by Tim Waggoner
As he focused on the patient’s cries, more details became clear. A nearly inaudible wet clicking from somewhere deep inside; a soft flutter of decaying moth wings coming from the lungs; the slick sliding of sweat and blood-covered rolls of flesh. All these things and more he heard. But he couldn’t hear what Lavinia had—couldn’t hear anything that told him what the patient was feeling.
His eyes snapped open. With a roar of rage and frustration, Dermot plunged his hands in the patient’s boneless flab and violently worked the flesh back and forth across the razored bed as if it were a giant cheese grater. When he was finished, there was nothing left but greasy-red hunks of meat scattered and splattered about the room.
“While I can’t fault your enthusiasm, Dermot—”
The gore-covered extern whirled to see Doctor Feculent floating in the doorway.
“—I must say your bedside manner leaves something to be desired.”
* * *
They sat in the doctor’s office, Feculent behind the barnacle-encrusted and seaweed-draped carcass of some strange sea beast he used for a desk, Dermot cross-legged upon a plastic cushion stuffed with used hypodermics and surgical wipes. Gobbets of patient dripped off him like crimson rain and struck the plastic with wet plopping sounds.
Doctor Feculent looked at Dermot for a long time before speaking. “You’re one of the most talented externs we’ve ever had at the facility, Dermot,” he said at last.
Dermot didn’t know what he’d expected Feculent to say, but this certainly wasn’t it. The doctor plunged a hand through the hard hide of his desk and with a thick sucking sound, pulled out a mucus-slick file folder. Feculent shook the folder several times to get the worst of the muck off, then opened it and scanned the contents.
“According to our records, your talents manifested early, at the tender age of four.”
Dermot remembered. “I dissected the neighbor’s cat with an exacto knife I stole from my father’s workbench.” Dermot had performed the procedure with the utmost precision, laying the organs out on the back porch just so, examining each one in turn and, when he was finished, putting them all back exactly where they belonged. Well, almost exactly. After all, he’d been only four.
“You fulfilled your early promise,” Doctor Feculent said, “eventually moving from cats to dogs, and from dogs to your siblings, and then to your parents. And once simple disassembly began to pale—after all, there are only so many ways to take something apart, aren’t there?—you started to…experiment. It was the result of one of these experiments which drew the attention of the local authorities to you, wasn’t it? And as a result, you soon found yourself a permanent resident of an institution for the criminally insane.
“That is, until a recruiter from the facility paid you a visit. We had heard of your work, and while your efforts were somewhat simplistic—”
Dermot scowled.
“—We thought them technically proficient enough to offer you an externship.”
Dermot had leaped at the chance, and the recruiter used the facility’s connections to get him released.
Feculent closed the file and jammed it back into the guts of his desk. He removed his hand and licked his slime-coated fingers clean. When he was finished, he smacked his dry, cracked lips and continued. “And now here you are, Dermot, your work above reproach on a mechanical level, but when it comes to truly understanding what it means to be a doctor…” Feculent trailed off, shaking his head.
Dermot could see his heart pounding faster, but try as he might, he couldn’t force it to slow down. It was most embarrassing.
“I’m afraid that despite your skills, your future here is in doubt.” Feculent considered for a moment. “Have you thought of taking up serial killing? It’s not medicine, but I’m told it has its own rather pedestrian rewards.”
Fury washed through Dermot like a battery acid enema. His heart pounded angrily, and he grabbed the throbbing organ and squeezed hard to calm it. “I was born to be a doctor,” he said through gritted teeth.
Feculent looked at Dermot, a dark dangerous light flickering in the depths of his filmy white eyes. “That, my dear boy, remains to be seen.”
* * *
Dermot stalked the dank, winding corridors of the facility, pausing only to administer an occasional kick to a patient lying on the floor. How dare Feculent talk to him like that? Dermot was one of the most skilled externs the facility had ever seen! But that didn’t matter, did it? Dermot thought bitterly. Not as long as Feculent had it in his tiny dog turd of a mind that he was lacking…whatever it was. He didn’t even understand it well enough to name it. No, despite Dermot’s considerable skill, Feculent would bounce him out of the program. He’d made that quite clear in his barely veiled parting threat. And being bounced at the facility could mean so many things. So many…dreadful things.
But Dermot was determined. If he didn’t have this whatever it was, then he’d just have to get it, wouldn’t he?
And he knew just the place.
He found Lavinia in the maternity ward, helping Doctor Squib jam miscarried fetuses back into their screaming mothers.
He waited for an opportunity to speak with her. One finally came when Doctor Squib shoved a little too hard and shredded a woman’s lower torso. He dropped the fetus to the floor in irritation, called for an orderly to clean up the mess and deliver it to the cafeteria, and stomped off. Lavinia started to follow, but Dermot caught her eye and motioned for her to come over.
As she walked, her exposed organs jiggled most enticingly, but Dermot didn’t care. He had other things on his mind.
“What do you want, Dermot? I have to meet Doctor Rigor in the flensing room in fifteen —”
Lavinia was cut off in mid-sentence as Dermot slashed a scalpel through the creamy mushroom-colored flesh of her throat. Thick black blood gushed forth. Lavinia tried to stem the flood of ichor with her hands, but she might as well have tried to hold back the ocean armed with nothing but a sieve and a sponge. Dermot’s cut had been too deep, too precise.
It took a few moments before she lost consciousness and fell to the floor. The orderlies who were busy cleaning up after Doctor Squib’s last patient paid no attention; it wasn’t their place. And besides, they had no sensory organs to speak of.
When Lavinia’s heart and lungs stilled, Dermot knelt beside her and readied his scalpel. Lavinia had the Whatever-It-Was. She’d proved that today during rounds. Now all Dermot had to do was find it—and make it his.
He began cutting.
* * *
“Where’s Lavinia?” Doctor Feculent asked in mild puzzlement. “It’s unlike her to be tardy for rounds.”
The externs looked at each other, some shrugging, some shaking their heads. Dermot tried not to smile.
Feculent looked at Dermot and frowned slightly. He nodded to the freshly stitched incision on Dermot’s left temple. “Getting in some extra credit work, Dermot?”
Dermot kept his tone even. “Just trying to keep up with my studies, Doctor.”
Feculent hmpffed. “Very well, then.” He glanced at his watch. “We can wait for Lavinia no longer. Let us begin.”
The first few cases they saw were simple ones—a pair of twins in the first stages of being returned to the single egg from which they’d come, and a famous fashion model who was undergoing a reverse liposuction to receive the total amount of fat taken from all the women in the world who’d suffered through useless fad diets and painful surgical procedures to try to look like her. Nothing particularly radical or challenging, and what few questions Doctor Feculent asked weren’t directed to Dermot.
But then the Doctor led them to an area of the facility that Dermot wasn’t familiar with. They walked some time in silence down corridor after corridor until Feculent had them stop before a featureless wooden door.
“I have something rather special planned today.” He gestured to the door. “Dermot, if you’ll do the honors?”
There was something about Feculent’s t
one that Dermot didn’t like, but he did as the doctor bade and stepped forward to open the door.
Inside, instead of a hospital room, was a yard. A tiny postage-stamp sized yard before a humble one-story house. A house that Dermot recognized.
Doctor Feculent grinned. “Who said you can’t go home again?”
Dermot just stood staring. He felt Doctor Feculent give him a shove, and he stumbled across the threshold and into the yard.
“Go on,” Feculent said as he gripped Dermot’s elbow and steered him forward. Dermot was dimly aware of the other externs filing in behind them, but he didn’t care. He was transfixed by the scene on the porch. A young boy, no more than four, was hunched over something that Dermot couldn’t see. But then, he didn’t need to see it, did he? He knew what it was. A cat. Or rather, several pieces of cat.
Doctor Feculent continued urging him toward the porch. “I’ve planned a little surprise quiz for you today, Dermot.” He pushed Dermot onto the front steps, then stopped. “Don’t worry, the lad can’t see us. This was a very important moment in your life, wasn’t it? Perhaps in many ways, the most important.”
Dermot nodded as he watched the little boy he’d been go methodically and coldly about his work.
Feculent went on. “It was the day your skills first blossomed. But the medicine we practice at the facility is about so much more than technique. There are many, many ways to cause simple physical pain; however, there are an infinite amount of ways to torture and degrade the spirit. To accomplish the latter, a doctor needs more than the ability to put together and take apart fleshy tinkertoys. A true doctor needs empathy, Dermot. The ability not just to feel pain, but to understand it, inside and out.”
Dermot couldn’t take his gaze off his younger self, but he heard the grin in Feculent’s voice. “Only when one truly understands pain in all its myriad glory can one effectively engender it. Only then can one become a true doctor in the fullest sense of the word.”
Feculent stepped—or rather drifted—up until he was positioned directly next to Dermot. He leaned over and whispered in Dermot’s ear, his breath morgue-frigid and stale. “The test is simple, Dermot. All you have to do is feel. Feel for this little boy you once were, feel for the dark path he has set his tiny feet upon this day. Feel for all who will fall beneath his knife in the years to come. Feel—and understand.”
Dermot concentrated, willing the small hunk of Lavinia’s brain that he’d transplanted into his skull last night to do its job. Willing it to feel. It gave a couple spastic twitches, and then a spiteful thought drifted across his consciousness, a thought that came in Lavinia’s voice.
Get bent.
And then nothing. The operation had failed.
He stared at the boy, at himself, desperately trying to eke out the slightest hint of emotion from his flat and lifeless psyche. But it was no use. The boy might have been a stranger to Dermot for all that he felt, just another patient, another piece of meat for him to work on.
Doctor Feculent tcched. “Sorry, Dermot. I’m afraid you failed.” He reached forward, gripped the little boy’s neck, and twisted. There was a loud CRACK! The boy’s eyes bulged, and then he fell limp. Feculent released the small corpse and it collapsed onto the bloody form of the cat the boy had been laboring over.
Dermot still struggled to feel something, anything. Sadness, pity, fear, despair…but all he felt was a burgeoning anger.
Doctor Feculent floated down the stairs and toward the open doorway, the other externs following behind. But Dermot stepped forward and knelt beside the still warm body of the little boy. He rolled him off the bloody, disemboweled cat and onto his back. Dermot then reached into the pocket of his lab coat and brought forth his trusty scalpel which was still coated with the dried flakes of Lavinia’s blood.
He was a doctor. No matter what Feculent or anybody else said. And he could fix this. He could heal the boy, make it so he could feel. All it would take was a little surgical skill. He ripped open the boy’s shirt and plunged the blade into the soft, virgin-pink flesh at the base of his throat and made an incision.
The skin peeled away to reveal not ribs, heart and lungs, but instead a vast, unending black void. An infinite expanse of pure, unbroken Nothingness.
And then the Nothing reached for Dermot.
* * *
Doctor Feculent closed the door on the extern’s screams.
“It’s a shame Dermot didn’t take my suggestion about serial killing. He might’ve been quite good at it. Ah, well, shall we continue our rounds, people?” The doctor drifted down the hallway, his students shuffling along behind.
’TIL VOICES DROWN US
The roads were narrower than he remembered; twistier—if that was a word—and rougher. The ditches on either side of the road were overgrown with weeds, tall grass, and stalks of Queen Anne’s lace. There weren’t many homes out here, mostly farmhouses set back a ways from the road, fields of corn and soybeans forming green barriers between their planters and the world.
Thomas Wolfe said you can’t go home again, but Michael knew that he’d gotten it wrong. You could go home, but who in their right mind would want to? But that was the problem: he wasn’t in his right mind, and so he had no choice but to return to Ashton.
“I’m hearing a K word. It’s a first name, I think. Kevin? Karl?”
“Could it be Clint?” The woman was soft-spoken, almost timid, but as soon as she said the name, he knew that was it.
“Yes, Clint. He’s…” Michael frowned. He tried to ignore the audience, the lights, the cameras and the crew, and concentrate on the almost inaudible voice whispering in his head. “He’s related to you, that’s definite. Close. Not a brother or father. Husband. He’s your husband.”
Ashton was a dirt-poor town in the middle of southwestern Ohio farmland, equally close to the Indiana and Kentucky borders. Houses with yards that always needed mowing, rusted-out cars up on blocks in the driveway, too much junk on porches, flaking paint, and drooping gutters. The main employer in the town, a bicycle factory, had closed its doors when he was a boy, and those foolish enough to stay in Ashton worked what subsistence-level jobs they could find, dull-eyed fish swimming in a river of alcohol and unfulfilled dreams, marking time until they died.
Except not everyone was content to wait for the inevitable. The grinding despair and hopelessness of life in Ashton took their toll, and every year more than a few folks decided to give the Reaper a helping hand. Gunshots to the head were a popular choice, as was driving your car at full speed into a tree. But the most common method of committing suicide in Ashton by far was jumping off the Old Mill Run Bridge into the rolling water of the Bluerush River.
He remembered an old joke from his childhood. What’s the most popular sport in Ashton? Diving.
In his mind, Michael saw the image of a sunflower growing in a garden. The flower was top heavy and drooped toward the ground, causing the stalk to bend. He wasn’t sure what the image meant—he often didn’t—but he knew it didn’t matter. His aunt had taught him that.
You don’t need to understand everything the dead show you, she’d said. You’re just their mailman; all you have to do is pass the message along.
He focused his gaze on the woman, on Clint’s wife.
Michael described the image of the sunflower, and the woman began to cry.
“I had a sunflower just like that in my garden. My husband teased me about how ugly it was, he…he used to say he was going to go out and cut it down, but of course he never did. Then one day—”
Another image came to Michael. “He took an old broom handle and used it to straighten the sunflower. He tied the stalk to the wood with a piece of twine so it would stand upright.”
The woman’s eyes grew wide, and she smiled in delight and disbelief. “Yes! But how could you know that?”
It was Michael’s turn to smile. “Because he just told me.”
He’d never had many friends growing up. To most of the other kids, he was the boy
who lived outside of town in the trailer with the “old witch woman.” Luckily, that reputation had kept him from getting beaten up more than once or twice, but that was about all it was good for. Ashton was a lousy place for anyone to grow up, but for someone of his abilities, the psychic atmosphere of the town was stifling and oppressive. He had no idea how his aunt endured it. When he at last reached adulthood, he joined a traveling carnival as a medium and got the hell out of Ashton. He’d returned only a handful of times since, and then only to visit his aunt on holidays.
Even though it wasn’t that hot out for late June, Michael kept the windows of his BMW rolled up and the air conditioner running. He told himself it was because he didn’t want to set his hay fever off, but in truth, he just didn’t want to breathe the air, didn’t want to fill his lungs with the smells of grass, corn and manure. He’d spent a decade and a half purging his system of this place, and he wanted to limit his exposure to it as much as possible.
As the applause began to die down, he felt a tingling at the base of his skull. Clint, trying to get his attention. Michael redoubled his concentration, attempted to clear his mind and be open to the spirit’s energy. He could feel Clint’s presence grow stronger, as if the man had been standing a dozen yards away a moment ago, but now had stepped to within arm’s length. He felt the man take one step closer, lean forward and whisper in his ear…
But instead of words, a new image appeared in his mind. A field of darkness rushing toward him, so deep, so utterly devoid of light that it pulled everything toward it; a complete, profound emptiness demanding to be filled. Then, as the blackness drew nearer—or as Michael was sucked toward it—he saw that what he had first taken for nothingness was instead something far worse. And it reached for him with a million-million grasping ebon claws.