The years, one by one, passed slowly, quietly by. There were a few times of crisis, of course — the time the Bear was so sick, for instance. It was sheer torture for Miriam to listen to him call out hoarsely for a doctor and know that she could not possibly get one. She could do nothing but pray, and eventually her prayers were answered. The Bear stopped sweating and moaning, finally, and began to get better. Then there was the time she herself was sick. It was one summer during her vacation. She was too ill to go to the doctor and had no way to summon him to the house, nor would it have been advisable for her to do so even if she could for, as keeper, she was in a sense as much a prisoner as the Bear. The fever raged through her for several days and the only thing that kept her from succumbing was the distant sound of the Bear’s plaintive calls. It would be so easy just to let go and die, but she could not. The Bear was hungry — needed her... So she fought, and lived to see the Bear fall upon the food she finally weakly brought to him. It was worth the fight.
Perhaps the worst time of all was when the pan of hot grease caught fire in the kitchen. With frantic efforts she managed to put it out, scorching her arms quite badly in the process. It was not the pain in her arms that left her trembling, though, but the thought of what might have happened had the fire spread. The Bear would have been trapped, burned alive. The thought left her weak. She wracked her brain for a solution to the possibility of such a thing’s happening again, and suddenly remembered that Harry, her former husband (she had not thought of him in years), had owned a revolver. She went upstairs and found it in an old cupboard. She felt much better. This way the Bear was assured of a quick, merciful death.
The time the furnace broke down required even more ingenuity on her part, and the coffee she offered the Bear at that time was heavily laced with sleeping pills. When he fell into a deep, drugged sleep she threw dropcloths over the cage, ranged discarded furniture against it, and called the repairmen. The men worked for an hour over the furnace, completely unaware that within a few feet of them a creature, once-man, slept.
And the years ticked on...
I was kind of at loose ends that summer I was sixteen, anyway. Having lost my mother and father in an automobile accident only a few months before, I was spending some time with my grandfather in his “hunting shack” at Wilton Falls. My grandfather was a judge downstate and normally used the shack only once or twice in the fall for hunting, but this year he had taken time off in the early summer and come up with me. Guess he thought some fishing and general rambling in the woods would be good for me; get my mind off my loss.
I was out in the woods by myself that day, though, when I came across the rusted barbed wire that surrounded the Winters place. I tested it with my foot and it gave way. Nimbly I leaped over the broken strands and soon found myself in a choked meadow, on the edge of which perched a weatherbeaten Victorian house. I regarded the apparition with surprise. Was it occupied? Probably not; much too neglected-looking. I sauntered over to observe more closely, and then bent to peer through one of the cellar windows. The cellar was quite dark and it was a moment before my eyes accustomed themselves to the feeble light. Almost directly under the window there was a cagelike arrangement, with a hulking shape in one corner. A shadow? No, it seemed to move, and suddenly I was looking at a matted tangle of hair, out of which stared the deadest, most vacant eyes I had ever seen. My heart gave a sickening lurch. What I was seeing was impossible. I stayed a moment longer, as if riveted by those terrible dead-man eyes. Then the shaggy head turned away and I was released — released to run across the sunny unreal meadow, over the broken strands of barbed wire that tore at my clothes, through the adjoining woods. I had slowed down somewhat by the time I reached my grandfather’s cabin and was a little ashamed of myself. After all, I was no kid — ye gods, I was sixteen — and here I was running like a scared rabbit. Then the memory of those eyes returned in full force and I felt cold sweat pop out all over me.
My grandfather, looking strangely unjudgelike in his plaid shirt and denim pants, was fussing at the stove when I came in. “Hello there,” he said. “I was wondering where you were. Lunch is almost ready.”
I stood, my back against the door, still breathing hard. “Gramp,” I said, and there was, despite myself, a quiver in my voice.
My grandfather looked up then. His glance sharpened. “Something the matter, son? You look upset.”
I tried to wave my hand deprecatingly but failed in that gesture, too. “Gramp, who lives in that big old house at the edge of the meadow?”
My grandfather frowned. “At the edge of the meadow... Oh, you must mean Mrs. Winters’ place. Why?”
“I was just over there now and I saw—”
“Over there? That place is posted. You shouldn’t have gone there.”
“But the fencing is all rusted and I didn’t see any No Trespassing signs...”
“Well, maybe the signs are too weathered to read any more, but everyone around here knows it’s posted.”
“Well, I didn’t know, and I looked in one of the cellar windows. Gramp, there’s something in a big cage there. A-A man, I think it is...”
My grandfather pulled out a chair and seated himself at the table. “Now, let’s hear this from the beginning. What are you talking about — a cage, and a man-you-think in it?”
I told him the whole thing, but I could see he wasn’t convinced.
“You’re sure your eyes, and imagination, weren’t playing tricks on you, son? I mean, everyone knows Mrs. Winters lives there all by herself. She’s had a very tragic life, actually. First her husband abandoned her and she had to bring up their son all alone. Then he was killed in the war. I wouldn’t want any wild rumors circulated by a grandson of mine to hurt her.”
“But it’s no wild rumor, Gramp, it’s true. Please, Gramp, you’ve got to go look yourself.”
I guess the urgency in my voice decided him. He stood up. “Okay. Best to squelch this now. You’ll see it was just your imagination...”
By nightfall all Wilton Falls was in a state of shock. The police had sawed off the old padlock and led a stumbling, half-blind Harry Winters into the fresh air of freedom, and the town’s gentle middle-aged librarian had been taken into “protective custody.” She did not seem to mind. Her only concern seemed to be that “The Bear” be taken care of. When assured that he would be, she went along docilely enough. Actually, both of them were taken to the county hospital for observation — but to different wings.
How the town did buzz the next couple of weeks. The story made even the downstate papers with a banner headline: husband kept in cage 30 years BY wife. Under my picture it said: He dared to look in the Witch’s dungeon. Under Mr. Winters’ picture it said: Caged like a beast for 30 of his 75 years. And under Mrs. Winters’ picture: The Witch of Wilton Falls — She turned her husband into a “Bear.” It was all pretty heady stuff for me, being hero-of-the-hour, as it were. But then I looked more closely at the pictures of Mr. and Mrs. Winters and suffered my first feeling of disquietude. They both had the look of puzzled children on their faces as they were led away.