THE M.D. A Horror Story

by Thomas M. Disch

  The stove was electric, and nowhere could he find matches, but this posed less of a problem than the staircase. He found a jar of cooking oil in the cupboard (it was as much weight as he could manage with both hands) and with it doused a broom, which he found, just where it should be, in the broom closet. He depressed the HI button for the front right burner on the stove and waited till the coils were glowing red. The broom straw ignited almost as soon as he touched it to the burner.

  He torched the kitchen curtains first, and then methodically he went about the dining room and living room, setting fire to whatever looked like ready tinder: the lace covering on the dining table, the dried flowers in the fireplace, the curtains (but they refused to catch). The flames leapt up eagerly at first, but then they seemed to possess no power of contagion, dying away without setting anything more substantial on fire. The room was full of smoke, but his torch was extinguished and the only flames were a faint blue flickering across the top of the dining room table.

  “Madge!” screeched a familiar voice. “Madge, are you out there? I think something must be on fire. Madge! Can you hear me over this microphone? Madge, damn it, answer me! I’m sure there’s smoke in the air. And I know I heard the alarm go off. Madge, how do I get this so-called security system to open my door? Madge!”

  Then, just when he supposed his efforts at arson had failed, the back of the upholstered platform rocker burst into flame, and a moment later the lampshade above it was burning, and then a hanging plant.

  “Madge!” Grandma O.’s voice was choked. “I know there’s a fire—and the phone is dead! Madge!”

  Ned returned to the kitchen and took up the heavy bottle of Wesson oil. He poured some into a cup and set the cup atop the stove and tipped it over so the oil flowed toward the red-hot coils. Without waiting for that oil to catch, he took the bottle into the living room and doused the carpet all about the burning platform rocker and made a trail, from there to the couch.

  He mounted, with effort, the four lowest steps of the staircase and splashed oil from the bottle (which was much lighter now) onto the banister and the runner and the wall alongside the stairs.

  Then he tried to leave by the front door, but he did not know the combination, any more than Mrs. Obstschmecker, that had to be punched into the keypad of the security system. He’d scarcely had time to register dismay before the smoke got to him.

  83

  The clouds had thickened across the sky so that the moon appeared only in glimpses, and it seemed, because of the erratic motion of the rented canoe, to peek out from a different quarter of the sky each time Launce looked up from the task of paddling. He’d remembered canoeing as effortless, a kind of slow luge that required only the feathering of the paddle to point it in the right direction. This canoe took all the strength he could muster, and Madge’s efforts at the front of the boat were so mismatched to his own that they were constantly veering off in an unintended direction. Finally he had to ask for mercy. His shoulders just couldn’t take any more.

  “Were the canoes always as big as this?” Madge wondered as she tucked her paddle under the seat.

  “And was the lake so dark?”

  “It’s the clouds, I suppose. I’m so thirsty. And I feel like I’m burning alive. My back is all pins and needles. I didn’t think we were out in the sun that long.”

  (It was at just that moment that the smoldering platform rocker burst into flame.)

  “You want me to open the last bottle?”

  “More than anything in this world.”

  Launce laid his paddle down on the ribs of the canoe’s bottom and twisted around to reach for the bag from the liquor store. He split the red aluminum foil seal and peeled it from the top of the bottle. It was slow work, and the effort of inserting the corkscrew of his Swiss army knife into the bottle’s cork proved even more taxing.

  “Want me to do it?” Madge asked, trying not to show her impatience.

  “No, that’s okay.”

  But it wasn’t okay, the cork wouldn’t budge (nor would the door of the Obstschmecker house, which Ned at that moment found himself unable to open)—not when he held the bottle under his left arm and tugged at the corkscrew with his right hand, and not when he braced the bottle between his thighs. The only result of his efforts was a sudden urgency to get to a toilet.

  “Really,” Madge insisted, “let me do it.” She reached forward and took bottle and corkscrew from Launce.

  Her first effort was no more successful than his. “It’s really in there.”

  She tried again with the bottle between her legs. “It doesn’t budge.”

  She stood up.

  “Madge,” Launce said cautioningly.

  “Don’t worry, I’m steady. I just need to get the leverage.”

  At just the moment Ned died, asphyxiated on the floor of the burning house, the cork came out of the bottle. Madge went over one side of the canoe, and Launce over the other. She’d vowed to herself, long ago, that she would do everything she could to outlive Ned. Though she would never know it, she’d been faithful to her vow.

  She was able, by clinging to the side of the capsized canoe, to polish off half the bottle, before her strength finally gave out. She enjoyed every blessed drop.

  84

  The fires of Pentecost were burning all around him, a curtain of bright orange flames, spiritual fires by the light of which Judge could see the glory promised to those like himself who were washed in the blood of the Lamb. He was standing smack dab in the middle of the Valley of Death, with fire to the right of him and fire to the left, but he feared no evil because the Lord God was there beside him and inside him. He was seized in his Rapture and squeezed in his hand, till he had to shout aloud from the joy of it, “Praise God! Glory hallelujah!” And still the flames grew brighter and leapt higher, climbing the trellised roses of the wallpaper and writhing about entrails that spilled over the edge of the altar prepared by the power of Judge’s faith and the wrath of Almighty God. A sweet smoke rose from the sacrifice, as from a bed of spices or a barbecue.

  And then the lips of the charred head parted and the mouth gaped wide like a second smaller wound within the larger wound where Judge had crammed it into the gutted belly of the sin-offering, like a battery inside a flashlight’s cavity, and the lips spoke to him in the language of Pentecost, which he alone could understand.

  —You are mine.

  “All yours,” Judge agreed. “Hallelujah!” Though there was in that hallelujah a faint uncertainty, a wavering, a diminishment of rapture, for even as he looked at it, the blackened face of the sacrifice shifted and changed, to become the face so well-known to him from all their hours of communion together, yet not Brother Orson’s either wholly, but also his own.

  —Mine entirely, the severed head insisted, with a wink of its blistered eyelid over the hollow socket.

  It was as though he were looking at his own corrupted flesh, as though the promise so long and so certainly promised him had been withdrawn and in its place only a plate of worms and maggots.

  And in that moment he knew the flames of the fire about him were not the flames of Pentecost, not of the spirit only, but a physical fire that was licking at the walls around him and searing his own flesh.

  —You need not feel the flames, the face before him promised. All their heat will be as a cool lotion to your skin if you will only take up the caduceus and worship me. But quickly, you have only a little time before the caduceus itself is consumed.

  Judge took up the caduceus from where it lay on the smoldering bed.

  Repeat after me: Thou, Mercury, art my god. I place my being in thy care.

  Judge shook his head.

  —You must say the words. I cannot help you otherwise.

  “You are not my god!” Judge protested fiercely. “My god is the god who delivered Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego from the burning fiery furnace, and he’ll deliver me now. ‘Cause I believe in him, and that’s his promise to those who do.”

/>   —You have never believed in anyone but me, you deluded ignorant redneck asshole, and I’m the only hope you have left. Not for eternity. Only for this moment’s anesthetic. Now kneel and adore me. Or, if you prefer, die in agony.

  The fire was all around him, inescapable. There was a terrible smell of burning meat, as the flames reached his father’s corpse and began to crisp its skin.

  Judge knelt and closed his eyes and repeated the words of his damnation. “Thou, Mercury, art my god. I place my being in thy care.”

  —Now I lay my soul in pawn.

  “Now I lay my soul in pawn.”

  —This upon thy staff I swear.

  It was too much, he would not do it. Though all his life had been a lie and this false god the very core of that lie, he would not commit this last abject abomination. He thrust the caduceus into the flames rising from the bed and held it there until it had been consumed, a burnt offering such as the law demands.

  EPILOGUE

  “Ms. Winckelmeyer?” the doctor’s receptionist called out, looking up from her switchboard toward the ceiling, as though she would not venture to guess which of the three people in the waiting room, Judith, Henry, or her lawyer, might be the Ms. Winckelmeyer in question.

  Judith stood up, and the lawyer leaned forward in his chair by way of indicating his willingness to accompany her into the doctor’s office. She signaled by a curt shake of her head that that wouldn’t be necessary.

  “I won’t be gone long,” she assured Henry, who did not look up from the puzzle cube in his hands.

  The assurance might well have been more for her own sake than the boy’s. The last time she’d been here at Willowville Memorial Hospital, she’d been kept incommunicado for two days and in quarantine for another week, not exactly the treatment one expects after almost being murdered. Her lawyer had assured her that even if the hospital had acted at the behest of the police, she had good grounds for a suit. But Judith did not have a litigious nature, and indeed was secretly grateful for having been spared the very worst of the news for so long. Had she known, in the days immediately afterwards, the extent of the horrors that had taken place, she might well not have been able to recover so quickly from her own traumas.

  However, it helped to have the hospital’s director think that she had such legal leverage, since it had allowed her to postpone the date of this meeting these many months and to set the agenda for what she would and would not discuss. If there were matters that she must be informed of, as the director insisted there were, and if these could not be imparted in a letter or over the phone, she was willing to receive that information, but she felt no answering obligation to satisfy his curiosity.

  In any case, she had no idea why Judge had done what he had done. It was not even certain that he had done it, at least not with regard to setting the house on fire. At first the police had thought the fire had been set by Ned, until it was pointed out that he had been in a state of coma since childhood. There had been so many horrors, and some of them so inexplicable (the decapitated head that had been identified as that of a northern Minnesota farmer, one Ray Bonner), that at last the prosecutors had given up trying to reconstruct the precise order in which Judge’s horrors had been perpetrated. As to his motives, what possible motive but total lunacy could there ever be for such actions?

  The director’s office bore a generic resemblance to all such, with decor that served no practical purpose but ritual expense: walls of never-to-be-read leather-bound books; a single abstract oil, crisp-edged organic forms in soothing earth tones; three framed diplomas (in case anyone doubted the man’s bona fides); and a concealed bar that had already been swung into sight by way of declaring the director’s, and the hospital’s, willingness to forget and be forgotten.

  Dr. Sackuvich introduced himself and offered his formal regrets for Judith’s treatment by the hospital, speaking with a constraint and stiffness that Judith found more congenial than the smoother maneuvers of a PR expert. He was a short, balding, middle-aged man who tried to remedy his general dowdiness with a bold mustache.

  After the formalities Dr. Sackuvich asked after the children, and Judith explained, somewhat reluctantly (for she didn’t see how they were his concern), that Jason Schechner had agreed to adopt the boy named after him. The other twin, Henry, had been staying with Judith at her deceased father’s home in Willowville, and would accompany her when she returned, sometime in October, to Florida.

  “And you feel that their separation at this time…?”

  “They would certainly have stayed together if that had seemed the better course.” She did not elaborate.

  “Yes, I’m sure you would not have… I didn’t mean to, um, poke my nose in. And of course they’ve been well provided for. The late Dr. Michaels was unusually, um, well, that’s none of my business. The reason I insisted on seeing you, Ms. Winckelmeyer, has to do with a letter that was found in the Obstschmecker home after the events of June 17. It had been written quite some time ago, and addressed to Dr. Michaels (though he would not have been a doctor when the letter was written). We believe—that is, the police believe—that it was kept in the possession of Dr. Michaels’s grandmother, for it was discovered in a dresser in the one room of the house that was not destroyed by the fire. It was the police who found it, and who opened it.” Dr. Sackuvich looked down at his desktop and cleared his throat. “But because of the nature of its contents, they thought it better that I be the one…”

  “I take it that there’s some reason why I should be acquainted with what is in that letter?”

  Dr. Sackuvich nodded. “Yes, you should as Henry’s adoptive mother, and the other boy’s new parents should as well. I’m sorry I couldn’t contact you until Mr. Schechner had returned to Cambridge. But the police wouldn’t allow us to discuss this matter until a medical determination had been made in the disposition of your son’s case. Your older son, that is—Judge.”

  Judith bit her lip. “I thought we had agreed, Doctor, that I would not be discussing my son’s case, as you put it.”

  “Indeed. Well. Here is a Xerox of that letter. The police have the original, but they say the paper is too crumbly to bear much handling. Perhaps you should read the letter now, and then if you… have any questions…”

  Judith took the four pages of the Xeroxed letter and read the message that, twenty-three years earlier, Henry Michaels had written to his son.

  April 3, 1976

  Dear Billy,

  I hope you never have to read this letter. I wish even more I didn’t have to write it. If you are reading it now, it’ll probably mean that I’m dead, and that I’ve been dead for quite a while, since what I guess this is is a suicide note. Maybe I’ll be stronger than I feel right now, maybe this will turn out to be a false alarm, I hope so. I love you, that’s the basic thing, and if I kill myself, that’s my own problem. I do love you though, Billy, you’ve got to believe that.

  One way or another, dead or alive, what I’ve got to tell you is bad news. For both of us. It seems that I’ve got a fifty-fifty chance of having about the worst goddamn disease in all creation—and if I’ve got it, then there’s an additional fifty-fifty chance that you do too. It’s called Huntington’s chorea. Chorea means having spastic-type fits, and the fits can be extreme, I’ve done research and seen pictures, and I don’t want to go into the details here, but believe me it’s awful, and the spastic fits aren’t the worst of it. The best you can hope for is that you get locked up in the loony bin before you do something that gets your picture in the paper. There have been a lot of cases where that’s happened, where someone just snaps and goes on a killing spree, someone who’d always been sane till that moment. And the damnedest part of it is there’s no way the doctors can tell you beforehand if you’ve got Huntington’s chorea or not.

  It’s in the genes, and you get it from one or the other of your parents. If one of them has it, then your own odds are fifty-fifty like I said. But—since it usually doesn’t hit you till you’r
e around forty or fifty or even later, you don’t necessarily find out that you’re at risk till you’ve already had kids of your own. My own dad died before it got to him, killed in Germany in the war, and I only found out that I’m a candidate two weeks ago from my sister-in-law Luisa. My brother Ed and I were never that close, he went into the Marines when I was still a kid after a big argument with my mother, which never got made up. We met a couple times later on but didn’t get on any better as grown-ups than as kids. Anyhow, when Ed came down with this disease and was hospitalized, they knew from the way that genes work that I have got a fifty-fifty chance of inheriting it, too. Those may be good odds for poker but not for staking your life on. I always thought that if I became blind or had something equally awful happen to me, I would take the easy way out, but this was a situation I never made any contingency plans for. I haven’t told Madge yet, and don’t intend to, since we’ve already agreed we don’t want any more kids.

  But if I do kill myself, I don’t want to put you in the position my dad put me and my brother in. He knew it was in his family, Luisa’s looked into it and found out he had an aunt and an uncle who got put into asylums when he was a kid, and his dad—my granddad—went off the deep end when my dad was in high school. So my dad knew, and kept it a secret. The thing is, if I’d known, I don’t think I’d have become a father. That’s a terrible thing for a man to say to his own son, but think about it. Because you’re in the same situation, or you will be when you get this letter. Maybe by then genetic research will have progressed to the point where there’s a diagnostic test, but I’m not sure if there were such a test that I’d want to take it. If I knew for certain that one day I would inevitably come down with it, then I don’t think I’d hesitate at all, I’d just pull the plug. This way I at least have that fifty-fifty chance, and if time goes by and it looks like my flip of the coin was lucky, then that will make your odds look better. So maybe for your sake I’ll try and hang on, and if I do, then I guess I’ll be explaining all this in person.