Tomorrow Lies in Ambush

Invasion of Privacy

“I saw Granny Cummins again today,” Sammy said through a mouthful of turnip and potato.

May’s fork clattered into her plate. She turned her head away, and I could see there were tears in her eyes. In my opinion she had always been much too deeply attached to her mother, but this time I could sympathise with her—there was something about the way the kid had said it.

“Listen to me, Sammy.” I leaned across the table and gripped his shoulder. “The next time you make a dumb remark like that I’ll paddle your backside good and hard. It wasn’t funny.”

He gazed at me with all the bland defiance a seven-year-old can muster. “I wasn’t trying to be funny. I saw her.”

“Your granny’s been dead for two weeks,” I snapped, exasperated both at him and at May, who was letting the incident get too far under her skin. Her lips had begun to tremble.

“Two weeks,” Sammy repeated, savouring the words. He had just discovered sarcasm and I could tell by his eyes he was about to try some on. “If she’d only been dead two days it woulda been all right, I suppose. But not two weeks, eh?” He rammed a huge blob of creamed potato into his mouth with a flourish.

“George!” May’s brown eyes were spilling as she looked at me and the copper strands of her hair quivered with anger. “Do something to that child! Make him drop dead.”

“I can’t Smack him for that, hon,” I said reasonably. “The kid was only being logical. Remember in Decline and Fall where a saint got her head chopped off, then was supposed to get up and walk a mile or so to the burial ground, and religious writers made a great fuss about the distance she’d covered, and Gibbon said in a case like that the distance wasn’t the big thing—it was the taking of the first step? Well …’ I broke off as May fled from the table and ran upstairs. The red sunlight of an October evening glowed on her empty chair, and Sammy continued eating.

“See what you’ve done?” I rapped his blond head with my knuckles, but not sharply enough to hurt. I’m letting you off this time—for the last time—but I can’t let you go on upsetting your mother with a stupid joke. Now cut it out.”

Sammy addressed the remains of his dinner. “I wasn’t joking. I … saw … Granny … Cummins.”

“She’s been dead and buried for …’ I almost said two weeks again, but stopped as an expectant look appeared on his face. He was quite capable of reproducing the same sarcasm word for word. “How do you explain that?”

“Me?” A studied look of surprise. “I can’t explain it. I’m just telling you what I seen.”

“All right—where did you see her?”

“In the old Guthrie place, of course.”

Of course, I thought with a thrill of something like nostalgia. Where else? Every town, every district in every city, has its equivalent of the old Guthrie place. To find it, you simply stop any small boy and ask him if he knows of a haunted house where grisly murders are committed on a weekly schedule and vampires issue forth at night. I sometimes think that if no suitable building existed already the community of children would create one to answer a dark longing in their collective mind. But the building is always there—a big, empty, ramshackle place, usually screened by near-black evergreens, never put up for sale, never pulled down, always possessing a “Bal immunity to property developers. And in the small town where I live the old Guthrie house was the one which filled the bill. I hadn’t really thought about it since childhood, but it looked just the same as ever—dark, shabby and forbidding—and I should have known it would have the same associations for another generation of kids. At the mention of the house Sammy had become solemn and I almost laughed aloud as I saw myself, a quarter of a century younger, in his face.

“How could you have seen anything in there?” I decided to play along a little further as long as May was out of earshot. “It’s too far from the road.”

“I climbed through the fence.”

“Who was with you?”

“Nobody.”

“You went in alone?”

“Course I did.” Sammy tilted his head proudly and I recalled that as a seven-year-old nothing in the world would have induced me to approach that house, even in company. I looked at my son with a new respect, and the first illogical stirrings of alarm.

“I don’t want you hanging around that old place, Sammy—it could be dangerous.”

“It isn’t dangerous.” He was scornful. “They just sit there in big chairs, and never move.”

“I meant you could fall or … What?

“The old people just sit there.” Sammy pushed his empty plate away. “They’d never catch me in a hundred years even if they did see me, but I don’t let them see me, ‘cause I just take one quick look through the back window and get out of there.”

“You mean there are people living in the Guthrie place?”

“Old people. Lots of them. They just sit there in big chairs.”

I hadn’t heard anything about the house being occupied, but I began to guess what had been going on. It was big enough for conversion to a private home for old people—and to a child one silver-haired old lady could look very much like another. Perhaps Sammy preferred to believe his grandmother had moved away rather than accept the idea that she was dead and buried beneath the ground in a box.

“Then you were trespassing as well as risking …’ I lowered my voice to a whisper as May’s footsteps sounded on the stairs again. “You didn’t see your Granny Cummins, you’re not to go near the old Guthrie place again, and you’re not to upset your mother. Got that?”

Sammy nodded, but his lips were moving silently and I knew he was repeating his original statement over and over to himself. Any anger I felt was lost in a tide of affection—my entire life had been one of compromise and equivocation, and it was with gratitude I had discovered that my son had been born with enough will and sheer character for the two of us.

May came back into the room and sat down, her face wearing a slightly shamefaced expression behind the gold sequins of its freckles. “I took a tranquilliser.”

“Oh? I thought you were out of them.”

“I was, but Doctor Pitman stopped by this afternoon and let me have some more.”

“Did you call him?”

“No—he was in the neighbourhood and he looked in just to see how I was. He’s been very good since … since …”

“Since your mother died—you’ve got to get used to the idea, May.”

She nodded silently and began to gather up the dinner plates. Her own food had scarcely been touched.

“Mom?” Sammy tugged her sleeve. I tensed, waiting for him to start it all over again, but he had other’ things on his mind. His normally ruddy cheeks were pale as tallow and his forehead was beaded with perspiration. I darted from my chair barely in time to catch him as he fell sideways to the floor.

Bob Pitman had been a white-haired, apple-cheeked old gentleman when he was steering me through boyhood illnesses, and he appeared not to have aged any further in the interim. He lived alone in an unfashionably large house, still wore a conservative dark suit with a watch-chain’s gold parabola spanning the vest, played chess as much as possible and drank specially-imported non-blended Scotch. The sight of his square hands, with their ridged and slab-like fingernails, moving over Sammy’s sleeping figure comforted me even before he stood up and folded the stethoscope.

“The boy has eaten something he shouldn’t,” he said, drawing the covers up to Sammy’s chin.

“But he’ll be all right?” May and I spoke simultaneously.

“Right as rain.”

“Thank God,” May said and sat down very suddenly. I knew she had been thinking about her mother and wondering if we were going to lose Sammy with as little warning.

“You’d better get some rest,” Dr. Pitman looked at her with kindly severity. “Young Sammy here will sleep all night, and you should follow his example. Take another of those caps I gave you this morning.”

I’d forgotten about his earlier visit. “We seem to be monopolising your time today, Doctor.”

“Just think of it as providing me with a little employment—everybody’s far too healthy these days.” He shepherded us out of Sammy’s room. “I’ll call again in the morning.”

May wasn’t quite satisfied—she was scrupulously hygienic in the kitchen and the idea that our boy had food poisoning was particularly unacceptable to her. ‘But what could Sammy have eaten, Doctor? We’ve had everything he’s had and we’re all right.”

“It’s hard to say. When he brought up his dinner did you notice anything else there? Berries? Exotic candies?”

“No. Nothing like that,” I said, ‘but they wouldn’t always be obvious, would they?” I put my arm around May’s shoulders and tried to force her to relax. She was rigid with tension and it came to me that if Sammy ever were to contract a fatal illness or be killed in an accident it would destroy her. We of the Twentieth Century have abandoned the practice of holding something in reserve when we love our children, assuming—as our ancestors would never have dared to do—that they will reach adulthood as a matter of course.

The doctor—nodding and smiling and wheezing—exuded reassurance for a couple more minutes before he left. When I took May to bed she huddled in the crook of my left arm, lonely in spite of our intimacy, and it was a long time before I was able to soothe her to sleep.

In spite of her difficulty in getting to sleep, or perhaps because of it, May failed to waken when I slipped out of the bed early next morning. I went into Sammy’s room, and knew immediately that something was wrong. His breathing was noisy and rapid as that of a pup which has been running. I went to the bed. He was unconscious, mouth wide open in the ghastly breathing, and his forehead hotter than I would have believed it possible for a human’s to be.

Fear spurted coldly in my guts as I turned and ran for the phone. I dialled Dr. Pitman’s number. While it was ringing I debated shouting upstairs to waken May, but far from being able to help Sammy she would probably have become hysterical. I decided to let her sleep as long as possible. After a seemingly interminable wait the phone clicked.

“Dr. Pitman speaking.” The voice was sleepy.

“This is George Ferguson. Sammy’s very ill. Can you get over here right away?” I babbled a description of the symptoms.

“I’ll be right there.” The sleepiness had left his voice. I hung up, opened the front door wide so that the doctor could come straight in, then went back upstairs and waited beside the bed. Sammy’s hair was plastered to his forehead and his every breath was accompanied by harsh metallic clicks in his throat. My mind became an anvil for the hammer blows of the passing seconds. Bleak eons went by before I heard Dr. Pitman’s footsteps on the stair.

He came into the room, looking uncharacteristically dishevelled, took one look at Sammy and lifted him in his arms in a cocoon of bedding.

“Pneumonia,” he said tersely. “The boy will have to be hospitalised immediately.”

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.

Sammy had been right—it was the face of his dead grandmother.

That was when the nightmare really began. The frightened child within me and the adult George Ferguson both agreed they had stumbled on something monstrous, and that adrenaline-boosted flight was called for, yet—as in a nightmare—I was unable to do anything but move closer to the focus of horror. I stared at the old woman in dread. Her rawboned face, the lump beneath one ear, the very way she held her magazine—all these told me I was looking at May’s mother, Mrs. Martha Cummins, who had died suddenly of a brain haemorrhage more than two weeks earlier, and who was buried in the family plot.

Of its own accord, my right hand went snaking into the triangular opening and tapped the dusty glass. It was a timid gesture and none of the people within responded to the faint sound, but a second later one of the men raised his head briefly as he turned a page, and I recognised him. Joe Bryant, the caretaker at Sammy’s school. He had died a year ago of a heart attack.

Explanation? I couldn’t conceive one, but I had to speak to the woman who appeared to be May’s mother.

I turned away from the window and went to the black rectangle of the house’s rear door. It was locked in the normal way and further secured by a bolted-on padlock. A slick moisture on its working parts told me the padlock was in good condition. I moved further along and tried another smaller window in what could have been the kitchen. It too was boarded up, but when I pulled experimentally at the short planks the whole frame moved slightly with a pulpy sound. A more determined tug brought the entire metal window frame clear of its surround of rotting wood, creating a dark opening. The operation was noisier than I had expected, but the house remained still and I set the window down against the wall.

Part of my mind was screaming its dismay, but I used the window frame as a ladder and climbed through on to a greasy complicated surface which proved to be the top of an old-fashioned gas cooker. My cigarette lighter shed silver sparks as I flicked it on. Its transparent blue shoot of flame cast virtually no light, so I tore pages from my notebook and lit them. The kitchen was a shambles, and obviously not in use—a fact which, had I thought about it, would have increased my sense of alarm. A short corridor led from it in the general direction of the lighted room. Burning more pages, I went towards the room, freezing each time a bare floorboard groaned or a loose strip of wallpaper brushed my shoulder, and soon was able to discern a gleam of light coming from below a door. I gripped the handle firmly and, afraid to hesitate, flung the open door. The old people in the big armchairs turned their pink, lined faces towards mine. Mrs. Cummins stared at me, face lengthening with what could have been recognition or shock.

“It’s George,” I heard myself say in the distance. “What’s happening here?”

She stood up and her lips moved. “Nigi olon prittle o czanig sovisess!” On the final word the others jumped to their feet with strangely lithe movements.

“Mrs. Cummins?” I said. “Mr. Bryant?”

The old people set their magazines down, came towards the door and I saw that their feet were bare. I backed out into the corridor, shaking my head apologetically, then turned to run. Could I get out through the small kitchen window quickly enough? A hand clawed down my back. I beat it off and ran in the direction opposite to the kitchen, guided by the light spilling from the room behind me. A door loomed up on my left. I burst through into pitch darkness, slammed it, miraculously found a key in the lock and twisted it. The door quivered as something heavy thudded against the wood from the other side, and a woman’s voice began an unnerving wail—thin, high, anxious.

I groped for the light switch and turned it on, but nothing happened. Afraid to take a step forward, I stared into the blackness that pressed against my face, gradually becoming aware of a faint soupy odour and a feeling of warmth. I guessed I was in a room at the front of the house and might be able to break out if only I could find a window. The wallpaper beside the switch had felt loose. I gripped a free edge, pulled off a huge swathe and rolled it into the shape of a torch while the hammering on the door grew more frantic. The blue cone of flame from my cigarette lighter ignited the dry paper immediately. I held the torch high and got a flickering view of a large square room, a bank of electronic equipment along one wall, and a waist-high tank which occupied most of the floor space. The sweet soup smell appeared to be coming from the dark liquid in the tank. I looked into it and saw a half-submerged thing floating face upwards. It was about the size of a seven-year-old boy and the dissolving, jellied features had a resemblance to …

No!

I screamed and threw the flaming torch from me, seeking my former state of blindness. The torch landed close to a wall and trailing streamers of wallpaper caught alight. I ran around the tank to a window, wadded its mouldering drapes and smashed the glass outwards against the boards. The planking resisted the onslaught of my feet and fists for what seemed an eternity, then I was out in the cool fresh air and running, barely feeling the ground below my feet, swept along by the dark winds of night.

When I finally looked back, blocks away, the sky above the old Guthrie place was already stained, red, and clouds of angry sparks wheeled and wavered in the ascending smoke.

How does one assimilate an experience like that? There were some aspects of the nightmare which my mind was completely unable to handle as I walked homewards, accompanied by the sound of distant fire sirens. There was, for example, the hard fact that I had started a fire in which at that very instant a group of old people could be perishing—but, somehow, I felt no guilt. In its place was a conviction that it the blaze hadn’t begun by accident I would have been entitled, obliged, to start one to rid the world of something which hadn’t any right to exist. There was no element of the religious in my thinking, because the final horror in the house’s front room had dispelled the aura of the supernatural surrounding the previous events.

I had seen an array of electronic equipment—unfamiliar in type, but unmistakable—and I had seen a thing floating in a tank of heated organic-smelling fluid, a thing which resembled …

No ! Madness lay along that avenue of thought. Insupportable pain.

What else had I stumbled across? Granny Cummins was dead—but she had been sitting in the back room of a disused house, and had spoken in a tongue unlike any language I’d ever heard. Joe Bryant was dead, for a year, yet he too had been sitting under that naked bulb. My son was seriously ill in hospital, and yet …

No!

Retreating from monstrosities as yet unguessed, my mind produced an image of Dr. Pitman. He had attended Granny Cummins. He had, I was almost certain, been the Bryant’s family doctor. He had attended Sammy that morning. He had been in my home the previous day—perhaps when Sammy had come in and spoke of seeing people in the old Guthrie place. My mind then threw up another image—that of the long-barrelled .22 target pistol lying in a drawer in my den. I began to walk more quickly.

On reaching home the first impression was that May had gone out, but when I went in she was sitting in exactly the same place in the darkness of the lounge. I glanced at my watch and discovered that, incredibly, only forty minutes had passed since I had gone out. That was all the time it had taken for reality to rot and dissolve.

“May?” I spoke from the doorway. “Did the clinic call?”

A long pause. “No.”

“Don’t you want the light on?”

Another pause. “No.”

This time I didn’t mind, because the darkness concealed the fact that my clothes were smeared with dirt and blood from my damaged hands. I went upstairs, past the aching emptiness of Sammy’s room, washed in cold water, taped my knuckles and put on fresh clothes. In my den I discovered that the saw-handled target pistol was never meant for concealment, but I was able to tuck it into my belt on the left side and cover it fairly well with my jacket. Coming downstairs, I hesitated at the door of the lounge before telling May I was going out again. She nodded without speaking, without caring what I might do. If Sammy died she would die too—not physically, not clinically, but just as surely—which meant that two important lives depended on my actions of the next hour.

I went out and found the atmosphere of the night had changed to one of feverish excitement. The streets were alive with cars, pedestrians, running children, all converging on the gigantic bonfire which had appeared, gratuitously, to turn a dull evening into an event. Two blocks away to the south the old Guthrie house was an inferno which streaked the windows of the entire neighbourhood with amber and gold. Its timbers, exploding in ragged volleys, were fireworks contributing to the Fourth of July atmosphere. A group of small boys scampering past me whooped with glee, and one part of my mind acknowledged that I had made a major contribution to the childish lore of the district. Legends would be born tonight, to be passed in endless succession from the mouths of ten-year-olds to the ears of five-year-olds. The night the old Guthrie place burned down….

Dr. Pitman lived only a mile from me, and I decided it would be almost as quick and a lot less conspicuous to go on foot. I walked automatically, trying to balance the elements of reality, nightmare and carnival, and reached the doctor’s home in a little over ten minutes. His Buick was sitting in the driveway and lights were showing in the upper windows of the house. I looked around carefully—the fire was further away now and neighbours were less likely to be distracted by it—before stepping into the shadowed drive and approaching the front door. It burst open just as I was reaching the steps and Dr. Pitman came running out, still shrugging on his coat. I reached for the pistol but there was no need to bring it into view, for he stopped as soon as he saw me.

“George!” His face creased with concern. “What brings you here? Is it your boy?”

“You’ve guessed it.” I put my hand on his chest and pushed him back into the orange-lit hall.

“What is this?” He shrugged against my hand with surprising strength and I had to fight to contain him. “You’re acting a little strangely, George.”

“You made Sammy sick,” I told him. “And if you don’t make him well again I’ll kill you.”

“Hold on, George—I told you not to get overwrought.”

“I’m not overwrought.”

“It’s the strain …”

“That’s enough !” I shouted at him, almost losing control. “I know you’re making Sammy ill, and I’m going to make you stop.”

“But why should I …?”

“Because he was in back of the old Guthrie place and saw too much—that’s why.” I pushed harder on his chest and he took a step backwards into the hall.

“The Guthrie house! No, George, no!”

Until that moment I had been half-prepared to back down, to accept the idea that I’d gone off the rails with worry, but his face became a slack grey mask. The strength seemed to leave his body, making him smaller and older.

“Yes, the old Guthrie place.” I closed the door behind me. “What do you do there, doctor?”

“Listen, George, I can’t talk to you now—I’ve just heard there’s a fire in the district and I’ve got to go to it. My help will be needed.” Dr. Pitman drew himself up into a semblance of the authoritative figure I had once known, and tried to push past me.

“You’re too late,” I said, blocking his way. “The place went up like a torch. Your equipment’s all gone.” I paused and stared into his eyes. “They are all gone.”

“I … I don’t know what you mean.”

“The things you make. The things which look like people, but which aren’t because the original people are dead. Those are all gone, doctor—burnt up.” I was shooting wildly in the dark, but I could tell some of my words were finding a mark and I pressed on. “I was there, and I’ve seen it, and I’ll tell the whole world—so Sammy isn’t alone now. His death won’t cover up anything. Do you hear me, doctor?”

He shook his head, then walked away from me and went up the broad carpeted stair. I reached for the pistol, changed my mind and ran after him, catching him just as he reached the landing. He brushed my hands away. Using all my strength, I bundled him against the wall with my forearm pressed across his throat, determined to force the truth out of him—no matter what it might be. He twisted away, I grappled again, we overbalanced and went on a jarring rollercoaster ride down the stairs, bouncing and flailing, caroming off wall and banisters. Twice on the way down I felt, and heard, bones breaking; and had been lying on the hall floor a good ten seconds before being certain they weren’t mine.

I raised myself on one arm and looked down into Dr. Pitman’s face. His teeth were smeared with blood and for a moment I felt the beginnings of doubt. He was an old man, and supposing he genuinely hadn’t understood a word I had been saying …

“You’ve done it now, George,” he whispered. “You’ve finished us.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s one thing I want you to believe … we never harmed anybody … we’ve seen too much pain for that…’ He coughed and a transparent crimson film spanned his lips.

“What are you saying?”

“It was to be a very quiet, very gradual invasion … invasion’s the wrong word … no conquest or displacement intended … physical journey from our world virtually impossible … we observed incurably ill humans, terminal cases … built duplicates and subsituted them … that way we too could live normally, almost normally, for a while … until death returned …”

“Dr. Pitman,” I said desperately, “you’re not making sense.”

“I’m not real Dr. Pitman … he died many years ago … first subject in this town—a doctor is in best position for our … I was skorded—you have no word for it—transmitted into a duplicate of his body …’

The hall floor seemed to rock beneath me. “You’re saying you’re from another planet!”

“That’s right, George.”

‘But, for God’s sake, why ? Why would anybody … ?”

“Just be thankful you can’t imagine the circumstances which made such a project … desirable.” His body convulsed with sudden pain.

“I still don’t understand,” I pleaded. “Why should you duplicate the bodies of dying people if it means being locked in an old house for the rest of your life?”

“Usually it doesn’t mean that … we substitute and integrate … the dying person appears to recover … but the duplication process takes time, and sometimes the subject dies suddenly, at home, providing us with no chance to take his place … and there can be no going back …’

I froze as a brilliant golden light flooded through the hall. It was followed by the sound of wheels on gravel and I realised a car had pulled into the driveway of the house. The man I knew as Dr. Pitman closed his eyes and sighed deeply, with an awful finality.

“But what about Sammy?” I shook the inert figure. “You’ve told me nothing about my son.”

The eyes blinked open, slowly, and in spite of the pain there I saw kindness. “It was all a mistake, George.” His voice was distant as he attempted more of the broken sentences. “I had no idea he had been around the old house … aren’t like you—we’re bad organisers … nald denbo sovisegg … sorry … I had nothing to do with his illness …’

A car door slammed outside. I wanted to run, but there was one more question which had to be asked. “I was in the old house. I saw the tank and … something … which looked like a boy. Does that mean Sammy’s dying? That you were going to replace him?”

“Sammy’s going to be all right, George … though at first I wasn’t hopeful … I haven’t known you and May as long as Dr. Pitman did, but I’m very fond of … I knew May couldn’t take the loss, so I arranged a substitution … tentatively, you understand, kleyl nurr … not needed now … Sammy will be fine …’ He tried to smile at me and blood welled up between his lips just as the doorbell rang with callous stridency.

I stared down at the tired, broken old man with—in spite of everything—a curious sense of regret. What kind of hell had he been born into originally? What conditions would prompt anybody to make the journey he had made for such meagre rewards? The bell rang again and I opened the door.

“Call for an ambulance,” I said to the stranger on the steps. “Dr. Pitman seems to have fallen down the stairs—I think he’s dying.”

It was quite late when the police cruiser finally dropped me outside my home, but the house was ablaze with light. I thanked the sergeant who had driven me from the mortuary where they had taken the body of Dr. Pitman (I couldn’t think of him by any other name) and hurried along the white concrete of the path to the door. The lights seemed to signal a change in May’s mood but I was afraid to begin hoping, in case …

“George!” May met me at the door, dressed to go out, face pale but jubilant. “Where’ve you been? I tried everywhere. The clinic called me half an hour ago. You’ve been out for hours. Sammy’s feeling better and he’s asking to see us. I brought the car out for you. Should I drive? We’re allowed in to see him, and I …’

“Slow down, May. Slow down.” I put my arms around her, feeling the taut gratification in her slim body, and made her go over the story again. She spilled it out eagerly.

Sammy’s response to drug treatment had been dramatic and now he was fully conscious and asking for his parents. The senior doctor had decided to bend regulations a little and let us in to talk with the boy for a few minutes. A starshell of happiness burst behind my eyes as May spoke, and a minute later we were on our way to the clinic. A big moon, the exact colour of a candle flame, was rising behind the rooftops, trees were stirring gently in their sleep, and the red glow from the direction of the Guthrie house had vanished. May was at the wheel, driving with zestful competence, and for the first time in hours the pressure was off me.

I relaxed into the seat and discovered I had forgotten to rid myself of the pistol which had nudged my ribs constantly the whole time I was talking to the police. It was on the side next to May so there was little chance of slipping it into the glove compartment unnoticed. Shame at having carried the weapon, plus a desire not to alarm May in any way after what she had been through, made me decide to keep it out of sight a little longer. Suddenly very tired, I closed my eyes and allowed the mental backwash of the night’s events to carry me away.

The disjointed fragments from Dr. Pitman made an unbelievable story when pieced together, yet I had seen the ghastly proof. There was something macabre about the idea of the group of alien beings, duplicates of dead people, cooped up in a dingy room in a disused house, patiently waiting to die. The memory of seeing Granny Cummins’ face again, two weeks after her funeral, was going to take a long time to fade. She, the duplicate, had recognised me, which meant that the copying technique used by the aliens was incredibly detailed, extending right down to the arrangement of the brain cells. Presumably, the only physical changes they would introduce would be improvements—if a person was dying of cancer the duplicate would be cancer-free. Ageing muscles might be strengthened—Dr. Pitman and those who had been in the house all moved with exceptional ease. But would they have been able to escape the fire? Perhaps some code of their own would not allow them to leave the house, even under peril of death, unless a place had been prepared to enable them to enter our society without raising any alarms ….

The aliens may have a code of ethics, I thought, but could I permit them to come among us unhindered? For that matter, had I any idea how far their infiltration had proceeded? I’d been told that Dr. Pitman was the first subject in this town—did that mean the invasion covered the entire state? The country? The world? There was also the question of its intensity. The dying man had said the substitution technique failed when a person’s death occurred suddenly at home, which implied the clinic was well infiltrated—but how thoroughly? Would there come a day when every old person in the world, and a proportion of younger people as well, would be substitutes?

Street lights flicking past the car pulsed redly through my closed eyelids, and fresh questions pounded in my mind to the same rhythm. Could I believe anything “Dr. Pitman’ had said about the aliens’ objectives? True, he had appeared kind, genuinely concerned about Sammy and May—but how did one interpret fecial expressions controlled by a being who may once have possessed an entirely different form? Another question came looming—and something in my subconscious cowered away from it—why, if secrecy was so vital to the aliens’ scheme, had “Dr. Pitman’ told me the whole fantastic story? Had he been manipulating me in some way I had not yet begun to understand? Once again I saw my son’s face blindly lolling as he was carried down the stairs, and a fear greater than any I had known before began to unfold its black petals.

I jerked my eyes open, unwilling to think any further.

“Poor thing—you’re tired,” May said. “You keep everything bottled up, and it takes far more out of you that way.”

I nodded. She’s mothering me, I thought. She’s happy, serene’ confident again—and it’s because our boy is getting better, Sammy’s life is her life,

May slowed the car down. “Here we are. We mustn’t stay too long—it’s very good of Dr. Milligan even to let us in at this time.”

I remembered Dr. Milligan—tall, stooped and old. Another Dr. Pitman? It came to me suddenly that I had told May nothing at all about the events of the evening, but before I could work out a suitably edited version we were getting out of the car. I decided to leave it till later. In contrast to the boisterous leaf-scented air outside the atmosphere in the clinic seemed inert, dead. The reception office was empty but a blond young doctor with an in-twisted foot limped up to us, then beckoned to a staffnurse when we gave our names. The nurse, a tall woman with mottled red forearms, ushered us into the elevator and pressed the button for the third floor.

“Samuel is making exceptional progress,” she said to May, “He’s a very strong little boy.”

“Thank you.” May nodded gratefully. “Thank you.”

I wanted to change the subject, because Sammy had never appeared particularly strong to my eyes, and the loathsome blossom of fear was fleshing its leaves within me. “How’s business been tonight?”

“Quiet, for once. Very quiet.”

“Oh. I heard there was a fire.”

“It hasn’t affected us.”

“That’s fine,” I said vaguely. If the aliens were constructed with precisely the same biological building blocks as humans their remains would appear like those of normal fire victims. There’ll be hell to pay, I told myself and desperately tried to adhere to that line of thought, but the black flower was getting bigger now, unmanageable, reaching out to swallow me. Biological building blocks—where did they come from? The dark soupy liquid in the tank—was it of synthetic or natural origin? The thing I’d seen floating in there—was it a body being constructed?

Or was it being dissolved and fed into a stockpile of organic matter?

Had I seen my son’s corpse?

Other thoughts came yammering and cavorting like demons. “Dr. Pitman’ had taken Sammy to the clinic in his own car, but he had been strangely delayed in arriving. Obviously he had taken the boy to the Guthrie place. Why? Because, according to his own dying statement, he had despaired of Sammy’s life, wanted to spare May the shock of losing her son and had arranged for a substitution—just in case. Altruistic. Unbelievably altruistic. How gullible did “Dr. Pitman’ think I was going to be? If Sammy had died naturally, or had been killed, and replaced by a being from beyond the stars I was going to make trouble for the aliens. I was going to shoot and burn and kill …

With an effort I controlled the sudden trembling in my limbs as the nurse opened the door to a small private room. The shaded light within showed Sammy sleeping peacefully in a single bed. My heart ached with the recognition of the flesh of my flesh.

“You may go in for a minute, but just a minute,” the nurse said. Her eyes lingered for a moment on May’s face and something she saw there prompted her to remain in the corridor while we went into the room. Sammy was pale but breathing easily. The skin of his forehead shone with gold borrowed from last summer’s sun. May held my arm with both hands as we stood beside the bed.

“He’s all right,” she breathed. “Oh, George—I would have died.”

At the sound of her voice Sammy’s eyelids seemed to flicker slightly, but he remained still. May began to sob, silently and effortlessly, adjusting emotional potentials.

“Take it easy, hon,” I said. “He’s all right, remember.”

“I know, but I felt it was all my fault.”

“Tour fault?”

“Yes. Yesterday at dinner he made me so angry by talking that way about my mother … I said I wanted him to drop dead.”

“That’s being silly.”

“I know, but I said it, and you should never say anything like that in case …’

“Fate isn’t so easily tempted,” I said with calm reasonableness. I had no right to assume. ‘Besides you didn’t mean it. Every parent knows that when a kid starts wearing you down you can say anything.”

Sammy’s eyes opened wide. “Mom?”

May dropped to her knees. “I’m here, Sammy. I’m here.”

“I’m sorry I made you mad.” His voice was small and drowsy.

“You didn’t make me mad, darling.” She took his hand and pressed her lips to it.

“I did. I shouldn’t have talked that way about seeing Gran.” He shifted his gaze to my face. “It was all a stupid joke like Dad said. I never saw Granny Cummins anywhere.” His eyes were bright and deliberate, holding mine.

I took a step back from the bed and the black flower, which had been poised and waiting, closed its hungry petals around me. Sammy, my Sammy, had seen the duplicate of Granny Cummins in the old Guthrie place—and no amount of punishment or bribery would have got him to back down on that point. Unlike me, my son had never compromised in his whole life.

Of its own accord, my right hand slid under my jacket and settled on the butt of the target pistol. My boy was dead and this—right here and now—was the time to begin avenging him.

But I looked down on May’s bowed, gently shaking shoulders; and all at once I understood why “Dr. Pitman’ had told me the whole story. Had the macabre scenes in the Guthrie place remained a mystery to me, had I not understood their purpose, I could never have remained silent. Eventually I would have had to go to the police, start investigations, cause trouble …

Now I knew that the very first casualty of any such action would be May—she would be destroyed, on learning the truth, as surely as if I had put a bullet through her head. My hand moved away from the butt of the pistol.

Sammy’s life, I thought, is her life.

In a way it isn’t a bad thing to be the compromising type—it makes life easier not only for yourself but for those around you. May smiles a lot now and she is very happy over the way Sammy has grown up to be a handsome, quick-minded fourteen-year-old. The discovery of a number of ‘human’ remains in the ashes of the Guthrie house was a nine-day wonder in our little town, but I doubt if May remembers it now. As I said, she smiles a lot.

I still think about my son, of course, and occasionally it occurs to me that if May were to die, say in an accident, all restraints would be removed from me. But the years are slipping by and there’s no sign of the human race coming to harm as a result of the quiet invasion. For all I know it never amounted to anything more than a local phenomenon, an experiment which didn’t quite work out. And when I look at Sammy growing up tall and straight—looking so much like his mother—it is easy to convince myself that I could have made a mistake. After all, I’m only human.