Lest Darkness Fall Read Free

Italy.
     
                Padway asked in Italian:
"Could you tell me where I could find a policeman?"
     
                The man stopped his sales
talk, shrugged, and replied, "Non compr' endo."
     
                "Hey!" said
Padway. The man paused. With great concentration Padway translated his request
into what he hoped was Vulgar Latin.
     
                The man thought, and said he
didn't know. Padway started to turn elsewhere. But the seller of beads called
to another hawker: " Marco! The gentleman wants to find a police
agent."
     
                "The gentleman is
brave. He is also crazy," replied Marco.
     
                The bead-seller laughed. So
did several people. Padway grinned a little; the people were human if not very
helpful. He said: "Please, I — really — want — to — know."
     
                The second hawker, who had a
tray full of brass knick-knacks tied around his neck, shrugged. He rattled off
a paragraph that Padway could not follow.
     
                Padway slowly asked the
bead-seller: "What did he say?"
     
                "He said he didn't
know," replied the bead-seller. "I don't know either."
     
                Padway started to walk off.
The bead-seller called after him: "Mister."
     
                "Yes?"
     
                "Did you mean an agent
of the municipal prefect?"
     
                "Yes."
     
                "Marco, where can the
gentleman find an agent of the municipal prefect?"
     
                "I don't know,"
said Marco.
     
                The bead-seller shrugged.
"Sorry, I don't know either."
     
                If this were
twentieth-century Rome, there would be no difficulty about finding a cop. And
not even Benny the Moose could make a whole city change its language. So he
must be in (a) a movie set, (b) ancient Rome (the Tancredi hypothesis), or (c)
a figment of his imagination.
     
                He started walking. Talking
was too much of a strain.
     
                It was not long before any
lingering hopes about a movie set were dashed by the discovery that this
alleged ancient city stretched for miles in all directions, and that its street
plan was quite different from that of modern Rome. Padway found his little
pocket map nearly useless.
     
                The signs on the shops were
in intelligible Classical Latin. The spelling had remained as in Caesar's time,
if the pronunciation had not.
     
                The streets were narrow, and
for the most part not very crowded. The town had a drowsy, shabby-genteel,
run-down personality, like that of Philadelphia.
     
                At one relatively busy
intersection Padway watched a man on a horse direct traffic. He would hold up a
hand to stop an oxcart, and beckon a sedan chair across. The man wore a gaudily
striped shirt and leather trousers. He looked like a central or northern
European rather than an Italian.
     
                Padway leaned against a
wall, listening. A man would say a sentence just too fast for him to catch. It
was like having your hook nibbled but never taken. By terrific concentration,
Padway forced himself to think in Latin. He mixed his cases and numbers, but as
long as he confined himself to simple sentences he did not have too much
trouble with vocabulary.
     
                A couple of small boys were
watching him. When he looked at them they giggled and raced off.
     
                It reminded Padway of those
United States Government projects for the restoration of Colonial towns, like
Williamsburg. But this looked like the real thing. No restoration included all
the dirt and disease, the insults and altercations, that Padway had seen and
heard in an hour's walk.
     
                Only two hypotheses
remained: delirium and time-slip. Delirium now