DeBeers 06 Dark Seed Read Online Free

together."
It was one of the few things he did with me on a regular basis.
While I was getting dressed, my mother returned. and I heard them talking, The Doctor didn't raise his voice, but he was getting her more and more upset. I could tell by the shrill sound of her replies and how she was getting louder and louder.
"I did what you should have done a long time ago." she concluded. "You're an expensive
psychiatrist. Claude, but you don't seem to know how to handle your own situations at home. and I warned you at the start that I wouldn't put up with anything that made me unhappy."
He didn't respond apparently, because I didn't hear him. I heard doors close and his footsteps in the hallway.
Later, at dinner, my adoptive mother-- as I could not help but think of her now-- acted as if nothing terrible had been said and told. She chatted on about her social plans, something new she wanted to buy for the house, and a vacation she was thinking they should take. It was as if I wasn't even there, as if her earlier words had made me invisible. I felt the Doctor's eyes on me from time to time, but other than that. and Amou's talking to me. I imagined myself drifting away, like an astronaut whose lifeline in space had been cut. I was floating into the darkness. helplessly.
At school I couldn't help wondering if I suddenly appeared different to my friends and my teachers. Did some of them always know the truth anyway? Was it something in my school records? There was one other adopted child in my classes, a boy named Scott Lawrence. For some reason his status as an adopted child was never kept secret. Of course, my adoptive mother had made it perfectly clear that I was a major embarrassment for the Doctor and his clinic, and so I had to be hush-hush. My very existence was a whisper.
Now that I had been so bluntly told the truth and left with the idea that madness could sprout in my face anytime, anywhere. I was sure anyone and everyone who looked at me instantly realized what I was.
At night I would lie awake and wonder what my real mother's name was and, of course, what she looked like. I would stare at myself in the mirror and study my eyes to see if there was someone crazy just waiting to pop out of me. And I would have terrible new nightmares about my birth.
I knew what someone in a catatonic state was like because I had wandered into the Doctor's office from time to time and looked at some of his
textbooks. I saw a picture of a woman who was catatonic. She looked like she was imprisoned in her own body. There were tubes connected to her, which was how she got food. When I asked the Doctor about it, he said sometimes people shut themselves up in their own bodies to escape from unpleasant things. They don't see or hear or even feel anything anymore.
A baby made in such a woman would grow like a plant, I thought. Her mother would not even realize she was in her until it was time for her to come out. The mother might have to be cut open and the baby taken out. Afterward, the sewed up mother wouldn't even know a baby had been there. Was that the way it had been for my real mother?
Maybe she didn't know I even existed, that a part of her was alive. She didn't name me or ever feed me-- she probably didn't so much as look at me and smile. I was just something that was, something without any history. My adoptive mother was right. I supposed. I should be very grateful for what she and the Doctor were giving me. They were giving me a name and a home.
I couldn't help but be more curious about Scott Lawrence now. What image did he have of himself? Did he wonder about his real parents, too? Did he especially wonder whether or not he had any brothers or sisters? Could I have any? Was my mother married before she went to the clinic and could she have had other children before she became mentally ill?
I couldn't really imagine Scott Lawrence being bothered by anything like this. Of all the boys in my class, he was one of the most outgoing, if not the