Clifford D. Simak

Maxwell reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out the photo of the lost Lambert that hung on Nancy Clayton’s wall.

“Mr. O’Toole,” he said, “there’s something I must show you.”

The goblin set down the mug.

“Let me see it, then,” he said. “All this beating amongst the bushes, when there was something that you had.”

He reached for the photo, bending his head to puzzle over it.

“The trolls,” he said, “of course. But these others I do not recognize. As if I should, but fail. There be stories, old, old stories…”

“Oop saw the picture. You know of Oop, of course.”

“The great barbarian who claims to be your friend.”

“He is my friend,” said Maxwell. “And Oop recalls these things. They are old ones from the ancient days.”

“But what magic is called upon to get a picture of them?”

“That I don’t know. That’s a picture of a painting, painted by a man many years ago.”

“By what means…

“I do not know,” said Maxwell. “I think that he was there.”

Mr. O’Toole picked up his mug and saw that it was empty. He tottered to the cask and filled it. He came back with his drink and picked up the photo, looking at it carefully, although somewhat blearily.

“I know not,” he finally said. “There were others of us. Many different ones no longer present. We here are the tail end of a noble population.”

He pushed the photo back across the table. “Mayhaps the Banshee,” he suggested. “The Banshee’s years are beyond all telling.”

“But the Banshee’s dying.”

“That he is,” said Mr. O’Toole, “and an evil day it is and a bitter day for him, with no one to keep the deathwatch.”

He lifted his mug. “Drink up,” he said. “Drink up. Can one drink enough, it may not be so bad.”

Maxwell came around the corner of the tumble-down shack and saw the thorn tree standing to one side of it. There was something strange about the tree. It looked as if a cloud of darkness had settled along its vertical axis, making it appear to have a massive bole, out of which emerged short and slender, thorn-armed twigs. And if what O’Toole had said was true, Maxwell told himself, that dark cloud clustered in the tree must be the dying Banshee.

He walked slowly across the intervening space and stopped a few feet from the tree. The black cloud moved restlessly, like a cloud of slowly roiling smoke.

“You are the Banshee?” Maxwell asked the tree.

“You’ve come too late,” the Banshee said, “if you wish to talk with me.”

“I did not come to talk,” said Maxwell. “I came to sit with you.”

“Sit then,” the Banshee said. “It will not be for long.”

Maxwell sat down upon the ground and pulled his knees up close against his chest. He put his hands down beside him, palms flat against the mat of dry and browning grass. Below him the autumn valley stretched to the far horizon of the hills north of the river-unlike the hills of this southern shore, but gentle, rolling hills that went up toward the sky in slanted, staircase fashion.

A flurry of wings swept across the ridge behind him and a flock of blackbirds went careening through the blue haze that hung against the steep ravine that went plunging downward from the ridge. But except for that single instant of wings beating in the air, there was a soft and gentle silence that held no violence and no threat, a dreaming silence in which the hills stood quiet.

“The others did not come,” the Banshee said. “I thought, at first, they might. For a moment I thought they might forget and come. There need be no distinction among us now. We stand as one, all beaten to the selfsame level. But the old conventions are not broken yet. The old-time customs hold.”

“I talked with the goblins,” Maxwell told him. “They hold a wake for you. The O’Toole is grieving and drinking to blunt the edge of grief.”

“You are not of my people,” the Banshee said. “You intrude upon me. Yet you say you come to sit with me. How does it happen that you do this?”

Maxwell lied. He could do nothing else. He could not, he told himself, tell this dying thing he had come for information.

“I have worked with your people,” he said, “and I’ve become much concerned with them.”

“You are the Maxwell,” said the Banshee. “I have heard of you.”

“How do you feel?” asked Maxwell. “Is there anything I can do for you? Something that you need?”

“No,” the Banshee said. “I am beyond all needing. I feel almost nothing. That is the trouble, that I feel nothing. My dying is different than your dying. It is scarcely physical. Energy drains out from me and there’s finally nothing left. Like a flickering light that finally gutters out.”

“I am sorry,” Maxwell said. “If talking hastens-”

“Talking might hasten it a little, but I no longer mind. And I am not sorry. I have no regret. I am almost the last of us. There are three of us still left, if you count me, and I am not worth the counting. Out of the thousands of us, only two are left.”

“But there are the goblins and the trolls and fairies…”