Morning Child and Other Stories

by Gardner Dozois

  Yes, it should leave here, get out of this situation altogether.

  So it hunted through the structure until it found access to a metal pipe that it followed up through the walls and out onto the roof, out into the chill outer air…. But there were the Northern Lights, blazing above it, filling the sky, curtains of dancing, shimmering radiation, seemingly only a few feet above its head, dazzling it, making it squirm and caper and thrash, coil and uncoil and coil, scribing odd cabalistic patterns in the snow…until, on the verge of total madness, it retreated back into the pipe, plunging deep into the reassuringly solid structure of the house, where at least the sheer mass of all the stone and wood and iron afforded it some protection against the shifting, chaotic, maddening lights in the sky.

  It had to stay here. It had no choice.

  The grandmother clock in the upstairs hallway chimed midnight, a soft, homey noise. The house was still, and the kitchen was warm. The thing in the basement—whatever it was—still had not come out. Mrs. Kingsley dared to hope that it would not, that it was holed up in the cellar for good, and would not willingly emerge. Her granddaughter was asleep again, and she was alone with her fear and her guilt.

  “He’s gone to town to get a snowplow,” she had lied. It was moral cowardice, pure and simple, and she knew that she would never be able to completely forgive herself for it. But by the same token, there was no way she could possibly have told the child the truth. Not now. Not in the state she was in. “He’ll be back in the morning, after breakfast.”

  “Oh.” Jennifer’s head had sunk back to the pillow then. She turned to the side, closed her eyes, and was asleep. A faint green glow from the calculator’s display tinged her face.

  Alma Kingsley stood motionless. Now that she listened, she could hear the house talking to itself. It creaked and groaned, making wooden noises like doors opening and shutting in a distant, fairy-tale wood. Ghosts walked the halls with slow, ominous tread.

  She was afraid. Her heart was beating rapidly, and her limbs felt weak and drained. Her house—her own house!—loomed dark and menacing on all sides, and she was afraid of it.

  She needed a weapon. The gizmo Desmond had been working on was nowhere near done, a tangle of wires and trash. Even with the power on, she would have no idea how to finish it herself. Desmond had said the monster was afraid of electricity, but with the power out, all the electronic equipment she owned, the television, the radios, the microwave, the food processor, were dead, and so the idea of surrounding them with a barricade of such things, all turned on, wasn’t going to work. The electric blanket was useless as a defense now too. There weren’t any firearms in the house, and she doubted a kitchen knife would be much use against the creature. Struck by sudden quick inspiration, she stepped into the mudroom to the side of the kitchen door and opened the narrow door of the utility closet. There was a heavy woodchopper’s ax there, set on brackets on the wall, behind a jumble of brooms, old vacuum cleaners, saws, rakes, and other junk, where it had rested untouched for years, since her hands had gotten too bad to let her chop her own wood for the winter.

  She fumbled the ax down from its brackets, lugged it into the kitchen—marveling ruefully at how heavy it now seemed, how much arm-strength she’d lost in only five or six years—and set it down near Jennifer’s cot, handle up, leaning against the wall.

  It wasn’t enough. The ax might make for a secondary, last-ditch line of defense if the thing got into the kitchen, but she was too weak and stiff and arthritic to wield it with any real vigor or competence anymore, and the idea of taking slow, clumsy strokes at a creature that moved as fast as this one did, in a half-darkened room that was dancing with shadows anyway, made her mouth dry with terror. That wasn’t good enough. She had to figure out some way to keep it out of the kitchen in the first place.

  How to do that? How to keep it out of here, keep it away from Jennifer? Think, damn it, think!

  The only thing she knew it feared was Desmond’s pocket calculator.

  That was a start, then. She darted into the darkened parlor and snagged a long, white taper from the candelabra on the mantelpiece. With a shiver, she retreated back to the kitchen. She wrapped several paper napkins around its base to protect her hand against the drippings. Desmond would have more calculators among his effects—he was simply that kind of person. There might even be one among Jennifer’s things. And for that matter, there was her own, tucked away in the upstairs china cabinet, which she used periodically for taxes and bills.

  The candle shed very little light; it seemed to blind her more than illumine the way. She hesitated in the doorway and the shadows flickered and waved about her like living things. She did not want to go into the dark.

  Holding herself straight, she stepped forward, fighting against panic.

  Desmond had brought along two more calculators, and Jennifer one, a child’s calculator in the shape of an owl, the readout part of its big round eyes. Among the child’s things, too, she had found a pocket computer game—Meteor Defense, or some such nonsense—and estimating it similar enough to be of use, that brought the total up to six. Five, if you didn’t count it.

  It had been a harrowing expedition. She had started at every creak of the joists or scream of stairway tread underfoot. She had felt the Dark Angel upon her twice, as the shadow in an empty doorway had shifted toward her, and when the darkness behind a cabinet gathered itself up to leap. As she returned downstairs and into the parlor, her pace quickened. The kitchen beckoned.

  It so heartened her to reach safe haven that she began to hum a snatch of Mozart. She was alive! She blew out the candle and dumped the calculators onto the kitchen table. For the moment, she didn’t even notice the thing crouching in the hallway.

  A sudden sense of foreboding, a prickling, crawling sensation, made her spin about. Something moved just outside the kitchen door. Black crawled within black, shadow in shadow.

  It yearned forward slightly, then retreated, bobbing up and down in indecision, torn between flight and attack. Mrs. Kingsley couldn’t even see it clearly, but she felt it studying the sleeping child.

  More from panic than courage, then, she ran at the thing wildly. She slashed her arm as if the calculator in it were an ax, and she could use it to chop the thing into bloody bits, its black ichor steaming onto the floor, eating through the carpet.

  It hesitated fractionally, then flowed into darkness and was gone.

  Mrs. Kingsley sobbed in the doorway, weak and despairing. It was a victory, but a minor one. The thing was still loose, and with every encounter it was losing fear.

  She set calculators by the doors to the pantry, hallway, and parlor. The fourth she put by the window, and the little computer game was laid at the foot of Jennifer’s cot as a second line of defense. They all glowed gently.

  The oil lamp was running low. Mrs. Kingsley blew it out, to conserve what little fuel remained, and twisted on two of the range burners. She felt oddly secure, surrounded by the arcane little devices, with their crisp little lights. She felt safe, protected. It was probably unwarranted, mere blind faith in technology, but…

  The calculator by the parlor door began blinking. The numbers had disappeared and there was a single dot tracking its way across the readout. She remembered Desmond bragging about the thing, when he first showed it to her, explaining that if it weren’t used for some number of minutes—five? twenty? ten?—the numbers disappeared from the readout, though the memory still held them, and it went into an energy-conserving mode. And then, if more time went by and nobody used it, it simply turned itself off.

  Hastily, she punched some figures at random, and hit a function button. The numbers came back on, with that funny little symbol that meant that an error had been made. She ignored it.

  It wasn’t long before she realized that the calculators were not going to do. Three of them kept blinking off, and one of the others was failing, its batteries low. She couldn’t keep punching the things through the night—sleep would take her lo
ng before the snowplow came.

  Think! she told herself fiercely. She had to kill the thing, to electrocute it somehow…She remembered a story Stephanie used to tell, about the summer camp she’d stayed at as a child, a place with an old-fashioned crank phone system.

  The girls used to hook up a phone with one wire connected to a metal bed frame, then the other to a wad of aluminum foil. When the victim sat down on the bed frame, one girl would toss her the ball of foil and yell “Catch!” while her accomplice gave the phone a vicious crank.

  She didn’t have a crank phone, of course, but she sensed she was on the right track. She’d found a trap that wouldn’t require much mechanical skill to set up. All she needed was a power source. Something like…

  Something like an automobile battery.

  She dressed hurriedly, making plans all the while.

  First, she got the jumper cables out of the El Dorado’s trunk, leaving it up and open behind her as she hurried them through the snow to the kitchen. Jennifer was still asleep, and this time Mrs. Kingsley didn’t try to keep from stroking her hair. The simple act seemed to fill her with resolve. The creature would not get the child. This she swore.

  Again she stepped out into the storm. The car’s front door balked at first, frozen with the cold. She yanked harder and it popped open.

  Candy stared up at her accusingly. The dead girl’s face was grotesquely shrunken in upon itself, and the tightening skin had pulled the eyes wide open. Mrs. Kingsley gasped involuntarily. She had forgotten the macabre thing was there, stretched out across the front seat.

  But there was no time for squeamishness. She leaned over the corpse, and fumbled under the steering wheel for the hood release. With a bing, the hood unlatched and she went around to the front—slamming the door shut behind her—to raise it up and confront the battery.

  She was fiddling with the cables—they were cold, of course, and frozen to the terminals, and corroded over as well—when her hands seized up with arthritis again. Vainly she tried to force her mittened hands to close about a cable. Pain shot up her arms, but still her hands did not respond. Frustrated, she slammed them against the cables again and again.

  The lines wouldn’t budge.

  Tears built at the corners of her eyes, but sternly she suppressed them, blinking them down, thinking harsh thoughts at herself. There had to be a way—the trunk! She’d left it open, hadn’t she? She hurried around back and it was true, the trunk still gaped wide. She rummaged about with her useless arms, pushing things to one side or another as if they were long sticks she was using to poke with, and at last she found what she was looking for. A tire iron.

  It took longer to scoop up the iron than she’d have liked, an awkward, nightmarishly elumsy time, but finally she had it, and scuttled back to the battery. Holding the iron as a Punchinello might hold its bashing-stick, she tried again and again, leaning, putting her weight just so, until finally the one cable popped loose and went banging against the engine.

  Time was all. Mrs. Kingsley tried hard not to think of Jennifer lying alone in the house, at the center of her protective pentagram of failing calculators, tried hard to put blind, unreasoning faith in the flimsy little Oriental-built machines.

  It took a hellishly long time to get the iron in position for the second cable, and then it kept slipping out of the way. But at last she pried that one free of its terminal too, and with a feeling of triumph, she let the iron fall. She reached for the battery.

  It would not budge.

  She couldn’t get her hands around the damnable thing, couldn’t get a hold on it, probably didn’t even have the strength to lift it.

  She did cry then, the tears running down her cheeks and the thin trail of moisture freezing on her skin with a faint crackling sensation. But even then she did not give up. Her mind kept working, as she started with a positive hatred at the battery. There was nothing in the workings of the car touching it, she noted, and nothing beneath it. There was a space of an inch or so around it on three sides, and it was set on a kind of little metal ledge.

  If not for that ledge, the battery would fall to the ground.

  She set out to break the little shelf, battering and prying at it with the tire iron. Time and again the iron slipped from her hands and fell. She had to get to her knees in the snow, and reach around under the car to make it fall flat, and then draw it out from under and seduce it into her arms again—she lost a lot of time that way.

  By now her knees and her arms, up to her shoulders, were numbed and bruised. The cold seemed to soak through to her bones, and she knew she was running a bad risk of frostbite.

  But at last she managed to poke and pry and stab enough that, with a sudden ripping noise, the battery was gone. It had fallen to the ground.

  She still couldn’t lift it up from the snow—not for more than a few seconds at a time, anyway. But she could get the thing back to the house by pushing it, if she was willing to crawl.

  Slowly, with distaste, she got down to the ground. Sometimes a woman had to crawl.

  It was more with disbelief than with joy that she finally shoved the battery onto the linoleum of the kitchen floor. Leaving it on its side, she slowly stood and sank gratefully into a chair. Her knees were afire. The creature could have come and taken her then, and she’d have felt only gratitude. It would be so very pleasant to simply lean back and fall asleep….

  Something creaked. Panicked, she struggled upright, twisting around to see that Jennifer was still all right. Her father’s calculator had slipped to the floor as the child shifted in her sleep. Of the guardian calculators at the doors, only one was still blinking.

  Hurriedly she punched new life into the calculators, bringing the green alphanumerics swimming up to their surfaces. There could be no sleep for her. She still had work to do, a trap to set.

  But desire would not unclench her hands. She thrust them into her armpits, desperately trying to warm the joints into movement. It didn’t work. She was stopped before she could begin.

  Finally she knelt by her granddaughter’s cot and nudged her ever so gently. “Rise and shine, sweetheart,” she murmured. “Grandmother needs you to be her hands.”

  Jennifer was sleepy and balky. It took a great deal of coaxing just to get her to untangle the jumper cables. Then, when they were stretched out to their ten-foot lengths, side by side like orange vinyl snakes, it was time to assemble the trap.

  Fortunately the cables were old, and the clips were not as taut as they might be. Even at that, Jennifer had to use both hands and all her strength to open the grippers enough to clamp them onto a battery terminal. The first two times she tried, they slipped right back off. Mrs. Kingsley merely tightened her lips and said, “Again.”

  “Why?”

  A noise came from the parlor, a faint, whispery slithering sound. Mrs. Kingsley threw back her head, listening, but it was gone. “Just do it. I’m your grandmother.” She put all the authority she had in her voice, and, for a wonder, the child obeyed.

  As soon as the connection was firm, and wouldn’t come loose at a tug on the cable, she threw a tea towel over the terminal, to protect her grandchild against accidental shock. “That’s good,” she said. “Now the other one.”

  “This is dumb!” Jennifer cried rebelliously. “I don’t have to if I don’t want to!”

  “By God, I’ll give you don’t-have-to!” Mrs. Kingsley angrily lifted a hand shoulder-high to slap the child. Then, at the look in her eyes, she stopped, and bit back her anger. She crouched down, joints hurting horribly, and hugged Jennifer to her. “I know it seems hard, child. But sometimes we have to do things we would rather not. It’s simply the way the world wags.”

  Jennifer obstinately shook her head.

  “It won’t take long, I promise. Suppose that as soon as we get through with this, we make hot chocolate? Would you like that?” She held the child at arm’s length, studied her solemnly. “Yes, I’d supposed you would.”

  The second cable went on
smoothly, and Jennifer enjoyed making the ball of aluminum foil. Alma Kingsley had to stop her from using up all that was on the roll.

  “Now pretend that the cable is an alligator, and make it bite the shiny ball.” It took Jennifer three tries, and then she got it right. The final step was to hook the other cable to something large and metallic, something that the creature would have to touch or pass over to get at her. This was less satisfactory than the rest. The nearest bed frame was on the second floor. She could no more have dragged it down into the kitchen than she could have hauled the battery up the stairs to it. In the end, the best she could find was a screen window that had been stored in the pantry against spring.

  The screen was wire mesh, not the modern plastic stuff, but after Jennifer had clipped the cable to it, it looked woefully small and inadequate. There was no way of placing it that guaranteed the creature would pass over it, or of being sure it would be touching when she threw the second cable. But it would have to do. Because it was the best she could come up with.

  “Gamma, we can make hot chocolate now, right?”

  She allowed herself a smile. “No, my young apprentice. You will make the cocoa. Your grandmother will supervise. Have you ever made cocoa all by yourself before?”

  Jennifer shook her head, eyes wide and solemn.

  “Well! This will be a special occasion, then. The first thing to do is to—”

  The cocoa was a smashing success. By the time it was made, Jennifer was nodding and yawning again. She only managed to drink half her mug’s contents before her head slumped over onto her shoulder. Mrs. Kingsley led her back to the cot, and pulled the blankets up over her.