The Totem

by David Morrell

  "After all, it doesn't matter. Nothing does," he often told himself. What profit if you diagnose a living person and that patient dies because there isn't a way to cure him? Granted, there were times when you could find out what was wrong with someone and stop the illness. But the end was still the same. If not on this occasion, maybe the next time, and finally the end was certain. Every person died. There wasn't any way to stop that. People just marked time. He couldn't bear the thought of caring for a patient and then failing.

  "Self-defeat," his father had said when he first suggested that he'd like to be a medical examiner. His father had been wrong, though, for the self-defeat was not his study of the dead but how his father had prolonged the agony of someone's living. Tomorrow and tomorrow. Life is just a sequence of small losses. All those phrases now occurred to him, but back then he had not been wise enough to understand them, to call them up against his father. It was just a matter of one's viewpoint. Life was either good, or else it wasn't. In the long run, did it matter if you saved a man from this disease and spared him for another? The final truth was what he studied on the table.

  Something else. A corollary. He would never have the strength to watch a patient die. He didn't have the courage. He was fearful of mistakes, and even if he made none, he was fearful of the look in someone's eyes should he be forced to pronounce a death sentence. He could never tolerate responsibilities of ultimate consequence. Certainly he had responsibilities in this profession, but if he failed, what difference did it make? A murderer would walk the streets. A suicide would never be detected. But he couldn't change what they had done; he couldn't replay time and alter things. The pain of what they did was past. He hadn't been connected with it.

  The medical examiner was not so unaware that he didn't realize the causes for his attitude. His mother, for example, who had died when he was very young but not so young that he didn't remember how her body tortured her. Lung cancer. And he'd seen his father helpless to preserve her. Yes, his father the physician who was powerless when it most counted. Each day watching as she wasted. No, although he himself had long since learned to mute the power of that memory, he had not forgotten. She had been the only person close to him who'd ever died and filled him with grief. He didn't know why that should be, how his mother had made so strong a mark on him. Perhaps because he loved her, and that startled him. Because he knew a child's love had little substance. So he told himself. But if he'd really loved her, she had been the only one he ever loved. For sure, he didn't love his father. New thought: could it be that he had set out, insecure, to imitate his father, and then facing up to how he felt about the man, he had determined to annoy him? Self-defeat? His father maybe had been right. It could be that he himself had ruined his own chance to have a lucrative career just to get back at his father.

  But he knew that wasn't true. He'd chosen this job because he liked it. The pleasure of practicing medicine without the obligations. His mind worked best without the setbacks of emotion. So his talents made him famous, but his life became a muddle. He could not commit himself to anyone. He had no use for friendship. People only let you down, he thought. Or die or get sick or leave. There were only different ways of losing. Better to be careful. So he concentrated exclusively on his work and lived alone and went out seldom. Personal distractions didn't matter either, he was thinking. Have a drink and just forget them.

  One day he had been too busy for a shower. One day he had guessed he didn't need to shave. His pants went unpressed, his shoes unshined. He wasn't so slovenly that his manner and appearance were offensive, but the edge was off, the shimmer gone, and now in retrospect he knew that he had started acting like a loser. Self-defeat? Could it be that he had always been a loser, but that losing wasn't any good unless you first had been a winner? Had he courted his own losses? Or else could it be- he thought about this often-that when he had made his choice between the living and the dead he himself had started dying? Other people whom he worked with didn't have that problem, so the job was not at fault here. For a time he had a lover, but she couldn't tolerate his lifeless manner, and indeed he'd forced her to leave, certain that she'd one day leave him anyway. Besides, the dead were much more lovely. He would often go down to the morgue at night and, solitary, stare at certain corpses. Not the ones who were disfigured by a fire, say, or a traffic accident. But those who having died peacefully were much more radiant than they could ever have been when alive. The peace that passeth understanding. Quiet and at rest. A pewter sheen upon their faces and their bodies. Like some statues but much better. Or when working late at night, he'd pause before he cut a body open, meditating on perfection, and when he at last was forced to cut, he would do it lovingly, with care, so much so that, responsive to his care, the body gave up all its secrets. But the process took much longer each day. What before had taken two hours now would last a half a day. And sometimes all alone and working late, he'd occupy himself with just one body until the dawn.

  So that was how they brought him down. Because when all his theorizing had been prolonged and exhausted, after he had put up all his layered explanations, he in time had come to understand his motives. He was fascinated by the dead, in love with them, and all he needed to discover that truth was one late hour's gentle touching of a young girl's lifeless body. He had looked up, and his supervisor had been standing in the doorway, watching him. There was no need for accusations or explanations. No word passed between them, but they both knew what had happened. One week later he resigned, effective when a person could be found to take his place, and without thinking, he went back to his birthplace, Potter's Field. His father had been dead by then, so it was easy to return. He sometimes thought that he had wanted to return since he'd first left the place, except his father would have been there. His credentials had been so impressive that he hadn't required a recommendation from his superior in Philadelphia. He'd asked; the local hospital had hired him.

  And here he'd stayed, and here he had been happy. Understanding bred control. He settled in his father's house. He did his job, and he passed the time. He continued drinking but not as much as before. On occasion, he looked at Slaughter's sometimes puffy face and thought that Slaughter ought to cut back on the beer, but really it was he himself who liked the beer, and he at last had found a friend in Slaughter. Because Slaughter's life was his profession, as his own was, and a friendship based on work was something that the medical examiner could handle. People who were good at what they did, who related to you on that basis, seldom disappointed you. And besides, although this was a weakness, he had come to like the man, perhaps in part because he sensed that Slaughter felt that way toward him.

  And so he frowned at it. The body of the cat down in the hollow. He stood along the rim and looked down at the mangled head, and it was blown apart, all right. Slaughter's magnum bullet had shattered the skull. There were bits of blood and brain and bone and fur that had been blasted back along the slope behind it. There were insects crawling on those pieces, on the carcass and the bloody skull, flies that clustered buzzing on the blood as well.

  When he had parked his car and walked across the dusty field to reach the hollow, he had heard a noise down in there. He'd seen a dog run from the hollow, glancing furtively, its ears back, its tail low, as it had loped away. He had seen a bloody strand of sinew hanging from its mouth, and although he'd have to check the textbooks in his office, he was certain that he'd read somewhere that rabies could be passed on from the meat of tainted animals. He didn't have a gun. He wouldn't know how to use it even if he had one (that had been another block between his father and himself; his father was a hunter; he himself had not been interested). If Slaughter had been here now, the medical examiner would have been eager for Slaughter to shoot the dog. Either that or trap it. But that second way was risky, and the dog might be too clever for them. Better just to shoot it. Never mind who owned it. Never mind that he himself would want a living animal for observation and testing. That dog was a danger. It was running
toward the cattle pens, and he was bothered by the damage that the dog could do if rabies were indeed the problem here. Oh, this soon the dog would not develop symptoms, but it certainly could leave the virus if it drank from where the cattle drank, and they would then contract it. He watched as the dog disappeared among the bushes by the cattle pens, as the cattle shifted slightly, brown shapes in a group across there, and he licked his lips and looked up at the summer sun.

  It was noon, and he was thirsty, worn down by the heat. He'd left his suit coat in the car, had pulled down his tie and fumbled to open his top shirt button. Now he rolled his sleeves up, and he walked down into the hollow. Every sound he made was vivid to him, the dry sand crunching underneath his shoes-he never wore the cowboy boots so many of the townsfolk wore, his suits still those that he had owned back in the East-and he was positive that he would waste his time by doing tests on what was in a heap before him. There were only bits and hints of brain, and worse, they were contaminated, fly eggs on them now, corruption settling in. The cat had been a large one, black, a massive torn. He could understand why Slaughter had been startled when it suddenly came leaping at him, but he wished that Slaughter had shot it somewhere else besides the head. Well, that couldn't be changed, and for certain, he couldn't leave it here. In case it was contagious, he would have to seal it in a bag and then destroy it.

  He waited, thinking, at last climbing back up the slope and crossing through the dust and bushes toward his car at the curb. He opened the trunk and reached in for the kit he always carried with him for emergencies. Lab coat, rubber gloves, a cap and face mask. Once he had them on, the face mask stifling in the mid-day heat, he chose a plastic bag, a pair of forceps, and he returned to the hollow. There, he used the forceps on the bits of bone and brain, dropping all those pieces in the open bag he held.

  The process took a half an hour. He made sure that he found them all. Then he went up on the rim and searched among the bushes. When he was satisfied, he used a stick to push the carcass into the bag, put the stick in there as well, and noticed a piece of ragged flesh that had been hidden by the body. When he gripped it with the forceps, setting it inside the bag, he paused to guarantee that he'd been thorough. Sure, the blood that soaked the sand, dry now, rustlike, but he couldn't leave it, and he had to go back to the car again, to get the shovel in the trunk, the lye he always kept there, and fifteen minutes later he was finished, the sand scooped into the bag, the hollow pale with sprinkled lye. He walked back to his car, tied the plastic bag and put it in another bag and then inside the trunk. He put the sack of lye, the shovel, his lab coat and cap and face mask in yet another bag, careful with the gloves he took off, locked the trunk, and didn't know another way he could have done it. He would drive now to the office, go down to the furnace in the basement, and arrange for what he'd gathered to be incinerated.

  Abruptly he was conscious of silence. No wind, no cars going by or people talking, no sound over at the cattle pens. Well, Saturday, he thought, there won't be much going on. But he had the odd sensation that he was not alone. Of course, he thought. My rubber gloves, my lab coat, cap, and face mask. I'd have looked like I was from another planet. Sure, the neighborhood is inside, staring past the drapes at me. But when he looked, he saw no movement at any windows, and he did his best to stop his premonition as he got in his car and drove away.

  He headed toward the hospital, glancing in his rearview mirror where he saw two men come from the Railhead bar. He saw a woman emerge from a house and get in her car. He thought he saw, reflected dimly, workers from the stockpens walking down the street behind him. It seemed as if the world had once again resumed its motion the instant he left that place, and he was thinking he should get control of his imagination. Keep your mind in order.

  Because really this was something that engaged him. If he didn't dare consider all the trouble that was maybe on the verge of breaking out, he found the problem in the abstract quite attractive. He was intrigued the way he once had been in Philadelphia. A riddle to be solved. A secret ready for him to discover. He was driving, glancing at a cat that perched in royal splendor on a porch rail. He was passing a young boy who walked a cocker spaniel. And because the day was hot, he leaned his elbow out the open window, his arm hairs shifting in the wind that the motion of the car made. He was almost startled by the excitement that he was feeling. Ten blocks later, he turned up the driveway toward the parking stalls behind the hospital. He waved to a man from the childrens' ward who drove out past him toward the street. He reached the back and pulled in at his parking space, getting out, his key in hand to open the trunk when something slowed him and then stopped him.

  It was something that he'd grown so used to that he'd long ago stopped being aware of it. Except last night when he and Slaughter had been talking in the office, and he'd noticed it, but Slaughter had first turned to it, unconsciously reminding him, and anyway the thing had been so much in keeping with their conversation that of course he would have noticed then, but normally it simply blended with the background, and it wasn't worth consideration. Now when everything that he'd been mulling through distracted him, the sound had changed, had drawn attention to itself.

  He stood motionless, his head turned, his hand still outstretched to unlock the trunk. Even when he shifted his body toward the trees back there, his hand remained outstretched and stiff until he noticed it and lowered it slowly to his side. He felt his muscles tighten. He almost couldn't make them work as he walked squinting toward the trees. In all the years he'd worked here, he had never gone back in them, never once been curious. There was a dry streambed, he knew, that in the spring was filled with rushing snowmelt from the mountains. But a flashflood was not a thing to walk near, and he'd always watched it from the distance of his parking space. The trees here all had leaves, their branches bare in the early spring, and there had been no trouble seeing. But in June now, everything was like a jungle back there, the trees thick, drooping, the bushes full and vine enshrouded, not to mention that there was a rusty fence.

  He had a fear of snakes, of things that crawled and he couldn't see, but he was thinking only of the sound beyond the trees now as he reached the fence, and glancing at the thick high grass beyond it, he gripped the sagging post to balance for a foothold on the wire.

  There was no need to climb the fence. The post continued sagging as he gripped it, and his weight kept pressing, and the post snapped softly, weakly, toppling toward the ground where it hung bobbing in the wires.

  He looked down at ants, a hundred of them, next a thousand. They were scurrying to flee the ruptured nest inside the base of the post, rice-shaped eggs gripped by their pincers, rushing off in all directions. He lurched back, revolted. All those ugly crawling things. His skin began to itch. His mouth tasted sour. He was conscious of the irony that he could look at burned and mutilated corpses, maggots on them, and be concerned only about how much damage had occurred within the lungs, and yet he couldn't bear to see these insects and their crazy panicked scurrying below him. Well, he thought, in the morgue he had control, but here the situation governed him, and as the sound beyond the trees became even stranger, he made himself go near the fence. He stepped across the sagging fallen wires, avoiding where the ants were, staring at them even as he worked around them toward the trees.

  He felt the bushes clutch his pants, and he was turning forward, stooping underneath a tree branch, soon encircled by the trees. The ground sloped: long grass, vines that clung hard to his pant cuffs. Everything was close and dark and humid. Then the trees gave out, and he was looking at the streambed. It was deep between the banks, dry, with sand, and here and there a rock or water-polished piece of driftwood. He saw tiny tracks of animals in the sand. He glanced along one track and saw movement ten feet to his right along the bank- a chipmunk up on its hind legs staring at him, in an instant darting into a hole beside a tree root. Then the chipmunk poked its head out, blinking at him.

  He glanced toward the streambed once more, swallow
ed, and with one leg cautiously before him, he eased down the loose earth of the bank. The sand at the bottom was soft beneath him, and he didn't like that feeling, didn't like the lacerated tire he saw wedged among the silt and rocks. He was eager to get up on the other side, edging slowly up, then listing off balance, clutching at a tree root up there, but the clutching was instinctive, and abruptly he released his grip, scrambling upward, dropping to his knees and clawing.

  At last, he reached the level, and he stood there, breathing, glancing all around. He brushed the dirt from his pantlegs, staring at his hands. The noise was even stranger, though, and slightly to his left, not straight ahead. He angled toward it, stooping past more trees, avoiding bushes, suddenly free of them, stark sunlight on him, open air before him, just the houses past the yards here, the white fence all along this back end of the houses.

  He prepared to climb the wooden fence when he thought better. Down there to his left, the sound was even closer, stronger. From that backyard two lawns down. He walked along the fence, and then he saw it, tangled in its chain, the doghouse scratched and bitten, splinters and blood spots on the lawn, an Irish setter, and the sound it made was chilling. Not a growl exactly, not a bark. Much lower, almost speaking, deep within its throat, long and drawn out, suddenly a sequence of quick choking, then that drawl-like laryngitic moaning. He stared at the bloody lips, the froth that dripped in great gobs from their corners, and as it stopped biting at the chain and went back to the bone-revealing sore that it was chewing on its left hind leg, he gripped the fence, peered down at the unmowed yard, and gasped, desperate to control the churning in his stomach. He'd seen what he could only term the face of evil. Later he would recollect how those peculiar words occurred to him. He'd judge and weigh them, hoping to condemn their wild emotion, but he knew that they were fitting. He had never seen such open, brutal, insane evil, and his instinct was to flee, to repel the image from his sight.