The Captive, page 6
"No. C'mere and smell this. There's a bear out here in the woods, sure enough."
I hear the girl shuffling back through the leaves. Her scent is covered with some sort of rank perfume that smells metallic, like a painted tin flower. She and the boy are standing even closer to the hole now. I am breathing silently, trying to decide if I could possibly get out and grab them before they ran away. But it would be useless. I could not move that fast without undoing much of the healing process. Only a direct danger could make me move fast now. I will wait them out.
"It sure does stink," the girl says. "Is that a bear? It smells like granddad's cowbarn when he hasn't cleaned it out all winter."
"That ain't a cow. That's bear," the boy says, excited and moving about near the stump of the fallen tree. "I smelled it one time when Fred and Uncle Jake and I went up to Wyoming to hunt cougars and stuff. There was a cave there that we almost got the bear from, but he smelled us and got back out of the canyon before we could get to the horses."
"Well, I don't want to find a bear in the dark, and neither do you," the girl says, very sensibly, I think.
"I bet Uncle Jake could bring his 30-30 right out here and, get that old bear," the boy says, stamping around in the leaves like a buffalo.
The danger is slow to dawn in my mind, dulled as I am with pain and the constant effort on keeping many sets of muscles in a state of tension. What if the boy does bring men with guns, and dogs, perhaps, to this woods? I am sure to be discovered, perhaps killed in my weak state. I would have to move, and I do not know the area. I don't know if I am even near the same city or in the same state. Bill Hegel could have driven anywhere to set up my death. His name in my mind brings on a feeling that I put down because it is totally inappropriate, but there is a mixed rage in it against the agent of my near death. He has succeeded in maiming me for a long time, perhaps ultimately killing me. I think about the feeling and put it away for later.
The young boy isstill kicking through the leaves. I will have to stop this or he will stumble right in on top of me. I feel anger toward him and want him to stop. I hear his feet suddenly stop. The giri's feet also stop. At that I realize what has happened. In my intense need for food, I drew them to me as I was drawing the dog. They left their car and came walking through the woods at my command. And now we are all trapped. The boy has scented me, and if what he says is true, he might bring back men and dogs to kill me, so in a very real sense I cannot allow him to leave. I could kill them both, but their automobile is not far away, and there would be an even more intense hunt for clues to their murder. I consider briefly trying to eat them both and burying what is left. But again, what of the car? I cannot stand upright, much less push an automobile down the road. What if I could push it? Could I push it back onto the railroad tracks and let another train do what was done to me? It is out of the question. I am probably too weak to even make a grab at one of them, much less do all that is in my mind. Even if I were healthy, it would be an onerous task, as I do not relish eating humans any more than I do their dogs. They are simply not creatures that it is a pleasure to eat, and my growing feelings of identification would make it difficult, an act almost of cannibalism. I can do this thing, I am thinking while I hold the two of them motionless in the dark woods with my will, but I do not want to. It is more trouble than it is worth. I try relaxing my hold on them to see what they do.
"Oh Stanley, what are we doing out here?" the girl almost screams. "I'm scared. Come on!" And she is off, running toward the car.
"OK, OK, I'm coming," the boy says, taking off after her at a run.
Stop!
I hear them skid to a stop near their car. They are motionless. I can still stop them, even at that distance. Perhaps desperation adds somewhat to the power I hold over their individual wills. Now I know they are frightened, and that if I release them for an instant they will be gone before I can concentrate and grab them again. The strain is beginnning to make me dizzy and weak. An idea begins to grow, so that I make them turn and begin walking back toward my lair.
As they approach with reluctant feet through the dark leaves, I plan as far ahead as I can with another part of my mind, and at the same time my body is moving various muscles, preparing for an effort that I convince my body is necessary. Some sacrifices at this time so we may survive, is the message. The two young people are standing at the edge of the dug-out place by the fallen tree now, their minds held steady by my own will. I reach up to the edge of the pit with my unbroken arm.
"Help me!"
They reach down, grasp my arm and pull with all their might as I scramble with my one good leg to get out of the hole. They are doing very well, but clumsily. They are strong for their size, and then I realize I am ordering them to strain to their utmost, and I relax the hold somewhat. No use injuring one of them. They would be of no help if I forced one of their muscles to lock or break a bone by overpowering the body's regulators. My necessity for survival is very strong. I order my own reactions to tone down somewhat. We have a lot of time, at least. Take it slowly. They each put a shoulder under one of my arms and help me up to my one good leg. It is very painful, but at last I am upright for the first time in many days and nights. I do not have any idea how many. My head is muggy with pain and there are bloody places opening up on my body. I pause for an internal inspection and find nothing immediately fatal letting go, apparently. The locked muscles in my leg and chest are painful, of course, but holding well. It is even possible to put a bit of weight on the broken leg if it is exerted straight downward. I feel the young people staggering beneath me as we drag and hop toward their car. I command them with all my will to hold my weight, not to drop me, to assist me as if I were a beloved parent, using every image of help, love, affection, duty that I can recall from my human lives. They do so well that the girl is even murmuring words of encouragement to me as she staggers with the weight of my left arm over her shoulder. I feel the arms of these young humans around my middle, getting bloody with my own blood as they almost carry me to their car. It seems immaterial to me at that moment that I am controlling them. They are assisting me, and it gives me a good feeling.
At the car comes the delicate job of hoisting my bulk into the back seat. I thank the luck that they have a back seat, that the car is not a coupe or something unmanageable. As it is, the task of getting me into the rear seat is almost superhuman, as I am stiff, larger than an adult human being, and not made for getting in and out of automobiles in the best of circumstances. I get a brief flash of that horrible moment just before the train hit when I got out of the car's windshield. That car must have been larger than this one, or else I was more desperate than I had supposed. At last I am lying in the back of their sedan, half on the seat, my shoulders against the driver's side, my one leg still protruding from the other door. I cannot bend it much because of the muscles holding the bone in place, so I have to crumple at the waist. It is painful and awkward, but at last I seem to be all inside the car. The girl shuts the door very carefully.
After they are in the front seat of the car, I begin my questions.
Where do you live?
About three miles from here, across the highway.
Is there a secret place where I can hide and get well?
(A pause.) The girl answers, I know! In the cellar of the old McKinley place. Yeah, the boy says. That's a swell place, and nobody goes there.
Take me there.
I lie back as well as I can, bracing my body against the bumps that make me bleed and send lightning jabs of pain through my chest and leg. The boy is driving carefully, slowly over the railroad tracks. I wonder how much of my hold on them will last if I relax it. I have never tried permanently influencing a human. But that one time I crept into Mrs. Stumway's house and whispered to her as she slept. Was that what made her take Charles in? If these young people can be so influenced, I will not have to kill them. But I am a horrible object to them now in my natural form. Still, I must try and hope they will not betray me to people with guns. As the car bumps along through the cool night air, I see the girl has her head turned, watching me over the back of the seat.
Do not be afraid. I will not harm you. I am badly hurt. A train hit me. I will get well, but I must have a safe place to rest, water, food. Will you help me?
The girl nods her head in the darkness, but I am aware that I am manipulating her mind. She is under the direct influence of my will which I am afraid to relax at this point. I ask the boy, and he too nods his head. But I cannot tell. I must wait and see if, when they are released, they run in fright. Then I will have to call them back and kill them. The car jolts over the washboarded road, making me weak with agony. I can only hold on now to the necessity of keeping these two creatures under my control. I manage to remain conscious until the car turns off the road into a lane. We go very slowly, and I notice the boy has turned off the car lights. At last the car turns around in a stand of thick weeds beside the dark bulk of a house. There are a couple of out buildings falling to ruin off to one side. The crickets and frogs keep up a background music that makes me want to sleep. I am having great trouble staying conscious. The boy and girl are helping me out of the car now. I swing my head back once in great agony as I slip and come down on the broken leg, and the stars seem a field of burning, sparkling eyes in the dark sky.
They are holding me between them again. We descend into a cellar by way of an outdoor entrance, down some cement stairs into a wet, cool place under the house. I extend my spatial sense, scanning the cellar area. There is nothing living there except some field mice just inside one broken window. The boy is gathering boards now. He talks about an old mattress upstairs. I am dizzy and my mind is slipping into gray spaces so that I am losing track of time. I must hold on until I find out if these people will obey me. The girl still has her arm around my waist as I stand leaning against a wall. The boy comes down the stairs that splinter and crack as he steps on them. He is dragging something, a mattress, which he puts on the boards in a corner. They help me to lie on the musty smelling old padding. The smell is disagreeable, but it is distant and unimportant. It is of no matter. I can rest now. There is a gray space before I regain my hold, and I see that the young people are still standing beside me.
When you go home, I am telling them, you will speak to no one about me. If you tell, they will come and kill me, and I am a friendly creature to man. I will not harm you. Tell no one. And you must help me by bringing water and food. Small animals, chickens, lambs, even cooked food, although I need the fresh, whole animal food now to help the healing. Will you do these things?
I see their heads nod. I extort another promise from them, and they nod again. I observe them with my spatial sense, listen to their breathing, catch their scents. But I cannot hold the concentration. I am going to lose hold in a moment. I must simply take the chance. I drop my hold on them, and see them visibly flinch.
They are backing away in the dark cellar, and I realize they cannot see me but can only sense my presence now that I am not helping them. I can smell their fear coming out strongly now. They are not speaking, but they reach the cellar door and go up the concrete steps quickly. I reach out to them, listening for their words. They have said nothing, and they are afraid. I do not know if they will bring people to kill me, but I am almost too weak to stop them now. Perhaps if they do I could shift at the last minute - but I know that would be impossible. A man would quickly die in my condition. But I can no longer hold to my consciousness, and as I hear the car doors slam shut and the car roar down the lane, I fall into grayness.
I awake with the aroma of cooked food making my mouth drool. It is light, and a shaft of sunlight stands serene in the doorway. Beside the mattress is a tin plate with a great yellow heap of scrambled eggs on it. There are strips of bacon across the top and half a dozen slices of brown bread at the side. An enamel jug of water stands next to the plate. I extend my senses to see if this is not some sort of trap. The house is deserted, and although I cannot extend my perceptions through the cement walls, I can hear that there is nothing breathing or moving anywhere near the old house. I feel childish tears in my eyes. And then I eat the meal, devouring everything in great gulps, washing it down with the cold well water. My stomach rumbles with the unaccustomed luxury of this prepared food. Belatedly, I hope that some undetectable and insidious poison has not been placed in the food, but I was too hungry to really care. I feel the serious lapse in my precautions, but in the next instant it all becomes laughable. I have put my life in the hands of two young people who are at best unknown quantities, at worst my executioners, and to worry about my security in such circumstances is arrogant nonsense.
***
The weather grows steadily on toward a hot summer. Each night the breeze coming across my bed from the broken window over to the cellar doorway is warmer, less of the day's heat being lost, and each dawn, as the sun slides along the white cement wall beside the steps until it stands full upon the dusty, littered floor in its golden rectangle, I feel the warmth of the earth increasing. I have been in this cellar for a week, and I have felt the bones begin to knit, the muscles still holding until I feel it possible to relax one or another of them in turn. The leg is not usable yet, and there are still swollen places in some joints and the healing lacerations on my chest and abdomen, but the broken wrist has almost stopped hurting, and the other arm is good enough for some tasks. My head and back, the two uncertainties in my attempts at self healing, are apparently coming along nicely, although much of my back is tender and I have discovered that I lost a chunk out of one ear.
None of my senses seems impaired, and I enjoy each morning reaching out into the weed grown yard and pulling in a rabbit or ground squirrel for breakfast. When Stanley or Barbara come to bring me something now, they most often toss it down the stairs without coming into the cellar. For the first few days, they would sneak in with food while I pretended to be asleep, and then would race out of the cellar as if I would be up and after them. I have grown to have an affection for these two brave young people, although it is a mystery to me yet how much of their activity is the result of my induced instructions and how much is their own sympathy for my plight. It is most often the girl who brings food, although usually the boy is detectable outside somewhere, and I assume they both live nearby, for they have never again brought an automobile up the lane.
Today I will go outside to look around and to stretch my muscles. My leg can take some weight, and I can hobble upright, although to do so brings more pain. But as I make this decision, there is an unusual series of noises from the outside. A car goes by on the road, and then another and another. Usually not more than half a dozen cars a day pass on the dirt road beyond the lane. They do not go on past, but I hear their engines roaring in first gear nearby. Is there a church, perhaps, some sort of farming process going on, a meeting? I would have heard cars like this before now if there were some center of everyday activity nearby. I stand up in the sunlight in the cellar door, unable to see beyond the top of the cellar steps or to extend my spatial perception in any detail beyond the immediate yard of the house. The sun is gloriously warm and golden on my fur. It makes me shiver. Now something is happening in a field nearby. The car engines have stopped now, and there is noise of people walking through grass and new corn fields. the rustle and shirring sounds of leaves across fabric. People are coming this way. I take a step up the stairs, holding to both sides of the cement passage to ease my bad leg.
"Hey-O, there he comes!"
The voice startles me by its nearness so that I try to step back and my leg doubles under me. I sit down hard on the cement floor, jarring my spine painfully. The voice came from above me, probably from an upper window of the house itself. How trusting I have become not to check my surroundings at all times. I have not scanned the upper parts of the house for days. There could be an army up there. I have been betrayed.
I stumble and crawl back to the mattress and concentrate. They will not catch what they are thinking they will this time. I shift.
And scream with pain and fall back on the mattress in agony. The pain in both legs races up into my skull and explodes there, making me insensible for a moment. One hand feels broken, and my whole spinal column is agonizing. My head pounds, and I look down to see blood oozing from half a dozen horrible looking lacerations that draw my stomach open as I move. The human cannot control his body, and the wounds are still too deep, not healed enough. I try to push the pain aside, get some concentration, but my voice screams again. I blank it out and concentrate, as I hear, as if from far away, shouts and the pounding of running feet.
I have it. I shift.
"Look out! By God, look at that! Geezus, I thought it got you, Tyler. Was it you who screamed? Don't get too close! Godamighty!"
The loud voices come down into the cellar slowly as I fall back on the mattress, holding myself in a score of places at once to reestablish control. The pains have become unbearable all over again, much of the healing undone by my foolish attempt to escape. And as the men come down the stairs with guns in their hands, down from the outside and cautiously from upstairs in the old house, I am hardly aware of them, searching inside my own body for the controls that will stop the bleeding once again, pull muscles back across broken places not yet healed, will power to control the swellings and internal misalignments that are still within me. The pains gradually give way as I establish control once again. I had forgotten how little control the human has over his body, and the change almost killed me before I could get back into my natural form. I am panting with the effort and with the nearness to destruction so that the men standing around me in the cellar now gradually assume the dangerous form they have taken on, their guns pointed at me from every direction of escape, more men on the stairways, blocking out the morning sun, their combined fear scent an acid stench in my nostrils. I come back to external reality again, look at them from my natural form and feel them in a group with all my senses. If they want to kill me now, they may, for I have little strength to fight them, and am only curious about their motives.
I hear the girl shuffling back through the leaves. Her scent is covered with some sort of rank perfume that smells metallic, like a painted tin flower. She and the boy are standing even closer to the hole now. I am breathing silently, trying to decide if I could possibly get out and grab them before they ran away. But it would be useless. I could not move that fast without undoing much of the healing process. Only a direct danger could make me move fast now. I will wait them out.
"It sure does stink," the girl says. "Is that a bear? It smells like granddad's cowbarn when he hasn't cleaned it out all winter."
"That ain't a cow. That's bear," the boy says, excited and moving about near the stump of the fallen tree. "I smelled it one time when Fred and Uncle Jake and I went up to Wyoming to hunt cougars and stuff. There was a cave there that we almost got the bear from, but he smelled us and got back out of the canyon before we could get to the horses."
"Well, I don't want to find a bear in the dark, and neither do you," the girl says, very sensibly, I think.
"I bet Uncle Jake could bring his 30-30 right out here and, get that old bear," the boy says, stamping around in the leaves like a buffalo.
The danger is slow to dawn in my mind, dulled as I am with pain and the constant effort on keeping many sets of muscles in a state of tension. What if the boy does bring men with guns, and dogs, perhaps, to this woods? I am sure to be discovered, perhaps killed in my weak state. I would have to move, and I do not know the area. I don't know if I am even near the same city or in the same state. Bill Hegel could have driven anywhere to set up my death. His name in my mind brings on a feeling that I put down because it is totally inappropriate, but there is a mixed rage in it against the agent of my near death. He has succeeded in maiming me for a long time, perhaps ultimately killing me. I think about the feeling and put it away for later.
The young boy isstill kicking through the leaves. I will have to stop this or he will stumble right in on top of me. I feel anger toward him and want him to stop. I hear his feet suddenly stop. The giri's feet also stop. At that I realize what has happened. In my intense need for food, I drew them to me as I was drawing the dog. They left their car and came walking through the woods at my command. And now we are all trapped. The boy has scented me, and if what he says is true, he might bring back men and dogs to kill me, so in a very real sense I cannot allow him to leave. I could kill them both, but their automobile is not far away, and there would be an even more intense hunt for clues to their murder. I consider briefly trying to eat them both and burying what is left. But again, what of the car? I cannot stand upright, much less push an automobile down the road. What if I could push it? Could I push it back onto the railroad tracks and let another train do what was done to me? It is out of the question. I am probably too weak to even make a grab at one of them, much less do all that is in my mind. Even if I were healthy, it would be an onerous task, as I do not relish eating humans any more than I do their dogs. They are simply not creatures that it is a pleasure to eat, and my growing feelings of identification would make it difficult, an act almost of cannibalism. I can do this thing, I am thinking while I hold the two of them motionless in the dark woods with my will, but I do not want to. It is more trouble than it is worth. I try relaxing my hold on them to see what they do.
"Oh Stanley, what are we doing out here?" the girl almost screams. "I'm scared. Come on!" And she is off, running toward the car.
"OK, OK, I'm coming," the boy says, taking off after her at a run.
Stop!
I hear them skid to a stop near their car. They are motionless. I can still stop them, even at that distance. Perhaps desperation adds somewhat to the power I hold over their individual wills. Now I know they are frightened, and that if I release them for an instant they will be gone before I can concentrate and grab them again. The strain is beginnning to make me dizzy and weak. An idea begins to grow, so that I make them turn and begin walking back toward my lair.
As they approach with reluctant feet through the dark leaves, I plan as far ahead as I can with another part of my mind, and at the same time my body is moving various muscles, preparing for an effort that I convince my body is necessary. Some sacrifices at this time so we may survive, is the message. The two young people are standing at the edge of the dug-out place by the fallen tree now, their minds held steady by my own will. I reach up to the edge of the pit with my unbroken arm.
"Help me!"
They reach down, grasp my arm and pull with all their might as I scramble with my one good leg to get out of the hole. They are doing very well, but clumsily. They are strong for their size, and then I realize I am ordering them to strain to their utmost, and I relax the hold somewhat. No use injuring one of them. They would be of no help if I forced one of their muscles to lock or break a bone by overpowering the body's regulators. My necessity for survival is very strong. I order my own reactions to tone down somewhat. We have a lot of time, at least. Take it slowly. They each put a shoulder under one of my arms and help me up to my one good leg. It is very painful, but at last I am upright for the first time in many days and nights. I do not have any idea how many. My head is muggy with pain and there are bloody places opening up on my body. I pause for an internal inspection and find nothing immediately fatal letting go, apparently. The locked muscles in my leg and chest are painful, of course, but holding well. It is even possible to put a bit of weight on the broken leg if it is exerted straight downward. I feel the young people staggering beneath me as we drag and hop toward their car. I command them with all my will to hold my weight, not to drop me, to assist me as if I were a beloved parent, using every image of help, love, affection, duty that I can recall from my human lives. They do so well that the girl is even murmuring words of encouragement to me as she staggers with the weight of my left arm over her shoulder. I feel the arms of these young humans around my middle, getting bloody with my own blood as they almost carry me to their car. It seems immaterial to me at that moment that I am controlling them. They are assisting me, and it gives me a good feeling.
At the car comes the delicate job of hoisting my bulk into the back seat. I thank the luck that they have a back seat, that the car is not a coupe or something unmanageable. As it is, the task of getting me into the rear seat is almost superhuman, as I am stiff, larger than an adult human being, and not made for getting in and out of automobiles in the best of circumstances. I get a brief flash of that horrible moment just before the train hit when I got out of the car's windshield. That car must have been larger than this one, or else I was more desperate than I had supposed. At last I am lying in the back of their sedan, half on the seat, my shoulders against the driver's side, my one leg still protruding from the other door. I cannot bend it much because of the muscles holding the bone in place, so I have to crumple at the waist. It is painful and awkward, but at last I seem to be all inside the car. The girl shuts the door very carefully.
After they are in the front seat of the car, I begin my questions.
Where do you live?
About three miles from here, across the highway.
Is there a secret place where I can hide and get well?
(A pause.) The girl answers, I know! In the cellar of the old McKinley place. Yeah, the boy says. That's a swell place, and nobody goes there.
Take me there.
I lie back as well as I can, bracing my body against the bumps that make me bleed and send lightning jabs of pain through my chest and leg. The boy is driving carefully, slowly over the railroad tracks. I wonder how much of my hold on them will last if I relax it. I have never tried permanently influencing a human. But that one time I crept into Mrs. Stumway's house and whispered to her as she slept. Was that what made her take Charles in? If these young people can be so influenced, I will not have to kill them. But I am a horrible object to them now in my natural form. Still, I must try and hope they will not betray me to people with guns. As the car bumps along through the cool night air, I see the girl has her head turned, watching me over the back of the seat.
Do not be afraid. I will not harm you. I am badly hurt. A train hit me. I will get well, but I must have a safe place to rest, water, food. Will you help me?
The girl nods her head in the darkness, but I am aware that I am manipulating her mind. She is under the direct influence of my will which I am afraid to relax at this point. I ask the boy, and he too nods his head. But I cannot tell. I must wait and see if, when they are released, they run in fright. Then I will have to call them back and kill them. The car jolts over the washboarded road, making me weak with agony. I can only hold on now to the necessity of keeping these two creatures under my control. I manage to remain conscious until the car turns off the road into a lane. We go very slowly, and I notice the boy has turned off the car lights. At last the car turns around in a stand of thick weeds beside the dark bulk of a house. There are a couple of out buildings falling to ruin off to one side. The crickets and frogs keep up a background music that makes me want to sleep. I am having great trouble staying conscious. The boy and girl are helping me out of the car now. I swing my head back once in great agony as I slip and come down on the broken leg, and the stars seem a field of burning, sparkling eyes in the dark sky.
They are holding me between them again. We descend into a cellar by way of an outdoor entrance, down some cement stairs into a wet, cool place under the house. I extend my spatial sense, scanning the cellar area. There is nothing living there except some field mice just inside one broken window. The boy is gathering boards now. He talks about an old mattress upstairs. I am dizzy and my mind is slipping into gray spaces so that I am losing track of time. I must hold on until I find out if these people will obey me. The girl still has her arm around my waist as I stand leaning against a wall. The boy comes down the stairs that splinter and crack as he steps on them. He is dragging something, a mattress, which he puts on the boards in a corner. They help me to lie on the musty smelling old padding. The smell is disagreeable, but it is distant and unimportant. It is of no matter. I can rest now. There is a gray space before I regain my hold, and I see that the young people are still standing beside me.
When you go home, I am telling them, you will speak to no one about me. If you tell, they will come and kill me, and I am a friendly creature to man. I will not harm you. Tell no one. And you must help me by bringing water and food. Small animals, chickens, lambs, even cooked food, although I need the fresh, whole animal food now to help the healing. Will you do these things?
I see their heads nod. I extort another promise from them, and they nod again. I observe them with my spatial sense, listen to their breathing, catch their scents. But I cannot hold the concentration. I am going to lose hold in a moment. I must simply take the chance. I drop my hold on them, and see them visibly flinch.
They are backing away in the dark cellar, and I realize they cannot see me but can only sense my presence now that I am not helping them. I can smell their fear coming out strongly now. They are not speaking, but they reach the cellar door and go up the concrete steps quickly. I reach out to them, listening for their words. They have said nothing, and they are afraid. I do not know if they will bring people to kill me, but I am almost too weak to stop them now. Perhaps if they do I could shift at the last minute - but I know that would be impossible. A man would quickly die in my condition. But I can no longer hold to my consciousness, and as I hear the car doors slam shut and the car roar down the lane, I fall into grayness.
I awake with the aroma of cooked food making my mouth drool. It is light, and a shaft of sunlight stands serene in the doorway. Beside the mattress is a tin plate with a great yellow heap of scrambled eggs on it. There are strips of bacon across the top and half a dozen slices of brown bread at the side. An enamel jug of water stands next to the plate. I extend my senses to see if this is not some sort of trap. The house is deserted, and although I cannot extend my perceptions through the cement walls, I can hear that there is nothing breathing or moving anywhere near the old house. I feel childish tears in my eyes. And then I eat the meal, devouring everything in great gulps, washing it down with the cold well water. My stomach rumbles with the unaccustomed luxury of this prepared food. Belatedly, I hope that some undetectable and insidious poison has not been placed in the food, but I was too hungry to really care. I feel the serious lapse in my precautions, but in the next instant it all becomes laughable. I have put my life in the hands of two young people who are at best unknown quantities, at worst my executioners, and to worry about my security in such circumstances is arrogant nonsense.
***
The weather grows steadily on toward a hot summer. Each night the breeze coming across my bed from the broken window over to the cellar doorway is warmer, less of the day's heat being lost, and each dawn, as the sun slides along the white cement wall beside the steps until it stands full upon the dusty, littered floor in its golden rectangle, I feel the warmth of the earth increasing. I have been in this cellar for a week, and I have felt the bones begin to knit, the muscles still holding until I feel it possible to relax one or another of them in turn. The leg is not usable yet, and there are still swollen places in some joints and the healing lacerations on my chest and abdomen, but the broken wrist has almost stopped hurting, and the other arm is good enough for some tasks. My head and back, the two uncertainties in my attempts at self healing, are apparently coming along nicely, although much of my back is tender and I have discovered that I lost a chunk out of one ear.
None of my senses seems impaired, and I enjoy each morning reaching out into the weed grown yard and pulling in a rabbit or ground squirrel for breakfast. When Stanley or Barbara come to bring me something now, they most often toss it down the stairs without coming into the cellar. For the first few days, they would sneak in with food while I pretended to be asleep, and then would race out of the cellar as if I would be up and after them. I have grown to have an affection for these two brave young people, although it is a mystery to me yet how much of their activity is the result of my induced instructions and how much is their own sympathy for my plight. It is most often the girl who brings food, although usually the boy is detectable outside somewhere, and I assume they both live nearby, for they have never again brought an automobile up the lane.
Today I will go outside to look around and to stretch my muscles. My leg can take some weight, and I can hobble upright, although to do so brings more pain. But as I make this decision, there is an unusual series of noises from the outside. A car goes by on the road, and then another and another. Usually not more than half a dozen cars a day pass on the dirt road beyond the lane. They do not go on past, but I hear their engines roaring in first gear nearby. Is there a church, perhaps, some sort of farming process going on, a meeting? I would have heard cars like this before now if there were some center of everyday activity nearby. I stand up in the sunlight in the cellar door, unable to see beyond the top of the cellar steps or to extend my spatial perception in any detail beyond the immediate yard of the house. The sun is gloriously warm and golden on my fur. It makes me shiver. Now something is happening in a field nearby. The car engines have stopped now, and there is noise of people walking through grass and new corn fields. the rustle and shirring sounds of leaves across fabric. People are coming this way. I take a step up the stairs, holding to both sides of the cement passage to ease my bad leg.
"Hey-O, there he comes!"
The voice startles me by its nearness so that I try to step back and my leg doubles under me. I sit down hard on the cement floor, jarring my spine painfully. The voice came from above me, probably from an upper window of the house itself. How trusting I have become not to check my surroundings at all times. I have not scanned the upper parts of the house for days. There could be an army up there. I have been betrayed.
I stumble and crawl back to the mattress and concentrate. They will not catch what they are thinking they will this time. I shift.
And scream with pain and fall back on the mattress in agony. The pain in both legs races up into my skull and explodes there, making me insensible for a moment. One hand feels broken, and my whole spinal column is agonizing. My head pounds, and I look down to see blood oozing from half a dozen horrible looking lacerations that draw my stomach open as I move. The human cannot control his body, and the wounds are still too deep, not healed enough. I try to push the pain aside, get some concentration, but my voice screams again. I blank it out and concentrate, as I hear, as if from far away, shouts and the pounding of running feet.
I have it. I shift.
"Look out! By God, look at that! Geezus, I thought it got you, Tyler. Was it you who screamed? Don't get too close! Godamighty!"
The loud voices come down into the cellar slowly as I fall back on the mattress, holding myself in a score of places at once to reestablish control. The pains have become unbearable all over again, much of the healing undone by my foolish attempt to escape. And as the men come down the stairs with guns in their hands, down from the outside and cautiously from upstairs in the old house, I am hardly aware of them, searching inside my own body for the controls that will stop the bleeding once again, pull muscles back across broken places not yet healed, will power to control the swellings and internal misalignments that are still within me. The pains gradually give way as I establish control once again. I had forgotten how little control the human has over his body, and the change almost killed me before I could get back into my natural form. I am panting with the effort and with the nearness to destruction so that the men standing around me in the cellar now gradually assume the dangerous form they have taken on, their guns pointed at me from every direction of escape, more men on the stairways, blocking out the morning sun, their combined fear scent an acid stench in my nostrils. I come back to external reality again, look at them from my natural form and feel them in a group with all my senses. If they want to kill me now, they may, for I have little strength to fight them, and am only curious about their motives.
