Thomas Disch - The Genocides

“Find him and bring him here. Right now. Blossom! Where’s Blossom? I saw her here a minute ago.” But Blossom too was nowhere to be found.

“She’s gotten lost!” Neil exclaimed, in a flash of understanding. “She’s lost in the roots. We’ll get up a search party. But first, find Orville. No—first help me with this.” Neil grabbed up Alice by the shoulders. Somebody else took her feet. She didn’t weigh more than a feedbag, and the pearest taproot where there was a sheer vertical drop wasn’t two minutes away. They dropped her down the shaft. They couldn’t see how far she fell, because Neil had forgotten to sting the lamp. No doubt, she fell a long, long way.

Now his father was revenged. Now he would look for Orville. There was only one bullet left in his father’s Colt Python .357 Magnum. It was for Orville.

But first he must find Blossom. She must have run off somewhere when she heard her father was dead. Neil could understand that. The news had upset him too, upset him something terrible.

First, they’d look for Blossom. Then they’d look for Orville. He hoped, how he hoped, that he wouldn’t find them together. That would be too awful for words.

You’d better hide , she thought, and that was how she got lost.

Once, when Blossom was seven, her parents had gone to Duluth for the weekend, taking the baby, Jimmie Lee with them, leaving her alone in the big two-story house on the outskirts of Tassel. It was their eighteenth wedding anniversary. Buddy and Neil, both big boys then, had gone away—one to a dance, the other to a baseball game. For a while she had watched television, then she played with her dolls. The house became very dark, but it was her father’s rule never to turn on more than one lamp at a time. Otherwise, you wasted current.

She didn’t mind being a little scared. There was even something nice about it. So she turned off all the lights and pretended the Monster was trying to find her in the dark. Hardly daring to breathe and on the tips of her toes, she found safe hiding places for all her children: Lulu, because she was black anyway, in the coal bin in the basement; Ladybird, behind the cats’ box; Nelly, the oldest, in the wastebasket by Daddy’s desk. It got scarier and scarier. The Monster looked everywhere in the living room for her except the one place she was—behind the platform rocker. When he left the living room, Blossom crept up the stairs, keeping close to the wall so they wouldn’t creak. But one did creak, and the Monster heard it and came gallumphing up the stairs behind her. With an excited shout she ran into the first room and shut the door behind her. It was Neil’s bedroom, and the big horned moosehead glowered down at her from his place over the chest of drawers. She had always been afraid of that moose, but she was even more afraid of the Monster, who was out there in the hall, listening at every door to hear if she was inside.

She crept on hands and knees to Neil’s closet door, which was ajar. She hid among the smelly old boots and dirty blue jeans. The door to the bedroom creaked open. It was so dark she couldn’t see her hand in front of her face, but she could hear the Monster snuffling all over. He came to the door of the closet and stopped. He smelled she was inside. Blossom’s heart almost stopped beating, and she prayed to God and to Jesus that the Monster would go away.

The Monster made a loud terrible noise and threw open the door, and for the very first time Blossom saw what the Monster looked like. She screamed and screamed and screamed.

Neil got home first that night, and he couldn’t understand what Blossom was doing in his closet with his dirty blue jeans pulled down over her head, whimpering like she’d been whipped with the strap, and trembling like a robin caught in an April snowstorm. But when he picked her up, her little body became all rigid, and nothing would content her but that she sleep that night in Neil’s bed. The next morning she’d come down with a fever, and her parents had to cut their trip short and come home and take care of her. No one ever understood what had happened, for Blossom didn’t dare tell them about the Monster, whom they couldn’t see. Eventually the incident was forgotten. As Blossom grew older, the content of her nightmares underwent a gradual change: the old monsters were no more terrifying now than the moosehead over the chest of drawers.

Darkness, however, is the very stuff of terror, and Blossom, running and creeping through the roots, descending depth after depth, felt the old fear repossess her. Suddenly all the lights in the house had been turned off. The darkness filled itself with monsters, like water pouring into a tub, and she ran down stairs and down hallways looking for a closet to hide in.

All through these last, long days of her father’s dying, and even before, Blossom had been too much alone. She had felt that there was something he wanted to say to her but that he wouldn’t let himself say it. This restraint humiliated her. She had thought that he did not want her to see him dying, and she had forced herself to stay away. Alice and Maryann, with whom she would customarily have passed her time, had no concern now but the baby. Blossom wanted to help them, but she was too young. She was at that age when one is uncomfortable in the presence of either birth or death. She haunted the fringes of these great events and pitied herself for being excluded from them. She imagined herself dying: how sad they would all be, how sorry they had neglected her!

Even Orville had no time for Blossom. He was either off by himself or at Anderson’s side. Only Neil seemed more upset at the old man’s death. Whenever Orville’s path had crossed Blossom’s he looked at her with such deadly intensity that the girl turned away, blushing and even slightly scared. No longer did she feel she understood him, and this, in a way, made her love him more—and more hopelessly.

But none of these things would have caused her to take flight, except into fantasies. It was only after she had seen the expression on Neil’s face, the almost somnambulistic cast to his features, when she had heard him speak her name in that particular tone of voice—it was then that Blossom, like a doe catching scent of a hunter, panicked and began to run: away, into the deeper, sheltering dark.

She ran blindly, and so it was inevitable that she would go over one of the dropoffs into a primary root. It could happen, in the dark, even if you were careful. The void swallowed her whole.

Her bent knees first entered the pulp of the fruit, then her body pitched forward into the soft, yielding floss. She sank deep, deep into it. She landed unhurt, only a few inches away from the broken but still breathing body of Alice Nemerov, R.N.

He had delayed, had Jeremiah Orville, altogether too long. He had meant to revenge, and he had instead assisted. Day by day he had observed Anderson’s death, his agony, his humiliation, and he knew that he, Jeremiah Orville, had had nothing to do with them. It was the Plant and mere happenstance that had brought Anderson low.

Orville had stood by, Hamletlike, and said amen to Anderson’s prayers—had deceived only himself by his subtleties. He had been so greedy that all Anderson’s sufferings proceed from himself alone and none from the Plant that he had led the old man and his tribe to a land of milk and honey. And now his enemy lay dying by the merest accident, by an infected bite on a vestigial toe.

Orville brooded, alone, in that deep darkness, and an image, a phantasm, took shape in the vacant air. Each day, the apparition took on greater definition, but he knew even from the first white shimmering that it was Jackie Whythe. But this was a Jackie who had never been: younger, lither, sweeter, the very essence of female grace and delicacy.