A couple of minutes before 8 am, a large dog assembled itself in a hedge on a quiet residential road on the edge of town. It padded along the pavement and sat down outside the wrought iron gates of the mock Tudor house. The dog could sense all the people in the houses around him, but in his friend’s house he could just pick out the faintest flicker – something was wrong.
He turned and walked up through the closed gate, through the locked front door and upstairs into the bedroom where his friend of yesterday was still lying. He walked up to the bed. “Hello Shuck, how did you get in? I think I am having a heart attack. I am glad you are here. I don’t want to die alone.” Edmund was struggling to talk and gasped for air when he stopped.
The dog thought “Shuck? I like my name. I will get help.”
He vanished. A young woman with white hair walked into the room. “Hello, I am Eostre, the dog you call Shuck, he belongs to me. He told me you need help.”
She walked over to the bed and sat carefully on the edge. She reached out her hand and placed it on Edmund’s chest. He felt a warm glow spreading into him, the pain stopped and breathing became easier.
“I have called an ambulance. They said they would be here very soon. We are in luck, I think there was one free nearby.”
The old man looked up at her, the white hair seemed to be natural, no dark roots, flawless skin. “Thank you, I feel much better. But how did you get here so quickly.”
She smiled “Shuck moves fast, so do I. He bullied me into coming, it was the only way I could shut him up. I had thought he was supposed to do what I said, not the other way round. But, I am glad to help his new friend. I like his name, he didn’t have one before.”
Edmund smiled back “You carefully avoided answering my question. No matter. Thank you for coming. And you know the legend of Shuck?”
“Yes, I looked it up on the way here, when he told me about it. I think it fits him well, but the Cambridgeshire version, the dog that followed lonely travellers to make sure they got home safe when they were walking the treacherous marshy paths and tracks of the old fens, before they were drained.”
Edmund replied “I have a feeling he did that to me yesterday when I wandered too close to the edge of the sea wall.”
Shuck reappeared, he had been tracking the ambulance, it was now only a few streets away.
Eostre looked appraisingly at Edmund “I think you are feeling a lot better?”
He nodded “Yes, very much so. I will feel a bit of a fraud when the ambulance gets here.”
Eostre stood up “Well you really shouldn’t, and I think you should go in and get yourself checked over anyway.” She walked to the door “I will go down and let them in, I will tell them I am Mrs Smith, your neighbour, if they ask, say that I will keep an eye on the house and feed the dog.”
Edmund looked on bemused as she aged 50 years right in front of him, the face, still beautiful, but wrinkled. As she turned to the door he called out. “Eostre, I hope you won’t mind my saying but, the catsuit, it looked lovely on you before, but as you are now, it might be a little bit of a shock to the ambulance crew.” It was made of a deep blue velvet and had looked very stylish on the 20 year old who had sat down on his bed earlier.
“Ah, thank you. Frumpy frock?” A worn floral dress had replaced the catsuit.
“Yes, that is much better.”
“Would you like me to visit you at the hospital, I assume they will want to keep you in for observation if nothing else?”
“Yes please, I would like that very much.” And maybe I might get some answers out of you, he thought.
She went downstairs, showed the men the way to the bedroom, walked out of the front door and was gone.
The ambulance crew checked Edmund over quickly, and once they were happy he was stabilised, then one of them sat and completed their paperwork while the other made friends with Shuck. “He’s a beauty, Mr Hale, huge though, what breed?”
Edmund answered “Do you know, I have no idea, I don’t think they make them like that anymore, one of a kind!”
The man laughed. “Yep, you might be right there, I’ve not seen one like him, that’s for sure. Very friendly and well mannered, you have him very well trained, will he be all right here on his own, while you are away with us?”
“Yes, he will be fine, my neighbour who you met will keep an eye on him and the house.”
They helped him onto a stretcher, there was a pause while both of the crew made a fuss of Shuck and then they loaded Edmund into the ambulance and drove off to the hospital.
Shuck took a look round the house. Everything seemed to be in good order, doors and windows closed and locked. He found pictures in the living room of a man who looked like a much younger Edmund, smiling, with his arms around a pretty auburn haired woman. “Margaret?” thought Shuck.
Then he turned back to his invisible scout form and continued his reconnaissance assignment of the day before.
At the hospital, Edmund was checked and tested, scanned and probed, X-rayed and imaged and finally, dumped in a bed for a night’s observation as Eostre had predicted. He had had the foresight to bring the book he was currently reading with him and lay there with it, head propped up on the pillows. After a while, a doctor appeared and walked up to his bed “Good afternoon Mr Hale, I am the consultant handling your case, my name is Dr. Kavita Sharma. May I sit down?” He said yes and she settled in the chair by his bed.
“I am happy to tell you that you have not had a heart attack. In fact, your heart is very strong,..” She paused “..actually, more than that, your heart is in the kind of condition we would expect of a fit man maybe twenty years younger than you. So my congratulations on that, you must have been taking very good care of yourself.”
“Now, you will be wondering, what caused you to feel so ill earlier. Well, there are a number of conditions which mimic the symptoms of a heart attack, we cannot be sure which was the culprit, but those which are serious like kidney disease and liver disease we have eliminated, your kidneys and liver seem to be as we would expect in a healthy person of your age. My opinion is that you had Myocarditis, which is an inflammation of the heart muscle. We saw a lot of it in young people during Covid. I have prescribed some medication for you.” She placed a package on the table by his bed. “Take one now and then follow the instructions on the pack. Do work through the whole course and I think I would suggest you contact your GP at the end of the course and see if they have any further advice for you. Do you have any questions?”
He shook his head “No, thank you. That is good to know.” The doctor said her goodbyes and left to see her next patient.
He felt rather bemused, what on earth can Eostre have done to his heart, he could feel, just sitting there in the bed, the tiredness he had felt for, well months, it had gone, and he now had the heart of ‘a fit man maybe twenty years younger’, he was pretty sure that had never been the case before.
He could hear panting. He looked down, the head of a very large black dog was resting on the seat of the chair the doctor had used. “Hello Shuck, where’s your mistress?”
“Here.” Eostre was pulling the curtains round the bed to screen them from view. “I don’t think I am supposed to be here now, and Shuck definitely isn’t. How are you feeling?”
Edmund looked at her thoughtfully for a moment, then “Well, I think you probably know, the consultant has just been to see me. She tells me that my heart is in fine condition, that I did not have a heart attack at all and she gave me some tablets for a rather minor condition which I don’t think I have. So, I am feeling confused. When you came to see me, I was about to die from a major heart attack, wasn’t I?”
Eostre nodded “Yes, had I come even a few minutes later, you would now be dead. Your heart had failed, you could have had that heart attack at any time over the last year or more, it just happened to be today. I think you have other questions you would like to ask me, but you have been through a very stressful day and you really need sleep now, more than you need answers. If you wish, I will visit you at home when you get back and we can talk then, if you have, as I suspect, questions about me, I would prefer to answer them in privacy, not here. In the meantime, is there anything you need tonight?”
Edmund smiled at her “Yes, I do have questions I would like to ask about you, and about him.” He pointed at Shuck “But, I owe you my life, thank you for that, it is a debt I can never repay, and if do not want to answer my questions, I will respect that and I will never tell anyone anything about you. I don’t think anyone would believe what I said anyway. But yes, I would like to know all about you and if you would visit me, I would like that very much. More pressingly, when I left home, I didn’t bring my wallet, my keys, or any clothes.”
“OK, we can sort that last bit out – clothes, what do you need, underwear, shirt, jacket, shoes and socks?”
“Yes, that would be perfect.”
Eostre turn to Shuck “Fetch!” Shuck vanished. She smiled at Edmund “I am so glad you turned him into a dog for me.”
There were a couple of clicks of hangers loaded with clothes arriving on the hook on the wall by the bed and a small pile of underclothes, socks, keys and wallet appeared on the bedside table, then two light thuds from shoes landing on the floor and the Shuck reappeared.
“That’s excellent, thank you Shuck.” Edmund looked up at Eostre “Tomorrow then? Call round late in the morning?”
Eostre nodded “Yes, have a good night’s sleep, Bye bye” And with that she vanished.
Edmund leaned back against the pillows, Eostre was right, he thought, I am exhausted, but life has suddenly got a lot more interesting. He smiled to himself and he dozed off, his hand stroking Shuck’s head.