The Chrysalids

twice! To speak heresy in my house, too. That cannot be allowed to pass.’

‘Perhaps, she did not realize what she was saying,’ my mother’s voice said, uncertainly.

‘Then it is time she did. It is our duty to see that she does.’

My mother started to answer, but her voice cracked. She began to cry: I had never heard her cry before. My father’s voice went on explaining about the need for Purity in thought as well as in heart and conduct, and its very particular importance to women. He was still talking when I tiptoed away.

I could not help feeling a great curiosity to know what was the ‘little thing’ that had been wrong with the baby — wondering if, perhaps, it were just an extra toe, like Sophie’s. But I never found out what it was.

When they broke the news to me next day that my Aunt Harriet’s body had been found in the river, no one mentioned a baby….

8

My father included Aunt Harriet’s name in our prayers on the evening of the day the news came, but after that she was never referred to again. It was as though she had been wiped out of every memory but mine. There, however, she remained very clearly, given form at a time when I had only heard her, as an upright figure with a face drained of hope, and a voice saying clearly: ‘I am not ashamed — I am only beaten.’ And, too, as I had last seen her, looking up at the house.

Nobody told me how she came to die, but somehow I knew that it had not been by accident. There was a great deal that I did not understand in what I had overheard, and yet, in spite of that, it was quite the most disturbing occurrence I had known yet — it alarmed me with a sense of insecurity far greater, for some unperceived reason, than I had suffered over Sophie. For several nights I dreamed of Aunt Harriet lying in the river, still clasping the white bundle to her while the water swirled her hair round her pale face, and her wide-open eyes saw nothing. And I was frightened….

This had happened simply because the baby was just a bit different in some way from other babies. It had something, or lacked something, so that it did not exactly accord with the Definition. There was the ‘little thing’ that made it not quite right, not quite like other people….

A mutant, my father had called it…. A mutant!… I thought of some of the poker-work texts. I recalled the address of a visiting preacher; the detestation there had been in his voice when he thundered from the pulpit: ‘Accursed is the Mutant!’

Accursed is the mutant…. The mutant, the enemy, not only of the human race, but of all the species God had decreed; the seed of the Devil within, trying unflaggingly, eternally to come to fruition in order that it might destroy the divine order and turn our land, the stronghold of God’s will upon Earth, into a lewd chaos like the Fringes; trying to make it a place without the law, like the lands in the South that Uncle Axel had spoken of, where the plants and the animals and the almost-human beings, too, brought forth travesties; where true stock had given place to unnameable creatures, abominable growths flourished, and the spirits of evil mocked the Lord with obscene fantasies.

Just a small difference, the ‘little thing,’ was the first step….

I prayed very earnestly those nights.

‘Oh, God,’ I said, ‘please, please, God, let me be like other people. I don’t want to be different. Won’t you make it so that when I wake up in the morning I’ll be just like everyone else, please, God, please!’

But in the morning, when I tested myself I’d soon pick up Rosalind or one of the others, and know that the prayer hadn’t altered anything. I had to get up still just the same person who had gone to bed the night before, and I had to go into the big kitchen and eat my breakfast facing the panel which had somehow stopped being just part of the furniture and seemed to stare back at me with the words: ACCURSED IS THE MUTANT IN THE SIGHT OF GOD AND MAN!

And I went on being very frightened.

After about the fifth night that praying hadn’t done any good, Uncle Axel caught me leaving the breakfast- table and said I’d better come along and help him mend a plough. After we’d worked on that for a couple of hours he declared a rest, so we went out of the forge to sit in the sun, with our backs against a wall. He gave me a chunk of oatcake, and we munched for a minute or two. Then he said:

‘Well, now, Davie, let’s have it,’

‘Have what?’ I said, stupidly.

‘Whatever it is that’s been making you look as if you were sickening for something the last day or two,’ he told me. ‘What’s your trouble? Has somebody found out?’

‘No,’ I said. He looked greatly relieved.

‘Well, what is it, then?’

So I told him about Aunt Harriet and the baby. Before I had finished I was talking through tears — it was such a relief to be able to share it with someone.

‘It was her face as she drove away.’ I explained. ‘I’ve never seen anyone look like that before. I keep on seeing it in the water.’

I looked up at him as I finished. His face was as grim as I’d ever seen it, with the corners of his mouth pulled down.

‘So that was it—’ he said, nodding once or twice.

‘It was all because the baby was different,’ I repeated. ‘And there was Sophie, too… I didn’t understand properly before… I — I’m frightened, Uncle Axel. What’ll they do when they find out I’m different…?’

He put his hand on my shoulder.

‘No one else is ever going to know about it,’ he told me again. ‘No one but me — and I’m safe.’

It did not seem as reassuring now as it had been when he said it before.

‘There was that one who stopped,’ I reminded him, ‘perhaps they found out about him… ?’

He shook his head. ‘I reckon you can rest easy on that, Davie. I found out there was a boy killed just about the time you said. Walter Brent his name was, about nine years old. He was fooling around when they were felling timber, and a tree got him, poor lad.’

‘Where?’ I asked.

‘About nine or ten miles away, on a farm over by Chipping,’ he said.

I thought back. The Chipping direction certainly fitted, and it was just the kind of accident that would account for a sudden unexplained stop…. Without any ill-will to the unknown Walter I hoped and thought that was the explanation.

Uncle Axel backtracked a bit.

‘There’s no reason at all why anyone should find out. There’s nothing to show — they can only know if you let them. Learn to watch yourself, Davie, and they’ll never find out.’

‘What did they do to Sophie?’ I asked once more. But again he refused to be drawn on that. He went on:

‘Remember what I told you. They think they are the true image — but they can’t know for sure. And even if the Old People were the same kind as I am and they are, what of it? Oh, I know people tell tales about how wonderful they were and how wonderful their world was, and how one day we’ll get back again all the things they had. There’s a lot of nonsense mixed up in what they say about them, but even if there’s a lot of truth, too, what’s the good of trying so hard to keep in their tracks? Where are they and their wonderful world now?’

‘“God sent Tribulation upon them,”’ I quoted.

‘Sure, sure. You certainly have taken in the preacher-words, haven’t you? It’s easy enough to say — but not so easy to understand, specially when you’ve seen a bit of the world, and what it has meant. Tribulation wasn’t just tempests, hurricanes, floods and fires like the things they had in the Bible. It was like all of them together — and something a lot worse, too. It made the Black Coasts, and the ruins that glow there at night, and the Badlands. Maybe there’s a precedent for that in Sodom and Gomorrah, only this’d be kind of bigger — but what I don’t understand is the queer things it did to what was left.’

‘Except in Labrador,’ I suggested.