Free Manly Wade Wellman - John the Balladeer 02 by After Dark (v1.1)

didn't have a true door, just a sort of drape
hung there, of what dark stuff I couldn't make out. If I walked to it, I could
push it aside easy and go on in. But I wasn't about to do that.
                 For
I recollected, right clearly, tales I'd heard about the sort of house not made
with hands. You can come across it here and there in lonesome places, the thing
they call a gardinel. I can't tell you where that name comes from, what
language or meaning it is. It grows up somehow to house size, they say, and
it's there to hope some man will think it's a house sure enough and go in and
not come out again.
                 Because gardinels eat men, so I'd heard tell.
                 But
Shonokins—Brooke Altic had said they weren't true men. Did Shonokins go into
gardinels?
                 "Good morning to you again, John."
                 It
was like as if the thought of him had called him up. Yonder came Brooke Altic,
in another suit of his bright, sharp city clothes and his dark glasses; yonder
he came round one of those curvy paths to meet me. In one of his gloved hands he
toted a cane of polished black wood, with a silver knob at one end and a sharp
silver spike to the other.
                 "So
you did come," he said, with his teeth all there in a gleam in his smiling
mouth. "I hoped you would. I more or less expected you would."
                 I
stood and looked him up and down, from his grinning face to his polished boots
and back, before I answered. "I just sort of thought I'd come along and
see what your settlement was like," I said.
                 "We
wanted you to come."
                 "No,
it was my own idea," I told him, while I wondered myself what he'd be up
to with me.
                 "Was
it?" Still he smiled. "Very well, maybe it was partly your idea and
partly ours. We know ways of using your own thoughts and fancies to get
something from you."
                 I
watched that silver-headed, silver-spiked stick of his. Its tip was sharp
enough to stab, if so be a man would want to stab.
                 "You
said you expected me here," I reminded him. "Expected me here to do
what?"
                 "To see wisdom. Recognize profit. And now you're
here."
                 I
looked again at that nearest house, with its eye-windows, its draped door.
                 "Go
on,” Brooke Altic bade me. "Go on in. There's no danger.”
                 "No
danger feared, but I won't go in where I don't reckon I'm wanted.” I stood with
my feet apart, and tried to act as easy about things as he did. "Mr.
Altic,” I said, "you can just call me a truth seeker. I'd admire to know
the whole truth about you Shonokins.”
                 "But
I've already tried to tell you some things,” he said. "And I've tried to
reach peaceable terms with you.”
                 "Peaceable terms,” I repeated after him. "Peaceable like those three Shonokins that came with guns
after Mr. Ben Gray, to rob him and maybe kill him?”
                 "They
weren't sent after you, John.”
                 "One
of them nair made it back to here,” I said. "He's a-laying back on that
straight, straight track of yours, where his friends left him to lie. I wonder
myself if I shouldn't go bury him, a-seeing you Shonokins don't seem to have
much mind to it.”
                 "I
was told he fell, but I didn't hear where.” He didn't seem to let on to feel
aught of sorrow for the death of one of his own kind. "But you say you
came here to know the truth. Truth about what?”
                 While he was a-saying that, he walked toward the yard of the
nearest house. I walked along beside him. Again I saw the things, the
strange things, that grew in the yard. The
hand-flowers on the bushes had flecks and streaks of deeper color in their
pink, like a sort