The Bog

by Talbot, Michael

  “Certainly part of their startling recoveries is due to advances medical science has made in such procedures as cardiopulmonary resuscitation and body-core re-warming. But a good deal of it is also due to a recently recognized phenomenon called the Mammalian Diving Reflex.”

  Both Melanie and David looked confused.

  “Let me explain,” Dr. Grosley went on. “You see, the reflex is triggered by the immersion of the face in cold water. This in turn stimulates the ophthalmic branch of the fifth cranial nerve, which results in apnea, bradycardia, and a redistribution of blood from the extremities to the central core of the body.”

  Melanie looked as if she were going to start crying again, and David looked at the doctor irritatedly. “Dr. Grosley, neither of us has any idea what you are talking about. Couldn’t you please just tell us in plain English?” Dr. Grosley blinked several times, looking sincerely apologetic. “I’m sorry. Do forgive me. All I meant is that when the face is immersed in cold water for any length of time, the body shuts down. It mobilizes all of its forces to supply the more vital organs such as the heart, lungs, and brain, with all of the available and oxygen-rich blood at its disposal. It seems to be a very ancient mechanism originally created by nature to allow seagoing mammals such as dolphins and whales to survive underwater. No one knows why human beings also possess the Mammalian Diving Reflex, but in cases such as this it can sometimes buy a little more time for drowning victims such as your son.”

  “But if I heard you correctly,” David interrupted, “the two cases that you mentioned occurred in ice water. The water in the bog lake was cold, but it certainly wasn’t near freezing.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Dr. Grosley responded. “Even on the warmest day of the summer, when the surface temperature of a lake is seventy to seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit, the water at the bottom still only hovers around fifty degrees, and that’s low enough.”

  “Are you trying to tell us that Tuck may be okay?” David asked.

  “Not exactly,” Dr. Grosley returned quickly. “What I mean to say is that we do not know yet. The fact that the water in the lake was cold and you were able to resuscitate your son after so long a time indicates the Mammalian Diving Reflex at least came into play, but the two cases I mentioned were two of the more remarkable ones. There have been other instances of MDR where the patients were resuscitated but still suffered considerable brain damage, and still others where the patients never came out of their comas at all. Now, we’ve run an EEG on your son, and we’ve discovered that there is still upper-brain activity, but all that tells us is that at least Tuck is not brain dead. But we have no idea if he’ll ever come out of his coma, or—if and when he does— whether he will have suffered brain damage, and to what extent. Only time can answer these questions.”

  “So all that you are really telling us,” David said, crestfallen, “is that there is hope.”

  “Yes,” Dr. Grosley returned. “I’m not making you any promises, but there is at least hope.”

  Melanie started to cry and David put his arm around her as the doctor stood up. He waited to see if they had any other questions, and after several moments David looked back up at him.

  “If Tuck does come out of his coma, do you have any idea when that might be?”

  The doctor shook his head sadly. “No, I’m sorry, but we have no way of determining that. It could be in a few days. It could be months.”

  He was about to turn and walk away when suddenly he paused and gazed down at Melanie with a quizzical look on his face.

  “Forgive me for saying it, Mrs. Macauley. I know you’ve been through rather a lot, but you do not look very well. Are you all right?”

  Melanie looked up at the doctor as if she were not going to say anything, but then, sniffling, apparently changed her mind.

  “Well, the truth is I haven’t been feeling very well lately.”

  Dr. Grosley looked at his watch. “I have a few moments, would you like rue to take a look at you?”

  Melanie looked at David hesitantly and David nodded, urging her on. Finally, faltering, she turned to the doctor once again. “Very well.”

  Melanie came away from the examination with a prescription for tranquilizers and the revelation that she was suffering from severe symptoms of stress. For the next twenty-four hours David and Melanie kept a close vigil over Tuck. All that night, as David sat up next to his son, his mind was racked intermittently by feelings of guilt over Tuck’s accident, and then fear for his daughter’s safety. He blamed himself for what happened to Tuck. He hated himself for ever taking Tuck to the bog in the first place, and he rebuked himself even more for not keeping a closer eye on him. Mixed in with this guilt was the worry that perhaps Melanie had been right, perhaps he had expected too much of his son, and if he had not this terrible thing might not have happened. As for Katy, David had no substantive reasons to suspect that Grenville was going to harm his hostage, but by now, at the very least, he had come to realize that the old sorcerer was as cruel as he was unpredictable, and even if he treated Katy with all of the decorum of his title, David knew that, should Grenville bring Katy out of her bewitched sleep, finding herself alone with the Marquis would be torture enough and would send her into a blind panic. And so, late that night, they drove back to the valley, and after picking up Katy, whom Grenville had mercifully left in her enchanted sleep for the duration of her incarceration, David reluctantly dropped his wife and daughter back at the cottage and returned to the hospital alone.

  As the first day of Tuck’s coma slowly grew into two, and then three, David’s guilt intensified. He recalled clearly that shortly before the accident he had entertained the notion of accepting Grenville’s offer of power, and he began to feel that, because of this, in some way beyond his reckoning the universe was punishing him, trying to teach him a lesson for having such cavalier thoughts. His excruciating bouts of self-reproach were punctuated only by moments of incredulity that he could be in this situation at all. As he passed the increasingly endless hours in the hospital waiting room watching the doctors and the nurses walking to and fro, he found himself wanting to shout out to them, to take them by the shoulders and tell them about the bizarre and terrifying plight that now held his family in a death grip, but even if he had harbored the hope that anyone would have believed him, he had come to believe in Grenville’s powers too fully to have any confidence that this would help him out of the nightmare he was living.

  It was on the fourth day following the accident, while David was getting some coffee out of a machine at the end of the corridor, that one of the nurses came running up behind him.

  “Mr. Macauley, Mr. Macauley! It’s your son. We believe he may be coming out of his coma!”

  Tossing his still full cup into the trash, David hurriedly followed the nurse back to Tuck’s room. There he found several other nurses standing around Tuck’s bed with Dr. Grosley hovering over his son excitedly.

  “His hands,” Dr. Grosley instructed. “Look at his hands.”

  David looked down and saw that Tuck’s tiny hands were twitching as if coursing with an unseen current. Although it was a minor act, the various onlookers in the room were responding to it with almost uncontrollable excitement. For the first time since the accident David also felt a surge of hope, but then he looked down and saw a large red welt on Tuck’s arm. “What’s that?” he asked.

  “We took some blood to test for hepatitis from the bog water,” Dr. Grosley was saying, when one of the nurses suddenly interrupted.

  “His eyes!” she said excitedly.

  David directed his attention to Tuck’s eyes and saw that his lids had also started to quiver. Like a robot exploring long-dead circuits, the unseen energy shot through Tuck’s still limp body, here causing a facial spasm, and there a twitch in his leg, until finally a rapturous cry rose from everyone in the room as Tuck’s eyes slowly opened and he apparently struggled to focus on the faces around him.

  David rushed forward and grasped his son
’s hand. “Tuck!” he exclaimed. “It’s Daddy. Daddy’s here.” He looked hopefully down into his son’s face, but Tuck just continued to squint confusedly, his gaze examining David, and then moving away and looking at Dr. Grosley, and then each of the nurses in turn.

  “Tuck!” David repeated, but still Tuck paid him no special mind. He looked at David with neither fear nor recognition, as if he saw no more that was familiar to him in David’s countenance than he saw in any of the other faces present.

  David looked fearfully at Dr. Grosley.

  “He may still be confused,” the older man returned. “Keep trying. See if you can get him to say something.”

  David turned again to his son. “Tuck,” he murmured softly. “Can you remember me? Do you know your name? Your name is Tuck. Can you say that? Can you say Tuck?’

  Still Tuck only blinked perplexedly.

  “Please,” David begged. “Please can you say something? Anything?”

  For the first time Tuck seemed to register that he was being asked to do something, and he looked at David slightly more penetratingly than before.

  “Tuck,” David said, mouthing the words more slowly. “Can you say Tuck?”

  He paused and everyone watched Tuck with silent anticipation, and then finally the child opened his mouth. For a moment nothing came out, as he apparently experienced anew the feeling of having vocal cords, and then at last a slow and faltering cascade of syllables crept forth. But everyone in the room remained tensely silent, for the sounds that came out had been unintelligible and more like the slurred and impenetrable stammerings of a stroke victim than coherent human speech.

  David’s face fell and Dr. Grosley quickly grasped his arm comfortingly.

  “Sometimes, if the speech centers of the brain have been damaged, many other functions still remain intact. Has your son learned to read yet?”

  David nodded.

  “Are there any written words, perhaps his name or something, that he would display a more than normal recognition of?”

  David thought about it for a moment. “Yes, I believe so,” he replied.

  Dr. Grosley withdrew a felt-tip pen from his pocket and took a piece of paper from a tablet near the bed. “Write the word here in large, bold letters.”

  David did as requested. With slow and measured strokes he spelled out the word MOXIE. Dr. Grosley took the paper back from him and looked at the word, blinking several times and then smiling faintly.

  “Now let’s see,” he said. He held the paper up a foot or two in front of Tuck’s face and Tuck focused on the marking on the paper.

  “Watch his lips to see if he tries to mouth the word silently,” he instructed.

  Again everyone in the room went silent, and for several seconds Tuck continued to scrutinize the word on the paper, the black against the white. But his lips did not move, nor did he register even the faintest hint of recognition. He looked up blankly at the people around him, still paying no more mind to David’s face than he did to any of the others present. A pall fell over the room.

  “I’m so sorry, Mr. Macauley,” one of the nurses said, and David turned to Dr. Grosley anxiously.

  “What does it mean?” he asked, whatever hope he had so recently fostered now rapidly slipping away.

  Dr. Grosley’s gaze became evasive and downcast. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It appears that your son’s brain damage is more extensive than we had expected.

  “What does that mean?” David repeated.

  Dr. Grosley looked at him grimly. “It’s difficult to say. At the very least it means that your son as you knew him is no longer there. There may be remnants of his memories of who he once was somewhere deep in his mind, but the fact that he displays absolutely no recognition of you, or his name, or the word that we have just shown him indicates that this information is pretty much absent from his mind.”

  “And at the very worst?” David asked, detecting in the way that Dr. Grosley had couched his remark that there were darker tidings to come.

  “Well certainly we now know that at least some brain damage has occurred. However, given that we still don’t know the extent of the damage, or what learning disabilities it has brought with it, it will still be quite some time before we can predict how much, if at all, Tuck might recover from his current condition. In the worst scenario he may remain like this forever, a perpetual infant. However, if the damage is not too severe, through therapy and a great deal of love and patience, in a few years we may be able to instill in him a few new memories, we may even, in time, be able to teach him to speak and read once again.”

  In the next several days it was discovered that Tuck’s motor functions had remained unimpaired, and although he was wobbly he could still manipulate objects and walk by himself. However, he still continued to display no more than what had become a familiar and trusting acceptance of David’s presence, and, in fact, displayed more excitement at the presence of a nurse that he had taken a liking to than he did toward his own father. Occasionally, he also persevered in his attempts at human speech, but these remained garbled and indecipherable, and Tuck seemed almost puzzled by this fact, as if something deep inside him recalled communicating with people in this manner, and was now baffled and frustrated at the process no longer working.

  Learning the truth about Tuck’s condition had also pretty much brought David to his knees. When he was with his son, or what was left of his son, he forced himself to be cheerful and encouraging, but when he was alone he was desolate. The loss of Tuck as he had known and loved him, combined with the unrelenting awareness of Grenville’s stranglehold on his family, had left David a broken man. He didn’t sleep much and he seldom ate, and by the time Dr. Grosley said it would be all right to take Tuck home and continue nursing him back to health there, David was like a man deranged, his hair tousled, his gaze blank and frightening, and his clothing unkempt. It was as he was out in the parking lot ready to bring the car around to pick up Tuck that he saw a figure approaching him in the darkness.

  He looked up agitatedly, primed to run at a moment’s notice, and then he realized it was Brad.

  “Dr. Macauley... David,” the younger man called out.

  “Brad, what are you doing here?”

  Brad stepped into the circle of one of the parking-lot lights and stood about four feet from David.

  “I was so worried about you,” he returned. “And Mrs. Macauley. I hadn’t heard from you and then a friend of mine who’s an intern here called me and told me what happened to Tuck. I’m so sorry.”

  David looked at his graduate assistant nervously. He was happy to see him, indeed, thrilled at the sight of a familiar and comforting face. But he was also afraid, for he knew that he was still bound by Grenville’s command of silence.

  “How is Mrs. Macauley... ah, Melanie doing?”

  “Not well, I’m afraid,” David stammered in return. Brad’s forehead furrowed as he shook his head sympathetically. “God, I’m sorry to hear about all of this. Listen, I don’t want to pressure you about the digs because I know that’s got to be the last thing on your mind, but is there anything I can do to help you out? Anything at all?”

  David felt a wave of affection for the younger man flow through him and he yearned desperately to be able to open up to him, to let everything that was happening to him just come flooding forth, but he knew that he could not. “No,” he said as the evening wind blew up gustily around them.

  “Do you think I could maybe visit, come around some day this week to see how things are going?”

  “No,” David repeated quickly, fearing the consequences. He looked at the younger man and saw that his feelings appeared to be hurt by the brusqueness of his refusal. “I’m sorry, Brad,” he said in a more amicable tone. “It’s just that... well, you’ve got to understand Melanie’s in pretty bad shape, and I appreciate your offer. I appreciate it more than you may even imagine, but I just don’t want to chance setting Melanie off. I hope you’ll be patient with me on this.” />
  “Sure, whatever you say,” Brad said softly.

  David looked at his watch and then back at the younger man, his eyes filled with conflicting emotion. “I’m sorry, Brad. I really have to be going.”

  Brad looked bewilderedly at him as David fidgeted and prepared to leave.

  “Dr. Macauley... ah, I mean, David?”

  “Yes?”

  “Are you sure everything’s all right? I mean, I know you must be going through hell, but I get a strange feeling there’s more to it than that, there’s something else going on that you’re not telling me.” Brad reached out and took David by the arm and David looked down, realizing that such a bold gesture of affection probably took every ounce of nerve that the younger man possessed.

  He looked up into the younger man’s eyes and was swept again with the urge to confide in him. After all, what more could happen to him? What terrible blow could fate or Grenville deliver him that would make him any more miserable? The wind blew again, and he looked around nervously as he realized that even if Julia had taken the form of an insect, if they strode together full face into the wind she might never be able to flutter close enough to them to hear, to know that he was betraying any secrets.

  His heart began to pound. “There is something I’m not telling you, Brad, but we’ve got to walk.” He looked around again. “I don’t want to be overheard.”

  “But there’s no one else in the parking lot,” Brad countered, looking even more concerned.

  “It doesn’t matter!” David snapped. “Follow me.” He turned around and started walking into the wind.

  They strode out into an open space in the parking lot and David continued to look fearfully about.

  “Well, what is it?” Brad prodded.

  David looked at the younger man once more and was about to tell him when suddenly he was swept with a constricting fear. Was he doing the right thing? Or was Grenville listening somehow, through some artifice that he didn’t even know about?

  He struggled to force the words out. “It’s more fantastic than anything you’ve ever encountered before in your life. Brad, I don’t expect for you to believe me, but certainly you know I’m not the sort of man to make something like this up. It’s the most frightening thing I’ve ever been up against. It’s—”