The Wanting Read online

  Max stared at the olive in his drink, then he fished it out, examined it. Again, he was beset by urgency. He’d finish this drink, then he’d go. But what then? Was he going to get to the bottom of the mystery?

  He drained the glass, set it down on the bar, refused a refill. But still he didn’t move. The rainy landscape outside wasn’t exactly welcoming. He tried to imagine Connie Harrison going deep into the forest, carrying her little package from Professor Zmia to Dick and Charlotte Summer. An errand girl.

  On a most curious errand.

  The puzzles shifted around inside his head like broken glass.

  Why in the name of God would Zmia send such a thing to Dick and Charlotte?

  Why would Dick and Charlotte Summer want a photograph of Denny?

  It eluded him, it shimmered before him then it shifted away, and he was lost in the stratosphere, where unanswerable questions were the most natural things in all the world.

  He stepped away from the bar and stood in the doorway, watching the rain fall over the parking lot and the impenetrable forest beyond.

  The boy stood in the hallway, the open door behind him. Watching him, Louise didn’t move. She could hear rain ticking all around the house as she stared at her son.

  Denny, she said, and her voice was filled with hollows.

  The boy stood very still. He had his hands stretched out in front of his body and he was looking at them, extending them as if they didn’t belong to him.

  Denny, she said again.

  The boy raised his face to look at her. She had a sense of nightmare, a viscous feeling, like that of treading through warm molasses.

  Those outstretched hands. That small upturned face.

  Louise put a hand to her throat, conscious of the way her mouth hung open, aware of how a paralysis had rendered her immobile. She wanted to step along the hallway and catch the boy in her arms and hold him but she couldn’t move, couldn’t take a single step, she could do nothing but simply stare at him with an expression she knew was one of complete bewilderment. And pain, somewhere there was pain. His eyes. Those hands.

  This isn’t Denny. This is some kind of substitute. This isn’t the kid who left this morning to go visit Dick and Charlotte and they sent a poor replica back in his place, so where was the real boy, where was her real son?

  She began to tremble. She felt it begin in her legs and move upward through her body, this shaking. Her mouth was dry and there was a pressure behind her eyes.

  Denny.

  She shut her eyes. Because she’d wake in a moment. She’d wake up and they’d be in their house in San Francisco and they’d never have heard of this forest, this house, their neighbors. There would be no old people. No photograph taken before the turn of the century. Nothing like that. There would just be the ordinary, Max’s practice, Denny roller-skating, herself perched over her easel, newspaper headlines about the Strangler—it would all be wonderfully banal.

  When she opened her eyes nothing had changed. The boy still stood there, framed by the open door. Rain fell through the trees behind him. Dripped on the porch. Tick tick tick.

  “Mom,” he said.

  She stepped slowly toward him. Her heart raged. All her pulses were haywire.

  Tick tick tick.

  He held his hands out to her, palms turned downward.

  “Look,” was what he said. Look, Mom.

  You step forward. Encounter unreality. Distortions of the world you thought you knew.

  Dear God!

  She reached out and touched his hands. She drew him toward her, pressing his body against her own. A thin scent rose up from him, filling her nostrils. It was musty, the perfume of decay.

  Nothing’s real. None of this. It’s a universe turned upside down, inverted so that everything slips away from you and goes falling out into the depths of space.

  You hold the boy, who isn’t the boy. Who isn’t your son.

  “Mom,” he said.

  She moved with him into the living room, her arm placed gently around his shoulders, and she made him lie down on the sofa, conscious of the photograph on the mantelpiece and how the Summers stared down at her.

  She looked away from the picture. Because it seemed to her now that the expressions on those young faces—which before she’d thought somehow sorrowful—were nothing of the kind.

  They were the sly, furtive smiles of people who win small victories, tiny triumphs. People who are in touch with secrets known to nobody else.

  Denny looked at his mother from where he lay on the sofa.

  She stared at him. This stranger. She clenched her hands together. It wasn’t anger she felt. It wasn’t sadness or puzzlement or hatred. It was an emotion she couldn’t name, as if inside her the capacity for feeling had become completely splintered and there were fragments of different sensations spinning madly through her mind.

  She looked at the boy’s hands. Then away.

  The knuckles. Those knuckles. And his face. That face.

  Fumbling, she flicked the pages of the telephone directory, looking under the heading for “Physicians,” thinking of Max as she did so, the absent Max, the doctor who wasn’t here to make the most important house call of his entire life.

  She dialed the number, got it wrong, dialed again. She heard herself say something about an emergency, something about a sick boy, and the woman who answered was slow, so goddamn slow, wanting to know about the boy’s temperature and if he’d been throwing up, wanting to know all kinds of useless things even as Louise tried to hurry her.

  When she hung up she turned to look again at her son. And she realized something that made her whole body cold. What could a physician do for this kid? What could medical science accomplish here? This was something else. Something with no name.

  She picked up his limp, swollen hand between her own. She gazed into his face and swept a strand of hair from his forehead. A gray-brown strand.

  “Mom,” the boy said. “Am I dying?”

  The voice, she thought. It was thick, hoarse. It wasn’t a boy’s voice. It belonged to somebody else.

  And suddenly she was filled with fleeting impressions, disjointed little memories that came rushing at her so quickly she couldn’t pin them down and make sense out of them. Her son’s hair in a glass jar. The worm-ridden bait in the bedroom. The scratch marks on the boy’s back. All the food Charlotte and Dick had fed him. And the picture Frog said they had.

  All these things flooded through her, as if they were narrow tributaries rushing toward one central river—but it was a river whose course she couldn’t chart, a river going nowhere.

  “Am I dying?” the boy asked again in the strange voice.

  She knew whose voice it was.

  “What you’ve got there,” Miles Henderson was saying, “is a photocopy of a journal written by a Welsh immigrant called Thomas Owens, who came this way in 1899. Quite an adventurer, Tommy Owens—or ‘Taffy’ as he sometimes called himself. A swashbuckler. You’ll see that the appropriate passage is marked, Metger. For your convenience.” There was a definite sarcasm in his voice, although there was also a certain resigned weariness—as if, having yielded the keys to his file to Metger, he was no longer interested in anything except the bottle of gin that sat in front of him.

  Metger strained to interpret the crabbed handwriting. Thomas “Taffy” Owens, Metger thought. The central figure in many of his father’s yarns. Taffy the Amazing. Taffy the Eccentric. The wild one.… He read:

  Later on the same afternoon, at around three o’clock, we came across a family of settlers whose personal tragedy affected us most deeply. Their name was Dower, out of Cardiff, and they were seeking their fortune in silver. Of their three infants, one was most peculiar in form and appearance. Although he was said to be only seven years of age, his features were wizened, his head devoid of hair, and he was deformed in the manner befitting a person of very advanced years. We were told that no treatment had allayed his symptoms, which were growing more pronounced daily.
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  “That was written in 1899,” Henderson said. “It’s the first record we have of a disease that had no name until very recently.”

  Metger set the journal down a moment, then picked it up again. He continued to read:

  A physician is sometimes in attendance, a small man whose labors appear to be in vain. It is said that he has traveled from the East to attend this sick child. The family, however, is very poor since Dai Dower, the father, is unable to find work. He has in some way offended Clarence Banyon, who owns the silver mines and much of the immediate territory. It is said that the mines and the land were deeded by the former owners, a family known as Summer. The reason for the transfer is not fully understood, although there is speculation amongst the Welsh that Banyon is heavily indebted to the Summers and has made promises to them of an evil nature.

  “A family known as Summer?” Metger asked.

  “Ancestors of those old folks down in the forest, I guess,” Henderson answered.

  “And they gave the land away?”

  “That’s how it sounds.”

  Metger put the journal down. “I wonder why. I also wonder what kind of promises Owens is talking about here. Of an evil nature?”

  “Hyperbole. Superstition. The early Welsh settlers were a superstitious crew.”

  “And who’s this small man?”

  “A traveling quack, I’d say,” Henderson answered. “The West was full of them back then. Probably still is.”

  Metger glanced down at certain phrases again.

  Features wizened, head devoid of hair, deformed in the manner befitting a person of very advanced years. It might have been an accurate description of Bobby Hann. Of Anthea Ackerley—at least what little had been left of her. And presumably Sammy Caskie also.

  Miles Henderson stood up, clutching the edge of his desk. “You’ll find, in that little drawer, our first illustration of the disease. It’s dated 1910.”

  Metger took out an old sepia picture.

  The face that stared back at him was ancient. The lips had collapsed in the face, so that they were nothing more than very thin lines surrounded by wrinkles. The ears protruded from the bald head. The neck was sunken and scrawny. The eyes were Bobby Hann’s eyes.

  “That’s Lincoln MacIvor, aged nine. Taken three months before his death,” Henderson said. “A pretty picture, huh? He had the misfortune to have the kind of caring parents who sold him to a traveling freak show.”

  Metger raised his eyes from the photograph and squinted at Henderson. On the physician’s face was an expression of subdued sadness, as if he had tested the integrity of the human race and found it sadly lacking in decency, himself included. A freak show, Metger thought.

  “You’ll find the entry for 1928 in the file so marked,” Henderson said. He filled his glass, sighed. He sat down and plumped his feet up on the desk and laughed, a strange little sound that was oddly nervous. “It’s not so bad, sonny. It’s not so bad, after all. I didn’t want to show you these things, but it doesn’t feel half as bad as I thought it would: It’s probably what a Catholic feels inside the confessional, huh?”

  1928.

  There was a photograph of an old woman, taken against a wooded background. A very small old woman. On the back of the photograph somebody had written in faded blue ink the words Georgina Monmouth, aged six, July, 1928.

  Henderson said, “Georgina died when she was seven. The physician at the time wrote up the case for publication. However, as bad luck would have it, his house burned down and his notes were lost and he himself seemingly suffered a stroke. It happened just about the time the last silver was gone and folks were thinking up ways of finding occupants for the Silver Queen Hotel and the Carnarvon Inn and the other hostelries that prevailed in those days.… There’s an awful lot of bad luck in this town, Jerry.”

  Metger didn’t speak.

  “The next case is Caskie. The one you asked about the other day. This one’s a little more comprehensively documented. The physician at the time was my predecessor, Daniel Jenkins. A private old man who retired in 1943, one year after Sammy Caskie died. Surprising, don’t you think, that Jenkins never wanted to publicize the case of Sammy Caskie? Could it have had something to do with the fact that Carnarvon was beginning to emerge from a ruined old mining town into a thriving tourist center, Jerry? Could it be connected to the fact that people were stopping here in this picturesque little town to take in the sights? Bringing their wives and families with them and breathing the air that was as sweet as any man ever breathed? And contributing to a general new prosperity? I’ve often wondered about that.…”

  There was more than sarcasm in the physician’s voice. There was bitterness. A tone in which was barely concealed Miles Henderson’s own complicity, his own regrets.

  Metger found himself looking at several photographs of the Caskie child taken over a period of a few months. In each picture the child looked markedly different. In the last one the boy appeared to be eighty years old, sad and wasted and dying. Like Bobby Hann.

  “I was in Carnarvon when the Caskie child was dying,” Henderson said. “I was working as old Dan Jenkins’s apprentice, so to speak. I was still a med student in those days. When I mentioned to Jenkins that he publish this case, it was suggested to me, in no uncertain terms, that some things were not to be bruited about.… Bruited about, Jerry. Are you catching my drift?”

  Henderson moved toward the filing cabinets now. Liquid spilled from his glass. It slithered down the front of his shirt and over his crotch. He appeared not to notice it. He waved the glass in the air precariously.

  “You’ll find Robert Hann in there. And Anthea Ackerley, your own private little obsession, although in poor Anthea’s case the documentation is incomplete since the child found her own tragic release from the death that faced her. It’s all in there, Jerry. Be my guest. Poke around as much as you like.”

  Metger stared inside the open drawer. The photographs, the documents lay around in disarray, like the pieces of a puzzle out of which no sense, no total pattern, might ever be created. He turned his face toward the window, watching rain slither down the glass.

  Between 1899 and now, six kids.

  Miles Henderson had gone back to his desk, where he contrived to knock his glass over and spilled gin made small puddles across papers. “Ooops,” he said. “Ooops.” He straightened up the glass, wiped up a puddle from under the telephone with an old handkerchief, laughed quietly to himself.

  Metger listened to the rain. In less than a hundred years, six kids.

  Henderson raised his face from the desk. “They’ve got a fancy name for it, Sheriff. Nowadays they call it progeria. A fancy name for an ugly sickness. It’s like pretty frosting on a cake that’s rancid. Progeria … the rapid advancement of senility in young people. The hell of it is, they don’t know what causes it and they don’t know how to cure it.” He paused. He drew the back of a hand over his lips. “But you only have to look at those pictures to see that if there’s a disease straight out of hell, progeria is the one. A six-year-old kid can turn into an eighty-year-old man and …” Henderson didn’t have to finish his sentence.

  “Progeria,” Henderson said again, as if the word awed him. “This profession of mine is real good at coming up with names. Hell, we can put names to almost anything, Sheriff. That’s the easy part. The tough part is finding out what lies behind some of those five-dollar labels. Progoddamngeria. Senile kids …” He seemed to drift away now into his own shroud of silences.

  The only sound in the room was the click of rain on glass. Metger dropped the pictures of Samuel Caskie back inside the cabinet drawer.

  “Maybe one in ten million kids catches this thing. Maybe it’s closer to one in twenty million. I don’t know the numbers, Jerry. All I know is that the statistics in this town are wrong as all hell. It shouldn’t be happening here with anything like this kind of regularity. Six kids in less than a century! One, maybe. Two would be farfetched. Three’s unthinkable!”

/>   Metger shut the drawer. He saw Sammy Caskie’s ancient face—like that of some sorrowful man who has witnessed too many terrors—slide away from him, back into the tomb of the filing cabinet. What struck him suddenly was the sheer random awfulness of the disease—a healthy child succumbs, ages, grows old and weary, small bones brittle, face etched with all the deep lines of a life that hasn’t even been lived, for Christ’s sake.

  “Why does it happen here like this, Miles? Why does it keep happening here?”

  Henderson shrugged. “Over the years wiser men than you and me have tried to answer that question, sonny. Highly paid specialists have come to town and secretly tested the drinking water and analyzed the air and dissected the beef we eat and the milk we drink. They’ve prodded around in our sewage and run tests on our garbage and dug holes in our landfill and shoved our excrement under microscopes and put our piss inside bottles. They’ve been down in the old mine shafts and run dirt samples through their computers. They’ve done so many tests in this goddamn town there aren’t any more left to do.”

  Henderson wandered around his study now, shuffling back and forth. “Healthy kids, Jerry,” he muttered. “It takes a healthy kid, it sneaks up on it in the dead of night, it takes control. Processes in the kid’s body that ought to take a lifetime happen in a matter of weeks, maybe months, maybe at best a few short years.… Only one outcome is certain. The kid dies. That’s the only sure thing. The kid dies. Then the years go past. And the whole sonofabitching thing starts up again.”

  Henderson turned to Metger with a look of pain on his face. “And what do we do, Jerry? What do the authorities in this town do? Why, we keep our mouths shut, don’t we? A slip of the pen here. A slip there. A record that isn’t quite right. A document that doesn’t make sense. A hasty burial. We’ve been keeping our mouths shut a long time now, Jerry. That’s what we’re good at in Carnarvon. Tourism and secrecy. Twin pillars of this neat little society we call home.…”

  Metger stood by the window now. He felt curiously numb, his brain empty. It was as if his mind had closed down, shutters drawn over his awareness. “Did any of these victims have anything in common, Miles? Did they live in the same house, the same spot, anything like that?”