by Bob Shaw
May came back into the room and sat down, her face wearing a slightly shamefaced expression behind the gold sequins of its freckles. “I took a tranquilliser.”
“Oh? I thought you were out of them.”
“I was, but Doctor Pitman stopped by this afternoon and let me have some more.”
“Did you call him?”
“No—he was in the neighbourhood and he looked in just to see how I was. He’s been very good since … since …’
“Since your mother died—you’ve got to get used to the idea, May.”
She nodded silently and began to gather up the dinner plates. Her own food had scarcely been touched.
“Mom?” Sammy tugged her sleeve. I tensed, waiting for him to start it all over again, but he had other’ things on his mind. His normally ruddy cheeks were pale as tallow and his forehead was beaded with perspiration. I darted from my chair barely in time to catch him as he fell sideways to the floor.
Bob Pitman had been a white-haired, apple-cheeked old gentleman when he was steering me through boyhood illnesses, and he appeared not to have aged any further in the interim. He lived alone in an unfashionably large house, still wore a conservative dark suit with a watch-chain’s gold parabola spanning the vest, played chess as much as possible and drank specially-imported non-blended Scotch. The sight of his square hands, with their ridged and slab-like fingernails, moving over Sammy’s sleeping figure comforted me even before he stood up and folded the stethoscope.
“The boy has eaten something he shouldn’t,” he said, drawing the covers up to Sammy’s chin.
‘But he’ll be all right?” May and I spoke simultaneously.
“Right as rain.”
“Thank God,” May said and sat down very suddenly. I knew she had been thinking about her mother and wondering if we were going to lose Sammy with as little warning.
“You’d better get some rest,” Dr. Pitman looked at her with kindly severity. “Young Sammy here will sleep all night, and you should follow his example. Take another of those caps I gave you this morning.”
I’d forgotten about his earlier visit. “We seem to be monopolising your time today, Doctor.”
“Just think of it as providing me with a little employment—everybody’s far too healthy these days.” He shepherded us out of Sammy’s room. “I’ll call again in the morning.”
May wasn’t quite satisfied—she was scrupulously hygienic in the kitchen and the idea that our boy had food poisoning was particularly unacceptable to her. ‘But what could Sammy have eaten, Doctor? We’ve had everything he’s had and we’re all right.”
“It’s hard to say. When he brought up his dinner did you notice anything else there? Berries? Exotic candies?”
“No. Nothing like that,” I said, ‘but they wouldn’t always be obvious, would they?” I put my arm around May’s shoulders and tried to force her to relax. She was rigid with tension and it came to me that if Sammy ever were to contract a fatal illness or be killed in an accident it would destroy her. We of the Twentieth Century have abandoned the practice of holding something in reserve when we love our children, assuming—as our ancestors would never have dared to do—that they will reach adulthood as a matter of course.
The doctor—nodding and smiling and wheezing—exuded reassurance for a couple more minutes before he left. When I took May to bed she huddled in the crook of my left arm, lonely in spite of our intimacy, and it was a long time before I was able to soothe her to sleep.
In spite of her difficulty in getting to sleep, or perhaps because of it, May failed to waken when I slipped out of the bed early next morning. I went into Sammy’s room, and knew immediately that something was wrong. His breathing was noisy and rapid as that of a pup which has been running. I went to the bed. He was unconscious, mouth wide open in the ghastly breathing, and his forehead hotter than I would have believed it possible for a human’s to be.
Fear spurted coldly in my guts as I turned and ran for the phone. I dialled Dr. Pitman’s number. While it was ringing I debated shouting upstairs to waken May, but far from being able to help Sammy she would probably have become hysterical. I decided to let her sleep as long as possible. After a seemingly interminable wait the phone clicked.
“Dr. Pitman speaking.” The voice was sleepy.
“This is George Ferguson. Sammy’s very ill. Can you get over here right away?” I babbled a description of the symptoms.
“I’ll be right there.” The sleepiness had left his voice. I hung up, opened the front door wide so that the doctor could come straight in, then went back upstairs and waited beside the bed. Sammy’s hair was plastered to his forehead and his every breath was accompanied by harsh metallic clicks in his throat. My mind became an anvil for the hammer blows of the passing seconds. Bleak eons went by before I heard Dr. Pitman’s footsteps on the stair.
He came into the room, looking uncharacteristically dishevelled, took one look at Sammy and lifted him in his arms in a cocoon of bedding.
“Pneumonia,” he said tersely. “The boy will have to be hospitalised immediately.”
Somehow I managed to speak. “Pneumonia! But you said he’d eaten something.”
“There’s no connection between this and what was wrong yesterday. There’s a lightning pneumonia on the move across the country.”
“Oh. Shall I ring for an ambulance?”
“No. I’ll drive him to the clinic myself. The streets are clear at this hour of the morning and we’ll make better time.” He carried Sammy towards the door with surprising ease.
“Wait. I’m coming with you.”
“You could help more by phoning the clinic and alerting them, George. Where’s your wife?”
“Still asleep—she doesn’t know.” I had almost forgotten about May.
He raised his eyebrows, paused briefly on the landing. “Ring the clinic first, tell them I’m coming, then waken your wife. Don’t let her get too worried, and don’t get too tensed up yourself—I’ve an emergency oxygen kit in the car, and Sammy should be all right once we get him into an intensive care unit.”
I nodded gratefully, watching my son’s blindly lolling face as he was carried down the stairs, then went to the phone and called the clinic. The people I spoke to sounded both efficient and sympathetic, and it was only a matter of seconds, before I was sprinting upstairs to waken May. She was sitting on the edge of the bed as I entered the room.
“George?” Her voice was cautious. “What’s happening?” “Sammy has pneumonia. Dr. Pitman’s driving him to the clinic now, and he’s going to be well taken care of.” I was getting dressed as I spoke, praying she would be able to take the news with some semblance of calm. She stood up quietly and began to put on clothes, moving with mechanical exactitude, and when I glimpsed her eyes I suddenly realised it would have been better had she screamed or thrown a fit. We went down to the car, shivering in the thick grey air of the October morning, and drove towards the clinic. At the end of the street I remembered I had left the front door of the house open, but didn’t turn back. I think I’d done it deliberately, hoping—with a quasi-religious irrationality—that we might be robbed and thus appease the Fates, diverting their attention from Sammy. There was little traffic on the roads but I drove at moderate speed, aware that I had virtually no powers of concentration for anything extraneous to the domestic tragedy. May sat beside me and gazed out the windows with the air of a child reluctantly returning from a long vacation.
It was with a sense of surprise that, on turning into the clinic grounds, I saw Dr. Pitman’s blue Buick sliding to a halt under the canopy of the main entrance. In my estimation he should have been a good ten minutes ahead of us. May’s fingers clawed into my thigh as she saw the white bundle being lifted out and carried into the building by a male nurse. I parked close to the entrance, heedless of painted notices telling me the space was for doctors only, and we ran into the dimness of the reception hall. There was no sign of Sammy, but Dr. Pitman was waiting for us.
‘Be calm, George. Getting into a panic won’t help things in the least.” He urged us towards a row of empty chairs. “Nothing held me back—I was driving with one hand and feeding your boy oxygen with the other.”
“I’m sorry, it’s just … how is he?”
“Still breathing, and that’s the main thing. Pneumonia’s never to be taken lightly—especially this twelve-hour variety we’ve been getting lately—but there’s every reason for confidence.”
May stirred slightly at that—I think she had been expecting to hear the worst—but I had a conviction Dr. Pitman was merely trying to let us down as gently as he could. He had always had an uncompromisingly level stare, but now his gaze kept sliding away from mine. We waited a long time for news of Sammy’s condition, and on the few occasions when I caught Dr. Pitman looking directly at me his eyes were strangely like those of a man in torment.
I thought, too, that he was relieved when one of the doctors on the staff of the clinic used all his authority to persuade May it would be much better for everybody if she waited at home.
The house was lonely that evening. May had refused sedation and was sitting with the telephone, nursing it in her lap, as though it might at any minute speak with Sammy’s own voice. I made sandwiches and coffee but she wouldn’t eat, and this somehow made it impossible for me to take anything. Tiny particles of darkness came drifting at dusk, gathering in all the corners and passageways of the house, and I finally realised I would have to get out under the sky. May nodded abstractedly when I told her I was going for a short walk. I switched on all the lights in the lounge before leaving, but when I looked back from the sidewalk she had turned them off again.
Go ahead, I raged. Sit in the darkness—a lot of good that will do him.
My anger subsided when I remembered that May was at least clinging to hope; whereas I had resigned myself, betraying my own son by not daring to believe he would recover in case I’d be hurt once more. I walked quickly but aimlessly, trying to think practical thoughts about how long I’d be absent from the draughting office where I worked and if the contract I was part way through could be taken over by another man. But instead I kept seeing my boy’s face, and at times sobbed aloud to the uncomprehending quietness of suburban avenues.
I don’t know what took me in the direction of the old Guthrie place—perhaps some association between it and dark forces threatening Sammy—but there it was, looming up at the end of a short cul-de-sac, looking exactly as it had done when I was at school. The stray fingers of light reaching it from the road showed boarded-up windows, sagging gutters and unpainted boards which were silver-grey from exposure. I examined the building soberly, feeling echoes of the childhood dread it had once inspired. My theory about it having been renovated and put to use had been wrong, I realised—I’d been a victim of Sammy’s hyperactive imagination and mischievousness.
I was turning away when I noticed fresh car tracks in the gravel of the leaf-strewn drive leading up to the house. Nothing very odd about that, I thought. Curiosity could lead anybody to drive up to the old pile for a closer look, and yet …
Suddenly I could see apples in a tree at the rear of the house.
The fruit appeared as blobs of yellowish luminescence in the tree’s black silhouette, and I stared at them for several seconds wondering why the sight should fill me with unease. Then the answer came. At that distance from the street lights the apples should have been invisible, but they were glowing like dim fairy lanterns—which meant they were being illuminated from another, nearer source. This simple application of the inverse square law led me to the astonishing conclusion that there was a lighted window at the back of the Guthrie house.
On the instant, I was a small boy again. I wanted to run away, but in my adult world there was no longer any place to which I could flee—and I was curious about what was going on in the old house. There was enough corroboration of Sammy’s story to make it clear that he had seen something. But old people sitting in big chairs? I went slowly and self-consciously through the drifts of moist leaves, inhaling the toadstool smell of decay, and moved along the side of the house towards crawling blackness. It seemed impossible that there could be anybody within those flaking walls—the light must have been left burning, perhaps weeks earlier, by a careless real estate man.
I skirted a heap of rubbish and reached the back of the house. A board had been loosened on one of the downstairs windows, creating a small triangular aperture through which streamed a wan lemon radiance. I approached it quietly and looked in. The room beyond was lit by a naked bulb and contained perhaps eight armchairs, each of which was occupied by an old man or an old woman. Most were reading magazines, but one woman was knitting. My eyes took in the entire scene in a single sweep, then fastened on the awful, familiar face of the woman in the chair nearest the window.
Sammy had been right—it was the face of his dead grandmother.
That was when the nightmare really began. The frightened child within me and the adult George Ferguson both agreed they had stumbled on something monstrous, and that adrenaline-boosted flight was called for, yet—as in a nightmare—I was unable to do anything but move closer to the focus of horror. I stared at the old woman in dread. Her rawboned face, the lump beneath one ear, the very way she held her magazine—all these told me I was looking at May’s mother, Mrs. Martha Cummins, who had died suddenly of a brain haemorrhage more than two weeks earlier, and who was buried in the family plot.
Of its own accord, my right hand went snaking into the triangular opening and tapped the dusty glass. It was a timid gesture and none of the people within responded to the faint sound, but a second later one of the men raised his head briefly as he turned a page, and I recognised him. Joe Bryant, the caretaker at Sammy’s school. He had died a year ago of a heart attack.
Explanation? I couldn’t conceive one, but I had to speak to the woman who appeared to be May’s mother.
I turned away from the window and went to the black rectangle of the house’s rear door. It was locked in the normal way and further secured by a bolted-on padlock. A slick moisture on its working parts told me the padlock was in good condition. I moved further along and tried another smaller window in what could have been the kitchen. It too was boarded up, but when I pulled experimentally at the short planks the whole frame moved slightly with a pulpy sound. A more determined tug brought the entire metal window frame clear of its surround of rotting wood, creating a dark opening. The operation was noisier than I had expected, but the house remained still and I set the window down against the wall.
Part of my mind was screaming its dismay, but I used the window frame as a ladder and climbed through on to a greasy complicated surface which proved to be the top of an old-fashioned gas cooker. My cigarette lighter shed silver sparks as I flicked it on. Its transparent blue shoot of flame cast virtually no light, so I tore pages from my notebook and lit them. The kitchen was a shambles, and obviously not in use—a fact which, had I thought about it, would have increased my sense of alarm. A short corridor led from it in the general direction of the lighted room. Burning more pages, I went towards the room, freezing each time a bare floorboard groaned or a loose strip of wallpaper brushed my shoulder, and soon was able to discern a gleam of light coming from below a door. I gripped the handle firmly and, afraid to hesitate, flung the open door. The old people in the big armchairs turned their pink, lined faces towards mine. Mrs. Cummins stared at me, face lengthening with what could have been recognition or shock.
“It’s George,” I heard myself say in the distance. “What’s happening here?”
She stood up and her lips moved. “Nigi olon prittle o czanig sovisess!” On the final word the others jumped to their feet with strangely lithe movements.
“Mrs. Cummins?” I said. “Mr. Bryant?”
The old people set their magazines down, came towards the door and I saw that their feet were bare.
I backed out into the corridor, shaking my head apologetically, then turned to run. Could I get out through the small kitchen window quickly enough? A hand clawed down my back. I beat it off and ran in the direction opposite to the kitchen, guided by the light spilling from the room behind me. A door loomed up on my left. I burst through into pitch darkness, slammed it, miraculously found a key in the lock and twisted it. The door quivered as something heavy thudded against the wood from the other side, and a woman’s voice began an unnerving wail—thin, high, anxious.
I groped for the light switch and turned it on, but nothing happened. Afraid to take a step forward, I stared into the blackness that pressed against my face, gradually becoming aware of a faint soupy odour and a feeling of warmth. I guessed I was in a room at the front of the house and might be able to break out if only I could find a window. The wallpaper beside the switch had felt loose. I gripped a free edge, pulled off a huge swathe and rolled it into the shape of a torch while the hammering on the door grew more frantic. The blue cone of flame from my cigarette lighter ignited the dry paper immediately. I held the torch high and got a flickering view of a large square room, a bank of electronic equipment along one wall, and a waist-high tank which occupied most of the floor space. The sweet soup smell appeared to be coming from the dark liquid in the tank. I looked into it and saw a half-submerged thing floating face upwards. It was about the size of a seven-year-old boy and the dissolving, jellied features had a resemblance to …