Strange Seed (24 page)

Another scream.
 
Closer.
 
Louder.

Naked, clothes in hand, she threw her door open and got out of the car.

“Oh Jesus, Jesus!” Gary shouted, and screamed again.

Ellen pulled her sweater on.

“Gary?” she called.
 
“Gary, what’s the matter, Gary?”
 
What’s happening here?
 
Oh, God, what’s happening here!

Gary appeared suddenly at the side of the road.
 
His pants were bunched up at his ankles.
 
He was clutching his right thigh and half hopping, half-stumbling toward her.
 
Ellen could see blood around his hands.

“Gary!
 
My God, Gary—“

“I been bit.
 
Somethin’ bit me bad!”
 
And he collapsed.

Ellen ran to him, bent over, pulled his hands away from his thigh.
 
She screamed.
 
Stood.
 
Ran to the car, hesitated, looked back.
 
Gary had regained consciousness, had pushed himself to his feet, was stumbling toward her.
 
She watched him a moment, unable to move. She ran to him, helped him to the car, put him in the driver’s seat.

“Gary, someone…someone—“

“Damn you, bitch!
 
Get in the fuckin’ car!
 
I gotta get to a fuckin’ doctor!”

She ran around to the passenger side, noted, briefly that, like Gary—whose pants had come off completely when he’d struggled to his feet—she was naked from the waist down, though, more briefly, how foolish they’d look if they were stopped, and got in.

Gary started the car and executed a quick K-turn.
 
He slammed the accelerator to the floor.

Three miles south of the house, on a particularly narrow stretch of road, Gary again lost consciousness.
 
Ellen screamed and watched helplessly as the gully came up at them.
 
She thought how slow the whole process—Death—really was.

*****

Rachel put her hands on the sides of the chair, locked her arms, pressed down.
 
Well, at least the chair didn’t creak and shiver—it would probably hold her.

She adjusted the chair under the back window, checked the alignment.
 
She picked up the hammer and a nail from the floor, put one foot on the chair seat, paused.
 
She was forgetting something, she realized.
 
But what?
 
She thought a moment.
 
The curtain rod.
 
She had to get that measurement right before she put any nails into the window frame.
 
She took her foot off the chair seat and glanced around the room.
 
The curtain rod, the curtain, all those little fixtures; she’d laid them out somewhere earlier that morning.
 
Right here in the living room, she thought.

She crossed to her desk, flicked the light on, studied the room carefully.
 
No curtain, no curtain road, no fixtures.

“Damn,” she whispered.

Then she remembered.
 
Paul had laid everything out for her the previous evening.
 
On the kitchen table.
 
But she’d been in there to fix coffee earlier, and to get the chair, and she didn’t remember…

She took a couple of steps to her right.
 
It was all there, she saw, on the kitchen table.
 
Her coffee cup, too.
 

She sighed.
 
This was becoming routine—forgetting.
 
Especially in the morning, especially within an hour or so after waking, before she had been able to build a good fire in the fireplace.
 
Yesterday morning it had been,
Did I have breakfast, yet?
 
And the morning before that, when she had been upstairs putting clear plastic over the bedroom windows, it had been,
Did I build a fire?
 
The question had gnawed at her while she worked and, eventually, she had to go downstairs to answer it.

She went into the kitchen, gathered the curtain, rod and fixtures into her arms, and went back to the window.
 
She set the curtain and fixtures on the floor and, rod in hand, stepped up on the chair.

She found, as she worked, that she was humming.
 
It pleased her.
 
It meant something—that she was contented, happy.
  
And the little things, like the memory loss, and that dull ache in her breasts and around her thighs—an ache that had been with her for a week or so—had not altered that contentment.
 
There were even times that, inexplicably, it all seemed interconnected—the ache, the memory loss, the contentment (magic).
 
As if one followed the other in succession.

She did not recognize the tune she hummed.
 
It was certainly a very simple melody; it could, she thought, have easily been a Gregorian chant.

She finished putting the rod up, stepped off the chair, and checked the alignment again.
 
Satisfied the rod was straight, she picked up the curtain and got back up on the chair.

She heard the front door open and looked toward it, startled.
 
Paul appeared in the living room doorway.
 

“Hi,” he said, took his coat off, threw it on the kitchen table, came over and put his hands on her waist.

“Hi,” she said.
 
“What are you doing home so early?”

“Early?” He lifted her a few inches and set her down on the floor.

She turned to face him and he kissed her softly on the forehead.
 
“Yes,” she said.
 
“It can’t be much past twelve.”

“Twelve?”
 
No.
 
It’s closer to four, Rachel.”
 
He checked his wristwatch.
 
“Three-fifty-six, to be exact.”

“It can’t be, Paul.
 
I mean, I just woke up a couple hours ago.”

“You slept pretty late, didn’t you?”
 
It was an accusation.

“No, Paul.
 
I woke up at seven-thirty.
 
I remember looking at the alarm clock.”

He chuckled softly.
 
“Do you mean you’ve misplaced, what…four hours?”

She raised an eyebrow.
 
“Apparently, I have.”

He stepped away from her and gave her a slow once-over, as if what she had done with the four hours was printed somewhere on her body.

“You’ve been outside,” he said.
 
“I can tell you that.”

She looked questioningly at him.
 
“Outside?
 
No.
 
I haven’t.”

“Look at your arms.”

“My arms?”

“Look at them.”

She held her arms up.

Paul said, “You didn’t have those scratches this morning.”

“My God,” she whispered.
 
“I don’t remember…I have no idea—“

She was wearing one of Paul’s flannel shirts with the sleeves rolled.
 
Short, narrow, barely visible scratches crisscrossed the outside of both forearms.

“It’s some kind of rash, Paul.
 
It has to be.
 
I did
not
go outside today.”

“You must have…”

“Wait a minute,” she interrupted.
 
An image had flashed through her mind—sunlit fields, the house, a long distance off, cut by tall grasses—vaguely, as if she were seeing it through a clouded fish-eye lens.
 
“Wait a minute,” she repeated, the image reappearing, clearer.
 
She smiled.
 
“Yes, I remember now.
 
I woke up, I got dressed, I went outside.”
 
She paused again.
 
“I went down that path.
 
Yes, I went down it, then I went into those fields to the north.
 
And then…”
 
Another pause.

“Yes?” Paul coaxed.

“And then I…I went to sleep.
 
I took a nap.
 
I went outside and took a damned nap.”

Paul laughed shortly again.
 
“It was pretty cold today, do you remember that?”

“No,” she answered at once.
 
“No, I remember being very warm, very comfortable.”

“Well, that’s okay, too,” Paul said, stepped forward, and put his arms around her.
 
He drew his head back a little.
 
“What’s this?” he said, and gently coaxed something out of her hair; he held it up for her to see.
 
“A burr,” he said.

“Uh-huh,” she said, and put her head against his shoulder.
 
“Paul,” she said, “I’m a little frightened, not remembering like this.
 
Something’s wrong.
 
Maybe I’ve got, I don’t know, Alzheimer’s or something.
 
I’m frightened.
 
And, at the same time, I feel so happy.
 
So contented.”

“Well, then, that’s all that should concern you,” Paul said.
 
“Just…enjoy, that’s all.
 
So what if your memory’s been a little fuzzy.
 
It’s just this house, the land everything works its…”

Magic!

“…magic on you, that’s all.
 
Your mind, your emotions are making a big adjustment, and I, for one, am very pleased by it.”

She said nothing.

He stepped away from her.
 
“Now, let me take you out to the car and show you what I got in town today.
 
For one, we’ll have no more cold mornings.
 
I got one of those portable electric heaters, if the generator can handle it.
 
Only cost 30 bucks, on sale.
 
And I got a couple gallons of bottled water—we’ll use it only for coffee, okay?
 
And—“

She listened, bewildered, at first, as he explained his day’s activities, then, as he led her outside, still talking—nonstop, so unlike him—she became aware that she was being caught up in his enthusiasm, almost hypnotized by it.
  
By the time they had brought the heater, the water, a heavy quilt, a dozen paperback books, mostly mysteries, two fifty-pound bags of rock salt, and twenty pounds of various meats (“A lot of it should keep pretty well in the fruit cellar, Rachel.”) into the house—she noted that she was no longer troubled, no longer frightened, that she even felt a bit foolish remembering the way she’d talked, and a little embarrassed, like an adolescent who, trying hard to act like an adult, throws a tantrum and reflects on it later.

And after they’d put everything away and Paul was seated at the table and waiting for his dinner, Rachel, at the stove, said matter-of-factly, “Sorry for the way I acted earlier.
 
You can imagine the way I felt.”

“Yes, I can,” Paul said.
 
“I certainly can.
 
But that sort of thing happens to all of us every now and then.
 
It’s nothing to get upset about.”

Rachel agreed that it did indeed happen to everyone, though she could think of none else it had happened to, and that she was no longer upset, that she was, and had been, and would be, quite comfortable.
 
Thanks to him.

November 8

It was the first time in weeks that Paul had left her alone at the house.
 
He had said he would the night before; “We’re going to have to restock the cupboards and that means I’ll have to go into town tomorrow.
 
It would be helpful if you’d stay here, Rachel.
 
I know it’s asking a lot, but I think it would be…for the best.”

She had, surprising herself, given him no argument.
 
HE would leave her alone at the house, she would stay alone, and that was that.
 
She would merely be certain all the doors and windows were locked.
 
Very simple.
 
No one could get in, then.

Paul had left without waking her.
 
Part of his plan, she supposed (if he still felt he needed one, and he probably did: he would always be protective of her.
 
It was only natural and forgivable and chauvinistic and sweet).
 
God, she loved him.
 
And the changes that had come over him.
 
His temper had all but disappeared, for instance (how he used to scare her with that temper).
 
He was more talkative, sillier, perhaps (an image of the lopsided pyramids came to her), but that was all right—no one needed to spend his life in deadly, smothering seriousness, unwilling to laugh or to say stupid things on occasion; such people were obviously afraid of themselves.

She wasn’t sure, however, about his lovemaking, about the direction it had taken in the last couple of weeks.
 
For a while, a few days, she remembered, it had been unbelievably good.
 
They had shared each other, their bodies, their love, rather than taken from another.
 
But there was little or nothing of that sharing left.
 
Something had taken its place.
 
For both of them.
 
Greed, maybe, though that word was, somehow, too civilized, too accusatory, too judgmental.
 
It only scraped the edges, wore away the protective layer.
 
It was impossible to define or even to know what lay beneath.
 
Something very…powerful.
 
And that, she knew, accounted for her aching thighs, her aching pelvis, her aching breasts—the power he had brought to their lovemaking.
 
The power she had returned.
 
As if some freedom had suddenly been given to them, a freedom without boundaries.
 
And they were using it.