Clifford D. Simak - A Death in the House.pdf

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Title : A Death in the House
Author : Clifford D. Simak
Original copyright year: 1959
Genre : science fiction
Comments : to my knowledge, this is the only available e-text of this
book
Source : scanned and OCR-read from a paperback edition with Xerox
TextBridge Pro 9.0, proofread in MS Word 2000.
Date of e-text : January 3, 2000
Prepared by : Anada Sucka
Anticopyright 2000. All rights reversed.
======================================================================
A Death in the House
Clifford D. Simak
Old Mose Abrams was out hunting cows when he found the alien. He didn't
know it was an alien, but it was alive and it was in a lot of trouble and Old
Mose, despite everything the neighbors said about him, was not the kind of man
who could bear to leave a sick thing out there in the woods.
It was a horrid-looking thing, green and shiny, with some purple spots on
it, and it was repulsive even twenty feet away. And it stank.
It had crawled, or tried to crawl, into a clump of hazel brush, but hadn't
made it. The head part was in the brush and the rest lay out there naked in
the open. Every now and then the parts that seemed to be arms and hands clawed
feebly at the ground, trying to force itself deeper in the brush, but it was
too weak; it never moved an inch.
It was groaning, too, but not too loud - just the kind of keening sound a
lonesome wind might make around a wide, deep eave. But there was more in it
than just the sound of winter wind: there was a frightened, desperate note
that made the hair stand up on Old Mose's nape.
Old Mose stood there for quite a spell, making up his mind what he ought
to do about it, and a while longer after that working up his courage, although
most folks offhand would have said that he had plenty. But this was the sort
of situation that took more than just ordinary screwed-up courage. It took a
lot of foolhardiness.
But this was a wild, hurt thing and he couldn't leave it there, so he
walked up to it, and knelt down, and it was pretty hard to look at, though
there was a sort of fascination in its repulsiveness that was hard to figure
out - as if it were so horrible that it dragged one to it. And it stank in a
way that no one had ever smelled before.
Mose, however, was not finicky. In the neighborhood, he was not well known
for fastidity. Ever since his wife had died almost ten years before, he had
lived alone on his untidy farm and the housekeeping that he did was the
scandal of all the neighbor women. Once a year, if he got around to it, he
sort of shoveled out the house, but the rest of the year he just let things
accumulate.
So he wasn't as upset as some might have been with the way the creature
 
smelled. But the sight of it upset him, and it took him quite a while before
he could bring himself to touch it. and when he finally did, he was
considerably surprised. He had been prepared for it to be either cold or
slimy, or maybe even both. But it was neither. It was warm and hard and it had
a clean feel to it, and he was reminded of the way a green corn stalk would
feel.
He slid his hand beneath the hurt thing and pulled it gently from the
clump of hazel brush and turned it over so he could see its face. It hadn't
any face. It had an enlargement at the top of it, like a flower on top of a
stalk, although its body wasn't any stalk, and there was a fringe around this
enlargement that wiggled like a can of worms, and it was then that Mose almost
turned around and ran.
But he stuck it out.
He squatted there, staring at the no-face with the fringe of worms, and he
got cold all over and his stomach doubled up on him and he was stiff with
fright - and the fright got worse when it seemed to him that the keening of
the thing was coming from the worms.
Mose was a stubborn man. One had to be stubborn to run a runty farm like
this. Stubborn and insensitive in a lot of ways. But not insensitive, of
course, to a thing in pain.
Finally he was able to pick it up and hold it in his arms and there was
nothing to it, for it didn't weigh much. Less that a half-grown shoat, he
figured.
He went up the woods path with it, heading back for home, and it seemed to
him the smell of it was less. He was hardly scared at all and he was warm
again and not cold all over.
For the thing was quieter now and keening just a little. And although he
could not be sure of it, there were times when it seemed as if the thing were
snuggling up to him, the way a scared and hungry baby will snuggle to any
grown person that comes and picks it up.
Old Mose reached the buildings and he stood out in the yard a minute,
wondering whether he should take it to the barn or house. The barn, of course,
was the natural place for it, for it wasn't human - it wasn't even as close to
human as a dog or cat or sick lamb would be.
He didn't hesitate too long, however. He took it into the house and laid
it on what he called a bed, next to the kitchen stove. He got it straightened
out all neat and orderly and pulled a dirty blanket over it, and then went to
the stove and stirred up the fire until there was some flame.
Then he pulled up a chair beside the bed and had a good, hard, wondering
look at this thing he had brought home. It had quieted down a lot and seemed
more comfortable than it had out in the woods. He tucked the blanket snug
around it with a tenderness that surprised himself. He wondered what he had
that it might eat, and even if he knew, how he'd manage feeding it, for it
seemed to have no mouth.
'But you don't need to worry none,' he told it. 'Now that I got you under
a roof, you'll be all right. I don't know too much about it, but I'll take
care of you the best I can.'
By now it was getting on toward evening, and he looked out the window and
 
saw that the cows he had been hunting had come home by themselves.
'I got to go get the milking done and other chores,' he told the thing
lying on the bed, 'but it won't take me long. I'll be right back.'
Old Mose loaded up the stove so the kitchen would stay warm and he tucked
the thing in once again, then got his milk pails and went down to the barn.
He fed the sheep and pigs and horses and he milked the cows. He hunted
eggs and shut the chicken house. He pumped a tank of water.
Then he went back to the house.
It was dark now and he lit the oil lamp on the table, for he was against
electricity. He'd refused to sign up when REA had run out the line and a lot
of the neighbors had gotten sore at him for being uncooperative. Not that he
cared, of course.
He had a look at the thing upon the bed. It didn't seem to be any better,
or any worse, for that matter. If it had been a sick lamb or an ailing calf,
he could have known right off how it was getting on, but this thing was
different. There was no way to tell.
He fixed himself some supper and ate it and wished he knew how to feed the
thing. And he wished, too, that he knew how to help it. He'd got it under
shelter and be had it warm, but was that right or wrong for something like
this? He had no idea.
He wondered if he should try to get some help, then felt squeamish about
asking help when he couldn't say exactly what had to be helped. But then he
wondered how he would feel himself if he were in a far, strange country, all
played out and sick, and no one to get him any help because they didn't know
exactly what he was.
That made up his mind for him and he walked over to the phone. But should
he call a doctor or a veterinarian? He decided to call the doctor because the
thing was in the house. If it had been in the barn, he would have called the
veterinarian.
He was on a rural line and the hearing wasn't good and he was halfway
deaf, so he didn't use the phone too often. He had told himself at times it
was nothing but another aggravation and there had been a dozen times he had
threatened to have it taken out. But now he was glad he hadn't.
The operator got old Dr. Benson and they couldn't hear one another too
well, but Mose finally made the doctor understand who was calling and that he
needed him and the doctor said he'd come.
With some relief, Mose hung up the phone and was just standing there, not
doing anything, when he was struck by the thought that there might be others
of these things down there in the woods. He had no idea what they were or what
they might be doing or where they might be going, but it was pretty evident
that the one upon the bed was some sort of stranger from a very distant place.
It stood to reason that there might be more than one of them, for far
traveling was a lonely business and anyone - or anything - would like to have
some company along.
He got the lantern down off the peg and lit it and went stumping out the
door. The night was as black as a stack of cats and the lantern light was
feeble, but that made not a bit of difference, for Mose knew this farm of his
 
like the back of his hand.
He went down the path into the woods. It was a spooky place, but it took
more than woods at night to spook Old Mose. At the place where he had found
the thing, he looked around, pushing through the brush and holding the lantern
high so he could see a bigger area, but he didn't find another one of them.
He did find something else, though - a sort of outsize bird-cage made of
metal lattice work that had wrapped itself around an eight-inch hickory tree.
He tried to pull it loose, but it was jammed so tight that he couldn't budge
it.
He sighted back the way it must have come. He could see where it had
plowed its way through the upper branches of the trees, and out beyond were
stars, shining bleakly with the look of far away.
Mose had no doubt that the thing lying on his bed beside the kitchen stove
had come in this birdcage contraption. He marveled some at that, but he didn't
fret himself too much, for the whole thing was so unearthly that he knew he
had little chance of pondering it out.
He walked back to the house and he scarcely had the lantern blown out and
hung back on its peg than he heard a car drive up.
The doctor, when he came up to the door, became a little grumpy at seeing
Old Mose standing there.
'You don't look sick to me,' the doctor said. 'Not sick enough to drag me
clear out here at night.'
'I ain't sick,' said Mose.
'Well, then,' said the doctor, more grumpily than ever, 'what do you mean
by phoning me?'
'I got someone who is sick,' said Mose. 'I hope you can help him. I would
have tried myself, but I don't know how to go about it.'
The doctor came inside and Mose shut the door behind him.
'You got something rotten in here?' asked the doctor.
'No, it's just the way he smells. It was pretty bad at first, but I'm
getting used to it by now.'
The doctor saw the thing lying on the bed and went over to it. Old Mose
heard him sort of gasp and could see him standing there, very stiff and
straight. Then he bent down and had a good look at the critter on the bed.
When he straightened up and turned around to Mose, the only thing that
kept him from being downright angry was that he was so flabbergasted.
'Mose,' he yelled, 'what _is_ this?'
'I don't know,' said Mose. 'I found it in the woods and it was hurt and
wailing and I couldn't leave it there.'
'You think it's sick?'
'I know it is,' said Mose, 'It needs help awful bad. I'm afraid it's
 
dying.'
The doctor turned back to the bed again and pulled the blanket down, then
went and got the lamp so that he could see. He looked the critter up and down,
and he prodded it with a skittish finger, and he made the kind of mysterious
clucking sound that only doctors make.
Then he pulled the blanket back over it again and took the lamp back to
the table.
'Mose,' he said. 'I can't do a thing for it.'
'But you're a doctor!'
'A human doctor, Mose. I don't know what this thing is, but it isn't
human. I couldn't even guess what is wrong with it, if anything. And I
wouldn't know what could be safely done for it even if I could diagnose its
illness. I'm not even sure it's an animal. There are a lot of things about it
that argue it's a plant.'
Then the doctor asked Mose straight out how he came to find it and Mose
told him exactly how it happened. But he didn't tell him anything about the
birdcage, for when he thought about it, it sounded so fantastic that he
couldn't bring himself to tell it. Just finding the critter and having it here
was bad enough, without throwing in the birdcage.
'I tell you what,' the doctor said. 'You got something here that's outside
all human knowledge. I doubt there's ever been a thing like this seen on Earth
before. I have no idea what it is and I wouldn't try to guess. If I were you,
I'd get in touch with the university up at Madison. There might be someone
there who could get it figured out. Even if they couldn't they'd be
interested. They'd want to study it.'
Mose went to the cupboard and got the cigar box almost full of silver
dollars and paid the doctor. The doctor put the dollars in his pocket, joshing
Mose about his eccentricity.
But Mose was stubborn about his silver dollars. 'Paper money don't seem
legal, somehow,' he declared. 'I like the feel of silver and the way it
chinks. It's got authority.'
The doctor left and he didn't seem as upset as Mose had been afraid he
might be. As soon as he was gone, Mose pulled up a chair and sat down beside
the bed.
It wasn't right, he thought, that the thing should be so sick and no one
to help - no one who knew any way to help it.
He sat in the chair and listened to the ticking of the clock, loud in the
kitchen silence, and the crackling of the wood burning in the stove.
Looking at the thing lying on the bed, he had an almost fierce hope that
it could get well again and stay with him. Now that its birdcage was all
banged up, maybe there'd be nothing it could do but stay. And he hoped it
would, for already the house felt less lonely.
Sitting in the chair between the stove and bed, Mose realized how lonely
it had been. It had not been quite so bad until Towser died. He had tried to
bring himself to get another dog, but he never had been able to. For there was
no dog that would take the place of Towser and it had seemed unfaithful even
 

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