Masters of the Maze by Avram Davidson Read Free Book Online Page B

some college friends of yours … or anything…. I really had no doubts that you would see your duty and be ready to do it. It isn’t quite what you think it is — what am I saying?
‘Quite?’
Lord!”
    This last, unexpected remark pushed Joe Bellamy out of his assurance and into confusion again. But that didn’t last long. Uncle Charles clearly knew what Joe had had in mind, and it wasn’t immediately important that Joe no longer had the least idea what Uncle Charles had in mind. There was a certainty about the older man which induced calm. There was that same certainty about the room and house and whole estate. Seen from the upper window, then, across the lawns which seemed to have been cut from green velvet by tailor’s shears, the woods seemed quite far away. The woods had grown much closer since … and not just about this house. The woods had grown much closer, all around the world.
    “The Bellamy enterprises don’t need you, Joe. They don’t need me, either. The secret of staying successfully wealthy nowadays has come to be a matter of finding the right men to keep the store for the storekeeper. Something called ‘management,’ Joe; if you haven’t heard it before in this connection, don’t bother to make a note of it, you’ll hear of it in this connection again. No one man in these times could possibly be an authority on wool
and
cotton
and
copper and everything else the family money has been put in….
    “Things aren’t the way they were when old Joash Bellamy would bring the
Amelia
into port and fill her up with whatever looked like a good buy and take her back to the old home port and unload her at his brother Ned’s wharf and warehouse and fill her up with whatever was on hand for another cruise — if he felt like it — or go kill trout at Spikin’ Duyvel if he felt like it, instead.
    “They aren’t the way they were when Ned’s son Tom used to sit in the old three-story countinghouse on Wall Street, either.
    “But there is one thing that
is
just the same as it was in my Grandfather Tom’s day, though. And in old Captain Joash’s day, too, and all the way back to the days of John Edward Bellamy. You know, I suppose, that he was the first of our line to live in America. You probably don’t know that no record exists of how he came to America — do you? Or why? No. Of course you don’t.
    “I mentioned the word
duty
a little while ago. The Bellamys have had a duty, a singular duty, I might say — nothing to do with making money. But money is essential to the doing of it….”
    His cold eyes stared through his nephew and he appeared to have fallen into a kind of reverie. The day was warm, the noon meal heavy. When Joseph’s head snapped up, some indefinable time later, he found the apology he had begun hastily to form was addressed to an empty chair. A little leather-bound book lay on the desk, facing his own chair, and on it was a note in Uncle Charles’s writing. It said, in curt entirety,
Read this.
    Later that day, only one place was set for dinner (“Mr. Charles will not be down tonight, sir. He asks you to excuse him.”) and after dinner an unsealed envelope was set beside his coffee cup: actually, on a silver salver. It contained a list of people and places he, Joseph John Edward Bellamy was to visit, and an approximate time-schedule for the visiting. It allowed him, he noted, with mingled curiosity and resignation, approximately one year.
    It was not till that year was almost over that nephew realized that he had on that day seen uncle for the last time.
    It was over the coffee, the brandy, the dark cigar, that the little book was read; baffling from the very beginning on the age-speckled title page.
    Relation of Sir Ezekiel Grimm, the Muggletonian, concerning a Daemon or Monster which appeared to him in the Night. Together with a Discourse on the Nature of a Garment which the said Apparition left behind him. And the full Text of a Sermon intituled Muggletonianism