The withered man looked up again. The woman in the green uniform was smiling at him through parted, almost twisted lips.
"I suppose that this time of year is the worst for you, isn't it?" she asked sympathetically. The first requirement of a good geriatrician was sympathy and understanding. She determined to try harder to understand.
The old man made no answer, only staring at her face. But his eyes were blank—seeing, yet blind to all around him. She frowned for a moment as she looked at him. The unnatural hairlessness of his body puzzled her, making it difficult for her to understand him while the thought was in her mind—that and the trouble she had getting through to him.
She stared at him as if to pierce the blankness of his gaze. Behind his eyes lay the emptiness of age, the open wound of stifled years.
"I'll move you over to the window, Mr. Symmes," she told him in soothing tones, her smile reappearing. "Then you can look out and see all the people. Won't that be fun?"
Picking up a box from the table, she adjusted a dial. The chair in which he was sitting rose slightly from the floor and positioned itself in front of the window. The woman walked to the wall beside him and corrected the visual index of the glass to match the weakness of the old man's eyes.
"See, down there? Just look at them pushing about."
A rabble of faces swam on the glass in front of him, faces of unfamiliar people, all of them unknown and unknowable to him.
Inside him the whisper of the wings mounted in pitch with a whining, leathery sound. The images of dead faces came flying up, careening across his mind, mingling and merging with the faces of the living. The glass became an anomalous torrent of faces.
Dead faces....