the dead of winter I don’t know, you’ll come to the glen again looking for me.”
“This is more important to me, Samuel,” he said. “It’s important for many reasons.”
“Parks, trees, gardens, children,” sang the little man.
Ash didn’t reply.
“Think about all those who depend on you, Ash,” said Samuel, continuing the same sermon for the same congregation. “Think of all these people who make and sell and buy and love the things you manufacture. That can substitute for sanity, I think, having other warm beings of intellect and feeling dependent upon us. You think I’m right?”
“It doesn’t substitute for sanity, Samuel,” said Ash. “It substitutes for happiness.”
“All right, that’s fine then. But don’t wait for your witches to come to you again, and for God’s sake never seek them on their own turf. You’ll see fear in their eyes if they ever see you standing in their garden.”
“You’re so sure of all this.”
“Yes, I’m sure. Ash, you told them everything. Why did you do that? Perhaps if you had not, they wouldn’t fear you.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“And Yuri and the Talamasca, how they will plague you now.”
“They will not.”
“But those witches, they are not your friends.”
“So you keep saying.”
“I know they are not. I know their curiosity and awe will soon change to fear. Ash, it’s an old cliché, they’re only human.”
Ash bowed his head and looked away, out the window at the blowing snow, at shoulders hunkered against the wind.
“Ashlar, I know,” Samuel said, “because I am an outcast. And you are an outcast. And look out there at the multitudes of humans passing on the street, and think how each one condemns so many others as outcast, as ‘other,’ as not human. We are monsters, my friend. That’s what we’ll always be. It’s their day. That we’re alive at all is enough to worry about.” He downed the rest of the drink.
“And so you go home to your friends in the glen.”
“I hate them, and you know it. But the glen we won’t have for long. I go back for sentimental reasons. Oh, it’s not just the Talamasca, and that sixteen genteel scholars will come with tape recorders, begging me to recite all I know over lunch at the Inn. It’s all those archaeologists digging up St. Ashlar’s Cathedral. The modern world has found the place. And why? Because of your damned witches.”
“You can’t lay that on me or on them, and you know it.”
“Eventually we’ll have to find some more remote place, some other curse or legend to protect us. But they’re not my friends, don’t think they are. They don’t.”
Ash only nodded.
Food had come, a large salad for the little man, the pasta for Ash. The wine was being poured in the glasses. It smelled like something gone utterly wrong.
“I’m too drunk to eat,” Samuel said.
“I understand if you go,” Ash said softly. “That is, if you’re bound to go, then perhaps you should do it.”
They sat in silence for a moment. Then the little man lifted his fork and began to devour the salad, shoveling it into his mouth, as bits and pieces fell to the plate despite his most diligent efforts. Loudly he scraped up every last bit of olive, cheese, and lettuce on the plate, and then drank a big gulp of the mineral water.
“Now I can drink some more,” he said.
Ash made a sound that would have been a laugh if he had not been so sad.
Samuel slid off the chair and onto his feet. He picked up the leather portmanteau. He sauntered over to Ash, and crooked his arm around Ash’s neck. Ash kissed his cheek quickly, faintly repelled by the leathery texture of the skin, but determined at all costs to hide it.
“Will you come back soon?” Ash asked.
“No. But we’ll see each other,” said Samuel. “Take care of my dog. His feelings are hurt very easily.”
“I’ll remember that.”
“And pitch yourself into your work!”
“Anything else?”
“I love you.”
And with that Samuel pushed and swaggered his way through the press of those being seated and those rising to go, and all the backs and elbows clumped against him. He went out the front door and along the front window. The snow was already catching in his hair and on his bushy eyebrows, and making dark wet spots on his shoulders.
He lifted his hand in farewell, and then he passed out of the frame, and the crowd became the crowd again.
Ash lifted the glass of milk and slowly drank all of it.