Strange Seed

by Stephen Mark Rainey

  Strange Seed

  A Novel by T.M. Wright

  ©1978, 2006, 2010 by T.M. Wright

  All Rights Reserved

  Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital Edition

  Copyright 2010 by T. M. Wright &Macabre Ink Digital Publications

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  “Where did you come from, baby dear?

  Out of the everywhere. Into here.”

  --Song from “At the back of the North Wind”

  With love for my wife, Roxane

  May, 1957

  Upstate NY

  The tall man curses sharply in reaction to the sudden pain. The pain fades slowly; the man turns to his son beside him and says, “Not a word to repeat, son. Not a word to repeat.”

  The child looks on wonderingly. “Yes, Father,” he says.

  The pain returns and the tall man curses again, and again. When the pain subsides, he says once more, “Not a word to repeat, son. Not a word to—“But the pain, renewing itself, chokes the sentence off.

  The man slumps, groaning, to his knees. “Father?” the child says. “Father?”

  The pain subsides, but not as much as before, and the man shakes his head slowly, in confusion.

  It occurs to him that he’s dying and his acceptance of that fact is quick, nearly casual. Because there are more important considerations: As a byproduct of his death, his son will be left alone in the secluded farmhouse.

  Through the pain, lingering dully at the back of his head, the man motions to his son to come over. The child obeys, and the man pulls him close. “Go to…Mr. Lumas,” he whispers, “down…” and again the pain stops his words.

  “Father?” the child says. “Father?”

  He’s more confused than I am, the man thinks, despite the pain.

  He tries to speak again, but speech is beyond him.

  A quivering smile shivers along his lips. He curses and falls face forward onto the wet earth.

  These past few weeks, the rain has been nearly continuous and the earth gives testimony to it. All about, the creatures who come out of the earth are showing themselves. The thickets bordering the field are a vibrant green. The small pine forest to the west—all winter and spring no more than a monotone darkness—seems in motion, as if in anticipation of summer and the changes it will bring.

  “Father?” the child says. “Father?” The tall man lies still. A burying beetle—small and efficient—probes tentatively at his chin.

  Around the tall man, the earth lives, the earth produces, and swells a little in expectation of what this recent death will give it (only one of many thousands of deaths that second).

  “Get up, Father,” the child says. “Father?” The child waits. What he has known from his father until this moment has been life. He has seen his father strain for hours at a stuck plow. He has seen him smile wearily at the end of the day. He has heard curses from him, and, each time, “Not a word to repeat, son. Not a word to repeat.” And he has seen him in the act of love—the act of life.

  “Father? Get up, Father.” There was small magic in the words before. There is no magic now.

  The child waits. Night comes. The child continues to wait.

  There is no more bewilderment than grief in the child, now—a bewilderment with immense capabilities. For, around him, creatures the earth has produced are becoming bold with curiosity. One creature is within arm’s reach, but—and not because of the moonless dark—the child does not sense its presence.

  The creature waits. Because of all that the earth has produced in recent weeks, its belly is full, and so it is merely curious. After many minutes, it moves off.

  The child continues to wait.

  Other things that the earth has produced—some as large as the child, some larger, and some so small he could not see them, even in daylight—move closer and form a very rough circle around the child and the tall man. Still, the child is ignorant of their presence.

  There are words prodding at the child’s consciousness—words that, in concert with his slowly fading bewilderment and increasing grief, have much to do with his ignorance of what surrounds him. For he has no fear. His father’s words have long since obliterated fear: “There is nothing here to harm you, son, unless you invite it.” And, “You are as much a part of this as any living thing.”

  The child waits. Eventually, the moonless dark lightens—a false dawn, but the end of darkness.

  “Father?” he says. “Father?” The word is so mechanical, now, that he does not realize he said it.

  He turns, hesitates, looks back at the gray, elongated mass that is his father.

  And goes back to the house.

  The house is very quiet—a maze of black and gray and harsh right angles. Habit soon overcomes the maze; the child makes his way to the house’s second floor, to his bedroom, and settles onto the old bed. Tears come to him, though he can’t yet consciously admit there is reason for tears. They trickle down his face. A dozen tears.

  He is accustomed to the noises of the house.

  Two dozen tears.

  The noises of the house are like friends because the child has known the noises since before he realized the house was making them. Vaguely he knows that the earth is partly responsible. That the earth swells and recedes, swells and recedes. Not as if it were restless—only breathing. Because the earth, like himself, must breathe, and the house—a part of the earth—must breathe with it.

  Three dozen tears. The pillow soaks them up.

  Groaning noises; if a man were responsible, wouldn’t he be very much like a scarecrow, or a stick man? Rasping, groaning noises. Wood sounds. And the distant spray-of-water sounds—the windows being pushed by the wind.

  Four dozen tears.

  And the scratch-and-skitter sounds of the other living creatures in the walls of the house.

  The tears stop.

  It is a creative house. Occasionally, there are new and often fleeting noises whose source is hard to pinpoint. Only half-consciously, the child listens to just such noises, now. And waits, expectation growing in him.

  After a long moment, he calls, “Father? Is that you?” He props himself up in the bed and continues to listen. He strains to see, but sees little.

  “Father?” he repeats, though with uncertainty, because the noises his father’s footfalls make on the stairs are of a different sort—more pronounced, more purposeful.

  The noises stop.

  The child sleeps.

  THE MORNING

  Realization, like punishment, comes swiftly to the child. And, as to punishment, he winces and stifles a moan. Here, in the bright sunlight, denial is impossible. He sees that his father’s body is becoming what swamps are made of and soil is made of—becoming food for the horsetail, and clover, and burying beetles, and a million others. Because the earth, the breathing earth, must be constantly nourished.

  His father’s words are closer now, and understandable. “Decay is not the grim thing it appears to be. It is renewal.”

  “Father?” the child pleads, realizing the futility of the word. “Father?” he repeats, more in the memory of those times his father responded to the word than for any other reason.

  Father?—distantly, from the thickets to the south. Father? Barely audible.

  The child looks up questioningly from his father’s body. “Father?” he cal
ls.

  Father?

  An echo, the child thinks. Months before, he remembers, in the heart of the forest, “Hello,” extended, “Hello,” repeated, “Hello,” shouted back at both of them, father and son, by the voices of the forest.

  “Hello,” the child calls.

  Father? replies the voice of the thickets.

  “Hello,” the child calls. And distantly, from the east, from the forest, “Hello, hello, hello,” decreasing in intensity. And finally, nothing.

  Hello—from the thickets.

  “Hello,” the child calls.

  Hello.

  “Hello, Father!” the child calls.

  And the forest replies, “Hello, Father! Hello, Father!”

  And the voice of the thickets replies, Hello, Father! Father? Father! Hello.

  TWENTY YEARS LATER

  Chapter One

  Rachel Griffin listened to an unfamiliar crowd of sounds—the varied chortlings of toads and frogs, the moaning and screeching of owls, the whir and squeak and twitter of a million insects. Occasionally, the wind moving over shards of glass in the window frames at the back of the small room added—to the sounds of the rural night—a dissonant set of high-pitched whining noises, like a family of small tin birds calling at a distance.

  Rachel felt, in the crowd of sounds, the conspicuous absence of the sounds of people. She wished for the groan of traffic, for the comforting, hollow noises of radios and TVs, even for the neighbors having one of their periodic arguments. But those, she knew, were the sounds of places which were far beyond her, places that—despite their many shortcomings—had variously served as home for nearly all of her twenty-six years and therefore didn’t give her the dismal sense of aloneness that this place gave her.

  “Paul?” she said.

  Paul Griffin turned from the window and saw that his wife was sitting up on the old overstuffed couch. He sensed that she was watching him intently, wonderingly.

  “Did I wake you?” he asked.

  “No. I haven’t been able to sleep.” She hesitated. “Is something wrong, Paul?”

  “Nothing’s wrong.” A pause. “It’s that floor. Have you ever tried to sleep on the floor? It’s impossible.” He felt himself grimace; lies, even half truths—as the remark had been—had never come easily to him. He was thankful for the near-total darkness, thankful it hid him. Rachel would know his deception, otherwise.

  “Do you want to use the couch, Paul?”

  “No.” He made a nebulous gesture with his arm. “Go back to sleep, Rachel. I’ll be to bed soon.”

  She wrapped herself in the large blue quilt she and Paul had been sharing and, stumbling once on the quilt’s trailing edges, joined him at the window. He put his arm around her. “You really should be asleep,” he told her.

  “Uh-huh.”

  He could dimly see her face now. In the classic sense, he knew, it was not a particularly beautiful face. The full, dark eyebrows were complemented by the large oval brown eyes and high forehead. Her mouth appeared to be in a constant pout because of a slight natural downturn at its outside edges and was full and nearly as dark as her brows—that fullness was offset by a strong jaw line and a long, gently muscled neck. It was a face, Paul mused, whose individual parts had struggled for preeminence; at last, a pleasing had been established.

  He kissed her. “Thank you,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “For not being able to sleep without me.”

  She smiled. “Our first night in our first house, Paul.” It had seemed, she realized, like an accusation.

  “Yes,” Paul said. He wanted to add, Our first and, I hope, our last house, but knew she’d sense the dishonesty in the remark. “The first of many nights, Rachel.”

  She leaned against him and mumbled what he thought to be an affirmative.

  I’m uncomfortable with this house, Paul. It frightens me. I’ve never lived here before. You have. And that gives you an advantage.

  “We’ve got our work cut out for us, Rachel.”

  “Yes, we do.”

  What do I know about houses like this, Paul? About this kind of life? It’s too quiet here. There’s too little light. We get used to noise and light. We grow to identify with it, no matter how much we deny it.

  “I can’t imagine why anyone would want to smash the windows like this, Rachel.” He fingered a fragment of glass protruding from the window frame. “I can’t imagine,” he continued, “why they’d want to do any of the fucking stupid things they did.”

  Rachel nodded slightly. Why indeed, Paul? She had assumed that “country people” bore an almost instinctive respect for the rights and property of others. But the house’s condition had caused her to rethink that assumption: people, she’d decided, were the same everywhere; country people, city people—it made no difference.

  “But it’s basically a very sound house,” Paul went on. He pushed against the window casing with the palm of his hand. “At least there’s nothing structurally wrong with it.”

  Rachel nodded again. “Let’s go back to bed, Paul. It’s late.”

  “You go ahead, darling. I’ll join you in a minute.” He put his hands on her shoulders and gently turned her around to face the couch. “Go ahead,” he repeated.

  Reluctantly, she went back to the couch, lay down, and adjusted the quilt so a good portion of it fell to the floor, where Paul, for lack of a better place, had chosen to sleep. “Don’t be too long, Paul.”

  “Just a minute or two.”

  Rachel closed her eyes. Yes, she thought, Paul had the advantage. The house charmed him. He had come home. The transition would be easy for him, if it hadn’t already happened. He was comfortable here, with the ghosts of his mother and his father and his boyhood self…

  “Are you asleep, Rachel?” Softly.

  “No.”

  “Oh… I was going to go outside for a minute.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t, Paul.”

  “You could come with me, if you’d like.”

  “It’s too cold… No.” She paused. “It’s late.”

  “I’ll just be a minute.”

  “I wish…” But he had already crossed through the large kitchen and was heading for the back door.

  “Try to go to sleep,” he called. In the next moment he closed the door behind him.

  Henry Lumas’s night vision was excellent. What would have appeared to other, less sensitive eyes as only a vaguely elongated, nearly amorphous mass, Lumas knew to the tall, thin young man who’d just moved into what had been the Newman house.

  Paul? Yes, that was the young man’s name. And his wife’s name was Rachel. A good name.

  They were city people—that was obvious to anyone with eyes and ears. How stiffly the young man walked, as if in pain; he was accustomed to the kind of awful confinement that only cities impose on a man.

  She—his wife—moved gracefully enough, but as if it were expected of her, as if she granted her favors reluctantly, out of a sense of duty. And that was unfortunate.

  Curses, as well, came too easily to the young man. He lacked patience (although, Lumas reflected, finding the house in that condition, the man had had good reason to curse). He was quick-tempered. He probably expected perfection, or at least that things run far more smoothly than things possibly could. If so, life here would be a revelation. Nothing ran smoothly here. You depended on nothing, you counted on nothing, only the bad.

  The Newmans had learned that quickly enough when, in the space of six months, their two children had died—one of pneumonia, the other of a disease even the doctor from town couldn’t diagnose—they’d learned.

  These people would learn, too. They’d have to learn.

  Across the darkened, weed-choked fields that separated him from the house, Lumas saw that Paul was looking his way.

  “Hello,” Paul shouted. “Hello.”

  For a moment, Lumas thought of answering. Then he saw that Paul had turned and was going back into the house.


  Lumas hesitated a second. It was unlikely that the young man had seen him, though of no significance if he had. He—Lumas—would introduce himself soon enough and offer the young couple his skills as a carpenter.

  He turned. What demanded his attention, now, were the traps he’d set out at various point in the forest. Maybe one of the traps would hold more than the fly-ridden stump of some luckless animal’s hind leg.

  For too long, that was all the traps had yielded.

  “Paul?” Rachel called. “Is that you?” She sat up and peered into the kitchen.

  “Yes, it’s me. Were you expecting someone else?”

  “No, I was…” She paused. “Who were you calling to out there?”

  “No one.” He crossed the room and sat next to her on the couch. “I just wanted to hear my echo. That’s pretty silly, huh.”

  She smiled weakly. “It’s late, Paul. You said that man—Mr. Marsh?—you said he was going to pick you up at 7:00.”

  “Yes,” Paul said. “I know.”

  Rachel wondered if the trace of annoyance in his tone was because she’d reminded him, or because there were only a few hours of sleep remaining. She tried—not very successfully, because of the darkness—to study his angular face, the deep-set hazel eyes. “Tell me what’s wrong, Paul.”

  He raised his eyebrows briefly—a gesture Rachel had learned was indicative of confusion. “It’s all very…discouraging, isn’t it?” he said. “Maybe it was a bad idea to come here. This house and…the condition it’s in—it must all be quite a shock to you.” He took her hand. “I mean,” he went on, his tone oddly paternalistic, “this isn’t New York City, is it?”

  “No,” was all Rachel could say: Paul’s sudden mood had taken her been surprise.

  “I’ve told you…you know what it’s like here, Rachel. But that really doesn’t mean very much—it means nothing—until you’ve experienced it.”

  “Paul, I—“

  “No, no. Let me finish.” He inhaled deeply. “I think I’m asking too much of you; that the…burdens of life here”—he grinned self-consciously—“may be, I don’t know—too much for you to handle. It takes one hell of a readjustment, more than not being able to run to the grocery store or to a movie—so much more…” He paused. Rachel realized what he wanted from her. She squeezed his hand reassuringly.