（外文电子版资料）Kuttner, Henry - Call Him Demon.doc

CALL HIM DEMON PAGE PAGE 3 CALL HIM DEMON by Henry Kuttner Chapter 1: Wrong Uncle A long time afterward she went back to Los Angeles and drove past Grandmother Keaton’s house. It hadn’t changed a great deal, really, but what had seemed an elegant mansion to her childish, 1920 eyes was now a big ramshackle frame structure, grey with scaling paint. After twenty-five years the – insecurity – wasn’t there any more, but there still persisted a dull, irrational, remembered uneasiness, an echo of the time Jane Larkin had spent in that house when she was nine, a thin, big-eyed girl with the Buster Brown bangs so fashionable then. Looking back, she could remember too much and too little. A child’s mind is curiously different from an adult’s. When Jane went into the living-room under the green glass chandelier, on that June day in 1920, she made a dutiful round of the family, kissing them all. Grandmother Keaton and chilly Aunt Bessie and the four uncles. She did not hesitate when she came to the new uncle – who was different. The other kids watched her with impassive eyes. They knew. They saw she knew. But they said nothing just then. Jane realised she could not mention the – the trouble – either, until they brought it up. That was part of the silent etiquette of childhood. But the whole house was full of uneasiness. The adults merely sensed a trouble, something vaguely wrong. The children, Jane saw, knew. Afterward they gathered in the back yard, under the big date-palm. Jane ostentatiously fingered her new necklace and waited. She saw the looks the others exchanged – looks that said, ‘Do you think she really noticed?’ And finally Beatrice, the oldest, suggested hide-and-seek. “We ought to tell her, Bee,” little Charles said. Beatrice kept her eyes from Charles. “Tell her what? You’re crazy, Charles.” Charles was insistent, but vague. “You know.” “Keep your old secret,” Jane said. “I know what it is, anyhow. He’s not my uncle.” “See?” Emily crowed. “S