The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck

by Alexander Laing

  “You saw it?”

  “Yes. It was an emergency case, born in the Widow’s old converted Cadillac ambulance. Dr. Kent hauled me out to help him tie off the umbilical cord. The thing that nearly threw me into a fit myself was the way it barked! Instead of a birth cry it lay barking—quick yelps—something like a terrier’s. I asked Dr. Kent about it afterward and he said the larynx wasn’t human at all.”

  “Did it live long?” I asked, lighting a cigarette with a match that wobbled in my fingers.

  “No. It died right there in the ambulance, and the mother died at the same time.”

  “Who was she?”

  “Mrs. Molyneaux, the Widow’s Canuck nurse. And do you know who was the appointed overseer of her place?”

  “I thought it took the whole staff, more or less, to keep an eye on her.”

  “It does, but Gideon Wyck was the official overseer from July 1, 1931, to January 1, 1932. You remember I told you about a call from the Widow to Dr. Alling, saying that she wouldn’t be responsible for Wyck’s safety?”

  “Then do you know how many of these queer cases came from the Widow’s?” I asked suddenly.

  “All five of the monsters were born to women living within a few miles of Altonville. But only the first and last came by way of the Widow.”

  “Any woman by the time she got to the Widow’s would be beyond the stage where much could be done to influence the form of the fetus.”

  “Yes, except in the case of the Widow’s nurse, Mrs. Molyneaux, who was the last one, and was there all the time—”

  “And of Sarah Mullin,” I broke in, “who was living at Wyck’s own house up to the time she went to the Widow’s.”

  “Exactly, David. In these two cases, and in all three others, Wyck could have exerted some kind of influence—God knows what—over the mothers during the formative stages of the embryos. Lucy Bennett, mother of the second one, lived out Center way, not very far from your famous ruined farm. What’s more, her skinflint old husband sent her in to the free ward for treatment, and the records show that Wyck took care of her. The mother of the third symmelus has been living alone in Alton Plain. Her husband’s a lumberjack, and hasn’t been home for a year, except a few days at Christmas, so Wyck could have had all the chances in the world to see her.”

  “And the fourth, the messed-up one?”

  “Sylvia Jones was the mother. Remember her?”

  I nodded, and felt something of a pang of sadness. She was a gay, considerate little nurse, who had been discharged from the hospital in February, when she fainted while on attendance upon one of the cases of stillbirth. I had a notion that she had been Daisy’s friend, and inquired.

  “She was,” she said, with a metallic tone of cold, controlled anger creeping into her voice, “and this completes my case. It killed her. When she was dying, she asked for me, the poor sweet little kid. She wanted to confess something, but talked all around the subject, till it was too late.”

  “You didn’t learn anything?”

  “Not much, but enough to know that Wyck himself got her into trouble. Now I come to think of it, she might have meant Ted. Well, when she threatened to have what we so nicely call an illegal operation, Wyck gave her a prescription to take every day for six weeks, but it did no good.”

  “Anything you’d take daily for six weeks couldn’t do any good. Do you suppose he—Daisy, did you get that prescription?”

  “No, but she said it’s the only one she ever had filled, and it must be on file at the drugstore.”

  “She must have been pretty dumb. Six weeks!”

  “And the stuff he gave her may itself have been part of his experiment on her, you see.”

  “Whew! That may be how he worked it with all of them, and the treatment itself was calculated to produce a monster. But why on earth should he want to produce monsters?”

  “Why should he have wanted to drive Mike Connell mad with ideas about demons? He was mad himself, David. We must be a bit crazy, too, to sit down here trying to talk calmly and professionally about all this. If you’d heard the screaming of those poor women—each time you could hear it all over the hospital. It made me want never to have a child. Poor little Sylvia.”

  “What’s Alling done?”

  “He gave strict orders to hush it up, like the time before, and took all the monsters away to his laboratory.”

  “Did he say why he wanted it all hushed up?”

  “Yes. He called all of us who had witnessed them into a private room and said there was a legislative investigation of the medical school pending, and that if the news of all this funny business got out, we all might lose our jobs.”

  Sixteen

  For the next few days, Dr. Alling kept me busy at all hours, as if he feared physical violence, and wanted someone always to be near. But that could hardly be true, as he slept alone in a house in no way guarded. His cook and housekeeper both lived in the village. There was not even one extra bed or cot about for an emergency.

  Perhaps it was only a result of knowing about Ted Gideon, but I was able by now to laugh at my own appalling suspicions of the spring.

  There was reassurance in his own attitude when he said, one morning, “You’ve doubtless noticed that I deliberately skipped the chapter on fetal deformities in our outline. The reason is of course the obvious.” When I looked a little puzzled, he added, “I mean that I’ve got some firsthand specimens in my laboratory—in fact, too many for comfort—and I want to finish a complete detailed inspection of them before writing anything at all on that theme.”

  In my renewed confidence, I asked, “What’s your explanation of them, sir? I mean, having too many for comfort all at once?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” he countered.

  “You mean it’s linked with Dr. Wyck’ disappearance?”

  “Of course. When I found out we were likely to be in for this visitation of monstrosities, I was sufficiently perturbed to avoid discussing it with anyone. I feel sure it will soon be over, for a number of reasons that I will tell you, like a wise prophet, after they prove true.”

  As I strolled back past the school that afternoon, Charlie the diener hailed me. “I’ve been hopin’ you’d go by, Doc,” he explained. “ ’Bout time we pumped some air into that vault, with school openin’ in a coupla weeks. I’d just as life have somebody around in case anything goes flooey with the machinery.”

  “Don’t trust your own invention?”

  “There’s a lot of fine inventors pushin’ up daisies, Doc, from tryin’ to fly with their own brand of wings.”

  As we descended the stairs, he added, “Gee, it’s been a funny summer, with no Mike to go fishin’ with.”

  As I told him of the last hopeless report, he shook his head, but became cheery again as he bent to read the pressure gauge on the chlorine tank. “See that now, Doc Saunders? Right on the dot where it was last spring. Ask Doc Kent. She was at 70, and he says, let her down to 50 flat. They all told me that she’d leak if I left her hooked up. ‘Not with them white lead joints, she won’t,’ I says. And she didn’t, did she now?”

  “If you want to prove she’s at 50 I’ll swear to it,” I said, after examining the gauge. “I don’t know where it was when you finished filling the vault, though.”

  “Sure I want to prove it. Doc Kent bet me a box o’ Pittsburgh stogies it’d leak five pounds. You gotta help me collect, Doc. That old fool Wyck shot off his mouth about gas leakin’, too, and spoilin’ things upstairs. ‘Chlorine don’t walk upstairs,’ I says. ‘You oughta be enough of a chemist to know that.’ Now, Doc, you turn that there valve in the exhaust pipe.”

  I followed directions. It was a two-inch lead pipe running from the sealed vault to a metal tank. This in turn had an outlet running outdoors. Chlorine from the vault would bubble up through water in the bottom of the tank, and then through several copper screens, electrically heated, above which were layers of finely powdered animal charcoal and antimony. Most of the wet chlorine formed
CuCl<sub>2 with the copper mesh. Any surplus was adsorbed on the antimony and charcoal. Charlie had not worked out the details, but it was he who had suggested using something like the gas masks he had worn in the war.

  When the exhaust valve was open, he snapped a switch. A small centrifugal blower between tank and vault whined to full speed and began drawing out the gas. We could hear it bubbling in the tank. Presently the pump changed its note.

  “Getting’ a vacuum in there,” Charlie said. “Now we can make a niche or two with no danger of any gas getting’ into the buildin’.”

  Air whistled through the cracks of the door as he pried at a piece of packing; and when he pulled it free there was a loud sucking noise. “See, Doc,” he said exultantly, “That vault was /hermetically/ sealed. That packin’ round the door don’t leak a mite.”

  “Well, your machinery seems to work, inventor,” I said. “I guess I’ll be on my way.”

  “What’s your hurry?” he inquired. “There may be a whiff or two left in there. I don’t figger on passing out with nobody around.”

  I waited ten minutes or so, while Charlie stripped from around the vault door its “packing.” He opened the padlock and worked hard at the bolts, which had been partly embedded in the tarry stuff. After some tugging, the heavy door swung out.

  “Snap that switch, will you, Doc?” he directed. “Yeah, the one highest up.”

  I turned it, but there was no effect.

  “Shoot!” Charlie exclaimed. “Bulb musta gone flooey durin’ the summer.”

  “Maybe it’s just loose,” I said. He groped for it, gave it a twist, and said, “Now try.”

  I snapped the switch again and the vault was lighted.

  “That’s funny,” I heard Charlie say.

  “What’s funny?” I asked, poking my head in and coughing over a whiff of unexhausted chlorine, which did not quite succeed in suppressing the regular vault smell of musty corpses, lying under snow-white shrouds on their tiers of shelves.

  “That there,” he said. “There wasn’t no stiff on the damned go-cart when I sealed this place up.”

  My stomach took a leap, and then settled down into the bottom of my abdomen. I resolved in a flash that Charlie, not I, would take off the cloth. I stepped nearer to have a good view of his face when he did it.

  “Funny the way you can forget a thing like that,” he muttered. “I coulda sworn I’d put every one o’ them stiffs in bed. Well, let’s see how they stood up.”

  He pulled the cloth from over the feet of the corpse that was lying on the wheeled stretcher in the middle of the room. I expected to see something loathsome, but this body was obviously embalmed, like all the others. I began to doubt the conclusion to which my mind had leaped.

  “Fine and dandy,” said Charlie. “Now, if this was three years ago, before we figgered out this chlorine stunt, you’d ’a’ scraped the mold off’n them feet half an inch thick—an inch, mebbe. Let’s see if his hair’s sheddin’.”

  He pulled away the head end of the shroud, stretched out a hand to pull at the hair, and then withdrew it slowly.

  “Holy Gawd, Doc!” he whispered. “It ain’t— Yeah, it is him. Ain’t it?”

  If Charlie had actually been aware of what he would find when he lifted that bleached shroud, then he was the finest actor I have ever seen. With eyes popping and fallen jaw, he stood staring at the cadaver of Gideon Wyck.

  The tallow-colored corpse showed faint red and purple blotches from extravasted blood and embalming fluid. The face, although somewhat relaxed with time, still was twisted with hideous signs of a convulsive death. I jumped and with difficulty restrained a yell of alarm as one of his arms, which had apparently been disturbed from a precarious equilibrium when the diener pulled at the shroud, suddenly slipped over the edge of the stretcher and dangled rigidly, pointing downward. Far less embalming fluid had been used that is usual. This was indicated by the extreme emaciation of the wrinkled skin, as it hung over the bones like wet cloth. Ordinarily the most wrinkled of bodies is distended to plump smoothness by the embalming fluid. But Gideon Wyck was certainly no pleasanter a man dead than alive.

  Charlie was first to regain some sort of composure. “Listen here, young feller,” he said, “you go and phone the sheriff. I’m gonna stand in that vault door, and not move for nobody till the sheriff gets here.”

  Grabbing the phone I said, “Daisy, get me the sheriff quick and you’d better listen in on this one.” I explained to the sheriff what had happened. “Have ye called Dr. Kent?” he asked. “Well, you do, and save me the trouble.”

  Dr. Kent was the state pathologist and a professor at the medical school, but he also held the office of county coroner.[1] Daisy at last located him at a store in town. As I finished giving him my message a car stopped noisily outside, and a Yankee voice bawled, “Where in hell is this here crime?”

  I told Sheriff Palmer Dr. Kent would be over shortly, and led him down to the vault. The diener was standing in the doorway.

  “How much have ye yanked him around?” the sheriff snapped, thrusting his head forward shrewdly.

  “He ain’t been touched,” said Charlie, “only to lift the cloth, each end. And that arm fell loose after I pulled the cloth from under it.”

  “Who say him first?” the sheriff inquired.

  “Dunno. Me and Doc Saunders here was both in there. I pulled the shroud off.”

  “Then you’re under arrest,” said the sheriff promptly. “And I’m like to want you, too,” he added, turning to me.

  He did some prowling and sniffing, but nothing else happened until the coroner came, accompanied by a public stenographer. I was thrown into an inner panic by the glance I got from Dr. Kent. He made a quick general inspection, and then asked the diener and me, each with the other absent, to describe what had happened, while the stenographer took down our depositions.

  “Very well,” he said. “Sheriff Palmer, will you arraign Mr. Michaud and Mr. Saunders before the magistrate, and then return here? As soon as another doctor arrives from the hospital we will proceed with the autopsy.”

  The office of the coroner does not exist in the State of Main. The governor appoints medical examiners, having similar duties.

  Seventeen

  Charlie and I were arraigned before Judge Cole as material witnesses and paroled in custody of the sheriff. He prowled through the preparation room, asking us questions about the embalming process, and hunting fingerprints. I observed with some relief that criminology, in Maine, remained doggedly in the romantic stage. We told the sheriff that rubber gloves usually were worn throughout the embalming process, but he continued to putter with a little pot of dry white lead, a device for dusting it evenly, and a magnifying glass.

  Presently he said, “Hey, what are you yaps hangin’ around here for? Beat it. But if I catch you over the township line, you’ll have a hell of a job getting’ out o’ jail for the next twenty years.”

  I stopped for a quick bite at the dog cart, and then hurried across the street to dress for an evening with Daisy.

  In front of the Connells’, the town clerk served me with a summons to appear for the coroner’s investigation, at 9:30 A.M. on the second day following. I resolved then and there to answer all questions in the simplest possible fashion, and to volunteer nothing.

  Daisy met me on the lawn, and we began to stroll around the back way toward the hospital, past the cemetery. Quite automatically we joined hands, smiled at each other, and looked ahead again.

  While I was describing carefully the afternoon’s astonishing occurrences, we passed the hospital and wandered on into the Bottom Road. When I had finished she was silent, all the way to the first little bridge. Then she said, “You don’t know how Alling reacted?”

  “I haven’t seen him since it happened.”

  “You were there over two hours,” she mused aloud, “and he didn’t come down to investigate the finding of the body of his own colleague—and he’s the head of the school. We’ve got
to figure out some innocent-sounding things for you to ask him in the morning, Davy.”

  “What for?” I inquired.

  “To see whether he did the job himself, or used the diener as a cat’s-paw.”

  I gave a nervous laugh. “Did the job himself? Why, the way he’s been trying to protect the school from an investigation—do you suppose he’d pull a bizarre stunt like that? It’ll be in headlines all over the country tomorrow morning. As for doing the job himself, can you imagine that crippled half-pint heaving a stiff around the embalming room?”

  “I don’t blame you for being loyal to the guy.”

  “It’s not that,” I insisted. “You know I was suspicious of him for months, over his not asking me where I’d been when I came in all messed up, that night.”

  “Why should he ask you where you’d been, if he did it himself? More than three hours passed between when you last saw Wyck and the time you came in and found Alling sitting up with Mike. What was he doing there at that hour, anyway?”

  “It’s perfectly obvious: Biddy called him up, because he was the last doctor Mike had had.”

  “Very good, Watson,” she mocked. “Unfortunately, Biddy did nothing of the sort. The record for that night shows only one call from the Connells’ line, when Alling called for help after Mike had gone coo-coo. Did you ever ask Biddy?”

  “No,” I confessed.

  “Well, do. The night girl might just possibly have left it off the slip, but it isn’t likely. I’d suggest that you ask Alling, just casually, how he happened to be there, too, tomorrow morning, and I’ll hang on to the line to make sure that the first one you ask doesn’t call up the other, so they can get together on an answer.”

  “You’re not meaning that you think Biddy is mixed up in this, Daisy?” I asked, half angry with myself, because I had secretly through over the possibility more than once.

  “Some laundress is,” she answered. “And what laundress could have more cause to be than Biddy? Those clothes of his weren’t laundered in any commercial establishment or they’d have laundry marks.”</sub>