I began to fear I would have to come up for air and descend a second time when I saw him, through a blurry film of dark water. Only vaguely at first and then more distinctly, revolving slowly about as if on some small underwater treadmill that was causing him neither to rise nor to descend farther.
Fortunately he did not struggle when I got to him, as close-to- drowning people are supposed to do unless you caution them in the open air where your voice carries. In another moment I had a tight grip on his arm and was ascending with him through what now seemed a depth of at least twenty fathoms.
Five minutes later he was lying stretched out on the sand at the base of the wreckage, with his mother bending over him. She was sobbing softly and looking up at me, her eyes shining with gratefulness.
No seven-year-old could have looked more capable of summoning to his aid all the innate vitality of the very young of sturdy constitution. The color was flooding back into his cheeks, and his eyes were fluttering open with the stubborn, resolute look of a young explorer who refuses to give up, despite the worst buffetings that fate can inflict.
I suppose I should have felt nothing but relief and sympathy. But I was still angry, and the first words I spoke to him were so harsh that 1 almost instantly found myself regretting them.
“You should have known better than to put your mother through something like this. It’s a good thing you’re not my son. If you were there would be no baseball or anything else for you for one solid month. You’d just have to sit at the window and call down to your friends. Probably they are as bad as you are. Unruly, selfish, totally undisciplined kids run together in wolf cub packs.”
The instant I stopped his eyes opened very wide, and he stared up at me without the slightest trace of hostility or resentment in his gaze. It was as if he realized I had spoken like the kind of person I wasn’t and really could never be.
“I couldn’t help it,” he said. “There was something there I knew I’d find if I looked around for it. I didn’t want to find it. But you can’t help it when you dream about something you don’t want to find, and you can’t wake up in time—”
“You dreamed about it?”
“Not like when I go to sleep. I was just thinking about what it would look like when I found it.”
“And that’s why you ran off the way you did, without warning your mother that you were about to do something dangerous?”
“I couldn’t help it. It was like something was pulling me.”
“You were looking at it when I spoke to you,” I said. “So you must have found it. It’s too bad you lost it when you fell into the water. If you still had it, what you want us to believe might make a little more sense. Not much — but a little.”
“I didn’t lose it,” he said. “It’s right here in my hand.”
“But that’s impossible.”
“No, it isn’t,” his mother said, interrupting us for the first time. “Look how tightly clenched his right hand is.”
I could hardly believe it, if only because it made far more sense to assume that the hands of a boy falling from a collapsing board would have opened and closed many times in a desperate kind of grasping, first at the empty air and then at a smothering wall of water rushing in upon him. What I had failed to recognize was that in such an extremity one may hold on to some small object that has just been picked up — a pebble or a shell — even more tightly.
There might even be — more to it than that. Not only adult men and women, but not a few children, had endured unspeakable torments without relinquishing, even in death, some small object precious to them, or feared by them in some terrible secret way. The Children’s Crusade—
It was hard for me to imagine what could have put such thoughts into my mind, for I hadn’t as much as caught a glimpse of the object which John had seemingly found very quickly. Surely what he had said about it could be dismissed as childish prattle. A dreamlike compulsion, coming upon him suddenly, and forcing him to go in search of it, as if drawn by a magnet. Powerless to resist, unable to break that mysterious binding influence. Not wanting to find it at all, but aware that he had been given no choice. Not wanting—
Susan had joined us beneath the wreckage, ignoring the wishes of her mother, who had waved her back to make her son’s recovery less of a problem. Another small child, hopping about in the sand, would have made it difficult for her to give all of her attention to what I’d just been saying to her son.
But now she was looking at me as if I had added a new, unexpected complication by my two full minutes of silence.
“Let him see what it was you picked up, John,” she said. “Just open your hand and show it to him. You’re making some strange mystery out of it, and so is he. I’d like to see it too. Then we’ll all be happier.”
“I can’t,” John said.
“You can’t what?” I demanded, startled by the look of astonishment and pain that had come into his eyes.
“I can’t move my fingers,” he said. “I just found out. I didn’t try before.”
“Oh, that’s nonsense,” I said. “Listen to me, before you say anything even more foolish. You must have at least tried to move your fingers a dozen or more times before I rescued you. Just as often afterward.”
He shook his head. “That’s not true.”
“It has to be true. That’s your right hand. You use it all the time. Everyone does.”
“I can’t move my fingers,” he reiterated. “If I’d opened my hand it would have fallen out—”
“I know all that,” I said. “But you could have at least found out before this whether you could so much as move your fingers. It would have been a natural thing to do.”
It had been difficult for me to think of his mother in a very special way, so overwrought had she become since I had gone to his rescue. But something of the beach-temptress look had returned when her son had opened his eyes and had seemed no worse for the tragedy that had almost overtaken him. But now she looked distraught again. Sudden fear flamed in her eyes.
“Could it be — hysterical paralysis?” she asked. “It can happen, I’ve been told, in quite young children.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Just try to stay calm. We’ll know in a moment.”
I took her son’s hand, raised it, and looked at it closely. He made no protest. The fingers could not have been more tightly clenched. The nails, I felt, must be biting painfully into the flesh of his palms. His knuckles looked bluish.
I began to work on his fingers, trying my best to force them open. I had no success for a moment. Then, gradually, they seemed to become more flexible and some of the stiffness went out of them.
Quite suddenly his entire hand opened, as if my persistent tugging at each individual finger in turn had broken some kind of spell.
The small object which rested on his palm did not seem to have been compressed or injured in any way by the tight constriction to which it had been subjected. I thought at first it was of metal, so brightly did it gleam in the sunlight. But when I picked it up and looked at it closely I saw that it was of some rubbery substance with merely the sheen of metal.
I had never before looked at any inanimate object quite so horrible. Superficially it resembled a tiny many- tentacled octopus, but there was something about it which would have made the ugliest of sea monsters seem merely fishlike in a slightly repulsive way. It had a countenance, of a sort, a shriveled, sunken old man’s face that was no more than suggestively human. Not a human face at all, really, but the suggestion was there, a hint, at least, of anthropoid intelligence of a wholly malignant nature. But the longer I stared at it the less human it seemed, until I began to feel that I had read into it something that wasn’t there. Intelligence, yes— awareness of some kind, but so much the opposite of anthropoid that my mind reeled at trying to imagine what intelligence would be like if it was as cold as the dark night of space and could exercise a wholly merciless authority over every animate entity in the universe of stars.
I looked at Helen Rathbourne and saw that she was trembling and had turned very pale. I had lowered my hand just enough to enable her to see it clearly, and I knew that her son had seen it again too. He said nothing, just looked at me as if, young as he was, the thought that such an object had been taken from his hand made him feel in some strange way contaminated.
“You picked it up without knowing,” I wanted to shout at him. “Forget it, child — blot it from your mind. I’ll take it to the pool you almost drowned in and let it sink from sight, and we’ll forget we ever saw it.”
