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I once saw a doll made by a primitive South American people. It was made from flexible reeds, crudely plaited, and tied off in places, to form a head and body, arms and legs protruding stiffly from it. The tangled masses of what looked like greyish horsehair at our feet were slowly spilling out of the membranous pods, lightening in colour at their outer edges, and – crudely but definitely – had begun forming themselves, the fibres straightening and aligning, into the rough approximation, each of them, of a head, a body, and miniature arms and legs. They were as crude as the doll I had seen – and just as unmistakable.
It's hard to say how long we squatted there, staring in stu
We watched, motionless, our mouths open, and occasionally the brown membranous surfaces of the huge pods cracked audibly – the sound of a brittle leaf snapping in two – and the pods crumpled steadily, slowly collapsing a little at a time, as the lava-like flow of the substance they were filled with continued to flow out, like a heavy, infinitely slow-moving fog. And just as a motionless cloud in a windless sky imperceptibly changes in shape as you watch, the doll-like forms on the floor became – no longer dolls. They were, presently, as large as infants; and the pods that had held the substance forming them were crumbling to brittle fragments. The nearly motionless weaving and aligning of whitening fibre had continued; and now the heads were indented in a vague approximation of eye sockets, a ridge of a nose had formed on each, a crease of a mouth, and at the ends of the arms, bent now at the elbows, the starlike shapes of tiny, stiff fingered hands were forming themselves.
Jack's head and mine turned together, and we stared into each other's eyes, knowing what, presently, we would see. "The blanks," he whispered, his voice rusty, "that's where they come from – they grow!"
We could no longer watch it. We stood suddenly, our legs stiff from crouching, and stumbled out into the basement, our eyes darting, frantically hunting normality. Then we stopped at nothing more than a pile of old newspapers, staring numbly down, in the light of Jack's flash, at the front page of an old San Francisco Chronicle, and the headlines and captions, the murder, violence, and corruption of a city, were understandable, and normal, and good to see. We lighted cigarettes, then, and wandered the basement, smoking, saying nothing, pacing and waiting, thinking what stu
The impossible process inside was nearly finished. The great shattered pods lay on the floor now in tiny broken fragments, an almost u
Squatting beside the nearest, I lifted the hand to stare numbly at the smooth, rounded absence of fingerprints, and two thoughts filled my mind simultaneously: They're going to get us, I thought, lifting my head to stare at Jack, and at the same time – Now, Becky has to stay here.
Chapter ten
The time was 2.21 in the morning; I'd just glanced at my watch and there were nine minutes to go before I woke Jack for his shift. I was patrolling the house, walking soundlessly along the upstairs hallway in my stocking feet; and now I stopped at the door of Becky's room. Noiselessly I opened it, walked in, and then, for the third time since midnight, I explored every inch of that room with my flashlight, just as I had every other room in the house. Stooping, I swept the beam under her bed; then I opened the closet and examined it.
Then, the beam of blue-white light focused on the wall just over Becky's head, I looked at her face. Her lips were slightly parted, her breathing regular, and her eyelashes curved down to lie on her cheek, a beautiful sight. She was very pretty, lying there, and I realized I was thinking how comforting it would be to be able to lie down beside her for a minute, to feel her stir sleepily, and feel the warmth of her next to me. Walk out of this trap, Son, I said to myself, and I turned toward the hallway and the attic stairs.
There was nothing in the attic that didn't belong there. In the beam of my flashlight I saw the row of my mother's dresses and coats, suspended on hangers from a length of pipe, and covered with a sheet to keep off the dust; on the floor beside them was her old cedar chest. I saw my father's wooden filing cabinet, his framed diplomas stacked on top of it, just as they'd been brought from his office. In that cabinet lay the records of the a colds, cut fingers, cancers, broken bones, mumps, diphtheria, births and deaths of most of Santa Mira for over two generations. Half the patients listed in those files were dead now, the wounds and tissue my father had treated, only dust.
I walked to the dormer window where I used to sit and read when I was a boy, and looked out at Santa Mira spreading away into the darkness below me. There they lay, the people of the town, sleeping out there in the dark; my father had brought a good many of them into the world. There was a night breeze stirring, and off to my left, on the pavement under the overhead street lamp, the fuzzy expanded shadows of the overhead telephone wires swung soundlessly back and forth over the deserted street, a lonely sight. I could see the McNeeleys' front porch, standing out sharply in the electric night-time glare of the street light, and the black shadowed bulk of their house behind it. I could see the Greesons' porch, too; I'd played house there with Dot Greeson when I was seven years old. Their long porch railing sagged inward in a shallow curve, and it needed painting, and I wondered why they'd let it go; they'd always kept up their place very neatly. Past the Greesons' I could make out the white picket fence around Blaine Smith's place; this town lying out there in the darkness was filled with neighbours and friends. I knew them all, at least by sight, or to nod or speak to on the street. I'd grown up here; from boyhood I'd known every street, house, and path, most of the back yards, and every hill, field, and road for miles around.
And now I didn't know it any more. Unchanged to the eye, what I was seeing out there now – in my eye, and beyond that in my mind – was something alien. The lighted circle of pavement below me, the familiar front porches, and the dark mass of houses and town beyond them – were fearful. Now they were menacing, all these familiar things and faces; the town had changed or was changing into something very terrible, and was after me. It wanted me, too, and I knew it.
A stair tread creaked, there was the sound of a soft footstep, and I swung in the darkness, crouching low, my flashlight raised as a weapon. Quietly Jack said, "It's me," and I flicked on the light and saw his face, tired and still sleepy. When he'd stopped beside me, I turned the light off, and for some moments we stood looking out at Santa Mira. The sleeping house under our feet, the street outside, the entire town were still and deathly silent; low ebb time for the human body and spirit.