‘No, I just want to get some medical information from him. Background, you know.’
‘Oh yeah, I see.’
‘Are you a nurse?’ he asked fearfully after a few more moments of silence.
‘No, I’m just the doctor’s receptionist. He doesn’t have a nurse. Sometimes I help him, sterilizing instruments or stuff like that, but mostly I’m out here.’
‘I see.’
Again, a few moments of silence. Miss Peters stared at Lasker as if he were some unusual specimen in a display case.
‘Did you go to Millie?’ she asked, referring to the local high school.
‘Yes, I did.’
‘So did I, but I don’t remember seeing you there.’
‘I was probably before your time.’
Miss Peters looked as if she were about to disagree, but then thought better of it. ‘When did you — ?’ She was interrupted by the sound of a door slamming somewhere in the house. ‘Oh, he’s out of the john now. I’ll tell him you’re here.’ She rose from her seat and strode out of the room. Within a few seconds she had returned, her head peering in through the doorway from the hall. ‘The doctor will see you now,’ she said with a smile, in what was apparently intended to be her best professional tone of voice. She led Lasker down the hall, past a storeroom crammed with cardboard cartons, past a small room with a large flat patient’s bed in the centre, to an office. Miss Peters stood by the door and gestured. ‘Please go right in.’
‘Thank you,’ Lasker said as he passed her. The door clicked shut behind him.
‘So. Mr Lasker. How do you do?’ Doctor E. E. Schmidt, a tall, gaunt, cadaverous individual of middle years, stepped forward and shook hands with the reporter. With his pallid complexion and his too-large laboratory coat, the physician looked like an enormous white penguin.
‘Fine, doctor, thank you.’
‘Sit down, sit down.’ He motioned Lasker to a plain wooden chair beside his desk, which was so small that when Schmidt sat down behind it he made Lasker think of someone who had been trapped in grammar school all his life. ‘Sorry about it being so dark in here. I have to get the damn fluorescent light fixed. They’re always on the fritz.’
‘Not at all.’ Lasker looked briefly around. It was a splendid room furnished in appalling style. Even the yellowed diploma on the wall was slightly out of kilter.
‘What can I do for you?’
‘Well, sir, I work for the Millville News, as I think I told you on the phone.’
‘Yes, yes, I remember. Proceed.’ Schmidt sat forward over the desk, with a serious, business-like look on his face.
‘I wanted to ask you a few questions about the death of James Donner.’
‘Ah, yes. Tragic matter.’
‘Yes, it was.’ Lasker cleared his throat. ‘However there —’
‘But I already gave my report, Mr Lasker. Surely you can check with the town authorities.’
‘Yes, sir, I’ve seen your report, but it still leaves a lot of questions in my mind.’
‘I see, I see.’ The doctor’s eyes widened with fascination. ‘You think there was something more to it?’
‘Well, don’t you?’
‘Of course,’ Schmidt replied with an off-hand shrug, closing his eyes briefly.
‘Well, what do you mean by misadventure? What is your professional understanding of the term?’ The physician raised his eyebrows in annoyance, and Lasker quickly added: ‘I want to make sure I understand the exact meaning of the word in the medical and legal senses.’
Somewhat mollified, Schmidt leaned back and stared into space, explaining, ‘Misadventure is an unlucky accident, unlucky, indeed often fatal. In fact, in the legal sense, strictly speaking, it is always fatal, otherwise it’s assault and battery and who cares anyhow? Best example, the textbook example, is when a household cat jumps into the baby’s crib because it is attracted by the smell of milk. Cat falls asleep on baby’s face, smothering baby. Death by misadventure. Hardly ever happens, but there you are. Good example.’
‘But it has to be an accident?’
‘Accident, chance, that sort of thing. The absence of design, you see. If you were bitten by a bushmaster, you —’
‘A what?’
‘A bushmaster, Mr Lasker. It’s a snake, a wonderful snake from South America. Also known as Lachesis muta. It can reach twelve feet in length, and its bite is especially deadly, in a very nasty way. So.’
Doctor Schmidt lapsed into silence and that faraway, dreamy look returned to his eyes. The tiniest hint of a smile suggested itself at the corners of his lips. Lasker waited patiently for a few moments before interrupting.
‘Doctor Schmidt?’
‘Yes, yes,’ he murmured, coming around slowly. ‘I was just thinking of that bushmaster. Such a snake. You know, the venom of the bushmaster renders the victim’s neck muscles inoperative so he can’t control his head. It just rolls around on the neck any which way — like so.’ The physician proceeded to roll his head around, and let his tongue hang out for good measure. ‘And then, of course, they die. But that neck effect is remarkable. I wonder why a snake would evolve a venom with such a special, localised effect?’
‘We were talking about misadventure, sir,’ Martin Lasker said as politely as he could manage.
‘Yes, well,’ Doctor Schmidt took up instantly, switching back into his lecturing manner. ‘If you were camping out — in the tropics, of course — and a bushmaster came into your tent and bit you and you died, that we could call death by misadventure. But if someone put the snake in your tent, well, that would naturally be murder. You see? Accident. Design. A murder like that would be very hard to prove, but you’d have the problem of getting the damn snake to the tent without having it bit you first. Not so simple, eh?’
‘What bothers me about the Donner case, sir, is —’
‘Yes, Donner, yes.’
‘Yes, uh, what bothers me is that what happened in that room seems hard to describe as an accident.’
‘Ah, yes, well…’ Schmidt let the words trail away. He looked philosophical.
‘I mean, I didn’t see the body, but I did see the room, and all that destruction — it just wasn’t an accident.’
‘I can see how you might think that, Mr Lasker, but you would like it even less if I had called it death by natural causes.’
‘You couldn’t have done that’
‘Well… I don’t suppose I could have, but all the available evidence indicates it was not caused by human agency — not that I would entirely rule out that possibility, you understand. I could have rendered an open verdict, I suppose, but I don’t like doing that, and misadventure is not, as I have tried to show you, inappropriate or inaccurate. It can remain an open case in the police files, but not in mine.’
‘It’s just not complete.’
‘What’s not complete? What are natural causes, for that matter? What is cancer? A disease, or simply a new form of self-destruction, an evolutionary check?’
Lasker had a grim vision of Schmidt continuing on, growing more and more speculative in his monologue, so he hastily spoke up.
‘About the body, sir, I read in your catalogue of things that happened — the broken bones and so on.’
‘So much.’
‘Yes, exactly, but I couldn’t figure out from your report which specific occurrence in the body brought about death.’
‘Neither could I,’ the physician answered simply. ‘There was so much — the heart, the brain, the spine — you can take your pick. I don’t know the actual chronology of the disaster.’
‘If you had to guess? Off the record, of course.’
‘Off the record I would still find it hard to guess. Maybe the spine went first, maybe the skull. Who knows?’
Lasker sighed. So far he had made very few notes in his pad. ‘Do you know of anything, again off the record, all this is just for me to think about, sir, you won’t be quoted, unless of course you want to be — do you know of anything that could d
o or cause that kind of damage in a person?’
‘It could be done by other people, but it is so utterly unlikely that the possibility doesn’t merit serious consideration. It would take almost superhuman strength and control. Mr Lasker, a chess pawn has a round ball for a cap. To drive it through the skin, through the muscle and fat, into the spine at an oblique angle, without making an incision first or using a hammer, which would leave a much larger bruise than actually was found — well, the more I think about it the less I believe that any person is physically able to do that.’
‘All right, after seeing the room I find it hard to imagine anyone doing that. But where does that leave us?’
‘If I knew, Mr Lasker, it would be in my report. As for idle guesses — a whirlwind perhaps? Tornados have driven pieces of straw through planks of pinewood. It’s possible, and if so, that’s misadventure.’
‘A whirlwind indoors? I’m not a meteorologist, but —’
‘Listen, anything’s possible. Last year in England a housewife reported that she was cooking in the kitchen when a fireball floated in through the open window and brushed up against her, scorching her dress.’
‘Well, that — ’ Lasker made a dismissive gesture with his hand.
‘Yes, yes, it’s quite possible, believe me. Not a publicity stunt by a crank. There have been a number of similar incidents here and in Europe. They think it has to do with electric stoves or microwave ovens and ionized air. They are investigating now.’ Schmidt emphasised the last word by tapping a finger on his desk as if he expected a final report any minute. ‘But the fireball effect is apparently quite possible, and if that can happen, indoors as well as out, then who knows what might have happened to poor Mr Donner?’
‘Do you recall when last year this happened?’ Lasker asked, intending to check the paper’s files for a news item on it.
‘Summer, maybe autumn? If she had the window open, in England, it must have been summer. Maybe late summer.’
‘Thanks. So you think the Donner case was just a freakish accident?’
‘Yes. Not an accident in the every-day sense of the word, but a very unusual accident. Yes.’
‘Was there anything you noticed in your examination of the body, anything that still troubles you? Something you might have left out of your report because it seemed too vague or tenuous?’
‘Everybody wants a clue,’ Schmidt said with a smile, ‘a clue to set them on the trail. I’m sorry I don’t have any.’ The doctor tore a blank sheet from the prescription pad on his desk, rolled it into a ball and tossed it into the wicker wastebasket several feet away. ‘If you want something to think about, Mr Lasker, think about this. Maybe our fine technological world has gotten so far out of hand that things can begin to happen that we don’t even recognise or understand. Impossible things, like this.’
Lasker decided to file that line of speculation for thought at some other time. ‘If I told you that the same sort of thing happened only a few days before the Donner incident, only it happened to an animal — would you still think it was a freak accident?’
Lasker was annoyed with himself for not realising that Sturdevent would naturally discuss the Bondarevsky matter with Schmidt. A duff reporter’s question. ‘So we have two incidents in a short space of time in the same area.’
‘That’s right.’
‘That makes it less freakish, doesn’t it?’
‘Not really, Mr Lasker. The fact that it happened to the cow reinforces my opinion rather than weakens it. Perhaps some freak topological effect, something in the air.’
Martin Lasker wrote on his pad: Something in the air. Schmidt and Sturdevent had worked out this line together, and it reminded him of politicians who, during the war in Vietnam, spoke of the light at the end of the tunnel As if it were real. As if it were an answer. The politicians had been selling an illusion. The notion that the cow and James Donner had been killed by a freak of nature seemed to Lasker to be the same kind of wishful thinking. But he had no explanations either.
After a few more inconsequential questions and equally inconsequential answers, Lasker rose to leave. ‘Thanks very much for your time, Doctor.’
‘Not at all. I’m sorry if I wasn’t able to help you much.’
‘It’s a very puzzling, disturbing problem.’
‘Yes, it is. I hope you solve it for us.’ Doctor Schmidt shook Lasker’s hand lingeringly. ‘By the way, Mr Lasker, just while you’re here.’
‘Yes?’
‘Have you had a physical check-up lately? You should have one every six months, you know.’
Lasker realised suddenly that Doctor Schmidt was taking his pulse. ‘Yes, as a matter of fact, I have. And a chest X-ray.’
Schmidt released Lasker’s wrist without the slightest trace of self-consciousness, and gave the reporter a hearty slap on the back.
‘Good, good.’
Miss Peters was reading Myra Breckinridge as Lasker passed through the reception room.
‘Good-bye.’
‘Come again,’ she smiled sweetly.
*
The ceiling was patterned with circles. Perhaps the colour had originally been sunshine yellow or a brisk mustard or even a pure, glossy white, but time had steadily dulled it to a lifeless gold. This was a good old building, or had been. Rooms meant to control, define and dominate space. Layout designed to marshal and channel activity into regular form and practice.
Solidity.
To support.
To enhance.
To house.
To shelter.
Now it just seemed angular and boxlike. A tired shell. The hush no longer suggested reverence or wisdom; it was the joyless silence of sterility.
Father Lombardy rolled over and sat up on the edge of his bed. He crushed out a cigarette. After five months he was smoking again.
What would Thomas Merton say about today’s event? Or Paul Tillich, or Martin Buber, or, better still, the old demythologizer Rudolf Bultmann? The young priest scanned the books on his shelf and an image grew in his mind: dozens of learned elderly men, philosophers, theologians, scientists, all sitting calmly in deck-chairs around the clearing, watching the blue fire and faces of heaven or hell that had confronted Father Lombardy. Would they nod, whisper to each other, or simply jump up and run through the swampy undergrowth, as he had this afternoon?
Ridiculous. He shook himself out of the day-dream, rose, walked over to the small writing desk, turned over a letter from his mother so that the blank backside of the page faced up, returned to his bed, sat down, lit up another Kent and leaned back against the headboard.
For the fiftieth time, he began to go over in his mind everything that had happened in that brief visit. It had all taken place so quickly. He should have stayed where he had fallen. Stayed and watched. Kept the faith, he thought, and that popular phrase now had an especially bitter taste. But he hadn’t stayed. When he had seen Joey’s eyes, wide, glassy, reacting with awe and enthusiasm, he had bolted, dragging the child with him. As he ran, fear began to rattle through his system and it was a physical as well as a mental thing, like a small but wild .22 bullet puncturing organs and bouncing off bones to do further damage. It hadn’t let up.
Maybe there wasn’t a logical explanation, maybe he was simply fortifying the trap he felt caught in, by seeking to reduce the experience to cold, dispassionate analysis. Analysis he was incapable of, anyhow. What was his basic, instinctive response? To run, to hide. But emotionally, psychologically, what visceral reaction? Fear. Yes, but what is behind the fear? What informs the fear? The unknown. The blue light. The faces. Forget the blue light, forget the shadowy faces, they’re only the outward manifestation. What was communicated to you, what flashed like a laser beam to your psyche in that first awful moment of confrontation? Something you have been trying already to bury beneath layers of objective explanation, each more irrelevant and obstructing than the last
‘Evil,’ he said, and the sound of his own clear voice startled him.
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But that was what he had sensed immediately. Evil. Not clammy, fiendish, bloodcurdling evil, not the common, even fashionable notion of Satanic evil, the Devil and all his works. No, this was something bleak, desolate, impersonal, something removed from the lore of demonology. Is it possible for evil to exist in the abstract, he wondered?
Father Lombardy got up from his bed again, and walked across the room to his closet door. He looked at the poster reproduction of Vermeer’s The Cook which was mounted there. With his thumb he pressed hard on the tack in the lower left hand corner until it was flush with the door.
But maybe his gut feeling was wrong. After all, there had been nothing abstract about what he actually experienced out there today. He had been physically thrown through the air. For several feet. That action had been directed against himself and the boy. To make matters worse, that was precisely the sort of thing that suggested a poltergeist. Maybe the traditional tales had some substance. Certainly the Church did not openly say that ghosts and the like did not exist, although it frowned on the subject. The fact that the thing had been a blue light or a blue fire didn’t necessarily matter; the common idea of a ghost as a kind of semi-transparent white nimbus of a wraith was not something you could look up in an encyclopaedia and find verified as universal law. And there were the faces.
But poltergeists were said to be harmless, prankish spirits, and that didn’t sit well with the priest. That sense of evil was too great to be denied. And being thrown through the air was a personal act, particularly if it happened that the thing was a force… a conscious and knowing presence… something… some thing.
It was hopeless. Father Lombardy felt as unsure of himself as he had this afternoon driving back to the rectory, his mind a turmoil.
He had to do something. He knew that. The Pomar kids were right about there being something at that place, and he would have to do something about it. Art Pomar had been on the phone twice already this evening, maybe more — Father Lombardy had told Mrs Baukus he didn’t feel well and didn’t want to take any calls tonight. That had not gone down well with the old lady, who believed that a priest should always be on tap. Tomorrow. Tomorrow, he knew, he would have to do something.
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