Strange Seed

by Stephen Mark Rainey

  But maybe none of it would happen this time. It had started, but Paul Griffin had a bad destructive streak in him, though he’d deny it. He wanted to put things in order, his order, which had nothing to do with what had been intended.

  His father had understood right off. And there was hope to be gained from that, because Paul was his father’s son. There was hope. For Rachel, too. Maybe more than for Paul. She understood more than she realized.

  *****

  This is turning out to be quite a long letter, isn’t it? A lot longer than I thought it would be.

  I’ve got good news. Friday, the man comes to put in the windows. Thank God! I go outside as much as I can to get away from this lousy darkness (our lights don’t help much). Paul’s getting the fields ready for next spring’s planting (he has to put in a “cover crop”), and sometimes I watch him, and other times I go on little nature walks. It’s amazing how many kinds and varieties of wildlife there are here, mostly insects and spiders of one sort or another, and birds—cardinals, hawks, etc.

  Lately, my walks have been short. That wolf (I find it hard to believe there actually is one) is once again on the prowl. Paul found several more slaughtered animals, woodchucks and such, and a fox, and early this morning he was awakened by noises outside our bedroom window. He swore he saw something moving around near the barn (about seventy-five feet away), though it was much too dark for him to be certain. Also, the weather has become amazingly unpredictable. We might have gorgeous blue skies early in the day, but by afternoon it can be sullen and overcast—as it is now. In the last week, we’ve had two vicious storms, and walking anywhere, even on the road in front of the house, can be risky.

  Believe me, I’d like to get outside more than I’ve been able to. Other than its darkness (only temporary, I hope), this house is pretty noisy. It’s an old house and noises are to be expected from old houses, I suppose, and maybe in time I’ll grow accustomed to it. But—and this is what I don’t like---the noises this house makes are even less predictable than the weather. It’s as if there’s a kind of diminutive symphony orchestra caught in the walls and floors and in the cellar, and one after the other, each member of that orchestra wheezes shortly into his brass instrument, or picks at his stringed instrument as if there’s something foreign on it, or runs his fingers delicately along his percussion instrument. And, all at once, it will seem that the whole orchestra has decided to go out for lunch, and so they put their instruments down with varying degrees of gentleness and go galumphing, tip-toeing, running out the back door.

  The noise of a bad cellist locked up in the cellar has been upstaged by the noise of a healthy rain flinging itself against the house.

  Paul will be in shortly.

  My love to all,

  Rachel

  But it wasn’t rain, Rachel saw. It was a fitful, strong wind.

  She had gone to the back door, had pushed the screen door open, and was waiting for Paul to appear around the corner of the house from the path a hundred yards to the north.

  She saw the hawk first as an indefinable speck over the western horizon, over the forest.

  A minute later, she made out the slow, easy movements of its great wings—the wind, she noted, did not appear to be affecting it.

  Then it was over the far field, where Paul had been working for the last two weeks.

  “Paul!” she called, as if the hawk were a threat to him.

  She saw, then, that the hawk was carrying something in its talons—something the size of a small cat—and that the thing was jerking about spastically, like a malfunctioning windup toy.

  Then the hawk, its great brown wings still moving slowly, easily, gracefully, was over the near field, and she could hear it screech occasionally, just on the ragged edge of discord.

  “Go away!” she whispered. Tightly. Desperately. “Go away. Please!”

  Chapter Eight

  Ten million deaths happened that day. Most of the deaths went unnoticed, except by those that killed and those that died. The forest survived because of the dead; the dead were food for the living, and the children and grandchildren of the living.

  Near the edge of the forest, a pair of burying beetles had laboriously dug a hole beneath the corpse of a young blue jay. Earlier in the day, a crow in search of food for its young had forced the blue jay from its nest, then had impaled and lost it. Now the burying beetles were busy pushing dirt over the corpse. They did their work quickly, perhaps aware that the longer the corpse remained visible, the greater the chances were that a raccoon or an otter or a fox would come along and snap it up.

  From one of the lower branches of an old and insect-hollowed pine, a great horned owl watched the burying beetles. His almost constant hunger had been satisfied. Attached to the back of his neck, by the teeth, was the rapidly putrefying head of a marsh mink. What remained of its body lay in the forest somewhere. The owl had gorged itself on it—once he had been able to separate it from the head—but the jaws of the mink were strong and its teeth were sharp, even now. In time, the head would fall away.

  His powerful back legs holding him fast to the petal of a wild tulip, an ambush bug waited patiently until a fat honeybee settled onto the flower and started the business of pollination. Though the ambush bug was only one-tenth the size of the bee, it attacked, quickly maneuvered it into the correct position, stung it between the eyes, and began its meal. The bee died five minutes later.

  The enemies of the snowshoe hare were numerous. Besides the owl and the mink, the fox and the weasel, they included the ever-present red-tailed hawk. The forest housed six hawks and one of them could always be seen circling just above the trees. The hare didn’t see the one above the clearing until it was nearly upon him, when the time for escape had long-since passed.

  Near a small pond just beyond the forest’s western perimeter, a praying mantis had hidden itself in a growth of cattails. A perfect hunter, the mantis would eat almost anything it could catch. Not far from the mantis, a hummingbird—its wings invisible in the dim, early morning light—floated from flower to flower and finally hovered near a bee balm flower, close to the mantis. The mantis moved forward stealthily, then its powerful legs shot out and quickly reduced the hummingbird to an unrecognizable mass of feathers and flesh.

  Near a cluster of sumac, a vixen fed growlingly on the carcass of a woodchuck. Her attention was diverted for a moment by a pair of blue jays flying away from the forest. An hour earlier, two crows had attacked the jays’ nest and now the gutted bodies of four blue jay chicks lay on the ground beneath. One of the bodies had already been found by a burying beetle. Another burying beetle had since joined it. Together, they would dig a hole beneath the blue jay chick then cover it so none of the other thousands of predators would find it.

  Time was not measured here.

  Life consumed it.

  And death consumed it.

  But death is only a servant to life—in all its forms, from the amoeba to the dragonfly to the owl and the hawk, from the euglena to the wild tulip to the white pine, from the lady’s slipper to the death’s cap mushroom.

  Where sun and soil and water combine, there is life.

  Chapter Nine

  At first, Rachel took little notice of the footprints. After all, the evidence of someone’s bare feet in the newly soaked earth wasn’t that unusual. Kids enjoyed running around with no shoes on, especially after a heavy rain.

  She smiled wistfully at the footprints, set her basket of just-washed clothes on the ground in front of the makeshift clothesline, and glanced around at the steep flight of steps leading to the back door of the house. She looked in the opposite direction. She could dimly see Paul in the far field, the one closest to the forest. When he finished his work, she’d tell him about her near-tumble down the steps; dry rot had made using them precarious, at best. She hoped that he and Mr. Lumas could fix them soon.

  She fished a pair of Paul’s long johns from the wicker basket, hung them from the line, and laughed as they
flapped crazily in a sudden brisk wind.

  This isn’t New York City, is it? She stopped laughing abruptly, stood on tiptoes, looked across the fields at Paul: The distance was too great, she realized, and the wind too strong—he’d never hear her. She settled back on her heels. This isn’t New York City, is it? Paul had told her that during their first night at the house.

  She turned. Where had she been, however temporarily? Back in New York, where children were as common a sight as lampposts? Where had she been for those few moments after she’d noticed the footprints?

  She studied the bare earth around her. There were no other footprints, only hers and…the child’s? Yes, without a doubt, she reasoned, a child had made them. They were far smaller than her own footprints, and they were not nearly as deep, but mere soft impressions in the earth, the impression of the heel noticeably shallower than the impression made by the toes. The child had been running, or moving stealthily toward the house.

  She bent over and ran her fingers around the perimeter of one of the footprints. The child, she thought, had paused here—the footprint was the same depth all around. She shifted her position slightly. The other print, she saw, was the same.

  She straightened, pursed her lips. What, she asked herself, was this stupid game she’d involved herself in? The fact was that someone had been prowling around the house. Paul had to be told immediately.

  She studied the footprints once more—it seemed important to be able to tell Paul what route the intruder had taken—turned and started for the path that ran along the northern edge of the fields. She stopped and gazed confusedly at the cellar door. Had she seen correctly. Did the small footprints end there—at the door? It would mean that the intruder had gotten into the cellar, but that was impossible—the door was closed and its simple lifting latch was not operable from the inside. Once in the cellar, you had to leave the door open or be trapped behind it. And most importantly, getting the snug-fitting door open even a foot or so—enough to squeeze through and into the cellar—was quite a noisy affair, requiring a great deal of strength. If someone had opened it, Rachel knew, she’d have heard the metallic shriek of the hinges, the whine of the door moving against its frame. No, the intruder had merely approached the door, tried it unsuccessfully, then had moved north along the cellar wall. His feet would leave no marks in the weeds there.

  She turned her head suddenly and cupped her hands to her mouth. “Paul!” she called. “Paul!” she repeated, feeling a twinge in her throat. Amazed, relieved, she saw that Paul was looking her way. Several moments later, he had crossed through the field and was loping down the path to the house.

  He put his ear to the cellar door. Rachel, just behind him, said, “No one could have gotten in there, Paul. I would have heard—“

  “Quiet!” he snapped. His sudden impatience took Rachel by surprise. She stepped back.

  “There’s no one in there!” she protested.

  Paul straightened, firmly grasped the door’s wooden handle with his right hand, and opened the latch with his left. He pulled experimentally on the handle. “Jesus,” he muttered, “it’s going to take two men to get this goddamned door open. It’s old wood, the rain must have warped it.” He turned his head and looked inquiringly at Rachel. “Have you seen Hank around?” he asked.

  Rachel shook her head. “No, I haven’t,” she answered. “But what does it matter, Paul? There’s no one—“

  “Yes, there is,” Paul cut in. “I can hear him. The poor bastard probably got caught in the rain…” He put his ear to the door again. “Hello,” he said. “You in the cellar: are you all right? Can you hear me?” He waited a moment and went on, his voice louder, “Hello, can you hear me?” Another pause. “Jesus,” he whispered. “Rachel, give me a hand here.”

  Rachel stepped up to the door and put her hands above Paul’s. Several seconds later, they pulled the door free of its frame. “Okay,” Paul said. “I can get it now.” Rachel hesitated a moment, then moved to the right, where she could peer into the inch-wide opening between the door and the frame. “I can’t see anything,” she said, and paused. “But I think I can hear him.”

  The piercing noise of the hinges straining against themselves followed and Paul had the door open. He let his hands fall to his sides and breathed heavily. “Going to have to…get that damned thing…fixed,” he said.

  *****

  Rachel hurried about the kitchen. “Have you seen the coffee, Paul?” she asked, threw a cupboard door shut and opened another.

  Paul slowly seated himself at the kitchen table. “I was sure,” he mumbled. “I heard him. I heard him!”

  “Here it is,” Rachel said.

  “And those footprints,” Paul went on. “He had to have been in there. Where else could he have been?”

  Rachel took the bag of coffee beans to the grinder. “Paul,” she said, her tone vaguely condescending, “you searched everywhere, didn’t you?” She waited, though it had been a rhetorical question. Paul nodded once. “Well then,” she continued, “the simple fact is—there was no one there, as I said in the first place.” She smiled as if to indicate the discussion was at an end.

  “It was dark,” Paul reminded her. “You couldn’t tell just how dark it was from outside. Hell, I bumped into that chest of drawers we put down there, it was so dark. The lantern didn’t help much. I could have overlooked—“

  “How could anyone hide down there?” Rachel interrupted. “Could you hide down there?”

  “No. But I’m not a child.”

  “Can we be sure it was a child?”

  “It was you that suggested it originally. And, from the size of those footprints, I don’t see how it could have been—“

  “I was wrong,” Rachel said. “Very simple. I was wrong.”

  “No, you weren’t. And when Hank shows up, he and I are gong to have another look. Unless you’ve overcome your fears of… Never mind. If there is someone down there, Hank and I will find him.”

  “This morning,” Rachel began, at a whisper, “he said he wasn’t feeling well. He’s probably in his cabin.”

  “Not feeling well? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Rachel shrugged. “I don’t know. It slipped my mind, I guess.”

  “Slipped your mind?” He waited a second for the explanation he knew was not forthcoming “Well,” he went on, “did he say what was wrong?”

  “No, not really. Something about stomach pains?”

  “Stomach pains?”

  “Yes, nothing serious, he said.” She paused. “It’s probably that awful diet of his—“

  “There’s nothing wrong with his diet,” Paul interrupted. “At least he’s getting all the protein he needs.” He stood, crossed the room and opened the back door. “I’ll be back in an hour or so. Have dinner ready, okay?”

  “Sure,” Rachel said, and closed the door behind him.

  *****

  I’ve got a few minutes, so I’ll add this P.S.

  In case you were worried about it—the man’s coming to put the windows in on Monday (it’s Friday as I write). And that will be the end of that experience, thank God. It’s going to cost a lot, of course, but that can’t be helped, apparently (though I wish the house had been insured).

  Also, we’ve got the car back, at last. Actually, we’ve had it back for a week or so, though we haven’t used it much. There’s a theatre in town and I told myself when we first got here that we’d be going out a lot, that we’d be constantly bored. Hasn’t happened. We’ve been working too hard getting this place in shape. Little things, now—like the back porch steps, and the screens around the front porch, and stripping a coat of ugly brown paint off the floor in here (the living room) to get at the beautiful pine floors beneath. Paul has assigned many of these small jobs to me. Not that I mind. And besides, I’ve found that when I’m not working, I don’t get bored. Many people would call it boredom, I suppose, but

  Damn I’ll be glad when the windows are in. I just thought I saw… And now I
hear…

  For several minutes, Rachel stared silently at the child. He was sitting on his heels between the refrigerator and the west wall of the kitchen, his torso forward so his chest touched his knees: he was, she realized with a little shudder, trying to hide from her even as she watched—his little sidestepping motions were a pathetic attempt to flow into the wall, as if he believed his small body could be made porous, or as if he got near enough to the wall, his color could change to its color. And his shallow breathing, she knew, was an effort; every once in a while, a low-pitched humming sound came from him, as if he were on the verge of snoring. It was obvious that his body wanted more air than he was allowing it.

  As she watched him, she wanted desperately to say Look at me, please! but couldn’t. It would frighten him, she knew—it would disappoint him, spoil his game if, by speaking, she gave him proof that she knew he was in the house.

  She reconsidered: It was not a game he was playing. Impossibly, he feared for his life, feared her, felt trapped or suddenly helpless. She couldn’t say why these thoughts came to her. Regardless of the dim light, she could see that his face was expressionless. Someone seeing a photograph of him would believe he was merely resting, or waiting, or that he was in the middle of a kind of joyless game of leapfrog.

  You should have some clothes on, she wanted to say, but felt, as soon as the words came to her, that it would be a strangely inappropriate remark. He had lived most, perhaps all, of his nine or ten years just as he was now: It was not his dark skin that told her that—but something else. His manner, perhaps, or his quite apparent lack of shame. She thought about that: no, it was not apparent, she concluded. None of what she’d so quickly assumed about him was apparent—only imaginative guesses. He is some wild creature that has gotten into the house, and the only thing human about him is his form. That is what had come to her the second she’d seen him, she told herself. And, of course, it was wrong.