Night & Demons by David Drake Page A

volumes beginning with The Book of the Damned . He threw out a number of speculations on what caused the data he reported: “I think we’re property,’’ or “Perhaps somebody is collecting Ambroses,’’ which are familiar even to people who don’t have the faintest notion of where the phrases come from. Personally, I’m convinced that Fort was joking—that is, that he believed the items were as true as anything else you’d find reported in, say, Nature, but that he understood the causes of the phenomena he reported were unknowable on the available data.
    Then again, maybe he was a humorless wacko who believed in wild conspiracies. Goodness knows, a lot of the people who’ve followed in his footsteps fit that category.
    SF stories led me to Charles Fort, but then I read him for his own sake. As for what I myself believe: I believe that the world is a very strange place, certainly stranger than I can explain.
    I haven’t used much Fortean material in my fiction because I find attempting to explain the phenomena leads to very silly results. This is as true of fiction like Donald Wandrei’s “Something from Above” as it is of Philip Klass’ “scientific” explanations of all UFOs as plasma effects (a notion that plasma physicists find ludicrous). Once in a while I tried, though. “Awakening” is an example.
    I’m not sure that I’d bother to include this little mood piece in Balefires were it not for one thing: this is the only story I sold while I was in Viet Nam. I wrote it in longhand and typed up a second draft on the orderly room typewriter one Sunday morning in Di An. While I sat typing the story, there was a bang behind me. I looked back over my shoulder and watched the ammo dump destroy itself in a series of increasingly loud explosions. Never a dull moment . . . .
    I sent my typescript to my wife Jo, at home in Chapel Hill. She retyped it and mailed it to Mr. August Derleth, the proprietor of Arkham House, who’d bought two previous stories from me. He took “Awakening” for $25. That’s one of the few good things that happened to me in Southeast Asia.
    * * *
    T hey remained some time in silence in the shadowed parlor, alternately sipping their tea and staring idly at the dim trees to be seen beyond the gauze curtains. At last Mab cleared her throat, a little coughing sound. The man looked up. “Mab?”
    “Frank, I think it’s time we try. We’ll never see Missy’s equal, you know.”
    Frank set down his cup and saucer on the old walnut table. He ran his left hand through the mane of iron-gray hair he cultivated, almost all that was left of the splendid man he had looked in his youth. “I suppose you’re right,” he finally admitted. “ My . . . aspirations aren’t what they were, I suppose. And Mab, I’m very much afraid the girl isn’t ready yet. She still doesn’t think of herself as one of us.”
    “Missy has had a year in this house, Frank.”
    “She had twelve in the alley and the orphanage, learning that witches are hags that live in dark corners, learning to laugh when one is pushed into the oven. Her first reaction . . . well, Missy isn’t a subtle child.”
    Mab, matronly in a print of pastel roses, clucked disapproval. “Nor is she stupid. The time Missy spent here was more than enough for her to realize what she is, and what we are. It’s our duty as her elders to keep her from wasting herself.”
    Frank bit absently on the setting of his ring. “ She can’t be forced—no, I don’t mean physical force, of course not. But we can’t make her believe what she doesn’t want to believe; what she’s been conditioned not to believe. It won’t help even to prove to her that she has the Power. That would only mean to her that she herself is evil, and she’d hate you for it. At best she’d not join us; at worst, with her Power . . .”
    Mab smiled. “ Now Frank, it’s the girl’s strength that worries you. But it’s time and past time that I stepped down. I