Warren Murphy: Next Of Kin

And he waited. Twilight became night, and the workers left the shipyard. The bright lights above the harbor compound went on, illuminating the palm trees outside the shipyard's fence and the calm ocean beyond. The warm trade winds blew stronger now. They smelled of sea and magic. The Dutchman closed his eyes and remembered.

The Dutchman. Who had ever given him that name? Jeremiah Purcell was about as Dutch as a corn fritter...

Corn. It had all begun with corn! The Master had told him that many wondrous things come from strange beginnings, but even the Master himself would have been surprised that Jeremiah's extraordinary talent was brought to light by a tub of field corn.

He was eight or nine years old when it happened. The Incident. The First Time. The Beginning. He had come to call It by a variety of names, that afternoon in Kentucky when the wheels of his rare and horrifying destiny began to turn.

The family pig was eating corn behind the mountain shack where Jeremiah lived with his parents. He was an only child; his birthing had nearly killed his mother. There were a lot of chores to be done, and looking after the pig was the least enjoyable of them, so Jeremiah was pleased that the pig would buck and snort and roll its eyes insanely whenever he came near the pen.

His father wasn't pleased. Slopping the hog should have been Jeremiah's job.

"What you do to that hog, boy?" his father would ask every day as he emerged filthy and stinking from the pen, collaring Jeremiah so that the stink would be on him, too.

"Nothing, Pa."

And his father would shove him aside and take a swig from the whiskey crock on the porch. "Musta done something. Threw stones at it, something."

"I didn't do nothing, Pa. He just don't like me."

"One a these days I gonna catch you, boy, hear? And I gonna give you a lickin' you won't forget."

The pig was going to get him a licking, Jeremiah knew, whether he did anything to provoke it or not. His father would use any reason to beat the boy for not slopping the hog himself. Damn fat pig, Jeremiah thought as he leaned against the corncrib at a safe distance from the animal. Probably eat anything, eat until it burst. His fingers played at the crinkly dry ears of corn in the crib. Pig food.

And suddenly, he could see it, an image so real, it blocked out all the sights and sounds around him, a picture in his mind more intense with color and texture than anything in reality. The image was of the pig gobbling up corn until it exploded, raining pork chops all over the yard. It was a funny image, but so real that Jeremiah's laughter was more hysterical than mirthful.

At the same time the picture popped into Jeremiah's brain, the pig began to huff and skitter around its pen, drawing toward the trough, where it began to eat voraciously.

"Pig food! Pig food!" Jeremiah shrieked gleefully, and threw two ears of corn into the pen. The pig finished everything in its trough and went for the corn.

"Pig food!" He carried an armload of corn to the pen. The pig reared back on its hind legs, screaming, as he approached, but began gobbling the corn as soon as the boy moved back toward the corncrib, its eyes frenzied and wide.

He brought over four more armfuls. "Eat till you burst, fat pig," Jeremiah whispered, the image in his head still vibrating quietly. The pig snorted and stomped and ate and searched for more food and ate it.

"Till you burst."

And then the pig moaned, a low, keening sound, and sniffed at the half-eaten ear of corn at its feet, and shuddered. It lay its head in the mud, and with a great thump, its massive body followed. The pig kicked twice in the air with its hind legs, panted, moaned, twisted its neck so that its head faced Jeremiah, and died. Its eyes were open. They stared vacantly at the boy. Jeremiah screamed.

Inside the house, his father stumbled off the couch, shaking himself awake and growling, "What'd he do now? Snotty little pup, prob'ly bothering with that hog again."

He had killed it. Through his screams, a part of Jeremiah realized with utter coldness and clarity that he had done something— something with his mind— to cause the occurrence in the pigpen.

His father saw the pig, started to drag its immense corpse out of the mud, then stopped.

"I think I'm going to take care of you first," he said. He ran for Jeremiah, but the boy didn't move. He was still thinking of the pig and the strange, unearthly image that had come into his sight, the killing picture. He had seen death, and death had been created.

He hardly felt his father's rough hand grab hold of his arm and whirl him around. Then the big hand headed straight for his face and jolted it back. The sting brought involuntary tears to his eyes. His father hit him again.

"Don't," the boy said, feeling light-headed. The hand came down again, across his eyes.

"Don't!" It was a command. And while the blow struck, Jeremiah's watering blue eyes locked into his father's, and the lights and colors appeared again. But this time there was a sound along with the colors, a hissing, crackling noise mixed with the orange and yellow of... his father's hair...

"You're on fire," the boy said, astonished.

His father screamed, a wild, mountain yell, and slapped frantically at the too-orange flames on his too-blue flannel shirt.

It's the picture, Jeremiah said to himself. It's not real— yet. He wanted to move— help his father, run away, anything— but he was rooted to the spot. He tried to make the killing picture go away, but he knew it was too late. He couldn't stop.

His mother, alarmed by the screaming, ran onto the porch, a broom in her hand. She dropped the broom, and both her hands flew to her mouth. She was running toward her husband.

"Go away," the boy snapped, but the picture was too strong. With a gasp, she clutched at the place on her skirt where the flames had erupted. His father caught her by the wrist, and they stumbled off together like two giddy dancers engulfed in flame.

It's not real yet...

They were headed for the pond.

It's not real...

Where they drowned.

* * *

"Can't nobody rightly say how it happened," Pap Lewis told the woman from the welfare office a week later at the train station. The woman had come to take Jeremiah to Dover City where, she told him, he would live in a place full of other children who'd lost their parents. Pap Lewis had wanted the boy to live with him and his family, but the welfare office said they were too poor to support another child.

Jeremiah waited quietly as the train steamed up to the platform and the woman took the boy's hand. Pap Lewis gave him a pat on the back and hoisted him up the steps into the train.

That was the last time Jeremiah saw him, because the train ride to Dover City was the setting for the second incident, the one-in-a-million chance that took Jeremiah Purcell from the ordinary world and thrust him, literally kicking and screaming, onto a new pathway that ended at Devil's Mountain, with the ultimate Master of Death as his guide.

On the train, Jeremiah left the woman from the welfare office to make his way to the lavatory two cars away. The route took him past a bank of sleeper cabins, where a boy not much older than Jeremiah sprawled on the floor with dozens of baseball cards around him. When Jeremiah tried to step around the boy, he accidentally walked over some of the cards. The boy scrambled to his feet with a shout and pushed Jeremiah into the door of one of the sleeper cabins. Jeremiah didn't strike back, since the boy was bigger than he was and, besides, Jeremiah wasn't much of a fighter. But as he watched the boy gather up his baseball cards, one odd, incongruous thought entered his mind and glowed there like a beacon: Rabbit.

The boy did look like a rabbit, with his knees bent near his body as he hunched over the floor. Still, the color in the train was so bright...