And on the Eighth Day

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Authors: Ellery Queen
man washing a nearby table top looked up, startled; then at Ellery, awed; then away.
    “Quenan!” The voice was nearer. “Elroï—”
    The Successor burst into the dining hall, his angelic face alight, the long hair tumbling into the curls of his young beard. “There is a message for you—” For a moment Ellery fancied that someone from outside had tracked him down—the mere possibility made him recoil. But then the Successor said, “—from the Teacher. He asks that you come at once to the holy house!” And the young man ran out.
    Ellery jumped up and hurried out after him. But the young Successor was speeding off in another direction, evidently on some task or errand, and Ellery made his way quickly to the Holy Congregation House. Here, just as he was about to open the door, he remembered the taboo, and he took hold of the bellrope instead and pulled it twice. And waited.
    Butterflies danced between the world of light and the world of shade. The sound of wood being chopped came to him: ka-thuh- thunk , ka-thuh- thunk . And the rich green smell of earth and water and plants.
    Just as the door of the holy house opened, a little boy rode by astride the pinbones of a young donkey, intent on the dancing butterflies.
    “Teacher—” Ellery said.
    And—“Teacher,” said the little boy.
    And—“Blessed be the Wor’d,” the Teacher said, to both. His eagle’s face softened as he looked at the child, and he raised his hand in a graceful gesture of benignity.
    “Walk in beauty,” the Navajo says in farewell. This old man walked in beauty.
    The little boy smiled with delight. Then he spied Ellery, and the smile wavered. “Blessed be the Wor’d,” the child lisped hastily, and with uplifted hand made the same gesture.
    “Come,” the old man said to Ellery. And he shut the door.
    This time they did not sit at the table or pause at the Successor’s empty rooms. The Teacher led Ellery to the only door of his own room. The light shed by the lamp over the sanquetum door in the main meeting room penetrated to the Teacher’s chamber, with its few stark furnishings, and by itself would have served dimly to illuminate it; but the chamber contained its own arrangements for light. These were three tall, very narrow windows, scarcely more than slits a few inches wide, one set in the far wall opposite the door, the other two in the walls to the side. Through each of these slit-windows a plinth of sunlight entered, to meet in the exact center of the room at the bed standing there, so that the bed itself was bathed in sun. (And now Ellery realized that three walls admitting sunlight meant three outside walls; the Teacher’s room was architecturally a wing of the building, exactly balanced on the other side by a wing housing the Successor’s two smaller rooms.)
    The Teacher’s chamber was the room of a cenobite. Its narrow trestle bed was of wood covered by sewn sheepskins—its mattress—with a single thin blanket neatly spread out. To each side of the head of the cot stood a small square table; two rude chests occupied the midpoints of the two facing side-walls; a stool in one corner was identical with a stool in the corner diagonally opposite. The room itself was square.
    And so it was easy, in this room of perfect balance, to sense that something was out of balance. Something jangled in this orderly structure, something was off-key.
    Key … Ellery’s eye leaped, just anticipating the Teacher’s pointing finger, to the top of the left-hand table. On it, to one side and near a corner, lay a bracelet of some dull metal; and attached to the bracelet was a single key.
    “Someone moved the key last night,” the Teacher murmured. He saw that Ellery was puzzled, and he said, “For someone to enter my room without my knowledge—Elroï, this is a grave matter.”
    “How can you be sure,” Ellery asked, “that the key was moved?”
    The old man explained. Each night after saying his prayers he took off the bracelet

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