I pulled out and turned posthaste, gravel and oyster shells popping beneath worn tires. “Keep a sharp eye!” I called to Walter when I considered the necessity to leave the headlamps off. “Yes, Mr. Morley!” he replied, and when I glanced back through the hole which had once housed glass, I saw the lad positioned in back, his crude bow at the ready. I knew that at an identical age, I’d have been in possession of not one-tenth of the boy’s courage. I’ll raise him as though he were my own, I vowed, and be the father he’d never had, and the same for Mary’s baby… Rusted springs ground when I throttled the archaic vehicle across the rutted road to town. The moon seemed to spray its light upon us for the few seconds that the road exposed us, such that the road itself and the trees and vegetation lining it seemed iridescent, and this made me think of Lovecraft’s masterpiece, “The Color Out of Space,” said to be his personal favorite. Though my fear levels jumped from this brief exposure, it enabled me to view the road both ways. Where I expected to glimpse enemies, I saw, again, virtually nothing in the way of detractors.
Strange, I thought. Unless they’re lying in wait…
The enfeebled truck rocked when I traversed the wheel and navigated into the long, heavily wooded dirt-scratch lane which would lead us to the house. Suddenly darkness swallowed us, only minutely dappled by the moon, for the boughs of overhead trees nearly connected with one another from either side, transposing our route into that of a tunnel. I had to retard speed considerably now, for the reduced visibility.
Walter’s wan face peered in to the rear hole. “Mr. Morley? Maybe you should turn on the headlamps. I can’t see a thing!”
The light-discipline of a soldier surely had tactical exceptions, not to mention that I was nothing remotely similar to a soldier. Just a rich pud, I recalled Zalen’s slight, but he was right. I fancied I could hear him laughing at me now, even as his odious head continued to cook. But now I would have to be a soldier, and I would have to take chances in order to achieve success. I took the lad’s advice, and switched on the headlamps.
The boy shrieked, and so did I.
Figures rushed forward out of the bramble-carpeted woods. Before I could even make transitive reaction, I saw a queerly robed figure—but one with a clearly human face—lunge forward but then buckle back, his hand shooting to his face as an arrow caught him right in his opened mouth.
“Good shot, Walter!”
When a hand—a human hand, not the webbed extremity I expected—shot into the passenger window, I thrust my pistol-filled fist toward it, then—
BAM!
The lucky shot caught the marauder right in the adam’s apple. Bubbly blood shot from the wound as the robed predator screamed.
And it was a man I recognized. Mr. Wraxall, the restaurant owner…
These were not the monstrous fullbloods I anticipated to be set for ambush, but townsmen, all dressed in those same robes with esoteric fringe. More snatches of faces were revealed: the hotel clerk, the maintenance man, the diner who’d been lunching with his paramour at the restaurant, and others. When two more shot out from left and right, Walter struck one in the shoulder; the aggressor unwisely hesitated where he stood, then was bellowing as the vehicle’s wheels drubbed him beneath the chassis. The second assailant tried to climb into my open window where I easily fired a shot directly into the top of his head. He fell away, but not before I could recognize the face in the hood’s ovaclass="underline" Dr. Anstruther.
Sin or not, I chuckled at the cad’s death, and considered the splotches of his grey matter upon my shirt a unique badge of honor.
The rest of the road to the house was clear.
Where I’d expected the opposition to be formidable, I found only sheepshank weakness in its place. The squat house now came into view at the end of the headlamps’ beams.
“This was almost too easy, Walter,” I called out behind me. “And that troubles me quite a bit.” I killed the motor, hopped out. “We must hurry now and fetch your mother. Between the engine-noise and my pistol, there’ll be more after us…”
I sprang to the vehicle’s rear bed to lift Walter out, but—
Oh, my God in Heaven, no…
The only objects occupying this space were the boy’s meager bow and the final can of petrol.
I glanced out into the woods but saw and heard nothing.
How could I have let this happen? I condemned myself. The town collective snatched Walter out of the back… and have taken him away…
4.
A half-hour’s desperate search in the woods yielded no positive result, and to search longer would only jeopardize the possibility of getting Mary and her unborn out alive. Hence, I trudged back to the brick-and-ivy-netted hovel like a man on his way to the gallows. What could I tell Mary? Her son had been abducted and most likely was dead already—all under my charge…
The very normal sound of crickets followed me back inside, but then came another sound, one which actually deflected my all-pervading muse of despair:
The sound of a baby crying.
I plunged out of the foyer’s ink-like murk into the candle-lit room, where the sound of infantile crying hijacked my gaze toward the heap of a mattress. “Mary!”
There she sat, bearing an exhausted smile as she sat upright among makeshift pillows. In her arms, pressed to her swelling bosom, was a newly born babe, swaddled in linens.
“I went into labor just after you left,” she said, rosy-cheeked. “And then it happened only minutes later.” She turned the infant for me to see.
A miracle, I thought. It was as perfect as any babe I’d ever beheld. The moment it took notice of me, it quieted, and looked at me wide-eyed.
“See, he likes you, Foster. Just the sight of you calms him.” Mary rocked him as best she could.
“What a wonder,” I whispered. “I’m only sorry I wasn’t here to assist when the time came.”
“Each time it’s easier,” she informed. “There was barely any pain with this one.” She glanced hopefully to me, eyes aglint in the candlelight. “But we must name him right away, in case—”
In case we die trying to leave, I finished for her.
“I’m going to name him Foster,” she said.
I went speechless, a tear beading in my eye.
Then her hopeful glance turned hard as granite. “And they’re not going to get this one. Only over my dead body…”
The joy of this notice crested in my heart, but then crashed to the most stygian depths.
She still didn’t know that Walter was gone.
“Mary, I… I…”
“I love you so much, Foster,” she interrupted, teary-eyed herself. “I want you to marry me. I want to spend the rest of my life with you, and raise this child with you… and make love to you every single night…”
The words, greater than any gift I’d ever been given, only dragged my spirit deeper into the abyss of black verity.
“You, me, and Walter,” she mused on, breast-feeding now. “We’ll be such a happy family.”
Sorrow sealed my throat like a strangler’s gasp. I could barely hack out, “Mary, you don’t understand. It’s about—”
“I know what it’s about,” her placid voice came to me. “It’s about Walter.”
I stared.
“I never got the chance to explain earlier,” she went on, modestly covering enough of her bosom to forestall my view. “Earlier, you said that you’d witnessed Cyrus Zalen at the waterfront, delivering sacks of newborns to the fullbloods.”