by Ann
Willet lay at one end of the line of trestles. He wore a thermal shirt and overalls that were strikingly new beneath the filth of burial. Their tough fabrics jarred with the fabric of his flesh – blue, swollen, seeming easily torn or burst, like ripe fruit. In life Willet had grease-combed his hair. Now it was a sculpture of dust, spikes and whorls shaped by the head’s last grindings against the mountain that clenched it.
Rigor had come and gone – Willet rolled laxly onto the gurney. As the doctor wheeled him past the others, he felt a slight self-consciousness. The sense of some judgment flowing from the dead assembly – unlike most such vagrant fantasies – had an odd tenacity in him. This stubborn unease began to irritate him with himself, and he moved more briskly.
He put Willet on the examining table and cut the clothes off him with shears, storing the pieces in an evidence box. The overalls were soiled with agonal waste expulsions. The doctor stared a moment with unwilling pity at his naked subject. ‘You won’t ride down to Fordham in any case,’ he said to the corpse. ‘Not unless I find something pretty damned obvious.’ He pulled his gloves tighter and arranged his implements.
Waddleton had said more to him than he had reported to the sheriff. The doctor was to find, and forcefully to record that he had found, strong ‘indications’ absolutely requiring the decedents’ removal to Fordham for X-ray and an exhaustive second postmortem. The doctor’s continued employment with the Coroner’s Office depended entirely on his compliance in this. He had received this stipulation with a silence Waddleton had not thought it necessary to break. His present resolution was all but made at that moment. Let the obvious be taken as such. If the others showed as plainly as Willet did the external signs of death by asphyxiation, they would receive no more than a thorough external exam. Willet he would examine internally as well, merely to establish in depth for this one what should appear obvious in all. Otherwise, only when the external exam revealed a clearly anomalous feature – and clear and suggestive it must be – would he look deeper.
He rinsed the caked hair in a basin, poured the sediment into a flask and labeled it. Starting with the scalp, he began a minute scrutiny of the body’s surfaces, recording his observations as he went.
The characteristic signs of asphyxial death were evident, despite the complicating effects of autolysis and putrefaction. The eyeballs’ bulge and the tongue’s protrusion were, by now, as much due to gas pressure as to the mode of death, but the latter organ was clamped between locked teeth, leaving little doubt as to that mode. The coloration of degenerative change – a greenish-yellow tint, a darkening and mapping-out of superficial veins – was marked, but not sufficient to obscure the blue of cyanosis on the face and neck, nor the pinpoint hemorrhages freckling neck, chest, and shoulders. From the mouth and nose the doctor scraped matter he was confident was the blood-tinged mucous typically ejected in the airless agony.
He began to find a kind of comedy in his work. What a buffoon death made of a man! A blue pop-eyed three-lipped thing. And there was himself, his curious solicitous intimacy with this clownish carrion. Excuse me, Mr Willet, while I probe this laceration. What do you feel when I do this? Nothing? Nothing at all? Fine, now what about these nails? Split them clawing at the earth, did you? Yes. A nice bloodblister under this thumbnail, I see – got it on the job a few days before your accident, no doubt? Remarkable calluses here, still quite tough…
The doctor looked for an unanalytic moment at the hands – puffed dark paws, gestureless, having renounced all touch and grasp. He felt the wastage of the man concentrated in the hands. The painful futility of the body’s fine articulation when it is seen in death – this poignancy he had long learned not to acknowledge when he worked. But now he let it move him a little. This Roger Willet, plodding to his work one afternoon, had suddenly been scrapped, crushed to a nonfunctional heap of perishable materials. It simply happened that his life had chanced to move too close to the passage of a more powerful life, one of those inexorable and hungry lives that leave human wreckage – known or undiscovered – in their wakes. Bad luck, Mr Willet. Naturally, we feel very sorry about this. But this Joe Allen, your co-worker. Apparently he was some sort of…cannibal. It’s complicated. We don’t understand it all. But the fact is we have to dismantle you now to a certain extent. There’s really no hope of your using these parts of yourself again, I’m afraid. Ready now?
The doctor proceeded to the internal exam with a vague eagerness for Willet’s fragmentation, for the disarticulation of that sadness in his natural form. He grasped Willet by the jaw and took up the postmortem knife. He sank its point beneath the chin and began the long, gently sawing incision that opened Willet from throat to groin.
In the painstaking separation of the body’s laminae Dr Winters found absorption and pleasure. And yet throughout he felt, marginal but insistent, the movement of a stream of irrelevant images. These were of the building that contained him, and of the night containing it. As from outside, he saw the plant – bleached planks, iron roofing – and the trees crowding it, all in starlight, a ghosttown image. And he saw the refrigerator vault beyond the wall as from within, feeling the stillness of murdered men in a cold yellow light. And at length a question formed itself, darting in and out of the weave of his concentration as the images did: Why did he still feel, like some stir of the air, that sense of mute vigilance surrounding his action, furtively touching his nerves with its inquiry as he worked? He shrugged, overtly angry now. Who else was attending but Death? Wasn’t he Death’s hireling, and this Death’s place? Then let the master look on.
Peeling back Willet’s cover of hemorrhage-stippled skin, Dr Winters read the corpse with an increasing dispassion, a mortuary text. He confined his inspection to the lungs and mediastinum and found there unequivocal testimony to Willet’s asphyxial death. The pleurae of the lungs exhibited the expected ecchymoses – bruised spots in the glassy enveloping membrane. Beneath, the polyhedral surface lobules of the lungs themselves were bubbled and blistered – the expected interstitial emphysema. The lungs, on section, were intensely and bloodily congested. The left half of the heart he found contracted and empty, while the right was overdistended and engorged with dark blood, as were the large veins of the upper mediastinum. It was a classic picture of death by suffocation, and at length the doctor, with needle and suture, closed up the text again.
He returned the corpse to the gurney and draped one of his mortuary bags over it in the manner of a shroud. When he had help in the morning, he would weigh the bodies on a platform scale the office contained and afterward bag them properly. He came to the refrigerator door, and hesitated. He stared at the door, not moving, not understanding why.
Run. Get out. Now.
The thought was his own, but it came to him so urgently he turned around as if someone behind him had spoken. Across the room a thin man in smock and gloves, his eyes shadows, glared at the doctor from the black windows. Behind the man was a shrouded cart, behind that, a wide metal door.
Quietly, wonderingly, the doctor asked, ‘Run from what?’ The eyeless man in the glass was still half-crouched, afraid.
Then, a moment later, the man straightened, threw back his head, and laughed. The doctor walked to the desk and sat down shoulder to shoulder with him. He pulled out the bottle and they had a drink together, regarding each other with identical bemused smiles. Then the doctor said, ‘Let me pour you another. You need it, old fellow. It makes a man himself again.’
Nevertheless his reentry of the vault was difficult, toilsome, each step seeming to require a new summoning of the will to move. In the freezing half-light all movement felt like defiance. His body lagged behind his craving to be quick, to be done with this molestation of the gathered dead. He returned Willet to his pallet and took his neighbor. The name on the tag wired to his boot was Ed Moses. Dr Winters wheeled him back to the office and closed the big door behind him.
With Moses his work gained momentum. He expected to perform no further internal necropsi
es. He thought of his employer, rejoicing now in his seeming-submission to Waddleton’s ultimatum. The impact would be dire. He pictured the coroner in shock, a sheaf of Pathologist’s Reports in one hand, and smiled.
Waddleton could probably make a plausible case for incomplete examination. Still, a pathologist’s discretionary powers were not well-defined. Many good ones would approve the adequacy of the doctor’s method, given his working conditions. The inevitable litigation with a coalition of compensation claimants would be strenuous and protracted. Win or lose, Waddleton’s venal devotion to the insurance company’s interest would be abundantly displayed. Further, immediately on his dismissal the doctor would formally disclose its occult cause to the press. A libel action would ensue that he would have as little cause to fear as he had to fear his firing. Both his savings and the lawsuit would long outlast his life.
Externally, Ed Moses exhibited a condition as typically asphyxial as Willet’s had been, with no slightest mark of fragment entry. The doctor finished his report and returned Moses to the vault, his movements brisk and precise. His unease was all but gone. That queasy stirring of the air – had he really felt it? It had been, perhaps, some new reverberation of the death at work in him, a psychic shudder of response to the cancer’s stealthy probing for his life. He brought out the body next to Moses in the line.
Walter Lou Jackson was big, six feet two inches from heel to crown, and would surely weigh out at more than two hundred pounds. He had writhed mightily against his million-ton coffin with an agonal strength that had torn his face and hands. Death had mauled him like a lion. The doctor set to work.
His hands were fully themselves now – fleet, exact, intricately testing the corpse’s character as other fingers might explore a keyboard for its latent melodies. And the doctor watched them with an old pleasure, one of the few that had never failed him, his mind at one remove from their busy intelligence. All the hard deaths! A worldful of them, time without end. Lives wrenched kicking from their snug meat-frames. Walter Lou Jackson had died very hard. Joe Allen brought this on you, Mr Jackson. We think it was part of his attempt to escape the law.
But what a botched flight! The unreason of it – more than baffling – was eerie in its colossal futility. Beyond question, Allen had been cunning. A ghoul with a psychopath’s social finesse. A good old boy who could make a tavernful of men laugh with delight while he cut his victim from their midst, make them applaud his exit with the prey, who stepped jovially into the darkness with murder at his side clapping him on the shoulder. Intelligent, certainly, with a strange technical sophistication as well, suggested by the sphere. Then what of the lunacy yet more strongly suggested by the same object? In the sphere was concentrated all the lethal mystery of Bailey’s long nightmare.
Why the explosion? Its location implied an ambush for Allen’s pursuers, a purposeful detonation. Had he aimed at a limited cave-in from which he schemed some inconceivable escape? Folly enough in this – far more if, as seemed sure, Allen had made the bomb himself, for then he would have to know its power was grossly inordinate to the need.
But if it was not a bomb, had a different function and only incidentally an explosive potential, Allen might underestimate the blast. It appeared the object was somehow remotely monitored by him, for the timing of events showed he had gone straight for it the instant he emerged from the shaft – shunned the bus waiting to take his shift back to town and made a beeline across the compound for a patrol car that was hidden from his view by the office building. This suggested something more complex than a mere explosive device, something, perhaps, whose destruction was itself more Allen’s aim than the explosion produced thereby.
The fact that he risked the sphere’s retrieval at all pointed to this interpretation. For the moment he sensed its presence at the mine, he must have guessed that the murder investigation had led to its discovery and removal from his room. But then, knowing himself already liable to the extreme penalty, why should Allen go to such lengths to recapture evidence incriminatory of a lesser offense, possession of an explosive device?
Then grant that the sphere was something more, something instrumental to his murders that could guarantee a conviction he might otherwise evade. Still, his gambit made no sense. Since the sphere – and thus the lawmen he could assume to have taken it was already at the mine office, he must expect the compound to be scaled at any moment. Meanwhile, the gate was open, escape into the mountains a strong possibility for a man capable of stalking and destroying two experienced and well-armed woodsmen lying in ambush for him. Why had he all but ensured his capture to weaken a case against himself that his escape would have rendered irrelevant? Dr Winters watched as his own fingers, like a hunting pack round a covert, converged on a small puncture wound below Walter Lou Jackson’s xiphoid process, between the eighth ribs.
His left hand touched its borders, the fingers’ inquiry quick and tender. The right hand introduced a probe, and both together eased it into the wound. It was rarely fruitful to use a probe on corpses this decayed; the track of the wound would more properly be examined by section. But an inexplicable sense of urgency had taken hold of him. Gently, with infinite pains not to pierce in the softened tissues an artifactual track of his own, he inched the probe in. It moved unobstructed deep into the body, curving upward through the diaphragm toward the heart. The doctor’s own heart accelerated. He watched his hands move to record the observation, watched them pause, watched them return to their survey of the corpse, leaving pen and page untouched.
External inspection revealed no further anomaly. All else he observed the doctor recorded faithfully, wondering throughout at the distress he felt. When he had finished, he understood it. Its cause was not the discovery of an entry wound that might bolster Waddleton’s case. For the find had, within moments, revealed to him that, should he encounter anything he thought to be a mark of fragment penetration, he was going to ignore it. The damage Joe Allen had done was going to end here, with this last grand slaughter, and would not extend to the impoverishment of his victims’ survivors. His mind was now made up: for Jackson and the remaining seven, the external exams would be officially recorded as contraindicating the need for any external exam.
No, the doctor’s unease as he finished Jackson’s external – as he wrote up his report and signed it – had a different source. His problem was that he did not believe the puncture in Jackson’s thorax was a mark of fragment entry. He disbelieved this, and had no idea why he did so. Nor had he any idea why, once again, he felt afraid. He sealed the report. Jackson was now officially accounted for and done with. Then Dr Winters took up the postmortem knife and returned to the corpse.
First the long sawing slice, unzippering the mortal overcoat. Next, two great square flaps of flesh reflected, scrolled laterally to the armpits’ line, disrobing the chest: one hand grasping the flap’s skirt, the other sweeping beneath it with the knife, flensing through the glassy tissue that joined it to the chest wall, and shaving all muscles from their anchorages to bone and cartilage beneath. Then the dismantling of the strongbox within. Rib shears – so frank and forward a tool, like a gardener’s. The steel beak bit through each rib’s gristle anchor to the sternum’s centerplate. At the sternum’s crownpiece the collarbones’ ends were knifed, pried, and sprung free from their sockets. The coffer unhasped, unhinged, a knife teased beneath the lid and levered it off.
Some minutes later the doctor straightened up and stepped back from his subject. He moved almost drunkenly, and his age seemed scored more deeply in his face. With loathing haste he stripped his gloves off. He went to the desk, sat down, and poured another drink. If there was something like horror in his face, there was also a hardening in his mouth’s line and the muscles of his jaw. He spoke to his glass: ‘So be it, your Excellency. Something new for your humble servant. Testing my nerve?’
Jackson’s pericardium, the shapely capsule containing his heart, should have been all but hidden between the big blood-fat loaves of his lungs
. The doctor had found it fully exposed, the lungs flanking it wrinkled lumps less than a third their natural bulk. Not only they, but the left heart and the superior mediastinal veins – all the regions that should have been grossly engorged with blood – were utterly drained of it.
The doctor swallowed his drink and got out the photographs again. He found that Jackson had died on his stomach across the body of another worker, with the upper part of a third trapped between them. Neither these two subjacent corpses nor the surrounding earth showed any stain of a blood loss that must have amounted to two liters.
Possibly the pictures, by some trick of shadow, had failed to pick it up. He turned to the Investigator’s Report, where Craven would surely have mentioned any significant amounts of bloody earth uncovered during the disinterment. The sheriff recorded nothing of the kind. Dr Winters returned to the pictures.
Ronald Pollock, Jackson’s most intimate associate in the grave, had died on his back, beneath and slightly askew of Jackson, placing most of their torsos in contact, save where the head and shoulder of the third interposed. It seemed inconceivable Pollock’s clothing should lack any trace of such massive drainage from a death mate thus embraced.
The doctor rose abruptly, pulled on fresh gloves, and returned to Jackson. His hands showed a more brutal speed now, closing the great incision temporarily with a few widely spaced sutures. He replaced him in the vault and brought out Pollock, striding, heaving hard at the dead shapes in the shifting of them, thrusting always – so it seemed to him – just a step ahead of urgent thoughts he did not want to have, deformities that whispered at his back, emitting faint, chill gusts of putrid breath. He shook his head – denying, delaying – and pushed the new corpse onto the worktable. The scissors undressed Pollock in greedy bites.