Strange Seed (15 page)

He cursed himself again and took a few halting steps forward.

Lumas’s red flannel shirt had been shredded viciously; only the arms remained more or less intact.
 
His faded brown pants had been torn in half down the crotch and down the back; the two halves lay crumpled at the foot of the bed.
 
There were smatterings of blood on the remains of the shirt, but nowhere else, except randomly on the floor around the bed.
 
It was apparent that, mercifully, Lumas had been attacked long after he’d died.
 
If not, the room would have been awash with his blood.

Several emotions swept over Paul—confusion: what animal would, or could, go to the trouble of removing Lumas’s clothes before making a meal of him?
 
Fear: not because of the scene itself—it was frightening only by extension—but because he knew that whatever had attacked Lumas was probably still lurking somewhere in the forest.
 
Grief, though muted by the circumstances of Lumas’s death.
 
Despite his apparently senseless attack on the child—made only a little less senseless by what Rachel had done; that apparent and silent conspiracy spoke only softly of sense or reason and shouted of hysteria—Lumas had been a good, kind and sensitive man, in many respects much like Paul’s father.
 
And when such a man dies, there’s good reason for grief.

Paul buried his face in his hands and closed his eyes tightly, as if to strengthen the grief he felt.
 
A tear moistened his fingers, then another.
 
And he realized that the tears were not for Lumas—they were for him self, and for Rachel.
 
They were tears of confusion, and of the agony that life here had become.
 
Tears that now flowed freely through his fingers, down the back of his hands, and onto the crude, dark floor.
 
“Hank,” he murmured.
 
“Hank, goddamn you!”
 
It was a curse of necessity.
 
Something had to be cursed.

He let his hands fall.
 
For a second, he flirted with the idea of burning the cabin to the ground, as if that would erase all that had happened in the few months—erase it or cleanse it.
 
But it was a foolish thought and he knew it.

He turned and looked up at the cabin’s severely peaked ceiling.
 
Were those small sounds the sounds of rain?
 
But that was impossible.
 
All morning the sky had been pale, quiet and cloudless.
 
Too beautiful a day to perform the grim task he’d come here to perform.

*****

Rachel put her hand against the wall to steady herself on the stairway.
 
“Paul?” she whispered.
 
“Is that you?”

Silence.

“Paul, if you’re down there, please answer me.”

The closed door at the bottom of the stairway rattled a little on its hinges.

“Paul, please!”
 

A voice from the other side of the door said, “Paul?”

She stopped moving down the stairs.
 
The voice, she realized, had been
her
voice—made slightly hollow, a bit off-key, by the closed door.
 
“Paul?” it repeated, and added, “Is that you?”

The long sliver of dull light along the bottom of the door was cut at the left and right by shadow.

“Paul?” Rachel pleaded aloud, “don’t play games with me!”
 
But Paul didn’t play such games, did he?
 
He
couldn’t
play such games.
 
He was too somber, too humorless.
 

“Paul?” she said and, on tiptoes, descended the last few steps and put her ear to the door, her hand lightly on the cold doorknob.
 
“Paul, please answer me,” she said.
 
She tightened her grip on the knob.
 
Turned it.
 
Hesitated.
 
“Paul?” she said.

“Paul, don’t.
 
Please answer me, Paul.”

An echo
, she told herself.
 
Only an echo.

“Don’t,” repeated the voice on the other side of the door.
 
“Please answer me, Paul.”
 
And added, “Paul?”

Rachel pushed on the door.
 
It didn’t respond.
 
“Oh, my God!” she whispered, and pushed harder, though in vain.
 
“Oh, please,” she wept, relaxing her grip on the knob and lowering herself to a knees-up, head forward sitting position on the stairs, “whoever you are, please, please go away!”

“Please go.
 
Oh my God!” said the voice at the other side of the door.

*****

It couldn’t be rain, Paul realized, and yet, of course, it had to be rain.
 
Some changes happened quickly here—the weather especially.
 
It was a very light rain; it sounded like mice running about on the roof.
 
And, as well, sunlight still illuminated Lumas’s bed, Lumas’s shirt and pants—what was left of them.
 
And what was left of them, Paul thought, was—along with the small, grimy cabin—probably all that was left of Lumas, the man.
 
Paul sighed.
 
Perhaps Lumas had been able to drag himself off, into the forest.
 
He was very strong; perhaps he’d been able to defend himself, had driven the animal away and then, in panic, had fled the cabin.
 
It was possible.
 
Another sigh.
 
Lumas was simply not the type to panic.
 
And the evidence of his shredded, barely bloodstained clothes was damning evidence indeed.

Paul went quickly to the bed, hesitated a moment, scooped up the shredded shirt and pants, turned and started for the door.
 
He stopped, his gaze on the shotgun standing up in the southeast corner of the room.
 
Lumas, he remembered, had once shown him the weapon, had, in fact, waxed enthusiastic about it.
 
“I don’t use it,” he’d said.
 
“Never needed to.
 
Probably never would.
 
But it sure is one hell of a fine gun, don’t you think?”
 
Paul only smiled and nodded.
 
Now, darkly aware that what had happened to Lumas could easily happen to him, and cursing himself for not having had the sense to have brought his own rifle, he took the shotgun from its place against the wall, studied it briefly, dispassionately—as if it had become some necessary but uninteresting extension of his arm—and made for the door.

He stopped once more.
 
The rain was letting up, he realized.

*****

The sliver of light along the bottom of the door had suddenly become whole again.

“Paul?” Rachel said.
 
Dimly, she was aware of how useless it was to call to him.
 
It wasn’t Paul at the other side of the door.
 
He was still at Lumas’s cabin, or had begun the grim process of burying him.
 
Even so, the possibility for communication existed.
 
It always existed.

“Paul?” she repeated.

From somewhere in the living room, but not from in front of the door, she heard Paul’s voice.
 
“I love you, darling,” it said.

Then her own voice, but not her voice:
 
“Oh, Paul,” it said.
 
“Oh, Paul!”

She screamed—it was shrill, abrupt, piercing.
 
She pressed her hands firmly to her ears and heard, through her hands, the scream repeated.

“My God, Paul,” she wept, “we have to leave this place.”
 
And for one beautiful, impossible moment she was back in her small and stifling Manhattan apartment, and she could hear her neighbors through the walls; they were a middle-age couple and they always argued.
 
She could make out none of the words but she knew it was a horrible argument. They hated one another, loved one another, were inseparable.

Outside, a wailing ambulance was on its way to somebody’s misfortune.

It was early June.
 
Paul Griffin had, the previous evening, asked her to marry him:
 
“I want you to be my wife, Rachel.
 
Will you be my wife?” he’d said, and it was obvious that he felt foolish asking her that way.

“I’d like that,” she’d answered, smiling gratefully, despite herself.

And now, listening to the drone of her middle-age neighbors, she laughed.
 

The moment ended.

She became aware of a presence at the top of the stairs.
  
She turned her head, looked.
 
It was the boy.

“What…what…” she stammered.

The boy laughed—that mature, infectious laugh so terribly unlike the laugh of a child, so terribly unlike what the laugh of a child could possibly be.

And Rachel laugh again—coldly, hysterically—and heard that whatever was at the other side of the door was laughing with her.

Paul knew it and tried hard to cope with it.
 
But coping was impossible.
 
It’s possible, he thought, to cope only with what is familiar and recognizable.
 
Coping with something that didn’t show itself, that remained hellishly anonymous, isn’t possible.
 
You don’t cope with ghosts, you experience them.

He knew there was no wolf.
 
The last wolf had been killed nearly a century ago, as he’d told Rachel.
 
Wolves left tracks.
 
He had seen none.
 
Wolves howled from time to time, but the only sounds here were the sounds one expected—sounds that were at least vaguely identifiable.
 
Wolves, as well, had their own way of killing, and though it was terribly effective, it was also messy.
 
Messier than had been evidenced by the poor, ravaged animals he’d found.

There was no wolf.
 
There was something else.

Suddenly, he remembered his final conversation with Lumas—more a monologue than a conversation, really, and one Lumas clearly felt
had
to be delivered before death claimed him.
 
A kind of bizarre last will and testament.

“The land…” he’d stammered.
 
“The land…” he’d repeated, obviously reaching deep within himself for the correct words.
 
“The land, Paul…the land creates.”

Everything he’d said had revolved around that statement.
 
But none of what he’d said had been any less vague.
 
Obviously, Paul thought, he had been employing his own opaque brand of subtlety.
 
His reference to Rachel’s “gifts” had been especially opaque.
 
If she possessed any gift, it was the questionable gift of an acute sensitivity couple, damnedly, with a remarkable imagination.
 
Evidence the voices she claimed to have heard from behind the closed door two weeks earlier, and the occasional and barely audible laughter she claimed to hear on random evenings.
 
Laughter that seemed to originate, she said, from somewhere within the forest, laughter Paul hadn’t heard, though his hearing, he’d reminded her, was excellent.

And so his deception, or half-truth, that the was going out each day in search of “the wolf.”
 
A deception for her sake.
 
She could picture a wolf; she could mentally hold onto it.
 
As he could.
 
But the ghosts that actually inhabited the land were something else entirely.
 
No, he thought, they were—as far as his knowledge of them was concerned—even less substantial than ghost.
 
They were a vacuum.
 
Something impossible for him to hold onto.
 
And if Rachel tried to deal with it, it would tear her apart from the inside.

And so his deception, for Rachel’s sake—wonderful, sensitive, vulnerable Rachel—would continue until he’d found whatever he was looking for.
 
Or until it found him.

These thoughts preoccupied him for more than half the distance down the path to the forest.
 
He stopped short, the rifle came to rest at a horizontal position in his hand.
 
He glanced critically at it.
 
He’d had little experience with rifles.
 
He knew only that their primary function was to kill, and that made them obscene.
 
He knew also that obscenity was necessary, on occasion.
 
What had been done to Lumas, for instance, was an obscenity.
 
Not the instinctive actions of an animal satisfying its hunger.
 
An obscenity.
 
It required the obscenity of a rifle bullet to answer it.

He glanced behind, up the path that led to the house, certain his preoccupation with Rachel and Lumas had caused him to overlook something.
 
But the path was empty—the brightly sunlit trees and bushes to either side were curiously motionless.