And on the Eighth Day Read Online Free

even on his once-a-year trips to Los Angeles he was always glad to get back. It was … He hesitated, his pudgy hands making exploratory circles in the air. It was so clean out here on the edge of the desert. You could see for miles in the daytime, and at night … oh, you could see for millions of miles.
    “How about those two fellows who were here when I arrived?” Ellery asked suddenly. “Who are they?”
    “Oh, they live out in the desert somewhere. Hermits.”
    “Hermits?”
    “Sort of. Don’t know what they do for grub generally—they come to the store here only a couple times a year. Nice folks, though. Queer, maybe, but like I said, they don’t bother nobody. Everybody’s got a right to go his own way, so long as he don’t bother nobody, is what I always say.”
    Ellery remarked that he couldn’t agree more, and rose. Mr. Schmidt swiftly suggested more pie and coffee in a transparent maneuver to detain him. Ellery smiled faintly, shook his head, settled his bill, and then said that he had better get some directions before going on.
    “Directions for where?” the little man asked. Ellery looked pained. Where indeed?
    “Las Vegas,” he said.
    Schmidt took Ellery by the arm and marched him to the door. Here, with many gestures, corrections, and repetitions, he described a route. Boiled down—as nearly as Ellery could remember afterward—it came to this: “Follow this road along the edge of the desert. Don’t take any of the roads that go off to the left. When you come to the first fork, bear right. That’s the road that leads you onto the main highway for Las Vegas.”
    Ellery waved good-bye and drove off. He expected never to see the End-of-the-World Store or Otto Schmidt, Prop. , again.
    Once again he drove off toward home, reversing the path of the pioneers—for that matter, of the sun itself. The hot meal had added its own inducement toward drowsiness to his exhaustion, and he had to fight a running battle with it.
    He kept his eyes open for the “first fork” in the road, where he was to bear right for the highway that led to Las Vegas. Once—perhaps twice, he was not sure—he noticed a wide path (it seemed little more) which he took to be one of the roads that “go off to the left,” and he avoided it with a minor sense of triumph. He had forgotten to ask Otto Schmidt how far away Las Vegas was and how long he might have to be on the road.
    The day was settling into its decline, and he began to entertain an only half-amusing fantasy that he was not going to reach any recognizable destination that night. It made him think of the legend of Peter Rugg. The Missing Man, New England’s version of The Flying Dutchman, who defied the heavenly elements and for punishment was condemned to gallop in his phantom chaise forever with a thunderstorm at his back, trying to reach a Boston that forever eluded him. Perhaps, Ellery thought, future travelers would repeat the tale of the ancient Duesenberg and its phantom driver, eternally stopping to inquire if he was on the right road to Las Vegas!
    Try as he would to keep not only his sleepy eyes but his drifting mind on the road (“… first fork … turn right …”), Ellery’s thoughts kept circling back to the old man with the curious speech, the curious costume, the curiously powerful serenity. Funny old bird to meet in the year 1944, of the independence of the United States the 168th, even in a timeless desert. Was there ever an age when that old man would not have commanded attention, a fascination not far removed from awe?
    A clump of desert willows pink with blossoms caught his eye; in the next moment he had forgotten them, but perhaps they sparked his mental leap backward over whole millennia to another time and desert and jallãbiyah -clad people among whom moved men like that old man—men called patriarchs, or prophets, or apostles.
    That old man of the wagon and his “ Very well, Storicai ,” in an English flavored with that strange