Manly Wade Wellman - John Thunstone 01 by What Dreams May Come (v1.1) Read Free Book Online Page A

was black velvet,
spangled all over with winking stars. In one quarter of it stood the moon,
pallidly yellow, greatening lopsidedly from its first quarter a few nights ago.
                 Thunstone
sniffed at the bowl of his pipe. It had a special odor, for the tobacco he had
stuffed into it was blended with kinnikinnick and the crumbled bark of the red
willow. Long Spear, an Indian friend, had told him that to smoke that mixture
was a strong guard against all evil magic. He turned toward the window again.
                 There
was no window, only a blurred dimness. And no wall. In
just that instant, it was as if Thunstone were somewhere in the open. He
strained his eyes to see.
                No window, no room. He did not sit
in a chair, he perched on a sort of hummock of earth.
He moved a foot. Under it turned something like a pebble. He was not in the
room he had rented, not anymore. He did not know where he was.
                 And
no moon, no stars. Perhaps no sky. He gathered a sense
of a stretch of land, tufted here and there with trees and brush. There was no Trail Street over there, certainly no lights. Far in the
distance he sensed, rather than saw, deeply dark hills. Among the tufts moved
things, stealthy things, darker than the dimness around them, things perhaps as
large as men. They seemed to approach.
                 Thunstone
jammed his pipe into his mouth, rummaged a pack of matches. He struck one
alight, and in its glow he saw his room again —the bureau, the door, the bed.
He set the flame to his pipe and it glowed redly. He blew puffs of smoke, to
the north, the west, the south, the east, then upward
and downward. Six puffs in all, as Long Spear had taught him, to the four winds
and the two directions, the ancient Dakotah way.
                 Softly
he sang a few words of a song Long Spear had taught him, a song that went back
to the Ghost Dance days of Long Spear's people:
                 Wahkondah dei dou ,
wah-pah-din ah tonhie . . .
                A song that prayed for help, that
asked Those Above for strength and courage.
                 Abruptly,
he lost all awareness of the tufted plain, the figures skulking upon it, the
far dark hills. His room was all around him again, and it was a chair he sat
on. He found the light above the bed, switched it on. The bed was there, with
comfortable plump pillows and a turned back coverlet.
                 Thunstone
went to the desk and, still smoking, wrote down all that he had seemed to
experience. By the time he had finished, the pipe had burned out. He laid it on
top of his writing, turned out the light again, and went back to the window.
That window remained, sill and sash.
                 He
gazed outward and saw the lights on Trail Street , the glow from the Moonraven across there.
He looked up at the sky, at the stars in their courses, their paths and
patterns that had been there since the beginning of the time that mankind knew.
Cancer, the Crab, soared high above. He remembered things he had heard
astrologers say about how the stars ruled life and history, and wondered for
the hundredth time if the astrologers truly believed the things they said.
                 At
last he sought the bed he had rented in this old house. It was a comfortable
bed, wide enough and long enough for his big frame. He lay with his hands
clasped under his head and mused as he lay and, musing, drifted into slumber.
     

             CHAPTER 4
     
                 But
Thunstone dreamed. His dreams were confused at first, blurred glimpses of
places he had been, people he had talked to in the past. Once he thought he was
with a rosy, fair-haired woman known in her circle as the Countess of Monteseco
though she had been born Sharon Hill at home in Pennsylvania. She smiled on
him, the smile he knew well, and the voice in the dream was her voice. Then