Free The Fellowship of the Talisman by Clifford D. Simak Page B

threatened to explode. At that point exactly, just before the moment of explosion, the pain went away, only to come again. He did not know when he hit the ground; he felt no impact as he fell. Later, with no way of knowing how much later, he found himself crawling on his belly, reaching out with clawed hands to clutch the ground and pull himself along. The funny thing was that he seemed to have no head. In its place was a tumbled fuzziness that could neither see nor hear. Later—he could not tell how much later or how soon—someone was splashing water on his face and saying, “It’s all right, m’lord.” Then he was lifted and slung across a shoulder and he tried to protest against it, but he couldn’t make a sound and he couldn’t move a muscle. All that he could do was sway and dangle on the shoulder.

6
    There finally was existence. But that was all—existence. It was a purposeless existence that floated in a place without reference points. It floated in an emptiness that was tied to nothing. The emptiness was comfortable and there was no urge to escape from it or to reach beyond it.
    A tiny sound intruded: a faint, far-off chirping sound, and the emptiness of existence tried to push it off or shut itself against it. For it was not meet, it might be destructive, for even so slight a thing as a chirping sound to intrude upon it.
    But the chirping sound persisted and it was nearer now or louder, and there was more of it, as if there might be many sources from which the chirps were coming.
    The consciousness floated in the emptiness and listened with an enforced tolerance to the chirping sound. And the chirping brought a word. Birds . It was birds that were chirping. They were the ones that made the noise. The consciousness reluctantly struggled with the word, for it had no idea what the word might mean or if it had a meaning.
    Then suddenly it did know what the word meant and that brought something else.
    I am Duncan Standish, said the emptiness, and I am lying somewhere, listening to birds.
    That was quite enough. That was all it needed, that was far more than it needed. It would have been content if nothing had come at all. For if this much came, there would be more yet to come and that was undesirable. The emptiness tried to shrink away, but that was impossible. Having come to something, it must then go on.
    Duncan Standish, no longer an existence poised in a vault of emptiness, but Duncan Standish, something. A man, he (or it) thought, and what was a man?
    Slowly he knew. Knew what he was and that he had a head and that a dull throbbing ache pulsed inside the head, with the comfort now all gone.
    Duncan Standish, man, lying in some confined space, for now he became aware that he was confined.
    He lay quietly to pull all his thoughts together, all those simple things that he had known at one time and only now was rediscovering. But even as he pulled his thoughts together, he kept his eyes tight shut, for he did not want to see. If he did not see, perhaps he could go back to that emptiness and comfort he had known before.
    It was no use, however. The knowledge first crept upon him slowly, then came on with a rush.
    He opened his eyes and stared up at a high-noon sky seen through a leafy canopy. He raised a hand and a rough stone stopped it, bruising his knuckles. He lowered his eyes and saw the stone, a slab that covered him almost to his shoulders. Resting on the slab was the bole of a large oak tree, the bark scaling off it as if it suffered some ravaging disease.
    The tomb, he thought, startled. The tomb of Wulfert, the wizard, unroofed many years ago by a falling tree. And now he was tucked into it.
    It was Conrad, he told himself, who had tucked him in the tomb. It was the kind of stupid thing that Conrad would do, convinced all the time he was doing it that it was for the best, that it was perfectly logical and what any man might do.
    It must have been Conrad, he told himself.