Cook made a low, unintelligible reply.
‘Purposely!’ his aunt exclaimed aghast. ‘Why, Bertha, I’m ashamed of you. He’s only a child!’
Pruitt drew his lips into a thin line. If she told about the nut shells, he’d fix her. He scrambled up the steps and held open the screen door.
But cook didn’t tell about the nut shells. She was too busy gritting her teeth against the tearing pull in her back.
‘Can I help?’ Pruitt let a troubled catch into his voice. His aunt patted his cheek. ‘We can manage, dear, thank you.’
Miss Bittner smiled on him benevolently. ‘You can take care of me while they’re gone,’ she said. ‘We’ll have a picnic supper. Won’t that be fun?’
‘Yes, Miss Bittner. Oodles of fun.’
He watched the two women assist their injured companion down the steps with Harry collaborating. He kissed his fingers to his aunt as the car drove away and linked his arm through Miss Bittner’s. He gazed cherubically up at her.
‘You are a filthy mess,’ he said caressingly, ‘and I hate your guts.’
Miss Bittner beamed on him. It wasn’t often that Pruitt was openly loving to her. ‘I’m sorry, Pruitt, but I can’t hear very well now, you know. Perhaps you’d like me to read to you for a while.’
Pruitt shook his head. ‘I’ll just play,’ he said loudly and distinctly and then, softly, ‘you liverless old hyena.’
‘Play?’ said Miss Bittner.
Pruitt nodded.
‘All right, darling. But don’t go far. It’ll be supper time soon.’
‘Yes, Miss Bittner.’ He ran lightly down the steps. ‘Good-bye,’ he called, ‘you homely, dear, old hag, you.’
‘Good-bye,’ said Miss Bittner, nodding and smiling.
Pruitt placed the bread board on the pegs and arranged the candles in a semicircle. One of them refused to stay vertical. It had been stepped on.
Pruitt examined it angrily. You’d think she’d be particular with other people’s property. The snivelling fool. He’d fix her. He ate the candy rosette with relish and, after it was completely devoured, chewed up the candle, spitting out the wick when it had reached a sufficiently malleable state. He delved into his shirt front and extracted the coal tar fly which had developed a decided list to starboard. He compressed it into shape, reanchored a wobbly pipestem leg, and established the figure in the centre of the bread board.
He folded his arms and began to rock back and forth, the swirling candles spreading his shadow behind him like a thick, dark cloak.
‘Hahneeweemahneemo. O Idol of the Flies, hear, hear, O hear, come close and hear. Miss Bittner scrooched one of your candles. So send me lots of flies, lots and lots of flies, millions, trillions, skillions of flies. Quadrillions and skintillions. Make them also no-colour so’s I can mix them up in soup and things without them showing much. Black ones show. Send me pale ones that don’t buzz and have feelers. Here me, hear me, hear me, O Idol of the Flies, come close and hear!’
Pruitt chewed his candle and contemplated. His face lighted, as he was struck with a brilliant thought. ‘And make a thinking-time-dream-thing hold still so’s I can get it. So’s I’ll know. I guess that’s all. Hahneeweemahneemo, O Idol of the Flies, you are free to GO!’
As he had done earlier in the afternoon, Pruitt became quiescent. His eyes, catlike, were set and staring, staring, staring, staring fixedly at nothing at all.
He didn’t look excited. He looked like a small boy engaged in some innocuous small-boyish pursuit. But he was excited. Excitement coursed through his veins and rang in his ears. The pit of his stomach was cold with it and the palms of his hands were as moist as the inside of his mouth was dry.
This was the way he felt when he knew his father and mother were going to die. He had known it with a sort of clear, glittering lucidity – standing there in the white Bermuda sunlight, waving good-bye to them. He had seen the plumy feather of his mother’s hat, the sprigged organdie dress, his father’s pointed moustache and his slender, artist’s hands grasping the driving reins. He had seen the gleaming harness, the high-spirited shake of the horse’s head, its stamping foot. His father wouldn’t have a horse that wasn’t high-spirited. Ginger had been its name. He had seen the bobbing fringe on the carriage top and the pin in the right rear wheel – the pin that he had diligently and with patient perseverance worked loose with the screwdriver out of his toy tool chest. He had seen them roll away, down the drive, out through the wrought-iron gates. He had wondered if they would turn over when they rounded the bend and what sort of a crash they would make. They had turned over but he hadn’t heard the crash. He had been in the house eating the icing off the cake.
But he had known they were going to die. The knowledge had been almost more than he could control, as even now it was hard to govern the knowledge, the certainty, that he was going to snare a dream-thing.
He knew it. He knew it. He knew it. With every wire-taut nerve in his body he knew it.
Here came one. Streaking through his mind, leaving a string of phosphorescent bubbles in its wake and the bubbles rose and burst and there were dark, bloody smears where they had been. Another – shooting itself along with its tail – its greasy sides ashine. Another – and another – and another – and then a seething whirlpool of them. There had never been so many. Spiny, pulpy, slick and cell-like, some with feelers like catfish, some with white, gaping mouths and foreshortened embryo arms. Their contortions clogged his thoughts with weeping. But there was one down in the black, not-able-to-get-to part of his mind that watched him. It knew what he wanted. And it was blind. But it was watching him through its blindness. It was coming. Wriggling closer, bringing the black, not-able-to-get-to part with it and where it passed the others sank away and his mind was wild with depraved weeping. Its nose holes went in and out, in and out, in and out, like something he had known long ago in some past, mysterious other life, and it whimpered as it came and whispered things to him. Disconnected things that swelled his heart and ran like juice along the cracks in his skull. In a moment it would be quite near, in a moment he would know.
‘Pruitt! Pruitt!’
The words were drops of honey.
‘Pruitt! Pruitt!’ Pollen words, nectarious, sprinkled with flower dust. The dream-thing waited. It did not – like the rest – dart away afrighted.
‘Pruitt! Pruitt!’ The voice came from outside himself. From far away and down, from some incredible depth like the place in his mind where They had a nest – only it was distant – and deep. Quite deep. So hot and deep.
With an immense effort Pruitt blinked.
‘Look at me.’ The voice was dulcet and alluring.
Again Pruitt blinked, and as his wits ebbed in like a sluggish tide bringing the watching dream-thing with it, he saw a man.
He stood tall and commanding and from chin to toe he was wrapped in a flowing cape and, in the flickering candlelight, the cape had the exact outlines of Pruitt’s shadow, and in and about the cape swam the watching dream-thing, as if it were at home. Above the cloak the man’s face was a grinning mask and through the mouth, the nostrils and the slits of eyes poured a reddish translucent light. A glow. Like that of a Hallowe’en pumpkin head, only intensified a thousandfold.
‘Pruitt. Look, Pruitt.’ The folds of the cloak lifted and fell as if an invisible arm had gestured. Pruitt followed the gesture hypnotically. His neck twisted round, slowly, slowly, until his gaze encompassed a rain of insects. A living curtain of them. A shimmering and noiseless cascade of colourless flies, gauzy-winged, long-bodied.
‘Flies, Pruitt. Millions of flies.’
Pruitt once more rotated his neck until he confronted the stranger. The blind dream-thing giggled at him and swam into a pleat of darkness.
‘Who – are – you?’ The words were thick and sweet on Pruitt’s tongue like other words he half remembered speaking a thousand years ago on some dim plane in some hazy twilight world.
‘My name is Asmodeus, Pruitt. Asmod
eus. Isn’t it a beautiful name?’
‘Yes.’
‘Say it, Pruitt.’
‘Asmodeus.’
‘Again.’
‘Asmodeus.’
‘Again, Pruitt.’
‘Asmodeus.’
‘What do you see in my cloak?’
‘A dream-thought.’
‘And what is it doing?’
‘It is gibbering at me.’
‘Why?’
‘Because your cloak has the power of darkness and I may not enter until …’
‘Until what, Pruitt?’
‘Until I look into your eyes and see …’
‘See what, Pruitt?’
‘What is written therein.’
‘And what is written therein? Look into my eyes. Look long and well. What is written therein?’
‘It is written what I wish to know. It is written …’
‘What is written, Pruitt?’
‘It is written of the limitless, the eternal, the foreverness of the what is and was ordained to ever be, unceasingly beyond the ends of Time for –’
‘For whom, Pruitt?’
The boy wrenched his eyes away. ‘No,’ he said, and with rising crescendo, ‘no, no, no, no, no!’ He slithered backwards across the floor, pushing with his hand, shoving with his heels, his face contorted with terror. ‘No,’ he babbled, ‘no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no!’
‘Yes, Pruitt. For whom?’
The boy reached the door and lurched to his feet, his jaw flaccid, his eyes starting in their sockets. He turned and fled up the path, heedless of the pelting flies that fastened themselves to his clothes and tangled in his hair, and touched his flesh like ghostly, clinging fingers, and scrunched beneath his feet as he ran on – his breath breaking from his lungs in sobbing gasps.
‘Miss Bittner … help … Miss Bittner … Aunt … Harry … help –’
At the bend waiting for him stood the figure he had left behind in the bathhouse.
‘For whom, Pruitt?’
‘No, no, no!’
‘For whom, Pruitt?’
‘No, oh no, no!’
‘For whom, Pruitt?’
‘For the DAMNED,’ the boy shrieked and wheeling, he ran back the way he had come, the flies sticking to his skin, mashing, as he tried frantically to rid himself of them, as on he sped.
The man behind him began to chant. High, shrill, and mocking, and the dream-thought took it up, and the earth, and the trees, and the sky that dripped flies, and the pilings of the pier clustered with their pulsating bodies, and the water, patched as far as eye could see with clotted islands of flies, flies, flies. And from his own throat came laughter, crazed and wanton, unrestrained and terrible, peal upon peal of hellish laughter that would not stop. Even as his legs would not stop when they reached the end of the pier.
A red-breasted robin – a fly in its beak – watched the widening ripples. A garden lizard scampered over a tuft of grass and joined company with a toad at the water’s edge, as if to lend their joint moral support to the turtle who slid off the bank and with jerky motions of its striped legs went down to investigate the thing that was entwined so securely in a fishing net there on the sandy bottom by the pier.
Miss Bittner idly flipped through a text book on derivatives. The text book was a relic of bygone days and the pages were studded with pressed wild flowers brittle with age. With a fingernail she loosened a tissue-thin four-leaf clover. It had left its yellow-green aura on the printed text.
‘Beelzebub,’ Miss Bittner read absently, ‘stems from the Hebraic. Beel, meaning idol, zeebub meaning flies: Synonyms, lesser known, not in common usage, are: Appolyon, Abbadon, Asmodeus …’ but Miss Bittner’s attention flagged. She closed the book, yawned and wondered lazily where Pruitt was.
She went to the window and immediately drew back with revulsion. Green Bay flies. Heavens, they were all over everything. The horrid creatures. Funny how they blew in off the water. She recalled last year, when she had been with the Braithwaites in Michigan, they had come – and in such multitudes – that the townspeople had had to shovel them off the streets. Actually shovel. She had been ill for three whole days thereafter.
She hoped Pruitt wouldn’t be dismayed by them. She must guard against showing her own helpless panic as she had done at teatime. Children placed such implicit faith in the invincibility of their elders.
Dear Pruitt, he had been so charming to her today.
Dear, little Pruitt.
Thus I Refute Beelzy
John Collier
‘There goes the tea bell,’ said Mrs Carter. ‘I hope Simon hears it.’
They looked out from the window of the drawing-room. The long garden, agreeably neglected, ended in a waste plot. Here a little summer-house was passing close by beauty on its way to complete decay. This was Simon’s retreat. It was almost completely screened by the tangled branches of the apple tree and the pear tree, planted too close together, as they always are in the suburbs. They caught a glimpse of him now and then, as he strutted up and down, mouthing and gesticulating all the solemn mumbo-jumbo of small boys who spend long afternoons at the forgotten ends of long gardens.
‘There he is, bless him!’ said Betty.
‘Playing his game,’ said Mrs Carter. ‘He won’t play with the other children any more. And if I go down there – the temper! And comes in tired out!’
‘He doesn’t have his sleep in the afternoons?’ asked Betty.
‘You know what Big Simon’s ideas are,’ said Mrs Carter. ‘“Let him choose for himself,” he says. That’s what he chooses, and he comes in as white as a sheet.’
‘Look! He’s heard the bell,’ said Betty. The expression was justified, though the bell had ceased ringing a full minute ago. Small Simon stopped in his parade exactly as if its tinny dingle had at that moment reached his ear. They watched him perform certain ritual sweeps and scratchings with his little stick, and come lagging over the hot and flaggy grass towards the house.
Mrs Carter led the way down to the play-room, or garden-room, which was also the tea-room for hot days. It had been the huge scullery of this tall Georgian house. Now the walls were cream-washed, there was coarse blue net in the windows, canvas-covered armchairs on the stone floor, and a reproduction of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers over the mantelpiece.
Small Simon came drifting in, and accorded a perfunctory greeting. His face was an almost perfect triangle, pointed at the chin, and he was paler than he should have been. ‘The little elf-child!’ cried Betty.
Simon looked at her. ‘No,’ said he.
At that moment the door opened, and Mr Carter came in, rubbing his hands. He was a dentist, and washed them before and after everything he did. ‘You!’ said his wife. ‘Home already!’
‘Not unwelcome, I hope,’ said Mr Carter, nodding to Betty. ‘Two people cancelled their appointments; I decided to come home. I said, I hope I am not unwelcome.’
‘Silly!’ said his wife. ‘Of course not.’
‘Small Simon seems doubtful,’ continued Mr Carter. ‘Small Simon, are you sorry to see me at tea with you?’
‘No, Daddy.’
‘No, what?’
‘No, Big Simon.’
‘That’s right. Big Simon and Small Simon. That sounds more like friends, doesn’t it? At one time little boys had to call their father “sir.” If they forgot – a good spanking. On the bottom, Small Simon! On the bottom!’ said Mr Carter, washing his hands once more with his invisible soap and water.
The little boy turned crimson with shame or rage.
‘But now, you see,’ said Betty, to help, ‘you can call your father whatever you like.’
‘And what,’ asked Mr Carter, ‘has Small Simon been doing this afternoon? While Big Simon has been at work.’
‘Nothing,’ muttered his son.
‘Then you have been bored,’ said Mr Carter. ‘Learn from experience, Small Simon. Tomorrow, do something amusing, and you will not be bored. I want him to
learn from experience, Betty. That is my way, the new way.’
‘I have learned,’ said the boy, speaking like an old, tired man, as little boys so often do.
‘It would hardly seem so,’ said Mr Carter, ‘if you sit on your behind all the afternoon, doing nothing. Had my father caught me doing nothing, I should not have sat very comfortably.’
‘He played,’ said Mrs Carter.
‘A bit,’ said the boy, shifting on his chair.
‘Too much,’ said Mrs Carter. ‘He comes in all nervy and dazed. He ought to have his rest.’
‘He is six,’ said her husband. ‘He is a reasonable being. He must choose for himself. But what game is this, Small Simon, that is worth getting nervy and dazed over? There are very few games as good as all that.’
‘It’s nothing,’ said the boy.
‘Oh come,’ said his father. ‘We are friends, are we not? You can tell me. I was a Small Simon once, just like you, and played the same games you play. Of course there were no aeroplanes in those days. With whom do you play this fine game? Come on, we must all answer civil questions, or the world would never go round. With whom do you play?’
‘Mr Beelzy,’ said the boy, unable to resist.
‘Mr Beelzy?’ said his father, raising his eyebrows inquiringly at his wife.
‘It’s a game he makes up,’ said she.
‘Not makes up!’ cried the boy. ‘Fool!’
‘That is telling stories,’ said his mother. ‘And rude as well. We had better talk of something different.’
‘No wonder he is rude,’ said Mr Carter, ‘if you say he tells lies, and then insist on changing the subject. He tells you his fantasy: you implant a guilt feeling. What can you expect? A defence mechanism. Then you get a real lie.’
‘Like in These Three,’ said Betty. ‘Only different, of course. She was an unblushing little liar.’
‘I would have made her blush,’ said Mr Carter, ‘in the proper part of her anatomy. But Small Simon is in the fantasy stage. Are you, not, Small Simon? You just make things up.’
Cries of Terror Page 12
