Offspring (3 page)

David Halbard was a satisfied man. He was right now. Sipping the dregs of his tired fifth cup.

He was always a bit surprised to find himself feeling that way. His first year out of the University of Pennsylvania via Brooklyn Polytechnic had been a disaster after all. Engineering school had prepared
him for the big design work, but the job at Comcorp had turned out to be completely by the book, nothing even remotely sexy. He gave it a year and a half and then quit, trusting to luck.

The job at IBM was better—a big new machine for the U.S. Coast Guard. He and two other guys had done most of the work themselves and they’d had a terrific time. But halfway through, the Guard had scrapped the project. Too complex, they said.

It wasn’t too complex as far as the team was concerned. It was just that the Guard was so fucking simple.

The next three years saw two more designs come and go, and by 1986 he’d had it. Total burnout, total discouragement. At this rate he was going to wind up designing transformers somewhere or something equally boring, plugging away all day and hating himself, and hating Amy for putting up with him.

By then he’d married her, his former assistant at IBM—similarly, her job was way beneath her—the single grace note in his messy, discordant life. They decided to simplify, to pick a place they liked and find some way to make it work. They had a little savings. They’d repair TVs and radios if they had to.

They were young and smart and what the hell.

The place was easy to come by. Amy came from Portland originally and still thought of Maine as home. And David, Brooklyn born, thought the coast of Maine looked fine.

He still did.

He turned off the Mac, got out of his chair and
walked to the double plate-glass doors to the sun deck. He slid one open to let in the morning air.

There was a breeze ruffling the tall grass and goldenrod beyond the stand of oaks but the day was going to be mild.

Small birds fluttered through the branches, assembling, singing in the trees.

One more cup
, he thought,
out here on the deck
.

He walked through the study back to the kitchen and poured himself a mugful.

Coffee never kept him awake. Work did.

Work was supposed to.

He took the mug outside and sat in one of the green wooden lawn chairs along the weathered railing.

Over his head two thick branches swayed in the breeze. The largest branch reached all the way across the deck, nearly fingering the bedroom window adjacent to the study.

Amy lay sleeping inside.

Got to cut that back one of these days
, he thought.

But he didn’t like to touch them, really. There were ten trees, spaced unevenly, all black oak, tall and old and venerable, and they seemed to deserve their living space.

It was unusual for trees to grow as big as these this far north. The cold winter winds off the sea kept most things stunted, hunched low to the ground. Humbled.

He wiggled his toes and sipped his coffee.

He was barefoot. The sun had warmed the deck already.

The deck was painted pinewood, gray, and it was roomy, twelve by thirty-five, room enough for four comfortable chairs, a picnic table with benches and a grill. Stilts pegged it to the side of a steep hill that rolled down through the stand of oak and scrub and flattened out to over three full acres of grasslands, another two acres of low pine, fir and cedar, and beyond that, to the point—to the cliffs and the sea.

You couldn’t see the cliffs through the pines. But the view was still spectacular in its way. Nothing trimmed. Nothing mowed or planted. Everything wild.

The woods are dark
, he thought.

Thank god for that.

It was the game that had bought them the place.

Two years before, while he was still writing code into ROM and then debugging, while Amy was designing the graphics and Phil was composing the music back in New York, they’d rented. A hundred-year-old house back in the woods. Charming except when it rained, because then the roof leaked in about a dozen places. You had a symphony of pots and pans. And nothing left to cook with at all.

But his idea for a fast, tense, really
scary
horror-adventure game turned out to be right on the money. Computer Arts had snapped it up, licensing American rights at a royalty rate that struck him as surprisingly generous. And “The Woods Are Dark” became their first big win against Nintendo. In fact it was
anybody’s
first big win against Nintendo—they’d dominated the market for so long.

Part of the reason was the controversy. His design had included hordes of spiders coming to devour you
through trembling sticky webs, writhing snake pits, deformed half-human monsters popping out of trees, from behind bushes, and a graveyard where the dead hauled themselves slowly, painfully, hand over hand out of their graves. What you killed, bled. Bled plenty.

Amy’s graphics were state of the art and shivery as hell and people were offended that it was mostly kids who would be playing with this thing.

But neither David nor Computer Arts saw it that way. Compared to a PG-rated movie these days the game was innocent as Scrabble.

Compared to every other game it was a stick of dynamite.

So sales went through the roof, allowing the company to buy more games, all of which were selling, too.

But “The Woods Are Dark” was Computer Arts’ equivalent to Nintendo’s “Super Mario Brothers.” No other game had topped it either here or in Japan—it was raking in as much over there now as it was at home. And the advance for the new game, “Hide and Seek,” was stunning.

So he and Amy went house shopping.

What they found was this, a gray cedar-shake saltbox with a view—also about a hundred years old and as isolated as the rental had been, with their nearest neighbor almost two miles north, but light-years from the other house in terms of upkeep. It had been owned by an old country doctor and his wife until he died and she moved to Arizona to be with her children. They’d had enough money and stubborn Yankee respect for things past to keep the house pretty
much what it had been originally, to keep the hand-hewn beams exposed and the moldings stained, not painted, and to hold on to the old potbellied stove.

Next week Campbell and his crew were bolting the sills to the foundation for the new addition. Much of the lumber was already piled under the deck, covered by tarps. He’d seen Campbell’s work and knew the man to be a meticulous craftsman, one who could be counted upon to keep the feel of the place and blend the old skillfully with the new. He was expensive but well worth the price.

And hell, they had the money. Miraculously, they had a lot more money than either of them knew what to do with.

His brokers knew.

Nintendo had one thing right
, he thought. Roughly translated from the Japanese, the word
nintendo
meant, “no matter how hard you work, the results are in the hands of god.”

He figured that said it all.

The coffee was almost gone.

The sun was warming. He was starting to feel drowsy. He heard the sudden whir of wings and saw a bird beat hard out of the tall grass. Grouse, partridge, pheasant—some kind of game bird—he wished he knew more about these things. The bird flew a hundred yards or so and settled back into the grass again. He watched until it disappeared.

Then looked back to where it had come from.

And damn near dropped his coffee.

It was far away but his eyes were pretty good, and
even if they’d only been half as good there was no mistaking what was out there.

She was standing in the grass and goldenrod. The grass was maybe three feet high, just up to her waist. If he had to guess, he’d say she was seventeen or eighteen. A teenager.

He couldn’t make out her features but her hair was dark and long, very long. Covering her naked shoulders. Half hiding her breasts.

He couldn’t say about the rest of her, but from the waist on up she was naked.

Holding a flower and turning it in her hands. A red one.

She was looking in his direction.

At the house, or at him.

Amy’s not going to believe this
, he thought.
Our very own wood sprite out here in the yard
.

The girl stood a moment longer and then turned and walked toward the pines, a wild thick cascade of dark brown hair disappearing slowly through the bright yellow grass.

He had to wake Amy and tell her.

He walked back into the study and slid the door closed behind him. He was on his way to their bedroom, passing the old Defiant potbellied stove in the middle of the study when he glanced at the clock.

Five-thirty
.

She’ll kill me
, he thought.

With good reason. Amy hadn’t been sleeping well in the past three months since Melissa was born, though Melissa was evolving (with incredible rapidity, he
thought—it was amazing how swiftly infants changed) into a good easy baby who didn’t tend to wake them every half hour like some of the others he’d known. He’d only had to tend to her once tonight.

And Amy’d slept through it soundly for a change.

Let her go
, he thought. The news could keep.

He peeked in on his way to the bathroom.

Her body had come back fast and he was pleased to see her sleeping naked again, the strong back, the slope of shoulder and the curve of her breast pressed into the bedsheet.

On the other side of the room Melissa lay tiny and pink faced in her bassinet.

You’re a pretty lucky sonovabitch
, he thought.
You know that?

Home and wife and baby.

Wood nymph and all.

Out in the field he heard the first crow of the morning.

Second Stolen moved through the shadows of the pine and cedar forest, breathing deeply of its sweet smell. Beneath her feet the fallen needles were thick, cool, wet with dew. A low branch brushed her thigh and made her nipples stiffen.

Sensation entered her more deeply than it did the others. She was not exactly pleased by this, but she knew it to be true.

She was nearing the edge of the forest. Already she could hear the sea.

She had not yet found the children. But it was dawn now. She had to return.

The Woman would be angry.

The Woman had sensed something. The Woman had sent Second Stolen to find the children—and she had not.

She felt a sullen shame.

She was not the hunter the Woman wished her to be.

At the end she had drifted to the house where the infant was, thinking dimly of her own child, who was hardly any older. But it was early and the infant had not appeared yet. Only the man, who had seen her.

She wondered if it mattered that the man had seen her.

There was only one way to cool the Woman’s anger, and that was to anticipate it. As she walked she watched for the proper instrument.

It needed to be thin and strong and supple.

There
.

The branch was green, tough, but her hands were calloused hard and she twisted it to the right, down and then up, splitting through the filaments of sapwood. She peeled away the needles. The wood bled in her hand.

She walked to the clearing, squinting at the sun.

Fat black bumblebees drifted through the hawk-weed, daisies, and clover. She stood among them, knowing the bees were harmless unless you hit or stepped on one. The bees flew low around her, gathering pollen on their long black legs.

Apart from the bees she was alone.

Across the clearing the surf pounded.

She brought the branch down across her back, striking hard, knowing that each blow must mark her or else there was no sense to it. She used it across her buttocks and thighs but did not dare to strike lower than that. She did not wish to stir the bees.

Sensation entered her more deeply than it did the others
.

When she was finished her hand was black with bark and sap.

Beyond the field the woods grew thick again. The path twisted up and then down through a long shaded canopy of gnarled scrubby pitch pine and spruces, beaten low by the offshore winds.

She walked through them to the cliffs, found the path again and started down.

Halfway down she saw them, all six of them below her scrambling over the rocks at the shoreline. The Girl carried a bag. The others did not go empty handed either though it was too far away to see what they had gathered.

It was dawn and they were moving quickly, silently.

They would be there long before her.

The Woman would be angry
.

She could call to them. Make them wait. The Woman might not question her, might think she had found them after all. Though it had taken her nearly all night and into the morning.

Except that she was marked already.

She was naked, and the Woman would read the marks and know.

On the trail before her lay a fox scat. She used the stick to pick it apart and saw the matted hair and bone—the fox’s meal of mouse or rabbit.

Its prey had known pain before it died. Had struggled against it.

She sighed at what could not be helped and continued on alone.

The map was out.

It wasn’t the same map they’d used eleven years ago but it might as well have been—it was that crinkled up and beat to hell—and it hung against the same old smoke-stained slate gray station-house wall.

The last time Peters had seen the place was at his retirement party.

Mary had been there, looking pretty and openly relieved that he was finally getting out. A few of the other wives were there, those who knew him well and still cared to know him, and when they presented him with the pair of welded, four-inch-thick solid brass balls, some of the wives had blushed.

The time before that was the time he’d made his last arrest.

He was clearing out his desk when this skinny little weasel of a kid walks in to post his buddy’s bail. The buddy’d been picked up for drunken driving and
reckless endangerment and he’d been there two, three days or so. They’d set bail at $1,200.