Seeds of Fear

THE BEAST Larry Tritten

Lewis woke to the sound of the animal breathing heavily, the gasped exhalations of its breath like those of someone sobbing, and they became steadily more excited as he lay alone in the darkness listening. It had reappeared again, after an absence of several nights during which he had dared to hope that the nightmare had finally come to an end, and as he lay quietly, paralyzed with fear, the familiar menacing sound overwhelmed him once more with a threat of terrible violence. As he listened, the gasping grew louder and more uneven and then broke as always into a protracted howling, the cry of a wounded or agonized thing.

The beast had returned. In a way it was a relief to have the tenuous thread of hope broken. There were times, now and then, when the beast would leave him alone for several consecutive nights, but after such an interim, it would always return, twice as fierce as before, growling and keening with such savagery that he could clearly picture for himself the manic gleaming of its eyes and the flashing of its teeth. He had only seen it once, a quick glimpse, but would never forget the sight, just as the beast would never let him rest. Except for its occasional absences, it prowled through the house each night, stalking him, endlessly, its presence a threat that dominated his thoughts by day as well as night. One day he was certain it would kill him and devour him, and on those nights when it didn't wake him with its wild cries, his dreams gave him dark visions of how this would happen, with the beast tearing the flesh from his struggling body. He had been born, he knew, to live indefinitely with this fear and to die after a seeming eternity of it when the beast decided it was time to feed. Perhaps a thousand nights from now, perhaps tonight.

Lewis began to weep, but soundlessly so as not to attract the beast to his door. Yet it was not that hard to cry soundlessly for someone who cannot even speak. Words were obstacles his tongue could not surmount, and his thoughts were themselves like tiny animals he had to struggle to control. What he perceived was a blurred and shifting montage of ideation illuminated by certain basic words and fragments of concept and guided by intuition. It was how he knew that his only real friend was dog, the good animal they allowed into his room sometimes to play with him. That was his only pleasure other than the customary one of eating and sometimes watching a little television. Beyond that there was only fear, his life an endless sequence of fear evolving into terror and devolving back into fear as he lived through blank days and dark nights waiting for the beast to come for him.

One night it would open the door, would come to feed.

Lewis wept soundlessly, his body shuddering with repressed sobs, and watched the door in the darkness, waiting. After a long while he finally slept again, and so descended into a nightmare in which the beast devoured him alive and screaming.

Then it was morning and the cell of his dun room was bright with sunlight. He got out of bed and sat on the edge of it, staring at the pink bunnies on the sleeve of his pajama top. Good animals. In time Mother came and dressed him, neither of them speaking because neither of them had anything to say, and in any case Lewis knew that this quiet and gentle (if not loving) woman was something more than she seemed to be. It was why every touch of her fingers as she dressed him filled him with coldness, why he could never trust her. She was part of the conspiracy.

Father came and stood in the doorway. "Hey, Lewis," he said in a monotone. He was carrying a blue book. "Elaine," he said to Mother, "I'm going to be late if I don't haul ass. I've got to give that Chaucer exam and — " he glanced at his watch " — I don't want to emulate the White Rabbit."

"But you are rabbity in some ways," Mother said to him with a smile.

Father smiled back at her and crossed the room and put his arms around Mother and kissed her, and she put her arms around him and pressed her face to his throat. "I love you," she said. "Ummmmmmm, you're so good…" She reached to unzip his pants, but he pulled away, laughing.

"No more than thou," Father said. "As for Love… his wings will not rest and his feet will not stay for us; Morning is here in the joy of its might; With his breath has he sweetened a night and a day for us — but I must now haul ass…"

"Swinburne?" asked Mother.

"To a point," Father said. He kissed Mother again. Lewis saw the tip of Mother's tongue, like that of a serpent, wet with light, slip from her mouth to ordain a kiss unlike any she had ever given him before she stopped the charade of kissing him. "See you, love," he said. '"Bye, Lewis."

After Father was gone, Mother took Lewis into the kitchen and fed him. No communication passed between them and their eyes never met. Sometimes a vague sense of warmth emanated from her, but it was not even a flickering of the glow that she and Father exchanged, and Lewis sensed that it was because he knew her secret. He knew the horror that lurked within her. He lived in fear of her. He froze at her touch, and because of that, she cared little for him and he believed that she knew what he knew.

When Mother had fed him, she put him back in his room and closed the door. Lewis sat alone in the silent room with his brooding fear. A fly circled the room listlessly in the summer heat, returning again and again to the window to bounce buzzingly against the glass.

Lewis did nothing all morning and afternoon. It was his task. Nothing. He could hear Mother moving about in the house and his fear simmered within him. His thoughts moved like glacial ice floes in the deep gray tide of his consciousness. Could she know that he knew the evil she possessed? Or did she even know of the evil herself? Still, even in his fear, he relaxed somewhat because he doubted that she would kill him in the daylight. Only at night.

Early in the afternoon Mother fed Lewis again in his room and then admitted dog to play with him. She went away for a long while and when she came back the room was cooler, the sunlight had disappeared, and the sky through the window had gone from bright to gloomy. Now he believed that Mother was changing, too, by subtle degrees as the day waned and night, which was the habitat of the beast and the setting for his death, approached.

Mother smiled at Lewis and he cringed inwardly. She gazed at him but seemed to look unseeingly through him, and he could sense, the way an animal senses a subtle change in its environment, that she was beginning to change. The scent of it came from her like a warm fragrance. She looked at her watch.

"Lewis," she said, "I just don't know what to say. This way it's no good for any of us. I love you as much as I know how, but you're lost in darkness, we can't reach you, you can't reach us. We're going to take you to a place where you'll probably be more at home, if not happier, where there are others like you. " Her voice faltered and then she was crying the way Lewis did at night, silently, tears running down her cheeks. She came to him and embraced him, kissing the top of his head as her sobs became more audible, then burst from her in a welling up of stifled and confused love. But he couldn't discern the love and she couldn't see the look of terror on his face.

That night, after supper, Lewis sat alone in his room. Outside he could hear them talking and then the sound of their voices was absorbed by a lyrical stream of music that flowed through the house. Lewis saw that the fly was still at the window, its attempt to get outside reduced to a feeble straggling movement and intermittent buzzing.

He fell asleep, and when he woke the beast was in the next room, snarling, sounding crazed, and for some reason he was absolutely certain that tonight was the night it would come for him and would kill him. It had something to do with the speech Mother had made. He doubted that she understood this thing that happened to her any more than he did, and Father was just a helpless part of the terrible process.

In time the beast began to utter a loud cry that would normally have driven Lewis to the brink of collapse, but tonight to his surprise he discovered that his fear, so long pervasive and uncontrollable, metamorphosed suddenly and unexpectedly into a sort of wild anger. Uncaged, his fear, bestial in its own right, ran rampant. He found himself moving swiftly from the bed and into the hallway, an action so bold that he could never even have contemplated it on other nights. But this was different. This night was the night everything would be resolved.

Lewis half expected the beast to catch him in the hallway, but he could hear it behind the door of the room he ran past on his way to the kitchen. His thoughts reeled in a wet red medley in his maddened brain.

The knife, the knife! Lewis knew what it would do, had seen the way it cut smoothly and easily through a roast or a loaf of bread. He found it in its drawer and took it out.

Lewis opened the door quietly and firmly and looked into the room where, once before, late at night, he had glimpsed the beast, and there it was again. It reared up, staring at him with Mother's face, demonically transformed.

Like cutting bread, but wildly, fearfully.

At the end of a long tunnel of time the solemn men came for Lewis and found him triumphantly red with blood, the beast slain, Mother and Father freed from the bondage of bestial transformation, himself saved. But they were not pleased, these men like his father (teachers, they called themselves) who had been at the house before. Never at a loss for big words, they momentarily lost their gift of language and wailed and howled instead, acting like beasts themselves.

Lewis sensed that he would never understand. His perceptions of the things people did were constantly undermined by the paradoxes of their enigmatic behavior. An ape probably would have understood a play by Shakespeare as well as Lewis understood the world he had been born into. Shakespeare. There was a word, reiterated continually in Lewis's presence, that had no meaning whatever to him. He barely understood simple words and concepts. Beast. Animal. Bad. Good. Mother. Father. He sensed that Mother and Father were broken now, like many of the moving dolls they had given him and which he had eventually broken, but on the dim stage of his mind he would always see them, again and again, turning into the raging and screaming beast with Mother's face, and would always hear Father's harsh words as he pinned her to the bed, biting her and being bitten in turn until they moaned and writhed, "Come, now, milady, animal, sweet animal, let us make the beast with two backs, let us make the wild beast and howl at the melting moon!