THE M.D. A Horror Story

by Thomas M. Disch

  William shook his head. “I think,” he said very carefully, “I should see a doctor.”

  Lorine laughed. “You and me both, sweetheart.”

  “I think this may be urgent.”

  “Hey, it wasn’t me who hung up the phone, it was your friend Judith.”

  “If you could get someone to drive me to 1350 Calumet Avenue here in St. Paul… It’s not more than a mile from the fairgrounds.”

  “Why, what’s there?”

  The caduceus was there, where he had first hidden it, in the insulation of the attic. The caduceus had never failed to be efficacious in the past. If he could lay hold of it, he would be well, the pain would be gone. But how could he explain that to this leather-clad harpy, this would-be teenager who looked older than Madge?

  All he could think to say was, “My stepmother lives there. She’s a nurse, she—” He caught his breath as another magnesium flare of pain swept through his nervous system.

  Lorine leaned forward, squint-eyed, her interest captured by the signs of his suffering as an iron filing might align itself inside a magnetic field. “Hey, you’re not bullshitting, are you? You got some kind of problem.”

  “Please,” he begged, with the abjection that comes as hope vanishes. “Just take me to… 1350 Calumet.”

  “Yeah, well, we’ll keep dialing. But meanwhile I think you could use a little mood alteration. Something to take your mind off your immediate problems.” She went to the steel-mesh cabinet from which she’d taken the telephone and returned with a box containing a hypodermic and various sized ampules. She readied his injection as skillfully as any R.N. and found the vein she was looking for after only the second try.

  The morphine flowed into him like the waters of baptism, erasing the pain, filling any darkness with bright white light. His body became a dawn meadow, shimmering with a dew of pure hurtless sensation.

  “That feels better?” Lorine inquired. Her husky voice seemed to have gained a clarinetlike timbre.

  He nodded.

  Lorine put a finger under his chin and tilted his held up so that she could look directly into his eyes. For a moment he thought she meant to kiss him, but then, reverently, she refilled the hypodermic from another ampule.

  “There was a song,” she remarked, “back in the sixties…” She paused as she felt the first rush of the drug, and resumed, “I can’t remember the lyrics anymore, but I used to listen to that song all the time.”

  76

  It was clear now that everything had been happening for a purpose: his father’s phone call coming just when it did, and Judith having arrived just when she did, so she would answer the phone when William rang and he would talk to her. Judge was sure no matter what sort of fix William was in he wouldn’t have told Judge the combination of the safe, not when he knew that inside it was not only the pile of money he’d wanted Judith to bring him but—Praise God!—the anchoring device for the parole board’s house-arrest system. He’d torn the office apart trying to find the damned thing—until he discovered the wall safe and realized that that was where it must be.

  At which point Lisa was already dead.

  He was sorry he had had to kill her, though at the time he’d felt a kind of satisfaction. Not a carnal satisfaction, but the feeling you get when the last piece of a puzzle slips into place, the righteous thwack of a knife as it keeps hitting the high-score areas in a target. No, he was sorry because he knew he was in deep shit and couldn’t see any way out. If he went any distance from the anchoring device in the house, the parole board band around his ankle would trigger an alarm and he’d be picked up and returned home. And if he’d removed the band himself with the garden shears, the police would have been at the house in no time and found Lisa’s body. No matter what he did, he seemed headed back to prison, so he had just sat tight and concentrated his attention on exploring Wyomia, which turned out to have been exactly the right thing to do.

  And now? Was it still the right thing to do? Wyomia was a gold mine of information, especially once he’d gained the Spectacles of True Vision. In some ways, in most ways, Wyomia was a more interesting place than Willowville or Minneapolis or anywhere real. It wasn’t like looking at pictures on a TV screen, it was like the world to come, the world of the last days promised by the Gospels and by Brother Orson.

  And he was there, even more vividly than when Judge had interfaced with him through his 900 phone number. People were always trying to explain away Brother Orson, saying he was just a computer-generated illusion of interactivity. But nothing could explain away what Judge had seen and heard in the last few days. He would have liked to boot up the disc again right now, but he really had to deal with the bodies first. Especially Lisa’s body, which smelled. One of the good things about living in the last days was knowing that your own flesh would never be corrupted. It would pass through the Rapture and be rendered incorruptible.

  Judge freed up the edges of an Oriental rug from the sofa legs pinning it to the carpet. He placed Lisa’s body at one end of the rug and got her rolled up into a fairly manageable bundle. He fastened the bundle to stay closed with three rep ties from William’s dressing room closet. When he’d finished and dragged the bundle out into the hall, Lisa’s hair was visible at one end and the tips of her shoes at the other, but basically she looked like a rolled-up rug.

  He left Lisa at the head of the stairs and then went down to the living room to figure out what to do with his mother. He really had not meant to kill Judith, but she hadn’t left him much choice. Once he’d refused to let her into William’s office, she’d said, “Okay,” and turned away and would have walked right out of the house. He’d had to stop her. The fact she was his mother really didn’t enter into it, though he knew if he got caught and there were newspaper headlines, they’d make him out to be some kind of monster for killing his mother and his stepmother, and they’d probably even try to blame him for Ben’s being dead, too. They’d say he was some kind of sex maniac, and it really wasn’t fair. And just try and explain to the media that neither Lisa nor Judith was his parent in the baptism of the Gospel. Oh, if he got caught now, there would be hell to pay.

  Judith’s corpse looked like she’d fallen asleep on the sofa where he’d left her. Her head lolled sideways across the upright cushion. Her left hand was wedged between her thighs, and her right hung limply from the armrest. Except that her eyes were closed, you might have supposed she was posing for a picture. Only if you looked at her neck real close could you see the marks his fingers had made when he’d strangled her.

  Judge wasn’t sure what to do with Judith. There was another Oriental carpet in the living room, but it was nine feet by twelve feet and not well adapted to the task. He knew, from the last time he’d taken a pizza out of it, that the freezer in the basement was too well stocked to get a body into it without taking out a lot of the food. Burying the bodies in the backyard was out of the question, even if he waited till late at night. There were just too many other houses with a view of what he’d be doing.

  As Judge stood there wondering how to proceed, the doorbell rang. He felt an instant of panic, but no more than that. Unbidden, the words of the Eighteenth Psalm came to his lips: The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; my God, my strength, in whom I will trust; my buckler, and the horn of my salvation.

  He squatted down, grabbed hold of the baseboard of the sofa, and hauled it out by main strength a couple of feet from the wall. With one hand he got hold of Judith by the waistband of her slacks and slid his other hand under her knees. Then, much as he might have executed a clean-and-jerk, he flipped Judith’s body up over the back of the couch and let it drop to the floor.

  He pushed the couch back to the wall, or as near as it would go. He regarded the effect from a distance, and he figured it would pass muster. Then he went to the monitor in the vestibule to see who was at the door.

  It was the black priest who’d preached the fine sermon about the Lord’s Prayer at Our Lady of Mercy Church
and then gone out with him and old Mrs. Obstschmecker to visit the cemetery. Father Lyman Sinclair.

  Judge was delighted.

  He unbolted the door and opened it and held out his hand to be shaken. “Well, as I live and breathe! You said you was going to come and pay me a visit and here you are!”

  The priest smiled. “Is this a convenient time? I’m not intruding?”

  “I can’t think of anyone I’d rather see at this moment than yourself. Ly-man Sin-clair. (You will remember that you said I didn’t have to call you Father.) Come inside! Come inside!”

  77

  Father Lyman Sinclair knew he was being a snoop, but that did not make him feel sinful, since where was the commandment that said thou shalt not snoop? Partly he’d been drawn here by ordinary celebrity curiosity, the same that could fill roadsides with a million unbelievers every time the pope stepped into a limo. Judge Winckelmeyer’s father was many notches lower on the scale of newsworthiness than the Holy Father, and lower than most movie stars, but he was at least the equal of the governor or even a news anchorman. He was also the only famous person Lyman had gone to school with, and since Lyman himself had become famous in a local way, there was a class reunion aspect to the visit. Even the school bully (and that surely had been Lyman’s role) develops a kind of sentimental interest after enough time has passed.

  Beyond that, however, was a bond of guilt that ran so deep in Lyman’s soul that it seemed sometimes that Billy Michaels was his brother, an Abel left alive after a botched murder. When he’d heard, the day after the trick he’d played on Billy, how Mr. Michaels had been killed in a car accident when he was driving Billy to the hospital, Lyman had gone straight to Father Youngermann at the rectory of Our Lady of Mercy and made his confession. The first real confession in his life. But Lyman had never felt forgiven, not entirely, and the sense of his sinfulness had eaten at him year after year until at last it had turned him into a priest. O felix culpa, perhaps, but even so he was sure that the ledgers of heaven had yet to be balanced between himself and the boy who’d become Dr. William Michaels.

  So here he was at the man’s home in Willowville, seated on his living room couch, yielding to the tug of all those years of curiosity and guilt. It might not be the scene of the crime he was returning to, but it felt like it.

  But that was only a part of his curiosity. He was fascinated no less by Judge Winckelmeyer, Dr. Michaels’s loutish stepson, and though he knew it was a morbid fascination, he could not resist the impulse, when his parochial duties had called him to Anoka, to turn off U.S. 10 at the Willowville exit. Here, in an interior that might have served as a cover for one of the magazines that cater to the houseproud—all lush fabrics and fine-grained woods—the boy seemed even stranger, more ungainly, than he had at the church or the cemetery. Nothing of this house’s genteel style had rubbed off on him. He looked like a plumber who’d come to fix a plugged drain, with the latex-pale skin some white men have that makes them look half dead and that even in his worst moments of envy or self-pity in seminary days Lyman would never have wished for in exchange for his own deep cocoa-brown.

  The boy’s eyes were what most fascinated Lyman. The eyes of fanaticism, of perfect faith, of lunacy. His own faith had never been so pure, nor had he ever seen quite the same telltale gleam in the eyes of other Catholics, except perhaps for some of the nuns, the ones he remembered from childhood. He envied such purity of heart and singleness of vision, but he feared it a little, too, and as usual when fear is complicated with desire, it had become a temptation, and he had yielded to it and come here.

  “I’ll bet I know what you’re thinking. You’re wondering why there’s such a smell in here. It’s the roses. On Monday my stepmother filled up all those pots she’s got on all the tables and then she went off east to see her brother, and I’ve been here since then more or less by myself. I didn’t think to get rid of the damn things till this afternoon, and that’s why there’s the smell.”

  “The church can get to smelling the same way—after a funeral.”

  Judge jutted his head forward, squinting.

  “Just a joke,” Lyman soothed. One had to remember that people with great faith were liable to have zero sense of humor.

  Judge nodded and seemed to relax. He was seated on the edge of a wingback chair, his elbows braced against his knees, his thick fingers tightly interlocked in a double-fist. “I didn’t notice it myself,” he went on. “till my real mother pointed it out to me. She’s come here to visit. But she is not here now. I told you about her.”

  “I remember you said your mother was a nun.”

  “Mm-hm, that’s her. You’d probably like her. Or maybe you wouldn’t: she’s a heretic.”

  “Yes, you mentioned that, as well, when we were driving to the cemetery. I probably would like her. Some of my best friends are heretics.”

  “That’s probably another joke, huh? Myself, I cannot see how you Catholics know what to believe when one bunch of you believes one thing and another bunch believes something else, and the newspapers say that some big percent of both sides don’t put any store by what the priests on either side say and just go their own way.”

  “We’re a bit like families that way, I suppose. Outsiders only hear the noise we make quarreling. The love is quiet.”

  “I’ve got to disagree with you there. With God there can’t be no room to quarrel. He says do this, you better do it. Thy will be done. It was you preached that sermon. Though when you hit that line, you kind of skittered off, as I recall. You just said we got to all love everybody else, and left it at that.”

  “I didn’t invent that idea myself, you know. That’s in the Gospel, too.”

  “But loving’s got to be the easy part. You won’t get no one to disagree about love. It’s when God’s got other ideas that Thy will be done can get tricky.”

  “Other ideas than love?” Lyman asked in a defensive tone. “Such as?”

  “Such as when he told Abraham to take his baby boy Isaac up on top of the mountain and kill him. I don’t see what love had to do with that.”

  “Truly, faith was more the issue in that case. But Abraham didn’t have to kill Isaac in the end. A ram was substituted.”

  “Mm-hm. But the reason we’re supposed to think Abraham was so special was because he would’ve done it if God hadn’t changed his mind at the last minute. Right? And then what about Jephthah? Jephthah went ahead and did what Abraham was let off the hook from having to do. He killed his only begotten. Course, it was his daughter he killed, not a son, but nowadays that’s not supposed to make a difference.”

  “I know the story of Jephthah,” Lyman said, in a tone of annoyance. The story of Jephthah was, in his opinion, one of the Old Testament’s major warts. Feminists loved to use it as ammunition to prove that Jehovah was not much better, from an ethical point of view, than Baal or Dagon or the other major contenders of that era. Yes, he knew the story very well, and he knew there was only one loophole: “But nowhere in the story does it say that God told Jephthah to do what he did. It was his own dumb idea to make the promise he did.”

  “Well, if it was such a dumb idea, why does the Bible say, chapter eleven, verse twenty-nine, Then the Spirit of the Lord came upon Jephthah, and then, the very next thing, verse thirty, Jephthah vowed a vow unto the Lord, and said, If thou shalt without fail deliver the children of Ammon into mine hands, then it shall be, that whatsoever cometh forth of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return in peace from the children of Ammon, shall surely be the Lord’s, and I will offer it up from a burnt offering. Seems pretty clear from that the Lord was inspiring Jephthah to vow that vow. And when it was his daughter stepped through the door, don’t you think the Lord must of had a hand in that, too? The Lord was testing Jephthah by making him burn to death the person he loved the most. That’s got to be the meaning of the story. And once he done what he vowed, then God made him one of the judges of Israel, like Samson. And Jephthah judged Israel six years: chapter twelve
, verse seven. It’s in the book.”

  “What is your point? Does Brother Orson think we should reinstitute human sacrifice?”

  “It ain’t my point, and it’s not Brother Orson’s point. It’s God’s. God can ask us to do some damned strange things. Like suppose there had to be a nuke-ular war to keep the Communists from taking over the whole world, and we’d bring on nuke-ular winter if we did that. I guess that might be some kind of human sacrifice, but we’d have to do it.”

  “Actually, Christ had different ideas about how to deal with one’s enemies. That’s why we speak of an Old Testament and a New Testament.”

  “What Brother Orson says, and what I believe, is there is just one God and he’s eternal. I am that I am! And if he says you got to kill the next person comes through the front door, why then, that’s what you got to do. No ifs, ands, or buts. But I’m forgetting my duties as a host. Would you like something to drink? I can offer milk or O-Jay or something from my father’s liquor cabinet.”

  “Some orange juice perhaps. I still have a long drive home.”

  Judge got to his feet and headed for the farther end of the living room, where it merged with a dining room of equal extent. “It’s too bad my father isn’t here right now,” he said, pausing in the archway between the two rooms. “I remember your saying how you went to school together.”

  Judge went through the arch, then turned left, out of sight, presumably toward a source of orange juice. When he’d gone, Lyman sniffed at the stink that hung in the air of the room. It went beyond the cloying scent of decaying flowers. It was more like meat that had begun to turn.

  There was a rustling sound that seemed to come from behind the couch. A pet of some sort, Lyman supposed. Since the couch had been pulled several inches away from the wall, it would have been an easy matter to crane his neck and look over the back of the couch, but just as he was about to do so, Judge returned with two glasses of orange juice.