“Did you like the way I cleaned up?” I asked, embarrassed even as the words left my mouth.
“Yes, thank you.”
“I’m sorry I spit food at dinner.”
Her only response was a slow nod, which trailed off into a very direct and very discomfiting stare.
“Mother?”
“You know what you are?” she said, her voice flat. “You are your father’s son.” She blinked. “You should go to bed now.”
I paused a long moment before obeying, climbing the stairs to my room in some confusion and unease. When I arrived, I found a small, dark object inhabiting a shallow depression in my pillow. It was the toy locomotive.
The following Saturday morning, my father woke me at the break of dawn. “Get dressed,” he said. “You’re going to see Doctor Stiles.”
FIFTEEN
I woke slowly, as if rising to the surface of a very deep lake. I could feel a pressure gradually lifting, only for it to be supplanted by nausea, faint at first, then increasingly intense. Light gathered, my head throbbed, and soon I found myself violently sick. I heard the sound of rain and could smell its tang, and I shivered. My vision was blurred. I squeezed my eyes shut, blinked, worked away the haze until I could see my surroundings.
I was inside a wooden cage — the same cage, in fact, that I had noticed on my way into the compound. Rusted iron shackles ringed my wrists and ankles, and my body was naked. And though I lay on my back on the cage’s floor, my shackles were chained to its ceiling, and my limbs were suspended several inches above the ground. My fingers and toes were cold and numb, and my privates had shrunk to a tiny ball of exposed flesh. I felt terribly weak and very thirsty.
I tugged at the chains, but nothing in the resistance I felt suggested that any was liable to break. Furthermore, my movement had the effect of draining what little energy I possessed, revealing in its wake a deep soreness that pervaded every muscle. My thoughts, too, were dull and uncomprehending, and I struggled to remember what I had been doing that led me here. I recalled a fire in a darkened room, but that was all. I coughed now, as though from a memory of smoke, and my throat felt raw.
“Hello, Eric,” came a voice from behind me.
I was startled, and jerked suddenly against the chains, sending another wave of pain washing through my body. I tipped my head back and saw a tall, stooped figure making its way around the cage. It was a man, very old, carrying a wooden chair. The chair was simple, spattered with many colors of paint, and roughened around the edges of the seat by irregular slots, as though someone had been using it as a sawhorse. He set the chair on the flagstones at my feet, lowered himself onto it, and stared at me, his thin, tan hands folded between his bony knees. He wore a torn but close-fitting V-neck sweater and a pair of faded and stained khaki pants. His feet were filthy and bare and his short white hair stood up on his head in all directions.
The old man was Professor Avery Stiles, of course. His face was the same, and when I saw it, I remembered the events that led to my capture, along with the grim reminiscences I indulged as I fell unconscious. I gasped for breath. Doctor Stiles smiled, a gentle, sad expression that nevertheless appeared to harbor great strength. He opened his mouth to speak.
“What do you want from me?” I demanded, and his eyebrows rose, as though with approval at my interruption.
“I might ask you the same, Eric.”
“I don’t understand.” My voice was wet and strangled. I turned my head and spat.
He cocked his head, blinking. Then he straightened, leaned back, and crossed his arms over his chest. Through the sweater I could see his biceps, thin and stringy. His jaw moved involuntarily.
“I was sorry,” he said, “to hear about your parents.”
I merely stared. When ten seconds or so had passed, he appeared mildly surprised and, again incongruously, somehow pleased.
“I had thought your father was a kindred soul,” he went on. “But it appears I was mistaken. A tragedy.”
I tried to speak, but all that emerged was a low, spitting growl.
After a moment’s thought, he leaned forward, gripping his knees. “I understood that your father possessed a great hidden well of anger. But I never imagined he might commit such an act.” Almost as an afterthought, he added, “She was a lovely woman, your mother.”
“Her death,” I managed at last, “was an accident.”
Again the eyebrows went up. “And his own?”
“He couldn’t bear the guilt.”
As I said this, I recalled the bruise I had seen on my mother’s neck, and felt a shiver of revulsion run through me. Professor Stiles studied my movement with a clinical eye.
“Uncomfortable, Eric?”
I said nothing.
“You should be able to free yourself, you know.”
Again, I offered no response.
He held out his palms, his long arms like the wings of some great, ancient bird. “I have confidence in you, Eric. You’ll find a way.”
I gathered my strength and tried to spit at him. But my dehydration was too advanced. Furthermore I sensed that, even had I been successful, he would barely have noticed. His imperviousness was absolute.
He studied me for some seconds, his face knotted with curiosity, and apparent, but surely false, concern. He stroked his white-bristled chin in a parody of deep thought. He leaned forward farther still, until his narrow face was framed by two of the wooden bars.
“Eric,” he said, “I think you need to ask yourself what it is, exactly, you’re doing here.”
I began to feel myself growing tired and nauseous again. I inhaled deeply, to clear my head, but the only tangible result was dizziness. I coughed, gasped, and then failed to suppress an enormous yawn. “You came,” I said. “To me. To my house.”
But Professor Stiles was shaking his head. “No, Eric. You need to understand the real reason you’re here. Not simply to these woods. Home. Why did you come back to Gerrysburg?”
“That’s none of your concern,” I managed. I could no longer lift my head to see him.
“Where did you live before this, Eric? Why did you leave the place you were before?”
“That’s … ” I muttered. “You …” But I could no longer speak, my exhaustion was so profound. Tears gathered in my eyes and rolled down the sides of my head.
Before I fell unconscious, I saw him get up and walk away.
I believe that my first visit to him was in his office at the college. Not the building where I encountered Professor Lydia Bulgakov — a different, older, smaller structure that, as far as I know, is no longer even standing. I recall that the room was taller than it was wide, with windows that stretched floor to ceiling and looked out upon a tree-covered hill that rose up and out of sight. It was my father, of course, who delivered me there, and I remember that he was uncharacteristically subdued, as if in awe. I had, as I’ve described, seen him indulge in some chummy banter with people in the past, and had known him to brood, or to explode into anger. But I had never seen this state — one of muted respect. Of course I followed suit.
Professor Stiles sat at a large wooden desk that took up a full quarter of the room, its veneer bubbled and peeling and thick with dust. He peered out at us through a canyon formed by a dozen high piles of heavy books, each appearing likely to fall at any moment. His smile when he saw us was wide and humorless and accompanied by a simple nod of acknowledgment.
“Eric,” my father said quietly, “sit down.” And he pointed to an arrangement of two chairs that stood in a bookcase-lined corner of the room. One was simple and wooden and appeared uncomfortable; the other was large, and thickly upholstered with worn leather. I chose the leather chair, of course, and slid onto it, tipping my head back to examine the incomprehensible titles on the spines of the Professor’s books.