It's Alive! (12 page)

He stood on the steps and inhaled deep the sweet, warm, fall air. Lights were on in all of the houses. Streetlights cast their strange yellow cones of glow onto the sidewalks.

Everything looked totally calm, normal. Just another evening. He saw the faint shapes of the canyon hills in the distance, and in the other direction the bright lights of Los Angeles quivering in the atmosphere.

Somewhere out there, it was not normal. It was as far from normal as it could possibly be. For what skulked, somewhere, in those shadows was not completely human, though not quite an animal. What it was exactly, he didn’t know. No one knew. No one alive. An army of invading troops would be more normal than the being that lurked in some protected spot, somewhere. Not here.

Or maybe here.

A State Police car turned the corner and cruised slowly past the house, five heads inside watching out all the windows, the barrels of shotguns standing upright among them.

Frank watched it glide through the block, turn, and disappear down another street.

Or maybe right here.

He went down the steps into the yard. He walked softly a few steps, then stopped, listening. A distant stereo wailed rock. Far away. Not on this block. Laughter. A neighbor’s house.

He went around to the side of his house, staying a few feet from the bushes that enclosed the property on three sides like a horseshoe, giving a semblance of privacy. A breeze rippled up, stirring the bushes and fluffing Frank’s hair.

A faint, low squeal.

Frank froze in his tracks, one foot still raised in midstep.

Was it a cry of some sort?

Again he heard it.

He went over to the wall of the house. The basement window. The breeze had teased it ajar. The rusty hinges squeaked. Taking the outside handle, he pulled it shut.

He walked around to the back. Water in the swimming pool rippled. The inflated plastic seat floated in one corner. In the darkness, he was glad he knew what it was. And he was glad he knew it was the cat, sitting there just outside its backdoor flap.

He went over to the cellar door and felt the padlock. Tugged it. Secure.

Goddam it. He was just walking around scaring himself. And probably scaring Lenore too, if she heard him rustling around out here.

He looked at the outline of bushes. Privacy. A hiding place. Crazy. The last place in the world that thing would be, if it had a brain, was here. And if it was just sneaking around aimlessly, chances were one in a million that it’d end up here.

It could be anywhere. Everywhere.

It. The thing. The infant. The animal. The killer. Whatever it was, he wished they would stop calling it “his baby.” They wanted to blame him. Stick him with it. It came from Lenore, for chrissake, and maybe his sperm didn’t even have anything to do with it. Maybe some tumor. Some weird growth that could just as well have occurred in any woman in the world.

Something that had never happened before. Like Jesus.

He enjoyed the analogy. Not because he was sacrilegious. But because it would be a good answer to throw out at people who called it “his baby.” He would say, “What about Jesus? Who was his father?”

They would say, “God.”

And he would say, “Maybe this is God’s too.”

And they would hate him for that They would call him a blasphemer. They would believe even more strongly that he was the father of a monster. That maybe
he
was a monster too, because he had monster blood in his veins. Monster DNA in his genes.

But it was God’s. Yes. In the final analysis, it was God’s work. Just like we were, and dogs and cats, everything that breathed. And didn’t breathe. That’s all he meant. You had to accept it as God’s. Even germs were God’s creatures, right?

That’s all he meant.

Maybe God was trying to tell us something. About germs and microorganisms and cells. About human cells. You are what you eat. The things we are taking into our bodies are poisons. Are they not? Do we know the effects of all the garbage we eat, drink, inhale, touch, absorb through our pores?

Weren’t lots of scientific experts already warning us about that?

Couldn’t God be warning us too?

And besides, how could anyone of decent morality blame him, or Lenore, for what happened? He made love to his wife, that’s all. He worked hard and was a good father and husband. She was a good mother and wife. They were not, all things considered, unusual.

Except that they were the parents of a monster.

No! He shook his head and sniffed back tears. They were not the parents. Lenore had had the tragic misfortune to be but a carrier of some vile organism. They couldn’t be blamed. They were already suffering more than anybody.

Except perhaps for the loved ones of those who were dead. Those who were killed by the monster. Those who would yet die, if the monster wasn’t killed first.

Perhaps tonight it would be killed.

He stood at the front door and breathed deeply to calm himself. He really did need a good meal, with Lenore. He wiped his eyes. Then he went in.

The food was still on the table, still wrapped, just as it had been when he left. The wine was unopened.

“Lenore?”

He trotted through the house and up the stairs. “Lenore?”

Lenore rolled slowly over on the bed to face him. “Hi, darling. Did you eat? Sorry, but I couldn’t wait up. I just suddenly got so tired and cold. Are you coming to bed soon?”

His mouth hung open. He leaned back against the wall and swallowed hard. “Yeah, sure. Let me just finish up a couple of things downstairs.”

He went back to the kitchen and began putting things back into the refrigerator and freezer.

What was wrong with Lenore? Maybe he misunderstood her. Maybe she just meant that she had suddenly felt too tired to make a big meal. That was to be expected, so soon after that . . . giving birth. But her manner, her sudden cheerfulness before. Her look. Her eyes puzzled him. He didn’t want to worry about her, not because he didn’t care—for he cared enormously for her—but because he didn’t want to face the thought that anything was seriously wrong. She needed to rest. They both did. They needed to get away to St. Thomas and lie in the sun and forget everything. Put it out of their minds. At least for a while.

He was determined to hold himself together. He couldn’t let down. His family depended upon him now more than ever, and he had to maintain control of himself. Maybe when the police were finished he would go on a toot.

He didn’t think he had ever felt so tired before.

And he wished the wind wouldn’t keep blowing the basement window open.

She had thought the feeling would leave her, after the birth. But it didn’t. Lenore still felt strange.

Of course, with everything that happened being so strange, being surrounded as she was with weird events—that could cause her feeling. But not entirely. Because she felt somewhat like she had felt before—an odd sense of foreboding, unusual tides of mood and energy. She did not feel in control of herself.

It was quite normal to feel tired, of course, after giving birth. But she didn’t feel tired all the time, or cold. Sometimes she had enormous energy, and her body sweated with heat. And during those times she didn’t feel like herself, she felt detached in a way, not part of what was going on around her. Or inside her.

Her breasts swelled with unused baby’s milk. That caused great sadness within her, and she wished the swelling would go away, the milk would go away. She didn’t need the constant reminder of what her body had been primed to do, and then been denied.

Frank was holding up well, it seemed. But he was so tired. She wished he could sleep.

She wished a lot of things. She wished she had a baby. Or that she didn’t have one. Sometimes she felt guilty. Chris, a normal, healthy child, was enough. She shouldn’t have wanted another one.

Or she should have wanted it sooner, had it sooner.

Or never had it at all.

When she thought about it, she felt sad and guilty. But sometimes she couldn’t think. Time just went by. She didn’t know how.

She slept. She would not remember her awful dream. If it was a dream.

“Reel it in slowly now, Chris. It’ll wiggle around plenty anyway, under the water.”

Chris reeled in and cast again, squinting across the lake into the low sun. “Charley, will the baby look like me?”

“I don’t know,” Charley said, flinging his lure far out into the lake. “Why do you ask?”

“Well, your two boys don’t look alike. And I was wondering if that meant the baby won’t look like me. I mean, it doesn’t
have
to look like me. I was just wondering if people would be able to tell that I was its brother.”

“That’s the kind of thing you never can predict, Chris. Nobody can ever be sure about a thing like that. For example, both your parents have light hair, while yours is black. We don’t know all that much about heredity.”

“What’s heredity?”

“Certain things in parents that show up in their kids. Physical things like size or build or color, or personality things like temperament—you know, your moods, patience, intelligence. Sometimes kids turn out very much like their parents, sometimes they don’t. When they do, we like to say it’s heredity; when they don’t, we don’t know what it is. We aren’t so sure about some things as we like to think we are.”

“I’m not sure about everything.”

“I know, Chris, and that’s good. Kids love to learn. Adults love to think they already know. We know how to get to the moon, but we don’t understand how everything works in our own bodies. Many years ago, before you were born, I guess it was when your father and I were kids, they invented the drug called penicillin. It was a super new medicine to treat all kinds of diseases. Diseases that killed people. Penicillin worked against those diseases, stopped them. We thought we had them whipped. But we didn’t know that much about it. Gradually some of these diseases developed new forms of themselves—just like through heredity—much stronger forms. And then penicillin wouldn’t work on them anymore. So we developed new drugs to work against the new forms of disease. I suppose in time there will be new forms of those diseases that will be too tough for the new drugs too.”

“Jeez, that’s scary.”

“I don’t mean for it to be scary, Chris. It’s just that the offspring of all living things seem to change over many years. We call it evolution. It certainly isn’t all scary or bad. It’s just that we don’t always understand it and can’t always predict it. Sometimes it’s like that with kids—they develop strengths or weaknesses that their parents didn’t have. Did you know that people in the days of our great-grandfathers were quite a bit smaller than people are today? People are getting larger.”

“Really?” Holding his fishing rod up beside him, Chris turned to look at Charley.

“Sure. I’m taller than my father was. On the other hand, he had a full head of hair all his life, while I’m getting bald. Who knows why?”

“Will I be taller than my dad?”

“Well, I don’t know. He’s pretty tall. You might be. Your children might be taller than you. Or stronger, or darker, or lighter, or smarter or not so smart—or anything at all. Don’t forget, you’re your mother’s child too. Her characteristics are mixed with your father’s in your body.”

“Dad’s taller than you.”

“He sure is. He was a good basketball player.”

“How did you and him get to be friends?” Chris cast, and his line snapped back and became tangled on the reel.

“Here, let me straighten that out for you. We were friends back in college. He was on the basketball team and I was a sportswriter for the school paper. We’ve been friends ever since those days. We’ve always helped each other out, especially those times when you need a friend the most.” He pulled several feet of line off the reel, until it was unsnarled; then he handed it back to Chris.

“Thanks. Why didn’t you keep on writing, I mean when you got out of school? Couldn’t you get a job on a regular paper, for pay?”

“Somebody had to take over my father’s paint store when he died.”

“Did you want to?”

“Watch where you’re casting now, use your wrist, look out for the branches behind you. Did I want to? I don’t know. I didn’t think about it. It was just the natural thing to do.”