Walter Miller: Dark Benediction

“It’s tonight,” he said. “He’s coming tonight, Mama.”

The rain ceased at twilight, but the wind stiffened, hurling drops of water from the pines and scattering them like shot across the sagging roof. Running water gurgled in the ditch, and a rabbit ran toward higher ground. In the west, the clouds lifted a dark bandage from a bloody slash of sky, and somewhere a dog howled in the dusk. Rain-pelted, the sick hen lay dying in the yard.

Lucey stood in the doorway, nervously peering out into the pines and the scrub, while she listened to the croak of the tree frogs at sunset, and the conch-shell sounds of wind in the pines.

“Ain’t no night for strangers to be out wanderin’,” she said. “There won’t be no moon till nearly midnight.”

“He’ll come,” promised the small voice behind her. “He’s coming from the Outside.”

“Shush, child. He’s nothing of the sort.”

“He’ll come, all right.”

“What if I won’t let him in the door?”

Doodie laughed. “You can’t stop him, Mama. I’m only half like you, and it hurts when he talks-inside.”

“Yes, child?”

“If he talks-inside to a human, the human dies. He told me.”

“Sounds like witch-woman talk,” Lucey said scornfully and stared back at him from the doorway. “I don’t want no more of it. There’s nobody can kill somebody by just a-talkin’.”

“He can. And it ain’t just talking. It’s talking inside.”

“Ain’t nobody can talk inside your mother but your mother.”

“That’s what I been saying.” Doodle Iaughed. “If he did, you’d die. That’s why he needed me.”

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.