Free The Road to Wellville by T.C. Boyle

this time tomorrow.” The Doctor consulted his pocket watch. “Four P.M. ” He looked up. “Am I understood?”
    Hannah nodded.
    The following evening, when the Doctor arrived home for dinner, a hundred things crowding his mind, he was surprised to see the stooped and shrunken form of George shuffling along the back hallway in his jacket. He paused to watch as the boy slowly mounted the stairs, each step a nearly insurmountable obstacle, and then he followed him as he reached the top, made his way down the upper hallway, turned into the dormitory, and, like an automaton, removed his jacket, hung it on the hook, allowed it to rest there a moment, and then slipped it back on again. It was past seven in the evening. The other children had had their supper, and Hannah was supervising the younger ones in their nightly calisthenics in the gymnasium, while the older children were busy with their chores and lessons. But for the Doctor and George, the dormitory was deserted.
    When the boy had shrugged back into his jacket and turned to retrace his steps, the Doctor spoke. “George,” he said, “you can stop now. I meant only for you to go until four. I think you’ve learned your lesson. Now hang up your jacket and run along with the other children and get your exercise.”
    But George didn’t hang up his jacket. He didn’t run along either. He simply shuffled out of the room, studying his feet, proceeded down the stairs, out the door and then back in again, mounting the stairs to remove his jacket and hang it on the hook for a moment before shrugging back into it and repeating the process all over again.
    Twice more the Doctor spoke to the boy, but George ignored him. John Harvey Kellogg might have been a hole in the wall, a lamp, a coat tree, a wraith wound in its invisible cerements. The boy’s feet hit the stairs, shuffled along the planks. All right, the Doctor thought. All right. If he wants to be stubborn about it, let him. After all, the Doctor had better things to do—sit down to supper, for one thing, and then it was back to the San to take care of the work he’d put off the previous afternoon. The boy would tire. It was inevitable.
    But George didn’t tire. He kept at it, day after day, night after night—he neither ate nor slept that anyone could see, and no plea, no remonstrance could turn him from his obsessive task. In the door, up the stairs, down the hallway to the naked hook, and then back again. The friction of the boy’s feet began to wear a path in the floorboards, his shoes split, the jacket came loose at the seams. A week passed. Two. No one had seen him take nourishment, use the bathroom, sleep. In the door, up the stairs, down the hallway to the naked hook. The doctor awoke in the night and far off, through the tomblike silence of that vast and shadowy house, he heard the shuffling tread of miniature feet:
sh-shh, sh-shh, sh-shh.
It maddened him. It irritated him. It cost him sleep. Finally, in his exasperation, after George had been at it for two and a half weeks and the whole house had been thrown into an uproar, the Doctor jerked back the bedcovers one night and stormed out the door, marched past his wife’s room, turned right down the front stairway and entered the children’s quarters at the rear of the house.
    The corridor was dim, palely lit by the moonlight spilling through the windows. He paused. Listened. He could hear his heart pounding in his ears—but nothing else. Nothing. Not a sound. And then, like a knife thrust, came the shriek of the door on its hinges, and there before him, ceaselessly shuffling, was the ghost of a tiny figure, locked in its compulsive labor: in the door, up the stairs, down the hallway to the naked hook. “George!” the Doctor bellowed. “Damn you, George—I say stop it. Stop this now!”
    His words had no effect. He stood in the boy’s way, blocking his path, but it was nothing to George. The tiny feet shuffled through two supernumerary steps, and