"Oh." Cora looked a moment at her face reflected in the oval mirror. Then her gaze lowered to the photograph on the dressing table-David as he was when he was nine. The Nielsen boy looked a great deal like David, she thought. Same height and build. Maybe David's hair had been a trifle darker but-
What's to be done with him?" she asked.
"Couldn't say, Cora," he answered. "We have to wait till the end of the month, I guess. Tom Poulter says the Nielsens got three letters the end of every month. Come from Europe, he said. We'll just have to wait for them, then write back to the addresses on them. May be the boy has relations over there."
"Europe," she said, almost to herself. "That far away."
Her husband grunted, then pulled the covers back and sank down heavily on the mattress.
"Tired," he muttered.
He stared at the ceiling. "Come to bed," he said.
"In a little while."
She sat there brushing distractedly at her hair until the sound of his snoring broke the silence. Then, quietly, she rose and moved across the hall.
There was a river of moonlight across the bed. It flowed over Paal's small, motionless hands. Cora stood in the shadows a long time looking at the hands. For a moment she thought it was David in his bed again.
It was the sound.
Like endless club strokes across his vivid mind, it pulsed and throbbed into him in an endless, garbled din. He sensed it was communication of a sort but it hurt his ears and chained awareness and locked incoming thoughts behind dense, impassable walls.
Sometimes, in an infrequent moment of silence he would sense a fissure in the walls and, for that fleeting moment, catch hold of fragments-like an animal snatching scraps of food before the trap jaws clash together.
But then the sound would start again, rising and falling in rhythmless beat, jarring and grating, rubbing at the live, glistening surface of comprehension until it was dry and aching and confused.
"Paal," she said.
A week had passed; another week would pass before the letters came.
"Paal, didn't they ever talk to you? Paal?"
Fists striking at delicate acuteness. Hands squeezing sensitivity from the vibrant ganglia of his mind.
"Paal, don't you know your name? Paal? Paal."
There was nothing physically wrong with him. Doctor Steiger had made sure of it. There was no reason for him not to talk.
"We'll teach you, Paal. It's all right, darling. We'll teach you." Like knife strokes across the weave of consciousness. "Paal. Paal."
Paal. It was himself; he sensed that much. But it was different in the ears, a dead, depressive sound standing alone and drab, without the host of linked associations that existed in his mind. In thought, his name was more than letters. It was him, every facet of his person and its meaning to himself, his mother and his father, to his life. When they had summoned him or thought his name it had been more than just the small hard core which sound made of it. It had been everything interwoven in a flash of knowing, unhampered by sound.
"Paal, don't you understand? It's your name. Paal Nielsen. Don't you understand?"
Drumming, pounding at raw sensitivity. Paal. The sound kicking at him. Paal. Paal. Trying to dislodge his grip and fling him into the maw of sound.
"Paal. Try, Paal. Say it after me. Pa-al. Pa-al."
Twisting away, he would run from her in panic and she would follow him to where he cowered by the bed of her son.
Then, for long moments, there would be peace. She would hold him in her arms and, as if she understood, would not speak. There would be stillness and no pounding clash of sound against his mind. She would stroke his hair and kiss away sobless tears. He would lie against the warmth of her, his mind, like a timid animal, emerging from its hiding place again-to sense a flow of understanding from this woman. Feeling that needed no sound.
Love-wordless, unencumbered, and beautiful.
Sheriff Wheeler was just leaving the house that morning when the phone rang. He stood in the front hallway, waiting until Cora picked it up.
"Harry!" he heard her call. "Are you gone yet?"
He came back into the kitchen and took the receiver from her. "Wheeler," he said into it. "Tom Poulter, Harry," the postmaster said. "Them letters is in."
"Be right there," Wheeler said and hung up.
"The letters?" his wife asked.
Wheeler nodded.
"Oh," she murmured so that he barely heard her.
When Wheeler entered the post office twenty minutes later, Poulter slid the three letters across the counter. The sheriff picked them up.
"Switzerland," he read the postmarks, "Sweden, Germany."
"That's the lot," Poulter said, "like always. On the thirtieth of the month."