Bradbury, Ray - SSC 07 (37 page)

 
          
 
They 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 Mom 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 mice 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 bum with autumn. 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.

 
          
 
That afternoon the doctor came again and
tapped his thin chest like a little drum. "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. "FU 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.

 
          
 
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 Ups.

 
          
 
"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.