the best of kuttner by Henry Kuttner

Author:Henry Kuttner [Kuttner, Henry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-12-08T17:30:36.466000+00:00

CALL HIM DEMON

Chapter 1. Wrong Uncle

A long time afterward she went back to Los Angeles and drove past Grandmother Keaton's house. It hadn't changed a great deal, really, but what had seemed an elegant mansion to her childish, 1920 eyes was now a big ramshackle frame structure, gray with scaling paint.

After twenty-five years the--insecurity--wasn't there any more, but there still persisted a dull, irrational, remembered uneasiness, an echo of the time Jane Larkin had spent in that house when she was nine, a thin, big-eyed girl with the Buster Brown bangs so fashionable then.

Looking back, she could remember too much and too little. A child's mind is curiously different from an adult's. When Jane went into the living-room under the green glass chandelier, on that June day in 1920, she made a dutiful round of the family, kissing them all. Grandmother Keaton and chilly Aunt Bessie and the four uncles. She did not hesitate- when she came to the new uncle--who was different.

The other kids watched her with impassive eyes. They knew. They saw she knew. But they said nothing just then. Jane realized she could not mention the--the trouble--either, until they brought it up. That was part of the silent etiquette of childhood. But the whole house was full of uneasiness. The adults merely sensed a trouble, something vaguely wrong. The children, Jane saw, knew.

Afterward they gathered in the back yard, under the big date-palm. Jane ostentatiously fingered her new necklace and waited. She saw the looks the others exchanged--looks that said, 'Do you think she really noticed?' And finally Beatrice, the oldest, suggested hide-and-seek.

'We ought to tell her, Bee,' little Charles said.

Beatrice kept her eyes from Charles.

'Tell her what? You're crazy, Charles.'

Charles was insistent but vague.

'You know.'

'Keep your old secret,' Jane said. 'I know what it is, anyhow. He's not my uncle.'

'See?' Emily crowed. 'She did too see it. I told you she'd notice.'

'It's kind of funny,' Jane said. She knew very well that the man

in the living-room wasn't her uncle and never had been, and he was pretending quite hard--hard enough to convince the grown-ups--that he had always been here. With the clear, unprejudiced eye of immaturity, Jane could see that he wasn't an ordinary grown-up. He was sort of--empty.

'He just came,' Emily said. 'About three weeks ago.'

'Three days,' Charles corrected, trying to help, but his temporal sense wasn't dependent on the calendar. He measured time by the yardstick of events, and days weren't standard size for him. They were longer when he was sick or when it rained, and far too short when he was riding the merry-go-round at Ocean Park or playing games in the back yard.

'It was three weeks,' Beatrice said.

'Where'd he come from?' Jane asked.

There were secret glances exchanged.

'I don't know,' Beatrice said carefully.

'He came out of a big round hole that kept going around," Charles said. 'It's like a Christmas tree through there, all fiery.'

'Don't tell lies,' Emily said. 'Did you ever truly see that, Charles?'

'No. Only sort of.'

'Don't they notice?' Jane meant the adults.

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