If Kornbluth introduced us to the creepy child trope, then Rice upped the ante. Big time. So much so that this story reads like an episode of TALES FROM THE CRYPT if it had happened in THE TWILIGHT ZONE.
Pruitt is a little shit. Actually, that’s a conservative evaluation of this snot-nosed fuckface cocksucker. When his parents died, he moved in with his aunt, her cook, a humpbacked man, and Miss Bittner, his governess. Once there, he begins tormenting just about everyone, yet he does so in such an innocent way that no one ever suspects he’s behind the chaos.
For example, he discovers his governess is afraid of flies but is fond of lemonade. His response? Put a dead fly in her glass of lemonade and hope she drinks some of it before she sees the bug. He does a lot of things other kids do, like spitting over banisters, stepping on anthills, and throwing rocks at birds, but it’s what he does to human beings that really drives him over the top of your typical brat.
He fucks with the cook, and when she doesn’t want to play his little game, he threatens to blackmail her. Later, he ties some string across the steps in the cellar and asks her to go fetch something down there for him, just so he can trip her up and sent her hurtling down the stairs.
The humpbacked gentleman, Harry, a fisherman, is mending his nets when Pruitt comes along. Because Harry isn’t very strong, Pruitt is able to grab his net away and throw it in the lake, where it sinks beyond the grasp of the poor handicapped fisherman.
Yet his aunt thinks the world of him. She knows some of the things he does are . . . peculiar . . . but she excuses him because he’s just a kid who doesn’t know any better. Any reader would know this is absolute blindness on her part, seeing as how we’ve experienced the story through Pruitt’s POV and know full well he has complete knowledge of what he’s doing. If ever in fiction there was a child who deserved a relentless thrashing, it’s young Pruitt.
But there’s more: he sneaks out to the bathhouse, where he performs an odd ritual in which he calls up something called the Idol of the Flies. Here he asks for the ability to pull off even more vicious and ugly deeds, and when he sits in the darkness, almost mediating on the evil he can do, he envisions dream-thoughts swimming around his head.
You know how some of these insufferable talking heads on TV news shows can’t stop talking about how awful kids are today? They should all read this piece, written in 1942, before most of those cunts were even born. Because lets face it, a lot of Pruitt’s actions are typical fodder for any ordinary child. Kids are sizzling balls of id until they reach a certain age when they start realizing that the world doesn’t exist for their amusement. Aside from the odd worship of the Idol of the Flies, Pruitt is essentially the Everykid.
That’s where Rice’s genius comes in. This is something universal that most people (or at least most people who are honest with themselves) recognize. Aunt Mona is right, up to a point. He’s just a kid, but just about every adult would be absolutely horrified to discover their own children doing these things.
SPOILER ALERT: As you may have surmised, the creature Pruitt worships really exists, although most of us know him as the LORD of the Flies. That’s right, Beelzebub comes to him at the end of his story, having tricked young Pruitt into setting it free on the world. Pruitt realizes what he’s done and goes mad as billions upon billions of flies shoot into the world. END OF SPOILERS.
So there are a lot of elements at work in this story, and Rice clearly knows what she’s doing. Pelan chose wisely with this one; it should be required reading, especially for someone who wants to be a parent. They might just change their minds.
[This story first appeared in UNKNOWN WORLDS and sadly cannot be read online at this time.]
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