New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (16 page)

'Don't be alarmed,' I urged, hurrying along at her side. 'Kids his age do reckless things at times simply because they just don't think. But we do, and it-will take only a moment to get him down.'

'He's not listening to me!' she protested. 'That's what alarms me. I've never known him to be so stubborn.'

'He'll listen to me,' I assured her. 'He may just be starting to feel the need for some stern father-to-son talk. If a kid has to go without something he's once known too long -'

'I don't want him to fall!' she said, as if she hadn't heard me, and before I could go on. 'I'm so terribly worried.'

'You can stop worrying,' I assured her. 'He'll climb straight down the instant I raise my voice.'

I was far from sure that he would. But it wasn't just an idle boast to impress her. I was genuinely concerned for the boy's safety, and there was no excuse for what he was doing now. He could, I felt, have at least answered his mother's almost frantic appeals. Refusing to obey was one thing, totally ignoring her concern quite another.

When I reached the piled-up mass of wreckage he had moved even closer to the edge of the demolished breakwater, and the beard on which he was standing seemed rickety in the extreme. It was so rotted away in spots that the swirling dark tides just beyond the almost rippleless pool were visible through the warped and nearly vertical far end of it. Something about the shape of it struck a chill to my heart. The supporting beams of a gallows might well have had just such a look, with both vertical and horizontal aspects, to the blurring vision of a condemned man awaiting swift oblivion.

Being parentally harsh is very difficult for me, because I've always felt that the young are frequently justified in their rebellion, and as often as not I find myself on their side. But now I was very angry and felt not the slightest trace of sympathy for a boy who could cause his mother so much unnecessary anguish.

'John, get down!' I shouted at him. 'You ought to be ashamed of yourself!'

I suddenly felt that shouting was not needed and went on just loudly enough to make sure he'd catch every word. 'I see I was wrong in believing everything your mother told me about you. No courageous explorer I've ever known took meaningless risks with his life. You've got to think of other people. How can you be so cruel, so thoughtless? Your mother -'

I stopped abruptly, noticing for the first time that there was a faraway look in his eyes and that he did not appear to be listening. He was clasping something in his right hand, and suddenly he opened his fingers and stared down at it, as if only the object mattered, and everything I had said had gone unheeded.

And that was when it happened. That was when the terrible mistake I'd made by not climbing up without saying a word and grabbing hold of him dawned on me. But perhaps it wouldn't have mattered. Even if he failed to put up a struggle, just my added weight on the board might have caused it to collapse anyway.

It collapsed with a dreadful splintering sound. The warped and upended, almost rotted away, portion fell first into the dark beach-bisecting channel, followed quickly by the part of it on which he had been standing. He went with that part so swiftly into the water that no slightest sound came from below the wreckage for ten full seconds. Then I heard only the gurgling of the water as it subsided, the initial splash having been a great deal louder. Despite that loudness I was quite sure that if he had made some outcry before vanishing I would have heard it.

My immediate, overwhelming emotion was one of horror, mingled with disbelief and a sudden gratefulness. The gratefulness was due solely to the fact that I had come to the beach to go swimming, and wore only bathing trunks beneath a light summer bathrobe.

I kicked off my sneakers first and discarded the bathrobe almost simultaneously with my swift ascent of the wreckage adjacent to the vanished part of the storm-shattered breakwater. I had no way of knowing how deep the water might be at that particular spot, but when a narrow channel widens out into a pool it is likely to have a greater depth as well, and I was ninetenths sure it was the opposite of shallow.

I remained for a moment staring down at that dark expanse of water, until I became convinced that no bobbing young head seemed likely to send a great wave of relief surging over me, for more additional seconds than I cared to risk wasting.

To have dived in would have risked a stunning blow to my head from the cluttered wreckage, which projected out over the pool in a dozen directions. So I let myself down slowly and cautiously before swimming out into the sluggishly moving current.

I abandoned my overhand strokes to plunge into the depths at about the spot where it seemed most likely John had been swallowed up. The farther I descended the less sluggish the current became, and I was soon being carried erratically back and forth in a tidebuffeted fashion.

It was my first attempt to save anyone from drowning, and I was lacking in all of the qualities that can make such a rescue attempt quickly successful.

I began to fear I would have to come up for air and descend a second time when I saw him, through a blurry film of dark water. Only vaguely at first and then more distinctly, revolving slowly about as if on some small underwater treadmill that was causing him neither to rise nor to descend farther.

Fortunately he did not struggle when I got to him, as close-to-drowning people are supposed to do unless you caution them in the open air where your voice carries. In another moment I had a tight grip on his arm and was ascending with him through what now seemed a depth of at least twenty fathoms.

Five minutes later he was lying stretched out on the sand at the base of the wreckage, with his mother bending over him. She was sobbing softly and looking up at me, her eyes shining with gratefulness.

No seven-year-old could have looked more capable of summoning to his aid all the innate vitality of the very young of sturdy constitution. The colour was flooding back into his cheeks, and his eyes were fluttering open with the stubborn, resolute look of a young explorer who refuses to give up, despite the worst buffetings that fate can inflict.

I suppose I should have felt nothing but relief and sympathy. But I was still angry, and the first words I spoke to him were so harsh that I almost instantly found myself regretting them.

'You should have known better than to put your mother through something like this. It's a good thing you're not my son. If you were there would be no baseball or anything else for you for one solid month.

You'd just have to sit at the window and call down to your friends. Probably they are as bad as you are.

Unruly, selfish, totally undisciplined kids run together in wolf cub packs.'

The instant I stopped his eyes opened very wide, and he stared up at me without the slightest trace of hostility or resentment in his gaze. It was as if he realized I had spoken like the kind of person I wasn't and really could never be.

'I couldn't help it,' he said. 'There was something there I knew I'd find if I looked around for it. I didn't want to find it. But you can't help it when you dream about something you don't want to find, and you can't wake up in time -'

'You dreamed about it?'

'Not like when I go to sleep. I was just thinking about what it would look like when I found it.'

'And that's why you ran off the way you did, without warning your mother that you were about to do some,thing dangerous?'

'I couldn't help it. It was like something was pulling me.'

'You were looking at it when I spoke to you,' I said. 'So you must have found it. It's too bad you lost it when you fell into the water. If you still had it, what you want us to believe might make a little more sense. Not much - but a little.'

'I didn't lose it,' he said. 'It's right here in my hand.' 'But that's impossible.'

'No, it isn't,' his mother said, interrupting us for the first time. 'Look how tightly clenched his right hand is.'

I could hardly believe it, if only because it made far more sense to assume that the hands of a boy falling from a collapsing board would have opened and closed many times in a desperate kind of grasping, first at the empty air and then at a smothering wall of water rushing in upon him. What I had failed to recognize was that in such an extremity one may hold on to some small object that has just been picked up - a pebble or a shell - even more tightly.

There might even be - more to it than that. Not only adult men and women, but not a few children, had endured unspeakable torments without relinquishing, even in death, some small object precious to them, or feared by them in some terrible secret way. The Children's Crusade -

It was hard for me to imagine what could have put such thoughts into my mind, for I hadn't as much as caught a glimpse of the object which John had seemingly found very quickly. Surely what he had said about it could be dismissed as childish prattle. A dreamlike compulsion, coming upon him suddenly, and forcing him to go in search of it, as if drawn by a magnet. Powerless to resist, unable to break that mysterious binding influence. Not wanting to find it at all, but aware that he had been given no choice.

Susan had joined us beneath the wreckage, ignoring the wishes of her mother, who had waved her back to make her son's recovery less of a problem. Another small child, hopping about in the sand, would have made it difficult for her to give all of her attention to what I'd just been saying to her son.

But now she was looking at me as if I had added a new, unexpected complication by my two full minutes of silence.

'Let him see what it was you picked up, John,' she said. 'Just open your hand and show it to him.

You're making some strange mystery out of it, and so is he.

I'd like to see it too. Then we'll all be happier.''I can't,' John said.

'You can't what?' I demanded, startled by the look of astonishment and pain that had come into his eyes.

'I can't move my fingers,' he said. 'I just found out. I didn't try before.'

'Oh, that's nonsense,' I said. 'Listen to me, before you say anything even more foolish. You must have at least tried to move your fingers a dozen or more times before I rescued you. Just as often afterward.'He shook his head. 'That's not true.'

'It has to be true. That's your right hand. You use it all the time. Everyone does.'

'I can't move my fingers,' he reiterated. 'If I'd opened my hand it would have fallen out -'

'I know all that,' I said. 'But you could have at least found out before this whether you could so much as move your fingers. It would have been a natural thing to do.'

It had been difficult for me to think of his mother in a very special way, so over~vrought had she become since I had gone to his rescue. But something of the beach-temptress look had returned when her son had opened his eyes and had seemed no worse for the tragedy that almost overtaken him. But now she looked distraught again. Sudden fear flamed in her eyes.

'Could it be - hysterical paralysis?' she asked. 'It can happen, I've been told, in quite young children.'

'I don't think so,'. I said. 'Just try to stay calm. We'll know in a moment.'

I took her son's hand, raised it, and looked at it closely. He made no protest. The fingers could not have been more tightly clenched. The nails, I felt, must be biting painfully into the flesh of his palms. His knuckles looked bluish.

I began to work on his fingers, trying my best to force them open. I had no success for a moment.

Then, gradually, they seemed to become more flexible and some of the stiffness went out of them.

Quite suddenly his entire hand opened, as if my persistent tugging at each individual finger in turn had broken some kind of spell.

The small object which rested on his palm did not seem to have been compressed or injured in any way by the tight constriction to which it had been subjected. I thought at first it was of metal, so brightly did it gleam in the sunlight. But when I picked it up and looked at it closely I saw that it was of some rubbery substance with merely the sheen of metal.

I had never before looked at any inanimate object quite so horrible. Superficially it resembled a tiny many-tentacled octopus, but there was something, about it which would have made the ugliest of sea monsters seem merely fishlike in a slightly repulsive way. It had a countenance, of a sort, a shrivelled, sunken old man's face that was no more than suggestively human. Not a human face at all, really, but the suggestion was there, a hint, at least, of anthropoid intelligence of a wholly malignant nature. But the longer I stared at it the less human it seemed, until I began to feel that I had read into it something that wasn't there. Intelligence, yes - awareness of some kind, but so much the opposite of anthropoid that my mind reeled at trying to imagine what intelligence would be like if it was as cold as the dark night of space and could exercise a wholly merciless authority over every animate entity in the universe of stars.

I looked at Helen Rathbourne and saw that she was trembling and had turned very pale. I had lowered my hand just enough to enable her to see it clearly, and I knew that her son had seen it again too. He said nothing, just looked at me as if, young as he was, the thought that such an object had been taken from his hand made him feel in some strange way contaminated.

'You picked it up without knowing,' I wanted to shout at him. 'Forget it, child - blot it from your mind.

I'll take it to the pool you almost drowned in and let it sink from sight, and we'll forget we ever saw it.'

But before I could say a word to John or his mother, something began to happen to my hand. It began to happen even before I realized the object was attached to a rusted metal chain and had clearly been designed to be worn as an amulet around someone's neck.

My fingers closed over it, contracting more and more until I was holding it in as tight a grip as John had done. I couldn't seem to open them again or hurl the object from me as I suddenly wanted to do.

Something happened then to more than just my hand. Everything about me seemed subtly to change, the contours of near objects becoming less sharply silhouetted against the sky and more distant objects not only losing their sharpness, but seeming almost to dissolve. There was a roaring in my ears, and a strange, terrifying feeling of vastness, of emptiness - I can describe it in no other way - swept over me.