That afternoon Mother introduced us to the man who was to be Father’s successor in the household, and to his three children, who were to be our new brothers and sister, and we shook hands shyly, in a state of mutual shock, and regarded one another with wide staring eyes. Our new Father! Our new brothers and sister! As Mother explained patiently her new husband was no stepfather but a genuine father; which meant that we were to call him ‘Father’ at all times, and even, in our most private innermost thoughts, we were to think of him as ‘Father’: for otherwise he would be very hurt, and very displeased. And so too with Einar and Erastus, our new brothers (not stepbrothers), and Fifi, our new sister (not stepsister).
Our new Father stood before us beaming, a man of our former Father’s approximate age but heavier and more robust than that Father, with an unusually large head, the cranium particularly developed, and small shrewd quick-darting eyes beneath brows of bone. He wore a fashionably tailored suit so dark as to resemble an undertaker’s, and sported a red carnation in his lapel; his black shoes shone so splendidly they might have been phosphorescent. ‘Hello Father,’ we murmured, hardly daring to raise our eyes to his. ‘Hello Father.’ ‘Hello…’ The man’s jaws were elongated, the lower jaw a good inch longer than the upper, so that a wet malevolent ridge of teeth was revealed; and, as often happened in those days, a single thought shot like lightning among us children, from one to the other to the other to the other, each of us smiling guiltily as it struck us; Crocodile! Only little Jori burst into tears when the thought passed into her head and after an embarrassed moment our new Father stooped to pick her up in his arms and comfort her…and some of us could virtually see how the memory of our former Father passed from her, as cruelly as if it had been hosed out of her skull. She was three years old then, and not accountable for her behavior.
New Father’s children were tall, big-boned, solemn, with a greenish peevish cast to their skin, like many city children; the boys had inherited their father’s large head and protruding crocodile jaws but the girl, Fifi, seventeen years old, was eye-catching in her beauty, with hair as mutinous as Cory’s, and wide-set brown eyes in which something wolfish glimmered.
That evening certain of the boys – Dale, Kit, and Hewett – gathered close around Fifi, telling her wild tales of the Valley, how we had to protect ourselves with rifles and shotguns from trespassers, and how there was a resurgence of rats and other rodents on the farm, as a consequence of so much excavation in the countryside, and these tales, silly as they were, and exaggerated, made the girl shudder and giggle and lean toward the boys as if she were in need of their protection. And when Dale hurried off to get Fifi a goblet of ice water – at her request – she took the glass from his fingers and lifted it prissily to the light to examine its contents, asking, ‘Is this water pure? Is it safe to drink?’ It was true, our water was sometimes strangely effervescent, and tasted of rust; after a heavy rainfall there were likely to be tiny red wriggly things in it, like animated tails; so we had learned not to examine it too closely, and as our initial attacks of nausea, diarrhea, and faint-headedness had more or less subsided, we rarely thought of it any longer but tried to be grateful, as Mrs. Hoyt used to urge us, that we had any drinking water at all. So it was offensive to us to see Fifi make such a face, handing the goblet of water back to Dale, and asking him how anyone in his right mind could drink such – spilth. Dale said angrily, ‘How? This is how!’ and drank the water down in a single thirsty gulp. And he and his new sister stood staring at each other, each of them trembling with passion.
As Cory observed smiling, yet with a trace of resentment or envy, ‘It looks as if “new sister” has made a conquest!’
‘But what will she do,’ I couldn’t help asking, ‘– if she can’t drink our water?’
‘She’ll drink it,’ Cory said grimly. ‘And she’ll find it delicious, like the rest of us.’ Which, of course, turned out very quickly to be true.
Cory’s confinement came in a time of ever-increasing confusion…when there were frequent power failures in the Valley, and all foods except tinned goods were scarce, and the price of ammunition doubled, and quadrupled; and the sky by both day and night was criss-crossed by the contrails of unmarked bombers in a design both eerie and beautiful, like the web of a gigantic spider. By this time construction in most parts of the Valley had been halted, temporarily or indefinitely: Part-completed houses and high-rise office buildings punctuated the landscape; some were mere concrete foundations upon which girders had been erected, like exposed bone. The lovely ‘Mirror Tower’ – as we children called it: It must have had a real name – was a two-hundred-story patchwork of interlocking slots of reflecting glass with a pale turquoise tint, and where its elegant surface had once mirrored scenes of sparkling beauty there was now, from day to day, virtually nothing: a sky like soiled cotton batting, smoldering slag heaps, fantastic burdocks and thistles grown to the height of trees. Traffic had dwindled to a half-dozen diesel trucks per day hauling their massive cargo (much of it diseased livestock bound for northern slaughterhouses) and a very few passenger cars. There were cloverleafs that coiled endlessly upon themselves and elevated highways that broke off in midair, thus as authorities warned travelers you were in danger, if you ventured into the countryside, of being attacked by roaming gangs – but the rumor was that the most dangerous men were rogue Guardsmen who wore their uniforms inside out and preyed upon the very people they were paid to protect. None of the family left the compound without being well armed and of course the younger children no longer left at all. All schools, public and private, were temporarily shut down.
The most luxurious of the model communities, known to us as The Wheel – its original name was forgotten: Whispering Glades? Deer Willow? – had suffered so extreme a financial collapse that most of its services were said to be suspended, and many of its tenants had fled back to the cities from which they’d fled to the Valley. (The community was called The Wheel because its condominiums, office buildings, shops, schools, hospitals, and crematoria were arranged in spokes radiating outward from a single axis; and were protected at their twenty-mile circumference not by a visible wall, which the Japanese architect who had designed it had declared a vulgar and outmoded concept, but by a force field of electricity of lethal voltage.) Though the airport at Furnace Creek was officially closed, we often saw small aircraft taking off and landing there in the night, heard the insectlike whine of their engines and spied their winking red lights, and one night when the sun hung paralyzed at the horizon for several hours and visibility was poor though shot with a duplicitous sharpened clarity there was an airplane crash in a slag-heap area that had once been a grazing pasture for our cows, and some of the older boys insisted upon going out to investigate…returning with sober, stricken faces, and little to say of the sights they had seen except they wished they had not seen them. Miles away in the foothills were mysterious encampments, some of them mere camps, in which people lived and slept on the ground, others deliberately if crudely erected villages like those once displayed in museums as being the habitations of Native American peoples…the names of these ‘peoples’ long since forgotten. These were rumored to be unauthorized settlements of city dwellers who had fled their cities at the time of the general urban collapse, as well as former ranchers and their descendants, and various wanderers and evicted persons, criminals, the mentally ill, and victims of contagious diseases…all of these officially designated outlaw parties who were subject to harsh treatment by the Guardsmen, for the region was now under martial law, and only within compounds maintained by government-registered property owners and heads of families were civil rights, to a degree, still operative. Eagerly, we scanned the Valley for signs of life, passing among us a pair of binoculars like forbidden treasure whose original owner we could not recall – though Cory believed this person, an adult male, had lived with us before Father’s time, and had been good to us. But not even Cory could remember his name. Cory’s baby was born shortly after the f
unerals of two of the younger children, who had died of violent flulike illnesses, and of Uncle Darrah, who had died of shotgun wounds while driving his pick-up truck in the Valley; but this, we were assured by Mother and Father, was mere coincidence, and not to be taken as a sign. One by one we were led into the attic room set aside for Cory to stare in astonishment at the puppy-sized, red-faced, squalling, yet so wonderfully alive creature…with its large oval soft-looking head, its wizened angry features, its unblemished skin. Mother had found a cradle in the storage barn for the baby, a white wicker antique dating back to the previous century, perhaps a cradle she herself had used though she could not remember it, nor could any of us, her children, recall having slept in it; a piece of furniture too good for Cory’s ‘bastard child,’ as Mother tearfully called it. (Though allowing that the infant’s parentage was no fault of its own.) Fit punishment, Mother said, that Cory’s breasts yielded milk so grudgingly, and what milk they did yield was frequently threaded with blood, fit punishment for her daughter’s ‘sluttish’ behavior…but the family’s luck held and one day the older boys returned from a hunting expedition with a dairy cow…a beautiful black-and-white marbled animal very like the kind, years ago, or was it only months ago, we ourselves had owned. The cow supplied us with sweet, fresh, reasonably pure milk, thus saving Cory’s bastard infant’s life, as Mother said – ‘for whatever that life is worth.’
Though she was occupied with household tasks, and often with emergency situations, Mother seemed obsessed with ferreting out the identity of Cory’s infant’s father; Cory’s secret lover, as Mother called him with a bitter twist of her lips. Yet it seemed to give her a prideful sort of pleasure that her eldest daughter had not only had a secret lover at one time in her life (the baby being irrefutable proof of this) but had one still – despite the fact that no lover had stepped forward to claim the baby, or the baby’s mother; and that Cory, once the prettiest of the girls, was now disfigured by skin rashes covering most of her body. And since her pregnancy her lower body remained bloated while her upper body had become emaciated. Mother herself was frequently ill, with flaming rashes, respiratory illnesses, intestinal upsets, bone aches, uncertain vision; like most of us she was plagued with ticks – the smallest species of deer tick, which could burrow into the skin, particularly into the scalp, unnoticed, there to do its damage, and after weeks drop off, to be found on the floor, swollen with blood, black, shiny, about the size and apparent texture of a watermelon seed, deceptive to the eye. By degrees Mother had shrunk to a height of about four feet eight inches, very unlike the statuesque beauty of certain old photographs; with stark white matted hair, and pale silvery gray eyes as keen and suspicious as ever, and a voice so hard, harsh, brassy, and penetrating, a shout from her had the power to paralyze any of us where we stood…though we knew or believed ourselves safely hidden from her by a wall, or more than a single wall. Even the eldest of her sons, Kit, Hewett, Dale, tall ragged-bearded men who absented themselves from the compound for days at a stretch, were intimidated by Mother’s authority, and, like poor Cory, shrank in guilty submission before her. Again and again Mother interrogated Cory, ‘Who is your secret lover? Why are you so ashamed of him?’ and Cory insisted she did not know who her lover was, or could not remember – ‘Even if I see his face sometimes, in my sleep, I can’t remember his name. Or who he was. Or who he claimed to be.’
Yet Mother continued her investigation, risking Father’s displeasure in so ruthlessly questioning all males with whom she came into contact, not excluding Cory’s cousins and uncles and even Cory’s own brothers! – even those ravaged men and boys who made their homes, so to speak, in the drainage pipes beyond the compound, and whose services the family sometimes enlisted in times of emergency. But no one confessed; no one acknowledged Cory’s baby as his. And one day when Cory lay ill upstairs in her attic room and I was entrusted with caring for the baby, feeding it from a bottle, in the kitchen, Mother came into the room with a look of such determination I felt terror for the baby, and hugged it to my bosom, and Mother said, ‘Give me the bastard, girl,’ and I said, ‘No Mother, don’t make me,’ and Mother said, ‘Are you disobeying me? Give me the bastard,’ and I said, backing away, ‘No Mother, Cory’s baby belongs to Cory, and it isn’t a bastard.’ Mother advanced upon me, furious; her eyes whitely rimmed and her fingers – well, what talons they had become! – outstretched; her mouth twisting, working, distending itself – and I saw that in the midst of her passion she was forgetting what she meant to do, and that this might save Cory’s baby. For often in those days when the family had little to eat except worm-riddled apples from the old orchard, and stunted blackened potatoes, and such wild game (or wildlife) as the boys could hunt down, we often forgot what we were doing in the very act of doing it; and in the midst of speaking we might forget the words we meant to speak, for instance water, rainbow, grief, love, filth, God, deer tick… and Father, who had become somber-minded with the onset of age, worried above all that as a family we might one day lose all sense of ourselves as a family should we forget, collectively, and in the same moment, the sacred word family.
And indeed Mother was forgetting. And indeed within the space of less than thirty seconds she had forgotten. She stared at the living thing, the quivering palpitating creature in my arms, with its soft flat shallow face, its tiny recessed eyes, its mere holes for nostrils, above all its small pursed mouth set like a manta ray’s in its shallow face, and could not, simply could not, recall the word baby; or infant; or Cory’s bastard. And shortly afterward there was a commotion of some kind outside, apparently rather close to the compound gate, and a sound of gunfire, familiar enough yet always jarring when unexpected, and Mother hurried out to investigate. And Cory’s baby continued to suck hungrily at the bottle’s frayed rubber nipple and all was safe for the time being.
But Cory, poor Cory, died a few days later: Early one morning Lona discovered her in her attic bed, her eyes opened wide and her pale mouth contorted, the bedclothes soaked in blood…and when in horror Lona drew the sheet away she saw that Cory’s breasts had been partly devoured, and her chest cavity exposed; she must have been attacked in the night by rats, and had been too weak or too terrified to call for help. Yet her baby was sleeping only a few feet away in its antique cradle, untouched, sunk to that most profound and enviable level of sleep at which organic matter seems about to pass over again into the inorganic. The household rats with their glittering amaranthine eyes and stiff hairless tails had spared it! – had missed it entirely!
Lona snatched up the baby and ran screaming downstairs for help; and so fierce was she in possession she could scarcely be forced to surrender the sleepy infant to the rest of us: Her fingers had to be pried open. In a dazed gloating voice she said, ‘It is my baby. It is Lona’s baby now.’ Father sharply rebuked her: ‘It is the family’s baby now.’
And Fifi too had a baby; or, rather, writhed and screamed in agony for a day and a night, before giving birth to a piteous undersized creature that lived for only a few minutes. Poor sister! – in the weeks that followed only our musical evenings, at which she excelled, gave her solace. If Dale tried to touch her, let alone comfort her, she shrank from him in repugnance. Nor would she allow Father or any male to come near. Sometimes she crawled into my bed and hugged me in her cold bone-thin arms. ‘What I like best,’ she whispered ‘is the black waves that splash over us, at night.’ And my heart was so swollen with emotion, I could not say no, or Oh yes.
The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories Page 163