Foundations of Fear

by David G. Hartwell

  But then again I’d already seen it do that half-flying thing where it came partway up out of the water when it attacked the other ducks so for all I knew it could fly all the way. And I didn’t really know how it dragged the ducks and swans under or what it did to them there. Perhaps it had big knives hidden in its wings or hooks, or maybe even it had some sort of built-in spear gun it used to harpoon them from the bottom so it could reel them down and then cut them up into little pieces there in the mud.

  But the real thing that was wrong with trying to catch it at night in the dark was that I wouldn’t be able to see it unless I used a light, so I wouldn’t know what it was doing, and if I did use a light that might wake it up, and anyway, somebody might see the light and come to find out what I was doing. So I finally decided that what I had to do was try to pull it out some real bright morning when it was near to shore, just after the sun came up but before it was ready to come up to the surface on its own. That way, maybe it would still be only half turned-on again, and even if it was all the way awake, maybe it would just try to swim back out to the middle and start sunbathing a little early.

  I bought some plastic rope, the kind you use to tie things on cars and trailers, and a heavy khaki sack from the Army-Navy surplus store to keep the duck dark in while I got it away from the lake and into the ten-gallon can. I’d cleaned the can out a long time ago, right after I got it from the station, and it had a lid on it, so I could shut the duck tight inside it where none of the light could get in to turn it on when I took it home.

  I waited until one night when I saw it was down in the mud close enough to shore on my side of the lake, then hid the can in somebody’s hedge about half a block up from the lake. I had about an inch of water in the can in case the duck needed it.

  I went down to the lake a long time before the sun came up and waited for the sky to get pink and for things to get bright enough so I could see. Not very many cars drove by and nobody in any of them paid any attention to me, except for one police car but I had all my stuff hidden and they were both friends of my father’s and already knew me, so it was all right. I told them I liked to come out and run around the lake and get some exercise and one of them said my father used to be just like me, which made me feel bad for a while even after they left.

  The sun came up while I was talking to them and it was already pretty bright by the time they left so I got my stuff out and put all the bamboo sections of the fishing pole together and went after the duck.

  It wasn’t all that hard to get the noose around the lily pads and pull them in to shore but when I got them I saw that they just seemed to stretch all the way back to the part of the bottom they’d been floating over. I waited a moment before I touched the lily pads and the stems, then tried it. They seemed to be made of some sort of tough plastic, so I got all the stems together in my hands and started pulling on them. At first they were real easy to pull in, like that kind of clothesline that goes on a spring-reel and that you can stretch out a long way, but after a while I felt them grab, like when you’re fishing and you finally reel in enough line to feel a big fish or a snag on it. I pulled and I could feel the duck on the other end. It was heavy and didn’t want to come when I yanked but it didn’t seem to be snagged and it wasn’t fighting me like a fish or anything and when I quit pulling it just stayed where it was, so I knew it wasn’t trying to get away or come after me. I tried pulling on the stems again and the same thing happened, so I kept pulling it in a little at a time, ready to let go and run if the duck started moving on its own.

  A candy-red Porsche came by, going a lot faster than it was supposed to. I just stood still, pretending that all I was doing was looking out at the water. The Porsche went by without stopping but now I could see another car over on the other side of the lake and somebody on his bicycle going up the back way to the college, so I knew that everybody was starting to get up and go to work and I had to start dragging the duck in a lot faster, without stopping every few seconds to check it like I’d been doing.

  Pretty soon I could see it and it wasn’t a duck at all, it was more like a big piece of dead wood, a branch about three feet long and maybe a couple of inches thick, with four or five broken-off little branches sticking out of it. At first I thought it was just something I’d snagged and that when I got it in to shore I’d have to get the lily pad stems from wrapped around it but then I saw that each stem came out of the end of a different one of the broken-off branches.

  As soon as I had the branch up out of the water and into the light it started to change. The ends started slowly humping in to the middle and the middle started to bulge out, but everything was happening real, real slow, like a slug creeping up the porch steps after it rains. I quick threw the sack over it to shut out the light but I could see it was still changing underneath until I got the lily pads in under the sack and out of the light too, and then it moved slower and slower until it stopped.

  There wasn’t anyone else around and the thing was still too long to get into the can, so I pulled the sack off it again. It started squeezing itself in some more and humping out all around the middle, still moving real slow, while I got the sack open and ready to throw over it again, but this time so I could push it inside the sack with the pole. I waited until it wasn’t much bigger than a real duck, though it didn’t look like a duck any more than it looked like a branch now, just a big lump of mud. I put the sack over it open and reached in underneath with the pole and wedged the pole under it so I could tip it back and make it fall into the sack, then pushed it back more and more until it was all the way inside the sack and I could tie the sack closed. I picked up the sack, making sure it didn’t get too close to my body. The duck was just a big round lump in the sack and it didn’t move at all. It wasn’t too heavy either, maybe about twenty pounds, but that was still heavy enough to make it a lot of work to get it up to the place where I had the can hid.

  I got the can out of the hedge and put the bag in it, but even though it wasn’t too big around to go in it was too long for me to put the top on it, just a little, maybe a couple of inches, but it was too late to try to open the sack and let in enough light to make the thing change some more, so I just left the lid there and carried the can the rest of the way home and put it in the toolshed behind the garage, under a bench, before I went back for the lid. Mother never used the toolshed, it was something Father’d built for himself back before they had me but sometimes the mess sergeant would make something out of wood for us back there, or work on something that needed fixing. He wasn’t really a bad man, even though I hated him. So even though there were a lot of cobwebs and spiders there and it was real dusty and full of other junk the lights still worked and the shed was in good enough shape to keep the rain and the sunlight out. It didn’t have any windows. If you went inside and closed the door before you turned the lights on nobody could see that they were turned on from the house.

  When I went back to get the lid I decided to check back at the lake to see if I’d left anything there, but I hadn’t, so I went back to the shed and put the lid by the can under the bench, then moved a broken black-and-white TV that was sitting in the far corner over in front of the can so that nobody could see the can unless they took the TV out from in front of it and so that even when the door was open the light from inside wouldn’t touch the can. I’d been thinking about what I had to do for a long time and I had it all figured out, or most of it, anyway.

  I even knew whose duck it was. James Patrick Dubic, the one I’d helped mother arrest and put away in prison. There couldn’t be two people that hated ducks that much, and in some of the clippings Mother’d saved for me they talked about how smart he was and how good he was with computers. I’d figured it out for sure that time I’d seen “The Invisible Boy” on TV because I’d already figured out that the duck had to be a robot or something just pretending to look like a duck the way it was pretending to look like a lump of mud right now. I got out my clippings just after I saw the movie so I coul
d be sure what James Patrick Dubic looked like and after that I’d been watching all the people sitting on the benches and walking around the lake, but he wasn’t ever there, at least not unless he’d changed an awful lot.

  I locked the shed and left the duck there in its can until Saturday night. That way if it had solar batteries maybe they’d run down enough so that even if it wanted to hurt me it wouldn’t be able to. Also, if it tried to escape I wouldn’t be there when it tried and so it couldn’t hurt me.

  Saturday night Mother had to work. I asked her before she left for the station what’d happened to Dubic, if he was still in prison or if they’d let him out or put him in a mental hospital or anything. She said she didn’t know but she’d ask and try to find out for me if I wanted. I said yes. It was still early when she drove away, about six-thirty, so it wasn’t nearly dark yet.

  We’d all had dinner together and Mother’d wheeled Father into the living room to watch the movies on the cable TV chain so I didn’t have anything to do except watch them with Father until it got dark enough.

  Around nine I went back to the shed. I had a flashlight, so when I unlocked the door and pushed it open I shone the light in through it before I went in to turn the real light on, but the duck was still in its can behind the TV set. I closed the door again and dragged the can out. It was heavier than I’d remembered, maybe twenty-five or thirty-five pounds. I pulled the bag out of the can and put it down, then got between it and the door and opened the door so I could run out of it and get away from the duck if it came after me. Then I turned the lights off and used the flashlight to see by when I dumped the duck out of the sack.

  It was still just a big lump, though some of the mud was dry and falling off. It smelled like mud and like sewers. I poked at it with the wooden end of a hoe and it didn’t do anything even when I poked it again harder, so I turned on the lights. I was right there by the door with my hand on the light switch waiting for it to do something but it didn’t do anything, even when I poked it with the hoe again. I watched it for three or four hours but it never did anything. I was afraid I’d broken it somehow but if I hadn’t maybe I’d be able to handle it safely at night with the lights on, which was good. I put the sack back over it and tipped it back into the sack with the hoe handle, then pushed the sack back under the bench behind the TV.

  Mother was home all day the next day and she and Father had some of his old friends from back when he was on the Marina police force, back before they’d combined it with the fire department there, over for a barbecue. They made hamburgers and spareribs in the black metal cooker in the backyard, then sat around drinking beer out of cans and talking about what things’d been like before Father’s accident and how good a cop he’d been. I couldn’t get back into the toolshed with them there. Father and Mother seemed to be having a pretty good time, like they liked each other again. Mother had Father’s shirt off so he could get a bit of a tan and one of the other men had his shirt off too. After a while I got really bored and uncomfortable so I went up to Beth’s house. I hadn’t seen her for a long time, not like I usually did, so I put my swimming suit on under my clothes and rode my bike up to her house but her brother had all his friends over to use the pool and her cousin was there too so she couldn’t go away with me even though she didn’t like any of them any more than I did. I went down to Thirty-one Flavors and got myself a double cone and a banana split before I went down to the wharf. I watched the tourists there for a while. It was a very nice day, all hot and clear, and there were two sea otters playing in the water. There was some sort of convention at the Doubletree Inn too, so there were too many people on the wharf and even though the organ-grinder had his monkey passing the tin cup and everything the tourists were all old and drunk and boring, worse than the golfers always were even. One of them threw a beer can at one of the sea otters but he missed. I told the traffic cop who was keeping them from driving out on the wharf when they weren’t supposed to anyway, and he made the man leave.

  After that I went over to the secret beach behind the Navy School that nobody’s supposed to use and went swimming for a while. The water wasn’t all that cold but it was still pretty cold, so when the sun started to go down I went back home. Mother and Father were still out back with their friends. Father had his shirt back on and he was starting to make nasty comments about Mother every now and then even though he still seemed to be having a pretty good time. I didn’t understand everything he said but I understood most of it, and when I didn’t understand something I could tell whether or not it was mean from the look on Mother’s face. One of his friends didn’t look very happy but the other one’d drunk as much as Father or maybe even more and he was all loud and happy. Mother was pretending she loved Father a lot and that the only reason he was saying all those awful things about her was because he wasn’t grateful for all she did for him but I don’t think anybody but Father and me noticed what she was saying.

  After a while I asked her about Dubic but she said she hadn’t had a chance to check up on him yet and she’d find out for me Monday.

  Monday she didn’t have to go to the station until late. I tried to tell her I was sick and couldn’t go to school but she had a hangover and got really angry and hit me, she said she had enough sick people in the house without me trying to get away with things by pretending to be sick too when I wasn’t, so I had to go anyway.

  She wasn’t home when I got back but she’d put Father’s wheelchair by the window because there wasn’t anything he wanted to watch on TV and that way he could watch the birds and the squirrels and the flowers in the backyard if he didn’t feel like reading. I couldn’t go back into the toolshed with him there so I put another magazine in his reader, then went down to the lake and watched the ducks for a while.

  The next morning I got up before it was light out and went back to the shed. The hinges on the door were rusty and made some noise when I opened it but not enough to wake anybody up. I used the flashlight to make sure the bag with the duck in it was still under the bench before I closed the door behind me and turned on the lights, then I oiled the hinges before I got the duck out from under the bench. I turned the lights off again and used the flashlight to see by while I got it out of the sack. It still looked like it was wet, even though the mud on it was almost all dry on both sides when pieces of it fell off.

  I wasn’t sure whether it was safe to touch it or not even after I poked it with the hoe again and it still didn’t do anything, but I already knew I had to learn more about how it worked if I was going to be able to make it do what I wanted, so I opened the door again. It was still dark outside. I got on the door side of the duck before I reached out and touched one of the spots where it was still coated with dry mud real quick.

  It didn’t do anything. I pushed it a little, to see if I could feel it react to me, but no motor started running inside it or anything. I pushed it again a little harder, still on one of the mud-covered spots, then touched it for just a second on one of the spots that looked like it was made out of wet muck. But it wasn’t really wet at all, just a little cold and all smooth and slick and sort of greasy, like the bottoms of those nonstick frying pans when you just rinse them out for a few days without using detergent on them. And it still hadn’t done anything.

  I looked at it for a while, trying to see if I could tell any difference between the different parts of it, but it was still just a lump and the same everywhere. So I touched it again in a different place and then in still another place, but the third time I let my hand stay there touching it a lot longer, maybe almost a minute, before I took it away. Then I pushed it again, only a lot harder this time.

  I sat down and looked at it again for a while, trying to get my courage up, then I picked it up real quick before I dropped it and ran back to the door to see what it did. But it didn’t do anything and I was starting to get really afraid that I’d broken it somehow.

  The sky was beginning to go pink and purple. I picked the lump up again and took it ove
r to the door and put it down close enough so the sunlight coming through the doorway would hit it soon. The door opened into the shed do I couldn’t put the lump right inside, it had to be back a bit so I could swing the door shut to keep it locked up inside if anything went wrong, so I had it maybe two feet back from the door. I tied a long piece of string to the door handle so I could stand outside away from the shed and pull the door shut without coming near the duck if I had to.

  About half an hour after the sun finally came up all the way the light coming through the doorway started to hit the duck, and after about ten more minutes it started to change again the way it’d changed that other time, just after I pulled it out of the water, only even slower this time. It humped itself in tighter and tighter, just like it had when it’d been changing from a log into a lump, until it was almost the same size as a real duck, maybe just a little bigger, and sort of the shape of a duck, only it still didn’t have a head or a tail or any wings or feathers or legs. While it was doing this all the dry mud on it cracked and fell off so the whole thing was wet-looking and glistening like it had just come out of the water. That took almost another hour and it was starting to get late so I pulled the door shut with the string and then locked it and hid the rope and went back inside the house.

  Mother was already up and in the bathroom. I’d forgotten to close the curtains to keep anyone from seeing what I was doing out back and the bathroom had two big windows beside the skylight, but she hadn’t noticed me or she would have come out to find out what I was doing. I put her coffee on for her, then got Father up and helped him into his wheelchair and took him to the bathroom while she made French toast for all of us for breakfast. He was really dirty for some reason so I had to clean the bathroom up a bit before I took my own shower and finished getting ready.