Scary Creek

by Thomas Cater

  I stared at the old volumes. “You found Grier’s journals?”

  Holding them in her arms, she smiled and nodded.

  “That’s remarkable,” I said. “I can’t believe no one ever came after them.”

  “I guess not,” she said. “They were in the same room with all the other records, only cleverly disguised.”

  I took them from her, handling them with tender loving care. “Oh, God, I hope he didn’t write like most doctors, a blurred scrawl.”

  “His handwriting is small and neat, but its faded,” she said, “You won’t have much trouble reading it, just in a few places. The more technical it gets, the smaller the handwriting.”

  I opened one book in the middle and read down a page. Everything was small, but legible and coherent. It was his log and personal notes that did not enter a patient’s file.

  The patient I was reading about was male, approximately 43 years of age, and after five years of depression had requested a lobotomy. Requested? He really had to be desperate to wish that upon himself, I thought. According to Grier, after surgery the patient no longer showed signs of depression and had recovered from the operation with a minimum of resipiscence. I had only just scratched the surface and already encountered a word surfeit with mystery. I closed the book and pressed it to my chest.

  “Now I’ll be able to get somewhere. I want to get started right away. Can I read them in my van? I won’t leave the grounds. I also want to talk to the Alberichs. Can you arrange it?”

  She shrugged her shoulders in a defenseless sort of way. “I don’t see why not. All you have to do is find them.”

  “Are they still holed up in the furnace room?”

  “I suppose,” she said. “It’s not like they check in with me.”

  I kissed her cheek. “Why don’t you join me for lunch? I’ve got a can of clam chowder, some chocolate milk and a box of year-old Christmas cookies in the van.”

  She made a sour face. “I’ll come out, but I want to take you to lunch, if you let me.”

  “Second best offer I’ve had since I got here,” I said.

  “What was the first?” she asked, and then blushed.

  “I’ll be in the van reading, of course,”

  “There’s a little French restaurant in town. It takes them forever to prepare and serve anything, so we’ll have lots of time to talk.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  I took Grier’s journals and locked myself in the back of the van. It was perfect for creating an environment of total and immediate isolation. I did get a few peeping Toms on rare occasions, but I suspect it wouldn’t be a problem here.

  According to his personnel record, Dr. Grier arrived at Vandalia State Hospital on October 1921 at the behest of Samuel Ryder, administrator and member of the board of directors. A more thorough examination of his file revealed that he was not only an eminent psychiatrist, but also a surgeon and an eye, ear, nose and throat specialist. Were they even in the same category with surgery and psychiatry? Was this his idea of a joke, or was it all part of the professional window dressing?

  I was a little perplexed. In those days, if a man was a specialist, he let it be known, but it still doesn't make sense. While he was performing surgery, did he keep busy cleaning out impacted ears, or swabbing throats? Maybe that was what attracted Samuel. If he knew something about eyes that no one else knew, he might have been able to restore, or improve Elinore’s sight.

  I began to wonder if Samuel had found Grier on one of his legendary trips or if Grier had stumbled upon the hospital and applied for the job. I was also curious to know how difficult it was to forge documents in the ‘20s. It would have been a travesty if he had been an impostor. I decided to keep my eyes open for verifiable documentation that might shed light on Grier’s qualifications. If it became necessary, I could write to one of the institutions he claimed to have attended.

  He must have spent months acquainting himself with the hospital’s operation. There were no indications that he attempted dangerous surgical procedures, nothing but conventional practices, whatever they were.

  In the spring of 1923 however, things took a different turn; he began lobotomizing patients. Later in the year, he operated on a hysterical woman who claimed to be ‘possessed by Klikouchy, or ‘screaming things.’ The language or spelling was not clear, but I had seen the word before in Elinore’s diary.

  The pages of his journal were for the most part faded. Some of the comments were about creatures that lived millions of years ago, and even now survive to ‘haunt’ or ‘hunt’ the wooded hills of Appalachia.

  I found that interesting, but didn’t know what to do, unless they were still haunting the hillsides.

  The operations must have been a momentous occasion. It may also have been something of a disappointment. He watched over his victim/patients like a doting mother, but she failed to respond and reportedly said absolutely nothing.

  There were follow-up tests and interviews, but they were all uneventful. It became apparent to Grier that leucotomy was a simple and essential procedure for silencing hysterical patients.

  The word ‘Klikouchy’ appeared again in the margins of his journal. It may have been a reference to an ethnic or cultural attribute. There were many question marks, but only one stab at a definition and that was ‘screaming things.’ In any case, it must have made a startling impression on him.

  A ward was eventually isolated for housing psycho-surgical patients, which must have been easy to maintain. Staffed with only one nurse, no chains or restraints were required. Additional aides need only ‘encourage’ patients to move in one direction or another. The doc said, ‘they were like cattle preferring to ‘low’ or graze in the pastures of their wards, or waste time in the dining halls or showers.

  Grier was a keen observer and made lots of notes. He was a man of infinite hope and patience and seemed to envision some kind of useful existence for his patients beyond leucotomy. There were clues, indications in his notes that he was always anticipating a miraculous recovery or some medical breakthrough when he began operating. He often referred to the color of his patient’s eyes and always conducted an eye examination to determine the acuity of a patient’s vision. It was a curious prelude to a lobotomy.

  In 1923, a surgical patient died: He performed an autopsy and -- according to his notes -- the brain was ‘abnormal’. The gray matter was discolored, but the eyes, the eyes again, were perfect in every respect. The patient’s name was Raines and there was a coded number referring to her file in parentheses. I decided to read no further until I had a chance to examine it. I left the journals and returned to the administrative office. Connie was up to her neck in red tape and treading reams of paper.

  “I need more help,” I pleaded. “How can I find this file?”

  She met me grudgingly halfway, but the scent of her cologne nearly lifted me off my feet.

  “No problem, if you have a number,” she said. “It’s numbered and lettered, right?” She looked at the number and nodded. “Down in the archives.”

  The numbers were in the right hand corner of every file and on the front of each cabinet, which I knew from my previous sojourn.

  “Find the right cabinet,” she said. “It’s all numerical.”

  Her smile cut through my flesh and impaled my soul. I suspected I was about to fall hopelessly in love.

  “You won’t have any trouble,” she said, “if you can remember how to get there.”

  I nodded silently, not knowing what to make of these deep and delightful feelings of affection I was enjoying.

  “Good luck,” she said, and bewitched me with a smile.

  I pivoted on my worn heels and strode with conviction and certainty down the hall. It was amazing what a little attention from an attractive woman could do for a man’s battered ego.

  I reached the stairs and descended into the gloom of that abysmal basement. A single low watt bulb still burned meekly in the hall, a memento of times passed. The old gurney
s and obsolete equipment were commencing to gather an air of familiarity about them and appeared less dangerous.

  I reached the records room and crept in. It was lit up like a public library. The filing clerk had been dutiful, but a careless housekeeper. The home office would have raised hell for this terrible disregard of efficiency. It took me nearly fifteen minutes to find the Raines file, which consisted primarily of charts.

  The Raines woman had been young, married and twenty-five years of age and had four kids. She was born in 1899 and died in 1924, with a brief history of mental illness. Her husband, a coal miner, had committed her for examination. She complained of hearing voices and said that Satan had pissed in her face. She described the ‘demon’ as being exceedingly small, less than six inches in height and looking like a penis. She said he stood on her stomach while she was in bed and made lewd gestures and advances. He also succeeded in making her pregnant.

  Her husband said she was a wicked woman and there was absolutely no chance of saving her. She had a few hysterical moments before he turned her over to the state. ‘Things were getting out of hand’, the file quoted him as saying.

  One week after her admittance, Doctor Grier drilled four holes in her skull and started disjuncting white matter. The hysteria and hallucinations stopped. In fact, a redemptive smile appeared on her hapless features and never left her face. Several months passed before she delivered her stillborn child in the hospital. A Madonna-like smile accompanied her to the grave.

  Several days later, Grier began feverishly to investigate the color and corrugations of brains he lobotomized. He described nearly all of them as unhealthy. In his examinations, the corrugations and ridges were not deep enough. For one reason or another, their brains were also dysfunctional.

  I was surprised and alarmed to discover a state mental facility performed so many autopsies in those early years. That was a job for the state’s medical examiner.

  Then he stopped and started again to explore and write about new experiments related to eyes.

  “Human tears are a re-creation of the primordial seas, which bathed the first eyes,” he said, which struck me as almost poetic. Then he continued with, “According to the Voynich script, the retina may be described as an outgrowth of the brain, a special part of the surface that has sent forth a bud that has become sensitive to light.”

  I could almost hear my brain calling for ‘light, more light!’

  “It retains brain cells between the receptors and the optic nerve, which modify electrical activity. Moving from the center of the human retina,” he continued. “It may be said that we travel back in evolutionary time from a highly organized structure to a primitive eye, which does no more than detect simple movement of shadows. The frog’s retina cannot see objects unless they are moving …

  “The eye is the first line of defense among primates. The dumber the animal, the smarter the retina. The edge of the human retina does not even respond when stimulated by movement, it merely initiates a reflex to direct the eyes to the source of movement so we can see it with our foveal eyes.”

  This subtle outgrowth of the brain was apparently to be the focal point of his examination. I read on, absorbed.

  “All sensory signals first go to a relay station in the thalamus, a central structure in the brain. The path is not clear. Messages seem to pass to primary areas in the cortex, where they are modified and sent to other parts of the brain. Somewhere and somehow along the way, the brain figures out what the object seen is all about.”

  I thought he was saying the brain could get it wrong, or confused, and assume it was seeing something that did not exist, or make mistakes in interpreting what it sees, or thinks it sees. My brain was having trouble trying to figure out what his brain was concocting.

  He switched to the simpler and more basic biological construction: “Each eyeball is equipped with six intrinsic muscles which hold it in position in its orbit. Beside the extrinsic eye muscles, there are also muscles within the eyeball. The iris is an annular muscle forming the pupil through which light travels to the lens.”

  I was profoundly aware that we were in dire need of light to see, but not intuitively.

  “Fish have dense and rigid lenses. The cornea is immersed in water; light is hardly bent at all (refractive index = density of surrounding medium).

  “Superior oblique: The tendon passes through a pulley in the skull in front of the suspecions of the eyeball…

  “There is a continuous small high frequency tremor that converts light into electrical impulses…the language of the nervous system.”

  You needed light for concrete images, but not for those materializing in darkness.

  “The visual acuity of the hawk is four times greater than a man. The size of receptors and density are important, if we consider the ability of the eye to distinguish details.

  When receptors are abundant, the details are more distinguishable. Is that why some cannot see the woods for the trees?

  “The fovea does not exist in eyes where depth perception is not important.

  Apes, he claimed, have developed fovea and precise control of eye movement. He said, “There is an evolutionary distance of 200 million years between the eyes of apes and those of humans.”

  I was astonished. The only difference between us is the evolution of the eye. Is that why we have come to discern that the eyes are the windows of the soul, and why an ape may or may not possess a soul, despite the fact the Exodus claims that ‘all things, even animals, possess souls.’

  “Insects can see colors, but some are color blind. Bees see colors that appear only white to us; and compound eyes show an increase in sensitivity to differences in light intensity.

  : The pigment in iris cells spreads out in bright light, but concentrate at the top when light is dim.

  “On a dark night, we can see shapes, but no color. Cones operate in bright light and they are responsible for greater and higher acuity in vision.

  “Any color in the spectrum visible to man can be matched by mixing the colors red, green and blue.”

  So what about that invisible spectrum; why are they out of sight?

  “The retina has more than one hundred million rods and cones. Rods function in low light, provide night vision; Cones are responsible for color vision in center of retina. The inability to distinguish red and greens indicates a degree of color blindness, a problem caused by certain chemical fluids”

  He was after something. I got the distinct impression he was researching and trying to fashion a custom set of designer eyeballs for Elinore! The solution I suspected was within his grasp, but the methodology was elusive.

  I skipped a badly faded section and skipped a few pages ahead of myself. I was looking for words that might indicate she received her new eyes, but stumbled on to what I believed was the procedure:

  “Enucleation of the globe: conjunctiva is incised at the cornea. Enlarge incision all around. With blunt dissection, the conjunctiva is suppurated from the sclera. This will expose the rectus muscles. Insert a muscle hook beneath the tendon, beginning with the superior rectus, moving to the medial and inferior. Cut as close as possible to the globe. The last muscle to be severed is the lateral rectus. Leave enough muscle attached to the eyeball to grasp with a tooth forceps. Rotate the eye medially and insert scissors along the temporal side of the eyeball, between it and the separated conjunctiva. With the scissors behind the globe, search for the optic nerve, a firm cord-like structure. Cut. Pull eyeball and cut restraining tissue. Watch for hemorrhage after nerve is cut; suture conjunctiva together.”

  He summarized the ‘coupe de grace’ in the next sentence:

  “Cut all eye muscles, feel for optic nerve, remove the globe and tie all muscles together: 3:15.”

  The numbers probably referred to the length of time required to perform the operation. If science hadn’t made many inroads by 1922, it wasn’t Ezekiel Grier’s fault. I got the feeling he was conducting private eye transplant research on wards o
f the state. Undoubtedly, he was within his rights, even if this particular area of research did not come under the auspices of the state or institution.

  The Raines file ended with a copy of a death certificate listed as post-operative trauma. I made a mental note to keep an eye peeled for that cause should I inadvertently examine a similar file.

  I returned her records to the cabinet and considered the problems involved in tracking the Alberichs down, but I could not forget his research on eyes. I glanced at my watch and noticed that it was close to noon, and I did have a date for lunch, the first in months. I decided to put off the interview with the three gnomes until later.

  Constance was sitting on the desk’s edge waiting, jacket and purse in hand.

  “I was about to come after you,” she said.

  “Where is the restaurant?” I asked, anxious to return to the journals.

  “Not far, about ten minutes by car.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  It was an old Victorian mansion that had been remodeled once too often. It too had seen a better day. There was not much original architecture left to recall from that forgotten era. An attorney and his wife had turned it into a French restaurant that resembled an elegant wine cellar. She was from the Bordeaux region of France and had brought her knowledge of food and wine to the mountains and hollows of West Virginia. They had spent time, effort and money bringing a little piece of France to Vandalia, but from the size of the luncheon crowd, the effort was in vain.

  There was another couple in the restaurant, a young man wearing a pest control uniform and his high school girlfriend. He was drinking coffee and eating pie. The young lady sitting opposite him was munching on a cream-filled Twinkie. She was nearly forty pounds overweight and the pastry wasn’t helping her cause.