Dr. William Finch stood quietly in the dark and blowing attic all morning and afternoon for three days. For three days in late November, he stood alone, feeling the soft white flakes of Time falling out of the infinite cold steel sky, silently, softly, feathering the roof and powdering the eaves. He stood, eyes shut. The attic, wallowed in seas of wind in the long sunless days, creaked every bone and shook down ancient dusts from its beams and warped timbers and lathings. It was a mass of sighs and torments that ached all about him where he stood sniffing its elegant dry perfumes and feeling of its ancient heritages. Ah. Ah.
Listening, downstairs, his wife Cora could not hear him walk or shift or twitch. She imagined she could only hear him breathe, slowly out and in, like a dusty bellows, alone up there in the attic, high in the windy house.
"Ridiculous," she muttered.
When he hurried down for lunch the third afternoon, he smiled at the bleak walls, the chipped plates, the scratched silverware, and even at his wife!
"What's all the excitement?" she demanded.
"Good spirits is all. Wonderful spirits!" he laughed. He seemed almost hysterical with joy. He was seething in a great warm ferment which, obviously, he had trouble concealing. His wife frowned.
"What's that smell ?"
"Smell, smell, smell?"
"Sarsaparilla." She sniffed suspiciously. "That's what it is!"
"Oh, it couldn't be!" His hysterical happiness stopped as quickly as if she'd switched him off. He seemed stunned, ill at ease, and suddenly very careful.
"Where did you go this morning?" she asked.
"You know I was cleaning the attic."
"Mooning over a lot of trash. I didn't hear a sound. Thought maybe you weren't in the attic at all. What's that?" She pointed.
"Well, now how did those get there?" he asked the world.
He peered down at the pair of black spring-metal bicycle clips that bound his thin pants cuffs to his bony ankles.
"Found them in the attic," he answered himself. "Remember when we got out on the gravel road in the early morning on our tandem bike, Cora, forty years ago, everything fresh and new?"
"If you don't finish that attic today, I'll come up and toss everything out myself."
"Oh, no," he cried. "I have everything the way I want it!"
She looked at him coldly.
"Cora," he said, eating his lunch, relaxing, beginning to enthuse again, "You know what attics are? They're Time Machines, in which old, dim-witted men like me can travel back forty years to a time when it was summer all year round and children raided ice wagons. Remember how it tasted? You held the ice in your handkerchief. It was like sucking the flavor of linen and snow at the same time."
Cora fidgeted.
It's not impossible, he thought, half closing his eyes, trying to see it and build it. Consider an attic. Its very atmosphere is Time. It deals in other years, the cocoons and chrysalises of another age. All the bureau drawers are little coffins where a thousand yesterdays lie in state. Oh, the attic's a dark, friendly place, full of Time, and if you stand in the very center of it, straight and tall, squinting your eyes, and thinking and thinking, and smelling the Past, and putting out your hands to feel of Long Ago, why, it ...
He stopped, realizing he had spoken some of this aloud. Cora was eating rapidly.
"Well, wouldn't it be interesting," he asked the part in her hair, "if Time Travel could occur? And what more logical, proper place for it to happen than in an attic like ours, eh?"
"It's not always summer back in the old days," she said. "It's just your crazy memory. You remember all the good things and forget the bad. It wasn't always summer."
"Figuratively speaking, Cora, it was."
"Wasn't."
"What I mean is this," he said, whispering excitedly, bending forward to see the image he was tracing on the blank dining-room wall. "If you rode your unicycle carefully between the years, balancing, hands out, careful, careful, if you rode from year to year, spent a week in 1909, a day in 1900, a month or a fortnight somewhere else, 1905, 1898, you could stay with summer the rest of your life."
"Unicycle?"
"You know, one of those tall chromium one-wheeled bikes, single-seater, the performers ride in vaudeville shows, juggling. Balance, true balance, it takes, not to fall off, to keep the bright objects flying in the air, beautiful, up and up, a light, a flash, a sparkle, a bomb of brilliant colors, red, yellow, blue, green, white, gold; all the Junes and Julys and Augusts that ever were, in the air, about you, at once, hardly touching your bands, flying, suspended, and you, simling, among them. Balance, Cora, balance."
"Blah," she said, "blah, blah." And added, "blah!"
e climbed the long
cold stairs to the attic, shivering. There were nights in winter when he
woke with porcelain in his bones, with cool chimes blowing in his ears,
with frost piercing his nerves in a raw illumination like white-cold
fireworks exploding and showering down in flaming snows upon a silent
land deep in his subconscious. He was cold, cold, cold, and it would
take a score of endless summers, with their green torches and bronze
suns to thaw him free of his wintry sheath. He was a great tasteless
chunk of brittle ice, a snowman put to bed each night, full of confetti
dreams, tumbles of crystal and flurry. And there lay winter outside
forever, a great leaden wine press smashing down its colorless lid of
sky, squashing them all like so many grapes, mashing color and sense and
being from everyone, save the children who fled on skis and toboggans
down mirrored hills which reflected the crushing iron shield that hung
lower above town each day and every eternal night.
Mr. Finch lifted the attic trap door. But here, here. A dust of summer sprang up about him. The attic dust simmered with heat left over from other seasons. Quietly, he shut the trap door down.
He began to smile.
he attic was quiet as a
thundercloud before a storm. On occasion, Cora Finch heard her husband
murmuring, murmuring, high up there.
At five in the afternoon, singing My Isle of Golden Dreams, Mr. Finch flipped a crisp new straw hat in the kitchen door. "Boo!"
"Did you sleep all afternoon?" snapped his wife. "I called up at you four times and no answer."
"Sleep?" He considered this and laughed, then put his hand quickly over his mouth. "Well, I guess I did."
Suddenly she saw him. "My God!" she cried, "where'd you get that coat?"
He wore a red candy-striped coat, a high white, choking collar and ice cream pants. You could smell the straw hat like a handful of fresh hay fanned in the air.
"Found 'em in an old trunk."
She sniffed. "Don't smell of moth balls. Looks brand-new."
"Oh, no!" he said hastily. He looked stiff and uncomfortable as she eyed his costume.
"This isn't a summer-stock company," she said.
"Can't a fellow have a little fun?"
"That's all you've ever had," she slammed the oven door. "While I've stayed home and knitted, lord knows, you've been down at the store helping ladies' elbows in and out doors."
He refused to be bothered. "Cora." He looked deep into the crackling straw hat. "Wouldn't it be nice to take a Sunday walk the way we used to do, with your silk parasol and your long dress whishing along, and sit on those wirelegged chairs at the soda parlor and smell the drugstore the way they used to smell? Why don't drugstores smell that way any more? And order two sarsaparillas for us, Cora, and then ride out in our 1910 Ford to Hannahan's Pier for a box supper and listen to the brass band. How about it?"
"Supper's ready. Take that dreadful uniform off."
"If you could make a wish and take a ride on those oak-laned country roads like they had before cars started rushing, would you do it?" he insisted, watching her.
"Those old roads were dirty. We came home looking like Africans. Anyway," she picked up a sugar jar and shook it, "this morning I had forty dollars here. Now it's gone! Don't tell me you ordered those clothes from a costume house. They're brand-new; they didn't come from any trunk!"
"I'm—" he said.
She raved for half an hour, but he could not bring himself to say anything. The November wind shook the house and as she talked, the snows of winter began to fall again in the cold steel sky.
"Answer me!" she cried. "Are you crazy, spending our money that way, on clothes you can't wear?"
"The attic," he started to say.
She walked off and sat in the living room.
The snow was falling fast now and it was a cold dark November evening. She heard him climb up the stepladder, slowly, into the attic, into that dusty place of other years, into that black place of costumes and props and Time, into a world separate from this world below.
e closed the trap door
down. The flashlight, snapped on, was company enough. Yes, here was all
of Time compressed in a Japanese paper flower. At the touch of memory,
everything would unfold into the clear water of the mind, in beautiful
blooms, in spring breezes, larger than life. Each of the bureau drawers
slid forth, might contain aunts and cousins and grandmamas, ermined in
dust. Yes, Time was here. You could feel it breathing, an atmospheric
instead of a mechanical clock.
Now the house below was as remote as another day in the past. He half shut his eyes and looked and looked on every side of the waiting attic.
Here, in prismed chandelier, were rainbows and mornings and noons as bright as new rivers flowing endlessly back through time. His flashlight caught and flickered them alive, the rainbows leapt up to curve the shadows back with colors, with colors like plums and strawberries and Concord grapes, with colors like cut lemons and the sky where the clouds drew off after storming and the blue was there. And the dust of the attic was incense burning and all of time burning, and all you need do was peer into the flames. It was indeed a great machine of Time, this attic, he knew, he felt, he was sure, and if you touched prisms here, doorknobs there, plucked tassels, chimed crystals, swirled dust, punched trunk hasps and gusted the vox humana of the old hearth bellows until it puffed the soot of a thousand ancient fires into your eyes, if, indeed, you played this instrument, this warm machine of parts, if you fondled all of its bits and pieces, its levers and changers and movers, then, then, then!
He thrust out his hands to orchestrate, to conduct, to flourish. There was music in his head, in his mouth shut tight, and he played the great machine, the thunderously silent organ, bass, tenor, soprano, low, high, and at last, at last, a chord that shuddered him so that he had to shut his eyes.
About nine o'clock that night she heard him calling, "Cora!" She went upstairs. His head peered down at her from above, smiling at her. He waved his hat. "Good-by, Cora."
"What do you mean?" she cried.
"I've thought it over for three days and I'm saying good-by."
"Come down out of there, you fool!"
"I drew five hundred dollars from the bank yesterday. I've been thinking about this. And then when it happened, well ... Cora ..." He shoved his eager hand down. "For the last time, will you come along with me?"
"In the attic? Hand down that stepladder, William Finch. I'll climb up there and run you out of that filthy place!"
"I'm going to Hannahan's Pier for a bowl of clam chowder," he said. "And I'm requesting the brass band to play 'Moonlight Bay.' Oh, come on, Cora ..." He motioned his extended hand.
She simply stared at his gentle, questioning face.
"Good-by," he said.
He waved gently, gently. Then his face was gone, the straw hat was gone.
"William!" she screamed. The attic was dark and silent.
Shrieking, she ran and got a chair and used it to groan her way up into the musty darkness. She flourished a flashlight. "William! William!"
The dark spaces were empty. A winter wind shook the house.
Then she saw the far west attic window, ajar.
She fumbled over to it. She hesitated, held her breath. Then, slowly, she opened it. The ladder was placed outside the window, leading down onto a porch roof.
She pulled back from the window. Outside the opened frame the apple trees shone bright green, it was twilight of a summer day in July. Faintly, she heard explosions, firecrackers going off. She heard laughter and distant voices. Rockets burst in the warm air, softly, red, white, and blue, fading.
She slammed the window and stood reeling. "William!" Wintry November light glowed up through the trap in the attic floor behind her. Bent to it, she saw the snow whispering against the cold clear panes down in that November world where she would spend the next thirty years.
She did not go near the window again. She sat alone in the black attic, smelling the one smell that did not seem to fade. It lingered like a sigh of satisfaction, on the air. She took a deep, long breath.
The old, the familiar, the unforgettable scent of drugstore sarsaparilla.
The Dragon
he night blew in the
short grass on the moor; there was no other motion. It had been years
since a single bird had flown by in the great blind shell of sky. Long
ago a few small stones had simulated life when they crumbled and fell
into dust. Now only the night moved in the souls of the two men bent by
their lonely fire in the wilderness; darkness pumped quietly in their
veins and ticked silently in their temples and their wrists.
Firelight fled up and down their wild faces and welled in their eyes in orange tatters. They listened to each other's faint, cool breathing and the lizard blink of their eyelids. At last, one man poked the fire with his sword.
"Don't idiot; you'll give us away!"
"No matter," said the second man, "The dragon can smell us miles off anyway. God's breath, it's cold. I wish I was back at the castle."
"It's death, not sleep, we're after..."
"Why? Why? The dragon never sets foot in the town!"
"Quiet, fool! He eats men traveling alone from our town to the next!"
"Let them be eaten and let us get home!"
"Wait now; listen!"
The two men froze.
They waited a long time, but there was only the shake of their horses' nervous skin like black velvet tambourines jingling the silver stirrup buckles, softly, softly.
"Ah." The second man sighed. "What a land of nightmares. Everything happens here. Someone blows out the sun; it's night. And then, and then, oh, God, listen! This dragon, they say his eyes are fire. His breath a white gas; you can see him burn across the dark lands. He runs with sulfur and thunder and kindles the grass. Sheep panic and die insane. Women deliver forth monsters. The dragon's fury is such that tower walls shake back to dust. His victims, at sunrise, are strewn hither thither on the hills. How many knights, I ask, have gone for this monster and failed, even as we shall fail?"
"Enough of that!"
"More than enough! Out here in this desolation I cannot tell what year this is!"
"Nine hundred years since the Nativity."
"No, no," whispered the second man, eyes shut, "On this moor is no Time, is only Forever. I feel if I ran back on the road the town would be gone, the people yet unborn, things changed, the castles unquarried from the rocks, the timbers still uncut from the forests; don't ask how I know; the moor knows and tells me. And here we sit alone in the land of the fire dragon, God save us!"
"Be you afraid, then gird on your armor!"
"What use? The dragon runs from nowhere; we cannot guess its home. It vanishes in fog; we know not where it goes. Aye, on with our armor, we'll die well dressed."
Half into his silver corselet, the second man stopped again and turned his head.
Across the dim country, full of night and nothingness from the heart of the moor itself, the wind sprang full of dust from clocks that used dust for telling time. There were black suns burning in the heart of this new wind and a million burnt leaves shaken from some autumn tree beyond the horizon. This wind melted landscapes, lengthened bones like white wax, made the blood roil and thicken to a muddy deposit in the brain. The wind was a thousand souls dying and all time confused and in transit. It was a fog inside of a mist inside of a darkness, and this place was no man's place and there was no year or hour at all, but only these men in a faceless emptiness of sudden frost, storm and white thunder which moved behind the great falling pane of green glass that was the lightning. A squall of rain drenched the turf; all faded away until there was unbreathing hush and the two men waiting alone with their warmth in a cool season.
"There," whispered the first man. "Oh, there..."
Miles off, rushing with a great chant and a roar – the dragon.
In silence the men buckled on their armor and mounted their horses. The midnight wilderness was split by a monstrous gushing as the dragon roared nearer, nearer; its flashing yellow glare spurted above a hill and then, fold on fold of dark body, distantly seen, therefore indistinct, flowed over that hill and plunged vanishing into a valley.
"Quick!"
They spurred their horses forward to a small hollow.
"This is where it passes!"
They seized their lances with mailed fists and blinded their horses by flipping the visors down over their eyes.
"Lord!"
"Yes, let us use His name."
On the instant, the dragon rounded a hill. Its monstrous amber eye fed on them, fired their armor in red glints and glitters, With a terrible wailing cry and a grinding rush it flung itself forward.
"Mercy, God!"
The lance struck under the unlidded yellow eye, buckled, tossed the man through the air. The dragon hit, spilled him over, down, ground him under. Passing, the black brunt of its shoulder smashed the remaining horse and rider a hundred feet against the side of a boulder, wailing, wailing, the dragon shrieking, the fire all about, around, under it, a pink, yellow, orange sun-fire with great soft plumes of blinding smoke.
"Did you see it?" cried a voice. "Just like I told you!"
"The same! The same! A knight in armor, by the Lord Harry! We hit him!"
"You goin' to stop?"
"Did once; found nothing. Don't like to stop on this moor. I get the willies. Got a feel, it has."
"But we hit something!"
"Gave him plenty of whistle; chap wouldn't budge!"
A steaming blast cut the mist aside.
"We'll make Stokely on time. More coal, eh, Fred?"
Another whistle shook dew from the empty sky. The night train, in fire and fury, shot through a gully, up a rise, and vanished away over cold earth toward the north, leaving black smoke and steam to dissolve in the numbed air minutes after it had passed and gone forever.
End of The Beginning
e stopped the lawn
mower in the middle of the yard, because he felt that the sun at just
that moment had gone down and the stars come out. The fresh-cut grass
that had showered his face and body died soft!y away. Yes, the stars
were there, faint at first, but brightening in the clear desert sky. He
heard the porch screen door tap shut and felt his wife watching him as
he watched the night.
"Almost time," she said.
He nodded; he did not have to check his watch. In the passing moments he felt very old, then very young, very cold, then very warm, now this, now that. Suddenly he was miles away. He was his own son talking steadily, moving briskly to cover his pounding heart and the resurgent panics as he felt himself slip into fresh uniform, check food supplies, oxygen flasks, pressure helmet, space-suiting, and turn as every man on earth tonight turned, to gaze at the swiftly filling sky.
Then, quickly, he was back, once more the father of the son, hands gripped to the lawn-mower handle. His wife called, "Come sit on the porch."
"I've got to keep busy!"
She came down the steps and across the lawn. "Don't worry about Robert; he'll be all right."
"But it's all so new," he heard himself say. "It's never been done before. Think of it—a manned rocket going up tonight to build the first space station. Good lord, it can't be done, it doesn't exist, there's no rocket, no proving ground, no take-off time, no technicians. For that matter, I don't even have a son named Bob. The whole thing's too much for me!"
"Then what are you doing out here, staring?"
He shook his head. "Well, late this morning, walking to the office, I heard someone laugh out loud. It shocked me, so I froze in the middle of the street. It was me, laughing! Why? Because finally I really knew what Bob was going to do tonight; at last I believed it. Holy is a word I never use, but that's how I felt stranded in all that traffic. Then, middle of the afternoon I caught myself humming. You know the song. 'A wheel in a wheel. Way in the middle of the air.' I laughed again. The space station, of course, I thought. The big wheel with hollow spokes where Bob'll live six or eight months, then get along to the moon. Walking home, I remembered more of the song. 'Little wheel run by faith, Big wheel run by the grace of God.' I wanted to jump, yell, and flame-out myself!"
His wife touched his arm. "If we stay out here, let's at least be comfortable."
They placed two wicker rockers in the center of the lawn and sat quietly as the stars dissolved out of darkness in pale crushings of rock salt strewn from horizon to horizon.
"Why," said his wife, at last, "it's like waiting for the fireworks at Sisley Field every year."
"Bigger crowd tonight ..."
"I keep thinking—a billion people watching the sky right now, their mouths all open at the same time."
They waited, feeling the earth move under their chairs.
"What time is it now?"
"Eleven minutes to eight."
"You're always right; there must be a clock in your head."
"I can't be wrong tonight. I'll be able to tell you one second before they blast off. Look! The ten-minute warning!"
On the western sky they saw four crimson flares open out, float shimmering down the wind above the desert, then sink silently to the extinguishing earth.
In the new darkness the husband and wife did not rock in their chairs.
After a while he said, "Eight minutes." A pause. "Seven minutes." What seemed a much longer pause. "Six ..."
His wife, her head back, studied the stars immediately above her and murmured, "Why?" She closed her eyes. "Why the rockets, why tonight? Why all this? I'd like to know."
He examined her face, pale in the vast powdering light of the Milky Way. He felt the stirring of an answer, but let his wife continue.
"I mean it's not that old thing again, is it, when people asked why men climbed Mt. Everest and they said, 'Because it's there'? I never understood. That was no answer to me."
Five minutes, he thought. Time ticking ... his wrist watch ... a wheel in a wheel ... little wheel run by ... big wheel run by ... way in the middle of ... four minutes! ... The men snug in the rocket by now, the hive, the control board flickering with light.
His lips moved.
"All I know is it's really the end of the beginning. The Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age; from now on we'll lump all those together under one big name for when we walked on Earth and heard the birds at morning and cried with envy. Maybe we'll call it the Earth Age, or maybe the Age of Gravity. Millions of years we fought gravity. When we were amoebas and fish we struggled to get out of the sea without gravity crushing us. Once safe on the shore we fought to stand upright without gravity breaking our new invention, the spine, tried to walk without stumbling, run without falling. A billion years Gravity kept us home, mocked us with wind and clouds, cabbage moths and locusts. That's what's so god-awful big about tonight ... it's the end of old man Gravity and the age we'll remember him by, for once and all. I don't know where they'll divide the ages, at the Persians, who dreamt of flying carpets, or the Chinese, who all unknowing celebrated birthdays and New Years with strung ladyfingers and high skyrockets, or some minute, some incredible second the next hour. But we're in at the end of a billion years trying, the end of something long and to us humans, anyway, honorable."
Three minutes ... two minutes fifty-nine seconds ... two minutes fifty-eight seconds ...
"But," said his wife, "I still don't know why."
Two minutes, he thought. Ready? Ready? Ready? The far radio voice calling. Ready! Ready! Ready! The quick, faint replies from the humming rocket. Check! Check! Check!
Tonight, he thought, even if we fail with this first, we'll send a second and a third ship and move on out to all the planets and later, all the stars. We'll just keep going until the big words like immortal and forever take on meaning. Big words, yes, that's what we want. Continuity. Since our tongues first moved in our mouths we've asked, What does it all mean? No other question made sense, with death breathing down our necks. But just let us settle in on ten thousand worlds spinning around ten thousand alien suns and the question will fade away. Man will be endless and infinite, even as space is endless and infinite. Man will go on, as space goes on, forever. Individuals will die as always, but our history will reach as far as we'll ever need to see into the future, and with the knowledge of our survival for all time to come, we'll know security and thus the answer we've always searched for. Gifted with life, the least we can do is preserve and pass on the gift to infinity. That's a goal worth shooting for.
The wicker chairs whispered ever so softly on the grass.
One minute.
"One minute," he said aloud.
"Oh!" His wife moved suddenly to seize his hands. "I hope that Bob ..."
"He'll be all right!"
"Oh, God, take care ..."
Thirty seconds.
"Watch now."
Fifteen, ten, five ...
"Watch!"
Four, three, two, one.
"There! There! Oh, there, there!"
They both cried out. They both stood. The chairs toppled back, fell flat on the lawn. The man and his wife swayed, their hands struggled to find each other, grip, hold. They saw the brightening color in the sky and, ten seconds later, the great uprising comet burn the air, put out the stars, and rush away in fire flight to become another star in the returning profusion of the Milky Way. The man and wife held each other as if they had stumbled on the rim of an incredible cliff that faced an abyss so deep and dark there seemed no end to it. Staring up, they heard themselves sobbing and crying. Only after a long time were they able to speak.
"It got away, it did, didn't it?"
"Yes ..."
"It's all right, isn't it?"
"Yes ... yes ..."
"It didn't fall back ...?"
"No, no, it's all right, Bob's all right, it's all right."
They stood away from each other at last.
He touched his face with his hand and looked at his wet fingers. "I'll be damned," he said, "I'll be damned."
They waited another five and then ten minutes until the darkness in their heads, the retina, ached with a million specks of fiery salt. Then they had to close their eyes.
"Well," she said, "now let's go in."
He could not move. Only his hand reached a long way out by itself to find the lawn-mower handle. He saw what his hand had done and said, "There's just a little more to do ..."
"But you can't see."
"Well enough," he said. "I must finish this. Then we'll sit on the porch awhile before we turn in."
He helped her put the chairs on the porch and sat her down and then walked back out to put his hands on the guide bar of the lawn mower. The lawn mower. A wheel in a wheel. A simple machine which you held in your bands, which you sent on ahead with a rush and a clatter while you walked behind with your quiet philosophy. Racket, followed by warm silence. Whirling wheel, then soft footfall of thought.
I'm a billion years old, he told himself; I'm one minute old. I'm one inch, no, ten thousand miles, tall. I look down and can't see my feet they're so far off and gone away below.
He moved the lawn mower. The grass showering up fell softly around him; he relished and savored it and felt that he was all mankind bathing at last in the fresh waters of the fountain of youth.
Thus bathed, he remembered the song again about the wheels and the faith and the grace of God being way up there in the middle of the sky where that single star, among a million motionless stars, dared to move and keep on moving.
Then he finished cutting the grass.
Fever Dream
hey put him between
fresh, clean, laundered sheets and there was always a newly squeezed
glass of thick orange juice on the table under the dim pink lamp. All
Charles had to do was call and Morn or Dad would stick their heads into
his room to see how sick he was. The acoustics of the room were fine;
you could hear the toilet gargling its porcelain throat of mornings, you
could hear rain tap the roof or sly rnice run in the secret walls or
the canary singing in its cage downstairs. If you were very alert,
sickness wasn't too bad.
He was thirteen, Charles was. It was mid-September, with the land beginning to burn with antumn. He lay in the bed for three days before the terror overcame him.
His hand began to change. His right hand. He looked at it and it was hot and sweating there on the counterpane alone. It fluttered, it moved a bit. Then it lay there, changing color.
hat afternoon the
doctor came again and tapped his thin chest like a little drurn. "How
are you?" asked the doctor, smiling. "I know, don't tell me: 'My cold is fine, Doctor, but I feel awful!' Ha!" He laughed at his own oft-repeated joke.
Charles lay there and for him that terrible and ancient jest was becoming a reality. The joke fixed itself in his mind. His mind touched and drew away from it in a pale terror. The doctor did not know how cruel he was with his jokes! "Doctor," whispered Charles, lying flat and colorless. "My hand, it doesn't belong to me any more. This morning it changed into something else. I want you to change it back, Doctor, Doctor!"
The doctor showed his teeth and patted his hand. "It looks fine to me, son. You just had a little fever dream."
"But it changed, Doctor, oh, Doctor," cried Charles, pitifully holding up his pale wild hand. "It did!"
The doctor winked. "I'll give you a pink pill for that." He popped a tablet onto Charles' tongue. "Swallow!"
"Will it make my hand change back and become me, again?"
"Yes, yes."
The house was silent when the doctor drove off down the road in his car under the quiet, blue September sky. A clock ticked far below in the kitchen world. Charles lay looking at his hand.
It did not change back. It was still something else.
The wind blew outside. Leaves fell against the cool window.
At four o'clock his other hand changed. It seemed almost to become a fever. It pulsed and shifted, cell by cell. It beat like a warm heart. The fingernails turned blue and then red. It took about an hour for it to change and when it was finished, it looked just like any ordinary hand. But it was not ordinary. It no longer was him any more. He lay in a fascinated horror and then fell into an exhausted sleep.
Mother brought the soup up at six. He wouldn't touch it "I haven't any hands," he said, eyes shut.
"Your hands are perfectly good," said Mother.
"No," he wailed. "My hands are gone. I feel like I have stumps. Oh, Mama, Mama, hold me, hold me, I'm scared!"
She had to feed him herself.
"Mama," he said, "get the doctor, please, again. I'm so sick."
"The doctor'll be here tonight at eight," she said, and went out.
