Gentle Invaders

by Hans Stefan Santesson

  Doc said, “Is this the little boy you brought in to the hospital?”

  “Yes,” she said. “But he’s better now.”

  Doc bent over and spoke to the boy. “Well,” he said. “And what’s your name, young man?”

  “Name’s Billy,” he answered, in a grave sweet treble that had a sound in it of bells being rung far off. “Billy Tate.”

  The woman who had come from the washtub said with unconcealed dislike, “He ain’t no Tate, whatever he might be.” She had been introduced as Mrs. Tate, and was obviously the mother and grandmother of this numerous brood. She had lost most of her teeth and her gray-blonde hair stood out around her head in an untidy brush. Doc ignored her.

  “How do you do, Billy Tate,” he said. “And where did you get that pretty red hair?”

  “From his daddy,” said Mrs. Tate sharply, “Same place he got his sneaky-footed ways and them yellow eyes like a bad hound. I tell you, Doctor, if you see a man look just like that child, you tell him to come back and get what belongs to him!”

  A corny but perfectly fitting counterpoint to her words, thunder crashed on Buckhorn’s cloudy crest, like the ominous laughter of a god.

  Sally reached down suddenly and caught up the boy into her arms . . ..

  The thunder quivered and died on the hot air. I stared at Doc and he stared at me, and Sally Tate screamed at her mother. “You keep your dirty mouth off my baby!”

  “That ain’t no way to talk to Maw,” said one of the older girls. “And anyhow, she’s right.”

  “Oh,” said Sally. “You think so, do you?” She turned to Doc, her cheeks all white now and her eyes blazing. “They set their young ones on my baby, Doctor, and you know why? They’re jealous. They’re just sick to their stomachs with it, because they all got big hunkety kids that can’t do nothin’ but eat, and big hunkety men that treat them like they was no better’n brood sows.”

  She had reached her peak of fury so quickly that it was obvious this row had been going on for a long while, probably ever since the child was born.

  Possibly even before, judging by what she said then. “Jealous,” she said to her sisters, showing her teeth. “Every last one of you was dancing up and down to catch his eye, but it was me he took to the hayloft. Me. And if he ever comes back he can have me again, for as often and as long as he wants me. And I won’t hear no ill of him nor the baby!” I heard all this. I understood it. But not with all, or even most of my mind. That was busy with another thing, a thing it didn’t want to grapple with at all and kept shying away from, only to be driven back shivering.

  Doc put it into words.

  “You mean,” he said, to no one in particular, “the baby looks just like his father?”

  “Spit an’ image,” said Sally fondly, kissing the red curls that had that queer glint of silver in them. “Sure would like to see that man again, I don’t care what they say, Doctor, I tell you, he was beautiful.”

  “Handsome is as handsome does,” said Mrs. Tate. “He was no good, and I knew it the minute I saw—”

  “Why, Maw,” said Mr. Tate, “he had you eating out of his hand, with them nicey ways of his.” He turned to Doc Callendar, laughing. “She’d a’ gone off to the hayloft with him herself if he’d asked her, and that’s a fact Ain’t it, Harry?” Harry said it was, and they all laughed.

  Mrs. Tate said furiously, “It’d become you men better to do something about getting some support for that brat from its father, instead of making fool jokes in front of strangers.”

  “Seems like, when you bring it up,” said Mr. Tate, “it would become us ail not to wash our dirty linen for people who aren’t rightly concerned.” He said courteously to Doc, “Reckon you had a reason for coming here. Is there something I can do?”

  “Well—said Doc uncertainly, and looked at the boy. “Just like his father, you say.”

  And if that is so, I thought, how can he be a mutant? A mutant is something new, something different, alien from the parent stem. If he is the spit an’ image outside, then build and coloring bred true. And if build and coloring bred true, probably blood-type and internal organs—

  Thunder boomed again on Buckhorn Mountain. And I thought, Well, and so his father is a mutant, too.

  But Doc said, “Who was this man, Sally? I know just about everybody in these hills, but I never saw anyone to answer that description.”

  “His name was Bill,” she said, “just like the boy’s. His other name was Jones. Or he said it was.”

  “He lied,” said Mrs. Tate. “Wasn’t Jones no more than mine is. We found that out.”

  “How did he happen to come here?” asked Doc. “Where did he say he was from?”

  “He come here,” Mrs. Tate said, “driving a truck for some appliance store, Grover’s I think it was, in Newhale. Said the place was just new and was making a survey of teevees around here, and offering free service on them up to five dollars, just for goodwill. So I let him look at ours, and he fussed with it for almost an hour, and didn’t charge me a cent. Worked real good afterward, too. That would ‘a been the end of it, I guess, only Sally was under his feet all the time and he took a shine to her. Kept coming back, and coming back, and you see what happened.”

  I said, “There isn’t any Grover’s store in Newhale. There never has been.”

  “We found that out,” said Mrs. Tate. “When we knew the baby was coming we tried to find Mr. Jones, but it seems he’d told us a big pack of lies.”

  “He told me,” Sally said dreamily, “where he come from.” Doc said eagerly, “Where?”

  Twisting her mouth to shape the unfamiliar sounds, Sally said, “Hryiliannu,”

  Doc’s eyes opened wide. “Where the hell is that?”

  “Ain’t no place,” said Mrs. Tate. “Even the schoolteacher couldn’t find it in the atlas. It’s only another of his lies.”

  But Sally murmured again, “Hrylliannu. Way he said it, it sounded like the most beautiful place in the world.”

  The storm cloud over Buckhorn was spreading out. Its edges dimmed the sun. lightning flicked and flared and the thunder rolled. I said, “Could I take a look at your television?”

  “Why,” said Mrs. Tate, “I guess so. But don’t you disturb it, now. Whatever else he done, he fixed that teevee good.”

  “I won’t disturb it,” I said. I wait up the sagging steps past the old man and the fat old dog. I went into the cluttered living room, where the springs were coming out of the sofa and there was no rug on the floor, and six kids apparently slept in the old brass bed in the comer. The television set was maybe four years old, but it was the best and biggest made that year. It formed a sort of shrine at one end of the room, with a piece of red cloth laid over its top.

  I took the back off and looked in, I don’t know what I expected to see. It just seemed odd to me that a man would go to all the trouble of faking up a truck and tinkering with television sets for nothing. And apparently he hadn’t What I did see I didn’t understand, but even to my inexpert eye it was obvious that Mr. Jones had done something quite peculiar to the wiring inside.

  A totally unfamiliar component roosted on the side of the case, a little gadget not much bigger than my two thumbnails.

  I replaced the back and turned the set on. As Mrs. Tate said, it worked real good. Better than it had any business to. I got a peculiar hunch that Mr. Jones had planned it that way, so that no other serviceman would have to be called. I got the hunch that that component was important somehow to Mr. Jones.

  I wondered how many other such components he had put in television sets in this area, and what they were for.

  I turned off the set and went outside. Doc was still talking to Sally.

  “. . . some further tests he wants to make,” I heard him say. “I can take you and Billy back right now . . .”

  Sally looked doubtful and was about to speak. But the decision was made for her. The boy cried out wildly, “No! No!” With the frantic strength of a young animal he twisted ou
t of his mother’s arms, dropped to the ground, and sped away into the brush so swiftly that nobody had a chance even to grab for him.

  Sally smiled. “All them shiny machines and the funny smells frightened him,” she said. “He don’t want to go back. Isn’t anything wrong with him, is there? The other doctor said he was all right.”

  “No,” said Doc reluctantly. “Just something about the X-rays he wanted to check on. It could be important for the future. Tell you what, Sally. You talk to the boy, and I’ll come back in a day or two.”

  “Well,” she said, “All right.”

  Doc hesitated, and then said, “Would you want me to speak to the sheriff about finding this man? If that’s his child he should pay something for its support.”

  A wistful look came into her eyes. “I always thought maybe if he knew about the baby—”

  Mrs. Tate didn’t give her time to finish. “Yes, indeed,” she said. “You speak to the sheriff. Time somebody did something about this, ’fore that brat’s a man grown himself.”

  “Well,” said Doc, “we can try.”

  He gave a last baffled glance at the woods where the boy had disappeared, and then we said goodbye and got into the station wagon and drove away. The sky was dark overhead now, and the air was heavy with the smell of rain.

  “What do you think?” I said finally.

  Doc shook his head. “I’m damned if I know. Apparently the external characteristics bred true. If the others did—”

  “Then the father must be a mutant too. We just push it back one generation.”

  “That’s the simplest explanation,” Doc said.

  “Is there any other?”

  Doc didn’t answer that. We passed through Possum Creek, and it began to rain.

  “What about the television set?” he-asked.

  I told him. “But you’d have to have Jud or one of the boys from Newhale Appliance look at it, to say what it was.”

  “It smells,” said Doc. “It stinks, right out loud.”

  The bolt of lightning came so quickly and hit so close that I wasn’t conscious of anything but a great flare of livid green. Doc yelled. The station wagon slewed on the road that now had a thin film of mud over it, and I saw trees rushing at us, their tops bent by a sudden wind so that they seemed to be literally leaping forward. There was no thunder. I remembered that, I don’t know why. The station wagon tipped over and hit the trees. There was a crash. The door flew open and I fell out through a wet whipping tangle of branches and on down to the steep-tilted ground below. I kept on falling, light down the slope, until a gully pocket caught and held me. I lay there dazed, staring up at the station wagon that now hung over my head. I saw Doc’s legs come out of it, out the open door. He was all right. He was letting himself down to the ground. And then the lightning came again.

  It swallowed the station wagon and the trees and Doc in a ball of green fire, and when it went away the trees were scorched and the paint was blistered on the wrecked car, and Doc was rolling over and over down the slope, very slowly, as if he was tired and did not want to hurry. He came to rest not three feet away from me. His hair and his clothes were smoldering, but he wasn’t worrying about it. He wasn’t worrying about anything, any more. And for the second time there had not been any thunder, close at hand where the lightning was.

  The rain came down on Doc in heavy sheets, and put the smoldering fire out.

  Jim Bossert had just come from posting Doc Callendar’s body. For the first time I found myself almost liking him, he looked so sick and beat-out. I pushed the bottle toward him, and he drank out of it and then lighted a cigarette and just sat there shaking.

  “It was lightning,” he said. “No doubt at all.”

  Ed Betts, the sheriff said, “Hank still insists there was something screwy about it.”

  Bossert shook his head at me. “Lightning.”

  “Or a heavy electric charge,” I said. “That comes to the same thing, doesn’t it?”

  “But you saw it hit, Hank.”

  “Twice,” I said. “Twice.”

  We were in Bossert’s office at the hospital. It was late in the afternoon, getting on for supper time. I reached for the bottle again, and Ed said quietly,

  “Lightning does that, you know. In spite of the old saying.”

  “The first time, it missed,” I said. “Just. Second time it didn’t. If I hadn’t been thrown clear I’d be dead too. And there wasn’t any thunder.”

  “You were dazed,” Bossert said. “The first shock stunned you.”

  “It was green,” I said,

  “Fireballs often are.”

  “But not lightning.”

  “Atmospheric freak.” Ed turned to Jim Bossert. “Give him something and send him. home.”

  Bossert nodded and got up, but I said, “No. I’ve got to write up a piece on Doc for tomorrow’s paper. See you.”

  I didn’t want to talk any more. I went out and got my car and drove back to town. I felt funny. Hollow, cold, with a veil over my brain so I couldn’t see anything clearly or think about anything clearly. I stopped at the store and bought another bottle to see me through the night, and a feeling of cold evil was in me, and I thought of green, silent lightning, and little gimcracks that didn’t belong in a television set, and the grave wise face of a child who was not quite human. The face wavered and became the face of a man. A man from Hyrlliannu.

  I drove home, to the old house where nobody Eves now but me. I wrote my story about Doc, and when I was through it was dark and the bottle was nearly empty. I went to bed.

  I dreamed Doc Callendar called me on the phone and said, “I’ve found him but you’ll have to hurry.” And I said, “But you’re dead. Don’t call me, Doc, please don’t.” But the phone kept ringing and ringing, and after a while I woke part way up and it really was ringing. It was two-forty-nine A.m.

  It was Ed Betts. “Fire up at the hospital, Hank. I thought you’d want to know. The south wing. Gotta go now.”

  He hung up and I began to put clothes on the leaden dummy that was me. The south wing, I thought, and sirens went whooping up Goat Hill. The south wing. That’s where X-ray is. That’s where the pictures of the boy’s insides are on file.

  What a curious coincidence, I thought.

  I drove after the sirens up Goat Hill, through the clear cool night with half a moon shining silver on the ridges, and Buckhorn standing calm and serene against the stars, thinking the lofty thoughts that seem to be reserved for mountains.

  The south wing of the hospital burned brightly, a very pretty orange color against the night.

  I pulled off the road and parked well below the center of activity and started to walk the rest of the way. Patients were being evacuated from the main building. People ran with things in their hands. Firemen yelled and wrestled with hoses and streams of water arced over the flames. I didn’t think they were going to save the south wing. I thought they would be doing well to save the hospital.

  Another unit of the fire department came hooting and clanging up the road behind me. I stepped off the shoulder and as I did so I looked down to be sure of my footing. A flicker of movement on the slope about ten feet below caught my eye. Dimly, in the reflected glow of the fire, I saw the girl.

  She was slim and light as a gazelle, treading her furtive way among the trees. Her hair was short and curled close to her head. In that light it was merely dark, but I knew it would be red in the sunshine, with glints of silver in it. She saw me or heard me, and she stopped for a second or two, startled, looking up. Her eyes shone like two coppery sparks, as the eyes of an animal shine, weird in the pale oval of her face. Then she turned and ran.

  I went after her. She ran fast, and I was in lousy shape. But I was thinking about Doc.

  I caught her.

  It was dark all around us under the trees, but the firelight and the moonlight shone together into the clearing where we were: She didn’t struggle or fight me. She turned around kind of light and stiff to face me
, holding herself away from me as much as she could with my hands gripping her arms.

  “What do you want with me?” she said, in a breathless little voice. It was accented, and sweet as a bird’s. “Let me go.”

  I said, “What relation are you to the boy?”

  That startled her. I saw her eyes widen, and then she turned her head and looked toward the darkness under the trees. “Please let me go,” she said, and I thought that some new fear had come to her.

  I shook her, feeling her small arms under my hands, wanting to break them, wanting to torture her because of Doc. “How was Doc killed?” I asked her. “Tell me. Who did it, and how?”

  She stared at me. “Doc?” she repeated. “I do not understand.” Now she began to struggle. “Let me go! You hurt me.”

  “The green lightning,” I said. “A man was killed by it this morning. My friend. I want to know about it.”

  “Killed?” she whispered. “Oh, no. No one has been killed,”

  “And you set that fire in the hospital, didn’t you? Why? Why were those films such a threat to you? Who are you? Where—”

  “Hush,” she said. “Listen.”

  I listened. There were sounds, soft and stealthy, moving up the slope toward us.

  “They’re looking for me,” she whispered. “Please let me go. I don’t know about your friend, and the fire was—necessary. I don’t want anyone hurt, and if they find you like this—”

  I dragged her back into the shadows underneath the trees. There was a huge old maple there with a gnarly trunk. We stood behind it, and now I had my arm around her waist and her head pressed back against my shoulder, and my right hand over her mouth.

  “Where do you come from?” I asked her, with my mouth close to her ear. “Where is Hrylliannu?”

  Her body stiffened. It was a nice body, very much like the boy’s in some ways, delicately made but strong, and with superb coordination. In other ways it was not like the boy’s at all. I was thinking of her as an enemy, but it was impossible not to think of her as a woman, too.