Free The Beyonders by Manly Wade Wellman, Lou Feck Page A

into the rear room. This was fitted up as a bedroom, with cot and bureau. One end of it was partitioned off for a bathroom. Slowly stood on the old rag rug and thought about things.
    She had never been baptized into the Kimber belief, she had been too young for that when she left the settlement to live with Miss Barnett in Sky Notch. But she had seen baptisms, and she understood Crispin's half-awed enthusiasm. In her mind she seemed to hear the singing voices again, to see the lights of the lanterns and torches and their reflected brightness on the dark water.
    After some moments, she reached behind her and unfastened the zipper at the back of the green-and-blue dress and carefully drew it upward over her head. She put it on the cot and took off her slip. Again reaching behind her back, she unhooked her brassiere and laid it on the dress. Dressed only in panties and shoes, she faced around toward the mirror on the wall.
    Miss Barnett had prized that mirror. It was four feet high and about a foot and a half broad, and if you stood just right you could see all of yourself in it at once. Slowly studied her image with appraising eyes.
    Her hair had been tumbled by pulling the dress and slip over it, but not much. She surveyed the splendor of her nakedness. It was pale where no sun had touched it since swimming time last summer. And her breasts were almost white, softly modelled globes with budlike points of pink. She drew a breath, and they stirred. Her shoulders were straight and her arms tapered. Her collarbones were so smoothly fleshed that she could barely see their outlines. Well-fleshed, she was well-fleshed, but with no loose, bubbly fat anywhere. She was looking at herself as maybe she had never looked at herself before.
    Maybe James Crispin was right. Maybe Duffy used to be right when he said she was lovelier than anything on earth, when he used to bless God for creating her. Maybe fellows loafing down at the county seat, or others she'd seen the few times she'd been in Asheville, maybe they truly meant it when they whistled at her and squinched up their faces. She never paid they any mind, never acted as if she knew they were alive or dead. But they always paid her plenty of mind. Maybe she was beautiful.
    And Crispin was an artist, a painter of pictures. Doc said he was a true artist. He didn't want to look at her beauty just to slobber over it, he wanted to put it in beautiful paints on canvas. He meant things honorably.
    All right, she said to herself, I'll do it. I'll go and pose for that picture.
    Quickly she began to put her clothes on again.

    Gander Eye had watched from his own front door as Slowly went into her living quarters. He waited for minutes until she appeared again and headed up Main Street toward the store.
    Now, he decided, he'd go for a little walk in the woods. He wanted to see things by the broad open light of the day, where it had been so hard to see them last night where the moonlight didn't soak in.
    He went back into his bedroom and changed into army surplus fatigues. They were the kind that were patterned with green and brown leaves over tan, the kind that might deceive a human eye, though perhaps not an animal s. He put on a pair of cleat-soled boots that laced up over the bottoms of the pants.
    From his stand of rifles he chose the Springfield. He fed a clip of cartridges into the magazine and clicked on the safety, and put several more clips into the pouchlike pockets of the fatigue blouse. Into the hip pocket of the pants went his pistol.
    Then he walked out and ambled to the ruins of the bridge at the end of town toward Dogged Mountain. He did not cross on the litter of fallen timbers, but headed along Bull Creek into the woods. Under that cover, he came upslope to where he reached the stone-studded pair of ruts that made that road of sorts to the Kimber settlement.
    Keeping well under the branches to the side, he strode along up the sloping way, looking everywhere and listening to