It's Alive!

by Richard Woodley

  Long enough for Charley to see him disappearing into the shadows to the rear of the house.

  He careened his station wagon against the curb and tugged on the inside door handle. It wouldn’t move. He yanked on it. It broke off in his hand. He banged on the door with his shoulder. “Chris!” he hollered, the word resounding in his car.

  Chris felt along the outside basement wall for the flowerpot, lifted it, scooped up the key, and probed for the hole in the padlock. He found it, turned the key in it to pop it open, and flipped the lock away. He pulled hard on the big door, lifting it slowly on its hinge. Slithering inside, he let the door close quietly down against his back.

  He shivered in the dank cellar, standing on the stone steps for a moment to get his breath. Then he went down the steps and started across the cellar floor toward the sliver of light glowing under the kitchen door at the top of the stairs on the opposite side.

  He groped along the familiar passage between the storage stacks, recognizing by touch his sled, his old stroller, the tall pile of old Life magazines, the fishing poles, the boxes of Salvation Army clothes.

  He stopped.

  Eyes. Large eyes looking at him. Across the cellar.

  “Dad? Mom? Who is it?”

  He was afraid, in a way. But not afraid. Something in the eyes made him not afraid. “Who is it? Biscuit?” They were not cat’s eyes. Large, round, like his own. “Who is it?”

  He worked his way slowly toward the eyes, and heard a low whimpering. “It’s okay. I won’t hurt you.” The whimpering became a steadier cry, still low. “It’s okay.” He moved closer. It cried and sniffled.

  Just a few feet away.

  He peered through the darkness. His eyes were growing accustomed to it, his pupils widening like those in the eyes he was looking at. “It’s okay.”

  He could see it now, dimly. He was not afraid. Not at all. Nothing like he had ever seen before. Or even dreamed. But it was a baby, and it didn’t scare him.

  He reached out his hand. The crying stopped. It blinked. Slowly it too raised its hand—its strange, clawed hand—and reached out.

  Charley hurled himself against the car door, feeling the tendons tear across his shoulder. The door broke open.

  Charley tumbled out, holding his shoulder, and ran for the rear of the house. “Chris—”

  Frank backed away from Lenore. His voice quaked. “It’s been here. You’ve seen it. You’ve been helping it . . .”

  They stared wildly at each other.

  “. . . It’s still here, down there. Isn’t it? Yes. God, yes!”

  He broke for the den, fumbling in his pocket for his keys, ripping them out, tearing his pocket and scattering coins over the floor.

  He opened the drawer of the desk and grabbed the .38 and a box of shells.

  Lenore ran in behind him, reaching for him, clawing at his back, slashing his shirt. “No! You can’t! You can’t do it! It’s our baby, Frank!”

  He swung his elbow, slamming her against the wall.

  He tried to push the shells into the chamber. They fell out of the box and rolled on the floor. He managed to load one, two. Enough. He swatted home the cylinder and dashed through the living room and kitchen to the cellar door.

  Lenore was right behind him, diving at his hands, tearing them away from the hook. “You can’t! You can’t!” She scratched his face and he staggered back. She barred the door with her arms. “HE—COULD—HAVE—KILLED—YOU!” Her voice came in wet, fast gasps. “Yes, it’s true. Before, when you were sleeping, he could have killed you. You know it. But he doesn’t want to kill you. He doesn’t want to hurt you. You’re his father—”

  He lunged for her, but she slid under his hand, down the door, collapsing on the floor, shivering with sobs.

  He sucked for breath, staring at her, fingering the .38.

  Charley reached the outside basement door and heaved it open with his one good arm. “Chris?”

  He leaned his head down inside the door. “Chris? You down there?”

  He heard a soft voice: “. . . Don’t be afraid. Nobody will hurt you. My name is Chris . . .”

  “Who’s down there with you, Chris? Frank? Everything okay?”

  “. . . Don’t be afraid . . .”

  The door from the kitchen exploded open, spraying a stream of light.

  Chris wheeled toward his father. “Don’t—”

  “Dive, Chris!” Frank hurtled down the stairs, waving his gun in front of him.

  “Dad, don’t—”

  The thing yowled and leaped from its perch into the shadows.

  Frank knocked Chris aside and fired.

  The thing screamed and bounded for the outside cellar door.

  Frank fired again.

  Charley stood silhouetted in the moonlight when the shape hit him. He staggered backward, tearing at it with his hands as it wrapped around his throat. Then he sagged slowly to the ground. The thing slithered away across the grass.

  Frank charged up the stone stairs. Charley was lying still on the grass.

  Light hit Frank in the face. Two policemen ran up, guns drawn.

  “I hit it,” Frank said, “I’m sure I hit it at least once.”

  One of the policemen rolled Charley over, shining his light at the gaping gashes in the throat.

  The other policeman ran around the edge of the backyard, flashing his light into the bushes.

  Police cars screeched to a halt in front of the house.

  “You didn’t have to shoot him, Dad.” Chris stood behind his kneeling father. His voice was calm. “He wasn’t going to hurt anybody.”

  Frank’s body shook with weeping. He bent over his friend. “Look what . . . he did to Charley. Look . . .”

  The policeman helped Frank to his feet.

  Detective Perkins and several other officers sprinted around the corner of the house.

  “We got one dead, lieutenant—there. Name is Charley something.”

  “Evans,” Frank’s voice was barely audible, “his name is Charley Evans.”

  “Davis shoot him?” Detective Perkins snatched Frank’s gun hand, then eased the pistol out of it.

  “No sir. Throat’s been ripped open. Guess it was that thing.”

  “I hit it, at least once. I shot. I hit it.”

  Police officers immediately fanned out in a search. Other sirens wailed their approach.

  “You see it, Mr. Davis?” Perkins asked.

  “Just . . . a blur.”

  “This your boy here?”

  “My name is Chris.”

  “You see it, Chris?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’d it look like?”

  Chris shrugged. “Nobody. Me. Mom. Dad.” Suddenly he turned and ran to the back door, where his mother stood holding herself tightly with her arms. “Mom—Mom—”

  He threw himself against her. They held each other. “He killed Charley, Mom. He killed poor Charley. He—didn’t mean to.” Chris wept and they rocked together.

  “He killed others too, Chris. He was afraid. He only wants to live. I’m glad you’re home, Chris . . .” She took the boy inside and closed the door.

  Detective Perkins examined Frank’s .38. “You shouldn’t have tried to do this yourself, Davis. Lucky you didn’t plug your son.”

  “I did, I—”

  Perkins peered at him.

  “I mean, I hit the thing.”

  Perkins turned to the first two officers. “How’d you guys miss all this?”

  “We were cruising, sir, just like we were supposed to. We were by this house at least once every minute. And the foot patrol was on station too. Musta just happened in a few seconds. We never saw that thing go in. I figure it musta been in there for a good while.”

  “You bastards were responsible,” he said softly.

  “Yes sir. It’s just that, we did what you said, you know, short of going right in the house. And you told us not to do that. And we haven’t had any sleep in two days . . .”

&n
bsp; “Okay.” Perkins chewed his cigar. “Get on the search, goddam it!”

  “Lieutenant! Lieutenant!”

  Perkins trotted over to the bushes.

  “Look here, lieutenant. Blood. Quite a bit. He hit it, all right.”

  “Here too, lieutenant, over here on this fence. Thing musta climbed over. Losing a lot of blood.”

  The men traced the trail of blood beyond the bushes and fence into the next yard.

  “Here, Lieutenant Perkins.” Captain Sanford stood in the gutter and stared down a storm drain. The trail of blood led across the sidewalk to the gutter and over to the drain. The trail stopped there; the blood trickled down through the grate. “I think we got the damn thing now. It’s down there.”

  “Okay, seal off the drains!” Detective Perkins barked fast signals to his men. “Men posted at every opening around here! We’ll take the cars to the other end of the feeder! Six men cover this house, four outside and two in! Get Mrs. Davis and the kid outta there, take ’em to the station!”

  He started for his car. Frank grabbed his arm. “I’m coming.”

  “No you ain’t.”

  Frank pushed in front of him. “I have to, lieutenant! I have to be along!”

  “You’ve done enough already. Wounded it. That’s plenty. Enough for you.”

  “No. Not yet!”

  Detective Perkins gazed at him, his eyes narrowed. He worked his cigar over to the corner of his mouth. “You may have finished it off already.”

  “Maybe not. I’ve gotta come! I’ve gotta be there when you find it.”

  Detective Perkins looked off into the distance, then back at Frank. “So you gotta do it yourself.”

  “It’s mine. My problem. Try to understand. Be more than a cop. Understand what I’m saying. You may need me. Try to understand . . .”

  “I understand, Mr. Davis. It may not always look like it, but that’s my job. Between us, I figured all along that this thing might be heading here—might be trying to get to its mother, in fact. In a way I was using you. But I thought we’d spot it first, was sure of it. Otherwise I never would have tried it. We blew it, that’s all. So you ended up having to take some potshots. Now, I know what you’re saying. But I don’t even hear it. I never heard it. You just get in my car, on your own. Don’t ask questions, don’t answer none.”

  “Thanks, lieutenant.” Frank closed his eyes. “I thank you for—”

  “Shut up. And here, take this.” He handed Frank back his .38. “It’s yours. Put it away. Don’t use it. We’ll get this thing. No sense in us both being out of a job.”

  Professor Eckstein stared down at the report Dr. Norten had written, several pages, single-spaced, its front cover marked, “Absolutely Secret and Confidential: Nobody Open.”

  “It’s all there, professor.” Dr. Norten beamed.

  Eckstein scanned the pages, flipping them over one after the other. “I see . . .”

  “Yes! I processed the final lab reports on Mrs. Davis myself. Even she doesn’t know.”

  “And it’s just like I—we had theorized.”

  “To the penny!”

  “This is terribly important, doctor—ominous. I suppose now we should release it to—”

  “No no NO!” Norten grabbed the document and hugged it to his chest. “That is, not yet. We must, of course, await the final autopsy reports on the thing itself.”

  “But meanwhile shouldn’t we alert—”

  “We can’t breathe a word, professor. Just a little longer. If we released this now—you know how the scientific community is, they’d just scoff at us for an incomplete study. Call us amateurs. Scaremongers. They wouldn’t believe us. Listen to me: we do this right, it’s the Nobel Prize for us. You hear that? The Nobel! Rich! Famous!”

  “I’m not so sure I care about being—”

  “And above all, professional!” Dr. Norten said, jabbing an index finger in the air. “Professionalism is good timing. We’ll be professional by sitting on this for a while, until the world is ready for it.”

  Buck Clayton stared out over the lights of Beverly Hills. It had been a very bad day.

  Today old man Marcus canceled the account.

  Not for the reason that his toy business had turned sour overnight—which it had. Nobody would touch a Marcus toy. It was those pictures that did that. Goddam pictures on KBOP-TV. Taken right in the school. Pictures of the toys that vampire kid had been messing with. Identified as Marcus toys.

  How in hell’d the TV people find out about that? How in hell’d they get in there to photograph them? Those pictures knocked the bottom right out of the Marcus toy business.

  But that wasn’t why old man Marcus pulled out.

  He pulled out, he said, because Frank Davis was no longer on the account. If Davis had been around to manage things, the old man said, those pictures never would have happened. So Buck Clayton stared out the huge window at the lights and wondered what he’d done to get himself in such a pickle.

  There were a million Frank Davises.

  Why in hell’d his Frank Davis have to go and father a freak kid?

  They stood on the spillway outside the end of an enormous pipe, one of those that form the vast subterranean storm-drain tunnel system that underlies Los Angeles. A police car sat with its nose in the pipe, and still there was room for men to pass in on either side. After a heavy rain, a torrent of water would flush out of this pipe and flood the spillway. Tonight it was nearly dry.

  The portable floodlights arrayed by police caused Frank to squint as he approached the tunnel entrance with Detective Perkins.

  Frank peered into the blackness within the tunnel of huge pipe.

  “No guarantee we’ll find it in there quick,” said Perkins. “We got men coming in from other directions. But the drains branch off every which way. It won’t get out. But it may take us a while. We ain’t gonna be comfortable in there. Sure you want to come along?”

  Frank nodded.

  “All right. Now, we’ll take a car in there a ways, far as it can go, so we’ll have lights from that for a while. Then all we got’s our flashlights. Don’t get lost.”

  Frank shook his head.

  “Let’s go.”

  The band of hunters dressed in blue police uniforms marched into the tunnel, followed by the car, which spread its light beams over them and beyond.

  The floodlit entrance quickly vanished as they moved around a bend. It was cold and dank. Water gurgled over their shoes. Sounds of their walking and breathing echoed along the pipe.

  Another group of men appeared, coming toward them from a branch tunnel to the left. “Clear, lieutenant, all the way out this one.”

  The band took the branch to the right, leaving the patrol car and its lights behind. Their flashlights flickered off the water and the dark stone walls.

  More branches. Detective Perkins split the men into smaller squads and sent them off into each new branch they passed. The sounds of their splashing through the water, their giving and answering commands, their grunting, wheezing, coughing, and panting bounced off the damp stone and echoed down the tunnels. It was impossible to tell where each sound was coming from.

  They had been in the tunnel for more than an hour, Frank guessed. They had doubled back through countless branches, meeting men emerging from some, sending other men off in new ones. Detective Perkins seemed to know just where they were. To Frank it was a total mystery. He had no sense of direction at all. For all he knew, they could be under Pasadena by now.

  He began to lag behind. He stopped and sagged against the wall, watching the others go on, their lights waving around ahead of them.

  The past days of exhaustion gripped him, weighted him down. He could barely keep his eyes open. And he was cold. Chilled beyond all recollection of warmth. He pulled his jacket tight across his chest and buried his chin in the collar.

  His light was dimming, and he snapped it off to save the batteries.

  He slumped against the wall in the dark, the unre
asonable cold numbing him. Nothing seemed important except to get warm and to sleep. He closed his eyes, but that didn’t help. When he opened them, it was as if he could suddenly see what he only heard.

  Silence.

  The police were gone. He was alone in the tunnel.

  He turned on his flashlight and moved forward, along the route where he had seen the police advancing. His feet were numb, down in the rivulet of water.

  He should call out. But the notion of that sound erupting in echoes around him chilled him more.

  He slogged along staring ahead into the gloom beyond the dimming beam of his flashlight. Passing black holes that would be entrances to other branches of the maze, he stayed in the main channel. Eventually he would find the police officers, if he kept on in this direction. But he didn’t. He gazed blankly at the entrance to yet another pipe and decided to go in that way for a while.

  He hadn’t gone far when he heard the sound. A low, weak, human moan.

  Where?

  The sound seemed to come from everywhere. Each way he turned, the frail sound bounced off the stone. But since he hadn’t heard it before, it must be ahead.

  He stuck his hand into his jacket pocket and felt the icy metal of his .38. He took it out. He should have it ready.

  He stepped up the pace on his aching legs, his revolver clacking against the stone wall as he steadied himself with that hand and held his light with the other. The sound was a bit louder now, a moan of sickness or sadness or pain. A pleading baby’s haunting whine.

  “Must not be in here, lieutenant. I think we been everywhere.”

  “It’s here. Where’s Davis?”

  “Davis? He was right behind us.”

  “Well, he ain’t now. Find a manhole, go topside, use your radio, find out if Davis surfaced anywhere.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Okay, all you men. Let’s double back. Davis is probably back there somewhere.”

  The men turned and began retracing the tunnel.

  “You think he went out, lieutenant?” a patrolman asked.

  “Nope.”

  “He shoulda stuck with us. He don’t know his way around in here.”