More Than Human

When the man was gone he dragged himself out of the brook and, faltering, crawled towards the woods.

When Alicia saw her father returning she put the heel of her hand in her mouth and bit down until her teeth met. It was not his clothes, wet and torn, nor even his ruined eye. It was something else, something which – ‘Father!’

He did not answer, but strode up to her. At the last possible instant before being walked down like a wheat stalk, she numbly stepped aside. He stamped past her and through the library doors, leaving them open. ‘Father!’

No answer. She ran to the library. He was across the room, at the cabinets which she had never seen open. One was open now. From it he took a long-barrelled target revolver and a small box of cartridges. This he opened, spilling the cartridges across his desk. Methodically he began to load.

Alicia ran to him. ‘What is it? What is it? You’re hurt, let me help you, what are you…’

His one good eye was fixed and glassy. He breathed slowly, too deeply, the air rushing in for too long, being held for too long, whistling out and out. He snapped the cylinder into place, clicked off the safety, looked at her, and raised the gun.

She was never to forget that look. Terrible things happened then and later, but time softened the focus, elided the details. But that look was to be with her for ever.

He fixed the one eye on her, caught and held her with it; she squirmed on it like an impaled insect. She knew with a horrifying certainty that he did not see her at all, but looked at some unknowable horror of his own. Still looking through her, he put the muzzle of the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

There was not much noise. His hair fluffed upward on top. The eye still stared, she was still pierced by it. She screamed his name. He was no less reachable dead than he had been a moment before. He bent forward as if to show her the ruin which had replaced his hair and the thing that held her broke, and she ran.

Two hours, two whole hours passed before she found Evelyn. One of the hours was simply lost; it was a blackness and a pain. The other was too quiet, a time of wandering about the house followed by a soft little whimpering that she made herself: ‘What?’ she whimpered, ‘what’s that you say?’ trying to understand, asking and asking the quiet house for the second hour.

She found Evelyn by the pool, lying on her back with her eyes wide open. On the side of Evelyn’s head was a puffiness, and in the centre of the puffiness was a hollow into which she could have laid three fingers.

‘Don’t,’ said Evelyn softly when Alicia tried to lift her head. Alicia set it back gently and knelt and took her hands and squeezed them together. ‘Evelyn, oh, what happened?’

‘Father hit me,’ Evelyn said calmly. ‘I’m going to go to sleep.’

Alicia whimpered.

Evelyn said, ‘What is it called when a person needs a… person… when you want to be touched and the… two are like one thing and there isn’t anything else at all anywhere?’

Alicia, who had read books, thought about it. ‘Love,’ she said at length. She swallowed. ‘It’s a madness. It’s bad.’

Evelyn’s quiet face was suffused with a kind of wisdom. ‘It isn’t bad,’ she said. ‘I had it.’

‘You have to get back to the house.’

‘I’ll sleep here,’ said Evelyn. She looked up at her sister and smiled. ‘It’s all right… Alicia?’

‘Yes.’

‘I won’t ever wake up,’ she said with that strange wisdom. ‘I wanted to do something and now I can’t. Will you do it for me?’

‘I’ll do it,’ Alicia whispered.

‘For me,’ Evelyn insisted. ‘You won’t want to.”

‘I’ll do it.’

‘When the sun is bright,’ Evelyn said, ‘take a bath in it. There’s more, wait.’ She closed her eyes. A little furrow came and went on her brow. ‘Be in the sun like that. Move, run. Run and… jump high. Make a wind with running and moving. I so wanted that. I didn’t know until now that I wanted it and now,I… oh, Alicia!’

‘What is it, what is it?’

‘There it is, there it is, can’t you see? The love, with the sun on its body!’

The soft wise eyes were wide, looking at the darkling sky. Alicia looked up and saw nothing. When she looked down again, she knew that Evelyn was also seeing nothing. Not any more.

Far off, in the woods beyond the fence, there was a rush of weeping.

Alicia stayed there listening to it and at last put out her hand and closed Evelyn’s eyes. She rose and went towards the house and the weeping followed her and followed her, almost until she reached the door. And even then it seemed to go on inside her.

When Mrs Prodd heard the hoof thuds in the yard, she muttered under her breath and peered out between the dimity kitchen curtains. By a combination of starlight and deep familiarity with the yard itself, she discerned the horse and stoneboat, with her husband plodding beside it, coming through the gate. He’ll get what for, she mumbled, off to the woods so long and letting her burn dinner.

He didn’t get what for, though. One look at his broad face precluded it. ‘What is it, Prodd?’ she asked, alarmed.

‘Gimme a blanket.’