Guazzo’s Compendium Maleficarum, a famous handbook used in the Church’s persecution of witches, gives it as a common sign of demonic possession to “feel a contraction of the heart, as if it had been unmercifully beaten.” See p. 169 of edition tr. by E. A. Ashwin, London, John Rodker, 1929.
The casual use of the term “diener” in this narrative is one reason why Mr. Painter feels certain that a genuine medical student is the author. The term, so far as I have been able to discover, is in use in this country in medical schools exclusively. It apparently comes directly from the German for “servant,” and reveals the Germanic training of most of the teachers.
Five
Jap Ross, a big squint-eyed classmate of mine, joined me as I was hurrying down once more to leave the building. “Had lunch?” he asked. “Come on over to the dog cart with me.”
“I’d like to see that symmelus, up at the hospital, while it’s still alive,” I said. “If it is still alive, that is.”
“That what?”
I explained. There was no reason why a third-year medic should know about the classifications of monsters, a subject that would not be touched upon except in its relation to obstetrics, in the last year. My own information came from the accident of my job with Prexy Alling.
“Oh, all right,” Jap said. “I hear you and Dick Prendergast were going to bust each other in the nose, a little while ago. Each of you claiming that you were the true papa of the whatchemecallit—symbolus?”
“No, I’m not a claimant. In fact, I don’t even know whether the mother was one of my girl friends. Who was she?”
“Dunno. Hey, Mickey,” Ross shouted to a second-year man, “congratulations. I hear you’re the father of a bouncing, eight-pound, symbol-whatchemecallit. Nice going, boy, old boy. Who’s the mother?”
Mickey Rehan came prancing over to assure us that he could not possibly have any children in the month of April. He had spent both July and August nursing a lumber freighter from Eastport to Algiers and back, and had been quarantined during his whole stay in the foreign port.
“All right, you’re exonerated,” Ross agreed. /“Cherchez la femme,/ and then we’ll have a better idea of who’s the proud papa. Who was she?”
“Girl named Mullin, according to Daisy Towers, who ought to know. Ever heard of her?”
The name sounded vaguely familiar, but I could not place it. Neither could Jap, who grunted, “She must have come by way of the Widow.”
That remark touches upon one of the reasons why Prexy has to be careful about reactions in the state legislature. To say that a woman had come to the hospital “by way of the Widow” meant that she had been resident for a while in a boardinghouse kept by the Widow Schmidt on the road to South Alton.
The Widow’s was both a practical and humane institution. However, since it dealt with a social problem which the community preferred to ignore, it was subjected to continual efforts at suppression. It was a boardinghouse, a refuge for pregnant woman who wanted both secrecy and intelligent medical care during the latter, more noticeable months of their pregnancy. Anyone who did not object to an audience could have her child gratis at the Altonville hospital, in consideration of the training thus afforded to students at the College of Surgery. Such patients needed a place to stay for the last doubtful week or two, and many preferred to stay at the Widow’s for two or three months, or even longer.
The Widow formerly had been a professional abortionist. Prexy once told me that she, after serving a stiff jail term, had come to him with the candid proposition that she set up an establishment along the present lines. He had recognized both the humanity and the scientific advantages of the arrangement, and had offered her some measure of protection in return for the right of medical overseership. An interne from the hospital visited the place daily, accompanied at least once a week by one of the staff physicians. It was suspected that the Widow occasionally indulged in her old profession, but no one had caught her at it.
As Ross and I neared the hospital, someone was saying, “Hell, you goofs, the proud papa’s probably old Gideon himself. She was the Wyck’s maid before she got a bit too much of a profile and had to be sent off to the Widow’s.”
Then I remembered. The girl had been discharged from the nursing staff. Her name was Sarah Mullin. She had fetched up as housemaid at the Wyck’s. As I speculated upon the not unlikely possibility that Wyck had philandered with his own domestic servant, a phrase he had spoken that very morning flashed back into my memory:
“Forget the moths, Fred,” he had said, intimating that he would have something better, in the way of monsters, for Dr. Alling to make slides of. And he had added, “I’m expecting it any day.”
For a moment my brain spun with the notion, ghastly and fantastic, that Gideon Wyck, by some means of prenatal influence unknown to orthodox morphological science, had deliberately begotten this monster. It was doubly shocking, with such a thought in mind, to be confronted at the main door of the hospital by Wyck himself. There was a bitter smile on his small, handsome mouth. His eyes seemed luminous with a checked passion. His face was still very pale. I felt as if released from an evil spell when he walked slowly down the steps.
Jap and I found the wretched little monstrosity in a room adjoining the free maternity ward. Several other medics were clustered around it, pridefully displaying to each other their calloused natures. The head and upper body of the creature were well enough formed, but for an abnormally distended belly. Although still breathing faintly, it must soon die; because the lower limbs were completely fuse together, leaving no external opening for either the intestinal or the urinary system. The creature’s single, centrally located leg tapered to where the knees should have been, and there contracted suddenly to a girth of little more than your thumb, continuing thence for a few more inches and ending in a raw, skinless blob.
“Not even a semicolon to punctuate his brief career,” remarked Ross.
“Yeah,” someone cut in, “Wyck’s going to do a post[1] on him, as soon as young symmy cashes in his checks, and find out just what does become of his pipes.”
In view of this I found it difficult to believe that Wyck could be the father of the monster. We had every cause for thinking the old doctor unbalanced; but even so, it did not seem fair to suppose that he was sufficiently morbid to cut up a child of his own begetting, especially when his co-worker, Dr. Alling, was at least as competent for the special requirements of the job.
A few moments later another incident occurred which seemed for awhile to confirm the assumption that Wyck had not sired the creature. While I was in the main hallway, downstairs, an old Ford came slurring around the hospital drive. A youth dashed up the steps. When he reached the reception window, however, he stopped short and said nothing at all.
Daisy Towers, seated at her switchboard, looked at him with a curt professional air and said, “Yes?”
I noticed that his fists were folding and unfolding in extreme agitation. He was rather handsome, ruddy, with wavy black hair worn long, and a thin, patrician nose that made all the more incongruous his costume: a faded flannel shirt, grease-stained khaki trousers, army boots, and a floppy felt hat with fishhooks and snells in the band.
When Daisy spoke a second time, he gulped, and asked jerkily, “Is there—did somebody get born here, today?”
“Who’s asking?” Daisy inquired. “Are you a prospective father?”
He seemed confused. Something buzzed on the switchboard. She attended to the call, and then turned again toward the waiting youth.
“It’s Sarah Mullin, I mean,” he blurted at last. “You’ve got to tell me. I heard—”
Daisy spoke more kindly. “What was it you heard?”
“Then she’s all right? Then she didn’t—”
Daisy said softly, “She died in childbirth.”
He swayed a little, turning to stare toward me with eyes which, I am sure, registered nothing that they saw.
“Is your name—Ted?” Daisy asked.
He nodded.
“Well, they told me to tell you, if you came, that she kept murmuring your name before—the end.”
He sobbed, turned quickly, and stumbled out to his car.
“That’s one mystery settled,” I remarked to Daisy. “But you wouldn’t think such a healthy specimen as that would have a deformed child.”
“No, you wouldn’t—and there isn’t any reason for thinking so even now,” she answers decisively.
“You mean that maybe he wasn’t the father?”
“That’s what I mean, Dave, without any maybe. If that fellow was the father you couldn’t have dragged him away from the baby with a team of Morgans.”
“That’s so. Who was he, then, her brother?”
“No. It’s a jolt to realize all of a sudden that you’ve become an uncle, without having had any say about it. That guy was just plain in love with her, that’s all. Anybody who was as worked up as he was over the situation in general would have clamped all his emotions right onto the kid, if the kid was his relation, Dave.”
Her analysis seemed sensible, when I thought it over. “Maybe he was somebody she’d given the gate,” I suggested, “and this lad wouldn’t admit to himself that he was still nuts about her—until he suddenly heard that she was dead.”
“That sounds a great deal more like it,” Daisy agreed. “But I’m sure I’ve seen that pair together, somewhere. It was six weeks ago yesterday that she went to the Widow’s, and—”
“How do you know that?”
She patted the switchboard and pointed to the telephone receiver clamped against one ear. “Six weeks ago yesterday,” she repeated, “and it wasn’t as long ago as that that I saw them, either. Wait! I remember! A month ago last Saturday I drove down to a dance at South Alton with your friend Jib Tucker. We nearly bumped into a couple walking by the roadside, in the dark. We backed up to be sure of things. I remember them standing there, hand in hand. It couldn’t have been very far from the Widow’s.”
That turned my suspicions about the monster’s paternity back again upon the sudden visitor to the hospital. Daisy was still positive, however, in her disagreement.
“Well, who was the father, then?” I inquired.
“Ask me no questions, and I’ll be in no danger of losing my job, Davy.”
It was plain that she knew more about the case than she cared to reveal, so I let it go at that.
I.e., a post mortem.
Six
I liked Daisy in spite of her tongue. She was pretty, with coppery hair and a kind of golden tan that still lingered in April. Her quick fingers never fumbled over the rows of plugs and switches. Her hearing was so acute that she seldom asked for a number to be repeated. Certainly she was to me the most attractive girl in town, and the only one—barring Marjorie Wyck—who seemed at all civilized. Most of the nurses were just small town girls. But Daisy’s family really belonged on the faculty side of the town-and-gown division. Her father had been treasurer of the medical school. His death had left his wife and daughter not too well provided for. Daisy had become a nurse at the age of eighteen, and, three years later, had taken the switchboard job. It paid less, but she liked the work better.
The medics, in general, ran the nurses ragged getting rid of their own inferiority complexes, another reason why the high-spirited Miss Towers preferred the switchboard job.
“It’s nearly one. Wait a minute, and you can have the joy of walking home with me,” she offered. I remember suddenly about the blood transfusions, and thought it a good idea to investigate wile I was on the spot. Daisy, when I told her what I wanted, admitted me to the little office behind the reception booth and pulled a drawer from the card index cabinet.
“What’s the problem?” she inquired.
“Ask me no questions till I find out whether I’m making a fool of myself,” I answered, unable to decide whether it was plausible that Wyck could have some ailment which made it possible for him to keep up an appearance of health only with the aid of blood transfusions. The primary anemias almost always are complications of other diseases which he could hardly have concealed. Indeed, the only justification for my suspicions lay in Wyck’s extraordinary character, which would drive him to bully himself even more than he bullied others, especially after his lifelong boast of perfect health.
If Mike had been giving blood to Wyck, the process obviously would have terminated at the time of Mike’s accident—and that might account for Wyck’s recent extreme pallor. I bent eagerly over the card giving Mike’s record as a blood donor. It showed eight transfusions within twenty months. Five of them, all to women, had been accomplished more than a year ago. The sixth, on the 8th day of October, had failed to save a man who was dying at the time. The seventh, on February 16th of the current year, had been given to one Joseph Baker—a first-year medic who had gone through the windshield of his roadster and was now at home convalescing. The last entry surprised me. It reads:
7 March 1932 { to Peter Thompkins, 250 cc.
to Joseph Baker, 250 cc.
Mike always told me about his cases. I had gathered from what he said that this transfusion had gone entirely to the boy who had shot himself: young Peter. Daisy got me the latter’s registry card, which showed that another donor had first been used for a full 500 cc., but that an additional amount had been needed. The explanation seemed therefore to be that, since Mike had been called in to give half the usual amount of blood, at the full minimum price, the physicians in charge had decided to draw off the normal amount and give half of it to Baker, who probably would have been still anemic. Baker’s card confirmed this.
“Well,” Daisy asked, “have you made a fool of yourself?”
“I would have,” I admitted, realizing that there was nothing to show that Mike had given blood to Wyck, “if I’d told you what I was looking for. But I’ve found something else to wonder about.”
“Which is?”
“I’ll trade you this information for yours about the paternity of the symmelus,” I offered.
She shook her head. “Rather not, Davy. I’d like to be just a little more sure of it.”
“The same goes for mine,” I agreed.
I was wondering. Mike’s awful seizure of pain, after midnight, had apparently coincided with the death of a boy into whose veins 250 cc. of Mike’s own blood had been introduced not long before. It seemed impossible that similar symptoms could have escaped notice in thousands of other cases when transfusions had failed to save a life; but the tantalizing fact remained that Mike’s own arm from which the transfusions had been made was now amputated, and the pain had centered in the severed ends of its nerves, giving Mike the impression that the agony which he experienced actually was being suffered in the arm that was no longer there.
When I told Daisy that I wanted to copy Mike’s record she decided not to wait. Nevertheless, the job was done so speedily that she was still in sight on Atlantic Street when I passed out through the hospital gates. There, the noise of a door slamming, some distance away, caused me to look curiously toward the pine grove concealing Wyck’s residence. Someone leaped into a parked Ford which turned and came snorting toward me at a furious rate. I saw that it was driven by the same strange boy, named Ted. He was frowning. His lips twisted in an almost maniacal way. It occurred to me that, even if the boy Ted had been only her casual friend, he would have know that Sarah had worked at the Wycks’ and would be likely to suspect the old doctor of having seduced her. I thought it might be a good idea to stop in at the gingerbread house to make sure that all was well.
When Dr. Wyck himself answered my knock. I felt rather foolish, so I said the first thing that I could think of:
“Mike had another of those attacks, this morning, sir. If it’s going to keep up this way, I was thinking it might be a good idea to keep him doped for awhile.”
The old doctor seemed to be without a quick answer. Presently he said, “No, I wouldn’t do that. No, not by any means.”
It was an unwritten law at the College of Surgery that whenever a student failed to understand the reason in pathology for a given course of treatment, he should demand an explanation. I hesitated this time, because I had a certain conviction that Gideon Wyck was unwilling to give the argument. This was confirmed when he added:
“I warn you, don’t do anything like that, at least until tomorrow. Understand?”
There again, as I look back upon it, was a warning I should have heeded, that something portentous would happen before the night was out. I am now quite sure that Gideon Wyck had his own good reasons for subjecting Mike to a deliberate recurrence of the agonizing seizures; but it was not until long afterward that the reasons were revealed.
As I stood uncomfortably in his doorway, I surprised myself by bluntly asking the question uppermost in my mind.
“What did Mike mean when he said something about giving blood to you, sir?”
He laughed sharply and unpleasantly. “So far as I can see, he was merely referring to the fact that it was I who drew off blood from him to be injected into various patients—such as your fellow student Joseph Baker. Mike must have been brooding on the nothing that I make my living by taking blood out of him and putting it into somebody else.”
The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck Page 4
