Strange Seed (26 page)

The man let go of the door.
 
Rachel closed it softly and watched as Quirk moved up the lawn to the car, got in, glanced skeptically at her, then drove away.

Paul arrived a half hour later.

“Insulation,” he explained, and pushed a huge roll of fiberglass through the doorway and into the kitchen.
 
“We can use it on the upstairs floor.
 
There are four more rolls in the car.”

“I’ll get my coat,” Rachel said, “and help you bring it in.”

“Good.
 
Thanks.”

“You’re late, Paul.”

“Yeah, I know.
 
Sorry.
 
I had some car trouble, then I had to search all over hell and gone for this stuff, and then I went to the phone company offices and waited around there for a couple of
 
hours.
 
I didn’t get much accomplished, I’m afraid.
 
I wanted to see if they could get the phone in before the end of the month, but they can’t.
 
Don’t ask me why—something about schedules and contracts and union stuff.”

“We had visitors, Paul.”

A pause.

“Visitors?”

“Some hunters.
 
They wanted to know if they could use our land.
 
I told them no.
 
That’s what I thought you’d say.
 
Is it what you’d say?”

“It sure as hell is.
 
Thanks.”

“Other than that, the day’s been pretty dull.”
 
She grinned.

“Dull?”

She got her coat off the coat tree, shrugged into it.
 
“Dull,” she repeated.
 
“Dead dull boring monotonous.
 
Until, that is, about three, and I began worrying about you.”
 
She paused.
 
“Bastard!” she concluded playfully.

“Dull dead boring monotonous, huh?
 
Sorry to hear it.”

“I’m not, Paul.
 
It was heaven.”

November 15

The shotgun felt heavy, alien, obscene in Paul’s hand.
 
It had no place here (what had Rachel called it?)—in heaven.

He inhaled deeply, caught the musty odor of the forest a hundred yards ahead, the smell of earth around him.
 
A lazy snowfall the night before had vanished shortly after sunrise, moistening the earth, warming it.

Winter, Paul realized, would soon be upon him.

He stared at the twin barrels of the shotgun as he walked.
 
What had he hoped to do with the thing?
 
Kill the approaching winter with it?

What did he have to fear from the winter that the house and the fireplace and his newly installed insulation and the portable electric heater wouldn’t take care of?
 
Civilized men are only slowed down by winters, not killed by them.
 
If, that is, they’re both civilized and careful (which was, after all, the key to survival under any circumstances).

But if that were true, and if he believed it—as he surely did—why was there that awful fluttering in the pit of his stomach, that second’s flow of adrenaline whenever the reality of the coming winter struck him?
 
As it had with the smell of the earth—moist and stinging and cool, the smell of mid-November.
 
The smell of the land in transition.

The November sky, as blue as it was today, caused the fluttering and the flow of adrenaline, too.
 
Because it was a tight, frigid blue—the summer sky was fluid and warm.

He gripped the gun tightly in his left hand. The metal was cold, dispassionate.
 
Dead metal.
 
The gun was death incarnate.
 
Death was its only purpose.

So why had he brought it here?
 
Into heaven.

He stepped cautiously across the narrow stream that bordered this side of the forest.
 
Stopped.

He had come here to kill.
 
He knew it at once and hated it and could do nothing about it.
 
He had come here to kill.
 
Before the winter could.

He was an on errand of mercy.
 
He was one of God’s perverse angels dispatched to ensure heaven a peaceful winter sleep.

He was the sandman.

A short distance to his left a pheasant suddenly took flight—a dozen sheets flapping crazily in a brisk wind.
 
Paul froze, the adrenaline coursing through him, giving him strength momentarily, then sapping it.
 
He snapped his head to the left, watched the pheasant settle to earth fifty yards away.
 
He turned his body to face it, raised the shotgun, aimed.

Sandman!

He touched one of the triggers, felt it give a little.

Sandman!

He squeezed harder, saw the pheasant crouch low, trying to camouflage itself.
 
It was a hen, dull brown, and the short grasses surrounding it were nearly the same color.

Sandman!

The pheasant shot into the air again.

Paul pulled the trigger tight.
 
The hammer clicked.
 
Paul smiled, relieved.
 
The chamber was empty.

He turned and took the shallow slope in long, slow strides.
 
He found his way to the clearing easily.

*****

Rachel had never tasted rabbit and the thought of it made her queasy
 
Rabbits were almost like cats—so soft and warm and frisky.
 
Some people made pets of rabbits.

But Paul had told her he was going to bring one home, if it happened to “pose” for him, offered itself.
 
And since, as he had also told her, they might not be able to depend on the grocery store in town for their meat when winter was fully upon them, she had agreed, in order to steel herself to the task, to cook the rabbit, or at least attempt it.

She rolled over onto her shoulder, folded the pillow so her neck and head were horizontal.
 
And hour’s nap was all she needed.
 
And then she’d do some cleaning, take a bath, do a little reading.
 
But just an hour’s nap, first.
 
To shake the cobwebs away.
 
To catch up on all the sleep she’d missed in the last couple of weeks.

They were both partly to blame for that, she knew.
 
Their need for one another, their hunger, had not just increased, it had doubled, and redoubled, had become all-but an obsession.
 
And she knew also that there were times—even when they were locked together and their ecstasy was all-consuming—that she was at a distance, watching, grimacing, thinking how distasteful, how wasteful of time, how deadening all of it was, that she was put on the earth for more than merely this.

Later, when she reflected on it, she ascribed those feelings to a latent Puritanism instilled in her by her stolid, no-nonsense mother.

Rachel closed her eyes.

The sex—yes, that was part of it.
 
But the dreams were a large part, too.

They weren’t dreams she wanted to remember, and, because she always awoke quickly, sometimes in a sweat, after having them, she remembered little.
 
Only a man with jet-black hair and a day’s growth of beard, and anguish splashed all over him and—the thing that caused her to wake, to run, to retreat—her own strange, warm feelings upon seeing that face, that anguish, as if it, the poor man’s anguish, were inexplicably related to her own pleasure.

But she was exhausted now.
 
Perhaps that would ensure a deep and dreamless sleep.
 
She hoped so.
 
She thought briefly of taking off her jeans and shirt and decided it would make no difference.
 
She was long past having to make herself comfortable in order to sleep.

Were the doors locked? she wondered.
 
And the windows?

But her consciousness dimmed and she saw, in her mind’s eye, that the house was wonderfully open, as it should be, to any of the creatures of the land that might want to come into it.
 
Then sleep overtook her.

*****

Paul had been waiting an hour, the shotgun propped up beside him against the tree trunk where he was sitting, when he heard a soft crackling noise in the underbrush behind him.
 
His body tensed, but he didn’t move.
 
They obviously wanted to take him by surprise.
 
Let them believe they were; it would ease their caution, make them bolder.

Without moving his head, he glanced at the shotgun.
 
He could reach it, stand, turn and fire in less than two seconds.
 
Very quick.
 
But quick enough?

How quick had Lumas been?

The soft cracking noise repeated itself.
 
It was closer, Paul thought—closer and more to the right.
 
But it wasn’t time yet.
 
He would wait.
 
Let them come to him.

He chanced a slow glance upward, into the trees that surrounded the clearing.
 
He focused on a huge brown nest in the upper branches of an oak at the other side of the clearing, and heard a soft padding sound, like a large cat walking across a stiff rug.
 

They were close.
 

He let his gaze fall, his head lowered, he stared a moment at the ground between his feet, saw a small cream-colored bone there.
 
The bone glistened warmly.
 
Seductively.

“Shit!” he whispered.

He grabbed the shotgun, stood, turned, aimed, fired.

Two seconds.

And for Paul, an eternity existed in them.
 
Around them.
 
Like a wheel.
 

His hand on the cold metal was his hand on his mother’s dead face; it was, “Good-bye, Mother.”
 
And it was his father’s tears.
 
And the other death; that small, wrinkled, white thing at his mother’s breasts.
 
That grotesquerie.
 
It was a black silhouette where his father lay, the night alone when the dark face touched him, reached out to him, rejoiced in him, in his sadness.

The wheel receded.
 
Went back to its point of rest, the place it had existed for twenty-one years—his years in New York, where he had learned what civilization was and what his part in it should be.

The point of rest.
 
Just below his consciousness, where he could not recognize it or call it up at will.
 
Or remember that it had shown itself again, for the fourth time since he had come back to the house.

He became aware of a dull ache in his shoulders and realized he had not held the gun properly, that its hard recoil had driven the stock into his shoulder.

He set the gun down, moved forward a few feet and bent over.
 
He lifted the mangled raccoon by the scruff of its neck.
 
Its hindquarters were nonexistent, its eyes were open.
 
Paul thought he saw fear and pleading in them.
 
Blood and salvia had welled up in its mouth.

Paul heard himself whisper, “I’m sorry,” and flicked the dead raccoon into the underbrush, turned, picked up the shotgun, started for home.

*****

He got down on one knee beside the bed, reached out, ran his hand gently over Rachel’s back, her waist, her buttocks.

She was never beautiful and inviting than when she was naked and asleep.

She moaned softly.

“Rachel,” he whispered.

Silence.

He coaxed her left leg toward him.
 
She moaned again.

“Rachel,” he repeated.

He put his hand between her thighs, touched her with the tip of a finger, pushed her right leg away, probed with all his fingers.
 
She was open, ready.

She moaned again.

He stood, hurriedly took of his pants, straddled her, inserted himself.

“Paul?” he heard.

He pushed himself into her—once, twice.

“Paul, help me.”

Three times.

She turned her right shoulder toward him, exposed her breast.
 
Paul caught a glimpse of red on the sheet.

Six times.

“Paul, please help me.”

Nine times.

He saw that the red on the sheet was her blood, that it also rimmed her nipple, that it had clotted around her breast.
 
Saw it, registered it.

“Oh, Paul, please, please—“

His climax was delicious.