The Teratologist

by Ward Parker

  A faint whistle came from the roof. One of the bolo men stepped into the room. He spoke quickly in a voice filled with alarm. The officer barked a reply and the soldier left.

  “The enemy is approaching. We don’t know if it’s a patrol or a larger force. You must hurry, Doctor.”

  He continued staring out the window, gathering his nerve, watching the tall grasses undulate in the wind all the way to the river. To the right of his view was the small cluster of homes that constituted the village, silhouetted by the late afternoon sun. A small green lizard sat on the windowsill watching him.

  “Okay, Simms, irrigate the wound with the remaining hot water. Then shave the right side of his head and wipe it down well with the iodine. Prop up his head a little more, too.”

  “Yes, sir,” Simms said, looking at him with apprehension.

  Follett rummaged in his bag. He was not equipped for this kind of surgery. The only bone saws he had were intended for the amputation of a limb. It would be like using a lumberjack’s saw to prune a rose. He looked into the stern faces of the officer in the corner and the bolo man guarding the door, then began placing his instruments on the table beside the bed.

  “Wipe these down with the iodine, too. This is a decidedly septic operating theater.”

  With the patient unconscious there was no need for ether. Once Simms had finished prepping the patient and the instruments, Follett went to work. With his scalpel he cut a large, semi-circular incision around the bullet wound, careful to avoid the anterior temporal artery. He pulled the skin away and folded the flap to rest on the boy’s head. Simms used gauze pads to wipe up the blood and hold the skin flap out of the way.

  “Now comes the tricky part,” Follett muttered.

  Sporadic gunfire outside startled him. He looked out the window. Tiny blue figures protruded above the tall grass, a skirmish line of American troops advancing toward the village from along the river, each man pausing to fire before reloading and continuing forward. The lizard on the windowsill looked out at them, his head raised in alarm.

  “Keep working,” the officer said.

  Follett selected a saw with a twelve-inch blade and fine teeth and went to work on the skull, carefully sawing through the bone until nearly through and then switching to the knife-blade side of the instrument to finish the cut without damaging the membrane of the dura mater beneath that covered the brain. Simms irrigated the cuts as he went to flush out the bone debris. Follett made four cuts and carefully removed with forceps a square of bone, placing it on gauze pads. Next, he began removing tiny bone splinters caused by the bullet that were stuck in the dura mater.

  Increased gunfire came from outside, breaking his concentration. He glanced at the window. The lizard was gone. The troops emerged from the grass, walking a couple of paces apart, calmly firing like they were shooting pheasants. To the right, another unit proceeded through the village, a few of them gathering up chickens.

  Then everything went to hell.

  A woman and two young children darted from a shed and ran across the dirt road. Someone shouted, gunfire erupted, and the family jumped sideways, all at once, landing in a heap on the dirt, a crimson puddle snaking out from under them. Just past them, a water buffalo dropped to its front knees and then keeled over.

  Follett returned to his work but the room briefly darkened as a body fell past the window—the lookout that had been posted on the roof—and suddenly bullets were thudding into the walls of the house. The officer stepped out into the main room and shouted an order.

  That’s when Simms made a run for it. He jumped onto the windowsill and tried to kick the shutters open but in an instant the bolo man had him by the back of his collar. He pulled Simms down and in one fluid motion pulled the bolo from its sheath and carved a deep gash across Simms’ throat. Simms clutched his throat as blood from his carotid artery sprayed Follett, the patient, the walls. He twisted as he collapsed on the edge of the bed, knocking the patient to the side.

  The officer was back, screaming at Follett, at Simms, at the bolo man—at the God who had abandoned him—as the window imploded in a shower of splinters and bullets. Follett dropped to his knees and ducked. Pain pierced his cheek and he reached up to find a shard of wood protruding about an inch, his tongue touching its sharp other end. The bolo man snapped backwards as he caught a bullet coming through the window. He fell to the floor where he shrieked in Tagalog and thrashed about.

  The officer was still shouting and then his son began convulsing violently. A large splinter had penetrated his brain through the opening in his skull. Follett’s heart stopped beating.

  From then on he was like a wind-up toy, moving mechanically to stabilize the boy while bullets whizzed into the room, hitting a wooden chest, the wall, a painting of the Virgin Mary. He smelled smoke and realized the roof thatching had caught fire. A haze of smoke hung in the light from the setting sun that poured through the shattered window. As he stuck his fingers in the patient’s mouth to keep his airway open, his convulsions stopped abruptly. Follett grabbed his wrist to take his pulse. Nothing.

  He was losing his patient. It was impractical to open the chest and massage the heart, so he tried an external procedure he’d once seen another surgeon do. He rapidly pushed the patient’s ribcage with his hands to compress the chest over the heart, essentially a closed-chest cardiac massage. He tried for what seemed like an eternity, until his shoulders ached and knew it was futile.

  He stopped and looked at the officer. The man’s eyes seemed to have sunk even further into their sockets and his face slackened. A tear rolled down his cheek. He shook with the sobs he tried to fight.

  “I’m sorry,” Follett said. “His trauma was simply too massive.”

  The officer gave no sign he’d heard over the sounds of gunfire that rattled outside the house, from all points of the village. The smoke was getting thicker and Follett’s eyes stung. When the officer knelt beside the bed and laid his head upon his son’s lifeless chest, Follett slipped quietly from the bedroom. In the main room, one of the riflemen crouched beneath a window, rising to take shots after long intervals, but the rest of the insurrectos were not there. Follett went outside where he could breathe better. Dusk was rapidly approaching.

  He saw some of the bolo men on the side of the house, facing the front, taking cover behind a wood pile. The other side of the house was unguarded. A field with crops of some sort stretched to a copse of trees and then a short distance from that was a forest. It took a moment for Follett to realize he should run, because his mind was still locked on his responsibilities of a surgeon. No, he was a prisoner and his duty was to escape.

  Just as he began running toward the copse of trees a shot cracked behind him. He turned and saw the officer with his pistol in hand pointing at him and shouting to the bolo men.

  Follett’s adrenaline—it was hard to believe he had any left—pushed him into a sprint through the row of beans and gourd-like vegetables. Another shot rang out and what sounded like a bee buzzed past his ear.

  He knew the officer’s intention was not to recapture him. The officer was going to execute him for failing to save the boy.

  He plunged into the small copse of trees with an underbrush of saw palmetto. A bullet snapped into a tree trunk a few yards away. He couldn’t hide here. He pushed through and exited into the field on the other side, but he ran at an angle that kept the trees in between him and his pursuers. The battle sounds from the village became louder despite his distance. He risked a look behind him and could see advance American scouts leaving the village and entering the field. It looked like the village had fallen. Would the officer and his men turn to fight a slow retreat or continue chasing him? He pushed himself to run faster. If he could make it to the woods, it would soon be night and he could simply hide until it was safe to get the attention of the American troops.

  Finally, he pushed through a curtain of vines and stumbled over the roots of some sort of banyan trees. He continued further into the da
rkness of the forest where it was fully dark and the insects droned. After he cut through a thicket of saplings smothered in vines, he dropped to the ground panting.

  When he looked around, his eyes adjusting to the dark, his heart froze. Dozens of pairs of eyes stared back at him in the darkness. Insurrectos, perhaps an entire company’s worth, were crouching behind cover. Faint reflections of moonlight flashed from the steel of their bolos as the nearest men rose and came at him. He could smell their sweat, their mildewed clothing, the oil from their blades. They made no noise as they approached and raised their arms to hack him to death.

  Then the freight train roared through—that was what it was like. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a large, dark creature racing toward him, a flash of yellow eyes. The creature roared and Follett’s knees suddenly went limp. The bolo men screamed and flew backwards as from the force of an explosion and Follett was lifted and carried through the trees at great speed. The creature that held him was large and hugged him to its chest like a baby. He smelled musky fur and then dizziness overtook him.

  The next thing he knew he was waking up, lying on his stomach in the dirt, looking at two pairs of soldier boots in the light of the moon.

  “See the patch on his collar?” one man said with a Midwestern twang. “He’s a doctor. What in hell is he doing out here?”

  And all Follett could think was, What was that beast?

  * * *

  He hadn’t experienced that memory of the Philippines since the unfortunate incident in the operating room in New York that ended his career as a surgeon. Right in the middle of a gall bladder excision, for no reason, he had suddenly found himself back in the Philippines, in that house with the wounded boy. He relived the entire thing, the sights and sounds and smells. The dead men in the room and the bullets hitting the house. His failure to save the boy. That day in New York his hands had begun shaking as if with palsy. He literally broke down and the assisting surgeon had to take over. He never performed surgery again, and thought he never would, until this day in Florida with a patient who was only part human.

  But he was ready. Somehow, by allowing his memories to unfold and not fighting them, he felt more in control.

  By now the natural light had faded. This neighborhood south of Miami was not electrified, so Follett was forced to work under kerosene lighting. After administering a few drops of ether, Follett shaved the fur off the patient’s stomach with a straight razor, and then with his scalpel made a small abdominal incision in the location of a mass he felt beneath the musculature. He carefully split the abdominal walls and entered the peritoneal cavity. And he immediately had a problem.

  The appendix was not where it was supposed to be. Instead, he had found some other, unidentifiable mass.

  “Yes, Doctor,” Stockhurst said from his chair nearby, reading his thoughts. “You’ll find a few differences from human anatomy, but you’ll figure it out. After all, you began your training by dissecting dogs and pigs, no?”

  “Your family is quite good at telepathy.”

  “Very useful when negotiating business agreements, as you might guess. I just wish Darryl hadn’t been showing off. He had promised to keep it secret.”

  Follett pushed his fingers further into the incision and probed to either side until he touched the appendix a few centimeters lower. He made a second incision, exposing the appendix which was indeed enflamed and close to rupturing. He tied it off at the base and then closed up the incision.

  He returned to the first incision, curious about the mass he had detected there. Was it a tumor? Examining it closely, he decided it didn’t appear cancerous, but looked more like a stunted, malformed gland the size of a chicken egg. But what gland?

  “Yes, the gland has a genetic defect, Doctor,” Stockhurst said. The product of interbreeding with humans, I’m afraid.”

  “Look, sir, it’s time you were honest with me about the patient, about Darryl. About the others of their kind that you brought to the Philippines.”

  Stockhurst looked surprised.

  “Yes, you didn’t read that thought because I suppressed it. I was there and saw a creature like this staring from a porthole of your ship. What are these creatures the products of? What species was it that was genetically capable of mating with humans? What species—”

  “What species am I?”

  Follett nodded as he tied the final suture in the first incision.

  “Cral.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “It’s what I am. You’re a human, I’m a cral. And as I am not a biologist, my best explanation is that this gland that perplexes you is involved with our ability to change our form, to shape-shift between what appears human—such as me, now—with our true form, which is a more formidable version of Darryl and Garan. We call them ‘the stranded’ because they are trapped in this form that you see. Being only half cral, they can’t develop the ability to shape-shift because that gland you found does not function properly and because of some other genetic defects.”

  “Cral. How long has your species existed?”

  “Tradition has it that we’ve been on Earth long before humans crawled out of the trees. But we live wherever there are few or no humans—that is, except for those like me who choose to prey in both worlds.”

  “Your son, William?”

  “One hundred percent human. He was adopted, in case you didn’t know. His adoption, and my long-departed human wife, helped legitimize me in society’s eyes.”

  “Did they know the truth about you?”

  “My wife did. But I took great pains to keep William from knowing.”

  Follett reflected that such deception would only be possible with a distant father-son relationship.

  “So why are you taking the stranded to the Philippines?”

  “Isn’t that obvious? Thousands of square miles of jungle and savannah without human encroachment. Unlike North America—Florida, even,” Stockhurst said with sadness. “This state used to be pristine until humans invaded and Flagler built his railroads to bring even more filthy humans and their diseases.”

  Follett thought of the mass grave they’d found. “Diseases, you said?”

  “Yes. The stranded are vulnerable to typhoid fever, cholera, and yellow fever. Their lifespans are only a couple of hundred years, half that of full crals. Again, the curse of mixed blood.”

  “I must ask you candidly,” Follett said. “There have been abductions and murders in recent years.”

  “You’re asking me if the stranded had anything to do with it? No. They mostly prey upon small animals. They’ll take the occasional human if they were starving, but only out in the wild. They would never take a human from a settlement.”

  Follett shuddered at the thought as he applied dressings to the incisions and checked the patient’s vital signs.

  “The patient should do well,” he said after covering him with a blanket and joining Stockhurst where he sat at the far end of the room. Outside the wind rattled the palms and scraped their fronds against the darkened windowpanes. “Now I would ask a favor of you. It’s about your grandson—I mean, son. Darryl.”

  “What of him? I heard he killed a couple of people and the blasted old man Flagler is upset, but why should it concern me?”

  “First of all, Flagler has hired Pinkertons with orders to shoot to kill if Darryl is seen on the property. But what most concerns me is I think he might be, literally or figuratively, possessed by an evil entity.”

  Follett recounted the out-of-body experience he had with Darryl in what had appeared to be the Underworld. He expected to be laughed at, but Stockhurst instead responded with a weary sigh.

  “Crals have a strong connection to the spiritual world. We worship the spirits of our ancestors, but at times we’re too susceptible to their influence. It’s not unknown for our kind to become possessed by spirits that are evil.”

  “We have to help Darryl,” Follett said. When Stockhurst didn’t answer, he added, “Surely you
have affection for him. Are you capable of affection?”

  “Of course I am,” Stockhurst said angrily. “I wouldn’t have asked you to save Garan if I were incapable of affection. There’s simply very little I can do about Darryl. I offered to take him off his father’s hands, but William wouldn’t allow it. He insisted on trying to integrate him into society. And now look what happened. He could have been running free in a forest or jungle somewhere but instead he’s at the mercy of Flagler and the other high society fops who treat him like dirt when he’s smarter and stronger and better than any of them.”

  “Can you reach him telepathically, so I at least know where he is? I only wish to help him.”

  “I have already tried, of course, but couldn’t reach him. I’ll try again now,” the old man said, relaxing his shoulders, placing his hands flat on his thighs and closing his eyes.

  “Tell him I want to help.”

  Stockhurst was quiet for a long time. Palm fronds scratched at the window. Follett glanced back at Stockhurst whose breathing had quickened. The old man’s brow furled as he grimaced. His lips soundlessly mouthed something as he shook his head. This continued, as if he were having a serious argument with someone. Then his entire body shook and his eyes popped open, exhibiting the first emotion Follett had seen in him since they had met other than mild annoyance. His eyes showed fear.

  “I found Darryl but it wasn’t him that I spoke to. He is indeed possessed and it’s worse than I thought. I recognized the voice and personality—someone I knew a couple hundred years ago. A traitor to crals whom I killed with my own hands. His name was Astogani. He has taken over Darryl.”

  “Where is Darryl?” Follett asked.

  “Oh, you don’t need to go to him, Doctor. He’ll be coming to you, and it’s not to pay a social call.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three