Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 35, No. 10, October 1990

And in the shadowy distance there was Bagley, and the mare, entering the rubble-strewn lot from the Main Street side. Among the scattered masonry Harry stumbled and fell, losing his hold on the mare’s bridle. A crack of thunder and the mare plunged, rearing, whinnying in terror, then, finding herself free, galloped off.

Without haste, as though other forces than his own had the ordering, George raised the gun and, as a sheet of lightning illumined the area, he fired. There was stillness and darkness, and then the gentler sounds of rain. George’s horse, sensing no restraint nor guidance on the bit, turned homeward. George, following the habit of years, with fingers that fumbled now, ejected the shells into the lane.

At the river’s edge where the footbridge spanned the narrower, deeper water, George let the gun go. It fell into the water with a barely audible splash and sank at once, soft black mud sucking it down, a quiet gurgle. The water’s surface, briefly rippled and mud-dyed, had settled by the time George had crossed. He shuddered and slumped forward. Once home he had had to be carried into the house. He could neither walk nor talk.

“A stroke,” Doc Entwistle said. “But vital signs are good. He’ll come out of this.”

Rachel was horrified. “He’d been feeling so good lately. I shouldn’t have let him — he never should have gone riding.”

“Why the hell not?” Doc said. “I told him to do whatever he felt like doing.”

Only with difficulty had George finally been able to tell Doc what had happened, not being quite sure that it had. Perhaps his realization of what had really happened came only then, for George suffered a second stroke, his overstrained heart giving way. His end had been peaceable. Rachel, who had suffered along with George’s days of pain, felt calm, her own burden lifted. Of course, Entwistle had had to tell Hardman. But they never did find the gun.

The shockwave through Longvalley, though profound, was only briefly devastating. In awed tones Longvallians whispered: “We said all along that the hand of God was in it that night. Since the beginning of time hasn’t He wrought his ordering through special people?” They thought that Charlie, through George, had been the instrument.

As for me, it made me shiver. Never before had I recognized the burden that the ancient ones had carried, the staggering responsibility of asking and of having been listened to.

Tonight, the first in a long time, my poor exhausted Earl is sleeping like a babe. From the window I can see over the moonlit valley. Beneath the lovely trees the river flows, silvered with starlight. So quiet the street outside. The storm, at last, is really over.

Mystery and Magic on the Steppe by Arthur Porges

Tugai Bey and his nephew, Burlai Khan, scouting well ahead of the Horde as ordered, found one small farm in a sheltered valley among the foothills, a rather rare configuration on the vast, level steppes. It was the first human habitation in many versts of featureless plain.

They dismounted from their shaggy little ponies, and horn reflex bows in hand, stalked the area, two dark men, short and muscular, wary and savage as any two wild animals. It was a poor enough place: a few patches of spindly wheat, one bony cow, a few chickens, and a sod hut for the family of three.

The Tartars cautiously skirted the farm on all sides, found no neighbors to worry about, and made their plans accordingly, being experienced scouts. The farmer, a burly Slav, was working in the field with a boy of perhaps twelve, no doubt his son. They were unarmed except for their crude hoes; obviously, this region had known peace of late. Certainly, no Horde had come this way for some years.

The woman, gaunt and juiceless, was plucking a scrawny hen while her baby, still too young to walk, played in the dirt at her feet, softly prattling.

The two barbarians exchanged several cryptic grunts. As expert raiders they had developed a simple, effective routine, requiring only a few basic signals. They fitted arrows to their short but immensely powerful bows, and struck. Neither the farmer nor his son, the only possible fighters in the family, could have been aware of what was happening to them. At that short range, from solid ground instead of galloping ponies, the two Tartars could have split wands. The whistling arrows drove deep into the victims’ bodies, and they died where they stood, uncomprehending and almost instantaneously. With uncouth cries of exultation, the scouts moved in on the terrified woman, frozen in place.

They were well aware that they must not burden themselves with captives, no matter how desirable as slaves: mobility and distance covered were the watchwords of this operation. Tugai Bey dashed the baby’s brains out against a rock; his nephew, grinning savagely at this welcome opportunity to indulge himself, strangled the mother, too traumatized by the fate of her infant to struggle, or, perhaps, even to care.