The Wanting

by Campbell Armstrong

  “That’s a cop’s question,” Henderson said. “This isn’t a cop’s problem. You’re looking for connections, you won’t find any. Don’t think I haven’t tried myself. Don’t think I haven’t stayed awake nights wondering whether there was some factor in common—because I have, I sure as hell have. I’ve been over it all, Jerry. It’s old ground to me. I’ve run the gamut from some kind of undetectable pollution to explanations that involve occult happenings.”

  Metger leaned against the desk. “Occult?” he asked.

  “Sure. Why not? When science doesn’t have an answer you start looking anywhere you can. I’ve asked myself some pretty odd questions. Were there old curses around Carnarvon? Some kind of ancient horror?”

  “What did you find?”

  Miles Henderson looked into his glass, as if he hadn’t heard Metger’s question. “I’m a man of science, Jerry. Anything that smacks of the occult leaves me pretty damn cold. Science wants to call this disease progeria and leave it at that. Who am I to contradict it?”

  “You still haven’t answered me, Miles,” Metger said.

  Henderson shrugged. “I first realized I was going soft in the brain when I found myself sitting up here, drunk as a lord, going over these records for hour after hour looking for some occult explanation. Jesus Christ, Jerry! Spooks. Witches. Curses.” Henderson shook his head from side to side. “These concepts don’t mean anything to a physician. You can’t X-ray them. You can’t take tissue samples and analyze them. And if you can’t do these things then you go back to the scientific explanation and you forget all the other nonsense and maybe you make a resolution to cut down on your drinking for a while. I quit chasing ghosts.”

  Henderson paused, smiling. “Progeria. That’s the official line, Jerry. The question you have to ask yourself is what you’re going to do with this knowledge. Publicize it? Empty the whole town? Chase everybody away in some general exodus, something like that? Choke the highways with frightened people? Forget it. Do you think you’ll even get the chance to tell your little narrative of doom? The prospect ahead of you, sonny, is silent and nasty.” Henderson smiled wearily. “You’re not the first person who wants to open this particular can of worms, Jerry. Your own father …”

  Metger was very still.

  “Stan wanted to be an author, for God’s sake! He wanted to write his stories down! Which included … these children. Just imagine the consequences for this town if he published his little histories! He wasn’t an easy person to shut up, I’m sure you know that.”

  “How did you manage it?” Metger asked.

  “Don’t look at me, Jerry. I didn’t do a damn thing to your father. Remember, I retired. I quit the club. I’m old and weary and sad. I’m the town drunk. I don’t belong in clubs. Lou Pelusi replaced me. Lou’s the conspiratorial type. Up to a point anyhow. One day he’s going to weaken, but for the time being he goes along with Ronson.”

  “How did he manage to silence my father?” Metger asked again.

  “Lou just keeps pumping drugs into Stanley. Later, I guess he thinks he’ll go inside the brain itself with a laser, so that he won’t need to continue with his injections. Lou’s hungry. He likes the nicer things in life. So he goes along, like I said. And he keeps up with all those nifty advances in medical technology. Like lasers. It’s double Dutch to me, Jerry, but Lou knows all that good stuff.”

  A laser, Metger thought. A beam of concentrated light to burn the cells of Stanley Metger’s brain. Was that the plan with Florence Hann as well? And were there others locked away in rooms in the nursing home? Others who’d stumbled onto the truth that the children of this picturesque town were all potential victims of an incurable disease?

  Children, Metger thought. Always the children. It kept coming back to Anthea Ackerley and the redwood house. To the scents and pictures that had dogged him for years. He saw Dennis Untermeyer’s face float into his mind and he was filled with a sudden fear. That kid. That house. The rainswept pines.

  “Will it happen again?” he asked. There was a hoarseness in his voice.

  Henderson nodded. “As sure as the sun rises. It could be happening right now, Jerry.”

  Metger felt the tension rise inside him. “I’ve got to put a stop to it,” he said.

  “How, Jerry? How do you propose to do that?”

  Metger went toward the door. He didn’t look back. He stepped out onto the landing. He heard Miles Henderson’s voice follow him all the way down the stairs.

  46

  “I don’t know how. I can’t explain how. I only know the Summers caused this. Some way. Some way they caused this thing to happen, Max,” and Louise watched her husband, who had just come inside the house, as he examined the kid. He looked in the boy’s mouth, peered down into the darkness of the throat, then studied Denny’s hands, turning them over, feeling the upraised knuckles, the swelling.

  Max touched his son’s hair. He did this tentatively, as if he doubted the evidence of his senses.

  Puzzled, scared, he looked down at the boy on the sofa. There was a certain receding of the lower gums and small specks of blood at the base of each tooth. The hands were swollen, the knuckles distended and reddened, and brown spots—spots he’d thought were freckles before—spread across the back of the hands and extended along the arm. The face …

  It was the face and the hair that shocked him most. Small lines spread out from the corners of the eyes—wrinkles, tiny wrinkles. And the hair was discolored, as if bleached in some weird way, the brown intermingled with streaks of gray. The eyes themselves, usually so lively, were flat and glazed and dead.

  “They did this,” Louise said again. “They did this to him!”

  Max looked at his wife. He wanted to say no, wanted to say that the old people couldn’t possibly have anything to do with this, and yet at the same time, how could he claim anything with certainty? He bent down, lowering himself over his son. He had heard of a disease that produced accelerated aging in young children, but he’d never encountered it—it was textbook stuff, things he’d read in journals and magazines, a few isolated case studies here and there. It was rare, so rare that it was never encountered by an ordinary GP in the general run of business. Jesus, he couldn’t even remember the name of the damned thing!

  He laid his hands on the boy’s arms.

  Louise, pacing around the room, said, “I called a doctor. You weren’t here. I had to do something. Christ knows what good a doctor can do!”

  Max felt numb, useless. A broken bone, a strep throat, a bad case of influenza, acne, even a heart seizure—he could have dealt with any of these things without even thinking, but the thing that faced him now was more than he could cope with.

  “The Summers,” Louise said again. “They did this!”

  “How? How could they?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know how!”

  Max turned to look at the kid. “Denny,” he said.

  The boy rolled his eyes toward his father.

  “How do you feel?” Max asked. A physician’s question-padding out silences. Even when the answer to the question was obvious.

  “Awful,” the kid mumbled.

  “Pain?”

  “Everywhere. All over.”

  Louise stood on the other side of the sofa. “Can’t you hear, Max? He doesn’t even sound like himself! That’s not his voice!”

  Hoarseness, Max thought, but didn’t say so. He looked at the boy hopelessly. Those hands—Jesus, those hands were not the hands of a twelve-year-old kid, and how could you explain the gum disease and the hair and the small lines running out from the corners of the eyes and the spots on the arm, those dark brown marks you normally saw only on …

  The old.

  Louise went to the fireplace. She picked up a picture of Dick and Charlotte.

  “They did this,” she said again. “Nobody else.”

  “How?” Max asked. A weariness went through him. A fatigue, an edge of fear. “Tell me how, Louise.”

&nb
sp; Louise didn’t answer the question. “You know when this picture was taken, Max?”

  What was she babbling about now? he wondered. What difference did it make?

  “Before the turn of the century, Max!”

  “Don’t,” he said. Hysteria.

  “Around 1899, Max.”

  “Louise—”

  “If the Summers were in their twenties when it was taken, you figure out how old they are right now!”

  Max didn’t say anything. He clasped Denny’s hand in his own, running his thumb over the swollen knuckles, and he thought, Arthritis. This boy has arthritis. But how? How the fuck could that be? Max’s eyes watered and he felt a tightness at the back of his throat. What he recalled, from the few things he’d ever read about cases like this, was the fact that it was invariably fatal.… No—it was something else, it was something other than the disease whose name he couldn’t recollect. It had to be. It had to be.…

  “A hundred and ten,” Louise was saying. “A hundred and twenty, Max.”

  “Do you know what you’re saying? You’re not making any goddamn sense!” The boy is sick, sick in the weirdest way imaginable, sick beyond all Max’s experience—and all Louise can talk about is some fucking photograph! He laid his hand on his son’s forehead—the skin was hot, feverish.

  “And whatever it is that’s happened to Denny doesn’t make any goddamn sense either, Max.”

  Max focused his attention on the boy, who moaned and shifted his body a little. Louise knelt on the rug beside the sofa, tugging at her husband’s arm.

  “Okay, you’re a doctor,” she said. “You don’t want to think about things that just don’t fit into your narrow little medical framework. I understand that. But look at the boy, Max! Look at his face and his hands!”

  Max thought of Connie Harrison now, going down into the pine trees with Dennis’s photograph. What were the connections there? What did Zmia have to do with the Summers? Everything shifted—what Louise had called his “narrow little medical framework” wasn’t equipped to carry the weight of this mystery. It sagged, buckled—he was at a loss.

  Louise covered her face with her hands. “Maybe …”

  “Maybe what?”

  “I don’t know, Max.…”

  Max lifted his hands in despair. They were debating the Summers, when all their attention should have been given to Dennis. To this wretched boy. This creature …

  Louise said, “Look, they fed him all the time, didn’t they? Charlotte was always baking things for him. How do we know she didn’t put something into that food? How do we know that? You said yourself her cooking was bitter, didn’t you?”

  “Bitter, yeah,” he said. “I don’t remember mentioning anything about potions, which is what I think you’re getting at.”

  Louise nodded. “And she cut his hair, Max.”

  “Well?”

  “She cut his hair and she kept it—”

  “I’m not with you, Louise.”

  Louise sighed in dismay. She could go on, she supposed. She could run through her little list. She could talk about the scratch marks on the kid’s back, those crisscrossing marks left by Charlotte’s fingers, the boy’s skin that must have adhered to the woman’s fingernails, perhaps even minuscule samples of his blood. She could speak about the sickening bait, which must have polluted the very air the boy breathed. She could mention the photograph the Summers were supposed to have, Dennis’s image locked inside their dreary little log house. And she could tell Max about how Charlotte’s hands had changed and how she’d seen the Summers dance and the way the old woman’s hair seemed to grow darker, she could tell her husband all these things—but he couldn’t help himself, he couldn’t overcome his training, the way he thought, he couldn’t get around science and into some other realm of experience, where logic didn’t have all the explanations, where common sense didn’t cover it all, where events happened that couldn’t be duplicated into the sterile controlled conditions of a laboratory.

  Max said, “You’re talking witchcraft, Louise. Isn’t that where you’re leading? Potions. Spells. Isn’t that your direction?”

  Louise stood up. She looked at her son. His hair. His flesh and blood. The food he ate. The air he breathed in his bedroom. The Summers had touched almost every aspect of her son.

  She turned her face to one side. All I know, she thought, is what I see. Denny grows older. The Summers get younger. That’s all I know.

  She peered through the window into the dismal rain that seeped throughout the forest. They’d said they were going away. On a honeymoon. She looked around at Dennis and she understood what it was that Dick and Charlotte—eternal lovers—were taking with them on their trip.

  Was it too late? she wondered. Too late to stop it?

  Drifting, dreaming, sliding in and out of a leaden sleep, Dennis realized that his father was sitting beside him on the sofa and that his mother had gone out into the rain. Distantly, he’d heard the door close and the sound of her feet slapping across the porch; then he was conscious of rain hammering against the house, a wild sound, wind-driven and bleak.

  His limbs were heavy, his mouth dry. Sometimes he tasted his own blood on his tongue. When he looked up into his father’s face the man’s features were somehow misty, seen through a fog.

  He’d been about to leave the Summers, he remembered, because the work on the truck was finished and he felt a little out of place, a little superfluous, since neither Dick nor Charlotte seemed to notice him very much. And then, just as he’d stepped out onto the porch, they’d called him back.

  Which was when they told him they were going away for a while. The information, which somehow hadn’t surprised him altogether, was vaguely depressing just the same. All the time they talked to him they were holding his hands. Dick on one side of him, Charlotte on the other.

  And he felt … he wasn’t sure … wasn’t sure what he felt … something he couldn’t define.

  They held his hands. They formed a light little circle. And he had felt …

  He blinked his eyes, the eyelids were heavy.

  You’ll always be with us, Charlotte had said.

  Part of you will, Dick had added.

  It was so hard to remember this now—tiny, broken pictures floated in and out of his mind.

  As Dick and Charlotte had held his hands, he’d felt … something flow out him. Something ebb away.

  It was as if a lively bird, which had occupied a space in his brain, had suddenly risen upward and flapped away, and he’d felt it go and the sensation was one of the most horrible emptiness imaginable.

  Then he’d seen himself through Dick and Charlotte’s eyes. A small boy with puffy hands and a wrinkled face. A boy whose arms and legs were stiff and painful. A boy who had risen and dragged himself back through the trees without once looking back at the house where the Summers lived, that place of music and laughter where a man and a woman loved and danced, danced and loved, and planned still another honeymoon.

  The wind that ripped through the trees pushed rain against her face, soaked her hair, entered her eyes. This whole forest, which had seemed to her at one time the most peaceful, the most relaxing place imaginable, had become hostile and sly. Sounds made by trees—the creak of trunks and the thrust of rain through branches—were voices crying aloud in anguish.

  When she reached the wash, where water was already beginning to create a quick-foaming stream, her clothes were sodden, her flannel shirt stuck to her skin, her jeans were cold and uncomfortable, water seeped inside her sneakers.

  A day for drowning. For dying.

  She forded the wash carelessly, slipping now and then, shoving her hands into the fast water for balance.

  Now the trees crowded her as she reached the far bank. Her long hair, whipped at by wind and water, blew into her eyes and stung her.

  She paused, breathless, and clung for a moment to a tree. All this, this landscape, this forest, the sky overhead, the deluge—she understood now that what lay out
here in the deep black heart of the forest was malignant and cruel and powerful.

  And it had taken her son from her. It had taken her boy away, dragged him into an area she couldn’t understand, couldn’t follow. She knew only that she felt deranged here in this forest.

  She clenched her hands, making two small hard fists.

  She had brought innocence into this place and it had been corrupted. Purity had been altered, youth stolen away.

  The weave of rain through the dense trees made a travesty of her sense of direction.

  The ground beneath her feet had the texture of swamp. It sucked at her sneakers and she kicked them off and moved barefoot, her soles hurting from blades of wood and pine-cones and fallen needles.

  Was she insane? Was she simply imagining the ugly sorcery of the Summers? The theft of a life? Was that something which—in her grief—she’d fabricated?

  Her son. Her son’s face.

  She lowered her face to keep the rain out of her eyes but the wind, raging without true direction, blew it against her cheeks and forehead anyway. When she raised her face to check her surroundings, like somebody in an unfamiliar environment hoping for a landmark, the rain came at her with a tidal force. She kept moving, hurrying as much as she could, her mind empty save for some cold hard notion of saving her son.

  But how? How did she fight?

  And then she stopped. Energy had gone out of her.

  It must have gone out of Dennis in just this same way, she thought. The Summers must have sucked the kid dry of life and vitality exactly like this, leaving him empty and useless and old. While they, like vampires of the spirit, replenished themselves on his young life.…

  It was madness time again. She was dreaming things. All this—a dream. A big bad one.

  The wind knocked her sideways into soaking shrubbery. Thorns and barbs penetrated the limp flannel of her shirt, piercing her flesh. She pressed her face into the damp bark of a tree and smelled moist wood rise into her nostrils. You can’t afford fatigue. Not now. Not now …