An Abundance of Devils

            Chapter 24:

     A couple of months after my arrival at the Parental School, a sultry late August stillness settles over Bed Number 4, Room A, Cottage B—my bed.  I am awakened at the chilling hour, sometime around three A.M., by a prickly sensation and raise my head from a damp pillow.  My ear picks up the whining of a distant automobile, probably some doctor being called to a deathbed away in the night.  I imagine relatives kneeling around the bed and an angel with outstretched arms hovering in a glow.  A shriveled old woman gasps for breath.  A colic baby goes purple.  Then there is rhythmic clomping of a horse and carriage moving along the Flushing-Jamaica road miles away.  It is certainly not the familiar throb of Manhattan.  Wailing voracious mosquitoes penetrate the corners of the screens of the cottage and find the ruddy, plump cheeks of Abe, Fritz’s tenderloin of veal, and my own sweet forearms.  They’ve wafted up from the pippin orchards of Newtown Creek and Maspeth and the meadows and brackish waters of Flushing and Whitestone and all the way down from Montreal and up from Havana and Mr. Roosevelt’s Panama Canal to feed on us at this hour.  I think of P.T. Barnum dying from an insect bite at Madison Square Garden.  I think of the bloodsucking McGees.  Jack-a-Ripper.  Crickets converse in long, intermittent chirpings.  Tree frogs—I remember the first night I heard the bleeping of tree frogs.  Abe, in the cot to my left, makes a soft “fish” with every breath.  I listen to the cottage’s massive, slumbering timbers snap and moan and grieve in the language of Poe.  My own heart thumps and my ears ring as I take in the faintest shuffle of a restless pigeon nesting along the eaves outside the window.  I guess this one chose not to return to his assigned coop atop our building, or this homer missed curfew after Mother clasped shut the coops at dusk.  And then I rivet on a faint sobbing—the sound that awakened me—and try to discern if the sound is coming from within my head or from without.

     A vague, grieving, mournful, continuous soft treble echoes through the cottage.  It is more of a groan that escalates to a low, haunting wail.  It is not a scream or a

squall, but a continuous, pulsating whimper.  It is not the sound of a single voice, a     crying infant, say, nor even human, I decide, but undulating streams of sounds           weaving a dissonant faint chord now, not unlike violins and cellos tuning in the distance.  Nor is it a mechanical effect—wind fluting through bare limbs in a blizzard, say.  There is no wind, no steam coursing the cottage pipes in August.  No electrical appliances—an electric mixer or sewing machine—are at work at this hour.  To insure that I am not dreaming, I sit up in my cot an