Morning Child and Other Stories (18 page)

It fled deep, sinking downward by instinct, tracing a tortuous way between walls and floors, sometimes following water pipes, and always avoiding electrical wires. Carefully, fearfully, it threaded its way along a twisty path that led downward, ever downward.

Finally it emerged into warm, cavernous darkness, and knew that it had found refuge.

Iago was dead, but Jennifer was alive; there was comfort in that. The faithful old family retainer had given up his life in defense of home and child, and that was somehow fitting. It was the way things ought to be. His corpse was outside the kitchen door now, packed in snow because the frozen earth made burial impossible, but Alma Kingsley vowed that her great-grandchildren would know his name.

The snow had finally stopped, and the night was clear, and bitterly cold, the stars burning in it like chips of ice. The great glowing, shimmering, billowing curtains of the Northern Lights were out, shifting restlessly back and forth on the horizon, brighter than she had ever seen them, so bright that it almost seemed that she could burn her hand on them, if she held it out to the sky.

It had been quite a storm. It must have dumped at least four feet of snow on the region all told, snowing through the night and through the day and through most of the night again, and the driveway beyond the lee of the house was buried under huge drifts; you couldn’t even see the highway at its end. So much for her first thought, which was to bundle them all into Desmond’s car and make a run for it, abandoning the house to the creature until they could come back later with help. To get the hell out of here!

But with all that snow, nobody was going anywhere, life-or-death emergency or not, until the snowplow came by in the morning. It was physically impossible. And if they locked themselves in the car as a refuge—her second thought—they’d freeze to death before daybreak. And besides, who was to say that it couldn’t get into the car after them, the way it seemed to be able to squeeze itself through the smallest of cracks?

“Did you notice that it was afraid of my pocket calculator?” Desmond asked. He was pacing the length of the kitchen, back and forth, from the pantry door to the wooden cot they had set up for Jennifer by the refrigerator. “And it wouldn’t touch the electric blanket either.”

“Why is that?” Mrs. Kingsley asked without interest. Her granddaughter was sleeping like an angel, and her heart pounded with fear for the child. She had to fight down the impulse to run a rough old hand over hair so fine it could break your heart.

“I don’t know, but did you see the way it squeezed into the wall? Like it was boneless, or something more than boneless. I’ll bet it doesn’t mass much of anything at all!”

He was getting excited now. Alma Kingsley simply tuned out his voice and let him rant on. Stephanie had always said that problem-solving was his forte, what he was most at home with. Given a logic problem—a crossword puzzle or a program that had crashed—and some shred of clue, his intuition would worry it to death or solution. To Alma Kingsley’s way of thinking, this was a good argument that problem-solving logic was not one of the civilized skills.

It was only when he moved her brand new toaster-oven to the kitchen table and began disassembling it that she was finally moved to object. “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?” she demanded.

“I’m going to wrap a resistance coil,” he said, absorbed in his chore and talking so fast his words ran together. “Look, this thing is obviously sensitive to electromagnetic radiation, right? Now, assuming its shape is maintained through bound charges, then it would move by shifting electrical potential within itself. That would explain how it moves so fluidly. So—”

“Desmond,” she said, her patience wearing thin, “just what are you trying to do?”

He looked up from his work, puzzled. “I’m building a signal-interrupter. Didn’t I make myself clear?” Without waiting for a response, he bent back down over the table, uncoiling wires from the heating elements.

She closed her eyes, calmed herself. “Just what will this signal-interrupter do when it’s built?”

“Well, basically—” He broke something out of the toaster-oven, glanced at it, threw it aside. “Basically, it ought to render this creature totally immobile anywhere within—oh, let’s say a fifteen-twenty foot radius. More, probably, but that much at least.”

For the first time in her life, Alma Kingsley wondered if God might not have had reasons for creating Desmond. “You can do this?” she asked anxiously. “Tonight?”

He favored her with a vulgar, lopsided grin. “Old hoss,” he said, “give me half an hour, and we have got it dicked!”

With no warning, all the lights went out at once, plunging them into complete darkness.

“Oh shit,” Desmond said.

Calmly, because she’d been through blackouts before, Mrs. Kingsley felt and twisted the knobs on the gas range. One by one the burners came on, filling the room with an eerie, flickering light.

By sheer bad luck, the furnace was off at the instant the power went. It was a gas furnace, but it operated off of a solid state programmable electric thermostat, and wouldn’t go back on again until the thermostat told it to. But it wasn’t really crucial; she lit the oven, leaving the door open for heat.

After some clumsy, fearful rummaging through the dark pantry, she unearthed a hurricane lamp. Its chimney had gulls painted on the side, and the transparent reservoir was filled with blue scented oil. Still, when she set it on the kitchen table, the light it shed was warm and friendly, and she could turn off the range.

Desmond, meanwhile, had found the utility flashlight in its recharger bracket by the basement door. He stood in the middle of the pantry, flicked it on and off, and then said, “What does this house have—fuses or circuit breakers?”

Alma Kingsley stared at the man in disbelief. His face was dark with shadow, his eyes lost in blackness. He was a silhouette creature, almost all outline and no substance, one hand on the doorknob of the cellar door. “Desmond, this isn’t the city. A power line is down. Going into the cellar and flicking a switch is not going to restore the electricity.”

She didn’t have to be able to see the face to know the smug, superior smile that crossed it now; she could hear it in his voice. “Let’s not get all worked up, now. Maybe a line is down. But the more likely reason is that a power transient has kicked out the main circuit breaker. There’s no reason for us to spend a night in the cold and dark when just a moment’s effort can restore the power.” He opened the door.

She peered past him, down into the cellar—it was a perfect, lightless black. Vague colors swam before her, visual hallucinations brought up by the absolute lack of light. The blackness crawled with menace. The only sound anywhere was the hissing of the gas oven.

Involuntarily, she clutched his arm. “For God’s sake, Desmond, you don’t know what’s down there!”

Desmond turned the flashlight on her face. She stood blinking as he studied her. “Don’t be such a wuss,” he said. “Whatever that thing is, we know that it’s somewhere
above
us, not below.”

He shook free of her grip and moved to the top of the cellar steps, hesitated for a moment, looking down. “Desmond,” she said, so frightened that she found herself actually pleading, “this is
unwise
. You’re acting like a character in a monster movie! Everybody in the theater would be yelling ‘Don’t go down there!’ by this point. Stay up here with us. We need you here.” It galled her to speak the words, words she’d never imagined she’d hear herself say—but it was true.

Desmond turned his head to look back at her, and grimaced. “Look,” he said, a defensive note creeping into his voice, “this thing
kills
people, and it’s on the loose. The only defense we have against it uses electricity. Either I go down there and reset the breakers, or we sit up here in the dark and wait to die.” After a second of silence, he grinned at her, the arrogance, the boundless self-confidence and self-assurance she’d always found so odious in the man already returning to his face after a fleeting moment of uncertainty. “Beside, I’ll be quick...and I’ll be careful!”

He was wrong, horribly wrong, but she didn’t have the arguments to confute him with, only a horrid assurance that he was making a stupid move. Desmond shone the flash down the stairs.

A thin line of worn wooden treads led downward into darkness, a trace of light glimmering on the walls to either side. When Desmond raised the flash slightly, a pale circle formed on the whitewashed rock wall just beyond the landing. “Damn,” he muttered. “I don’t suppose the circuit box is on the near wall?”

“No, it’s on the wall opposite, at the front of the house.”

Abruptly, Desmond turned and walked back into the kitchen. For a giddy moment, Mrs. Kingsley thought he had come to his senses. But he only paused by his daughter and gently placed something on the cot beside her sleeping head. The calculator. He switched it on, then turned back toward the cellar.

“For the love of Christ, Desmond!”

But, ignoring her completely, he stepped down onto the top stair. It groaned under his weight. Slowly he descended, clutching the loose railing with his free hand. The light danced and bobbed on the basement wall, growing brighter as he approached, then darting to the side and disappearing as he turned away. Briefly, there was the faintest shimmer of reflected light, and then nothing.

The air from below was warm, like an animal’s breath on her face. Staring down into the liquid blackness, Mrs. Kingsley felt her every nerve on end. She strained to hear, to track her son-in-law’s progress below by sound alone. But the dirt floor muffled his footsteps, and damped down the noise he made.

“Desmond?” she said softly. He did not answer. Her own breath sounded loud to her; she could make out nothing above it. It was uncanny how silent the cellar was. It was as if the darkness were a gigantic beast that moved on soft paws to swallow up the least sound.

Then Desmond stumbled into a pile of cardboard boxes filled with old paint and coffee cans that she had put away years ago against some possible future need. A jar fell to the floor. He kicked it angrily, and it skittered and skipped away to shatter against the wall. “Fuck.”

Mrs. Kingsley leaned down into the stairway. The darkness was so deep, so absolute, it seemed to want to suck her down into it. It welled up dizzyingly about her, and she had to put out a hand to steady herself against the jamb.

Silence again. Then—

“Found it!” Desmond shouted. He sounded relieved; one presumed the darkness had finally gotten to him. There were faint noises as he poked about. “Jeez, this is an old system. Look at the rust on it! I’ll bet you ten to one I—”

He gasped.

The flashlight clattered noisily to the ground. For an instant there was silence, complete and profound. Then a kind of throbbing electrical hum rose to fill the darkness. Over the throbbing came other sounds, choking and thrashing sounds, as if Desmond were having a seizure. The noise went on and on.

And then it stopped.

The silence seemed to echo, like the air just after a great bell has been stilled. Fearfully, Alma Kingsley called down, “Desmond? Desmond, are you all right?” She waited, and heard nothing. “Desmond?”

A faint slithering noise whispered up from below. It wasn’t quite like anything she had ever heard before, and yet it definitely came from a living creature. It was coming from the far side of the cellar, and it was headed right for the stairway.

Frantically, she slammed the door shut, and backed away, into the warmth and light of the kitchen. For an instant’s frozen horror, she was convinced it would follow her. But it did not.

“Gamma?”

Jennifer was sitting up in bed, sleepily rubbing one eye. It was clear that the door slamming had wakened her. “Gamma,” she said. “Where’s Daddy?”

It had fled as far as it could, as deep as it was possible to go in this labyrinthine structure, and had thought itself safe. It badly needed to think things through, as a dozen conflicting emotions chased themselves through its neural fabric, and at that point wanted only solitude, darkness, stillness, the security of enclosure. But then, terrifyingly, one of the sophonts had come
after
it, tracking it down, coming relentlessly closer and closer and closer, a buzzing electrical device that emitted a spray of photons—a weapon?—in one hand. It had backed away in terror, retreating as the man came on toward it step by step, finally stopping only when it backed up against a solid wall and there was no place left to go without turning and exposing its back to a potentially fatal attack.

Still the man came implacably on, ever closer, ponderous steps shaking the floor like thunder, looming huge and heavy and menacing, only a few bodylengths away now. At last, still moving forward, the sophont turned the stream of photons from its device/weapon directly
on
it....

Trapped, terrified, knowing that it might only have seconds of life left in which to act, it struck. The sophont jerked and thrashed and flailed, the electrical device flying from its hand to shatter against the floor and go out.

It had tried its best to avoid this confrontation, had not wanted to kill again so soon, had wanted to think about the whole situation, but it had been given no choice.

None of those considerations kept it from feeding as fully as it could, of course, now that it
had
killed. The sophont was big and vigorous, in the prime of its cycle of existence, and was full of the fire-of-life.

When it had finished with him, it fell refreshed and somewhat calmer...although, almost immediately, a new unease began to grow within it. This was a bad situation, trapped inside a structure like this with a band of sophonts, all alerted to its presence. It was a dangerous situation, one in which it could easily be trapped or attacked—and there was something
else
about the situation that dimly troubled it, something other than the danger, something that generated another kind of unease. It shouldn’t be hunting sophonts, it knew that somehow, not unless it had no other choice. It should find other, easier, less dangerous prey, like the rats and squirrels and birds it’d found in the park. To find nonsophont prey instead would be far less dangerous, and it would
also
be, it would also be...something. Something it no longer had the concept for, but which it vaguely knew was desirable.