by K. W. Jeter
He walked across the space, the Indian rugs yielding beneath his feet. At the edge of the grand staircase, he looked up into the sunlight flooding down from the landing window. He grasped the banister and ascended.
The doctor was waiting for him. He saw the white-coated figure, back turned to him, standing by the counter, sorting through his instruments.
The gaunt face turned and looked over his shoulder at Mike. And smiled. He gestured for Mike to step closer.
"I'm glad you made it," whispered the doctor. "We've got an awful lot to do…" His rubber-gloved hand extended something toward Mike.
He felt his own fingers close on cold metal. He looked at his hand and saw a scalpel, its edge glistening as though made of silver fire.
"Here we are." The doctor stood by the examining table. A white sheet covered the figure lying on it.
Mike looked down at the table as the doctor reached over and swung the examining lamp into place. Its light caught a spill of blond hair tumbling from beneath the sheet's edge.
The doctor drew the sheet away from the body, exposing the feet and legs first, then the naked groin.
A corpse, already dissected. The skin had been split and peeled back, exposing the shafts of bone and striated muscle tissue. The female organs lay nestled in the pelvic basin, like unborn things that had never taken human shape.
"You see?" The doctor's whisper again. He drew the sheet farther back, to reveal the coiled viscera, the knotted spine running underneath, a snake in a soft, moist garden. The woman's breasts lay against the slender biceps muscles, as though giving suckle to the red tissue, the clotted blood speckling the nipples. The cage of her ribs guarded the spongy lungs and the fist shape between them.
The sheet was bunched around the figure's neck, her face still covered. Mike leaned over her with the scalpel. He didn't know where to begin, what he was to do. The flesh, naked beyond what the skin had ever shown, glistened with wet jewels.
A rubber-gloved hand moved at the edge of his vision. The doctor pulled the sheet away, off the table and the figure's head. The golden hair trailed across the padded surface beneath.
Lindy's face, eyes closed, mouth parted as though stilled with its last breath-the throat beneath her chin had been opened, showing the windpipe and the tendons running next to it, but the face hadn't been touched. The skin there was still perfect and unmarked.
He brought his face close to hers, marveling at her beauty, his own lips parted for a kiss.
Her eyes snapped open. Her gaze, perfect black at its center, locked into his.
Her mouth widened, smiling.
The scalpel clattered on the floor as he fell backward. His hand hit the examining lamp, its beam arcing across his face.
Lindy sat up on the table, smiling as her breasts slid across her ribs and dangled on straps of skin against her viscera. Smiling at him.
Her red hand reached for him, the fingers curling, wanting to draw him into her kiss. Her embrace.
The lamp swung again on its arm. Its glare burst and blinded him as he fell.
***
He woke with a flashlight shining in his eyes. From across the room-the beam was small enough to blot out with his upraised hand.
For a moment, he thought it was the kid, come back again. Doot had gone puttering off on his motorbike, heading home. He'd told Doot that he and Lindy wanted a little privacy.
Lindy… Next to him, she pushed herself upright, holding one of the blankets across her breast. Her eyes scanned confusedly across his face.
"Mike-" The remains of her own sleep, and whatever she'd helped herself to from the case, still tangled about her. "Mike, what is it?"
The flashlight beam swept across her. She shrank back from it, the edge of the blanket pulled to her chin.
It wasn't the kid. With the flashlight turned away from him, Mike could see the taller, thinner figure behind it.
The beam pointed to the floor, making a bright oval there. Enough light scattered to the sides to show the outlines of the lobby, the ragged curtains over the windows.
The dim light also showed the gaunt face that Mike had seen in the dreaming. Skeletal, flesh carved down to the angles of the bone beneath. But without the gold-rimmed spectacles. The face had dark sunglasses on-the round black lenses looked like bored-out holes into the man's skull.
There was no white doctor's coat, either. Mike could see that the bony man had on old denim work pants, the legs bagging loosely on his frame. And a shabby-looking plaid flannel shirt, buttoned up to his Adam's apple. The cords of his neck were stretched taut beneath the frayed edges of the collar.
It's the caretaker-he realized that now. Just some old fart with a flashlight, prowling around. The one that the kid had told him about.
The man smiled, a crease lengthening in the narrow face.
"Don't worry, folks." Dry voice, paper and dust. "I just came around to see how my guests were."
Lindy had scooted over close to him. He felt the bare skin of her arm touching his. He kept his eyes on the old man.
The caretaker stepped closer, the puddle of light floating ahead of him. "How you folks doing?"
Mike watched the man as he stopped a couple of yards away. "We're okay," he said after a moment.
The black lenses regarded him. "You didn't look so okay the other night." The voice even drier, as if it couldn't even be bothered to laugh. "When I fixed you up."
Mike glanced down at the bandages wrapped around his ribs, then back to the man.
He nodded. "Thanks."
"You're in a bad way, son." The flashlight's beam moved across the floor, then slid partway up a wall, the man's hidden gaze following it, then turning back to Mike. "You should be in a hospital. There's only so much you can do with some bandages."
"I'll be all right."
"Suit yourself."
The caretaker turned away and walked toward the lobby's door. Mike watched him, until he was gone. He didn't have to push the boards far to get outside.
"It's okay." He looked over at Lindy. "I don't think we have to worry about him."
They lay back down, the side of her face resting against his shoulder. But he didn't sleep.
TWELVE
"This was quite a place at one time." The caretaker stopped and looked back over his shoulder. "People used to call it The Mayo Clinic of the West.' " His thin lips formed their mirthless smile. "It was really something. Or so I've been told."
The old man was giving them the grand tour. Nelder-Mike had remembered the name the kid had told him. That was it. Old Nelder, with his grey William-Burroughs-plays-Mister-Death face, had come sliding back into the building's lobby, with a skillet of bacon and bread fried in the grease. He must have been outside as soon as dawn had come over the hills, building the little fire and squatting down beside it. At least in the morning, with the bright daylight scraping in, the dark glasses on the skinny face didn't look so strange.
"Used to be the biggest train stop between here and Lincoln, Nebraska." Nelder kept walking, turning his head toward his shoulder when he spoke. "Folks came from all over to take the cure."
Mike hobbled after him, one foot dragging. The old man had dug up a crutch, a real antique with a cracked leather pad and a grip that looked as though it were carved from yellowed ivory. That, plus Lindy on his other side, the side he couldn't move, kept him upright. Most of the time, at least-he'd already taken one fall when the tip of the crutch had slipped out from beneath his weight and Lindy hadn't been able to catch him in time. He'd hit the floor hard enough to knock out what little breath he had left. Gasping, he'd looked up and seen the caretaker standing there, waiting and watching, face expressionless behind the black glasses.
They were in a ground floor corridor now, in the burned-down wing. Up ahead, they could see where the blackened timbers laced across the sky, the walls and ceiling collapsed together.
Mike stopped, resting his weight against the crutch and Lindy's grasp on his other arm. "What cure
?" he called after Nelder.
The black glasses looked around at him.
"The waters." Nelder pointed a bony finger toward the floor. "Place is built on top of a natural mineral spring. What they call geothermal-water just comes steaming up out of the ground, boiling hot. Some doctor back around the 1800s came out here and discovered it. 'Course, the Indians knew all about it, already. But they'd been cleared off. So the doctor built the clinic here. Thermalene, he called it. You can still see the letters outside, up on top of the building-most of 'em, at any rate. Claimed the water had all sorts of medicinal properties-cure anything, from impetigo to swooning fits."
"Yeah?" Mike lifted his head. "Did it?"
The old man shrugged. "People maybe thought it did."
Mike watched as Nelder went a few steps farther along the corridor and pushed open a door. Nelder tilted his head toward it.
"Come on-" Mike jerked the crutch tip ahead of himself. Lindy's grip tightened on his arm. "Let's go see whatever the fuck it is."
Her nose wrinkled in disgust when the smell hit them.
It looked like an old-fashioned steam room. The years of neglect that had decayed the rest of the building had settled here as well. The tiled walls were covered with mold; the concrete steps going down from the corridor were slick with damp. The far side of the room was filled with stone basins set close to each other, oblong cavities the size of bathtubs. A network of pipes mazed above them. The spigots mounted into the ends of the basins were chained shut, with large rusting padlocks dangling from the links.
"Jesus." Lindy looked as though she were going to puke. "Smells like something died in here."
Nelder gave his thin smile again. He had gone ahead of them, down the concrete steps; he stood near the circular drain in the middle of the room's floor.
"That's the water," said Nelder. "Folks used to pay a lot of money to come here and soak in it. Drink it, too."
Lindy made a gagging face, tongue sticking out.
Mike ignored her. He let go of the crutch and grasped the iron rail running beside the steps. The metal was wet and peeled rust flaked against his palm as he dragged his dead foot behind. He managed to get to the bottom without falling. Lindy hurried after him and helped pull him upright.
He leaned his hip against the rail-the metal creaked, the bolts straining in the stone wall-and looked around the room.
"So what happened?" The patches of mold, with their baroque edges, were the size of eagles nailed up. "It doesn't look like anybody's been around here in a while."
Nelder shrugged. "That was all a long time ago." The smile again. "Before my time, even. Scandals, maybe-the old quack who ran the place probably got into trouble. Telling people they'd get cured, then they came out here and died on him. Something like that, I figure. Then there was a fire; as you saw, most of the east wing is gone." The smile went away. The black glasses gazed across the mottled walls. "And then people just forgot about this place after a while."
"Hey, I'm not kidding." Lindy tugged on Mike's arm. "This place is really making me sick."
He let her pull him back up the steps. In the corridor, they waited, and finally heard Nelder clumping up after them. The old man pulled the door shut, but the smell still hung stifling around them.
***
He'd been in the examining room before: in the dreaming, and when he'd managed to drag himself up the big stairs that opened onto the lobby.
It wasn't the way it had been in the dreams, all bright and shiny and new. This was another outpost of the decayed world. Rust and broken glass, and the dirty cotton stuffing straggling out of the examining table's padding. The bottles, dark blue with hand-written labels, lay on their sides in the cabinets, mired in cobwebs.
"What the hell's this thing?" Lindy had found the contraption hulking in the corner. She leaned close to it, peering at the gold decorations on black enamel, all under layers of ancient dust.
Nelder stood in the doorway, his skinny arms folded over his chest. "That, young lady, is the first X-ray machine brought west of the Mississippi."
Mike, propped against the edge of the examining table, looked around at Nelder. "Really?"
The caretaker paused a beat before answering. "So I've been told." His flat voice scraped through the room.
The counter underneath the glass-fronted cabinets was close enough for Mike to reach. He prowled through the contents of a metal tray.
"You got some real antiques here." He picked up a suture needle, laid it down, then something like a hemostat. He didn't recognize it. "Last time I saw stuff like these was when I was in med school. We had one instructor who had a collection of antique surgical instruments. All kinds of strange stuff. Pretty grisly when you got into the Victorian obstetrical devices-decapitating hooks and shit like that-"
Nelder's round black gaze turned toward him. "You're a doctor?"
Mike dropped the instrument into the tray. They were all specked with rust, the blades dulled by time.
He nodded. "Yeah. I am." He looked up at the old man. "Well, practically. I was finishing up my residency when… some shit happened."
The skeletal face stayed expressionless. The silence goaded him on more than any questions could.
"I got started doing some shit I shouldn't have. You start doing things… and then they catch up with you. That fuckin' fentanyl…" He laughed, a dead imitation of laughter. There was still fentanyl working its way through his bloodstream, from the shot Lindy had given him a couple of hours ago. That was the only thing that enabled him to move around without feeling the pain of his damaged flesh. "That's some high-powered stuff."
"This is some kind of drug you're talking about?" Nelder spoke as if they were discussing something to do with a frog dissected on a lab table. "A narcotic, I take it?"
Mike nodded. "Synthetic opiate. Good for terminal cancer, major trauma, deep-tissue burn injuries. Just about a hundred times more powerful than morphine. Good for anybody who's screaming his head off; one shot, agony all gone, pink clouds come rolling in." He turned his own death's-head grin at Nelder. "Know what else it's good for? It's good for getting high as a fuckin' kite, that's what it's good for. And you know what else? For getting strung out like a telephone wire. And for getting stupid and doing stupid things. I was signing shit out of the pharmaceuticals cage like I was checking books out of the public library." The words kept pouring out of him, dizzying. "Shorting patients, giving 'em saline, keeping the good stuff for myself. Hoarding it. And then… once you start screwing up… you can hide it, you can hide it for a real long time, but somebody will know. Like they can smell it on you or something. And I'm not talking about cops." He shook his head. "Other people… they just know. And they come around, it's their business to know, they come around and tell you about the money. They got other people doing it, why not you? And pretty soon you got the fentanyl, and everything else, and the money." He laughed again, feeling his ribs begin to ache beneath the bandages. "And then you're really screwing up."
"You weren't much of a doctor." The thin lips barely moved. "Were you?"
"On the contrary." Mike picked up an instrument from the tray and tested its edge against his thumb. "Actually I'm a very good doctor. I know my stuff. I'm just not a very good criminal." The tool made a pink line in his skin. "Good criminals don't get stupid and burn the wrong people."
"I wouldn't know about that," said Nelder.
Lindy had come over from the X-ray machine. She took Mike's arm and laid her head against his shoulder. He felt disgusted for a moment, as though a fingertip had been set down in his gut. He knew she was still rolling under her own dosage.
***
There was a swimming pool behind the building, at the end of a path bordered with red brick. It looked as old as the clinic itself, with the same tiles set around the sides as covered the wall in the room with the stone basins.
Empty now-the contents must have been drained out a long time before, back when the clinic had been shut down. The
bottom had filled with debris over the years: tree branches-a dead-looking grove lay a few yards farther on-and brown leaves; charred timbers that had been hauled out and dumped from the burned wing. Other trash had been browned by the sun, old cardboard boxes and papers, all of it piled together in a thick, interlaced mulch, a stratum of decay.
Mike leaned on the crutch, looking across the tile-rimmed hole. "What, they went swimming in the stuff? The water, I mean."
Beside him, Nelder pointed to a group of control valves near the pool's edge. The iron wheels on a pair of U-shaped pipes rising from the ground were also chained and padlocked. "They used to fill it up every morning, then drain it at night. Least, that's what I was told." His finger moved a couple of inches, indicating a third wheel set in a metal housing, larger than the other two. "So it'd always be fresh." He turned, pointing in another direction, to a rock-lined culvert yards away, with a pipe spout horizontal at its end. "Came out there-so it could soak back in the ground."
Mike closed his eyes. A vision lit the interior of his head for a moment. Of the women in their old-style bathing costumes, down to their knees, and with those funny ruffled hats.
"So that's it?"
Nelder was walking away, through the dust and loose gravel surrounding it. The brown weeds scratched at his legs as he headed toward the low hills.
Mike hobbled after the caretaker, then stopped, exhausted. He leaned over the crutch, gasping. The shot of fentanyl was starting to wear off. He raised his head and saw that Nelder had halted and turned around to gaze at him.
"That's the whole story on this place?" Mike tilted his head toward the clinic building. The sun had risen far enough to spell out THERMALEN in upside down shadows on the ground; the last wooden E sprawled yards away. "Just some quack… peddling miracle cures?" The banished pain was returning. It crept up his spine, already blurring his vision.
