Dark Benediction Read Online Free PDF

might fit in with this secrecy business."
    "How's that?"
    "People who know they're dying often behave that way. Little secret activities that don't become apparent until after they're gone. Set up causes that won't have effects until afterwards. Immortality cravings. You want to have posthumous influence, to live after you. A suicide note is one perversion of it. The suicide figures the world will posthumously feel guilty, if he tells it off."
    " And Kenny ... '!"
    "I don't know, Rod. The craving for immortality is basically procreative, I think. You have children, and train them, and see your own mirrored patterns live on in them, and feel satisfied, when your time comes. Or else you sublimate it, and do the same thing for all humanity—through art, or science. I've seen a lot of death, Rod, and I believe there's more than just-plain-selfishness to people's immortality-wishes; it's associated with the human reproductive syndrome—which includes the passing on of culture to the young. But Kenny's just a kid. I don't know."
    Despite Kenny's increasing helplessness and weakness, he began spending more time wandering out in the woods. Cleo chided him for it, and tried to limit his excursions. She drove him to town on alternate days for a transfusion and shots, and she tried to keep him in the house most of the time, but he needed sun and air and exercise; and it was impossible to keep him on the lawn. Whatever he was doing, it was a shadowy secretive business. It involved spades and garden tools and packages, with late excursions into the maples toward the creek.
    "You'll know in four or five months," he told me, in answer to a question. "Don't ask me now. You'd laugh."
    But it became apparent that he wouldn't last that long. The rate of transfusions doubled, and on his bad days, he was unable to get out of bed. He fainted down by the creek, and had to he carried back to the house. Cleo forbade him to go outside alone without Jules' day-to-day approval, and Jules was beginning to be doubtful about the boy's activities.
    When restricted, Kenny became frantic. "I've got to go outside, Dad, please! I can't finish it if I don't. I've got to! How else can I make contact with them?"
    "Contact? With whom?"
    But he clammed up and refused to discuss anything about the matter. That night I awoke at two a.m. Something had made a sound. I stole out of bed without disturbing Cleo and went to prowl about the house. A glance down the stairway told me that no lights burned on the first floor. I went to Kenny's room and gingerly opened the door. Blackness.
    "Kenny—?"
    No sound of breathing in the room. Quietly I struck a match.
    The bed was empty.
     
    "Kenny!" I bellowed it down the hall, and then I heard sounds—Cleo stirring to wakefulness and groping for clothes in our bedroom. I trotted downstairs and turned on lights as I charged from room to room.
    He was not in the house. I found the back screen unlatched and went out to play a flashlight slowly over the backyard. There . . . by the hedge . . . caught in the cone of light ... Kenny, crumpled over a garden spade.
    Upstairs, Cleo screamed through the back window. I ran out to gather him up in my arms. Skin clammy, breathing shallow, pulse irregular—he muttered peculiarly as I carried him back to the house.
    "Glad you found it ... knew you'd find it . . . got me to the right time . . . when are we . . . ?"
    I got him inside and up to his room. When I laid him on the bed, a crudely drawn map, like a treasure map with an "X" and a set of bearings, fell from his pocket. I paused a moment to study it. The "X" was down by the fork in the creek. What had been buried there?
    I heard Cleo coming up the stairs with a glass of hot milk, and I returned the map to Kenny's pocket and went to call the doctor.
    When Kenny awoke, he looked around the room very carefully—and seemed disappointed by what he saw. "Expecting to wake up somewhere else?" I asked.
    "I guess it was a dream," he mumbled. "I