Michael Bishop - A Gift from the Graylanders(1).pdf - Michael Bishop - margozap

A GIFT FROM THE

GRAYLANDERS

Michael Bishop

True science fiction horror stories are rare, and despite the surfeit of

monster movies they are seldom about attacks on Earth by alien

beasties. Here is a quietly written sf story whose undercurrent of fear

builds gradually, as in the best horror stories. But its ending isn't at all

what you might expect.

Michael Bishop won a Nebula Award for his novelette "The

Quickening." His many novels include No Enemy but Time and Ancient of

Days.

In the house where Mommy took him several months after she and

Daddy stopped living together, Cory had a cot downstairs. The house

belonged to Mommy's sister and her sister's husband Martin, a pair of

unhappy people who already had four kids of their own. Aunt Clara's kids

had real bedrooms upstairs, but Mommy told Cory that he was lucky to

have a place to sleep at all and that anyway a basement was certainly a lot

better than a hot-air grate on a Denver street or a dirty stable like the one

that the Baby Jesus had been born in.

Cory hated the way the basement looked and smelled. It had walls like

the concrete slabs on the graves in cemeteries. Looking at them, you could

almost see those kinds of slabs turned on their ends and pushed up

against one another to make this small square prison underground. The

slabs oozed wetness. You could make a handprint on the walls just by

holding your palm to the concrete. When you took your hand away, it

smelled gray. Cory knew that dead people smelled gray too, especially

when they had been dead a long time—like the people who were only bones

and whom he had seen grinning out of magazine photographs without any

lips or eyeballs or hair. Cory sometimes lay down on his cot wondering if

maybe an army of those gray-smelling skeletons clustered on the other

side of the basement walls, working with oddly silent picks and shovels to

break through the concrete and carry him away to the GrayLands where

their deadness made them live.

Maybe, though, the gray-smelling creatures beyond the basement walls

were not really skeletons. Maybe they were Clay People. On his cousins'

black-and-white TV set, Cory had seen an old movie serial about a strange

planet. Some of the planet's people lived underground, and they could step

into or out of the walls of rock that tied together a maze of tunnels

beneath the planet's surface. They moved through dirt and rock the way

that a little boy like Cory could move through water in summer or loose

snow in winter. The brave, blond hero of the serial called these creatures

the Clay People, a name that fit them almost perfectly, because they

looked like monsters slapped together out of wet mud and then put out

into the sun to dry. Every time they came limping into view with that

tinny movie-serial music rum-tum-tumplng away in the background, they

gave Cory a bad case of the shivers.

Later, lying on his cot, he would think about them trying to come

through the oozy walls to take him away from Clara's house the way that

Daddy had tried to kidnap him from that motel in Raton, New Mexico.

For a long time that day, Daddy had hidden in the room with the vending

machines. Going in there for a Coke, Cory had at first thought that Daddy

was a monster. His screams had brought Mommy running and also the

motel manager and a security guard; and the "kidnap plot"—as Mommy

had called it later—had ended in an embarrassing way for Daddy, Daddy

hightailing it out of Raton in his beat-up Impala like a drug dealer making

a getaway in a TV cop show. But what if the Clay People were better

kidnappers than Daddy? What if they came through the walls and

grabbed him before he could awake and scream for help? They would

surely take him back through the clammy grayness to a place where dirt

would fill his mouth and stop his ears and press against his eyeballs, and

he would be as good as dead with them forever and ever.

So Cory hated the basement. Because his cousins disliked the

windowless damp of the place as much as he did, they seldom came

downstairs to bother him. Although that was okay when he wanted to be

by himself, he never really wanted to be by himself in the basement .

Smelling its mustiness, touching its greasy walls, feeling like a bad guy in

solitary, Cory could not help but imagine unnameable danger and

deadness surrounding him. Skeletons. Clay People. Monsters from the

earthen dark. It was okay to be alone on a mountain trail or even in a

classroom at school, but to be alone in this basement was to be punished

for not having a daddy who came home every evening the way that

daddies were supposed to. Daddy himself, who had once tried to kidnap

Cory, would have never made him spend his nights in this kind of prison.

Or, if for some reason Daddy could not have prevented the arrangement,

he would have stayed downstairs with Cory to protect him from the

creatures burrowing toward him from the GrayLands.

"Cory, there's nothing down here to be afraid of," Mommy said. "And

you don't want your mother to share your bedroom with you, do you? A

big seven-year-old like you?"

"No," he admitted. "I want my daddy."

"Your daddy can't protect you. He can't or won't provide for you. That's

why we had to leave him. He only tried to grab you back, Cory, to hurt me.

Don't you understand?"

Daddy hurt Mommy? Cory shook his head.

"I'm sorry it's a basement," Mommy said. "I'm sorry it's not a chalet

with a big picture window overlooking a mountain pass, but things just

haven't been going that way for us lately."

Cory rolled over on his cot so that the tip of his nose brushed the

slablike wall.

"Tell me what you're afraid of," Mommy said. "If you tell me, maybe we

can handle it together—whatever it is." After some more coaxing, but

without turning back to face her, Cory began to talk about the skeletons

and the Clay People from the GrayLands beyond the sweating concrete.

"The GrayLands?" Mommy said. "There aren't any GrayLands, Cory.

There may be skeletons, but they don't get up and walk. They certainly

don't use picks and shovels to dig their way into basements. And the Clay

People, well, they're just television monsters, make-believe, nothing at all

for a big boy like you to worry about in real life."

"I want to sleep on the couch upstairs."

"You can't, Cory. You've got your own bathroom down here, and when

you wake up and have to use it, well, you don't disturb Uncle Martin or

Aunt Clara or any of the kids. We've been through all this before, haven't

we? You know how important it is that Marty get his sleep. He has to get

up at four in order to make his shift at the fire station."

"I won't use the bathroom upstairs. I won't even drink nothin' before I

go to bed."

"Cory, hush."

The boy rolled over and pulled himself up onto his elbows so that he

could look right into Mommy's eyes. "I'm scared of the GrayLands. I'm

scared of the gray-smellin' monsters that're gonna come pushin' through

the walls from over there."

Playfully, Mommy mussed his hair. "You're impossible, you know that?

Really impossible."

It was as if she could not wholeheartedly believe in his fear. In fact, she

seemed to think that he had mentioned the GrayLands and the monsters

who would come forth from them only as a boy's cute way of prompting

adult sympathy. He did not like the basement (Mommy was willing to

concede that point), but this business of a nearby subterranean country of

death and its weird gray-smelling inhabitants was only so much childish

malarky. The boy missed his father, and Mommy could not assume

Daddy's role as protector—as bad as Clinton himself had been at

it—because in a young boy's eyes a woman was not a man. And so she

mussed his hair again and abandoned him to his delusive demons.

Cory never again spoke to anyone of the GrayLands. But each night,

hating the wet clayey smell of the basement and its gummy linoleum floor

and the foil-wrapped heating ducts bracketed to the ceiling and the naked

light bulb hanging like a tiny dried gourd from a bracket near the

unfinished stairs, he would huddle under the blankets on his cot and talk

to the queer creatures tunneling stealthily toward him from the

GrayLands—-the Clay People, or Earth Zombies, or Bone Puppets, that

only he of all the members of this mixed-up household actually believed in.

"Stay where you are," Cory would whisper at the wall. "Don't come over

here. Stay where you are."

The monsters—whatever they were—obeyed. They did not break

through the concrete to grab him. Of course, maybe the concrete was too

thick and hard to let them reach him without a lot more work. They could

still be going at it, picking away. The Clay People on that movie planet had

been able to walk through earth without even using tools to clear a path

for themselves, but maybe Earth's earth was packed tighter. Maybe good

old-fashioned Colorado concrete could hold off such single-minded

creatures for months. Cory hoped that it could. For safety's sake, he would

keep talking to them, begging them to stay put, pleading with them not to

undermine the foundations of his uncle's house with their secret digging.

Summer came, and they still had not reached him. The walls still stood

against them, smooth to the touch here, rough there. Some of the

scratches in the ever-glistening grayness were like unreadable foreign

writing. These scratches troubled Cory. He wondered if they had always

been there. Maybe the tunneling creatures had scribbled them on the

concrete from the other side, not quite getting the tips of their strange

writing instruments to push through the walls but by great effort and

persistence just managing to press marks into the outer surface where a

real human being like him could see them. The boy traced these marks

with his finger. He tried to spell them out. But he had gone through only

his first year in school, and the task of decipherment was not one he could

accomplish without help. Unfortunately, he could not apply for help

without breaking the promise that he had made to himself never to speak

of the GrayLanders to anyone in Aunt Clara's family. If Mommy could

muster no belief in them, how could he hope to convince his hard-headed

cousins, who liked him best when he was either running errands for them

or hiding from them in the doubtful sanctuary of the basement? Then

Cory realized that maybe he was having so much trouble reading the

GrayLanders' damp scratches not because he was slow or the scratches

stood for characters in a foreign tongue, but because his tormentors'

painstaking method of pressing them outward onto the visible portions of

the walls made the characters arrive there backwards . Cory was proud of

himself for figuring this out. He filched a pocket mirror from the handbag

of the oldest girl and brought it down the creaking stairs to test his theory.

This girl, fifteen-year-old Gina Lynn, caught him holding the mirror

against one of the rougher sections of wall, squinting back and forth

between the concrete and the oval glass. Meanwhile, with the nub of a

broken pencil, he was struggling to copy the reversed scratches onto a

tatter of paper bag. Cory did not hear Gina Lynn come down the stairs

Michael Bishop - A Gift from the Graylanders(1).pdf

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