Synopsis: “The Idol of the Flies” is a short story by Jane Rice, published in June 1942 in Unknown Worlds magazine. It tells the story of Pruitt, a cruel and manipulative orphaned boy who lives under the care of his aunt and takes perverse delight in tormenting those around him. While his governess and the servants struggle to endure his whims, Pruitt indulges in sadistic games and disturbing rituals in which flies play a central role.
The Idol of the Flies
Jane Rice
(Full story)
Pruitt watched a fly on the corner of the table. He held himself very still. The fly cleaned its wings with short, back-stroke motions of its legs. It looked, Pruitt thought, like Crippled Harry – cook’s husband. He hated Crippled Harry. He hated him almost as much as he hated Aunt Mona. But he hated Miss Bittner most of all.
He lifted his head and bared his teeth at the nape of Miss Bittner’s neck. He hated the way she stood there erasing the blackboard in great, sweeping circles. He hated the way her shoulder blades poked out. He hated the big horn comb thrust into her thin hair – thrust not quite far enough – so that some of the hair flapped. And he hated the way she arranged it around her sallow face and low on her neck, to conceal the little button that nestled in one large-lobed ear. The button and the narrow black cord that ran down the back of her dress under her starched collar.
He liked the button and the cord. He liked them because Miss Bittner hated them. She pretended she didn’t care about being deaf. But she did. And she pretended she liked him. But she didn’t.
He made her nervous. It was easy. All he had to do was open his eyes wide and stare at her without batting. It was delightfully simple. Too simple. It wasn’t fun any more. He was glad he had found out about the flies.
Miss Bittner placed the eraser precisely in the centre of the blackboard runnel, dusted her hands and turned towards Pruitt. Pruitt opened his eyes quite wide and gimleted her with unblinking stare.
Miss Bittner cleared her throat nervously. ‘That will be all, Pruitt. Tomorrow we will begin on derivatives.’
‘Yes, Miss Bittner,’ Pruitt said loudly, meticulously forming the words with his lips.
Miss Bittner flushed. She straightened the collar of her dress. ‘Your aunt said you might take a swim.’
‘Yes, Miss Bittner.’
‘Good afternoon, Pruitt. Tea at five.’
‘Yes, Miss Bittner. Good afternoon, Miss Bittner.’ Pruitt lowered his gaze to a point three inches below Miss Bittner’s knees. He allowed a faint expression of controlled surprise to wrinkle his forehead.
Involuntarily, Miss Bittner glanced down. Quick as a flash, Pruitt swept his hand across the table and scooped up the fly. When Miss Bittner again raised her head, Pruitt was regarding her blandly. He arose.
‘There’s some lemonade on top of the back porch icebox. Can I have some?’
‘May I have some, Pruitt.’
‘May I have some?’
‘Yes, Pruitt, you may.’
Pruitt crossed the room to the door.
‘Pruitt …’
Pruitt stopped, swivelled slowly on his heel and stared unwinkingly at his tutor. ‘Yes, Miss Bittner?’
‘Let’s remember not to slam the screen door, shall we? It disturbs your auntie, you know.’ Miss Bittner twitched her pale lips into what she mistakenly believed was the smile of a friendly conspirator.
Pruitt gazed at her steadily. ‘Yes, Miss Bittner.’
‘That’s fine,’ said Clara Bittner with false heartiness.
‘Is that all, Miss Bittner,’
‘Yes, Pruitt.’
Pruitt, without relaxing his basilisk-like contemplation of his unfortunate tutor, counted up to twelve, then he turned and left the room.
Clara Bittner looked at the empty doorway a long while and then she shuddered. Had she been pressed for an explanation of that shudder she couldn’t have given a satisfactory answer. In all probability, she would have said, with a vague conciliatory gesture, ‘I don’t know. I think, perhaps, it’s a bit difficult for a child to warm up to a teacher.’ And, no doubt, she would have added brightly, ‘the psychology of the thing, you know.’
Miss Bittner was a staunch defender of psychology. She had taken a summer course in it – ten years ago – and had, as she was fond of repeating, received the highest grades in the class. It never occurred to Miss Bittner that this was due to her aptitude at memorizing whole paragraphs and being able to transpose these on to her test papers without ever having digested the kernels of thought contained therein.
Miss Bittner stooped and unlaced one Oxford. She breathed a sigh of relief. She sat erect, pulled down the back of her dress and then felt with her fingertips the rubbery, black cord dangling against her neck. Miss Bittner sighed again. A buzzing at one of the windows claimed her attention.
She went to a cupboard which yielded up a wire fly swatter. Grasping this militantly, she strode to the window, drew back, closed her eyes, and swatted. The fly, badly battered, dropped to the floor and lay still on its wings, its legs curled.
She unhooked the screen and with the end of the swatter delicately urged the corpse outside.
‘Ugh,’ said Miss Bittner. And had Miss Bittner been pressed for an explanation of that ugh she, likewise, would have been at a loss for a satisfactory answer. It was strange how she felt about flies. They affected her much as rattlesnakes would have. It wasn’t that they were germy, or that their eyes were a reddish orange and, so she had heard, reflected everything in the manner of prisms; it wasn’t that they had the odious custom of regurgitating a drop of their last meal before beginning on a new one; it wasn’t the crooked hairy legs, nor the probing proboscis; it was – well, it was just the creatures themselves. Possibly, Miss Bittner might have said, simpering to show that she really didn’t mean it, ‘I have flyophobia.’
The truth was, she did. She was afraid of them. Deathly afraid. As some people are afraid of enclosed areas, as others are afraid of height, so Miss Bittner was afraid of flies. Childishly, senselessly, but horribly, afraid.
She returned the swatter to the cupboard and forthwith scrubbed her hands thoroughly at the sink. It was odd, she thought, how many flies she had encountered lately. It almost seemed as if someone were purposely diverting a channel of flies her way. She smiled to herself at this foolish whimsy, wiped her hands and tidied her hair. Now, for some of that lemonade. She was pleased that Pruitt had mentioned it. If he hadn’t, she might not have known it was there and she did so love lemonade.
Pruitt stood at the head of the stairwell. He worked his jaws convulsively, then he pursed his mouth, leaned far over the polished banister and spat. The globule of spittle elongated into a pear-shaped tear and flattened with a wet smack on the floor below.
Pruitt went on down the stairs. He could feel the fly bumbling angrily in its hot, moist prison. He put his tightly curled hand to his lips and blew into the tunnel made by his thumb and forefinger. The fly clung for dear life to his creased palm.
At the foot of the stairs Pruitt paused long enough to squeeze each one of the tiny green balls on the ends of the fern that was potted in an intricate and artistic copper holder. Then he went through a hallway into the kitchen.
‘Give me a glass,’ he said to the ample-bosomed woman who sat on a stool cracking nuts and putting them into a glass bowl. The woman heaved herself to her feet.
‘“Please” won’t hurt you,’ the woman said.
‘I don’t have to to say “please” to you. You’re the help.’
The cook put her hands on her hips. ‘What you need is a thrashing,’ she said grimly. ‘A good, sound thrashing.’
By way of reply, Pruitt snatched the paper sack of cracked shells and deliberately up-ended the bag into the bowl of nuts. The woman made a futile grab. Her heavy face grew suffused with a wave of rich colour. She opened her hand and brought it up in a swinging arc.
Pruitt planted his feet firmly on the linoleum and said low, ‘I’ll scream. You know what that’ll do to aunt.’
The woman held her hand poised so for a second and then let it fall to her aproned side. ‘You brat,’ she hissed. ‘You sneaking, pink-eyed brat.’
‘Give me a glass.’
The woman reached up on a shelf of the cabinet, took down a glass and wordlessly handed it to the boy.
‘I don’t want that one,’ Pruitt said, ‘I want that one.’
He pointed to the glass’s identical twin on the topmost shelf.
Silently, the woman padded across the floor and pushed a short kitchen ladder over to the cabinet. Silently, she climbed it. Silently, she handed down the designated glass.
Pruitt accepted it. ‘I’m going to tell Aunt Mona you took your shoes off.’
The woman climbed down the ladder, put it away and returned to the bowl.
‘Harry is a dirty you-know-what,’ Pruitt said.
The woman went on lifting out the nut shells.
‘He stinks.’
The woman went on lifting out the nut shells.
‘So do you,’ finished Pruitt. He waited.
The woman went on lifting out the nut shells.
The boy took his glass and repaired to the back porch. It spoiled the fun when they didn’t talk back. Cook was ‘on to’ him. But she wouldn’t complain. Aunt Mona let them stay through the winter rent free with nobody but themselves to see to and Harry was a cripple and couldn’t make a living. She wouldn’t dare complain.
Pruitt lifted the pitcher of lemonade from the lid of the ice-box and poured himself a glassful. He drank half of it and let the rest dribble along a crack, holding the glass close to the floor so it wouldn’t make a trickling noise. When it dried it would be sweet and sticky. Lots of flies.
He relaxed his hand ever so slightly and dexterously extricated his shop-worn captive. It hummed furiously. Pruitt pulled off one of its wings and dropped the mutilated insect into the lemonade. It kicked ineffectually, was quiet, kicked again, and was quiet – drifting on the surface of the liquid, sagging to one side, its remaining wing outstretched like a useless sail.
The boy caught it and pushed it under. ‘I christen you Miss Bittner,’ he said. He released his hold and the fly popped to the top – a piece of lemon pulp on its back. It kicked again – feebly – and was quiet.
Pruitt replaced the lemonade and opened the screen door. He pulled it so that the spring twanged protestingly. He let go and leaped down the steps. The door came to with a mighty bang behind him. That was the finish of Aunt Mona’s nap.
He crouched on his haunches and listened. A cloud floated across the sun. A butterfly teetered uncertainly on a waxy leaf, and fluttered away following an erratic air-trail of its own. A June bug drummed through the warm afternoon, its armoured belly a shiny bottle-green streak in the sunlight. Pruitt crumbled the cone of an anthill and watched the excited manoeuvres of its inhabitants.
There was the slow drag of footsteps somewhere above – the opening of a shutter. Pruitt grinned. His ears went up and back with the broadness of it. Cook would puff up two flights of stairs ‘out of the goodness of her heart’, Aunt Mona said – ‘out of dumbness’, if you asked him. Why’nt she let ‘Miss Mona’ fill her own bloody ice bag? There’d be time to go in and mix the nut shells up again. But no, he might run into Miss Bittner beating a thirsty course to the lemonade. She might guess about the fly. Besides he’d dallied too long as it was. He had business to attend to. Serious business.
He got up, stretched, scrunched his heel on the anthill and walked away in the direction of the bath-house.
Twice he halted to shy stones at a plump robin and once he froze into a statue as there was a movement in the path before him. His quick eyes fastened on a toad squatting in the dust, its bulgy sides going in and out, in and out. in and out, like a miniature bellows. Stealthily Pruitt broke off a twig. In and out, in and out, in and out. Pruitt eased forward. In and out, in and out, in and out. He could see its toes spread far apart, the dappling of spots on its cool, froggy skin. In and out, in and out, the leg muscles tensed as the toad prepared to make another hop. Pantherlike, Pruitt leaped, his hand descending. The toad emitted an agonized squeaking scream.
Pruitt stood up and looked at the toad with amusement. The twig protruded from its sloping back. In and out, in and out went the toad’s sides. In – and out, in – and out. It essayed an unstable hop, leaving a darkish stain in its wake. Again it hopped. The twig remained staunchly upright. The third hop was shorter. Barely its own length. Pruitt nosed it over into the grass with his shoe. In – and – out went the toad’s sides. In – and – out, in – and – out, in.…
Pruitt walked on.
The crippled man, mending his fishing net on the wooden pier, sensed his approaching footsteps. With as much haste as his wracked spine would permit, the man got to his feet. Pruitt heard the scrambling and quickened his pace.
‘Hello,’ he said innocently.
The man bobbed his head. ‘’Do, Mr Pruitt.’
‘Mending your nets?’
‘Yes, Mr Pruitt.’
‘I guess the dock is a good place to do it.’
‘Yes, Mr Pruitt.’ The man licked his tongue across his lips and his eyes made rapid sorties to the right and left, as if seeking a means of escape.
Pruitt scraped his shoe across the wooden planking. ‘Excepting that it gets fish scales all over everything,’ he said softly, ‘and I don’t like fish scales.’
The man’s Adam’s apple jerked up and down as he swallowed thrice in rapid succession. He wiped his hands on his pants.
‘I said I don’t like fish scales.’
‘Yes, Mr Pruitt, I didn’t mean to –’
‘So I guess maybe I’d better fix it so there won’t be any fish scales any more.’
‘Mr Pruitt, please, I didn’t –’ His voice petered out as the boy picked up a corner of the net.
‘Not ever any more fish scales,’ said Pruitt.
‘Don’t pull it,’ the man begged, ‘it’ll snag on the dock.’
‘I won’t snag it,’ Pruitt said; ‘I wouldn’t snag it for anything.’ He smiled at Harry. ‘Because if I just snagged it, you’d just mend it again and then there’d be more fish scales, and I don’t like fish scales.’ Bunching the net in his fists, he dragged it to the edge of the dock. ’So I’ll just throw it in the water and then I guess there won’t be any more fish scales.’
Harry’s jaw went slack with shocked disbelief. ‘Mr Pruitt …’ he began.
‘Like this,’ said Pruitt. He held the net out at arm’s length over the pier and relinquished his clasp.
With an inarticulate cry the man threw himself awkwardly on the planking in a vain attempt to retrieve his slowly vanishing property.
‘Now there won’t be any more fish scales,’ Pruitt said. ‘Not ever any more.’
Harry hefted himself to his knees. His face was white. For one dull, weighted minute he looked at his tormentor. Then he struggled to his feet and limped away without a word.
Pruitt considered his deformed posture with the eye of a connoisseur. ‘Harry is a hunchback,’ he sang after him in a lilting childish treble. ‘Harry is a hunchback, Harry is a hunchback.’
The man limped on, one shoulder dipping sharply with each successive step, his coarse shirt stretched over his misshapen back. A bend in the path hid him from view.
Pruitt pushed open the door of the bathhouse and went inside. He closed the door behind him and bolted it. He waited until his eyes had become accustomed to the semi-gloom, whereupon he went over to a cot against the wall, lifted up its faded chintz spread, felt underneath and pulled out two boxes. He sat down and delved into their contents.
From the first he produced a section of a bread board, four pegs, and six half-burned birthday candles screwed into nibbled-looking pink candy rosettes. The bread board he placed on top of the pegs, the candles he arranged in a semi-circle. He surveyed the results with squint-eyed approval.
From the second box he removed a grotesque object composed of coal tar. It perched shakily on pipe-stem legs, two strips of cellophane were pasted to its flanks and a black rubber band dangled downwards from its head in which was embedded – one on each side – a red cinnamon drop.
The casual observer would have seen in this sculpture a child’s crude efforts to emulate the characteristics of the common housefly. The casual observer – if he had been inclined to go on with his observing – also would have seen that Pruitt was in a ‘mood’. He might even have observed aloud, ‘That child looks positively feverish and he shouldn’t be allowed to play with matches.’
But at the moment there was no casual observer. Only Pruitt absorbed in lighting the birthday candles. The image of the fly he deposited squarely in the middle of the bread board.
Cross-legged he sat, chin down, arms folded. He rocked himself back and forth. He began to chant. Sing-song. Through his nose. Once in a while he rolled his eyes around in their sockets, but merely once in a while. He had found, if he did that too often, it made him dizzy.
‘O Idol of the Flies,’ intoned Pruitt, ‘hahneemahneemo.’ He scratched his ankle ruminatively. ‘Hahneeweemahneemo,’ he improved, ‘make the lemonade dry in the crack on the back porch, and make Miss Bittner find the scrooched up fly after she’s already drunk some, and make cook go down in the cellar for some marmalade and make her not turn on the light and make her fall over the string I’ve got tied between the posts, and make aunt get a piece of nutshell in her bread and cough like hell,’ Pruitt thought this over. ‘Hell,’ he said, ‘hell, hell, hell, hell, HELL.’
He meditated in silence. ‘I guess that’s all,’ he said finally, ‘except maybe you’d better fill up my flycatcher in case we have currant cookies for tea. Hahneewee-mahneemo, O Idol of the Flies, you are free to GO!’
Pruitt fixed his gaze in the middle distance and riveted it there. Motionless, scarcely breathing, his lips parted, he huddled on the bare boards – a small sphinx in khaki shorts.
This was what Pruitt called ‘not-thinking-time’. Pretty soon, entirely without volition on his part, queer, half-formed dream things would float through his mind. Like dark golliwogs, propelling themselves along with their tails, hinting at secrets that nobody knew, not even grownups. Some day he would be able to catch one, quickly, before it wriggled off into the inner hidden chamber where They had a nest and, then, he would know. He would catch it in a net of thought, like Harry’s net caught fishes, and no matter how it squirmed and threshed about he would pin it flat against his skull until he knew. Once, he had almost caught one. He had been on the very rim of knowing and Miss Bittner had come down to bring him some peanut butter sandwiches and it had escaped back into that deep, strange place in his mind where They lived. He had had it only for a split second but he remembered it had blind, weepy eyes and was smooth.
If Miss Bittner hadn’t come – he had vomited on her stocking. Here came one of Them now – fast, it was coming fast, too fast to catch. It was gone, leaving behind it a heady exhilaration. Here came another, revolving, writhing like a sea snake, indistinct, shadowy. Let it go, the next one might be lured into the net. Here it came, two of them, rolling in the sleep hollows. Easily now, easily, easily, close in, easily, so there wouldn’t be any warning ripples, closer, they weren’t watching, murmuring to each other – there! He had them!
‘Pruitt! Oh, Pru-itt!’
The things veered away, their tails whipping his intellect into a spinning mass of chaotic frenzy.
‘Pru-itt! Where are you? Pru-itt!’
The boy blinked.
‘Pru-itt! Oh, Pru-itt!’
His mouth distorted like that of an enraged animal. He stuck out his tongue and hissed at the locked door. The handle turned.
‘Pruitt, are you there?’
‘Yes, Miss Bittner.’ The words were thick and meaty in his mouth. If he bit down, Pruitt thought, he could bite one in two and chew it up and it would squish out between his teeth like an éclair.
‘Unlock the door.’
‘Yes, Miss Bittner.’
Pruitt blew out the candles and swept his treasures under the cot. He reconsidered this action, shoved his hand under the chintz skirt, snaffled the coal tar fly and stuffed it in his shirt.
‘Do you hear me, Pruitt? Unlock this door.’ The knob rattled.
‘I’m coming fast as I can,’ he said. He rose, stalked over to the door, shot back the bolt and stood, squinting, in the brilliant daylight before Miss Bittner.
‘What on earth are you doing in there?’
‘I guess I must’ve fallen asleep.’
Miss Bittner peered into the murky confines of the bathhouse. She sniffed inquisitively.
‘Pruitt,’ she said, ‘have you been smoking?’
‘No, Miss Bittner.’
‘We mustn’t tell a falsehood, Pruitt. It is far better to tell the truth and accept the consequences.’
‘I haven’t been smoking.’ Pruitt could feel his stomach moving inside him. He was going to be sick again. Like he was the last time. Miss Bittner was wavering in front of him. Her outside edges were all blurry. His stomach gave a violent lurch. Pruitt looked at Miss Bittner’s stockings. They were messy. Awfully messy. Miss Bittner looked at them too.
‘Run along up to the house, Pruitt,’ she said kindly. ‘I’ll be up presently.’
‘Yes, Miss Bittner.’
‘And we won’t say anything about smoking to your auntie. I think you’ve been sufficiently punished.’
‘Yes, Miss Bittner.’
Pruitt went languidly up the path, conscious of Miss Bittner’s eyes boring into him. When he turned the bend, he stopped and crept slyly into the bushes. He made his way back towards the bathhouse, pressing the branches away from him and easing them cautiously to prevent them from snapping.
Miss Bittner sat on the steps taking off her stockings. She rinsed her legs in the water and dried them with her handkerchief. Pruitt could see an oval corn plaster on her little toe. She put her bony feet into her patent-leather Health shoes, got up, brushed her dress and disappeared into the bathhouse.
Pruitt inched nearer.
Miss Bittner came to the doorway and examined something she held in her hands. She looked puzzled. From his vantage point, Pruitt glimpsed the pink of the candy rosettes, the stubby candle wicks.
‘I hate you,’ whispered Pruitt venomously, ‘I hate you, I hate you.’ Tenderly, he withdrew the coal tar image from his shirt. He cuddled it against his cheek. ‘Break her ear thing,’ he muttered. ‘Break it all to pieces so’s she’ll have to act deaf. Break it, break it, hahneeweemahneemo, break it good.’ Warily he crawled backwards until he regained the path.
He trudged onward, pausing only twice. Once at a break in the hedge he reached into the aperture and drew out a cone-shaped contraption smeared with syrup. Five flies clung to this, their wings sticky, their legs gluey. These he disengaged, ignoring the lesser fry of gnats and midges that had met a similar fate, and returned the flycatcher to its lair. The second interruption along his line of march was a sort of interlude during which he cracked the two-inch spine of a garden lizard and hung it on a bramble where it performed incredibly tortuous convulsions with the lower half of its body.
Mona Eagleston came out of her bedroom and closed the door gently behind her. Everything about Mona was gentle from the top of her wren brown hair threaded with grey to the slippers on her ridiculously tiny feet. She was rather like a fawn. An ageing fawn with liquid eyes that, despite the encroaching years, had failed to lose their tiptoe look of expectancy.
One knew instinctively that Mona Eagleston was that rare phenomenon – a lady to the manner born. If, occasionally, when in close proximity to her nephew, a perplexed look overshadowed that delicate face, it was no more than a passing cloud. Children were inherently good. If they appeared otherwise, it was simply because their actions were misunderstood. They – he – Pruitt didn’t mean to do things. He couldn’t know – well, that slamming the screen door, for instance, could send a sickening stab of pain through a head racked with migraine. He couldn’t be expected to know, the poor orphan lamb. The poor, dear, orphan lamb.
If only she didn’t have to pour at teatime. If only she could lie quiet and still with a cold compress on her head and the shutters pulled to. How selfish she was. Teatimes to a child were lovely, restful periods. Moments to be forever cherished in the pattern of memory. Like colourful loops of embroidery floss embellishing the whole. A skein of golden, shining teatimes with the sunset straining the windows and high-lighting the fat-sided Delft milk-jug. The taste of jam, the brown crumbles left on the cookie plate, the tea cups – egg-shell frail – with handles like wedding rings. All of these were precious to a child. Deep down inside, without quite knowing why, they absorbed such things as sponges absorbed water – and, like sponges, they could wring these memories out when they were growing old. As she did, sometimes. What a wretched person she was to begrudge a teatime to Pruitt, dear, little Pruitt, her own dead brother’s child.
She went on down the stairs, one white hand trailing the banister. The fern, she noticed, was dying. This was the third fern. She’d always had so much luck with ferns, until lately. Her goldfish, too. They had died. It was almost an omen. And Pruitt’s turtles. She had bought them at the village. So cunning they were with enamelled pictures on their hard, tree-barky shells. They had died. She mustn’t think about dying. The doctor had said it was bad for her.
She crossed the great hall and entered the drawing-room.
‘Dear Pruitt,’ she said to the boy swinging his legs from the edge of the brocaded chair. She kissed him. She had intended to kiss his sunwarm cheek but he had moved, suddenly, and the kiss had met an unresponsive ear. Children were jumpy little things.
‘Did you have a nice day?’
‘Yes, aunt.’
‘And you, Miss Bittner? Did you have a nice day? And how did the conjugations go this morning? Did our young man … why, my dear, whatever is the matter?’
‘She broke her ear thing,’ Pruitt said. He turned towards his tutor and enunciated in an exaggerated fashion, ‘didn’t you, Miss Bittner?’
Miss Bittner reddened. She spoke in an unnaturally loud toneless voice of the deaf, ‘I dropped my hearing-aid,’ she explained. ‘On the bathroom floor. I’m afraid, until I get it fixed, that you’ll have to bear with me.’ She smiled a tight strained smile to show that it was really quite a joke on her.
‘What a shame,’ said Mona Eagleston, ‘but I daresay it can be repaired in the village. Harry can take it in tomorrow.’
Miss Bittner followed the movement of Mona Eagleston’s lips almost desperately.
‘No,’ she said hesitantly, ‘Harry didn’t do it. I did it. The bathroom tile, you know. It was frightfully clumsy of me.’
‘And she drank some lemonade that had a fly in it. Didn’t you, Miss Bittner? I said you drank some lemonade that had a fly in it, didn’t you?’
Miss Bittner nodded politely. Her eyes focused on Pruitt’s mouth.
‘Cry?’ She ventured. ‘No, I didn’t cry.’
Mona Eagleston seated herself behind the teapot and prepared to pour. She must warn cook, hereafter, to put an oiled cover over the lemonade. One couldn’t be too particular where children were concerned. They were susceptible to all sorts of diseases and flies were notorious carriers. If Pruitt were taken ill because of her lack of forethought she would never forgive herself.
‘Could I have some marmalade?’ Pruitt asked.
‘We have currant cookies, dear, and nut bread. Do you think we need marmalade?’
‘I do so love marmalade, aunt. Miss Bittner does too. Don’t you, Miss Bittner?’
Miss Bittner smiled stoically on and accepted her cup with a pleasant non-committal murmur that she devoutly hoped would serve as an appropriate answer to whatever Pruitt was asking.
‘Very well, dear.’ Mona tinkled a bell.
‘I’ll pass the cookies, aunt.’
‘Thank you, Pruitt. You are very thoughtful.’
The boy took the plate and carried it over to Miss Bittner and an expression of acute suffering swam across the Bittner countenance as the boy trod heavily on her foot.
‘Have some cookies.’ Pruitt thrust the plate at her.
‘That’s quite all right,’ Miss Bittner said, thinking he had apologized and congratulating herself on the fact that she hadn’t moaned aloud. If he had known she had a corn, he couldn’t have selected the location with more exactitude. She looked at the cookies. After that lemonade episode, she had felt she couldn’t eat again – but they were tempting. Gracious, how that corn ached.
‘Here’s a nice curranty one.’ Pruitt popped a cookie on her plate.
‘Thank you, Pruitt.’
Cook waddled into the room. ‘Did you ring, Miss Mona?’
‘Yes, Bertha. Would you get Pruitt some marmalade, please?’
Bertha shot a poisonous glance at Pruitt. ‘There’s none up, ma’am. Will the jam do?’
Pruitt managed a sorrowful sigh. ‘I do so love marmalade, aunt,’ and then happily, as if it were an afterthought, ‘isn’t there some basement cubby?’
Mona Eagleston made a helpless look at cook. ‘Would you mind terribly, Bertha? You know how children are.’
‘Yes, ma’am, I know how children are,’ cook said in a flat voice.
‘Thank you, Bertha. The pineapple will do.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’ Bertha plodded away.
‘She was walking around in her bare feet again today,’ Pruitt said.
His aunt shook her head sadly. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ she said to Miss Bittner. ‘I dislike being cross, but ever since she stepped on that nail’ – Mona Eagleston smiled quickly at her nephew – ‘not that you meant to leave it there, darling, but … well … will you have a slice of nut bread, Miss Bittner?’
Pruitt licked back a grin. ‘Aunt said would you like a piece of nut bread, Miss Bittner,’ he repeated grinningly.
Miss Bittner paid no heed. She seemed to be in a frozen trance sitting as she did rigidly upright staring at her plate with horror. She arose.
‘I … I don’t feel well,’ she said, ‘I think … I think I’d better go lie down.’
Pruitt hopped off his chair and took her plate. Mona Eagleston made a distressed tching sound. ‘Is there anything I can do –’ she half rose but Miss Bittner waved her back.
‘It’s nothing,’ Miss Bittner said hoarsely. ‘I … I think it’s just something I … I ate. Don’t let me disturb your t-t-teatime.’ She put her napkin over her mouth and hastily hobbled from the room.
‘I should see that she –’ began Mona Eagleston worriedly.
‘Oh, don’t let’s ruin teatime,’ Pruitt interposed hurriedly. ‘Here, have some nut bread. It looks dreadfully good.’
‘Well …’
‘Please, Aunt Mona. Not teatime.’
‘Very well, Pruitt.’ Mona chose a slice of bread. ‘Does teatime mean a great deal to you? It did to me when I was a little girl.’
‘Yes, aunt.’ He watched her break a morsel of bread, butter it and put it in her mouth.
‘I used to live for teatime. It was such a cosy …’ Mona Eagleston lifted a pale hand to her throat. She began to cough. Her eyes filled with tears. She looked wildly around for water. She tried to say ‘water’ but couldn’t get the word past the choking in her lungs. If Pruitt would only – but he was just a child. He couldn’t be expected to know what to do for a coughing spell. Poor, dear, Pruitt, he looked so … so – perturbed. Handing her the tea like that, his face all puckery. She gulped down a great draught of the scalding liquid. Her slight frame was seized with a paroxysm of coughing. Mercy! She must have mistakenly put salt in it, instead of sugar.
She wiped her brimming eyes. ‘Nutshell,’ she wheezed, gaining her feet. ‘Back … presently …’ Coughing violently, she, too, quitted the room.
From somewhere beneath Pruitt’s feet, deep in the bowels of the house, came a faint far-away thud.
Pruitt picked the flies off of Miss Bittner’s cookie. Where there had been five, there were now four and a half. He put the remains in his pocket. They might come in handy.
Dimly he heard cook calling for help. It was a smothered hysterical calling. If Aunt Mona didn’t return, it could go on quite a while before it was heeded. Cook could yell herself blue around the gills by then. ‘Hahneeweemahneemo,’ he crooned. ‘O Idol of the Flies, you have served me true, yea, yea, double yea, forty-five, thirty-two.’
Pruitt helped himself to a heaping spoonful of sugar.
The pinkish sky was filled with cawing rooks. They pivoted and wheeled, they planed their wings into black fans and settled in the great old beeches to shout gossip at one another.
Pruitt scuffed his shoe on the stone steps and wished he had an air rifle. He would ask for one on his birthday. He would ask for a lot of impossible things first and then – pitifully – say, ‘Well, then, could I just have a little old air rifle?’ Aunt would fall for that. She was as dumb as his mother had been. Dumber. His mother had been ‘simple’ dumb, which was pretty bad – going in, as she had, for treacly bedtime stories and lap sitting. Aunt was ‘sick’ dumb, which was very dumb indeed. ‘Sick’ dumb people always looked at the ‘bright side’. They were the dumbest of all. They were push-overs, ‘sick’ dumb people were. Easy, little old push-overs.
Pruitt shifted his position as there came to his ears the scrape of footsteps in the hall.
That dragging sound would be cook. He wondered if she really had pulled the muscles loose in her back. Here came Harry with the car. They must be going to the doctor. Harry’s hunch made him look like he had a pillow behind him.
‘We mustn’t let Pruitt know about the string,’ he heard his aunt say. ‘It would make him feel badly to learn that he had been the cause.’
Cook made a low, unintelligible reply.
‘Purposely!’ his aunt exclaimed aghast. ‘Why, Bertha, I’m ashamed of you. He’s only a child!’
Pruitt drew his lips into a thin line. If she told about the nut shells, he’d fix her. He scrambled up the steps and held open the screen door.
But cook didn’t tell about the nut shells. She was too busy gritting her teeth against the tearing pull in her back.
‘Can I help?’ Pruitt let a troubled catch into his voice. His aunt patted his cheek. ‘We can manage, dear, thank you.’
Miss Bittner smiled on him benevolently. ‘You can take care of me while they’re gone,’ she said. ‘We’ll have a picnic supper. Won’t that be fun?’
‘Yes, Miss Bittner. Oodles of fun.’
He watched the two women assist their injured companion down the steps with Harry collaborating. He kissed his fingers to his aunt as the car drove away and linked his arm through Miss Bittner’s. He gazed cherubically up at her.
‘You are a filthy mess,’ he said caressingly, ‘and I hate your guts.’
Miss Bittner beamed on him. It wasn’t often that Pruitt was openly loving to her. ‘I’m sorry, Pruitt, but I can’t hear very well now, you know. Perhaps you’d like me to read to you for a while.’
Pruitt shook his head. ‘I’ll just play,’ he said loudly and distinctly and then, softly, ‘you liverless old hyena.’
‘Play?’ said Miss Bittner.
Pruitt nodded.
‘All right, darling. But don’t go far. It’ll be supper time soon.’
‘Yes, Miss Bittner.’ He ran lightly down the steps. ‘Good-bye,’ he called, ‘you homely, dear, old hag, you.’
‘Good-bye,’ said Miss Bittner, nodding and smiling.
Pruitt placed the bread board on the pegs and arranged the candles in a semicircle. One of them refused to stay vertical. It had been stepped on.
Pruitt examined it angrily. You’d think she’d be particular with other people’s property. The snivelling fool. He’d fix her. He ate the candy rosette with relish and, after it was completely devoured, chewed up the candle, spitting out the wick when it had reached a sufficiently malleable state. He delved into his shirt front and extracted the coal tar fly which had developed a decided list to starboard. He compressed it into shape, reanchored a wobbly pipestem leg, and established the figure in the centre of the bread board.
He folded his arms and began to rock back and forth, the swirling candles spreading his shadow behind him like a thick, dark cloak.
‘Hahneeweemahneemo. O Idol of the Flies, hear, hear, O hear, come close and hear. Miss Bittner scrooched one of your candles. So send me lots of flies, lots and lots of flies, millions, trillions, skillions of flies. Quadrillions and skintillions. Make them also no-colour so’s I can mix them up in soup and things without them showing much. Black ones show. Send me pale ones that don’t buzz and have feelers. Here me, hear me, hear me, O Idol of the Flies, come close and hear!’
Pruitt chewed his candle and contemplated. His face lighted, as he was struck with a brilliant thought. ‘And make a thinking-time-dream-thing hold still so’s I can get it. So’s I’ll know. I guess that’s all. Hahneeweemahneemo, O Idol of the Flies, you are free to GO!’
As he had done earlier in the afternoon, Pruitt became quiescent. His eyes, catlike, were set and staring, staring, staring, staring fixedly at nothing at all.
He didn’t look excited. He looked like a small boy engaged in some innocuous small-boyish pursuit. But he was excited. Excitement coursed through his veins and rang in his ears. The pit of his stomach was cold with it and the palms of his hands were as moist as the inside of his mouth was dry.
This was the way he felt when he knew his father and mother were going to die. He had known it with a sort of clear, glittering lucidity – standing there in the white Bermuda sunlight, waving good-bye to them. He had seen the plumy feather of his mother’s hat, the sprigged organdie dress, his father’s pointed moustache and his slender, artist’s hands grasping the driving reins. He had seen the gleaming harness, the high-spirited shake of the horse’s head, its stamping foot. His father wouldn’t have a horse that wasn’t high-spirited. Ginger had been its name. He had seen the bobbing fringe on the carriage top and the pin in the right rear wheel – the pin that he had diligently and with patient perseverance worked loose with the screwdriver out of his toy tool chest. He had seen them roll away, down the drive, out through the wrought-iron gates. He had wondered if they would turn over when they rounded the bend and what sort of a crash they would make. They had turned over but he hadn’t heard the crash. He had been in the house eating the icing off the cake.
But he had known they were going to die. The knowledge had been almost more than he could control, as even now it was hard to govern the knowledge, the certainty, that he was going to snare a dream-thing.
He knew it. He knew it. He knew it. With every wire-taut nerve in his body he knew it.
Here came one. Streaking through his mind, leaving a string of phosphorescent bubbles in its wake and the bubbles rose and burst and there were dark, bloody smears where they had been. Another – shooting itself along with its tail – its greasy sides ashine. Another – and another – and another – and then a seething whirlpool of them. There had never been so many. Spiny, pulpy, slick and cell-like, some with feelers like catfish, some with white, gaping mouths and foreshortened embryo arms. Their contortions clogged his thoughts with weeping. But there was one down in the black, not-able-to-get-to part of his mind that watched him. It knew what he wanted. And it was blind. But it was watching him through its blindness. It was coming. Wriggling closer, bringing the black, not-able-to-get-to part with it and where it passed the others sank away and his mind was wild with depraved weeping. Its nose holes went in and out, in and out, in and out, like something he had known long ago in some past, mysterious other life, and it whimpered as it came and whispered things to him. Disconnected things that swelled his heart and ran like juice along the cracks in his skull. In a moment it would be quite near, in a moment he would know.
‘Pruitt! Pruitt!’
The words were drops of honey.
‘Pruitt! Pruitt!’ Pollen words, nectarious, sprinkled with flower dust. The dream-thing waited. It did not – like the rest – dart away afrighted.
‘Pruitt! Pruitt!’ The voice came from outside himself. From far away and down, from some incredible depth like the place in his mind where They had a nest – only it was distant – and deep. Quite deep. So hot and deep.
With an immense effort Pruitt blinked.
‘Look at me.’ The voice was dulcet and alluring.
Again Pruitt blinked, and as his wits ebbed in like a sluggish tide bringing the watching dream-thing with it, he saw a man.
He stood tall and commanding and from chin to toe he was wrapped in a flowing cape and, in the flickering candlelight, the cape had the exact outlines of Pruitt’s shadow, and in and about the cape swam the watching dream-thing, as if it were at home. Above the cloak the man’s face was a grinning mask and through the mouth, the nostrils and the slits of eyes poured a reddish translucent light. A glow. Like that of a Hallowe’en pumpkin head, only intensified a thousandfold.
‘Pruitt. Look, Pruitt.’ The folds of the cloak lifted and fell as if an invisible arm had gestured. Pruitt followed the gesture hypnotically. His neck twisted round, slowly, slowly, until his gaze encompassed a rain of insects. A living curtain of them. A shimmering and noiseless cascade of colourless flies, gauzy-winged, long-bodied.
‘Flies, Pruitt. Millions of flies.’
Pruitt once more rotated his neck until he confronted the stranger. The blind dream-thing giggled at him and swam into a pleat of darkness.
‘Who – are – you?’ The words were thick and sweet on Pruitt’s tongue like other words he half remembered speaking a thousand years ago on some dim plane in some hazy twilight world.
‘My name is Asmodeus, Pruitt. Asmodeus. Isn’t it a beautiful name?’
‘Yes.’
‘Say it, Pruitt.’
‘Asmodeus.’
‘Again.’
‘Asmodeus.’
‘Again, Pruitt.’
‘Asmodeus.’
‘What do you see in my cloak?’
‘A dream-thought.’
‘And what is it doing?’
‘It is gibbering at me.’
‘Why?’
‘Because your cloak has the power of darkness and I may not enter until …’
‘Until what, Pruitt?’
‘Until I look into your eyes and see …’
‘See what, Pruitt?’
‘What is written therein.’
‘And what is written therein? Look into my eyes. Look long and well. What is written therein?’
‘It is written what I wish to know. It is written …’
‘What is written, Pruitt?’
‘It is written of the limitless, the eternal, the foreverness of the what is and was ordained to ever be, unceasingly beyond the ends of Time for –’
‘For whom, Pruitt?’
The boy wrenched his eyes away. ‘No,’ he said, and with rising crescendo, ‘no, no, no, no, no!’ He slithered backwards across the floor, pushing with his hand, shoving with his heels, his face contorted with terror. ‘No,’ he babbled, ‘no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no!’
‘Yes, Pruitt. For whom?’
The boy reached the door and lurched to his feet, his jaw flaccid, his eyes starting in their sockets. He turned and fled up the path, heedless of the pelting flies that fastened themselves to his clothes and tangled in his hair, and touched his flesh like ghostly, clinging fingers, and scrunched beneath his feet as he ran on – his breath breaking from his lungs in sobbing gasps.
‘Miss Bittner … help … Miss Bittner … Aunt … Harry … help –’
At the bend waiting for him stood the figure he had left behind in the bathhouse.
‘For whom, Pruitt?’
‘No, no, no!’
‘For whom, Pruitt?’
‘No, oh no, no!’
‘For whom, Pruitt?’
‘For the DAMNED,’ the boy shrieked and wheeling, he ran back the way he had come, the flies sticking to his skin, mashing, as he tried frantically to rid himself of them, as on he sped.
The man behind him began to chant. High, shrill, and mocking, and the dream-thought took it up, and the earth, and the trees, and the sky that dripped flies, and the pilings of the pier clustered with their pulsating bodies, and the water, patched as far as eye could see with clotted islands of flies, flies, flies. And from his own throat came laughter, crazed and wanton, unrestrained and terrible, peal upon peal of hellish laughter that would not stop. Even as his legs would not stop when they reached the end of the pier.
A red-breasted robin – a fly in its beak – watched the widening ripples. A garden lizard scampered over a tuft of grass and joined company with a toad at the water’s edge, as if to lend their joint moral support to the turtle who slid off the bank and with jerky motions of its striped legs went down to investigate the thing that was entwined so securely in a fishing net there on the sandy bottom by the pier.
Miss Bittner idly flipped through a text book on derivatives. The text book was a relic of bygone days and the pages were studded with pressed wild flowers brittle with age. With a fingernail she loosened a tissue-thin four-leaf clover. It had left its yellow-green aura on the printed text.
‘Beelzebub,’ Miss Bittner read absently, ‘stems from the Hebraic. Beel, meaning idol, zeebub meaning flies: Synonyms, lesser known, not in common usage, are: Appolyon, Abbadon, Asmodeus …’ but Miss Bittner’s attention flagged. She closed the book, yawned and wondered lazily where Pruitt was.
She went to the window and immediately drew back with revulsion. Green Bay flies. Heavens, they were all over everything. The horrid creatures. Funny how they blew in off the water. She recalled last year, when she had been with the Braithwaites in Michigan, they had come – and in such multitudes – that the townspeople had had to shovel them off the streets. Actually shovel. She had been ill for three whole days thereafter.
She hoped Pruitt wouldn’t be dismayed by them. She must guard against showing her own helpless panic as she had done at teatime. Children placed such implicit faith in the invincibility of their elders.
Dear Pruitt, he had been so charming to her today.
Dear, little Pruitt.
THE END
