THE M.D. A Horror Story

by Thomas M. Disch

  “Halloween is one of the oldest holidays that we celebrate. It comes on the 31st of October. The word Halloween is a contraction for ‘All Hallows Eve,’ that is, the night before the Christian festival of All Saints’ Day. But Halloween and the customs associated with it go back long before the Christian era. It goes back to the time of the ancient Druids, who lived in England and northern Europe when those lands were still one vast forest, where wolves stalked through the night and men lived in fear. The Druids reckoned that the new year began at Halloween and not on January 1st, so that for them Halloween was also New Year’s Eve!

  “The Druid name for Halloween was Oidhche Shamhna, that is, the Vigil of Saman. Saman was the Druid god of Death, and on his feast night, it was believed, Lord Saman would summon the souls of all the wicked who had died in the last year and who had been living since their deaths in the bodies of animals.”

  “Hey,” Billy commented, “this is really creepy stuff, isn’t it?”

  Ned, who had been propped into a sitting position in his bed, listened, as mute and powerless as any minion of Lord Saman.

  Billy continued reading from the Junior Universe:

  “In Christian times many people continued to believe that All Hallows Eve was the one night of the year when ghosts and witches were most likely to wander abroad. They also continued the Druid custom of building great bonfires in thanksgiving for the year’s harvest. Stones would be placed in these bonfires, one for each member of the family. In the morning the ashes of the fire would be sifted to look for the stones, and if any were missing or had been damaged, it was believed that the person represented by that stone would die within the year.

  “Though we no longer credit such superstitions in modern times, Halloween is still associated, in many minds, with the uncanny and the supernatural. The jack-o’-lanterns glowing in the windows of our homes are a reminder of the Druids’ ancient bonfires and their forest-world of witches and ghost-haunted wild animals. For us, too, Halloween is a fit time for giving thanks and for sharing the pleasures and benefits of civilized life. And the candy too!”

  Billy closed the thick volume for letters G through I and returned it to its own little bookcase at the side of Ned’s bed. He felt Ned’s diaper to be sure it was dry, and then he sat down on the edge of the mattress. The only light on in the room was the tensor lamp at the table where Billy had been reading, and this far away it gave Ned’s pale, slack features a weird look that would have been scary to someone who wasn’t as used to it as Billy. Once, when he’d had the house to himself except for Grandma O., who was taking a nap, Billy had brought his friend Ralph Johnson up to Ned’s bedroom and let Ralph see Ned laid out on the bed with just his diaper on and drooling. He’d shown Ralph how you could tell Ned was alive by holding a mirror up in front of his mouth and had dared Ralph to hold the mirror himself, but Ralph wouldn’t come that close to the bed. Any time after that that Billy wanted to play Parcheesi or Sorry with Ralph, they had to play in the dining room or the living room. Ralph refused to go to any of the upstairs rooms because of Ned’s being upstairs.

  Even without Ned in it his bedroom would have struck an outsider as creepy because of the small jungle of houseplants standing in pots and hanging in baskets in front of the three windows that looked out onto the sun porch. Some were the original coleuses and prayer plants from the Hanging Gardens of Wyomia (banished from Billy’s own room by the decree of the victorious young bowling pin king, Reinhardt), and others were their descendants. There was also enough glacial ivy sprawling out of pots and baskets to have supplied a small florist shop. Despite the lack of direct sunlight in the room, and despite the minimal attention they received, all the plants were thriving with thick twisty stems and fat, rather yellowish leaves. The reason for this unnatural vitality was that Billy had used the positive powers of the caduceus on them to ensure their health, just the way he had saved the elm tree in the backyard from the common fate of the other elms in the neighborhood, which had all had to be cut down because of Dutch elm disease.

  At first Billy had been reluctant to use the caduceus for such a big undertaking. The elm was huge, almost twice as high as the Obstschmecker house, and it seemed to be in the first stage of infestation. Billy didn’t have to be reminded that the power in the caduceus was the same as in an electric battery: if you didn’t recharge it, it went dead. When he had the caduceus in his hand and he closed his eyes and concentrated, he could even feel the charge from the caduceus inside his own body. It was like the trembling you can feel when you’re walking on a bridge and a truck drives across at the same time. Or like the tuning fork that Sister Catherine had struck during a science demonstration on the subject of sound waves. But in the end, seeing how much the old tree seemed to mean to Madge and to Grandma O., and just because it was so tremendously big, Billy had used the caduceus to make the elm better.

  Strangely, curing the elm, instead of draining power from the caduceus, had given it incredibly more. Not a tuning fork now, but an electric drill or a live snake wriggling in his hands. Finally Billy figured out the reason: it was because Dutch elm disease was transmitted by beetles that burrow under a tree’s bark, and what the caduceus did was to make all those hundreds and thousands, maybe millions, of beetles get sick and die. Making the tree healthy again may have used some of the caduceus’s positive power, but not as much as the caduceus had gained from what it had done to the beetles. Once Billy realized this he’d made sure to take the caduseus outdoors every so often (hidden from sight in his KISS knapsack) to get it charged up and coincidentally to save one of the elms in Brosner Park.

  He was proud of the power he possessed and of his secret good deeds on behalf of Brosner Park, but he was never tempted to take credit or brag, not to other kids and certainly not to grown-ups. Partly it was a matter of not having that many friends, but more it was from a feeling, hazy but strong, that the power of the caduceus could only diminish by being known—and doubted. Grown-ups didn’t believe in anything that wasn’t a part of their everyday world. They said they did, some of them, and the nuns and priests would talk about the power of prayer, but they didn’t really, and their not believing was contagious the way a disease was contagious. It had happened to him once already with Santa Claus, and he didn’t want it to happen again, and so even when he went to confession with Father Windakiewiczowa he hadn’t explained what he’d done to Ned. He’d confessed to having “hurt” his brother but insisted that it had been an accident. Father Windakiewiczowa hadn’t wanted any more details, he’d just given him a penance of ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys and Billy was back to his basic state of grace.

  There was one more reason Billy was never tempted to speak of the caduceus and its powers. He had the perfect person to share his secrets with right at home. Ned might not be able to do much else at all, but he could listen. And things became clearer as a result of spelling them out for Ned’s benefit. Like the way that Sister Catherine had kept the whole class from going on a field trip to the Como Zoo because of five boys’ coming back late from recess. Billy had blamed Sister Catherine, but in talking about it to Ned, he realized she was probably right, she probably couldn’t trust those five boys to stay together with the class and not go off on their own, and so really she didn’t have any choice, and the fault was the fault of the five boys, not hers.

  They were all five of them black, but that was something you weren’t supposed to pay any attention to, since prejudice was a mortal sin.

  “I don’t care all that much about the field trip,” Billy explained to his brother, whose head had tipped sideways again so that his eyes seemed fixed on the highest-hung basket of coleus. “I’ve been to the zoo lots of times. But it isn’t fair. They do things wrong and we all get blamed, and if you tell on them, like Geraldine McKune did when Lyman Sinclair wrote ‘fuck’ at the bottom of the vocabulary list on the blackboard, they’ll beat you up. Geraldine’s a girl, so they didn’t beat her up, but they did pour ink down the arms of
her white coat when it was hanging in the cloakroom. There was no way to prove it was Lyman. But everyone, including Sister, knows that if it wasn’t Lyman it was one of the other four, everyone knows. And it isn’t fair.”

  Billy looked to Ned for confirmation, saw that his head was lolling to the side, and readjusted head and pillow to their standard relation.

  “Well, look at that,” said Madge from the doorway. “The little orderly is on the job around the clock.”

  Even without turning round, Billy could tell that Madge had been drinking. Sober, she never had much to say except “That’s nice,” or “That’s interesting,” or “I’m busy now, go bother your father,” but when she drank there was a sarcastic streak to everything she said, or maybe the difference was just that there was a point to it. Billy usually liked her better when she was drunk. Indeed, most people did, including Henry, though it was Henry who kept arguing that she had to do something about her problem before it became serious.

  “He’s dry,” said Billy, backing away from the bed.

  Madge nodded, and clawed with a blunt fingernail at the black scarf knotted under her chin. More and more she’d taken to wearing black clothes when she didn’t have to be in her nurse’s uniform. They were more practical. Henry said they made her look like an old woman and had given her a red dress for her birthday, which she almost never wore. Billy thought the black clothes made her look witchy and liked them for that reason, though he’d have never said so to her, supposing she’d ever have asked his opinion. There was an understanding between the two of them that they would get in each other’s way as little as possible.

  Without thinking through the psychological equation, Billy understood that Madge’s apparent coldness toward him was a side effect of her having to go on living with Ned the way he was now, feeling a love for him that could never be returned but could never be buried and mourned and forgotten either. So Billy didn’t blame her, but he did feel sad for a while, as he stood outside the bedroom door and listened to Madge, when she thought she was alone with Ned, as she began to talk to him in a low, singsongy voice, like the old women at the back of Our Lady of Mercy murmuring their prayers. He wished there were something he could do to help, some medicine that would make her feel better than the fifth of vodka in the freezer compartment of the icebox behind the half-gallon brick of Sealtest, not to hide it from anyone, since they all knew it was there, but just to keep it politely out of sight.

  And right then, since his mind was already on the caduceus, because of what had happened earlier with Grandma O. in the backyard, Billy had an inspiration. There was a medicine he could give her. Hadn’t he heard his father say, when he was arguing with Madge about her drinking, that her alcoholism was a disease? If that was so, then Billy could cure her of it with the caduceus!

  Alcoholism—what in the world would rhyme with that? Nothing at all. In which case the thing to do was turn the words around so that the hard one didn’t have to come last. For instance: “You’re not an alcoholic now.”

  What rhymed with “now”?

  17

  Old age is full of tribulations, whoever you are, but for a mean-spirited or sour-tempered person—Mrs. Obstschmecker was both of those things—old age is more full of tribulations than for most. You find out then who your real friends are, or you find you don’t have any. About the only person left she could honestly count as a friend was Mrs. Wolfgren, but a month ago Mrs. Wolfgren had been taken off to a “home” by her ungrateful daughter Karen. St. Jude’s Residence. St. Judas’s came closer to the truth. Now even on the days Madge had off from work and was free to drive her mother somewhere, Mrs. Obstschmecker had no desire to see Mrs. Wolfgren, not in the dismal little room that she had to share with another woman who was practically dead from some kind of cancer. It was too awful. And in any case Mrs. Wolfgren was no longer much fun to visit. She had nothing to talk about but her bowel movements and how she had slept, and she didn’t have the concentration for a single hand of rummy, much less an entire game, and nothing Mrs. Obstschmecker had to say to her seemed to register any more than if she’d been talking to Ned. Awful, just awful.

  But she couldn’t let herself become a complete stay-at-home or she would gradually end up like Mrs. Wolfgren herself. She had to keep active, do things. Her doctor said so, and Madge agreed. But what? Gardening was the ideal solution, but now at the end of October (this was the morning of Halloween), there was precious little gardening to be done, except to look after the houseplants, which were all in thriving condition anyhow and needed no looking after. Walking was good exercise, but Mrs. Obstschmecker no longer felt safe walking in her own neighborhood, and in any case a long walk usually made her hip act up. She could take the bus downtown, but downtown St. Paul had changed so much over the last so many years that it was almost like visiting a city in some other state, Chicago or Denver, and to get to downtown Minneapolis required a transfer at Coughlin and Larpenter, where she might have to wait half an hour or longer, and she didn’t feel up to that, especially with the weather looking so uncertain.

  “I know,” she said aloud, as she stood facing the full-length mirror on the door of the hallway closet, undecided whether or not to take out her coat, “I’ll have my hair done.”

  She didn’t, if truth be told, actually require a perm, since she’d got her last perm just a week before Labor Day. A shampoo would do the job, then a little set to the curls in front while Sonia did her nails. At once she felt more cheerful.

  She put on her brown coat and a trim little toque in almost the same shade of brown and set off for the bus stop. The bus arrived without too long a wait, and for the length of the ride Mrs. Obstschmecker was the only passenger. At the corner of Ludens and Coughlin she thanked the driver politely (he was a colored man who’d been driving that route as long as Mrs. Obstschmecker could remember), and he said she was welcome.

  And there, between the corner drugstore and a new Laundromat that had been just an empty shell for years, was Ludens Beauty Salon. Poster-sized advertisements for hair preparations adorned the windows and served to screen the intimate work that went on within from the view of casual passersby (of which at this hour on a Friday morning there were few).

  “Mrs. Obstschmecker!” Sonia declared, a tart smile puckering her vivid lips into a cupid’s bow. “What a nice surprise. Come in!”

  “I should have called,” said Mrs. Obstschmecker, allowing Sonia to remove her coat. “But I was out walking and I saw the bus and I had this sudden impulse. I hope you can squeeze me in. I just want a wash and a light set. And my nails, of course.” She handed Sonia her hat.

  Mrs. Obstschmecker settled her large body into the shampooing chair with a feeling mildly apprehensive and mildly adventurous, much as (in earlier years) she would have felt having been coaxed onto one of the tamer rides at the State Fair. Sonia tucked a towel about the unbuttoned neck of Mrs. Obstschmecker’s dress and then, ever so gradually, lowered the back of the chair until Mrs. Obstschmecker’s head rested against the chill molded porcelain of the shampooing basin.

  “Now just relax, dear,” said Sonia.

  Mrs. Obstschmecker smiled up at the twin bars of the fluorescent fixtures, and did, to a degree, relax. She listened to the gentle whoosh of warm water from the rubber tube connected to the faucet of the basin and then, as she felt the first soothing warmth of the spray, she closed her eyes and exhaled the breath that she’d held clenched in her chest since the first lowering of the chair.

  There was a spluttering sound as Sonia squirted a glob of the shampoo into her hand. Then Sonia’s soft, soap-lubricated hands began to press and prod and palpate Mrs. Obstschmecker’s scalp. There was a tingling feeling that became a tickling sensation. The usual even tempo of Sonia’s soothing hands became irregular, then stopped entirely.

  “Mrs. Obstschmecker,” she said, in a tone that seemed almost threatening, “what have you been doing to your hair?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Hav
e you been using some kind of dye? You know at your age, the hair is very delicate. It can’t sustain harsh chemical treatment.”

  Mrs. Obstschmecker tried to open her eyes but at once they started to sting from the shampoo. And her scalp was all pins and needles. “I haven’t done anything to my hair,” she protested weakly. “What’s the matter? Why does it feel so…”

  “I’ll tell you this, lady,” Sonia said, in a voice that was almost unrecognizable. “I am not going to be held responsible. This is pure baby shampoo, there is nothing in it that could possibly account for… something like this.”

  Mrs. Obstschmecker struggled to lift herself into a sitting position with no success. Her eyes stung. Her scalp felt like it was on fire.

  “Lie back,” Sonia said sternly. “I’ll rinse out the shampoo. But I won’t take responsibility.”

  The warm water sluiced through the rubber tube and across Mrs. Obstschmecker’s forehead, affording an almost instantaneous relief as it flowed downward across her tingling scalp. But that relief was cut short by Sonia’s sincerely horror-stricken whisper, “Jesus.”

  Mrs. Obstschmecker struggled to sit up, this time with real determination, but Sonia pushed her back roughly into the shampooing chair. “No,” she said. “Let me wrap a towel around your head first. And then I want you to leave.”

  Without bothering to dry her hair, Sonia wrapped a large white towel around Mrs. Obstschmecker’s head, and then she levered the chair back into a sitting position.

  “I don’t understand,” Mrs. Obstschmecker said, almost whimpering. “Why are you behaving like this? You owe me some kind of explanation.”

  Sonia folded her arms across her water-splotched blouse. “You want an explanation? Look in the sink.”