The Many

©1986 by David B. Silva

All Rights Reserved

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Prologue

Winter, 1974

The Work of the Devil

With the curtains pulled back, the turbulent night sky peered in through the window, now and then raging with a roll of thunder, an explosion of lightning. On the night stand, next to the bed where Libby Reed was in labor, a single lamp did its best to hold back the blackness with a light bulb hardly bright enough for reading. It was the only light on in the house.

Eldon Reed sat in the corner of the second-story room in a shadow untouched by the flashes of lightning outside. In his lap, opened to a dog-eared page of the Old Testament, he held the Bible his father had given him half a lifetime ago. His hands lay upon the pages, as if they could feel the very fiber of the paper, the every up and down of the ink. He was not reading.

Lightning hit in the far distance, lighting up the sky behind the gray clouds. A loud clap of thunder rolled across the acres of wheat and over the house, drowning out the sharp, piercing scream that had just escaped from Libby’s mouth. She gasped for a breath, pushed, then came up for another breath.

“Eldon…”

“The Lord’s watching over you, woman.”

Another struggle for breath.

“Something’s wrong, Eldon.”

Another push. This one from somewhere deep inside her.

“It’s ripping me wide open. I can feel it tearing me apart.”

The sky exploded with another flash of lightning, and Eldon silently counted off the seconds—one thousand one, one thousand two—until the roar of thunder rolled across the yard and through the house.

“Four miles,” he said quietly. “Getting closer.”

Libby gasped for another lungful of air, swallowing down a stuttered scream. She fell back against the damp pillow, trying to keep the air inside her lungs long enough to keep her from unconsciousness.

“Please, Eldon.”

Her pink cotton nightgown, shoulder to toe in length, had gathered up around her protruding stomach. The bed sheets, wrinkled and damp, were pulled back. There was a sharp odor in the room, a bittersweet fragrance of perspiration, fear, and excitement.

She pushed again, not because she wanted to (she would have preferred more time to catch her breath, to build up her strength a bit more). But the baby inside her had already begun to force itself through the birth canal.

“It’s not supposed to feel like this,” she said behind another breath. “Eldon, please. Call someone. One of the neighbors. Please.”

He leaned forward in the chair, crossing from shadow to light, half his face masked, half ablaze with another strike of faraway lightning. “It’s the Lord’s work, not theirs. Let Him do it according to His plan.”

one-thousand one, one-thousand two, one-thousand three … getting closer

“Oh God—ohhhh—Ghhhhd!”

A sob, a cry, almost a scream.

“It’s coming, Libby.” He closed the Bible in his lap, snapping it shut as another clap of thunder rolled across the valley beyond the bedroom window. “It’s almost here.”

She caught a short breath, pushed, caught another breath, then began panting.

Eldon felt himself being drawn out of the chair to a standing position. He leaned forward toward Libby as she sank deeper into the mattress, pushing against herself. Breaths held then lost. Some cries swallowed, some not. Her legs were open as wide as physically possible, her knees angled away from where the first dark fluids of birth were beginning to flow out of her.

“He who hath sipped from the fountain of the Lord, shall be cleansed. He who hath followed the word of the Lord shall reap the harvest of his faith.” Eldon stood next to the bed, entranced by the first hint of the baby (pale, almost colorless) as it began to emerge from its mother. “This is our time, Libby. The Lord’s time. Not much longer and the greatest of all His blessings will be ours.”

Her eyes were dark-rimmed, her hair damp and stringy, each hand embedded as deep as the first knuckle into a corner of the bed’s mattress.

She rose up again, her back arched.

Her eyes closed, her breath held.

She pushed again.

A moan.

Almost a scream.

“Harder, woman.” Eldon kneeled at her bedside, his hands clasped in silent prayer, his elbows sinking into the mattress.

The baby’s head emerged, suddenly free of its mother, dark fluid gushing out from somewhere deep inside her, staining the bed sheets red, making life seem more like death.

Eldon moved in, gradually realizing that the baby wasn’t moving, that the colors of birth weren’t as alive as they should have been. The umbilical cord was wrapped around the baby’s neck, a deadly hangman’s noose in the making.

“Push harder, woman!” Eldon screamed. “As hard as the Lord permits!”

The baby’s shoulders struggled through the opening, from the warmth of the birth canal to the coolness of the winter air. Libby groaned, and in one final effort, the baby slipped free of its mother’s grasp, sliding out into the world and landing on the soft, plump covers of the bed.

It lay death still.

A boy.

Breathless.

Silent.

Another strike of lightning hit, not quite as far away as some of the others this time. And absently, in the back of his mind, Eldon counted off the seconds between the flash of lightning and the roll of thunder.

one-thousand one, one-thousand two…

close enough to wake the devil.

Libby cried out. “My baby…”

“Something’s wrong,” Eldon said. He unwound the umbilical cord from around the baby’s neck, then lifted the boy off the mattress, and gave him a sharp slap across the buttocks.

The icy blue color of lifelessness held on.

Another slap across the buttocks.

“He won’t breath,” Eldon said in panic.

Libby started crying.

“The devil’s got him, and he won’t let go.”

Eldon gave the boy another sharp slap across the buttocks, and when that god awful blueness wouldn’t go away, he felt a shiver pass up his fingers—hands—arms. A shiver as cold as death itself.

“The devil’s taken him,” he whispered, placing the dead child down on the mattress. “He was evil, and the Lord let the devil take him from us.”

Libby’s cries turned softer.

Eldon stared momentarily out the bedroom window, then looked about for his Bible. He found it on the floor, next to the bed. He kneeled, taking the book up in his hands, opening it to a random page the way he almost always did. It read: If my step hath turned out of the way, and mine heart walked after mine eyes, and if any blot hath cleaved to mine hands; then let me sow, and let another eat; yea, let my offspring be rooted out.

He had done none of those things. It wasn’t punishment that had taken the life of his baby, he thought. It was the Lord’s own love, the hand of the Lord reaching down from the heavens to protect him from something that had grown evil in the belly of his wife.

Eldon closed the book, glanced down at the baby, and felt that shiver rumble up through his body again.

A strike of lightning lit up the sky outside his bedroom window,

(one-thousand…)

and there was an explosion of flames and thunder and tremors that ripped through the barn, a hundred feet away, sending debris—some charred instantly black, some still burning, all yellow and orange and red, the devil’s colors—into the air and back to earth again. Wooden raindrops.

The devil’s wrath.

And at that same moment, the baby suddenly began to cry.

Eldon turned to the sound just in time to see the color wash back into the baby’s cheeks,

(the devil’s color?)

in time to see the first awkward movements of the baby’s arms and legs,

(the devil’s movements?)

and he took a step back from the bed, because something felt terribly wrong here. There was the stench of something burning in the air. And on the other side of the bedroom window, there were the crackling flames of the fire. And right before him on the bed, where only a minute ago the baby was blue, then colorless, then dead at the hands of the Lord; there was something pink and kicking and alive at the hands of…

the devil?

“He’s … alive.”

Libby’s tears turned to soft laughter.

But he’s not our child, Eldon thought. Not this boy, once dead, now alive. That’s not the way the Lord intended it.

He continued to hug the Bible against his body, waist-high, at just the right angle so that the cover’s gold print (cracked and lined and worn, but still shiny in places) reflected back the light of the wing-like flames that stretched high above the barn.

He’s not our child.

He belongs to the devil.

Note From Dave:

The Many is now available as an ebook on the Kindle and The Nook for only $2.99. Interested readers can pick up a copy here:

The Many on The Kindle
The Many on The Nook

I hope you enjoy it.