Strange Seed

by Stephen Mark Rainey

  “Well, that’s it,” she whispered, and settled back, eyes on the narrow road ahead.

  “Yes,” Paul said.

  “That’s it,” she repeated, at a whisper.

  “Yes.” He took his foot off the accelerator to negotiate a long, slow curve. “Yes, that’s certainly it.”

  “Maybe it would have worked, Paul.”

  “Maybe.”

  “And maybe not.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter.” God, this was worse than silence.

  “No, it doesn’t matter. Not anymore.” He accelerated. The road was straight for another quarter mile.

  “Do you think they were trying to keep us there, Paul? Throwing everything out of the car like that. Do you think it was a challenge or something?” That was better—more to the point.

  “It’s possible,” he said. It can wait, Rachel. He cranked his window up against the road dust wafting into the car.

  “Well, it’s hard to say why they did it, isn’t it? I mean…we don’t know anything about them, do we, Paul?”

  “No. Nothing.” Drop it, Rachel.

  “Why did they do what they did to the house, for instance?

  “We have no proof..”

  “Who needs proof, for God’s sake? Mr. Marsh didn’t do it, and I’m certain Mr. Lumas didn’t…”

  “How can you be so certain of that?” Paul asked. He brought the car nearly to a stop; a severe right-hand turn to the west confronted him. Out of the turn, he remembered, the road narrowed, and it would require all his attention to keep the car from wandering onto the soft shoulder to the left or into the heavily wooded valley to the right. If, improbably, he met another car along that precarious half mile, he thought…

  “You don’t really believe Lumas could have vandalized the house, do you, Paul?”

  He was through the turn—the half mile was before him. He accelerated to just over twenty-five miles an hour. I really don’t see that it matters a whole hell of a lot, Rachel. What’s done is done. Lumas is dead—“

  “Yes.”

  “And it’s all behind us. As you said, let’s not look backward.”

  “Of course,” Rachel said. “But…well, it’s something that’s going to be on our minds for a long, long time.”

  “Which means we don’t have to talk about it now.”

  “You want me to shut up?”

  “No. It’s this damned road, that’s all.”

  “I don’t remember coming this way when we came up, Paul.”

  “Well, we did.” He let off on the accelerator; the car’s front right wheel lowered into a deep pothole, which threw Rachel against her door. The cat bounded from her lap and into the back of the car, tail fluffed.

  “Jesus!” Paul muttered, and touched the accelerator gently. He felt the back wheels spin for a moment, then catch on the loose, dry gravel, and the car lurched forward. A second later, the right back wheel caught the pothole and threw Rachel toward the back of her door. She reached for her seat belt. “It’s not you,” she explained, and hurriedly fastened the belt.

  “It gets worse,” Paul said.

  “I’m sure it does. All that rain during the summer.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You know, Paul, now that I think about it, the more convinced I am that it was a challenge.”

  He looked confusedly at her.

  “Throwing our stuff on the road,” she said. “They were challenging us.”

  Another pothole threw Rachel toward Paul, then violently to the right; the side of her head struck the window.

  Paul glanced at her. “You all right?”

  Rachel rubbed her ear and attempted a smile. “Yes. Is it going to be like this all the way to town, Paul?”

  Again, he looked confusedly at her; she’d ridden this road before—surely she remembered. “Just a mile or so, then we’ll hit Route 58.”

  “Oh yes. I remember now.”

  “And the road widens a couple hundred feet ahead.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “We’ll be all right, Rachel.”

  “I have no doubt,” she said. “Paul?” A brief pause. “What are we running from?” She glanced at him, saw his grip on the wheel tighten, the suggestion of a grimace appear on his face. He said nothing.

  “Paul?” She thought of repeating her question—What are we running from?—as if he hadn’t heard her. “Why are we running” she said.

  “We aren’t,” he said.

  “You don’t think so? Then what would you call it?”

  He chanced a quick look at her; she saw pleading in his eyes: Later, Rachel. Later. “I’d call it,” he began, eyes on the road again, “admitting that a situation has gone sour.”

  “You were unhappy there—at the house?”

  “Wasn’t it obvious, Rachel?”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “Yes, then. I was unhappy.”

  “No you weren’t, Paul. Not with the house, not with what you were doing, only with the fact that the boy was with us. Even the others didn’t matter that much.”

  “What are you talking about, Rachel?”

  “Only that we’ve got to be honest about this; we aren’t running from the house or from what we’d planned. We’re running…Paul!”

  He braked hard; the car came to a quick halt, its back end dangerously close to the shoulder of the road.

  “For Christ’s sake, Rachel!”

  But she had thrown her door open and was stepping hurriedly out of the car.

  “Rachel, what in the hell!” He reached for her, but she was on the road, now. She started toward the front of the car, stopped, her steady gaze fixed on something in the valley to the right.

  Paul opened his door, stepped onto the road. “Rachel?” he said over the top of the car.

  “Come here, Paul.” He saw the upper part of her left arm move slightly, as if she were pointing.

  “What is it, Rachel?”

  “Come here, please.”

  He closed his door and moved around to the front of the car. He stopped a few feet from Rachel and looked questioningly at her, though her gaze was still on something in the valley. She pointed again. He looked.

  The body lay on its stomach in a small clearing a few yards up the valley’s opposite slope, head turned to the right, legs splayed out, arms at its sides and turned inward, so the palms were up.

  “It’s one of them, isn’t it, Paul?” Resignedly, desperately.

  Paul said nothing for a moment, then moved off the road and started down the slope. He looked back: “I’ll get him. Wait here.”

  “Yes,” Rachel said. “Be careful, Paul.”

  Nearly a half hour later, Paul, breathing heavily, laid the body gently on the road in front of the car. He straightened. “She hasn’t been dead too long, Rachel. She’s still warm.”

  Rachel leaned over the dark naked body, placed her hand on the girl’s cheek. “She’s beautiful, Paul.” The word was accurate: as with the boy, Rachel knew, in life it would not have been. But now that death had settled over the girl’s features, the word was no long inadequate, no longer too restrictive.

  “Yes,” Paul whispered.

  Rachel thought fleetingly, They could have been twins, the boy and this girl.

  “Very much like the boy,” Paul said, as if to himself.

  “Yes,” Rachel said.

  “Well, we can’t leave her here.”

  “Are you sure she’s dead, Paul?”

  Yes, I’m sure, his silence told her.

  He bent over, slipped his arms behind the girl’s knees and neck, straightened with the body in his arms and said, “Clear a place in the back of the car, Rachel.”

  “What are…what are you going to do, Paul?”

  “Bury her, of course.”

  “But maybe she’s not…maybe she isn’t one of them. I mean, shouldn’t we…”

  “No. We shouldn’t. Now please do as I’ve asked. We’re going bac
k to the house.”

  “We can’t do that, Paul.”

  “Just to bury her. that’s all.”

  “But why not right here?” She pointed tremblingly. “Down there, where you found her.”

  “I have my reasons. Trust me, please.”

  “I’ll wait for you, Paul. I’ll wait right here. Don’t worry.”

  “You’re coming with me. Now clear a place in the back of the car.”

  It was clear from his tone that argument was useless. “They’ll be waiting,” Rachel said, and did as Paul had asked.

  Chapter Nineteen

  It was only minutes before Rachel realized the truth, and not from anything Paul had said; if she had listened merely to his words, she would have believed he was doing what he said he was doing, and nothing more. But he was deceiving her. More than that, he had relegated her—no, she amended, had relegated her desperation to be away from the houses—to a position of non-importance; as if, in the thirty minutes it had taken him to go into the valley, take the girl’s body into his arms and, resting often, bring it back to the car—he had somehow been impressed with a great sense of duty, a nebulous but massive feeling of obligation, and her—Rachel’s—presence while he preformed that duty, met that obligation, was somehow necessary, while her pleadings and her desperation mattered not at all.

  And so the truth hit her, though she couldn’t pinpoint how, or from what source: They were going back to the house. And they were going to stay.

  She should not have gotten into the car with him, she thought. She rejected the idea. Even if she had realized the truth sooner, it would have been impossible for her not to have gone back with him. And the reasons were simple. She loved him. Deeply. And she did trust him. It was herself she feared. Herself she could not trust. She didn’t fear the children. She feared her ignorance of them.

  And yet, though she as able to categorize her fears, knew where they originated—an ability anathema to her ideas of herself—she was frightened. More frightened than she had ever been. More frightened, she thought, than one who knows death is imminent, but realizes its source. That fear, spawned by the quick, irreversible approach of eternity, is specific. Her fear, spawned not by what she knew or thought she knew, but by the vacuum of not knowing, by the darkness of ignorance, could slowly and agonizingly tear her apart. A self-torture she would be powerless to stop, or even control.

  And she knew also that place, proximity, would exercise only a slowing action on that self-tortured. New York, though it was hundreds of miles distant, though it was a wholly different world from the world she and Paul had planned to leave, would only temporarily salve or sublimate her fears. She could not run from an enemy which drew its identity and its intentions primarily from her imagination, from her need to fill in the blanks. What had she said to Paul? “They’ll be waiting for us.” Her ignorance would have them waiting anywhere—at the house, in New York City, in her dreams—lurking in the silence and darkness that would exist wherever she might e.

  “Stop,” she said, though not as a command or in desperation, but in resignation—a tone designed to tell Paul she knew what he was doing and that she wanted to talk about it a moment without the distraction of the car lurching this way and that on the bad road.

  “Why?” Paul said.

  “Please, just stop.”

  He glanced at her; she wasn’t looking at him; she was looking at the cat lying in her lap—peacefully, now, after she had restrained it several times from leaping into the back of the car, curious about the girl’s body.

  “Rachel, we haven’t got time.”

  “Please.”

  Paul sighed and brought the car to a slow halt. He rested his forearms on the steering wheel, kept his eyes on the road. “Okay, what is it?”

  She hesitated, her unfocused gaze still on the cat. She was surprised to feel a tear slip down her cheek and onto the back of her hand. “I just want to know…why, I suppose.”

  “Why what?” Annoyance.

  “Why we’re going back. If you know.”

  He sighed again. “I told you why.” He put his hand on the gearshift. She reached out suddenly, put her hand on his, looked pleadingly at him. “You owe them nothing, Paul.”

  “Owe them? What in hell are you talking about?”

  “I know what you’re doing,” she said. “I know.”

  The abrupt anger that tightened his features made her withdraw her hand quickly. “You don’t know anything,” he told her. “You only think you do.” He put the car in gear and floored the accelerator. The car’s rear wheels spun a moment, then the left rear wheel caught on the loose gravel and the car fishtailed toward the center of the road. “Dammit!” Paul whispered, let off on the accelerator and pulled the wheel violently to the left. He lightly touched the accelerator; the car straightened and they were moving again. A ten-minute drive remained.

  *****

  Paul brought the car to a careful stop on the road in front of the house. Rachel, frowning, looked past him: It hasn’t changed, she thought. It should have begun to disintegrate, evaporate; its walls and windows should have begun falling inward or outward as soon as they left. She and Paul gave the house life, didn’t they? It took something from them and existed because of them, so they were necessary to it.

  “This is going to take some time, Rachel.”

  “Time?”

  “A couple of hours, I guess. Why don’t you wait in the house?” His slight smile was, she knew, designed to apologize for his anger ten minutes earlier.

  “Is that what you want, Paul? For me to wait in the house.”

  “It’s just a suggestion. I’m sure you wouldn’t want to…”

  “No, I wouldn’t.”

  And the children weren’t waiting. Of course. That had been a stupid, hysterical thing to say. And the house hadn’t changed, hadn’t metamorphosed.

  “Just a few hours. Maybe not even that long,” Paul said.

  “Then we’ll leave for good, Paul?”

  “Yes.” Comfortingly, reassuringly.

  “I hope so.”

  He said nothing.

  “I don’t think I could stand it here another day,” Rachel said.

  He took a deep breath. “You underestimate yourself,” he said on the exhale, then added condemningly, “And sometimes you misjudge me.” He opened his door and stepped out of the car.

  *****

  Rachel ran her hand slowly along the top of the iron stove. She studied her hand. No dust. Not even that much in the way of change. It was all as they had left it.

  Out of the corner of her eyes she noticed Mr. Higgins trotting from the living room toward the open front door. She crossed the kitchen quickly and closed the door. “No, Higgins,” she said. The cat looked wide-eyed at her and meowed once, pleadingly. “No,” she repeated. The cat turned and trotted back into the living room, then up the stairs to the second floor.

  Rachel listened for a moment. The house was quiet. Contented, of course. Contented they were back. Front outside she could hear Paul at work—the rasping scrape of the shovel being pushed into the hard earth. He must have decided to bury the girl very close to the house. For his own reasons. His private reasons.

  I don’t misjudge you, Paul. I love you. And I trust you. But I don’t know you. So how can I misjudge you?”

  It was a good question. A good thought.

  She went into the living room, settled into Paul’s wing-backed chair, and waited.

  I knew you better before we came here.

  But she did trust him. She had to: it wasn’t as if she had a choice.

  Well, she could walk, of course. She’d done a lot of walking in New York City, before her marriage to Paul. From 75th Street to Grand Central—over thirty blocks. She’d done that a dozen times or more, and often on a hot summer afternoon, hotter, she thought, in that city than anywhere else on earth. But it was better than the buses, and the subway had always been out of the question. In that respect, she supposed, she wou
ld never be a New Yorker, would never be willing to shut herself up with the crowds unless it was absolutely necessary, which it seldom had been.

  The crowds. They had been, she reflected, one of the reasons she hadn’t given Paul a harder time when he’d announced his plans to move to the house. She could have flatly refused; it might have worked, though it would have done irreparable damage to their new marriage. But the crowds. What was it about the great masses of New Yorkers that unsettled her more than other crowds did? Their aloofness? That was part of it. And their very numbers. Or, on second thought, perhaps not. Perhaps it was more their aloofness than their numbers. It was an aloofness that was as if, as New Yorkers—outside their apartment and homes—in the midst of, a part of, or, more correctly, pieces of that creature called New York City, their existence was designed to sustain it, to nourish it. Individuals did not exist in any crowd, but, in New York the crowd was the individual.

  And what of the crowds here at the house? Around it.

  She remembered a Sunday early in spring that she and Paul had left New York and had driven several hundred miles to a little park near Albany. They had supposed that because it was a cool day, and overcast, the park would be theirs alone, until they saw the cars, and the couples moving slowly over the park lawns, in and out of the woods, some with newly procured walking sticks in hand. Still, they thought, there was enough of the park that they’d be able to find a place somewhere that the people, and the sounds of the people, would be behind them.

  They walked, avoiding the paths, carefully through thickets, up and down small wooded hills, until they found themselves at a shallow odorless swamp. They paused there. Listened. Nothing. It was a good spot. Who, after all, would avoid the paths, as they had done? It was a perfect spot, free, even, of the occasional beer can or cigarette butt common to the most secluded areas of all parks.

  And then they heard the shouting of some anxious mother whose child had apparently wandered beyond her control. They looked. The woman was at the top of a high ridge behind them. “Have you seen,” the woman called, and went on to describe her son.

  There had been a lesson in that, Rachel thought. Something trite about the encroachment of civilization—that no matter how unspoiled, how wild a place might be, it was wild and unspoiled only because man decreed that it should be that way. If he should decree otherwise…