Scream Quietly - a Collection of Charles L. Grant by Charles L. Grant & Stephen Jones & Andrew Smith

Author:Charles L. Grant & Stephen Jones & Andrew Smith [Grant, Charles L. & Jones, Stephen & Smith, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781906301873
Amazon: 1906301875
Publisher: PS Publishing
Published: 2011-12-01T23:00:00+00:00

II

It was maddening. But I was eighteen, and what was I to make of events years apart when there was my life to live? College took most of my time. I wasn’t that fine a natural student, and had to work like hell just to hang onto my scholarship. Weekends, then, I studied, returning home only on holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas. And each time, Gramp would meet me at the door, examine me intently, and disappear into his room. Mom was worried, but I put it off to old age—the callow assessment of a non-thinker who’d left first-year philosophy with a crisis of faith that ended in my having no faith. It was fashionable, besides. And I grew so used to it that in time I never missed God at all.

Two months after graduation I married a woman I thought I loved; by the same token, she thought me more ambitious than I was. She was also disappointed when, three weeks after the ceremony, I was drafted and didn’t elect to hightail it to Canada. Twenty-two months in Vietnam, and when I returned I was single again.

It didn’t matter.

I didn’t want to be living with anyone then, anyway. I’d seen a lot, had seen too much, and all I asked was to be left alone with myself.

And I was: a week after I’d taken a teaching position at Oxrun’s Hawksted College, Mom died in her sleep.

Then, in October, I was in the front yard raking and cursing the first fall of leaves when I heard a voice calling. I looked up and over the privet hedge and saw Gramp standing in front of the hospital. He had that damned gun in his hand, and he was shouting, beckoning me frantically with one hand, pointing up the street with the revolver. I threw the rake aside, had taken no more than five or six steps toward the kerb when suddenly he screamed. It wasn’t the theatrical gurgling of a doddering old fool, but the full-throated bellowing of a man terrorised, a man dying. He jabbed at the air again and, just as I broke into a run, fell face first into the gutter.

Even now I can recall little of the next few days. There was Gramp’s head in my lap, interns and nurses trying to crowd me to one side, a few passers-by, two men standing in front of our house, a policeman demanding to know what the hell was going on. Then Gramp filled his lungs with air and I thought he was going to scream again. A hand on my shoulder, gently urging me away. Gramp’s chest slowly, slowly collapsing. Blue lips parting: “Alex.”

“Yes, Gramp, yes, I’m here.”

A muttering: “The soldiers, Alexander, the seasons,” and nothing more. Nothing more. The suspenders sagged to either side of his ribs; his trousers were suddenly five sizes too large; only his face remained taut, almost trembling.

I took the gun from his hand and slipped it into my shirt; when I rose, my knee brushed against him and the change in his pocket jingled.

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