The Sixth Commandment

by Lawrence Sanders

  “Thorndecker!” someone called in a quavery voice, and the others took up the cry.

  “Thorndecker!”

  “Thorndecker!”

  “Thorndecker!”

  Then it became a long, wailing moan: “Thooorndecker!” And we all, scarcely sane, went stumbling across the slick, frosted fields, lights jerking up and down, calling his name again and again, echoing his name, while the cold rain pelted a black and ruined world.

  Oh yes, we found him. We had passed through the cemetery and were slowly, fearfully working the stand of bare trees on the far side. There was a shout, the wild swinging of a lantern in wide circles. We all ran, breathless and blundering, to the spot. We clustered.

  He lay on his back, spreadeagled, face turned to the falling sky. He wore only pajama pants. He was almost completely bald; only a few wet tufts of hair were left. Bare feet were bruised and bleeding. His eyes were open. He was dead.

  Arms, shoulders, torso, neck, face, scalp—all of him exposed to view was studded with suppurating tumors. Great blooms of red and yellow and purple. Rotting excrescences that seemed to have a vigorous life of their own, immortal, sprouting from his cooling flesh. They had soft, dough-like centers, and browned, crusted petals.

  There was hardly an inch of him not choked by cancerous growths. Eyes bulging with necrosis, mouth twisted, nose lumped, the limbs swollen with decay, trunk gnarled with great chunks of putrescent matter. The smell was of deep earth, swamp, and the grave.

  The trembling circles of light exposed the horror he had become. I heard a sobbing, was conscious of people turning away to retch. Someone began to murmur a prayer. But I was stone, transfixed, looking down at what was left of Dr. Telford Gordon Thorndecker, wanting desperately to find meaning, and finding nothing.

  The butler-thug volunteered to remain with the body. The rest of us wandered back to Crittenden Hall. We moved, I noted, in a tight group, seeking the close presence of others to help hold back the darkness, to prove that live warmth still existed in the world. No one spoke. Silently we filed through the cemetery, gravestones glistening in our lights, and straggled across the stubbled fields to the brightness of Crittenden Hall, a beacon in the black.

  A half-hour later I was seated with Dr. Kenneth Draper in Thorndecker’s private office in the Crittenden Research Laboratory. I had left Mary Thorndecker to deal with the police. I had latched onto Draper—literally. I took him by the arm and would not let him go, not for an instant, I am not certain if any of us were acting rationally that night.

  I marched Draper upstairs to his apartment and let him dress. Then I pulled him into that marvelous Thorndecker sitting room where I swiped a bottle of brandy, and thought nothing of it. I made Draper gulp a mouthful, because his face was melting white wax, and he was moving like an invalid. I took him and the brandy back to the research lab. Found the keys, turned off the alarm, opened the door, turned on the lights.

  In Thorndecker’s private lab, I pushed Draper into the chair behind the desk. I peeled off my soaked hat and coat. I found paper cups, and poured us each a deep shot of brandy. Some color came back into his face, but he was racked with sudden shivers, and once his teeth chattered.

  Thorndecker’s journal, the one he had been working on the last time I saw him alive, still lay open on the desk. I shoved it toward Draper.

  “When did it start?” I asked him.

  “What will they do to me?” he said in a dulled voice. “Will I go to jail?”

  I could have told him that if he kept his mouth shut, probably nothing would happen to him. How could they prove all those Crittenden Hall patients had died other than natural deaths? I figured the Coburn cops would be satisfied that Thorndecker had killed his wife and her lover, then died himself from terminal cancer. It was neat, and it closed out a file. They wouldn’t go digging any deeper.

  But I wanted to keep Draper guilty and quivering.

  “It depends,” I told him stolidly, “on how willing you are to cooperate. If you spell it out for me, I’ll put in a good word for you.”

  I didn’t tell him that I had about as much clout with the Coburn cops as I do with the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  “All right,” I said, in the hardest voice I could manage, “when did it start?”

  He raised a tear-streaked face. I poured him another brandy, and he choked it down. He stared at the ledger, then began turning the pages listlessly.

  “You mean the—the experiments?”

  “Yes,” I said, trying not to yell at him, “the experiments.”

  “A long time ago,” he said, in a voice so low I had to crane forward to hear him. “Before we came to Crittenden. We started with normal mammalian cells. Then concentrated only on normal human cells. We were looking for the cellular clock that causes aging and death. Dr. Thorndecker believed that—”

  “I know what Thorndecker believed,” I interrupted him. “Did you believe in the cellular clock theory?”

  He looked at me in astonishment.

  “Of course,” he said. “If Dr. Thorndecker believed in it, I had to believe. He was a great man. He was—”

  “I know,” I said, “a genius. But you didn’t find it? The cellular clock?”

  “No. Hundreds of experiments. Thousands of man-hours. It’s extremely difficult, working with normal human cells in vitro. Limited doublings. The cells become less differentiated, useless for our research. We confirmed conclusively that the cell determines longevity, but we couldn’t isolate the factor. It was—well, frustrating. During that period, Dr. Thorndecker became very demanding, very insistent. Hard to deal with. He could not endure failure.”

  “This was before you came to Crittenden?”

  “Yes. Dr. Thorndecker’s first wife was still alive. Most of our research was being done on small grants. But we had no exciting results to publish. The grant money ran out. But then Dr. Thorndecker’s first wife was killed in an accident, and he was able to buy Crittenden and establish this laboratory.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I know. And then?”

  “We had been here only a short time, when one night he woke me up. Very excited. Laughing and happy. He said he had solved our basic problem. He said he knew now what our approach should be. It was an inspiration. Only a genius could have thought of it. A quantum leap of pure reason.”

  “And what was that?” I asked.

  “We couldn’t keep normal cells viable in vitro. Not for long. But cancer cells flourished, reproduced endlessly. Apparently they were immortal. Dr. Thorndecker’s idea was to forget about finding the factor in normal cells that caused senescence and death, and concentrate on finding the factor in abnormal cells that caused such wild proliferation.”

  “The factor that made cancer cells immortal in vitro?”

  “Yes.”

  I took a deep breath. There it was.

  I knew what was coming. I could have stopped right there. But I wanted him to spell it out. Maybe I wanted to rub his nose in it.

  “And you found the factor?”

  He nodded. “But the problem was how to separate the longevity effect from the fatal effect. You understand? The cancer cells themselves simply grew and grew—forever, if you allowed them to. But they killed the host organism. So all our research turned to filtering out the immortality factor, purifying it in effect, so that the host’s normal cells could absorb it and continue to grow indefinitely without harm. Very complex chemistry.”

  “It didn’t work?” I said.

  “It did, it did!” he cried, with the first flash of spirit he had exhibited. “I can show you mice and guinea pigs in the basement that have lived three times as long as they would normally. And they’re absolutely cancer-free. And we have one dog that, in human terms, is almost two hundred years old.”

  “But no success with chimps?”

  “No. None.”

  “So this essence of yours, this injection, wasn’t always successful?”

  “No, it wasn’t. But animals are notorious
ly difficult to work with. Sometimes they reject the most virulent cancer cells. Sometimes a strain of rats supposed to be leukemia-prone will prove to be immune. Animals do not always give conclusive results, insofar as their reactions can be applied to humans. And animal experimentation is expensive, and takes time.”

  I leaned back and lighted a cigarette. Like most specialists, he tended to lecture when riding his own hobbyhorse. I probably knew as much about nuclear physics as he did, but bio-medicine was his world; he was confident there.

  “Animal experimentation is expensive,” I said, repeating his last words, “and it takes time. And Thorndecker never had enough money for what he wanted to do. But more than that, he didn’t have the time. He was a man in a hurry, wasn’t he? Impatient? Anxious for the fame the published discovery would bring?”

  “He was convinced we were on the right track,” Dr. Draper said. “I was, too. We were so close, so close. We had those animals in the basement to prove it—the ones who had doubled and tripled their normal life spans.”

  I rose and began to pace back and forth in front of the desk. Somehow I found myself with a lighted cigarette in each hand, and stubbed one out.

  “All right,” I said, “now we come to the worm in the apple. Whose idea was it to try the stuff on humans?”

  He lowered his head and wouldn’t answer.

  “You don’t have to tell me,” I said. “I know it was Thorndecker’s idea; you don’t have the balls for it. I’ll bet I even know how he convinced you. ‘Look, Draper,’ he said, ‘there can be no progress without pain. Sacrifices must be made. We must dare all. Those patients in Crittenden Hall are terminal cases. How long do they have—weeks, months, a year? If we are unsuccessful, we’ll only be shortening slightly their life span. And think of what they will be contributing! We can give their remaining days meaning. Think of that, Draper. We can make their deaths meaningful!’ Isn’t that what Thorndecker told you? Something like that?”

  He nodded slowly. “Yes. Something like that.”

  “So you selected the ones you thought were terminal?”

  “They were, they were!”

  “You thought they were. You weren’t sure. Doctors can never be sure; you know that. There are unexpected remissions. The patient recovers for no explainable reason. One day he wakes up cured. It happens. You know it happens.”

  He poured himself another cup of brandy, raised it to his pale lips with a shaking hand. Some of the brandy spilled down his chin, dripped onto his shirtfront.

  “How many?” I demanded. “How many did you kill?”

  “I don’t know,” he muttered. “We didn’t keep—”

  “Don’t give me that shit!” I screamed at him. “Thorndecker kept very complete, precise records, and you know it. You want me to grab up this journal and all the others for the past three years, and take them to the cops? You think you can stop me? Try it! Just try it! How many?”

  “Eleven,” he said in a choked voice.

  “And none survived?”

  “No,” he said. Then, brightly: “But the survival time was lengthening. We were certain we were on the right track. Dr. Thorndecker was convinced of it. I was, too. We had purified the extract. A week ago we were absolutely certain we had made the breakthrough.”

  “Why didn’t you try it on another patient?”

  Draper groaned.

  “Don’t you understand? If it had succeeded, how could Thorndecker publish the results? Admit experiments on humans? Fatal experiments? With no informed consent agreements? They’d have crucified him. The only way was to inject himself. He was so sure, so sure. He laughed about it. ‘The elixir of life, Draper,’ he told me. ‘I’ll live forever!’ That’s what he told me.”

  I marveled at the man, at Thorndecker. To have such confidence, such absolute faith in your own destiny, such pride in your own skill. To dare death to prove it.

  “What went wrong?” I asked Draper.

  “I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. “Initially, everything was fine. Then, in a short time, the first symptoms appeared. Hair falling out, skin blotches that signaled the beginning of tumors, sudden loss of weight, loss of appetite, other things …”

  “Thorndecker knew?”

  “Oh yes. He knew.”

  “How did he react?”

  “We’ve spent the last few days working around the clock, trying to discover what went wrong, why the final essence not only didn’t extend life but produced such rapid tumor germination.”

  “Did you find out what it was?”

  “No, not definitely. It may have been in the purifying process. It may have been something else. It could have been Dr. Thorndecker’s personal immunochemistry. I just don’t know.”

  “Julie Thorndecker was aware of this?”

  “She was aware that her husband was fatally ill, yes.”

  “Was she aware of the experiments you two ghouls were carrying out?”

  “No. Yes. I don’t know.”

  I sat down again. I slumped, so exhausted that I could have slept just by closing my eyes.

  Dazed, not thinking straight, I wondered what I could do about this guy. I could have him racked up on charges, but I knew a smart lawyer could easily get him off. Do what? Exhume the corpses and find they had died of cancer? He’d never spend a day in jail. There might be a professional inquiry, and his career would be ruined. But so what? I wanted this prick to suffer.

  “What about Ernie Scoggins?” I asked him dully. “Was Scoggins blackmailing Thorndecker?”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” he mumbled.

  “You goddamned shitwit!” I yelled at him. “You were Thorndecker’s righthand man. You know about it all right.”

  “He got a letter from Scoggins,” Draper said hastily, frightened. “Not mailed. A note shoved under his door. Scoggins was working here at the time. He helped out with the animals occasionally. And when we had burials in the cemetery. He guessed something was wrong. All those tumorous corpses …”

  “Did he have any hard evidence of what was going down?”

  “He stole one of Dr. Thorndecker’s journals. It was—ah—incriminating.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “I don’t know. Dr. Thorndecker said he’d take care of it, not to worry.”

  “And he got the journal back?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Ernie Scoggins disappeared.”

  “Dr. Thorndecker had nothing to do with that,” he said hotly.

  “Maybe not personally,” I said. “But he had his wife persuade Constable Ronnie Goodfellow to take care of it. She persuaded him all right. It wasn’t too difficult. She could be a very persuasive lady. And I suppose the same thing happened when it turned out that old Al Coburn had a letter from Scoggins recounting what was in Thorndecker’s journal. So Al Coburn had to be eliminated, and the letter recovered. Constable Goodfellow went to work again, and did his usual efficient job.”

  “I don’t know anything about Al Coburn,” Draper insisted, in such an aggrieved tone that he might have been telling the truth;

  I couldn’t think of anything else to ask. Not only was my body weary, but my brain felt flogged. Too many strong sensations for one night. Too many electric images. The circuits were overloaded.

  I stood up, pulled on my sodden coat and hat, preparing to leave. I had a sudden love for that bed in Room 3-F.

  “What’s going to happen to me?” Dr. Kenneth Draper asked.

  “Keep your mouth shut,” I advised him resignedly. “Tell no one what you’ve told me. Except Mary Thorndecker.”

  “I can’t tell her,” he groaned.

  “If you don’t,” I said, “I will. Besides, she’s already guessed most of it.”

  “She’ll hate me,” he said.

  “Oh, I think shell find it in her heart to forgive you,” I told him. “Just like Lord Jesus. Also, she’ll probably inherit, and she’ll need someone to help her run Crittenden Hall and the lab.”


  He brightened a little at that.

  “Maybe she will forgive me,” he said, almost to himself. “After all, I just did what Dr. Thorndecker told me to.”

  “I know,” I said. “You just obeyed orders. Now where have I heard that before? Goodnight, Dr. Draper. I hope you and Mary Thorndecker get married and live happily ever after.”

  There were two Coburn police cruisers, a car from the sheriff’s office, and an ambulance in the driveway when I went outside. The gates were wide open. I just walked out, and no one made any effort to stop me.

  Thirty minutes later I was snuggling deep in bed, purring with content. The last thing I thought of before I dropped off to sleep was that I had forgotten to pick up my aluminum stepladder before I left Crittenden. I was more convinced than ever that I just wasn’t cut out for a life of crime.

  The Eighth Day

  I AWOKE ABOUT ELEVEN Monday morning. I got out of bed immediately. Showered, shaved, dressed. Finished packing and snapped the cases shut. Took a final look around Room 3-F to make certain I wasn’t forgetting anything. Then I rang for Sam Livingston, and asked him to take the luggage down to my car. I told him he could have what was left of the ale and vodka. I took the remainder of the brandy with me.

  The desk clerk wanted to talk about the terrible tragedy out at Crittenden. That was his label: “Terrible tragedy.” I cut him short and asked for my bill. While he was totaling it, I glanced over toward the locked cigar stand. There was a sign propped on the counter. I went over to read it.

  “Closed because of death in the family.”

  I think that sad, stupid sign hit me harder than anything I had seen the night before.

  I paid my bill with a credit card, and said goodby to the clerk. Went into the bar to shake Jimmy’s hand, pass him a five and say goodby. Went out to the parking lot and helped Sam Livingston stow the suitcases and briefcase in the trunk. Put my hat, coat, and brandy bottle in the back seat.

  I gave Sam a twenty. He took it with thanks.