Free Strange Seed by Stephen Mark Rainey Page B

forward.   He reached out to steady himself against the trunk of the dead honey locust.
    *****
    The sound of human agony is a mixture of fear and confusion and, underlying it, a spontaneous, unspoken plea that the cause of the suffering be ended.   It is an unmistakable sound.   And Paul Griffin, breathless from his run down the rutted path, tensed himself, hearing it, and listened a few seconds, head cocked, for a repeat of the sound.   He heard nothing.
    “Hank?” he called.   “Hank?” he called again, hands cupped to his mouth.
    He heard nothing.
    He stepped carelessly across the brook that separated him from the forest’s eastern perimeter.   “Hank!”   He lifted his foot out of the soft mud at the brook’s edge, listened, heard only the sound of water trickling into the elongated hole his foot had created.
    “Hank!   It’s me—Paul Griffin!”
    To the south, a grouse hurried into the shelter of some thickets.   Ahead—west—from the lower branches of a huge sycamore, a gray squirrel, obviously annoyed, chattered briefly and disappeared around the other side of the tree.
    “Jesus H. Christ!” Paul muttered.   “Hank!” he shouted.   “Where are you?”
    Silence.
    He moved quickly up the shallow slope, stopped and glanced to the east, at the house.   He found himself momentarily startled by the fact that only with effort could he distinguish it from the land around it.   The top of the stone tile roof—dull red because of the setting sun—was clearly visible, but it was not sufficient to immediately suggest that a house lay beneath.   The normally bright green shingles—so cheerful in daylight—now were muted, now blended almost perfectly with the flat near-darkness of the fields, the thickets, and the scattering of trees.   It was a vaguely disorienting sight; Paul turned quickly from it and moved with caution into the forest.
    “Hank?” he called.   “Where are you?”
    Several minutes later, after stumbling occasionally over darkness-obscured roots and vines, he heard a gurgling, low-pitched moan and plunged forward toward what he knew was its source—the small grove of honey locusts he’d paused at a month earlier, the grove of honey locusts that Lumas—in, Paul realized in retrospect, was a fit of temper—had ordered him away from, as if he had been some nameless trespasser bent on the destruction of private and valuable property.
    *****
    Rachel’s brow furrowed in confusion.   She had known something about this child sleeping so peacefully on the old couch.   No, she decided—she hadn’t merely know something about him, she had known everything.   But just briefly, not long enough, now, that the knowledge was anything more than a dim, elusive feeling she could appreciate just fleetingly.  
    Why, for instance, had she told Paul that Henry Lumas would “understand”?   Understand what?   Was the child his?   That was stupid.   If Lumas “understood,” it was an understanding identical to what she had experienced only a half hour ago, an understanding—a feeling—which would soon dissipate completely, like the heavy, then static, then completely absent aura of a particularly distasteful dream.
    She’d acted as if in a panic, she remembered.   She had pointed stiffly at the child and pleaded, “Get hold of him, before…”   Before what, for God’s sake?   Had she supposed he could walk through walls?
    And a minute or two later, as Paul prepared to look the child over, when the lamplight had fallen on the child’s face—what had she seen there that had caused her to run, frightened, into the kitchen, and bring her to the point of tears?   There was nothing in the child’s face to elicit such a reaction.   It was a perfect face.   As perfect, she thought, as the face of a wildflower.
    “Damn!” she whispered tightly, more in frustration than anger.
    She rose from her wicker chair and went into the kitchen, to the back door.   She opened it and