Margaret St. Clair (24 page)

She got out her diary and opened it. But it wouldn’t do; the volume had no lock, and she knew her mother read it. She never wrote anything important in it.

She looked at the scribbled pages with dislike. It would be nice to be able to tear them out and crumble them up in the wastebasket. But her mother would notice and ask her why she had destroyed her pretty book. No …

She hunted about the room until she found a box of note paper. Using the lid of the box as a desk, she printed careful ly across the top of one of the narrow gray sheets: THE MAN.

She hesitated. Then she wrote: “1. Where did he come from?”

She licked her pencil. The idea was hard to put into words. But she wanted to see it written out on the paper. She began, erased, b egan again. Finally she wrote, “I think he came to Moss Island from the mainland. I think he came over one night last month when the tide was so low. I think he came here by acci —” She erased. “By mistake.”

Brenda was ready for the second question “Why does he stay on the island?” she scribbled. She was writing faster now. “I think because he cannot swim. The water would —” she paused, conscious that the exact word she wanted was not in her vocabulary. At l a st she wrote, “would wash him away.”

She got out another sheet of note paper. At the top she printed, “THE MAN —Page 2.” She bit into the pencil shank judiciously. Then she wrote, “What kind of a man is he? I think he is not like other people. Not like us. He is a different kind of a man.”

She had written the last words slowly. Now inspiration came. She scribbled, “He is not like us because he likes dead things to eat. Things that have been dead for much —” She erased. “For a long time. I think that is why he came to M.I. in the first place. Hunting. He is old. Has been the way he is for a long time.”

She put the pencil down. She seemed to have finished. Her mother must have gone out; the noise of her parents’ voices had ceased, and the house was perf ectly quiet. Outside, she could hear the faint slap of her father’s trowel as he worked on the concrete.

There was a long pause. Brenda sat motionless. Then she picked up the pencil again and wrote at the bottom of the page, very quickly, “I think he wan ts to be born.”

She picked up what she had written and looked at it. Then she took the two pages and went with them into the bathroom. She tore them into small pieces and flushed them down the drain.

Supper that night was quiet. Once Brenda’s mother st arted to say something about Elizabeth Emsden, and was stopped by her father’s warning frown. Brenda helped with the dishes. Just before she went upstairs to bed, she slipped into her parents’ bedroom, which was on the ground floor, and unlatched the wind o w screens.

She had trouble getting to sleep, but slept soundly. She was aroused, when the night was well along, by the sound of voices. She stole out on the stair landing and listened, her heart beginning to thud.

The rotten smell was coming up in burning, bitter waves. The cottage seemed to rock under it. Brenda clung to the banister. He had come then, the man —her man —from the quarry. She was glad.

Brenda’s father was speaking. “That smell is really incredible,” he said in an abstracted voice. An d then, to Brenda’s mother, “Flora, call Elizabeth and tell her to have Jim come over. Hurry. I don’t know how much longer I can keep him back with this thing. Have Jim bring his gun.”

“Yes.” Flora Alden giggled. “You said Elizabeth was hysterical, didn’t you? For God’s sake keep your voice down, Rick. I don’t want Brenda to waken and see this. She’d be —I don’t think she’d ever get over it.” She moved toward the telephone.

Brenda’s eyes widened. Were her parents really solicitous for her? Were they af raid she’d be afraid? She moved down two or three steps, very softly, and sat down on one of the treads. If they noticed her now, she could say their voices had awakened her. She peered out between the banisters.

Her father was standing in the hall, holding the man from the quarry impaled in the stabbing beam of an electric torch.
He —oh, he was brave —he kept moving about and trying to rub the light out of his eyes. He made little rushes. But her father shifted the torch mercilessly, playing him in it, even though his hand shook.

Brenda’s mother came back from the phone. “He’s coming,” she reported. “He didn’t think the gun would do much good. He had another plan.”

It took Jim Emsden long enough to get to the cottage for Brenda to have time enough to shiver and wish she had put on her bathrobe. She yawned nervously and curled herself up more tightly against the banister. But she never took her eyes from the tableau in t h e hall below.

Emsden came in by the side door. He was wearing an overcoat over his pajamas. He took a deep breath when he saw the gray, blobby shape in the light of the torch.

“Yes, it’s the same man,” he said in his rumbling voice. “Of course. Nobody could mistake that smell. I brought the gun, Rick, but I have a hunch it won’t help. Not against a thing like that. Elizabeth got a glimpse of him, you know. I’ll show you what I mean. Keep him in the torch.”

He raised the .22 to his shoulder, clicked the bolt, and fired. Brenda’s little scream went unheeded in the whoosh of the shot. But the man from the quarry made no sign of having received the impact. He did not even rock. The bullet might as well have spent its force in mud.

“You see?” Emsden demanded. “It wasn’t any good.”

Flora Alden was giggling gently. The beam of the torch moved in bobbing circles against the darkness. “What’ll we do, Jim?” Rick asked. “I didn’t know things like this could happen. What are we going to do? —I’m afraid I’m goi ng to be sick.”

“Steady, Rick. Why, there’s one thing he’ll be afraid of Whatever he is. Fire.”

He produced rags and a bottle of kerosene. With the improvised torch they drove him out of the cottage and into the night outside. Whenever he slowed and tr ied to face them, his head lowered, his teeth gleaming, they thrust the bundle of burning rags in his face.

He had to give ground. Brenda was chewing her wrist in her excitement. She heard her father’s higher voice saying, “But what will we do with him, Jim? We can’t just leave him outside the house,” and Emsden’s deeper, less distinct answering rumble, “… kill him. But we can shut him up.” And then a confused roll of voices ending in the word “quarry.” She could hear nothing more.

Next day an atmosphere of exhaustion and cold defeat hung over the house. Brenda’s mother moved about her household tasks mechanically, hardly speaking to her daughter, her face white. Her father had not come back to the cottage until daybreak, and had left again after a fe w hours. It was not until nearly dusk that Brenda was able to slip out and try to find what had become of the man.

She made straight for the quarry. When she reached it, she looked about, bewildered. The sides were still sharp and square, but a great moun d of rock had been piled up in the center. The men of Moss Island must have worked hard all day to pile up so much rock.

She slid down the sides and clambered up the heap in the center. What had become of him? Was he under the mound? She listened. She co uld hear nothing. After a moment she sat down and pressed her ear to the rock. It felt still warm from the heat of the sun.

She listened. She could hear only the beating of her heart. And then, far down, a long way off, a rustle within the heap like tha t made by a mole’s soft paws.

After that, things changed. Brenda’s father had to go back to the office, since his vacation was over. He could visit Moss Island only on weekends. Brenda’s mother began to complain that Brenda was getting hard to handle, no longer obeyed.

The children who had rejected the girl now sought her out. They came to the cottage as soon as breakfast was over, asking for Brenda, and she went off with them at once, deaf to all that her mother could say. She would return only at dusk , pale with exhaustion, but still blazing with frantic energy.

Her new energy seemed inexhaustible. The physical feats that had once repelled her drew her irresistibly. She tumbled, climbed, dove, chinned herself, did splits and cartwheels. The other chi ldren watched her admiringly and applauded. For the first time in her life she tasted the pleasure of leadership.

If that had been all, only Brenda’s parents would have complained. But she drew her new followers after her into piece upon piece of mischie f. They were destructive, wanton, irrepressible. By the end of the summer everyone on Moss Island was saying that Brenda Alden needed disciplining. Her parents complained bitterly that she was impossible to control. They sent her off ahead of time to scho o l.

There the events of the late summer were repeated. Brenda’s schoolmates accepted her blindly. The teachers punished and threatened. Her grades, for the first time in her life, were bad. She was within an inch of being expelled.

The year passed. Spring came, and summer. The Aldens, fearing more trouble, left Brenda at school after the school year was over. She did not get back to Moss Island until late July.

The last few months had changed Brenda physically. Her narrow body had rounded and grown mor e womanly. Under her shirt —she still wore slacks and shirt —her breasts had begun to swell and lift. She seemed to have outgrown her tomboy ways. Her parents began to congratulate themselves.

She did not go at once to the cairn in the quarry. She ofte n thought of it. But she felt a sweet reluctance, an almost tender disinclination toward going. It could wait. August was well advanced before she visited the mound.

The day was warm. She was winded after the walk through the woods. She let herself down the side of the quarry delicately, paused for breath, and went up the mound with long, slipping steps. When she got to the top she sat down.

Was there, in the hot air, the faint hint of rottenness? She inhaled doubtfully. Then, as she had done last year, she pressed her ear to the mound.

There was silence. Was he —but of course, he couldn’t be dead. “Hi,” she called softly, her lips against the rock. “Hi. I’ve come back. It’s me.”

The scrabble began far down and seemed to come nearer. But there was t oo much rock in the way. Brenda sighed. “Poor old thing,” she said. Her tone was rueful. “You want to be born, don’t you? And you can’t get out. It’s too bad.”

The scrabbling continued. Brenda, after a moment, stretched herself out against the rock. The sun was warm, the heat from the stones beat up lullingly against her body. She lay in drowsy contentment for a long time, listening to the noises within the mound.

The sun began to wester. The cool of evening roused her. She sat up.

The air was utterly silent. There were no bird calls anywhere. The only sounds came from within the mound.

Brenda leaned forward quickly, so that her long hair fell over her face. “I love you,” she said softly to the rock. “I’ll always love you. You’re the only one I could ever love.”

She halted. The scrabbling within had risen to a crescendo. She laughed. Then she drew a long wavering sigh. “Be patient,” she said. “Someday I’ll let you out. I promise. We’ll be born together, you and I.”

1954.
Weird Tales

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Short In The Chest

The girl in the marine-green uniform turned up her hearing aid a trifle —they were all a little deaf, from the cold-war bombing —and with an earnest frown regarded the huxley that was seated across the desk from her.

“You’re the queerest huxley I ever heard of,” she said flatly. “The others aren’t at all like you.”

The huxley did not seem displeased at this remark. It took off its windowpane glasses, blew on them, polished them on a handkerchief, and retu rned them to its nose. Sonya’s turning up the hearing aid had activated the short in its chest again; it folded its hands protectively over the top buttons of its dove-gray brocaded waistcoat.

“And in what way, my dear young lady, am I different from other huxleys?” it asked.

“Well — you tell me to speak to you frankly, to tell you exactly what is in my mind. I’ve only been to a huxley once before, but it kept talking about giving me the big, overall picture, and about using dighting [*
In the past, I have been accused of making up some of the unusual words that appear in my stories. Sometimes this accusation has been justified; sometimes, as in “Vulcan’s Dolls” (see Plant Life of the Pacific World) it has not. For the record, therefore, be it observed that “dight” is a middle English word meaning, among other things, “to have intercourse with.” (See Poets of the English Language, Auden and Pearson, Vol. 1, p. 173.) “Dight” was reintroduced by a late twentieth-century philologist who disliked the “sleep with” euphemism, and who saw that the language desperately needed a transitive verb that would be “good usage.”
] to transcend myself. It spoke about in-group love, and i ntergroup harmony, and it said our basic loyalty must be given to Defense, which in the cold-war emergency is the country itself.

“You’re not like that at all, not at all philosophic. I suppose that’s why they’re called huxleys —because they’re philosop hic rob —I beg your pardon.”

“Go ahead and say it,” the huxley encouraged. “I’m not shy. I don’t mind being called a robot.”

“I might have known. I guess that’s why you’re so popular. I never saw a huxley with so many people in its waiting room.”

“I
am
a rather unusual robot,” the huxley said, with a touch of smugness. “I’m a new model, just past the experimental stage, with unusually complicated relays. But that’s beside the point. You haven’t told me yet what’s troubling you.”

The girl fiddled nervously with the control of her hearing aid. After a moment she turned it down; the almost audible sputtering in the huxle y ‘s chest died away.

“It’s about the pigs,” she said.

“The pigs!” The huxley was jarred out of its mechanical calm. “You know, I t hought it would be something about dighting,” it said after a second. It smiled winningly. “It usually is.”

“Well … it’s about that too. But the pigs were what started me worrying. I don’t know whether you’re clear about my rank. I’m Major Sonya Briggs , in charge of the Zone 13 piggery.”