Dark Benediction Read online

  Lucey’s eyes kept flickering toward the rain-soaked scrub, and she hugged her huge arms, and shivered. “Silliest I ever!” she snorted. “He was just a man, and you never even seed him.”

  She went inside and got the shotgun, and sat down at the table to clean it, after lighting a smoky oil lamp on the wall.

  “Why are you cleaning that gun, Mama?”

  “Wildcat around the chicken yard last night!” she muttered. “Tonight I’m gonna watch.”

  Doodie stared at her with narrowed eyes, and the look on his face started her shivering again. Sometimes he did seem not-quite-human, a shape witched or haunted wherein a silent cat prowled by itself and watched, through human eyes.

  How could she believe the wild words of a child subject to fits, a child whose story was like those told by witching women and herb healers? A thing that came from the stars, a thing that could come in the guise of a man and talk, make love, eat, and laugh, a thing that wanted a half-human son to which it could speak from afar.

  How could she believe in a thing that was like a spy sent into the city before the army came, a thing that could make her conceive when it wasn’t even human? It was wilder than any of the stories they told in the deep swamps, and Lucey was a good Christian now.

  Still, when Doodie fell asleep, she took the gun and went out to wait for the wildcat that had been disturbing the chickens. It wasn’t unchristian to believe in wildcats, not even tonight.

  Doodie’s father had been just a man, a trifiin’ man. True, she couldn’t remember him very clearly, because she had been drinking corn squeezin’s with Jacob Fleeter before the stranger came. She had been all giggly, and he had been all shimmery, and she couldn’t remember a word he’d said.

  “Lord forgive me,” she breathed as she left the house.

  The wet grass dragged about her legs as she crossed the yard and traversed a clearing toward an island of palmetto scrub from which she could cover both the house and the chickenyard.

  The clouds had broken, and stars shone brightly, but there was no moon. Lucey moved by instinct, knowing each inch of land for half a mile around the shack.

  She sat on a wet and rotting log in the edge of the palmetto thicket, laid the shotgun across her lap, stuffed a corncob pipe with tobacco from Deevey’s field, and sat smoking in the blackness while whippoorwills mourned over the land, and an occasional owl hooted from the swamp. The air was cool and clean after the rain, and only a few night birds flitted in the brush while crickets chirped in the distance and tree frogs spoke mysteriously.

  “AAAaaaAAaaarrrwww… Na!”

  The cry was low and piercing. Was it Doodie, having another spasm—or only a dream? She half-arose, then paused, listening. There were a few more whimpers, then silence. A dream, she decided, and settled back to wait. There was nothing she could do for Doodle, not until the State Healthmobile came through again, and examined him for “catchin’” ailments. If they found he wasn’t right in the mind, they might take him away.

  The glowing ember in the pipe was hypnotic—the only thing to be clearly seen except the stars. She stared at the stars, wondering about their names, until they began to crawl before her eyes. Then she looked at the ember in the pipe again, brightening and dimming with each breath, acquiring a lacy crust of ashes, growing sleepy in the bowl and sinking deeper, deeper, while the whippoorwills pierced the night with melancholy.

  …Na na naaaAAAAhhhaaa

  When the cries woke her, she knew she had slept for some time. Faint moonlight seeped through the pine branches from the east, and there was a light mist over the land. The air had chilled, and she shivered as she arose to stretch, propping the gun across the rotten log. She waited for Doodie’s cries to cease.

  The cries continued, unabated.

  Stiffening with sudden apprehension, she started hack toward the shack. Then she saw it—a faint violet glow through the trees to the north, just past the corner of the hen house! She stopped again, tense with fright. Doodie’s cries were becoming meaningful.

  “Pa! I can’t stand it any closer! Naa, naaa! I can’t think, I can’t think at all. No, please….”

  Reflexively, Lucey started to bolt for the house, but checked herself in time. No lamp burned in the window. She picked up the shotgun and a pebble. After a nervous pause, she tossed the pebble at the porch.

  It bounced from the wall with a loud crack, and she slunk low into shadows. Doodie’s cries continued without pause. A minute passed, and no one emerged from the house.

  A sudden metallic sound, like the opening of a metal door, came from the direction of the violet light. Quickly she stepped over the log and pressed back into the scrub thicket. Shaking with fear, she waited in the palmettos, crouching in the moonlight among the spiny fronds, and lifting her head occasionally to peer toward the violet light.

  She saw nothing for a time, and then, gradually the moonlight seemed to dim. She glanced upward. A tenuous shadow, like smoke, had begun to obscure the face of the moon, a translucent blur like the thinnest cloud.

  At first, she dismissed it as a cloud. But it writhed within itself, curled and crawled, not dispersing, but seeming to swim. Smoke from the violet light? She watched it with wide, upturned eyes.

  Despite its volatile shape, it clung together as a single entity as smoke would never have done. She could still see it faintly after it had cleared the lunar disk, scintillating in the moon-glow.

  It swam like an airborne jellyfish. A cluster of silver threads it seemed, tangled in a cloud of filaments—or a giant mass of dandelion fluff. It leaked out misty pseudo-pods, then drew them back as it pulled itself through the air. Weightless as chick-down, huge as a barn, it flew—and drifted from the direction of the sphere in a semi-circle, as if inspecting the land, at times moving against the wind.

  It was coming closer to the house.

  It moved with purpose, and therefore was alive. This Lucey knew. It moved with its millions of spun threads, finer than a spider’s web, the patterns as ordered as a neural array.

  It contracted suddenly and began to settle toward the house. Glittering opaquely, blotting out half the cabin, it kept contracting and drawing itself in, becoming denser until it fell in the yard with a blinding flash of incandescent light.

  Lucey’s flesh crawled. Her hands trembled on the gun, her breath came in shallow gasps.

  Before her eyes it was changing into a manlike thing. Frozen, she waited, thinking swiftly. Could it be that Doodie was right?

  Could it be?—

  Doodle was still whimpering in the house, weary now, as he always was when the spasm had spent itself. But the words still came, words addressed to his father.

  The thing in the yard was assuming the shape of a man—and Lucey knew who the man would be.

  She reared up quickly in the palmettos, like an enraged, hulking river animal breaking to the surface. She came up shotgun-in-hand and bellowed across the clearing. “Hey theah! You triflin’ skunk! Look at me!”

  Still groping for human shape, the creature froze.

  “Run off an’ leave me with child!” Lucey shouted. “And no way to pay his keep!”

  The creature kept coming toward her, and the pulsing grew stronger.

  “Don’t come any nearer, you hear?”

  When it kept coming, Lucey grunted in a gathering rage and charged out of the palmettos to meet it, shotgun raised, screaming insults. The thing wobbled to a stop, its face a shapeless blob with black shadows for eyes.

  She brought the gun to her shoulder and fired both barrels at once.

  The thing tumbled to the ground. Crackling arcs danced about it, and a smell of ozone came on the breeze. For one hideous moment it was lighted by a glow from within. Then the glow died, and it began to expand. It grew erratically, and the moonlight danced in silvery filaments about it. A blob of its substance broke loose from the rest, and windborne, sailed across the clearing and dashed itself to dust in the palmettos.

  A sudden gust took the re
st of it, rolling it away in the grass, gauzy shreds tearing loose from the mass. The gust blew it against the trunk of a pine. It lodged there briefly, quivering in the breeze and shimmering palely under the moon. Then it broke into dust that scattered eastward across the land.

  “Praised be the Lord,” breathed Lucey, beginning to cry.

  A high whining sound pierced the night, from the direction of the violet light. She whirled to stare. The light grew brighter. Then the whine abruptly ceased. A luminescent sphere, glowing with violet haze, moved upward from the pines. It paused, then in stately majesty continued the ascent, gathering speed until it became a ghostly chariot that dwindled. Up, up, up toward thegleaming stars. She watched it until it vanished from sight.

  Then she straightened her shoulders, and glowered toward the dust traces that blew eastward over the scrub.

  “Ain’t nothing worse than a triflin’ man,” she philosophized. “If he’s human, or if he’s not.”

  Wearily she returned to the cabin. Doodle was sleeping peacefully. Smiling, she tucked him in, and went to bed. There was corn to hoe, come dawn.

  Report: Servopilot recon six, to fleet. Missionman caught in transition phase by native organism, and devastated, thus destroying liaison with native analog. Suggest delay of invasion plans. Unpredictability factors associated with mothers of genetic analogs. Withdraw contacts.

  Servo Six.

  1965 (published in 1955 as The Triflin’ Man)

  THE WILL

  The will of a child. A child who played in the sun and ran over the meadow to chase with his dog among the trees beyond the hedge, and knew the fierce passions of childhood. A child whose logic cut corners and sought shortest distances, and found them. A child who made shining life in my house.

  Red blood count low, wildly fluctuating… Chronic fatigue, loss of weight, general lethargy of function… Noticeable pallor and muscular atrophy… the first symptoms.

  That was eight months ago.

  Last summer, the specialists conferred over him. When they had finished, I went to Doc Jules’ office—alone, because I was afraid it was going to be bad, and Cleo couldn’t take it. He gave it to me straight.

  “We can’t cure him, Rod. We can only treat symptoms—and hope the research labs come through. I’m sorry.”

  “He’ll die?”

  “Unless the labs get an answer.”

  “How long?”

  “Months.” He gave it to me bluntly—maybe because he thought I was hard enough to take it, and maybe because he knew I was only Kenny’s foster father, as if blood-kinship would have made it any worse.

  “Thanks for letting me know,” I said, and got my hat. I would have to tell Cleo, somehow. It was going to be tough. I left the building and went out to buy a paper.

  A magazine on the science rack caught my eye. It had an article entitled Carcinogenesis and Carbon-14 and there was a mention of leukemia in the blurb. I bought it along with the paper, and went over to the park to read. Anything to keep from carrying the news to Cleo.

  The research article made things worse. They were still doing things to rats and cosmic rays, and the word “cure” wasn’t mentioned once. I dropped the magazine on the grass and glanced at the front page. A small headline toward the bottom of the page said: COMMUNITY PRAYS THREE DAYS FOR DYING CHILD. Same old sob-stuff—publicity causes country to focus on some luckless incurable, and deluge the family with sympathy, advice, money, and sincere and ardent pleas for divine intervention.

  I wondered if it would be like that for Kenny—and instinctively I shuddered.

  I took a train out to the suburbs, picked up the car, and drove home before twilight. I parked in front, because Cleo was out in back, taking down clothes from the line. The blinds were down in the living room, and the lantern-jawed visage of Captain Chronos looked out sternly from the television screen. The Captain carried an LTR (local-time-reversal) gun at the ready, and peered warily from side to side through an oval hole in the title film. Kenny’s usual early-evening fodder.

  “Travel through the centuries with the master of the clock!” the announcer was chanting.

  “Hi, kid,” I said to the hunched-up figure who sat before the set, worshiping his hero.

  “Sssshhhhhhhh!” He glanced at me irritably, then transferred his individual attention back to the title film.

  “Sorry,” I muttered. “Didn’t know you listened to the opening spiel. It’s always the same.”

  He squirmed, indicating that he wanted me to scram—to leave him to his own devices.

  I scrammed to the library, but the excited chant of the audio was still with me. “…Captain Chronos, Custodian of Time, Defender of the Temporal Passes, Champion of the Temporal Guard. Fly with Captain Chronos in his time-ship Century as he battles against those evil forces who would—”

  I shut the door for a little quiet, then went to the encyclopedia shelf and took down “LAC-MOE.” An envelope fell out of the heavy volume, and I picked it up. Kenny’s.

  He had scrawled “Lebanon, do not open until 1964; value in 1954: 38¢,” on the face. I knew what was inside without holding it up to the light: stamps. Kenny’s idea of buried treasure; when he had more than one stamp of an issue in his collection, he’d stash the duplicate away somewhere to let it age, having heard that age increases their value.

  When I finished reading the brief article, I went out to the kitchen. Cleo was bringing in a basket of clothes. She paused in the doorway, the basket cocked on her hip, hair disheveled, looking pretty but anxious.

  “Did you see him?” she asked.

  I nodded, unable to look at her, poured myself a drink. She waited a few seconds for me to say something. When I couldn’t say anything, she dropped the basket of clothes, scattering underwear and linens across the kitchen floor, and darted across the room to seize my arms and stare up at me wildly.

  “Rod! It isn’t—”

  But it was. Without stopping to think, she rushed to the living room, seized Kenny in her arms, began sobbing, then fled upstairs when she realized what she was doing.

  Kenny knew he was sick. He knew several specialists had studied his case. He knew that I had gone down to talk with Doc Jules this afternoon. After Cleo’s reaction, there was no keeping the truth from him. He was only fourteen, but within two weeks, he knew he had less than a year to live, unless they found a cure. He pieced it together for himself from conversational fragments, and chance remarks, and medical encyclopedias, and by deftly questioning a playmate’s older brother who was a medical student.

  Maybe it was easier on Kenny to know he was dying, easier than seeing our anxiety and being frightened by it without knowing the cause. But a child is blunt in his questioning, and tactless in matters that concern himself, and that made it hell on Cleo.

  “If they don’t find a cure, when will I die?”

  “Will it hurt?”

  “What will you do with my things?”

  “Will I see my real father afterwards?”

  Cleo stood so much of it, and then one night she broke down and we had to call a doctor to give her a sedative and quiet her down. When she was settled, I took Kenny out behind the house. We walked across the narrow strip of pasture and sat on the old stone fence to talk by the light of the moon. I told him not to talk about it again to Cleo, unless she brought it up, and that he was to bring his questions to me. I put my arm around him, and I knew he was crying inside.

  “I don’t want to die.”

  There is a difference between tragedy and blind brutal calamity. Tragedy has meaning, and there is dignity in it. Tragedy stands with its shoulders stiff and proud. But there is no meaning, no dignity, no fulfillment, in the death of a child.

  “Kenny, I want you to try to have faith. The research institutes are working hard. I want you to try to have faith that they’ll find a cure.”

  “Mack says it won’t be for years and years.”

  Mack was the medical student. I resolved to call him tomorrow. But his
mistake was innocent; he didn’t know what was the matter with Kenny.

  “Mack doesn’t know. He’s just a kid himself. Nobody knows—except that they’ll find it sometime. Nobody knows when. It might be next week.”

  “I wish I had a time-ship like Captain Chronos.”

  “Why?”

  He looked at me earnestly in the moonlight. “Because then I could go to some year when they knew how to cure me.”

  “I wish it were possible.”

  “I’ll bet it is. I’ll bet someday they can do that too. Maybe the government’s working on it now.”

  I told him I’d heard nothing of such a project.

  “Then they ought to be. Think of the advantages. If you wanted to know something that nobody knew, you could just go to some year when it had already been discovered.”

  I told him that it wouldn’t work, because then everybody would try it, and nobody would work on new discoveries, and none would be made.

  “Besides, Kenny, nobody can even prove time-travel is possible.”

  “Scientists can do anything.”

  “Only things that are possible, Kenny. And only with money, and time, and work—and a reason.”

  “Would it cost a lot to research for a time-ship, Dad?”

  “Quite a lot, I imagine, if you could find somebody to do it.”

  “As much as the atom-bomb?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I bet you could borrow it from banks… if somebody could prove it’s possible.”

  “You’d need a lot of money of your own, kid, before the banks would help.”

  “I bet my stamp collection will be worth a lot of money someday. And my autograph book.” The conversation had wandered off into fantasy.

  “In time, maybe in time. A century maybe. But banks won’t wait that long.”

  He stared at me peculiarly. “But Dad, don’t you see? What difference does time make, if you’re working on a time-machine?”

  That one stopped me. “Try to have faith in the medical labs, Kenny,” was all I could find to say.

  Kenny built a time-ship in the fork of a big maple. He made it from a packing crate, reinforced with plywood, decorated with mysterious coils of copper wire. He filled it with battered clocks and junkyard instruments. He mounted two seats in it, and dual controls. He made a fish-bowl canopy over a hole in the top, and nailed a galvanized bucket on the nose. Broomstick guns protruded from its narrow weapon ports. He painted it silvery gray, and decorated the bucket-nose with the insignia of Captain Chronos and the Guardsmen of Time. He nailed steps on the trunk of the maple; and when he wasn’t in the house, he could usually be found in the maple, piloting the time-ship through imaginary centuries. He took a picture of it with a box camera, and sent a print of it to Captain Chronos with a fan letter.