NightScape Part 16

One house in particular - the house where he'd started to raise his family. As soon as the renovation was completed, he found antique furniture from the period. When Anthony visited, he was amazed by how closely the house resembled the way it had looked when he was a child. His father had arranged to have Marian's urn released to him. It sat on a shelf in a study off the living room. Next to it were framed pictures of Anthony and his mother when they'd been young, the year Anthony's father had gotten sick.

His father found antique audio equipment from back then. The only songs he played were from that time. He even found an old computer and the game that he'd wanted to play with Anthony, teaching his great-grandson how to play it just as he'd already taught the little boy how to do somersaults on the lawn.

Anthony turned sixty. The hectic years of trying to save his father were behind him. He reduced his hours at the office. He followed an interest in gardening and taught himself to build a greenhouse. His father helped him.

"I need to ask you something," his father said one afternoon when the project was almost completed.

"You make it sound awfully serious."

His father looked down at his calloused hands. "I have to ask your permission about something."

"Permission?" Anthony's frown deepened his wrinkles.

"Yes. I.. .It's been five years. I.. .Back then, you told me that I had to learn to live again."

"You've been doing a good job of it," Anthony said.

" I fought it for a long time." His father looked more uncomfortable.

"What's wrong?"

"I don't know how to..."

"Say it."

"I loved your mother to the depth of my heart."

Anthony nodded, pained with emotion.

"I thought I'd die without her," his father said. "Five years. I never expected.. .I've met somebody. The sister of a man whose house I'm renovating. We've gotten to know each other, and.. .Well, I.. .What I need to ask is, would you object, would you see it as a betrayal of your mother if..."

Anthony felt pressure in his tear ducts. "Would I object?" His eyes misted. "All I want is for you to be happy."

Anthony was the best man at his father's wedding. His stepmother was the same age as his daughters. The following summer, he had a half-brother sixty-one years younger than himself. It felt odd to see his father acting toward the baby in the same loving manner that his father had presumably acted toward him when he was a baby.

At the celebration when the child was brought home from the hospital, several people asked Anthony if his wife was feeling ill. She looked wan.

"She's been working hard on a big trial coming up," he said.

The next day, she had a headache so bad that he took her to his clinic and had his staff do tests.

The day after that, she was dead. The viral meningitis that killed her was so virulent that nothing could have been done to save her. The miracle was that neither Anthony nor anybody else in the family had caught it, especially the new baby.

He felt drained. Plodding through his house, he tried to muster the energy to get through each day. The nights were harder. His father often came and sat with him, a young man next to an older one, doing his best to console him.

Anthony visited his wife's grave every day. On the anniversary of her death, while picking flowers for her, he collapsed from a stroke. The incident left him paralyzed on his left side, in need of constant care. His children wanted to put him in a facility.

"No," his father said. "It's my turn to watch over him."

So Anthony returned to the house where his youth had been wonderful until his father had gotten sick. During the many hours they spent together, his father asked Anthony to fill in more details of what had happened as Anthony had grown up: the arguments he'd had with the broker, his double shifts as a waiter, his first date with the woman who would be his wife.

"Yes, I can see it," his father said.

The next stroke reduced Anthony's intelligence to that of a nine-year-old. He didn't have the capacity to know that the computer on which he played a game with his father came from long ago. In fact, the game was the same one that his father had given him on his ninth birthday, two weeks before his father had gotten sick, the game that he'd never had a chance to play with his son.

One morning, he no longer had a nine-year-old's ability to play the game.

"His neurological functions are decreasing rapidly," the specialist said.

"Nothing can be done?" Anthony's father asked.

"I'm sorry. At this rate.. .In a couple of days.

Anthony's father felt as if he had a stone in his stomach.

"We'll make him as comfortable here as possible," the specialist said.

"No. My son should die at home."

Anthony's father sat next to the bed, holding his son's frail hand, painfully reminded of having taken care of him when Anthony had been sick as a child. Now Anthony looked appallingly old for sixty-three. His breathing was shallow. His eyes were open, gla.s.sy, not registering anything.

Anthony's children and grandchildren came to pay their last respects.

"At least he'll be at peace," his second daughter said.

Anthony's father couldn't bear it. "He didn't give up on me. I won't give up on him."

"That theory's been discredited," the specialist said.

"It works."

"In isolated cases, but-"

"I'm one of them."

"Of the few. At your father's age, he might not survive the procedure."

"Are you refusing to make the arrangements?"

"I'm trying to explain that with the expense and the risk-"

"My son will be dead by tomorrow. Being frozen can't be worse than that. And as far as the expense goes, he worked hard. He saved his money. He can afford it."

"But there's no guarantee a treatment will ever be developed for brain cells as damaged as your son's are."

"There's no guarantee it won't be developed, either." "He can't give his permission."

"He doesn't need to. He made me his legal representative." "All the same, his children need to be consulted. There are issues of estate, a risk of a lawsuit."

"I'll take care of his children. You take care of the arrangements."

They stared at him.

Anthony's father suspected they resisted the idea because they didn't want to drain money from their inheritance. "Look, I'm begging. He'd have done this for you. He did it for me. For G.o.d's sake, you can't give up on him."

They stared harder.

"It's not going to cost you anything. I'll work harder and pay for it myself. I'll sign control of the estate over to you. All I want is, don't try to stop me."

Anthony's father stood outside the cryochamber, studying the stick-on plaque that he'd put on the hatch. It gave Anthony's name, his birthdate, when he'd had his first stroke, and when he'd been frozen. "Sweet dreams," it said at the bottom. "Wake up soon."

"Soon" was a relative word, of course. Anthony had been frozen six years, and there was still no progress in a treatment. But that didn't mean there wouldn't be progress tomorrow or next month. There's always hope, Anthony's father thought. You've got to have hope.

On a long narrow table in the middle of the corridor, there were tokens of affection left by loved ones of other patients: family photographs, a baseball glove, and a guitar pick. Anthony's father had left the disc of the computer game that he and Anthony had been playing. "We'll play it again," he'd promised.

It was Anthony's father's birthday. He was forty-nine. He had gray in his sideburns, wrinkles in his forehead. I'll soon look like Anthony did when I woke up from being frozen and saw him leaning over me, he thought.

He couldn't subdue the discouraging notion that one of these days he'd be the same age as Anthony when he'd been frozen. But now that he thought about it, maybe that notion wasn't so discouraging. If they found a treatment that year, and they woke Anthony up, and the treatment worked...We'd both be sixty-six. We could grow old together.

I'll keep fighting for you, Anthony. I swear you can count on me. I couldn't let you die before me. It's a terrible thing for a father to outlive his son.

Douglas a. Winter is a fiction writer (Run), critic (books about Stephen King and Clive Barker), anthologist, and attorney. His first anthology, Prime Evil (1988), is one of the great collections of the macabre. In the mid-1990s, he phoned to tell me about a second anthology he Was planning: Millennium. When published in 1997, the book was ret.i.tled Revelations because of a conflict with a TV series that had the same name, but the original t.i.tle Millennium gives you a sense of what Doug had in mind. He invited various writers to choose a decade in the twentieth century and write an apocalyptic story about it, one that would be rooted in history and give a sense of the ultimate issues that the decade had faced. I was immediately intrigued, As many of my novels show, the professor in me has always loved working with history. The forties, fifties, and sixties had already been taken, Doug said, so which of the remaining decades did I want? The teens, I said. Because of the First World War? No, although the war would be in the story. The subject I wanted to dramatize had been potentially more apocalyptic than the war and foreshadowed later similar global threats. It gave me nightmares.

If I Should Die before I Wake It wasn't the first case, but it was Dr. Jonas Bingaman's first case, although he would not realize that until two days later. The patient, a boy with freckles and red hair, lay listlessly beneath the covers of his bed. Bingaman, who had been leaving his office for the evening when the boy's anxious mother telephoned, paused at the entrance to the narrow bedroom and a.s.sessed immediately that the boy had a fever. It wasn't just that Joey Carter, whom Bingaman had brought into the world ten years earlier, was red in the face. After all, the summer of 1918 had been uncommonly hot, and even now, at the end of August, the doctor was treating cases of sunburn. No, what made him conclude so quickly that Joey had a fever was that, despite the lingering heat, Joey was shivering under a sheet and two blankets.

"He's been like this since he came home just before supper," Joey's mother, Rebecca, said. A slim, plain woman of thirty-five, she entered Joey's room ahead of the doctor and gestured urgently for him to follow. "I found his wet bathing suit. He'd been swimming."

"At the creek. I warned him about that creek," Joey's father, Edward, said. Elmdale's best carpenter, the gangly man still wore his coveralls and work boots and had traces of sawdust in his thick, dark hair. "I told him to stay away from it."

"The creek?" Bingaman turned toward Edward, who waited anxiously in the hallway.

"The water's no good. Makes you sick. I know 'cause Bill Kendrick's boy got sick swimming in it last summer. Breathed wrong.

Swallowed some of the water. Threw up all night long. I warned Joey not to go near it, but he wouldn't listen."

"The creek through Larrabee's farm?"

"That's the one. The cattle mess in the water. The stuff flows downstream and into the swimming hole."

"Yes, I remember Bill Kendrick's boy getting sick from the water last summer," Bingaman said. "Has Joey been vomiting?"

"No." Rebecca's voice was strained.

"I'd better take a look."

As Bingaman went all the way into the room, he noted a baseball bat in a corner. A balsa-wood model of one of the Curtiss biplanes that the American Expeditionary Force was using against the Germans hung above the bed, attached by a cord to the ceiling.

"Not feeling well, Joey?"

It took an obvious effort for the boy to shake his head "no." His eyelids were barely open. He coughed.

"Been swimming in the creek?"

Joey had trouble nodding. "Shoulda listened to Dad," he murmured hoa.r.s.ely.

"Next time you'll know the right thing to do. But for now, I want you to concentrate on getting better. I'm going to examine you, Joey. I'll try to be as gentle as I can."

Bingaman opened his black bag and leaned over Joey, feeling heat come off the boy. Joey's mother and father stepped closer, watching intently. Joey's cough deepened.

Ten minutes later, Bingaman put his stethoscope back into his bag and straightened.

"Is that what it is?" Edward asked quickly. "Bad water from Larrabee's farm?"

Bingaman hesitated. "Why don't we talk somewhere else and let Joey rest?"

Downstairs, the evening's uneaten dinner of potatoes, carrots, and pork chops cooled in pots and a frying pan on the stove.

"But what do you think it is?" Rebecca asked the moment they were seated at the kitchen table.

"How serious is this?" Edward demanded.

"His temperature's a hundred and two. His glands are swollen. He has congestion in his lungs."

"My G.o.d, you don't think he has diphtheria from the water." Rebecca's anxiety was nearing a quiet panic.

Edward stared at the floor and shook his head. "I was afraid of this."

"No, I don't think it's diphtheria," Bingaman said.

Joey's father peered up, hoping.

"Some of the symptoms are those of diphtheria. But diphtheria presents bluish-white lesions that have the consistency of leather. The lesions are surrounded by inflammation and are visible near the tonsils and in the nostrils."

"But Joey-"