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.
“You just got here,” I accused. “What held you up?”
“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.