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 lips.
‘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 towards 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 carriage by the mother and father, who handed him up 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.’