Button, Button: Uncanny Stories by Richard Matheson Page B

crisp in his lungs, cold against his pale cheeks.
    Where were they? Paal closed his eyes and tried to sense their presence. They weren't in the house. Where then? Where were his mother and father?
    Hands of my mother. Paal washed his mind clean of all but the trigger symbol. They rested on the ebony velvet of his concentration-pale, lovely hands, soft to touch and be touched by, the mechanism that could raise his mind to the needed level of clarity.
    In his own home it would be unnecessary. His own home was filled with the sense of them. Each object touched by them possessed a power to bring their minds close. The very air seemed charged with their consciousness, filled with a constancy of attention.
    Not here. He needed to lift himself above the alien drag of here.
    Therefore, I am convinced that each child is born with this instinctive ability. Words given to him by his father appearing again like dew-jewelled spiderweb across the
    fingers of his mother's hands. He stripped it off. The hands were free again, stroking slowly at the darkness of his mental focus. His eyes were shut; a tracery of lines and ridges scarred his brow, his tightened jaw was bloodless. The level of awareness, like waters, rose.
    His senses rose along, unbidden.
    Sound revealed its woven maze-the rushing, thudding, drumming, dripping rain; the tangled knit of winds through air and tree and gabled eave; the crackling settle of the house; each whispering transience of process.
    Sense of smell expanded to a cloud of brain-filling odors-wood and wool, damp brick and dust and sweet starched linens. Beneath his tensing fingers weave became apparentcoolness and warmth, the weight of covers, the delicate, skin-scarring press of rumpled sheet. In his mouth the taste of cold air, old house. Of sight, only the hands.
    Silence; lack of response. He'd never had to wait so long for answers before. Usually, they flooded on him easily. His mother's hands grew clearer. They pulsed with life. Unknown, he climbed beyond. This bottom level sets the stage for more important phenomena. Words of his father. He'd never gone above that bottom level until now.
    Up, up. Like cool hands drawing him to rarified heights. Tendrils of acute consciousness rose towards the peak, searching desperately for a holding place. The hands began breaking into clouds. The clouds dispersed.
    It seemed he floated towards the blackened tangle of his home, rain a glistening lace before his eyes. He saw the front door standing, waiting for his hand. The house drew closer. It was engulfed in licking mists. Closer, closer-
    Paal, no.
    His body shuddered on the bed. Ice frosted his brain. The house fled suddenly, bearing with itself a horrid image of two black figures lying on-
    Paal jolted up, staring and rigid. Awareness maelstromed into its hiding place. One thing alone remained. He knew that they were gone. He knew that they had guided him, sleeping, from the house.
    Even as they burned.
    That night they knew he couldn't speak.
    There was no reason for it, they thought. His tongue was there, his throat looked healthy. Wheeler looked into his opened mouth and saw that. But Paal did not speak.
    "So that's what it was," the sheriff said, shaking his head gravely. It was near eleven.
    Paal was asleep again.
    "What's that, Harry?" asked Cora, brushing her dark blond hair in front of the dressing table mirror.
    "Those times when Miss Frank and I tried to get the Nielsens to start the boy in school." He hung his pants across the chair back. "The answer was always no. Now I see why."
    She glanced up at his reflection. "There must be something wrong with him, Harry," she said.
    "Well, we can have Doc Steiger look at him but I don't think so."
    "But they were college people," she argued. "There was no earthly reason why they shouldn't teach him how to talk. Unless there was some reason he couldn't."
    Wheeler shook his head again.
    "They were strange people, Cora," he said. "Hardly spoke a word themselves. As