And on the Eighth Day by Ellery Queen Read Free Book Online Page B

right of entrance into this Holy Congregation House.” He and the Successor lived there, and the Superintendent—whose duties, Ellery gathered, resembled those of a steward, or sexton—acted as liaison between the Teacher and the Crownsil.
    “But to two alone belongs the right of silent entrance,” said the Teacher. “These are your servant and his Successor.”
    “Your servant …” The dream was multiplying. Ellery felt like seizing his head in his hands out of sheer frustration. After all, he had been given entrance. Who in God’s name was he supposed to be? Who was “Elroï Quenan”? To cover his confusion, Ellery repeated, “Silent entrance?”
    The old hand—bone and vein and skin and sinew—gestured. “There is only one door into the holy house,” he said. “That one through which we came. It is never locked; it has no lock. For this house is the heart of the Congregation.” His voice did not rise; but it deepened with the fervor of belief.
    In the language of modern anthropology, the house had mana , and as such it was taboo to the community. The only exceptions were rigidly fixed: the members of the Crownsil and the Superintendent. And even they were subject to a ritual discipline. Any of these wishing entrance must first sound the bell outside the door. Only if the Teacher himself answered might the official enter. If the Teacher was absent, or if he was engaged in prayer or meditation or study and did not reply to the bell, then he who rang had either to wait or to seek admittance at another time.
    “For none but your servant—” (there it was again! Is thy servant a dog, that he should do such a thing? as practice slavery, for example? Was he being gently chided?) “—your servant or the Successor may be alone in this holy house,” the old man explained. “To this rule we hold most strictly, as an outward sign of obedience to our holy regimen, that none may set foot in this house when I am not in this house, save only the Successor.”
    Ellery’s weariness kept him from uttering the Why not? in his thoughts. Probably the old man himself could not give a reason. It was the Rule, the Law; all ritual hardened into that.
    Ellery’s glance wandered to the far end of the long hall, where stood the closed door with its overhanging kerosene lamp, the door to the room the youngster with the angelic face had called the “sanquetum.”
    At Ellery’s glance, the Teacher said softly, “And the sanquetum. Yes. The forbidden room, as the Successor and the community commonly name it …”
    Concerning this forbidden room, the old man went on to say, the rule was even stricter. Only one person in the community, the Teacher, might ever set foot in that room; not even the Successor might enter there. It was kept always locked, and the only key to the lock was held by the Teacher. (This was by contrast with the scriptorium, the Successor’s official workroom; the door to the scriptorium might be locked, but it need not be, and to this door the Successor usually kept the only key.)
    “Thus you see,” the Teacher summed up, “our governance is by the fifteen elect: the Crownsil of the Twelve, and the Superintendent, and the Successor, and he who is the leader and the guide and the healer of his flock—thy servant, called the Teacher.”
    In Ellery’s dream it came to him in an enormous waxing of light, like a sunburst, that he was not listening to a recital from some old and forgotten romance, but to the description of an actual community existing in the United States of America in the year 1944, apparently to the complete ignorance of county, state, and federal officials and to some 135,000,000 other Americans.
    Searching his memory for a parallel, he could find only one: that tiny community, on its Appalachian mountaintop, which—isolated by a landslide that destroyed its only road to the outside world—remained forgotten for almost a generation, until communication was re-established.
    But that