The Cottage

To Will Durkin it seemed to be the realization of a long-cherished dream—this return from town over a rutted dirt road, equipped and ready for a cruel duel with another man's offspring. He raised his left hand as he drove, staring at his bony knuckles, and then slashing at the empty air with a whiplash ferocity of purpose.

Perhaps there had been a hard core of cruelty in Durkin at birth. Perhaps he had knotted up his fists, and cried out in resentment on first seeing the sunlight, eager to hurt and punish.

It was difficult to say, difficult to be sure. But certainly the stony soil which had nourished his childhood had helped to make him what he was—a gaunt, restless-eyed man so consumed by animosity he could find no pleasure in merriment of any kind.

In town he had stalked with fierce impatience from the general store to the post office, and then back down Cedar Street to his car, clutching his purchase with the greediness of a carrion crow eager to take flight. Now, beneath the leaden sky, in his asthmatic wreck of an automobile, he pictured himself as too shrewd and quick-witted to allow a woman's simpering stupidity to weaken his attachment to the land.

A dust storm could stir a man to anger, and rob him of a night's sleep. It could demolish his chicken cots, and embitter him in other ways. But it could also protect him by keeping him hard.

So certain was he of that hardness that the gathering clouds, the dust flurries, and the whistling wind gave him no concern. They seemed to be setting a seal on his purpose, and he was sure that if trouble descended from the sky he would know how to cope with it.

Unfortunately Durkin had no way of knowing that the desert was soon to blossom in ways that were strange. He heard the dull, occasional rumbling, and saw the sky light up far to the east. But his thoughts were on other things. If he had been told that the desert was being used by the Government as an atomic proving ground he would have dismissed the matter with a shrug.

Malice narrows curiosity. In the back seat of the creaking car a small, white cottage caught and held the leaden sky glow, its tiny windows gleaming like uncut jewels.

A man of wide and kindly sympathies would have taken delight in the cottage, for though it was a cheap toy it had been built with great respect for the critical eye of childhood. It had eight rooms, a porch trellis, and a little golden weathercock on its roof.

Durkin smiled spitefully, remembering with grim pleasure the child training article in the popular science magazine which had sent him into town in search of an inexpensive doll house.

The article had contained a great deal of meat, and its impact upon his mind had been remarkably direct. Give a kid a doll house with a mother and father doll inside, and you could find out exactly what he thought of his parents. He'd move the dolls around, and work out his private grudges on them. He'd pretend the dolls were his real parents, and act out what the article had called the family drama.

Yeah, why not? A man had a right to know what his own kids thought of him, hadn't he? Especially if they were stepkids, and owed everything to him. Apart from the fact that the article had been against punishing children the way he'd been punished as a kid—and what better way was there?—its ideas were good.

The article had contained a lot of fancy phrases like "harmful emotional repression," and "healthful release of guilt feelings." But giving a grudge a fancy name didn't change it one bit. If the kids he'd fed and clothed hated him his hand would come down heavy on them. Yes, by heaven. Each whack would ring out like a pistol shot.

It was high noon when Durkin came in sight of the farmhouse, and saw the children playing in the yard, and his wife standing in the kitchen door. Her stringy black hair annoyed him far out of proportion to its importance, and he was further incensed by the realization that she was staring up the road as if she had another complaint to make, and could hardly wait for him to come within earshot.

He drove into the yard muttering unpleasantly to himself. Abruptly his stepson Robert—a tall, freckled-faced youngster of nine—stopped playing. Seven-year-old Emily, thoughtful-eyed and less assertive, remained seated, but Durkin could see that there was a defiant something struggling in her head.

The ritual of mistrust they'd worked out against him never varied. As he descended from the car he became aware of a hostile silence hemming him in, making him feel like a stranger. Even their expressions betrayed them. The instant fear came into Robert's eyes Emily too became fearful, clutching the doll she was holding more tightly to her breast.

Flushed and resentful, Durkin stood waiting for his wife to advance toward him across the yard. She had been beautiful once, but she now only reminded him of a nag set out to pasture after years of usefulness about the farm. She was as handy about the farm as she was about a stove, but that didn't mean he had to be grateful to her.

He'd taken her in and married her, hadn't he? A woman of forty with two kids, a complaining woman who was always trying to meddle in his affairs.

"You're back early, Will!" Helen Durkin said.

"Yeah," he grunted, eyeing her bitterly.

"Did you buy the fertilizer, and the barbed wire?"

He shook his head, his lips writhing back from his teeth in cruel derision.

"I bought something better," he said. His voice was harsh, edged with mockery. "A present for the kids."

Durkin reached into the car as he spoke, and hauled out the doll house. He set it down on the stony soil directly in front of him, and folded his arms, his eyes darting toward his stepson in surly challenge.

"Come here, Robbie!" he called out. "Look what I've got for you!"

Robert scrambled to his feet with a startled gasp, and Emily turned to look at her mother in bewilderment, Durkin glanced triumphantly at his wife, stepped back, and waited for the children to approach.

Robert came forward slowly, stark incredulity in his stare. His sister followed at a less cautious pace, her fear swallowed up by the miracle that had taken place before her very eyes.

Robert spoke first. "Golly, it's a little house."

"A doll house!" Emily elaborated, falling to her knees, and staring in through the diamond-bright windows at a sight that made her catch her breath.

In a room on the ground floor four dolls sat at a circular table. Before each was a knife and fork, a tiny plate and a double serving of wax vegetables. The husband doll wore a stiff, ill-fitting store suit, the wife a checkered gingham dress, and the two children blue denim overalls.

The parents were wooden dolls, but Durkin had been forced to purchase the children separately, and insert them in the house. The children were made of some new-fangled plastic material which Durkin intensely disliked. But very lifelike dolls they were, and just the right size to lend wings to the illusion of a happy family about to break bread together.

"That's me!" Emily cried excitedly.

She raised a window, reached inside, and lifted "herself" out. The doll had dark hair and brown eyes, and Emily was an ash blond. But childhood is not a time for carping, and it has been well established that a completely unspoiled imagination can be sent soaring by a fancied resemblance in the twinkling of an eye.

"That's me, isn't it, Mommy?" Emily insisted. "Isn't it?"

She displayed the doll proudly to her mother, her eyes shining with unshakable conviction.

"Yes, dear—of course." Helen Durkin glanced sharply at her husband as she spoke. The look in his eyes frightened her. There was satisfaction in his stare, but it was a cold, derisive kind of satisfaction with no warmth or sympathy radiating out from it.

He was watching Emily as he might have watched a humming bird hovering over a cannibal plant, one of those horrible fly-trap things that grew in tropical jungles. What chance would the humming bird have against the sudden, cruel closing of the plant's spiked petals, its animal-like ferocity of purpose?

An overpowering surge of terror swept over Durkin's wife, tightening the muscles of her throat. Will, don't—she wanted to scream. Don't punish the children because you hate me. Or because you hate yourself. Don't, Will, please—

Robert failed to notice the trembling of his mother's hands, failed even to observe that his stepfather had not budged an inch from his attitude of sharp-eyed observation.

For a moment the adult world was blotted out for Robert—blotted out completely. He knelt and stared through the cottage window as his sister had done, resting his hand on the arching trellis.

It was not a doll house to Robert. He took far too much pride in his budding masculinity to admit for an instant that he could be interested in a doll house. No—it was a cottage, small, white and very beautiful. He pictured himself as having a wife and children of his own and coming home every night to just such a cottage.

"You look tired," his wife would say. "You'd better rest a bit—then we'll have dinner." He could picture himself going into the bathroom and turning on the hot water. Later he'd open the windows wide to the night air. He'd hear crickets chirping as the children clustered about him.

But so complex and subtle are childhood identifications that he could also think of himself as still a boy, living with his sister in a cottage just as small, white and beautiful, but set adrift on a pirate-perilous sea remote from his stepfather's mockery.

With a swift, defiant gesture Robert reached in through the window, and grasped the crude doll replica of himself. He lifted it out, jarring the parent dolls slightly.

"Excuse me, Mom," he said.

To the replica of his stepfather he offered no apology.

Durkin's lips whitened, and for the barest instant a defeated look touched his gaunt face. From thought to attitude he had the whip hand over his stepchildren. Yet even when his power could not be questioned he found himself a shunned and forgotten man.

Fury turned the living flesh and bone of his face into a stone mask with features so sharp that his wife recoiled as if feeling the cruel rasp and bite of them against her cheeks.

Cursing softly, Durkin swung about and went striding toward the kitchen door without a backward glance.

All through dinner he was silent, completely ignoring his wife, and raising his eyes only to stare out the kitchen window at the bare yellow earth he could at least bend to his will. Even when the children excused themselves, and ran out into the yard again he remained sullenly uncommunicative.

In an attempt to make conversation Helen Durkin said: "Will, it came over the radio right after you left. They're making some more of those atomic weapon tests. Remember the last time—how the explosion shook the house?"

"So that's where the flash came from!" Durkin muttered. "I saw it when I stopped at the gas station to get my battery checked. I figured it was just heat lightning."

"Robbie saw it too," Robert's mother said. "It means a lot to a boy to know he's living in an age like this. In some ways Robbie is a man already, Will. A boy born a hundred years ago had to remain a child every waking hour. But not Robbie. Robbie was born into a different kind of world."

Her eyes flashed with stubborn pride. "Robbie has real strength inside of him, Will. He'll make a mark for himself in the world. He'll grow up knowing what atomic energy means. He won't age and dry up before his time. You ought to be proud of him, Will."

Abruptly Durkin pushed back his chair and stood up, his eyes grown sharp again from watching the children playing in the yard. He had avoided looking at his wife, but now he permitted his gaze to linger for an instant on her pinched and sallow features, in a scrutiny so mocking it made her almost physically ill.

Your brats hate me, his eyes mocked. One of these days I'll catch them off guard and give them a lesson in discipline they won't forget in a hurry.

She knew what he was waiting for. He was hoping they'd stop playing just long enough to cast a look toward the kitchen door filled with unmistakable hate. He was hoping to emerge beneath the darkening sky, and see Emily turn away her head, remembering the loving father she had lost, and the harsh, unbending man who had come to take his place.

She knew that he was waiting only for that. He was the kind of man who had to have an excuse to justify his every act of cruelty. Some oddity in his makeup made self-justification as necessary to him as breathing.

With a chill foreboding she watched him turn, and go striding out into the yard.

The children had been kneeling on opposite sides of the doll house, but they got up the instant they saw their stepfather approaching. Robert looked guilty, and his sister's face mirrored his guilt.

"You ate your lunch mighty fast," Durkin said. "What's going on here?"

"Nothing," Robert said.

"What kind of answer is that?" Durkin demanded, his face turning ugly.

"We were just playing house," Emily said, quickly.

"Then why did you get up so fast when you saw me?" Durkin asked. "Is there something in that house you don't want me to see?"

Robert shook his head, his eyes on the ground.

"Speak up! I asked you a question."

"We were just pretending," Robert said.

For an instant the man and the two children stood with the doll house between them. They were each aware that they had started a game that must be played out now to the bitter end, no matter how frightening it became.

"We'll soon know!" Durkin said.

Durkin bent swiftly, and without glancing at the children, picked up the house, and raised it until the ground floor windows were on a level with his eyes.

He stared in.

Children do not self-consciously engage in gruesome pranks—even when they hate. Emotional impulses which later in life are filtered through reason and become social attitudes remain in children appallingly direct.

Children are thus exposed to adult censure for acts which they would never dream of performing in a frame of reference removed from the playground and tied in with their socially-consolidated attitudes of respect toward home, school, and parents.

Children chalk up sidewalks, ring doorbells and throw stones at windows and are almost instantly sorry. But Durkin knew nothing of that. He only saw himself sitting on a red-hot stove, his long legs drawn up grasshopper fashion on both sides of his lank body.

What was even more shocking, he saw himself as a fiend incarnate. The children had done an astonishingly ingenious job of making a devil out of him by painting him in the darkest colors imaginable.

In fact, they had painted him black. The ill-fitting store suit had been removed, and with the aid of Emily's water-color set, and Robert's clay modeling set he had been made to resemble a demon being roasted over a spit.

Utterly fiendish was his charcoal-dark aspect of face and limb. Horns sprouted from his temples, and a long, forked tail, ash-gray in hue, coiled down over the stove like some evil brand snatched from the burning.

There were tiny gleaming coals in the stove fashioned of red isinglass. The stove had gone with the house, but by the matchless artistry of childhood something new had been added, and as Durkin stared all of the color drained from his face.

He was sitting directly over the coals, exposed to the cruelly searing blast in every part of his anatomy. For an instant the illusion of searing heat was so real that he responded psychosomatically. His nostrils dilated with the odor of burning flesh, and his nerve-roots shrieked as if irradiated by intolerable pain.

Then reality came sweeping back. Instead of an imaginary projection of himself he saw only a ridiculous wooden doll sprawled akimbo on a toy stove.

Shaking with rage, Durkin set the house down, swung about, and gripped his stepson savagely by the wrist.

"Just pretending, were you?" he muttered. "Just waiting for me to come out here, and pat you on the back."

Robert tried to break free. Sick with fear, he tugged and twisted, but Durkin had stronger fingers than a demon, and a deeper understanding of how a frightened boy could make a fool of a man by using his smallness as a cloak.

"You too, Emily," Durkin said. "Come here. I want to have a long, fatherly talk with you."

Emily turned and cast a frantic glance of appeal toward the kitchen door. When her mother did not appear she started backing away from her stepfather across the yard.

Without releasing her brother, Durkin circled around in back of her. "Not so fast, brat!" he warned. "You and Robbie play house in a mighty interesting way. Suppose you tell me more about it."

"Let me go!" Robert pleaded. "We just took one of the dolls and made a Halloween coal man out of him."

"A coal man, eh?" Durkin sneered. "That's sure odd. You must have forgotten it's not Halloween?"

"It doesn't have to be Halloween!" Robert protested.

"Doesn't it? I suppose not. You could turn on your own father just as well on Thanksgiving day. That's how grateful you are."

Emily spoke up defiantly then. "You're not Robbie's father," she said. "You never could be."

"I tried my best to be a good father to Robbie," Durkin said, lowering his voice in mock humility. "You can't claim I didn't try. But there comes a time when discipline's needed. No punishment's severe enough for a boy who'd like to see his own father roasted like a chestnut in a red-hot fire."

A sudden, terrible anger flared in his eyes. "No punishment's bad enough. But a strong birch switch laid on heavy may do some good."

He stared at Emily, his neck arched in chicken-hawk fashion. "I can't punish you the way I'm going to punish Robbie," he said. "You're too young—just a baby. But when a baby does wrong you've got to be stern. That's kindness."

Durkin bent abruptly, gripped his stepdaughter by the elbow, and lifted her to her feet. "A few hours without your supper in the dark—"

"Mommy!" Emily shrieked. "Mommy, Mommy!"

The kitchen door flew open, and Helen Durkin came running out of the house, her eyes wide with fright. She went up to her husband, and started tugging at his wrists.

"Let them go!" she cried. "Robbie hasn't done anything. I was watching every minute."

"He hasn't, eh?" Durkin glared at her. "He'd like to see me hanging from a rafter. Give him a piece of rope, and he'd hang me in effigy."

"He wouldn't. Why do you say a thing like that? You must be out of your mind, Will Durkin!"

"He would, I tell you. He's already done something just as bad. He's got to learn respect, and I'm going to give him the thrashing of his life."

"Will Durkin, you let them go. Do you hear? You've no right—"

Surprisingly Durkin complied. He released both children, and turned his full fury on his wife.

"I'm going upstairs and get a birch switch," he said. "You'd better see that Robbie stays right here in the yard. I'll hold you responsible. If he isn't here when I come back you can pack your things and get out. No right to punish my own son. We'll see—"

His eyes narrowed in relentless hate, Durkin swung about and went striding toward the house. Despite his rage he experienced a fierce, secret gratification in knowing he'd had the foresight to cut and trim a stout birch switch well in advance.

Perhaps it was intended by something in the mysterious, hidden texture of nature itself that Will Durkin should reach the house before the first blast came. Perhaps fury kindled and unleashed by a puny man in a moment of cataclysmic upheaval had an energy pattern of its own, capable of blending with that greater violence, and carrying its victim to disaster, precisely as a tiny squirming creature of the sea might be lifted up and carried on the back of a terrified tortoise.

Be that as it may, Durkin was well inside the house, crossing the kitchen to the living room when light flashed all about him, and a chill wind brushed the nape of his neck. His lips tightened, but for an instant he continued on, as if refusing to believe that a mere rumbling and quaking could prevent him from climbing a narrow flight of stairs, and returning to the yard with a cruel instrument of retribution in his clasp.

Then, abruptly, panic overcame him. Shock after shock shook the house, jarring up through him, threatening to pitch him off his feet. But even as he swung about in wild terror he could not quite relinquish what he had set out to do. One part of his mind remained filled with choking rage, and his hands were busy at his waist, unbuckling his cowhide belt and ripping it free. At least he'd give his stepson a hiding—

Suddenly through the kitchen door he caught a brief glimpse of the children, standing in the yard. They were clinging to their mother, but they were as yet untouched by the violence which was raging all about them.

Durkin's jaw fell open. The violence increased with appalling suddenness, breaking every window in the house, filling the kitchen with blowing dust.

With a deafening roar the house vanished, carrying Durkin with it. The children cried out in bewilderment and fright, and pressed closer to their mother.

In every upheaval, no matter how violent, there may well be pockets of erratically channeled calm, regions of security which remain untouched by the turbulence surrounding them. Helen Durkin clung resolutely to an assurance which nothing could shake, and with her conviction that the children would not be harmed went a warm gratefulness that they had turned to her for comfort and protection.

She stood staring straight ahead, refusing to be dismayed, hearing only a dreadful humming sound which gradually died away.

Where the house had stood there spread only a smooth expanse of yellow sand.

The whirling was like nothing Durkin had ever known before. It constricted his chest, blurred his vision, and drove the blood in torrents from his heart. There was no stopping it, and as it grew steadily more intolerable he tore at his collar, swayed, and went down on his hands and knees.

Around and around the cottage whirled, now rising and tilting, and then descending with a terrible, jerky abruptness. Twice he tried to rise, but fell back helpless, powerless to save himself from the spineless inertia that sent him spinning to and fro like some ill-made, rain-sodden scarecrow dragged in disgust from a corn-field, and tossed into a butter-churning machine.

In one respect only was Durkin fortunate. His torment, though great and almost unendurable, was not absolutely continuous. There were moments when the cottage seemed to hover motionless in mid-air, or to drift lazily in a single direction with a buoyancy as light as thistledown.

Gradually these moments became more frequent, calming Durkin like a soothing palm pressed with compassion to his brow. More and more frequent until the merciless buffetings and swift, sickening descents ceased completely, and a light that was bright, clear and steady streamed in through the kitchen window, and somewhere off in the distance a snowy-crested bird burst into song.

There were flowers outside the window, scarlet and aquamarine faintly flecked with gold. Tall-stemmed and wide-petalled they were, almost screening the view, and if at that moment Durkin had been on his feet staring out he might well have failed to see the huge, joyously romping lad.

But Durkin was still lying prone, and the lad's curiosity had not as yet been acutely aroused.

The lad came swinging boisterously down a country lane, his lips puffed out in a childish pout, his chubby hands thrust deeply into the green and vermillion trousers of his play suit.

He did not love his foster father, and he had run away in a sudden burst of independence and was temporarily free to roam. Oh, it was good to be free to laugh and romp in the sunlight, and to build mud castles out of the gleaming red walls of Snerkle nests.

He came swinging around a curve in the lane and stopped abruptly, staring straight before him in utter disbelief.

For a moment he stood as if turned to stone, his eyes saucer-wide in the slanting sun glow. Then he was running forward with a cry of boyish eagerness.

The little cottage stood in a glimmer of sunlight and shadow cast by weaving boughs. All about it stretched a smooth blue lawn, starred with long-stemmed wind-flowers as tall as the house itself.

He clapped his hands in pure delight. True, he had a village of his own to play with, an entire toy village bright with weaving communication beams. But all the dolls were child dolls and the village no longer pleased him.

He pouted and became angry again when he thought about it. His foster father did not want him to play with grown-up dolls. His foster father was an old meanie, and he didn't want him to have any fun.

He was hovering directly over the house now, straddling it. He reached down with a chuckle of delight, and poked at the little red chimney with a stubby forefinger, beaming in simple pleasure as four tiny bricks tumbled out on the roof.

Then he bent over and stared with a puzzled frown at the smashed windows.

A moment later he was squatting before the house peeking in. Slowly as he stared all of the good-natured anticipation went out of his face.

Exaltation of a different kind came into his features, a fiendish kind of exaltation common enough in childhood, but often disturbing to adults.

It was shockingly disturbing to Durkin. Roused suddenly to consciousness in the middle of the kitchen floor he saw the great malicious child face staring in at him, and struggled frantically to rise, his eyes wild with terror.

There were other things Durkin did not understand, about energy, about time, about other worlds of life and purpose lying parallel to ours in undreamed of dimensions of space.

He did know that a single farmhouse in the path of a tornado could be uprooted and carried for miles through the sky. He knew that a fence could be leveled, a tree torn down and the rest of the countryside remain unscathed, even to the last sun-gilded haystack.

It was easy to understand how such things might be. But nothing had prepared Durkin's mind for the disturbing and frightening parallel which a scientist might have drawn from a hurricane's erratic course. He had no way of knowing that matter on the fringe of an atomic blast could be agitated abnormally, and pass into another dimension piecemeal.

He had no way of knowing that the desert at the edge of an atomic proving ground might decide suddenly to blossom like some multi-dimensional rose.

He had no way of knowing that size is a relative thing, varying with every matter dissolving energy shift in the physical universe, and that a house could be huge in one dimension, his own, and tiny in another, and might even indeed take on the aspect of a house built solely to delight the eye of childhood.

He had no way of knowing, for he had not heard the great eternal voices discussing it. The reddening of the rose meant nothing to him, the stars in their wheeling courses, the speculations of men like gods.

All time, all space is relative, Einstein had said. There is only one equation for energy, matter, light, fire, air—

And who knows how closely other dimensions may parallel ours?

Durkin had no way of knowing until the great dimpled hand reached in through the window and picked him up. Then, and only then, in one blinding flash of intuition, he guessed the truth.

Too late. The blade of grass was like a tendril rope, and it went so swiftly about Durkin's throat he had no time to leap back. As he screamed and struggled a huge wet palm smothered his mouth, rumpled his hair, and squeezed the breath from his lungs. His struggles were of no avail.

Emotional impulses which later in life are filtered through reason and harden into social attitudes remain in children appallingly fluid and direct. A child identifies itself with its toys and it is very easy for a child to see a living, breathing adult human being in a doll which is in reality quite unlike the object of its love—or hate.

Kneeling beside the house, a child Durkin knew nothing about thought it all out for the barest instant, its body oddly bent. Then it leaned forward, and hung its hated foster father very carefully to a ceiling rafter in the precise middle of the house.

Ever so slowly the child arose, and the snowy-crested bird burst into song again, somewhere off in the distance. But Durkin knew nothing of that.