by Peter Straub
''Then get someone.' His head fell back, but he was still alive. Those perfect teeth which should have graced a tooth-powder advertisement shone in his gray face. 'You can't shoot me. I haven't even been here a month.'
'That weird rationality, an excuse like that of a third-grader. I could feel the presence of that perhaps hallucinatory bird behind me, and it was all of a piece with the stink of burned flesh I could suddenly catch from my own face, the smell of shit and intestinal gas coming from Vendouris — all of this was thrown into an odd relief by Vendouris' strange childish plea. Something in my mind moved: I was in the war, and the war referred only to itself.
''It's not possible,' Vendouris said, and I knew he meant that it was not possible that this had happened to him. He was still a civilian mentally.
'Now, think of my choices. I could pick him up, as he wished, and kill him — give him an agonizing death. I could stay by him and let him die. He may have had another half-hour, or however long it took him to really understand his condition. In that half-hour he would have suffered every agony possible for man to know. Killing him by lifting him would have been more merciful. His pain was already burrowing through his shock. I could have left him, gone the three miles to the hospital, and left him to die alone.
'He began to breathe in sharp little pants, like an overheated dog.
'There was really only one solution. I took my revolver out of the holster. He saw me do it and his eyes widened, and for a second he was sane again. He tried to crawl back, and most of his insides cascaded out of him.
'Maybe he died then. But I do not think so. I think what killed him was the bullet I put into his forehead.
'A sink of odors surrounded me: my own burned flesh and sweat; Vendouris' horrible stinks of dying, blood; cordite. I picked up my things and walked along the edge of the road in the direction of the artillery fire. I should have been afraid. I should have felt like running back to the port and stowing away in the next ship for America. But instead I felt as though I were walking toward my destiny, for which poor William Vendouris and four other men had already given their lives.
'Now we move ahead a couple of months. The Field Hospital was desperately understaffed, the more so that Vendouris was dead, and two other doctors and I slept three hours out of every twelve, taking shifts on a camp bed in a little tent a few yards from the larger tent which was our operating theater. Which is to say that we breathed war, drank war and slept war every day. Our work was packing wounds, closing aspirating chest wounds, and controlling hemorrhages on soldiers brought in from the battlefields and trenches by the Norton-Harjes and Red Cross ambulances. When we had taken off a leg or put a Thomas splint on a fracture, the wounded were sent off to hospitals for more extensive treatment. The loss of the truck I had been on meant not only the absence of another doctor but also of three months' worth of morphia and other supplies due for the hospital — so most of our operations were done with little or no anesthetic. Often we worked under torches just like those you see in the woods out there, moving with the comings and going of the war in Les Islettes, Cheppy and Verennes. The troops we worked with were mainly men from New York, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut, boys of nineteen and twenty who'd wake up on the table and reach for their groins with the first movement of consciousness, just to make sure everything was there. It had not been a week before all of the medical staff and many of the troops knew about what happened to Vendouris. The other doctors, a tall red-headed Georgian named Withers and a smart, haggard, bald New Yorker named Leach, seemed to approve of what I had done, and so did most of the troops.
'But they gave me a nickname. Can you guess? They called me the Collector. That act of mercy toward a fatally injured man set me apart, even in conditions as cramped and abnormal as prevailed in Field Hospital 84. Sometimes when I walked into the mess, I could hear men whispering the name. And once when I was operating on a poor little rifleman from the Pennsylvania detachment, trying to put his stomach back in place, he opened his eyes — two orderlies were holding him down — and looked at me and gasped, 'The Col. . . ' and died.
'Leach told me, 'Don't worry about it. If I'm ever in that spot, I hope you'll do me the same favor Most of the boys are so addled by war they no longer think right.'
'There was another reason for the name. For a time I made quite a bit of money playing cards with the line officers and other doctors. I assure you, I did not cheat. I just knew much more about the behavior of cards than they. But after a time I was no longer welcome in the games — I suppose I had won about a quarter of the regiment's money, most of it from Withers, who was a rich man. Withers had come to dislike and distrust me: after initially taking my side in the Vendouris business, he had begun to think that there was something fishy in it. By the time they had got around to bringing in the bodies, there was no money in Vendouris' pockets. And of course, being what he was, Withers distrusted all Northerners on principle. He hated Negroes the same way. And it is true that the work and the hours and the almost constant shelling had affected me too. I had lost forty pounds. When I was not on duty, I drank to put myself to sleep. And while I was still welcomed in card games, I played feverishly, recklessly — often I took large sums from Withers on the strength of a bluff.
'But after three or four months of those terrible conditions, I gave in to the strain. I began to imagine that I was poor William Vendouris. My destiny, which had seemed mysteriously near on the day I walked toward the front, had vanished with an equal mysteriousness. Unless Vendouris was my destiny. One day I saw him lying on a stretcher just taken from one of the Norton-Harjes ambulances — grinning in pain with his perfect teeth, holding in his purple guts with both hands. He looked toward me and said, 'My soul, Collector, my soul.' I staggered, and Leach saw me do it and took over my job.
'The next day it was clear to me: I was Vendouris. I had simply been given the wrong papers. I explained this to Leach and to Withers, and they sat me down and got the colonel. I explained to him too that my name was not Nightingale but Vendouris, and that Nightingale had been killed on his first day in France. When I looked into the mirror, I saw William Vendouris' face. When I dressed, I put on Vendouris' clothes. I asked the colonel if he could get me the address back home of my wife and family, because the war had driven it out of my mind.
'The colonel arranged for me to be sent to the Neurological Hospital at Tours, and after a week there I was evacuated to Base Hospital 117 at La Fauche, where I wasted my time with carpentry and woodcarving — they could have sent me home or sent me back to work, and they sent me back to work. To Ste. Nazaire.
'It was in Ste. Nazaire that my destiny and I finally came face to face. And it was my destiny that sent me there, for the day after I left, Field Hospital 84 got a direct hit from a German shell, and Dr. Leach and all the men there but one were killed on the spot. Only Withers, who was in the camp bed jn the separate tent and who hated me, survived. And he was a part of my destiny too.'
4
'I was quartered in a factory taken over by the army,' Collins said, and Tom looked up to see that the air was darkening. The sun was a red ball above the trees on the other side of the lake. His watch said it was just past ten-thirty. It's a trick, he told himself. Relax and enjoy it.
'Of course there was not much left to show what it had been before the war — I think the Germans had used it before we did. The lines had been dismantled and rows of cots for the enlisted men filled three-fourths of the enormous floor. Officers like myself had little cubicles with doors you could lock. On the factory's second floor were some staff offices — medical personnel also had the use of a large gaslit basement filled with sprung couches and exhausted chairs. The hospital was across the street from the factory, and at most hours of day or night you could find unshaven young doctors asleep on the couches, breathing in clouds of third-hand pipe smoke. The idea was, I guess, that I had suffered a temporary lapse and could come to my senses away from the front, in a more or less medical atmospher
e. And if I did not — well, as long as I was steady enough to operate jn a week, it did not matter what I thought my name was. We were short of doctors, and nobody ever suggested sending me home. 'The orderly who showed me to my cubicle called me Lieutenant Nightingale, and I said, 'That is an error. My name is Lieutenant William Vendouris. Please try to remember that, Private.' He gave me a rather frightened look and faded out the door.
'I slept for about two days straight, and woke up starved. I straightened my uniform, laced up my puttees, and went across the street to the hospital canteen.
'Black attendants were dishing up the food and pouring coffee, and I got in line, thinking that now things were going to work out. Then I heard a drawling Southern voice coming from one of the tables, saying, 'Waaall, the Collector's here. The coin collector.' I turned around. Dr. Withers was staring at me, exuding hatred from every bristling orange hair on his head. He too had been transferred to Ste. Nazaire. He leaned across the table and began to whisper to the doctor eating with him. It suddenly seemed that everyone in the canteen was looking at me. I put down my tray and left. Out on the street I bought a loaf of bread, some cheese, and a bottle of wine and went back to my cubicle. Later I went out for more wine. I felt absolutely flat and useless. I knew Withers would be spreading terrible stories about me. I wanted to get back to work in order to prove myself, but my orders did not begin for another five days. Until then, I did not exist except as a name — the wrong name — on a cubicle door.
'Drink is a sacrament, you know. Any drink is a sacrament, and alcohol loosens the ropes tying down the god within. I reread some pages of Le Dogme et Rituel, and saw more in them than I ever had before. Then I ripped off a long piece of paper, lettered 'Vendouris' on it and tacked it over 'Lt. Nightingale' on my door. After that I rooted around in my case for my cards and did lifts and passes and shuffles for a couple of hours. If I did not exist in the Army's eyes, that was the perfect place for magic to flourish — an official limbo. And for five days I drank wine and ate cheese and bread and soaked myself in the practice of magic. It was a rededication — was I not a man risen from the dead? A man with secret power in his fingers? It was perhaps the most intense period of my life, and by the time it was over I knew that medicine was only a byroad for me, and that magic was the highway. I must have read Levi's book three times straight through, turning the pages with Vendouris' fingers, reading the type with Vendouris' eyes.
'On the sixth day I showered and changed my clothes and reported to the hospital. The major in charge of the administration admitted me and looked me over, knowing that I was crazy. He hated to be stuck with a mental case, if that was what I was, but no one had told him that I couldn't doctor with the best man on his staff. He said, 'I understand that you no longer acknowledge the name Charles Nightingale, Lieutenant.' All he wanted was for me to get out of his office and get to work, where my craziness would not be flaunted in his face. I said, 'That is correct, Major. But to avoid trouble until this matter is corrected, I have no objections if the staff want to address me as Dr. Collector.' He blinked. 'This is a nickname,' I explained. Of course by then he had heard it from Withers. 'Call yourself what you like, Lieutenant. Your performance records are excellent. I just don't want any trouble.'
'I could see his aura as I spoke to him. It was dirty, inflamed. He was a coward, an unhealthy man. Not like you two boys. You have wonderful healthy auras. Can you see mine?'
The red sun split into a brilliant haze behind the magician's head: Tom could look at Collins only by squinting. Glowing redness swam about him. 'Yes,' Del said beside him. Spears of blackness shot through the red.
'A month later, I met a remarkable man, whose aura was rainbowlike and seemed to blaze.' Collins let this picture hang in the air before them a moment, then continued his story.
'There was a great deal of initial suspicion about me, but my behavior in the operating theater gradually put it to rest. It was a slightly more relaxed version of Hospital 84 — most of the time we had morphia, and we did not actually have to tie up the wounds with bootlaces and fishing wire. But it was working nine or ten hours all day in the stink of blood, with the screams of the poor injured devils all about us. I knew that I was stronger than I had ever been in my life; I felt the beginnings of that power which I had always known would be within me, as fixed and steely as the light from a star. On the one morning a week I had off, I went through the bookstores which had survived the shelling and found French translations of the writings of Fludd and Campanella, the famous sixteenth-century magicians, and Mather's translation of The Key of Solomon. Even in the midst of the bloody, harried work of patching up soldiers so they could return to the trenches to be killed, I felt the strength of my other craft. I liked being called Dr. Collector. Eventually only Withers distrusted me — he still imagined that I had stolen his money at the card table, and he refused to work next to me or to eat at the same bench.
'Of course I had eventually begun to remember my own past, including the moment when I had shot Vendouris. To that extent the colonel's therapy had been successful. But I was the Collector: I had collected Vendouris, or he had collected me, and I kept his name on the door of my cubicle. It seemed to me that a portion of his soul had entered mine, and was a part of that which gave me strength.
'And the day after I remembered putting my merciful buliet into my dying fellow doctor and felt my repressed personality returning to me, I was sewing up a private named Tayler from Fall Ridge, Arkansas, after removing a bullet from his lung. To work on the lungs, you cut the ribs away from the breastbone and peel them back like a door to the chest cavity. I had the bullet out, along with a third of Tayler's lung, which had become nearly gangrenous with infection. I thought he had a fair chance for survival — these days, it would be a very good chance. It was in no way an exceptional operation, in fact I think it was my third like it of the week. But Tayler died while I was suturing him up. I felt his life stopping: as though I'd heard the sudden cessation of an unobtrusive noise, heard the absence of a sound. Then, though I had paid no attention to his aura before, since I never did when I was operating, I saw his go black and murky. Just then a great white bird flapped up out of his chest: a great white bird like the one I had seen in the field of dead men. It flew up without making a sound; the others looked but did not see. The owl sailed out through the closed window, and I knew it was going toward the man who had aimed the bullet at little Tayler.
'The day after that, I healed a man with my fingers alone.
'He was a black man, an American Negro named Washford. Negroes served in the 92nd Division, under their own officers; they were rigidly segregated. In the normal course of things, the only ones we saw were working as valets or kitchen help or orderlies in the hospital. They had their own meeting places, their own girls, their own social life, which was closed off to the rest of us. Well, Washford had caught a round in his ribs, and the bullet had traveled around inside him for a while, generally messing up his giblets.
'When the attendant wheeled him in, Withers had just finished with his last patient, and the man took Washford to his table. Withers turned away without looking, bathed his hands in the sink, and then came back to the table. He froze. 'I won't work on this man,' he said. 'I am not a veterinarian.' He was from Georgia, remember, and this was 1917 — it does not excuse him, but it helps to explain him. His nurses looked at me, and the other doctors momentarily stopped their work. Washford was in danger of bleeding to death through his bandages while we decided how to handle Withers' defection. 'I'll exchange patients with you,' I finally said, and Withers stepped away from his table and came toward mine.
''I don't care if you kill that one, Collector,' he said. 'But you'll be disappointed — he has no pockets.'
'I ignored him and went to Washford and pulled away the soaked bandages. The nurse put the ether pad over his nose and mouth. I cut into him and began to look around. I removed the bullet and began repairing the damage. Then I felt a change come ove
r my whole body: I felt as light as if I had taken the ether. My mind began to buzz. My hands tingled. I trembled, knowing what I could do, and the nurse saw my hands shake and looked at me as if she thought I was drunk. My drinking was well known, but really all of us drank all the time. But it was not alcohol, it was the smack of knowledge hitting me like a truck: I could heal him. I put down the instruments and ran my fingers along the torn blood vessels. Radiance — invisible radiance — streamed from me. The mess the bullet had caused as it plunged from lung to liver to spleen closed itself — all of that torn flesh and damaged tissue; it grew pink and restored, virginal, as you might call it. The nurse backed away, making little noises under her mask. I was on fire. My mind was leaping. I jerked out the retractors and ran my first two fingers over the incision and zipped him up, welded his skin together in a smooth pinkish-brown line. Withers' nurse ripped off her mask and ran out of the theater.
''Take him out,' I said to the astonished attendant, who had been half-dozing at the back of the room: he had seen the nurse run out, but nothing of the operation. Washford went one way, I went another — I was floating. I came out into the big tiled hallway outside the theater. The nurse saw me and backed away. I started to laugh, and realized I was still wearing my mask. I removed it and sat on a bench. 'Don't be afraid,' I said to the nurse.
''Holy mother of Jesus,' she said. She was Irish.
'That miraculous power was ebbing from me. I held my hands up before my face. They looked skinned, in the tight surgical gloves.
''Holy mother of Jesus,' the nurse repeated. Her face was turning from white to lobster pink.
''Forget about it,' I said. 'Forget what you saw.'
'She scampered back inside the theater. I still could not comprehend what had just happened to me. It was as though I had been raised up to a great eminence and been shown all the things of this world and been told: 'You may have what you like.' For a second I felt my blood pressure charge upward, and my head swam.