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.
At seven, with night dark and close around the house, Charles was sitting up in bed when he felt the thing happening to first one leg and then the other. “Mama! Come quick!” he screamed.
But when Mama came the thing was no longer happening.
When she went downstairs, he simply lay without fighting as his legs beat and beat, grew warm, red-hot, and the room filled with the warmth of his feverish change. The glow crept up from his toes to his ankles and then to his knees.
“May I come in?” The doctor smiled in the doorway.
“Doctor!” cried Charles. “Hurry, take off my blankets!”
The doctor lifted the blankets tolerantly. “There you are. Whole and healthy. Sweating, though. A little fever. I told you not to move around, bad boy.” He pinched the moist pink cheek. “Did the pills help? Did your hand change back?”
“No, no, now it’s my other hand and my legs!”
“Well, well, I’ll have to give you three more pills, one for each limb, eh, my little peach?” laughed the doctor.
“Will they help me? Please, please. What’ve I got?”
“A mild case of scarlet fever, complicated by a slight cold.”
“Is it a germ that lives and has more little germs in me?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure it’s scarlet fever? You haven’t taken any tests!”
“I guess I know a certain fever when I see one,” said the doctor, checking the boy’s pulse with cool authority.
Charles lay there, not speaking until the doctor was crisply packing his black kit. Then in the silent room, the boy’s voice made a small, weak pattern, his eyes alight with remembrance. “I read a book once. About petrified trees, wood turning to stone. About how trees fell and rotted and minerals got in and built up and they look just like trees, but they’re not, they’re stone.” He stopped. In the quiet warm room his breathing sounded.
“Well?” asked the doctor.
“I’ve been thinking,” said Charles after a time. “Do germs ever get big? I mean, in biology class they told us about one-celled animals, amoebas and things, and how millions of years ago they got together until there was a bunch and they made the first body. And more and more cells got together and got bigger and then finally maybe there was a fish and finally here we are, and all we are is a bunch of cells that decided to get together, to help each other out. Isn’t that right?” Charles wet his feverish lips.
“What’s all this about?” The doctor bent over him.
“I’ve got to tell you this. Doctor, oh, I’ve got to!” he cried. “What would happen, oh just pretend, please pretend, that just like in the old days, a lot of microbes got together and wanted to make a bunch, and reproduced and made more—”
His white hands were on his chest now, crawling toward his throat.
“And they decided to take over a person!” cried Charles.
“Take over a person?”
“Yes, become a person. Me, my hands, my feet! What if a disease somehow knew how to kill a person and yet live after him?”
He screamed.
The hands were on his neck.
The doctor moved forward, shouting.
At nine o’clock the doctor was escorted out to his car by the mother and father, who handed him his bag. They conversed in the cool night wind for a few minutes. “Just be sure his hands are kept strapped to his legs,” said the doctor. “I don’t want him hurting himself.”
“Will he be all right, Doctor?” The mother held to his arm a moment.
He patted her shoulder. “Haven’t I been your family physician for thirty years? It’s the fever. He imagines things.”
“But those bruises on his throat, he almost choked himself.”
“Just you keep him strapped; he’ll be all right in the morning.”
The car moved off down the dark September road.
At three in the morning, Charles was still awake in his small black room. The bed was damp under his head and his back. He was very warm. Now he no longer had any arms or legs, and his body was beginning to change. He did not move on the bed, but looked at the vast blank ceiling space with insane concentration. For a while he had screamed and thrashed, but now he was weak and hoarse from it, and his mother had gotten up a number of times to soothe his brow with a wet towel. Now he was silent, his hands strapped to his legs.
He felt the walls of his body change, the organs shift, the lungs catch fire like burning bellows of pink alcohol. The room was lighted up as with the flickerings of a hearth.
Now he had no body. It was all gone. It was under him, but it was filled with a vast pulse of some burning, lethargic drug. It was as if a guillotine had neatly lopped off his head, and his head lay shining on a midnight pillow while the body, below, still alive, belonged to somebody else. The disease had eaten his body and from the eating had reproduced itself in feverish duplicate.
There were the little hand hairs and the fingernails and the scars and the toenails and the tiny mole on his right hip, all done again in perfect fashion.
I am dead, he thought. I’ve been killed, and yet I live. My body is dead, it is all disease and nobody will know. I will walk around and it will not be me, it will be something else. It will be something all bad, all evil, so big and so evil it’s hard to understand or think about. Something that will buy shoes and drink water and get married some day maybe and do more evil in the world than has ever been done.
Now the warmth was stealing up his neck, into his cheeks, like a hot wine. His lips burned, his eyelids, like leaves, caught fire. His nostrils breathed out blue flame, faintly, faintly.
This will be all, he thought. It’ll take my head and my brain and fix each eye and every tooth and all the marks in my brain, and every hair and every wrinkle in my ears, and there’ll be nothing left of me.
He felt his brain fill with a boiling mercury. He felt his left eye clench in upon itself and, like a snail, withdraw, shift. He was blind in his left eye. It no longer belonged to him. It was enemy territory. His tongue was gone, cut out. His left cheek was numbed, lost. His left ear stopped hearing. It belonged to someone else now. This thing that was being born, this mineral thing replacing the wooden log, this disease replacing healthy animal cell.
He tried to scream and he was able to scream loud and high and sharply in the room, just as his brain flooded down, his right eye and right ear were cut out, he was blind and deaf, all fire, all terror, all panic, all death.
His scream stopped before his mother ran through the door to his side.
It was a good, clear morning, with a brisk wind that helped carry the doctor up the path before the house. In the window above, the boy stood, fully dressed. He did not wave when the doctor waved and called, “What’s this? Up? My God!”
The doctor almost ran upstairs. He came gasping into the bedroom.
“What are you doing out of bed?” he demanded of the boy. He tapped his thin chest, took his pulse and temperature. “Absolutely amazing! Normal. Normal, by God!”
“I shall never be sick again in my life,” declared the boy, quietly, standing there, looking out the wide window. “Never.”
“I hope not. Why, you’re looking fine, Charles.”
“Doctor?”