THE M.D. A Horror Story

by Thomas M. Disch

  “I believe you, I believe you,” Henry said, shaking the boy’s shoulder. “Now come on, wake up.”

  It was never easy to wake Ned when he was in the grip of his night terrors. Madge had asked a woman doctor in the psychiatric ward about Ned’s problem, and the doctor had explained that it was clinically different from ordinary nightmares but nothing to worry about. He would outgrow them.

  Henry pulled the boy into a sitting position and shouted at him: “Ned, wake up—it’s only a dream.”

  “I didn’t see it!” Ned screamed in reply, twisting his body to break out of Henry’s grip. “I wasn’t there!” It was as though he were defying a torturer who was trying to get him to confess—but to what crime, imagined or real, Ned would probably not be able to say once he was awakened. For unlike dreams, these night terrors seemed to vanish without a trace at the moment of waking. All Ned had ever been able to say about them was that they involved someone with a squeaky voice and that the scariest thing about them was a feeling of being crushed beneath a slowly moving weight.

  The boy shook his head back and forth, whipping his sweat-curled hair from side to side. “I didn’t see it!” he shouted one last time—and then awoke. The eyes that had been trapped, open but sightless, in the nightmare regarded Henry with recognition, and the lips still flecked with spittle offered him a tired smile. “Hi. I guess I was dreaming again.”

  Henry nodded.

  “I’m sorry. I hope I didn’t wake everyone up. Is it late?”

  “It’s not even eleven yet.”

  “Mom’s still at work?”

  Henry nodded. “And I’m downstairs wrapping presents with Grandma Obstschmecker.”

  Ned wiped the spittle from his mouth. “What are you doing wrapping presents? I thought they all came from Santa Claus.”

  “Okay, smart guy, we’re not wrapping presents. We’re discussing politics. You want to come down and discuss politics with your grandmother?”

  “No thanks. I think I’d rather have another nightmare.”

  “No more nightmares tonight. Doctor’s orders.” He gave the boy a hug and eased his still tense body back against the damp pillow. “You can read for a while if you want to.”

  Ned shook his head.

  “See you in the morning,” Henry said, switching off the light.

  There was no response from the darkness.

  Henry made sure that Billy was sleeping soundly (for a wonder, the boy hadn’t come down with a cold as a penalty for his adventure of two days ago). Then he took a piss in the bathroom sink and returned downstairs to finish wrapping presents.

  8

  It was the day after the day after Christmas, and Ned had the house all to himself. His mother, who had Thursdays off, and Henry, now officially unemployed, had gone to an early matinee of a brand-new and supposedly very gross horror movie called The Exorcist, while Grandma Obstschmecker had taken Billy to a free puppet-show version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, leaving Ned at liberty to use the phone or plunder the icebox or play with any of Billy’s Christmas presents without Billy’s knowing. Instead, he had spread open his three-ring binder on the dining room table to do some Extra Credit homework for Miss Brophy’s Core Curriculum class.

  The Caduceus

  he wrote across the top of a sheet of the wide-lined paper, where the title was supposed to go, and then, on the next line:

  (Symbol of Medical Science)

  He skipped two lines, and began:

  Mercury was a deity worshiped by the ancient Romans. He was the god of roads and messengers. Statues and pictures of Mercury show him wearing winged shoes and a winged cap, symbols of his speedy delivery of messages.

  In the encyclopedia article Ned was copying, from his own edition of the Junior Universe of Knowledge Encyclopedia, the wording was slightly different, and there was some dull stuff about modern words (“commerce,” “merchandise,” and “merchant”) that were related to Mercury’s name. Ned didn’t bother copying those parts.

  He is also shown holding a winged wand, or staff, called a caduceus. His caduceus had two serpents twisted around it to protect him as he journeyed through heaven and earth. In later times Mercury became the god of magic and science, and so his caduceus is now a symbol of the science of medicine. Among the Oroonookoo Indians of South America similar winged “witch-sticks” are used in ceremonies of healing as well as in rituals of black magic.

  This was, in fact, a little stronger than what the Junior Universe had to say about the subject. In particular the information about the Oroonookoo Indians had come from a comic-book column “Stranger Than Fiction!” in the February 1972 issue of the Green Magician, where there had been a drawing of an Oroonookoo witch-stick that had made a strong impression on Ned, due to the fact that he possessed something that looked almost exactly like what the artist had drawn. However Ned’s witch-stick or caduceus or whatever it was hadn’t come from South America or ancient Greece. He’d made it himself by tying the dried corpse of some kind of sparrow to the end of a strange twisty doubled-up stick. The way the two pieces of wood had twined around each other really did make them look like a pair of snakes. Ned hadn’t had any particular idea in mind when he’d made the thing except that it looked kind of neat in a spooky sort of way.

  For a while just after he’d made it Ned had used the crucified dead sparrow to terrorize his little brother. He would hold it out in front of him and wave it back and forth and intone in his solemnest tone of threat, “Watch out—I’m going to touch you with the poison stick. Watch out!” And Billy, who was wonderfully terrorizable, would run off in a state of panic and just about wet his pants from fear of what he imagined the stick would do. It was dumb, but it was fun, and teasing (according to what Father Windakiewiczowa had told Ned in confession) was generally only a venial sin, so long as it didn’t involve physical abuse.

  “The Roman gods were not like our God,” Ned continued down the page.

  They were not always virtuous. Mercury was famed not only as a messenger and a healer but as a thief. Criminals prayed to him as their protector. One of the planets is named for him, as well as the element mercury, which is found in every thermometer. By a strange irony, mercury poisoning is one of the deadliest diseases known to man. Its symptoms include sore mouth and gums, loose teeth, intestinal disorders, and often death. The caduceus of the god Mercury may be a symbol of medical science, but the element mercury is just the opposite!

  The page was almost filled, and Ned wrote his name and homeroom number in the corner, and then in the opposite corner “For Extra Credit.” He smiled with the satisfaction of closure. The school did not have a copy of the Junior Universe, nor did the local library branch, and so even if Miss Brophy suspected that his paper had been copied from a book, there was no way she could prove it. The encyclopedia had come as a present from his real father, Lance Hill, who lived in Canada and sold the Junior Universe of Knowledge Encyclopedia for a living. Or at least that’s what he’d been doing for a living last year when he’d sent the set to Ned for a Christmas present. Since then Ned’s father had dropped out of sight, except for a postcard in July from Whitehorse in the Yukon Territory (“The Northern Lights are really something!”) and a letter to Madge a couple of weeks later asking for money. (Ned wasn’t supposed to have read the letter, but like the god Mercury, he was sneaky and knew all of his mother’s hiding places.) Ned felt sorry for his father, who hated Canada and couldn’t find any kind of good job there but had to live there because he was a draft dodger; but he didn’t really miss him, since Lance had fled across the border way back in 1967, when the war was just getting into high gear and when Ned was only five. Even before that Lance and Madge had not been living together, and so Ned had few clear memories of “the hippie” (as Grandma Obstschmecker referred to him). The clearest was of a picnic in someone’s backyard where there was a horseshoe game. All through a long summer afternoon (as Ned recalled) his father had tried to throw a horseshoe that would go around
the stake in the ground and make the wonderful ringing sound that announced to the other picnickers that a point had been scored, but he never did. His throws kept getting wilder and wilder, and there was a fight around the car when it was time to drive home about who would do the driving. Lance lost, and Madge drove. Now what kind of father was that? On the whole Ned felt he was a lot better off with Henry for a father, even if it did mean explaining to everyone he met why his last name was Hill when his parents’ last name was Michaels.

  Billy and Grandma Obstschmecker got home a little after four, and Ned, who had been mastering the art of taking apart and putting together a puzzle consisting of four bent nails, settled down at the kitchen table with a glass of milk and a wedge of lardy-slice (an Obstschmecker holiday specialty) to listen to Billy’s breathless retelling of the story of Snow White. Grandma Obstschmecker, meanwhile, went to take a nap in her room on the first floor.

  When Billy reached the high point of the story, the witch’s presentation of the poisoned apple, he detoured from strict narrative sequence to ask Ned: “There really aren’t witches like that, are there? Grandma said it’s all just make-believe, all the stuff about princes and magic and dwarfs.”

  Ned considered the flakes of lardy-slice sprinkled over the marble-patterned Formica tabletop. “Well, no, I wouldn’t say so. I mean, there really are dwarfs, I’ve seen photographs and I’ve seen them in movies, and there are princes in England and places like that. And there used to be witches all over the place. And people were so scared of what they could do, they used to burn them alive.”

  “How?” Billy wanted to know.

  “Well, first they’d tie them to a stake, a really big piece of wood, and then they’d build a bonfire around their feet. And people would come and watch it happen.”

  “Why don’t they do it anymore?”

  “Not everyone believes in witches anymore. Not here in America anyway. They do in Haiti though. They have voodoo there. And in South America there are the Oroonookoo Indians.”

  Billy, who had already been informed about the practices and powers of the Oroonookoo Indians, nodded gravely. “They’re the ones with the sticks. But why don’t the people who believe in witches burn them anymore?”

  “I guess because the government won’t let them.”

  Billy still wasn’t satisfied. “But suppose there was a witch who does bad things like kill people, or put them to sleep like the witch did to Snow White, what about that?”

  Ned took a judicious sip of milk while he considered the problem, then delivered his verdict. “I guess with witches what you’ve got to do is fight back with witches. But with good witches.”

  The idea that witches might be good was new to Billy. “What do good witches do?”

  Off the top of his head Ned had no answer to that. Then he had a flash of inspiration. “The good witches are like saints. Or priests. Like the priest in the movie Mom and Dad went off to see. The Exorcist.”

  “That’s about the kid who gets the devil inside of her and says all the dirty words?” (This had been Grandma Obstschmecker’s synopsis of the movie when she’d turned down the opportunity, offered earlier that day, to go downtown and see The Exorcist with Madge and Henry.)

  Ned nodded. “And do you remember the other night on TV when there was that priest on the talk show explaining that there really are devils that do that, get inside of people and make them act crazy? And what a priest can do is he can drive out the devil, and that’s what an exorcist is, someone who does that. So I guess what a good witch would do would be to reverse what the bad witch was doing. Like if the bad witch was making people sick, the good witch could make them better again.”

  Billy thought that over carefully, and the more he thought about it, the more it seemed to make sense.

  Ned, meanwhile, had to fight against the temptation to feel angry because he hadn’t been allowed to see The Exorcist. He felt he was mature enough to see a movie that had dirty words in it. Things had probably been different in the past, when his parents had grown up. Back then, kids probably never heard those words. But now they used them, even at a Catholic school, even at Our Lady of Mercy. Ned had read The Exorcist from cover to cover, having snitched it from Henry’s mound of coverless paperbacks in a box in the attic. He thought it was a terrific story, and he’d have loved to see all the scary parts done really believably in a movie. But Madge had said no, absolutely not, and Henry had backed her up, and so now Ned would never see the movie, since it was rated R and Ned wouldn’t be allowed in the theater without a grown-up with him. It was so unfair, especially considering the fact that Ned had a vocation to the priesthood and that The Exorcist was a movie with a priest as the hero, but getting angry about it was a sin—specifically a sin against the Fourth Commandment, Honor thy father and mother.

  9

  “And how is the king of Bowling Pin Kingdom?” Henry asked, entering his son’s bedroom after a pro forma rap on the door.

  The bowling pins of the kingdom in question were deployed in various significant combinations throughout the room, some promenading in open sight, others skulking under the bed or peering out from the mouths of V-shaped caverns formed by spread-open books. The larger bowling pins were grown-ups, the smaller were children, but politically the pins were organized into two factions that did not respect the generation gap. These were the Greens, led by Dundor, the large green bowling pin, and his concubine Fluff, the large yellow bowling pin, and the Reds, led by the witch Icksy and her son Reinhardt, the large and small red bowling pins. Icksy had once murdered Dundor’s only son, Hans, and Dundor had made a vow to conquer the old Red witch and all her people, who had been forced to retreat, after a long series of battles, to the caverns of Ho Chi Minh Mountain in the darkest corner of the bedroom. The victorious Greens, by contrast, enjoyed a luxurious life among the coleuses and prayer plants that formed the Hanging Gardens of Wyomia in front of the double window and on its sills. Billy looked after these descendants of the downstairs houseplants himself, or rather Dundor’s chancellor did, as part of his duty in running the kingdom’s vast irrigation project. The chancellor’s official name was Cardinal Richloo, but he also had a secret name, known only to himself and to Icksy, the Red witch. It was because she had this power over Dundor’s most trusted servant that the Reds had been able to survive so long the invasions of the Greens, but now, as a result of Santa Claus’s major Christmas present to Billy, things were getting desperate. Santa had given Billy a toy train that ran on steel tracks, and Dundor had laid the tracks from Wyomia westward to the foothills of Ho Chi Minh Mountain. Once the holiday truce expired, Dundor would move his troops and supplies by train to the heart of his enemies’ territory and bomb them back to the Stone Ages. At least that was what he was threatening to do on his nightly television broadcast to his subjects.

  Needless to say, Billy could not explain all of this to his father. Not because Henry wouldn’t have been interested. He would probably have been too interested, being himself a great teller and welder-together of stories. But the long struggle between the Greens and the Reds was Billy’s private property, and he didn’t want anyone else coming in and telling any of the bowling pins what to do, not his father, and not Ned, and certainly not Grandma Obstschmecker, who was always asking questions about them in the hope Billy would provide further proof for her contention that his hours with the bowling pins represented an unhealthy interest and therefore should be taken away from him.

  Instead of answering his father’s question, Billy parried with one of his own. “What time is it?”

  “Time for bed.”

  “You said you’d read me a story tonight.”

  “That’s what I’m here for. Have you picked out a book?”

  “I will now.”

  While Billy went to Ho Chi Minh Mountain to select his bedtime story, Henry sat down on the edge of the large, bumpy bed. Just as though he’d eased into a hot bath, he could feel the tensions in his back and shoulders and neck e
asing away. He loved the rituals of bedtime as much as Billy did, and even had a theory, which he’d never told anyone, not even Madge, that the time he spent spinning tales for Billy had a therapeutic value equal at least to Tylenol or Ben-Gay.

  Billy returned with a picture book called The Night Before Christmas. “Read this.”

  Henry wrinkled his forehead into a question. “This? Are you sure? Tonight is the night after the night after Christmas. Santa Claus is down at the South Pole, taking a vacation.”

  “I know. But I like the way it sounds: ‘Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.”

  “That’s called rhyming, when two words make the same sound. There’s lots of other stories that rhyme, not just The Night Before Christmas.”

  “I know, but I like this one.”

  “Your brother says that you’re able to read it by yourself. Has your reading really got that good?”

  “But that’s not the same as when you read it. You read better than I do.”

  “Well, I’m glad to hear that I’m still employable somewhere. Okay, we’ll read The Night Before Christmas one more time, but that’ll be it with Santa Claus till next year. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Billy conceded reluctantly.