Mr. Howard raised his brows, "I like frankness, truth. Thank you for your honesty. But, simultaneously, I do not tolerate flippant rebellion. You"ll stay an hour after school tonight and wash the boards."

After school, walking home, with autumn leaves falling both before and after his pa.s.sing, Mr. Howard caught up with four of his students. He rapped his cane sharply on the sidewalk. "Here, what are you children doing?"

The startled boys and girls jerked as if struck upon their shoulders by his cane. "Oh," they all said.

"Well," demanded the man. "Explain. What were you doing here when I came up?"

William Arnold said, "Playing poison."

"Poison!" Their teacher"s face twisted. He was carefully sarcastic. "Poison, poison, playing poison. Well. And how does one play poison?"

Reluctantly, William Arnold ran off.

"Come back here!" shouted Mr. Howard.

"I"m only showing you," said the boy, hopping over a cement block of the sidewalk. "How we play poison. Whenever we come to a dead man we jump over him."

"One does, does one?" said Mr. Howard.

"If you jump on a dead man"s grave, then you"re poisoned and fall down and die," expained Isabel Skelton, much too brightly.

"Dead men, graves poisoned," Mr. Howard said, mockingly. "Where do you get this dead man idea?"

"See?" said Clara Parris, pointing with her arithmetic. "On this square, the names of the two dead men."

"Ridiculous," retorted Mr. Howard, squinting down. "Those are simply the names of the contractors who mixed and laid the cement sidewalk."

Isabel and Clara both gasped wildly and turned accusing eyes to the boys. "You said they were gravestones!" they cried, almost together.

William Arnold looked at his feet. "Yeah. They are. Well, almost. Anyway." He looked up. "It"s late. I gotta go home. So long."

Clara Parris looked at the two little names cut into the sidewalk. "Mr. Kelly and Mr. Terrill," she read the names. "Then these aren"t graves? Mr. Kelly and Mr. Terrill aren"t buried here? See, Isabel, that"s what I told you, a dozen times I did."

"You did not," sulked Isabel.

"Deliberate lies," Mr. Howard tapped his cane in an impatient code. "Falsification of the highest caliber. Good G.o.d, Mr. Arnold, Mr. Bowers, there"ll be no more of this, do you understand?"

"Yes, sir," mumbled the boys.

"Speak up!"

"Yes, sir," they replied, again.