Night-Bloom by Herbert Lieberman

admitting office at New York University Medical Center.
    “Hello,” he barked into the phone a moment later. “Dr. Shavers here. I’m calling from out of town. A patient of mine, Charles Watford, will be admitting himself in the next half hour. He has recurrent renal colic, and I suspect he may require catheterization. I’d like him admitted as an outpatient and put right to bed. My associate, Dr. Rashower, will be up first thing in the morning to do the blood work. The patient will be bringing in urine samples. Poor chap’s in a great deal of pain so he’ll require analgesics over the next forty-eight hours. Until I get back. I’d like him started on meperidine—seven hundred milligrams, liquid, limit his fluids and sodium; no coffee, tea or other stimulants. I’d like an IVN too, and we ought to set him up with radiology for a series of KVR scans. He’s quite important. Diplomatic. State Department. That sort of thing. Please see to it that every step is taken to make him as comfortable as—”
    “What did you say your name was, Doctor?” a nurse inquired politely on the other side.
    “Shavers,” Watford snapped at once, but his heart skipped a beat. “Dr. E. K. Shavers.”
    He realized suddenly that if she asked him what the E stood for, he couldn’t say. But she never did.
    “I’m sorry. We have no Dr. Shavers affiliated here. Could you please—”
    “Sorry,” Watford murmured—
    “Wait. Don’t hang up,” he heard the voice say, but by that time he had judiciously clicked off.
    In the next moment, he was scanning the directory for Beth Israel, another hospital he knew to be in the vicinity, and a likely candidate for affiliation with Dr. E. K. Shavers, Urology, M.D., P.C., F.A.C.S. In no time, he was on the phone with the admitting office of Beth Israel, recounting almost word for word the same scenario he had used a few moments before with N.Y.U. Medical Center. This time it worked like a charm.
    He stepped out of the phone booth and wended his way slowly toward the counter. The pharmacist standing there was adding a column of figures. He looked up as Watford reached the counter.
    “Hello—I’m Charles Watford.”
    “Ah, yes. Mr. Watford. Dr. Shavers called in your prescription a few minutes ago. It’s waiting right here for you.”

10
    “Come up.”
    “It’s too high.”
    “It’s not high. You’re being ridiculous. Come up here, I said.”
    “I’m going down.”
    “Don’t be a fool.”
    “I’m dizzy. I’m—”
    “Don’t you dare go down.”
    In the empty steeple, the voices had a terrifying metallic resonance. A sharp brutal jolt from above. The boy looked up at the stern, gray presence on the stair—an august figure in his late sixties with a mane of flowing white hair and an eye that gave his gaze a beady, slightly walleyed cast.
    “Come up, I tell you,” the man fumed through clenched teeth, struggling to yank the boy bodily up the spiral stair that corkscrewed its way up through the center of the steeple. Against that force, the boy sank to his knees and pulled down hard against the upward drag.
    “You’re coming up, I said.”
    “No, I’m not,” the boy bawled. He had a sinking sense of all defiance oozing out of him. They hung there that way in midair, as it were, locked to each other by the grasp of hands, unable to resolve their struggle one way or another. Gasping and grunting, the man hauled and tugged the boy inchingly upward. His terrified gaze caught sight of the upward reaches of the steeple, beyond the shoulder of the man, the high dark place where he was being dragged. There were beams, rafters and thick hanging ropes surrounding a labyrinth of immense mechanisms where the clock and the great chimes were housed. It was very high up there, and blindingly bright. Mote-filled sunbeams poured through the clerestory windows encircling the steeple.
    The boy had already reached a height above the ground that had paralyzed his ability to look either up or