Sam Weller - Shadow Show

“Now what, dear children?” the pastor murmured. “Dear children? Would you hide from your own father? Would you hide like that villain Cain who cast the first sin against his brother, Abel? Come out now, my dear children, and forget your temptation. Come out now, and I promise you, all will be forgiven.”

The children were huddled only a few meters from where Forrest Blau was now standing, his boots roughly parting the damp foliage. Quinn sobbed a muffled cry where he lay, and began to consider their surrender. Surely, if he confessed now, if they both came clean, the pastor, his father, his mother, the colony, would find a way to forgive them both for what they had done. But then—only a few meters away from where they were huddled—there was the sound of nervous movement rising through the underbrush. Forrest Blau paused, brought the rifle’s sight up to his eye, and fired twice. Something fell and then died in the grass. It was a small, nearly wingless bird. As the pastor saw what he had killed, his face fell into a nettle of confusion. The reddish-purple animal lay split in two before him, its gaunt wings still flapping. Forrest Blau knelt, prodding the creature with his bare finger, as it rasped and twitched.

Quinn watched from where he lay, trembling. There would be no confession, no forgiveness; this much was clear now. Forrest Blau meant to kill them both. His expression, his anger was as terrifying as the God of the Old Testament’s.

Quinn held the heavy rock in his hand, his right fist shaking with fright.

The pastor was now pensively holding the bird in the palm of his hand, muttering, “Behold the fowls of the air, for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather, yet your Heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye any better than they?’” Then answering his own question, Forrest Blau murmured, “Neh, neh, neh.”

Suspecting that this was his only chance, Quinn slowly raised himself up from the ground and, once he was standing, brought the angular rock down hard against the pastor’s helmet once, then again, knocking it off. The pastor roared with pain—like a lion having been cut in two—falling forward to his knees. The boy brought down the rock against the back of Forrest Blau’s head once, twice, then a third time, and the older man fell limply to his side. Taking advantage of the pastor’s pain, the boy pried the rifle loose from the pastor’s grip. Awkwardly, he set the butt of the gun against the inside of his shoulder and took aim, finding it hard to maneuver the finger of his glove along the edge of the trigger. Finally he found it and prepared to fire.

But Forrest Blau lifted his head first, his silver beard glistening with drool and sweat. His bare hands pawed the dirt where he had fallen. He pulled himself achingly to his knees, glancing up at the boy and rifle with a glare that was both dull and unafraid. Quinn shuddered, seized with the sudden recognition that he could not pull the trigger. And then, just as soon as this recognition passed among the boy’s other senses, the pastor collapsed, falling forward into the mud, his body shaking with a violent paroxysm. For many moments the boy held the rifle there, aimed at the pastor’s body, waiting for it to move again. When it did not, when he began to hear Lana coughing alone in the weeds, the boy lowered the rifle and took a step closer to where Forrest Blau lay. The pastor was still trying to breathe, though his body was crippled, stricken. Something was wrong with the left side of his face. Finally his expression became tightened and his eyes went wide, wider still; there was no mistaking the sudden, bared, grimace of death. The pastor looked to be smiling, and for the first time in as long as the boy could remember, the smile seemed somewhat human, the grimace of someone at peace.

In the weeds Lana was alive though disoriented, bleeding from a spot near her right shoulder; she was whispering something again and again, a song or prayer perhaps. He fitted her helmet back in place, set a tourniquet along her upper arm where she had been shot, and tied the long yellow rope around her waist. She did not seem to notice her father lying there, dead, on a pyre of pink and yellow flowers.

Returning to the surface, Quinn hoisted the girl up through the light-filled opening. Once she was close enough to touch, he reached for her, catching her beneath her arms, and gently laid her in the dust. Then he untied the rope, dropping it down into the cavern with an air of finality, before he began to cover the entrance to the hole, dragging loose rocks into place, disguising the opening with dirt and an odd mound of gravel. The girl was still breathing quickly, talking wildly to herself. Finally he realized it was a song. Something from chapel. “Rise up, all you unbelievers,” she whispered, though the way she was singing it sounded hopeful, true. He lifted one of the girl’s arms over his shoulder, while his own arm rested behind her back, gripping her side tightly. Together, like that, moving step by step, they wandered toward the pale glow of the three domes, the world echoless before them. Hand in hand, through the endless dust, they made their way back.

The first Ray Bradbury story I ever read was “The Veldt.” I was eleven or twelve years old, and the story was put in front of me by an older cousin who had a deeper wisdom about such things. I had heard of science fiction, had seen it in comic books, but had never read it in prose. Reading that one particular story, like encountering a number of Mr. Bradbury’s works, has gone on to live in a particularly vivid and nearly unconscious part of my imagination, as have most important childhood discoveries, an image that gets replayed as I’m sleeping, or thought about at odd moments in the day, whenever something drifts out of the corner of my eye.

“The Veldt,” like the best science fiction, seems purposely derived from the myth or folktale in its youthful characters, its ruthlessness, and its life-or-death stakes. There is something interesting and dramatic for me in children negotiating the unknown. “The Veldt” also seems heavily moral, like some of my other favorite sci-fi tales, which connects to another older literary form, the Bible. Following those two inspirations, I decided to set my story on an unknown planet, peopling it with religious missionaries and their curious, adolescent children. Living in modern-day America, it’s sometimes easy to forget how so many generations ago, our unknown territory was colonized by religious missionaries as well. Out of those characters and that setting, I started developing the notion that Quinn and Lana were a future Adam and Eve, borrowing ideas and events from the Bible and Milton’s Paradise Lost . The last line of the story is a re-conceptualization of one of Milton’s ending lines. Writing this piece was one of the most fun experiences I’ve ever had writing. It was a pleasure to live in Mr. Bradbury’s world even for an hour, a few minutes.

It was a lonely house in a lonely land.

The wind blew from here to there and stirred up whorls of lonely dust. Fields burned under a gray sun. When any of the few birds still living passed by, always going somewhere else, the spindly trees seemed sad in their rejection, for no nests ever thrived amid the branches, and no sweet song of youth was ever sung.

The woman who lived in the house was hard. She had to be. It was a hard world now. She could look out across a landscape the color of rust and see in the hazed distance the oil and natural gas pumps that no longer moved. They hadn’t moved for a long time. Their day was finished. And so too had died the wires, after the great storms and the winter heat waves and the upheavals that had cracked the dry earth and the dusty roads and had nearly, to the woman’s hard blue eyes, rearranged the ridges all the long twenty miles to Douglasville.