Strange Seed (8 page)

Rachel shook her head.
 
“No, I haven’t,” she answered.
 
“But what does it matter, Paul?
 
There’s no one—“

“Yes, there is,” Paul cut in.
 
“I can hear him.
 
The poor bastard probably got caught in the rain…”
 
He put his ear to the door again.
 
“Hello,” he said.
 
“You in the cellar: are you all right?
 
Can you hear me?”
 
He waited a moment and went on, his voice louder, “Hello, can you
hear
me?”
 
Another pause.
 
“Jesus,” he whispered.
 
“Rachel, give me a hand here.”

Rachel stepped up to the door and put her hands above Paul’s.
 
Several seconds later, they pulled the door free of its frame.
 
“Okay,” Paul said.
 
“I can get it now.”
 
Rachel hesitated a moment, then moved to the right, where she could peer into the inch-wide opening between the door and the frame.
 
“I can’t see anything,” she said, and paused.
 
“But I think I can hear him.”

The piercing noise of the hinges straining against themselves followed and Paul had the door open.
 
He let his hands fall to his sides and breathed heavily.
 
“Going to have to…get that damned thing…fixed,” he said.

*****

Rachel hurried about the kitchen.
 
“Have you seen the coffee, Paul?” she asked, threw a cupboard door shut and opened another.

Paul slowly seated himself at the kitchen table.
 
“I was sure,” he mumbled.
 
“I heard him.
 
I
heard
him!”

“Here it is,” Rachel said.

“And those footprints,” Paul went on.
 
“He had to have been in there.
 
Where else could he have been?”

Rachel took the bag of coffee beans to the grinder.
 
“Paul,” she said, her tone vaguely condescending, “you searched everywhere, didn’t you?”
 
She waited, though it had been a rhetorical question.
 
Paul nodded once.
 
“Well then,” she continued, “the simple fact is—there was no one there, as I said in the first place.”
 
She smiled as if to indicate the discussion was at an end.

“It was dark,” Paul reminded her.
 
“You couldn’t tell just
how
dark it was from outside.
 
Hell, I bumped into that chest of drawers we put down there, it was so dark.
 
The lantern didn’t help much.
 
I could have overlooked—“

“How could anyone hide down there?” Rachel interrupted.
 
“Could
you
hide down there?”

“No.
 
But I’m not a child.”

“Can we be sure it
was
a child?”

“It was you that suggested it originally.
 
And, from the size of those footprints, I don’t see how it could have been—“

“I was wrong,” Rachel said.
 
“Very simple.
 
I was wrong.”

“No, you weren’t.
 
And when Hank shows up, he and I are gong to have another look.
 
Unless you’ve overcome your fears of…
 
Never mind.
 
If there is someone down there, Hank and I will find him.”

“This morning,” Rachel began, at a whisper, “he said he wasn’t feeling well.
 
He’s probably in his cabin.”

“Not feeling well?
 
Why didn’t you tell me?”

Rachel shrugged.
 
“I don’t know.
 
It slipped my mind, I guess.”

“Slipped your mind?”
 
He waited a second for the explanation he knew was not forthcoming
 
“Well,” he went on, “did he say what was wrong?”

“No, not really.
 
Something about stomach pains?”

“Stomach pains?”
 

“Yes, nothing serious, he said.”
 
She paused.
 
“It’s probably that awful diet of his—“

“There’s nothing wrong with his diet,” Paul interrupted.
 
“At least he’s getting all the protein he needs.”
 
He stood, crossed the room and opened the back door.
 
“I’ll be back in an hour or so.
 
Have dinner ready, okay?”

“Sure,” Rachel said, and closed the door behind him.

*****

I’ve got a few minutes, so I’ll add this P.S.

In case you were worried about it—the man’s coming to put the windows in on Monday (it’s Friday as I write).
 
And that will be the end of that experience, thank God.
 
It’s going to cost a lot, of course, but that can’t be helped, apparently (though I wish the house had been insured).

Also, we’ve got the car back, at last.
 
Actually, we’ve had it back for a week or so, though we haven’t used it much.
 
There’s a theatre in town and I told myself when we first got here that we’d be going out a lot, that we’d be constantly bored.
 
Hasn’t happened.
 
We’ve been working too hard getting this place in shape.
 
Little things, now—like the back porch steps, and the screens around the front porch, and stripping a coat of ugly brown paint off the floor in here (the living room) to get at the beautiful pine floors beneath.
 
Paul has assigned many of these small jobs to me.
 
Not that I mind.
 
And besides, I’ve found that when I’m not working, I don’t get bored.
 
Many people would call it boredom, I suppose, but

Damn I’ll be glad when the windows are in.
 
I just thought I saw…
 
And now I hear…

For several minutes, Rachel stared silently at the child.
 
He was sitting on his heels between the refrigerator and the west wall of the kitchen, his torso forward so his chest touched his knees: he was, she realized with a little shudder, trying to hide from her even as she watched—his little sidestepping motions were a pathetic attempt to flow into the wall, as if he believed his small body could be made porous, or as if he got near enough to the wall, his color could change to its color.
 
And his shallow breathing, she knew, was an effort; every once in a while, a low-pitched humming sound came from him, as if he were on the verge of snoring.
 
It was obvious that his body wanted more air than he was allowing it.

As she watched him, she wanted desperately to say
Look at me, please!
but couldn’t.
 
It would frighten him, she knew—it would disappoint him, spoil his game if, by speaking, she gave him proof that she knew he was in the house.

She reconsidered: It was not a game he was playing.
 
Impossibly, he feared for his life, feared her, felt trapped or suddenly helpless.
 
She couldn’t say why these thoughts came to her.
 
Regardless of the dim light, she could see that his face was expressionless.
 
Someone seeing a photograph of him would believe he was merely resting, or waiting, or that he was in the middle of a kind of joyless game of leapfrog.

You should have some clothes on,
she wanted to say, but felt, as soon as the words came to her, that it would be a strangely inappropriate remark.
 
He had lived most, perhaps all, of his nine or ten years just as he was now:
 
It was not his dark skin that told her that—but something else.
 
His manner, perhaps, or his quite apparent lack of shame.
 
She thought about that: no, it was not apparent, she concluded.
 
None of what she’d so quickly assumed about him was apparent—only imaginative guesses.
 
He is some wild creature that has gotten into the house, and the only thing human about him is his form.
 
That is what had come to her the second she’d seen him, she told herself.
 
And, of course, it was wrong.

“Wait there,” she said.

His body twitched slightly.

“Oh wait there.
 
Please!”
 
And she backed away from him a few feet and switched on the overhead lamp.

She gasped.

He had turned his head to look at her.

*****

One word—“beautiful”—came to her in that moment.
 
And in the next moment she rejected it.
 
The word was not merely inadequate.
 
It was dishonest.
 
To herself.
 
To her whole being.
 
Because so much that is commonplace is called
beautiful
.
 
Men and women are beautiful.
 
And children.
 
Animals.
  
Poetry.
 
Joy.
 
Love.
 
Even sadness.
 
The face she studied—the eyes that studied her—was not.

It was hideous.
 
As perfection has to be.
 
And hypnotic, as the full moon is hypnotic.

It was a face in total harmony with itself.

For one insane moment, she thought that her own children would look very much like this child.

The color of his skin was much the same as hers, wasn’t it?
 
No, perhaps more like Paul’s.
 
And the tapering oval eyes.
 
Paul’s eyes.
 
And the strong chin.
 
The idea dissipated.
 
Her own children, she knew, would be to this child what an Audobon print is to what it depicts.
 
An imitation.
 

She took a step closer to the child.
 
He raised his head a little to keep his eyes on hers.

She had seen that fragile blue—the color of his eyes—before.
 
It was the color of a cloudless early morning sky, just before sunrise, after all but the brightest stars have winked out.
 
That fragile, pale and transient blue.
 
A blue so sharply, exquisitely, in contrast to the dark, smooth, almost earth-colored skin.

But it was his hair that was earth-colored, she amended.
 
As if the thick, great mass of it falling to his shoulder blades and to the base of his neck—though, curiously, not over his forehead—was a strange kind of rich topsoil.

His high cheekbones and straight nose were reminiscent of the American Indian, but not so stark as that, her thoughts continued, more as if the smooth, flawless dark skin did not cover bone and cartilage, but something far less substantial—soft clay, perhaps.

Above the pale blue eyes, the brows were the same rich topsoil color as his hair, and just as thick and full, but they did not meet in the middle, as such brows so often did.
 
Instead, as full as they were, they tapered nearly to a point just over the upper inside edge of the eye sockets.
 
On any other child, the effect would have been ludicrous, as if the child had been fooling around with makeup and tweezers.

His mouth, parted a little, was what some would call a classic mouth—bottom lip full, top lip slightly less full.
 
The two parts formed a dark red, moist unity, and more than that—an invitation.
 
A seduction in and of themselves.

Rachel took a step backward.
 
And two things happened simultaneously: the overhead lamp flickered once, shot out the deep, harsh blue light that signals the death of the bulb (darkness reentered the room), and the back door opened.
 
Paul appeared.

“I don’t know where Hank is,” he said, stooping over to remove his mud-caked boots.
 
“He’s not in his cabin.
 
I nearly broke his door down pounding on it.”
 
Brief pause.
 
“Turn the light on, would you, Rachel.”

She pointed tremblingly at the child.

“Is something wrong?” Paul asked.

She nodded sharply in the direction of the child, and, as she did so, the child put his head between his knees.
 

“I see you!” Rachel blurted.
 
“I see you!
 
You won’t get away!”

“What the…” Paul whispered.
 
Still wearing his right boot, he took a few awkward steps toward the child.
 
“Come out of there!” he demanded.

Rachel looked frantically at her husband.
 
“Don’t just stand there, Paul.
 
Get hold of him before…”
 
And she knew how utterly foolish her words would sound.

Paul hesitated, his gaze first on the child, then on Rachel.
 

“
Do
something, Paul!”