Strange Seed by Stephen Mark Rainey Page A

boy?”
    “Asleep,” Rachel answered quickly, “ever since you left.”
    “Good.   That’s good.”
    He followed Rachel into the bedroom and quickly scanned the bet.   “Get the goddamed cat off it, okay!”
    Rachel pushed at the fat’s flank a couple of times.   “C’mon, Mr. Higgins,” she said.   “Shoo!”   Mr. Higgins meowed in protest and moved slowly off the bed.
    Paul shifted Lumas’s body around so he carried it for a second in his outstretched arms, then carefully lowered it onto the bed.   He straightened, took a deep breath.   “My God”—on the exhale—“I don’t ever want to go through that again!”
    “What’s wrong with him, Paul?”
    “Damned if I know.”   He took another deep breath, then knelt on one knee beside the bed.   Rachel switched on the lamp on the dresser.   It didn’t work.   “It’s that fucking generator,” Paul told her.   “Just get the kerosene lamp, I guess.   And some cloth for a bandage.”  
    Rachel nodded and went into the living room.
    Paul took hold of Lumas’s left hand and tried to examine it.   “Can’t see a goddamned thing,” he whispered.   “Rachel,” he called, “the lamp!   Please!”
    “I’m trying to find a bandage, Paul,” she answered peevishly.
    “Well, bring the lamp first!”
    “How am I going to find a bandage in the dark?”
    “For God’s sake, we’ve got more than one lamp in this house, don’t we!”
    “I’ll only be a second…”   She rummaged about in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom.   “Here’s one,” she called.   A moment later, she reappeared in the bedroom doorway, lantern dangling from one hand, a white strip of cloth from the other.   She held the lantern out.   “Here,” she said.
    “No, hold it over him.”
    She moved closer to the bed and held the lamp over Lumas.
    “That’s right,” Paul continued.   “Now give me the bandage.”
    She handed him the bandage.   He glanced at her: he had Lumas’s left hand cradled in his hand.   “Pretty messy, huh?” he said.
    Rachel’s face tightened.   “What happened to it, Paul?”
    “He put a thorn through it,” Paul said.
    “A thorn?”
    “From a honey locust.”   He started to wrap Lumas’s still-bleeding hand with a bandage.
    “Oh,” Rachel said.   “That’s a tree, isn’t it?”
    “Yes.   A tree with thorns on it.”
    “Like a rosebush,” Rachel whispered.
    Paul glanced confusedly at her.   “Yes,” he said.   “Like a rosebush.”   He tied the bandage into a knot over Lumas’s palm and studied the results of his work.   “This is no good,” he said.   “His hand’s still bleeding.   Don’t we have anything else, some cotton or something?”
    “Let me do it,” Rachel said, and handed him the lamp.   “You’ve got that bandage all wrong.   And you’ve got to clean the wound first.”
    Paul stared blankly at her a moment, as if he intended to give her an argument, then straightened.   “I’ll get a pan of water,” he said, and stepped away from the bed.
    “Yes, good,” Rachel said.   She leaned over Lumas.   “And see if you can find another strip of cloth and a thin piece of wood so I can fix a tourniquet.   He seems to have lost a lot of blood.   Has he been bleeding ever since you found him?”
    “No.   I helped him back to his cabin and he seemed okay for a while.   We talked—I’ll tell you about it—and then, all of sudden, he was out.   His hand must have started bleeding again because of the way I was carrying him.”
    “Yes,” Rachel said, and picked at the tight knot Paul had tied in the bandage.   “That’s possible.”
    *****
    Paul leaned forward in his winged-back chair.   “That’s the whole story, Rachel.   If you can make any sense of it, I wish you’d share it with me.   He said you’d understand.”
    “Really?   Why would he say that?”
    Paul shrugged.   “Who knows.   He seems to think quite a lot of you.   He said you had a