Little Deaths

by John F. D. Taff

  I had been alone with many lunatics before—men who fancied themselves Napoleon or Christ, men who fancied themselves women, men afraid of ordinary things, men afraid of supernatural things—but never a man who had actually killed.

  What to do with such a man in such a situation?

  He, fortunately, took the lead, or I fear we’d be standing there yet today.

  His coat opened like the panels of a religious triptych, fell to the floor, revealing a horror that will live inside my mind forever. For even the darkness—or the madness, which you can well attest—could not blot it out.

  Hands, dozens of them, a hundred of them, covered his nude body, erupted from every filthy square inch of exposed skin. They writhed along his form, each seemingly possessed of an individual will.

  Some caressed him—a rather dainty one, I’m somewhat embarrassed to say, stroked his indifferent genitals. Others tortured him, pinching, pulling, slapping, poking his flesh.

  And they were as different as the original extraneous limb had been to his own. There were feminine hands, children’s hands, male hands, old hands, dark, light, small and large hands.

  His own two were held outstretched to me, beseeching.

  “Help me,” he wept, large tears rolling down his face, falling like rain upon the waving, upturned fingertips.

  “I can feel. I can feel them all.”

  With newfound strength, I raced behind my desk, opened a locked drawer and withdrew a small box containing a syringe and three vials of morphine, which I keep on hand for my more excitable patients.

  Nervously, I filled the syringe, cautiously approached Craddock, horrible and beautiful, I now realized, like a strange male Medusa.

  He watched me with cowering, pitiable eyes as I came near—the eyes of a wounded beast.

  Unable to find a suitable injection site amidst the undulating appendages, I stabbed it directly into his bare, corded neck.

  Craddock screamed, thrust me away, fell to the floor as if pole axed.

  Horribly, when he hit the ground, there was a series of loud reports, cracking and crunching.

  Broken fingers, you see.

  * * *

  Yes, I did, at that juncture, administer a tincture of morphine to myself, to calm my own jumpy nerves. Yes, just a brief kiss of the grey lady.

  I dragged him—Judas Priest, he was heavy!—across the rug to the couch, trying desperately to ignore the sound of all of those fingers raking along the carpet, snapping and crackling under his weight.

  I didn’t notice until I had him lying atop the couch, but the hands still moved, as if untouched by the flow of morphine in his blood, as if they took their substance from another source.

  Or partook not of blood altogether.

  Even under the pall of the drug, Craddock’s delirium animated his body, his head thrashing on the pillows, his arms and legs twitching.

  I knelt there for a moment, pitying the murderer. Poor wretch! Observe his trials, his torments!

  And then a thought came into my mind.

  Here is someone who could benefit from my ministrations.

  My head began to clear at that thought, when the front bell rang.

  I immediately remembered the visitor from Scotland Yard.

  What to do? What to do?

  * * *

  You find that question so hard to fathom?

  Are not we both men of science? Are we not trained to seek out the questions and problems that vex life, to answer them, to solve them?

  Would you not have done the same in my circumstances?

  … No?

  Ah, well, you are younger than I. You have time to court the mysteries, to seduce the answers from them. I am getting older and am forced, by my age, to abduct them, wring the truth from them.

  That is why I lied to Inspector Lester.

  Craddock was my captured mystery, and I decided then, unconsciously perhaps, to study him, to learn his terrible, secret truth.

  Oh yes, most cunningly, I straightened my clothing, brushed my hair, pinched my cheeks here and there to bring the color back.

  How I beguiled the poor man. Oh, it was a brilliant performance.

  “Please step in and warm yourself,” I said. “Would you care for a cup of tea? Oh yes, I saw him, stood right here, he did. Murderous, he looked,” I said. “No, sir, I didn’t take him on as a patient. Something about him didn’t feel right. Oh, well then I saw the story in the Times. That’s why I sent for you,” I said. “If there is anything else I can do, please let me know. I hope you catch the man. Lord, what a ghastly crime!” I said.

  And all the time hating the officer, wishing he would leave. Thinking of Craddock there behind the closed door to my office, lying naked with a hundred hands waving like Sargasso floating atop a deep, dead sea.

  A sea of dark truth.

  Leave he eventually did, with my kind thanks and another invitation to have a cup of tea, thankfully declined.

  I dashed back to my office, locking the front door and my office door behind me.

  Craddock, indeed, still lay there, unmoving, save for the waving hands.

  Suddenly inspired, I grabbed a pen and a piece of paper, took them to the couch.

  I pressed the pen into the palm of one of the swaying hands, and it clenched around it.

  I guided it to the paper, and after a moment, it moved instinctively, as if guessing my intent.

  He feels me.

  It scrawled the words on the sheet in huge letters, passed the pen to a neighboring hand, which took it up, and it, too, wrote upon the sheet. He feels me.

  And so on, like a ship tossed on great waves, the pen passed from hand to hand, each writing the same three words.

  Shaking, I snatched the pen away, and the hands returned to their aimless, rhythmic motion.

  I suddenly remembered an article about mesmerism that I had read in a professional journal.

  Ah, you read it, too?

  I would have guessed you to have dismissed it. But I did not. No, I knew how to proceed then with Mr. Craddock.

  But first, I had to let the morphine subside within him.

  * * *

  That evening, after a meager dinner of cold ham and cheese, a heel of stale bread, and a cup of tea, I revisited Mr. Craddock.

  He was awake now, groggy, but entirely aware of his situation.

  I was spared, for the moment, the distracting movement of the hands, for while he was under sedation, I had strapped him into a straitjacket.

  Yes, very much like the one I’m wearing now, though I don’t think I tightened the buckles quite as painfully as you have.

  He didn’t talk to me at all as I moved about the office gathering what I needed.

  But this time, his eyes followed me with interest as they had not done during his prior visit.

  I lit a candle and extinguished the gas lamps in the room. We were immediately plunged into darkness.

  Guided by the candle’s sputtering light, I made my way to the seat nearest the couch.

  Though it was my first attempt at Dr. Mesmer’s therapy, Craddock was hypnotized within minutes, as he followed my soft, repeated instructions and the bobbing candle flame.

  “Mr. Craddock, you will answer all of my questions honestly and accurately. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” he answered, and his voice was distant and small.

  “Return now to the moment when you made the decision to kill your family. Why did you decide to do it?”

  Silence for a moment, and the candle lit his grimacing face.

  “Unloving. Incapable of the tender emotions. Love. Accused by my parents, my children, my own wife…” Here, he sobbed.

  “… and they were right. I could not feel them. They were not real. Just things. Just things,” he wailed.

  “And now? After you have murdered them?”

  “I feel them. All of them. Every feeling, every emotion. Everything I was unable to feel when they lived. They are with me constantly. And I am mad.�
��

  “The hands? They are a manifestation of this?” I asked, too eagerly, I must admit, for he noticed the slight change of tone in my voice.

  “Yes. They are my hearts.”

  “Your wife’s, your children’s, yes. But the others?”

  “They have killed since.”

  I was aghast. “They? The hands have killed?”

  “Yes. They want me to feel more. To fully understand what I could not before.”

  “But if you feel now, then you are whole. You have what you were missing before.”

  The fool! I thought. He should have seen a medical doctor. Craddock had been on the right track with the murders, but couldn’t see how to proceed afterwards.

  It was all so clear to me.

  The hands!

  Yes, the hands were the cure and the disease.

  They had to come off.

  To cure Craddock, I had to remove them.

  Of course I was capable. I was trained primarily as a medical doctor, though my skills in surgery were a trifle off from years of disuse.

  They should suffice, though, for simple amputations.

  I possessed the instruments, the ether.

  I could help Craddock, return the gift he had given me.

  For it was then that I saw my life stretch before me like a shining path.

  And I was about to set my first step upon it.

  * * *

  It was 2 a.m. when I made the first cut.

  Craddock was, as I said, abominably large and required strenuous effort on my part to get him into the cellar, where I had set up a crude operating theatre. As it was, his legs hung over the end of my wholly inadequate table.

  I had laid out my instruments on a small tea table I dragged down the steps, arranged the various other surgical accoutrements to be close at hand when needed, since I would be performing alone.

  When everything was finally in place, Craddock was strapped to the table with strong leather belts, anesthetized thoroughly with ether. I drew on an apron and picked up my scalpel.

  I selected a hand at random, the dainty female one sprouting from the center of his chest, more intimate than a lover’s, and brought the knife to bear.

  Oh, what a scene followed. I know not how I kept my sanity intact.

  The dainty thing spasmed as the knife scored the flesh of its wrist, flailed in an attempt to grab the instrument, pluck it from my grasp.

  There, too, was a hideous scream that burst from the mouth of the unconscious man, though it was not his own. It was high and feminine, echoing in the confines of the cellar.

  I nearly lost all resolve upon hearing it.

  There was a splash of blood as the knife bit deep, encountering no bone on its way.

  Imagine! No bone supporting the horrifying thing.

  With a bit of force and a twist of the blade, it separated from the man, dropped to the ground where it continued to twitch and claw for several minutes.

  The other hands were suddenly manic, as if they understood my awful purpose. They grabbed at my apron, at my sleeves, pawed at me.

  Something snapped within me then. Yes, snapped with an audible sound.

  I became furious, lopping off hands with broad, arcing swipes of the scalpel. The cellar became a charnel house, an abattoir as blood and tissue flew in all directions, spattered the gas lamps so thickly that the light took on a deep rose color.

  And still I cut and hacked, turning Craddock this way and that as screams of all kinds poured from his mouth. Children and men and women all screamed through Craddock’s mouth.

  I must admit that I don’t know how long I stood there, dripping with gore, slicing at the body of poor Mr. Craddock, a heap of amputated flesh flopping at my feet.

  I don’t remember when the screams stopped; certainly it was before I excised the last of the hands.

  By then, of course, Craddock was quite dead.

  While exhausted, I was elated, as you can no doubt imagine.

  I had succeeded.

  If only Craddock had taken my advice, done this earlier when there were fewer hands, he might have survived the procedure.

  I consoled myself with the fact that while Craddock had left this life, he left it able to feel.

  Fortifying myself with a draught of brandy from a bottle I’d brought down earlier, I went about the task of cleaning the place.

  I felt energized, electric. I finally saw how to help, how to make a difference for my other patients. Suddenly, it became so clear that I harbored hope even for the most stubbornly regressive of them.

  The cellar was thoroughly cleaned, and Craddock was dissected into small pieces, fed slowly into the boiler so as not to arouse the suspicious sniffs of my neighbors.

  Not that the authorities would be searching here for Craddock!

  Why, they had no reason to suspect the connection in the first place.

  * * *

  I grow weary, and the spirits burn in my brain, doctor.

  The rest you know, I assume, from speaking with the inspectors.

  I was never violent, you understand, never brutal. Always with a cup of poisoned tea or an overdose of morphine. Always quiet and civil and gentle as I helped them solve their problems. Always a proper burial in the garden behind the house.

  And afterward, it was as if a new window opened within me, and I was able to see, to finally understand each one.

  To feel them.

  Unlike Craddock, I understood the curse inherent in the gift.

  I removed each eruption as it appeared, a simple operation.

  Everything was going so well. I had helped so many people.

  Now, I am unable to help anyone.

  Even myself.

  I help you, doctor?

  By Jove, that is true insanity! I don’t feel you!

  And you can’t help me, either.

  Do you know how I feel?

  Do you know how anyone in this asylum feels?

  I think not.

  How can you hope to help me if you don’t understand?

  You have been kind, I’ll grant.

  No, I have quite forgotten the straitjacket, but you are kind to inquire as to my comfort.

  You could, however, loosen the bandages around my forehead, they are a bit tight.

  There…

  Ah, better.

  But why do you blanch, sir? Why so pale?

  The wound has gotten worse, has it?

  Bumps?

  Five of them, you say?

  IN MEN, BLACK

  The dark suit in the plastic dry cleaner bag arrived on a Wednesday, and Travis absently removed the hanger from the doorknob of his apartment.

  Using his other hand, he jiggled out his keys, fitted one into the lock, swung the door open onto emptiness, blackness.

  He flipped the leaning floor lamp on, slung the dry cleaning bag over the one piece of furniture in the place—a sagging, beaten futon—and went to the refrigerator. It had been a long, hard day at the office, with real estate sales being what they were—or weren’t these days—and Travis wanted something to clear the dust and sourness from his mouth, something to numb his brain.

  He removed a can, popped the top, and drained half before the door shut. Weighing the remainder of the can’s contents against how he felt, he reached in just before the door closed and grabbed another.

  He set the beers onto the arm of the futon, yanked his tie off, stepped from his pants. Sniffing at the shirt’s armpits, he judged it wearable for at least one more day, slid it around a hanger.

  In the bathroom’s cramped confines, he shed his underwear and stepped into the shower. He let the scalding water steam the day from his skin; steam the thoughts from his head.

  When he felt enough of the day had swirled down the drain, he toweled off, stepped into a pair of shorts, and slid on a t-shirt. He flopped onto the futon, and, just like that, the day he had hoped had been washed down the shower drain came back.

  Swallowing the rest of the second
beer, he flipped the can into a corner and stretched out atop the disarrayed covers on the futon.

  Soon, he was asleep.

  * * *

  When he awoke, he felt muzzy, disoriented. Against the pull of lethargy, he shuffled to the bathroom to void the suddenly insistent beers from last night.

  Twenty minutes later, he padded to the closet in his underwear, noticed the dry cleaner bag, still draped over the arm of the futon.

  The suit inside was dark, and there was also a white shirt and a tie. The suit and tie were black… flat, midnight black. It had no pattern, no stripes, no sheen. It was as dark and featureless as if it had been spun from charcoal.

  Travis knew he didn’t own a black suit, had never owned a black suit, but he put it on anyway. This one fit his body intimately, as if it had been made for him.

  Absently, he reached into the pockets. His left hand closed around a pink message slip, strangely addressed to him.

  Pharmacist called. Your prescription is ready.

  Travis stood there wearing a suit that wasn’t his, looking at a message about a prescription that wasn’t his, either.

  A short car ride later, Travis found himself standing in line behind an elderly woman in the too-bright neighborhood drugstore. He waited patiently as the woman finished her business, stepped to the counter.

  “The pharmacist would like to speak with you at the window marked ‘Consultation’,” the cashier told him.

  Up the aisle a little, he stepped between two dividers that gave the window some measure of privacy. The pharmacist appeared, and Travis stepped back, feeling a scream push at the constriction of his throat.

  The man’s face was round and bland and white… not just the white of too many hours spent indoors, not even the white of anemia. This was a pallor so deep it appeared almost like makeup. His lips were thin, almost to the point of nonexistence, colorless.

  He had no eyebrows.