Free Fear that man by Dean Koontz Page B

suffered what the psychologists call a trauma. That seems like a very inadequate word to me.
        To understand this “trauma,” one should know some of the events that preceded it. The townsfolk came in the middle of the night and took her, decapitated her, stuffed a cross cut from stale bread into her dead mouth, and charred her on fire fed by the boughs of a dogwood tree. I was five years old at the time.
        Those were the days when men still killed, before Hope sprang up as the capital of our galaxy and pushed forth a society where no man killed another man, where sanity ruled. That was a thousand years ago, a century after Galactic War I, before Eternity Combine gave us immortality. And worst of all, that was Earth. The rest of the galaxy was staggering to its feet, aware that something had gone amiss in the great chauvinistic dreams that had dominated for so many hundreds of years. Hope was an idea born in the brighter minds, a last possibility for the survival of what Man should be, a dream of kinglessness, of Utopia unmarred, a last chance but the best chance ever for mankind. Yet Earthmen were still hunting witches.
        To hide me from those who would destroy me because my mother was a mutant who could lift pencils (only pencils and scraps of paper!) with her mind, my grandparents locked me in a closet of their house. Smells: mothballs, old rubber rainshoes, yellowed magazine paper. Sights: dark ghosts of wools and cottons hanging about, imagined spiders scuttering viciously through the darkness.
        And I wept. There was little else to do.
        On the third day, the witch-hunters were certain that I had perished in the fire of the house, for they could not find me and trusted my grandparents because-as a cover against the day he knew was coming-my grandfather had belonged to the witch-hunting group. So it was that on the third day I was brought forth from the closet and into the parlor where my grandmother kissed me and dried my eyes on her gray, coarse apron. On that same day, Grandfather came to me where I sat with my grandmother, his huge and calloused hands folded over each other, concealing something. “I’ve a surprise for you, Andy.”
        I smiled.
        He took one hand from the other, revealing a lump of coal with eyes a shade darker than the rest of it. “Caesar!” I cried. Caesar was my myna bird, rescued in some unknown, unknowable, miraculous fashion from the holocaust of the exorcism.
        I ran to Grandfather, and as I ran, the bird screeched in imitation: “Andyboy, Andyboy.” I stopped, my feet suddenly rocks too heavy to lift another inch, and I stared at it. It fluttered a wing. “Andyboy, Andyboy, An-”
        And I started to scream. It was an involuntary scream, torn from my lungs, bursting through my lips, roaring madly into the room. The myna’s words were mockings of my mother’s words. The inflection, though certainly not the tone, was perfect. Memories of my mother flooded me: warm kitchens to burned corpse to storytelling sessions to a headless, bloodless body. Bad and good memories mixed, mingled, blew each other to larger than life reality in my memory. I turned and ran from the parlor. Wings beat against me. Caesar was a stuck recording.
        Grandfather was running too, but he did not seem to be Grandfather any longer. Instead, he had become one of the witch-hunters shooting out the windows of our house, screaming for my mother’s death.
        Running through the half open cellar door, I stumbled down the steps, almost crashing down to a broken neck on the concrete, flailing at the hideous wings and the sharp orange beak that tried to be her lips. I locked myself in the coal room while Caesar battered himself to tatters against the thick door. When Grandfather finally broke it down, I was on my knees with my head against the floor, unable to scream in anything but a hoarse whisper. My knuckles were raw from pounding them into the concrete,