Strange Seed by Stephen Mark Rainey

peered into the soft, nearly liquid darkness beyond.   It was a harder, heavier darkness at the horizon.   Paul was there, in the midst of that darkness.   He had vaulted into it from the shelter of the house.   But why?   Was something wrong with Lumas?   Obviously, Paul knew something he wasn’t telling her—hadn’t had the time to tell her.   Because this was the first time since he and Lumas had discovered the ravaged deer that he had left the house after sunset.   It had to be true—Henry Lumas was ill and needed Paul’s help.   And Paul, apparently unmindful of the very real danger to himself, was going to give it.   Paul must care a great deal about the old man, she thought.   Perhaps, with his stories of living alone in those woods and his intense hatred of “civilization,” Lumas reminded Paul of Paul’s father, though, of course, not in a physical way (but such things actually counted for very little.   You had to look beyond the eyes and the structure of the face to really know a person.   Just as, her thoughts continued, she had done upon encountering the child.   She caught herself on the thought.   She had, then, almost sensed his presence more than she’d actually seen him.   And that was when she’d known, however briefly, all there was to know about him.   Later, the yellow lamplight on him, it had been the grotesque perfection, the inhuman symmetry of his face that had caused her to run from him; it had harshly confirmed what had, just moments before, been only subliminal.
    She closed the door, went into the living room and stood by the couch, her gaze on the child.   She supposed he was sleeping.   His large, oval, pale blue eyes were lightly closed; his firmly muscled chest—how like a man’s it was, except that it was totally without hair—moved almost imperceptibly, his rhythmic breathing incredibly shallow.   His body, Rachel saw, was in precisely the same position Paul had forced it into forty five minutes ago.
    She noticed the blanket folded at the child’s feet and chided herself for not having the good sense to cover him.   she unfolded the blanket and brought it slowly up over his ankles, over his knees, his thighs.   She paused.   Yes, she thought, how like a miniature man he was—a miniature, yet strongly developed man whose body bore no traces of hair, except lightly, on the forearms, and lavishly, on the head, but nowhere else, not even around…   She quickly finished covering him, stepped back and stared at him silently, wonderingly.
    “Where did you come from?” she whispered.   She smiled.   The words were part of a poem she’d learned as a child:   “Where did you come from baby dear?” she said aloud.   “Out of the everywhere, into here?”
     

Chapter Eleven

    It was past ten when Rachel, trying unsuccessfully to nap in the wicker chair, heart footfalls on the back steps.   Paul, she realized.   But he was moving so slowly and heavily, as if in pain.
    “Rachel,” he called, “open the door.”
    Rachel bolted from her chair.   “Paul?” she yelled as she ran through the kitchen.   “What’s wrong?”   She threw the back door open.
    In the dim light, Rachel couldn’t see who it was that Paul carried, fireman style, on his shoulders, but she knew that it was Lumas.   She hesitated, confused, then—as Paul stepped awkwardly to his right—she pushed the screen door open.   Paul moved past her, into the kitchen, and looked about anxiously.   He nodded at the table.   “Clear that off, would you?”
    “Paul…is he…”
    “No, he’s not dead.   Just the clear the table off, please.”
    “Our bed, Paul—put him on our bed.”   She hurried past him into the living room, stopped, looked back: “Well?”
    “Yes,” Paul said.   “Of course,” and he stepped sideways through the narrow doorway and followed Rachel into the living room: he hesitated a moment at the couch and nodded: “How’s the