The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck

by Alexander Laing

  “Prendergast?” Dr. Wyck asked, chuckling.

  “That’s it. Prendergast. Prendergast. Now I’ll remember. I have enough trouble with the legislature as it is, without running into things like this, Gideon. You stay away. I want to handle it in my own fashion. It’s got to come up tonight, because he filed a formal petition. You’d better tell me about him now, though.”

  “Nothing much to tell, Fred. I caught him cribbing on his first exam in my course last fall. He knew he’d have to do a little extra work to convince me, after that, and I’ve given him all the leeway he could want. But he’s got steadily worse all year.”

  “Sure you haven’t been leaning down too hard, Gideon? He claims he’s in danger of losing his degree because of your deliberate unfairness.”

  “Tripe!” said Dr. Wyck, gruffly. “I could have had him fired on the spot. I gave him a chance, instead, but he went right on bluffing.”

  Prexy must have thought I was out of earshot, for he replied in a low voice. “All right. But it’s becoming more than just an embarrassment, Gideon, having the rest of the faculty forever voting you down on matters of grades and discipline. Remember, I’d prefer that you absent yourself because of illness, tonight. I can handle the rest of them better if you’re not there at all.”

  Marjorie called Prexy to the telephone. He came bustling out, looking remarkably cheerful.

  “Here’s luck, Saunders. Here’s a coincidence for you. There’s just been a monster born at the hospital. Want to see it while it’s still alive? You’ve just got time before your lecture.”

  He noticed my inconclusive expression, and his own face sobered.

  “Jekyll and Hyde,” he murmured. “Doctors have to keep a watch on their emotions, because in real life it’s the scientist, it’s Jekyll, that plays the brute. I suppose I really ought to weep at such news—and yet, for the last year I’ve been hankering to get some good slides of tissue from a symmelus.[5] That’s what it is, by the way—a symmelus. That bright girl at the switchboard had all the details. I think she knows where I am at any moment all day long. What’s her name?”

  “Daisy Towers,” I said. “She keeps tabs on me, even. She routed a call for me through to the dog cart, the other day. Said she knew I’d be eating there.”

  “Oh? Well, I’m glad she’s not on duty at night. I sense the difference at just about supper time. People stop finding me then, and I have a hunch that it’s because that girl must go off duty about then.”

  “She does. She goes off at seven o’clock. And then for the next hour you always have trouble getting people on the phone, because one of the hospital porters has the board till the night girl comes on at eight.”

  “So that’s the reason, eh? Well, Miss Towers is a remarkably smart girl. She said the mother of the monster died. Perhaps that’s lucky, the issue being a bastard as well as a monster.”

  Prexy Alling had delayed starting the car, upon hearing the phone ring a second time. But no one appeared at the doorway. As the car began to move, he said, “You know, I want to benefit from Wyck’s enormous learning on the subject, and I have my private opinion that he’s a very sick man. I didn’t want to speak of it before his daughter, but I’ve seldom seen a man’s general appearance change so in a few weeks as his has. Have you?”

  I shook my head. My mind seemed to be seething with disconnected portents. Things had been happening too rapidly for comfort, in the ten hours since a little past midnight. What was the demonic understanding, or misunderstanding, between Wyck and Mike Connell? Had the former really received some of the latter’s blood, to strengthen him against an ailment which he refused to acknowledge to the world? And why had he demanded the return of a certain book, secretly looking at once to see whether it contained a slip of paper with cryptic notations? What was the horrible information about Dr. Wyck that had driven Muriel Finch to the verge of hysterics, the thing she did not even dare admit that she knew? Why, if his mind was so obviously deranged, did his associates permit him to continue as a practicing doctor and teacher? What had happened that Gideon Wyck, who notoriously was without mercy in cases of classroom delinquency, had failed to report a case of cribbing at once? Was it merely for the pleasure of hazing the culprit slowly, all year?

  I resolved to look up Prendergast, who I knew well, and get his version of the affair as soon as possible.

  A history, that is, of deviations from what is normal in the origin and growth of body and mind.—Ed.

  Demoniality by Ludovice Maria Sinistrari, Friar Minor. Tr. By the Rev. Montague Summers. London: The Fortune Press, 1927. (Original edition, Paris, 1875, from Ms. Written c. 1700.)

  Etienne and his son Isidor Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. The father helped pave the way for Darwin’s theories.—Ed

  The author of this narrative perhaps assumes in the general reader a knowledge of the medical significance of the word “monster”: “An animal or plant departing greatly from the usual type: a monstrosity.” The deliberate formation of monsters by external influence in the laboratory is most easily accomplished with certain insects, notably the Lepidoptera. The reference to a calf is significant in that (as every visitor to the side shows of a country fair must know) abnormal births of accidental origin seem to be commoner among cattle than among other domesticated mammals. Dr. Alling, as later events make clear, was preparing microphotographs of sections of tissue taken from various monsters to illustrate a lecture on the cause of such deviations.—Ed.

  “The pelvis and lower extremities in the individuals of this group are imperfectly developed, and the two lower limbs are more or less fused. Sometimes this fusion is complete, and the feet are wholly lacking.”—New International Encyclopedia, 2nd ed., vol. 16, p. 174.

  Four

  We were just turning in at the hospital when someone behind us on Atlantic Street frantically screamed our names.

  “Mr. David! Dr. Alling! You, for the love of Gof, you come.”

  The car stopped, spraying gravel at the wheels. Biddy Connell ranged alongside, panting. “ ’Tis my Mike again,” she said, “ ’tis certain he’s dyin’.”

  “Who’s—” Prexy looked at me. “Oh! She means Mike Connell.”

  “Himself. And that old divil Dr. Wyck wasn’t up, he said, and wouldn’t come, says he, if he was up. God have mercy on his black sowl. So I was comin’ to drag a doctor meself. Quick, now.”

  “What’s the matter with him?” asked Dr. Alling.

  “Oh, the terrible, terrible pain in the arm—you know, where it ain’t there. I couldn’t stand his screechin’.”

  “Get in,” Prexy said abruptly. As we drove the block or so to the Connells’, I got in a few words about the similar occurrence of some time after midnight.

  We found Mike in a sleep of exhaustion, from which Biddy promptly awakened him to justify he anxiety. He looked wildly around, as if afraid of the unseen world.

  “Are you still feeling pain?” Dr. Alling asked kindly.

  “No. That is, not enough to spit at. But oh, Doctor, I felt the sowl dragged near out of me arm. He was tuggin’ at it, but I couldn’t see him.”

  “Please tell me just what happened.”

  “Wide awake, I was, this time. There’s always the little pains. But it started growin’, slow, getting’ worse and worse, right here.” He put his index finger to a point in the air, three or four inches below the stump of his left arm.

  “What did it feel like?”

  “Like—like he was tearin’ the muscles out o’ me. Like his claws was in me muscles, Doc. Oh, tuggin’—slow—harder and—”

  “His claws? Whose claws?”

  “The black one. I couldn’t see him only shadow-like. And when I wouldn’t let go to him, he began bangin’ me heart, like wit’ a big club, right here. And all the while he was tuggin’ and tearin’. And then me heart began to burst, Doc. Everythin’ swimmin’, and the room whirling’, and me sowl near torn out. It was the black one, I know. I could just see him hazy.”[1]

 
; He turned suddenly on the pillow and sobbed. Dr. Alling looked seriously at Biddy and me.

  “Just when did you say this happened before?”

  “Early this morning, about one or two o’clock. We called Dr. Wyck a few minutes after it began, but it took perhaps five minutes to locate him.”

  “I see. Dr. Wyck left my laboratory about then, in response to your call. He’d been helping me with some slides. I didn’t note the exact time.”

  “I saw him plain, that time,” Mike cried. “All black and grinnin’.”

  “Dreamin’, he must have been, when it started,” Biddu hastily explained.

  “No, Doc, it was real. And this time I could see him too. Yes, I did see him—the white eyes, wit’ black pinpoints in the middle. Doc, if he comes again? I can’t stand it again. Next time he’ll drag out me sowl. Oh, God, what shall I do?”

  “We’ll be right back, Mike,” Dr. Alling promised. “Saunders, I want to talk to you a minute.” I followed out to the doorstep. “You said his heart was behaving strangely?”

  I described the symptoms with care. He shook his head.

  “Like nothing I’ve ever heard of. All mental in origin, perhaps, but such terrific physical effects take a physical remedy. Well, I’ll stop back with a hypodermic for the wife to give him, if he has another attack. Risky business, but she probably couldn’t get anything in at the mouth, if he was like that. I can’t understand why Wyck wasn’t interested enough to come in his pyjamas? He really must be ill.”

  This gave me an opening to speak about what had been nagging my conscience all morning.

  “I don’t know, of course,” I said, “but it may be explained by something else I didn’t tell you of. It came out last night that Dr. Wyck had been filling Mike’s head with stuff about demons. Well, you’ve seen the result of it. It may be unethical to say this, but I heard him myself, last night, giving him more nonsense to believe. I think it’s a damned outrage.”

  Dr. Alling cocked his little birdlike head shrewdly. “Thanks for your frankness,” he said. “There have been many private matters in which I’ve had to place confidence in your discretion as my secretary, Saunders. Please say nothing. I’ll admit sub rosa that arrangements are being made to have Dr. Wyck retired from actual practice. For years he’s handled only emergency and charity cases. He won’t have even those, in a short while.”

  Perhaps it would have been better, in the long run, if I had not been given this early reassurance. In such a case, I might have spoken further, and my words might have altered the whole course of future events. I am positive now that Dr. Alling at this time could not have suspected that anything was seriously wrong. For years Wyck had acted like an old Tartar, but had had the justification of brilliance in the laboratory, in the classroom, and as a surgeon. Probably, at the time of which I am writing, the faculty had reached the decision that a temperament unfortunate from the first had merely become a little too much so, with advancing years. They had decided to retire him at sixty-six, rather than at sixty-eight. That was all. The step they were quietly preparing to take had not been occasioned by any inkling, on their part, of the gruesome facts which I myself was on the verge of discovering. Had they known, or even suspected, Wyck surely would have been under restraint within a few hours; but it so happened that a little more than half a day of extra freedom gave fate the opportunity to embroil us all in a mystery to which I myself do not as yet see any clear solution—and I think I know more about it than any other living person.

  I must get back to my story. Dr. Alling and I stepped in again to caution Biddy to communicate at once with Dr. Alling direct if the symptoms should recur. As only ten minutes remained before my lecture, Prexy drove off without me to see the symmelus, and I walked back toward the school building. Prendergast corralled me as soon as I was inside the front door, eagerly waving a paper under my nose.

  “Here, Dave, your John Hancock’s needed. Here’s where you sign.”

  “Show it to me afterward, then,” I said, as the hour began striking.

  “Oh, don’t be an old woman,” he urged. “It just says in effect that Wyck’s an old son-of-a-bitch, and we all know that.”

  “Sorry, I probably agree with it, but I won’t sign anything without reading it first.”

  “O.K., O.K.,” he said testily.

  When the lecture was over I listened while the paper was read aloud by a disinterested third party. It proved to be a perfectly just catalogue of well known examples of Wyck’s arbitrary unfariness, and several malcontents willingly appended their signatures. I refused, because it was address to the state legislature. Had it been merely a petition to the faculty, I would have signed it at once; but I knew too much about Prexy’s troubles with the legislature to put my name on any document that might serve further to embarrass him, in that quarter. By the exercise of an adroit political instinct, he was able to keep a small working majority of the liberals on his side, to assure the yearly appropriation; but I well knew that a latter from the antivivisectionist societies, objecting to our use of live animals in the laboratory, was enough to send Prexy scooting down to the legislature.

  I explained my stand briefly, but Prendergast ended by calling me a coward, and some other students had to stop the threatening fight. After that scene I had no occasion before the faculty meeting to question him about Wyck’s actual behavior.

  The whole episode was in character. Prendergast and I, at the University of Maine, had both engaged in a feat of undergraduate journalism that caused quite a flurry on the campus: a little crusading weekly hat he immodestly called Prendergast’s Pillory. He was, of course, editor-in-chief. I was literary editor, general proofreader, make-up man, and office dog.

  It had been good fun. Prendergast filled the two inside pages with excellent militant editorials, naming names and sparing no one. He put two or three local bootleggers out of business for selling bad liquor, of which Prendergast’s Pillory published an exact chemical analysis, together with the name of the seller, place of purchase, and price. The government took no notice, but the students simply stopped buying. The paper printed frequent attacks upon what were considered unjust administrative procedures. Each issue contained a curt analysis of the teaching qualifications of one member of the faculty.

  My friend Prendergast was always crusading for what he believed to be just causes, in a courageous but transient way. On the other hand, he had blind spots of character. It should be emphasized, however, that the main source of his B.S. degree was the Pillory, rather than classwork. Amiable professors, who admired him as a journalist, overlooked his neglect of format studies.

  But the situation at medical school had proved to be decidedly different. No one would give him a passing grade in Physiological Chemistry on the basis of his worth as a crusader. Glibness and an excellent memory had barely got him by the first two years. We all knew, moreover, that he was a chronic cribber on exams. It had not surprised me in the least to learn that Wyck had caught him at it. His dissections were excellently done, with the aid of a glance or two at the work of tolerant friends.

  In the Pillory, Prendergast had bitterly fought the examination system per se. Since he sincerely disbelieved in examinations as a way of testing knowledge, I suppose he could crib without any loss of self-respect. At any rate, examinations had been the immediate cause of his undoing; and he was certainly displaying journalistic shrewdness in attacking an author for his woes at once so terrifying and so vulnerable as Gideon Wyck.

  When the threatened fight over signing his petition had ended in Prendergast’s being hauled away, a hoarse voice sounded from the basements stairs.

  “Hey, Doc. Hey one o’ you, give us a hand. Hey!”

  That, I knew was Charlie Michaud, the diener[2] of the anatomy museum, who indiscriminately addressed all students as “Doc.” I descended the basement stairs that led to the preparation room, where bodies for dissection were embalmed.

  “Hello, Doc,” Charlie said, “want to see my
latest invention? It’s a whiz. Only trouble is, I invented it so as to make it easier for one guy to do the job, and, by George, it takes two to run it. I got tired o’ sawin’ all these damn skulls with a handsaw, so I rigged up this little rotary saw—see!—on this extry motor that was kickin’ around. Only, it takes both my hands to hold the saw gadget steady, and that damn stiff’s head wobbles. Put yer foot on her face, will ya? Hold it steady, so’s I can take the top of her head off. I’m scairt I’ll dig in too deep, the way my nice invention’s workin’ so far.”

  “How do I know you won’t cut my foot off, while you’re at it?” I objected, as I climbed up beside the corpse on which he was working.

  “All you got to do is jump in time, Doc,” he said, genially. “Here she goes.”

  He pressed a switch, and the little motor with its rotary saw snarled to full speed. I jammed the instep of my boot down hard on the stiff’s face, and said, “Go ahead, but take it easy.”

  The head shuddered under my foot as the saw bit into the skull. Charlie moved it steadily through a half circle. Then we heaved the corpse over, and he completed the process from the back.

  “There, Doc,” he said, exultantly, bending the head back a little and taking off the top of the skull as if it were the lid of a box. “How’s that? Woulda taken half an hour, the old way. Did it in no more’n a minute, with this new invention.”

  He stuck his fingers down between the bone and the brain, lifting the frontal lobe free of the temporal.

  “Ain’t she a beauty?” he said, admiringly. “Inside of he head looks a lot better than the outside, hey? Wouldn’t think she’d have such a nice, neat brain, with a mug like that, would you? Well, thanks, Doc. I’ll give you a yell when I’ve got another to do.”

  The little sample episode out of Charlie’s routine labors is given to help explain some of the occurrences yet to come. Ordinarily, the very presence of a dead body is a deeply disturbing factor in community life. People in general cannot rest content until they have put a corpse out of the way, underground or in the crematory oven. Our efforts were of an exactly opposite sort. It was difficult for the school to get corpses at all. When we got them, we did all that we could to make them last. Each of us had his own cadaver in the anatomy course, and became exceedingly well acquainted with every wrinkle and secret of it, as Rupert Brooke would say, before the year was over. But it takes only a week or so to get thoroughly used to working in a room full of mutilated dead bodies; presently you reach a point where you think nothing of holding a dead woman’s face steady with your foot, while someone else saws the top of her head off. In such surroundings, the remains of violent crime do not seem quite so appalling as they must among good ordinary citizens.