The Bog (35 page)

It was nearly dark before the ambulance finally arrived, accompanied by the police from Leeming as well as Grenville’s Rolls. It did not surprise him that Grenville was here. He knew that after Melanie had called for the ambulance she would have worried about what Grenville would do when he found out, and she would have called him to apprise him of what was going on. The cars pulled to a stop and the ambulance attendants jumped out and rushed over. Within moments they had placed Tuck’s still-unconscious form on a stretcher and had clamped an oxygen mask over his face.

Melanie also ran over, beginning to scream when she saw Tuck, and one of the policemen quickly took her by the shoulders and held her back.

Grenville got out of his Rolls and watched the proceedings sternly.

As the ambulance attendants loaded Tuck’s stretcher into the back of the ambulance, David tried to comfort Melanie and Katy also ran over crying. It was only after both the police and the ambulance attendants were out of hearing range that Grenville strode angrily over.

“What in the bloody hell do you think you’re doing having these people come here?” he demanded.

David looked at him wrathfully. He knew that Grenville was going to be livid over his actions, but he no longer cared. “It’s my son in there,” he said. “He’s nearly drowned. I had to call them.”

Grenville was still fuming. “And what do you intend to do now?” he asked.

“We intend to go to the hospital and see that he’s okay,” David shot back.

“I won’t allow it!” Grenville snapped.

“And what are you going to do to stop us?”

Grenville glared in the direction of the police, apparently weighing his options.

“If you kill them, not only will Tuck probably die and you won’t have him, but you’ll bring in an investigation that even you might have some trouble handling.”

“Very well,” he growled. “You’ve got me on this one. You and your wife may accompany your son to the hospital, but your daughter stays here.”

Before David or Melanie could do a thing he pulled Katy away from them. Katy’s eyes widened with terror and she was about to cry out when Grenville quickly passed his hand over her face and she fell into a bewitched sleep.

“She’ll be at Wythen Hall until you return,” he said. “And may I suggest for her sake that you keep me fully informed of what is going on, and you return forthwith.” He gestured for his chauffeur to come over to take Kathy’s limp body and place it in the Rolls.

David stepped forward to stop him, but Grenville intervened, venom flooding his expression. “I warn you, Professor Macauley, do not push me any further, or I will kill all of these people, including your son, right here and now.”

Convinced that Grenville was now telling the truth, David stepped back.

“No!” Melanie exclaimed as she watched Katy being taken away, but one of the policemen was approaching them and David motioned for her to be silent.

The ambulance started its motor.

“We’re ready to leave,” the policeman informed them. “Would you and your wife like a ride to the hospital?”

“Thank you,” David returned, “but I have my car here. We’ll drive ourselves.”

“Very well,” the policeman said, nodding. “If you don’t mind we’ll follow along also. We have a few questions we’re going to have to ask you. Just formalities, you understand.”

David nodded.

Before they left David ran up to the ambulance one last time and looked in at his son. “Any prognosis?” he asked the attendant who was still involved in administering oxygen to Tuck.

The attendant looked up. “How long did you say he was underwater?”

“Thirty-five minutes,” David returned.

A shadow seemed to fall over the attendant’s face. “Of course, we’ll have to run some tests, but it’s a miracle that you were able to revive him at all.” He looked with concern at his partner. “I hate to be the one to tell you this, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up about him ever regaining consciousness. Brain death generally occurs after five to ten minutes without oxygen. Even if we do manage to keep your son alive, it’s doubtful that he’ll ever come out of his coma.”

The words cut through David like a sword. Numbed with shock, he assisted Melanie into the Volvo.

“What did he say?” she asked. But for the moment David could not reply. Both the ambulance and the police started their engines and David followed suit. As he turned the key in the ignition he looked at Grenville one last time.

“
What
did he say?” Melanie repeated, but still to no avail.

David’s thoughts were a thousand miles away, and as he pulled up onto the lane he registered only the bottomless pain inside him and the glower on Grenville’s face, illumed by the flashing red light of the ambulance as it receded into the distance.

At the hospital they waited for almost three hours before the physician attending Tuck, a Dr. Grosley, finally came out to talk to them.

Dr. Grosley was a tall man with a bald head. David searched his face for some hint of the news he was bearing. “How is he?” David asked “Is there any hope?” The doctor’s expression remained grim. “Please sit down,” he said, as he took a seat beside them. Before continuing he took off his glasses and wiped their lenses clean with a handkerchief. Then he replaced them and looked at David and Melanie somberly.

He cleared his throat. “As you know, something of a minor miracle has occurred in your being able to revive your son at all after he was submerged for so long underwater.” He looked at David. “I must commend you for your efforts. As I understand it, they were quite extraordinary.”

David nodded perfunctorily.

Dr. Grosley paused again, as if he didn’t quite know what to say next. “I also understand that the lake your son drowned in was a bog lake and that the water was quite cold. Is that correct?”

Again David nodded. “Yes, that’s correct. But why are you asking this? Is it important?”

Dr. Grosley pursed his brow. “In this case I’m beginning to believe that it was quite important. In fact, for your son, the difference between life and death. I don’t know if you have noticed, but in the news in the past several years there have been a number of accounts of this sort of thing. Last year a young boy fell through the ice in a river in Scotland and was under for forty minutes and then was successfully revived. And just this past winter a young woman was pulled from her automobile twenty-five minutes after plunging into an ice-encrusted pond and was successfully resuscitated.”

“And were they all right?” David asked.

“In these two particular cases, after sufficient medical treatment both were able to resume normal lives.”

“But how?” Melanie asked, grasping her husband’s hand hopefully.

“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.