Nifft the Lean. His strength as a writer is, however, in
the horror mode regardless of genre or category and he
is perhaps the most under-appreciated of the major contemporary talents working in horror— although* perhaps this will be remedied by his forthcoming collection from
Arkham House, at least in part. "The Autopsy" is horror
in the science fiction category, a transformation of the
myth of demonic possession into the realm of objective
science. Shea's cinematic effects compare favorably
with such newer talents as Clive Barker, colorful and
unflinchingly clinical. And this story uses some of Love-
craft's conventions more effectively than any other contemporary horror writer. Shea has been growing in strength for more than a decade and belongs already to
the company of the best writers of horror today.
Dr. Winters stepped out of the tiny Greyhound station and
into the midnight street that smelt of pines and the river,
though the street was in the heart of the town. But then it
was a town of only five main streets in breadth, and these
extended scarcely a mile and a half along the rim of the
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265
gorge. Deep in that gorge though the river ran, its blurred
roar flowed, perfectly distinct, between the banks of dark
shop windows. The station’s window showed the only light,
save for a luminous clock face several doors down and a little
neon beer logo two blocks farther on. When he had walked
a short distance, Dr. Winters set his suitcase down, pocketed
his hands, and looked at the stars—thick as cobblestones in
the black gulf.
“ A mountain hamlet—a mining town,” he said. “ Stars.
No moon. We are in Bailey.”
He was talking to his cancer. It was in his stomach. Since
learning of it, he had developed this habit of wry communion
with it. He meant to show courtesy to this uninvited guest.
Death. It would not find him churlish, for that would make
its victory absolute. Except, of course, that its victory would
be absolute, with or without his ironies.
He picked up his suitcase and walked on. The starlight
made faint mirrors of the windows’ blackness and showed
him the man who passed: lizard-lean, white-haired (at fifty-
seven), a man traveling on death’s business, carrying his own
death in him, and even bearing death’s wardrobe in his suitcase. For this was filled—aside from his medical kit and some scant necessities—with mortuary bags. The sheriff had told
him on the phone of the improvisations that presently enveloped the corpses, and so the doctor had packed these, laying them in his case with bitter amusement, checking the last
one’s breadth against his chest before the mirror, as a woman
will gauge a dress before donning it, and telling his cancer:
“ Oh, yes, that’s plenty roomy enough for both of us!”
The case was heavy and he stopped frequently to rest and
scan the sky. What a night’s work to do, probing soulless
filth, eyes earthward, beneath such a ceiling of stars! It had
taken five days to dig them out. The autumnal equinox had
passed, but the weather here had been uniformly hot. And
warmer still, no doubt, so deep in the earth.
He entered the courthouse by a side door. His heels
knocked on the linoleum corridor. A door at the end of it,
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Michael Shea
on which was lettered nate craven, county sheriff,
opened well before he reached it, and his friend stepped out
to meet him.
“ Damnit, Carl, you’re still so thin they could use you for
a whip. Gimme that. You’re in too good a shape already. You
don’t need the exercise.”
The case hung weightless from his hand, imparting no tilt
at all to his bull shoulders. Despite his implied selfderogation, he was only moderately paunched for a man his age and size. He had a rough-hewn face and the bulk of brow,
nose, and jaw made his greenish eyes look small until one
engaged them and felt the snap and penetration of their intelligence. He half-filled two cups from a coffee urn and topped both off with bourbon from a bottle in his desk. When
they had finished these, they had finished trading news of
mutual friends. The sheriff mixed another round, and sipped
from his, in a silence clearly prefatory to the work at hand.
‘‘They talk about rough justice,” he said. ‘‘I ’ve sure seen
it now. One of those . . . patients of yours that you’ll be
working on? He was a killer. ‘Killer’ don’t even half say it,
really. You could say that he got justly executed in that blast.
That much was justice for damn sure. But rough as hell on
those other nine. And the rough don’t just stop with their
being dead either. That kiss-ass boss of yours! He’s breaking
his god-damned back touching his toes for Fordham Mutual.
How much of the picture did he give you?”
‘ ‘You refer, I take it, to the estimable Coroner Waddleton
of Fordham County.” Dr. Winters paused to sip his drink.
With a delicate flaring of his nostrils he communicated all
the disgust, contempt and amusement he had felt in his four
years as Pathologist in Waddleton’s office. The sheriff
laughed.
“ Clear pictures seldom emerge from anything the coroner
says,” the doctor continued. “ He took your name in vain.
Vigorously and repeatedly. These expressions formed his
opening remarks. He then developed the theme of our office’s
strict responsibility to the letter of the law, and of the work
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men’s compensation law in particular. Death benefits accrue
only to the dependents of decedents whose deaths arise out
o f the course of their employment, not merely in the course
of it. Victims of a maniacal assault, though they did die on
the job, are by no means necessarily compensable under the
law. We then contemplated the tragic injustice of an insurance company —any insurance company—having to pay benefits to unentitled persons, solely through the laxity and incompetence of investigating officers. Your name came up
again.”
Craven uttered a bark of mirth and fury. ‘‘The impartial
public servant! Ha! The impartial brown-nose, flim-flam and
bullshit man is what he is. Ten to one, Fordham Mutual will
slip out of it without his help, and those men’s families won’t
see a goddamn nickel.” Words were an insufficient vent; the
sheriff turned and spat into his wastebasket. He drained his
cup, and sighed. ‘‘I beg your pardon, Carl. We’ve been five
days digging those men out and the last two days sifting half
that mountain for explosive traces, with those insurance investigators hanging on our elbows, and the most they could say was that there was ‘strong presumptive evidence’ of a
bomb. Well, I don’t budge for that because I don’t have to.
Waddleton can shove his ‘extraordinary circumstances.’ If
you don’t find anything in those bodies, then that’s all the
autopsy there is to it, and they get buried right here where
their families want ’em .”
T
he doctor was smiling at his friend. He finished his cup
and spoke with his previous wry detachment, as if the sheriff
had not interrupted.
“ The honorable coroner then spoke with remarkable volubility on the subject of Autopsy Consent forms and the malicious subversion of private citizens by vested officers of the law. He had, as it happened, a sheaf of such forms on his
desk, all signed, all with a rider clause typed in above the
signatures. A cogent paragraph. It had, among its other qualities, the property of turning the coroner’s face purple when he read it aloud. He read it aloud to me three times. It ap
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Michael Shea
peared that the survivors’ consent was contingent on two conditions: that the autopsy be performed in locem mortis, this is to say in Bailey, and that only if the coroner’s pathologist
found concrete evidence of homicide should the decedents be
subject either to removal from Bailey or to further necropsy.
It was well written. I remember wondering who wrote it.”
The sheriff nodded musingly. He took Dr. Winters’ empty
cup, set it by his own, filled both two-thirds with bourbon,
and added a splash of coffee to the doctor’s. The two friends
exchanged a level stare, rather like poker players in the clinch.
The sheriff regarded his cup, sipped from it.
“In locem mortis. What-all does that mean exactly?”
“ ‘In the place of death.’ ”
‘‘Oh. Freshen that up for you?”
‘‘I ’ve just started it, thank you.”
Both men laughed, paused, and laughed again, some might
have said immoderately.
“ He all but told me that I had to find something to compel
a second autopsy,” the doctor said at length. “ He would have
sold his soul—or taken out a second mortgage on it—for a
mobile x-ray unit. He’s right of course. If those bodies have
trapped any bomb fragments, that would be the surest and
quickest way of finding them. It still amazes me your Dr.
Parsons could let his x-ray go unfixed for so long.”
“ He sets bones, stitches wounds, writes prescriptions, and
sends anything tricky down the mountain. Just barely manages that. Drunks don’t get much done.”
“ He’s gotten that bad?”
“ He hangs on and no more. Waddleton was right there,
not deputizing him pathologist. I doubt he could find a cannonball in a dead rat. I wouldn’t say it where it could hurt him, as long as he’s still managing, but everyone here knows
it. His patients sort of look after him half the time. But Waddleton would have sent you, no matter who was here. Nothing but his best for party contributors like Fordham Mutual.”
The doctor looked at his hands and shrugged. ‘ ‘So. There’s
a killer in the batch. Was there a bomb?”
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269
Slowly, the sheriff planted his elbows on the desk ana
pressed his hands against his temples, as if the question had
raised a turbulence of memories. For the first time the docto r-h a lf harkening throughout the never-quite-muted stirrings of the death within him—saw his friend’s exhaustion: the tremor of hand, the bruised look under the eyes.
“ I ’m going to give you what I have, Carl. I told you I don’t
think you’ll find a damn thing in those bodies. You’re probably going to end up assuming what I do about it, but assuming is as far as anyone’s going to get with this one. It is truly one of those Nightmare Specials that the good Lord tortures
lawmen with and then hides the answers to forever.
“ All right then. About two months ago, we had a man
disappear—Ronald Hanley. Mine worker, rock-steady, family
man. He didn’t come home one night, and we never found a
trace of him. OK, that happens sometimes. About a week
later, the lady that ran the laundromat, Sharon Starker, she
disappeared, no trace. We got edgy then. I made an announcement on the local radio about a possible weirdo at large, spelled out special precautions everybody should take.
We put both our squadcars on the night beat, and by day we
set to work knocking on every door in town collecting alibis
for the two times of disappearance.
“ No good. Maybe you’re fooled by this uniform and think
I ’m a law officer, protector of the people, and all that? A
natural mistake. A lot of people were fooled. In less than
seven weeks, six people vanished, just like that. Me and my
deputies might as well have stayed in bed round the clock,
for all the good we did.” The sheriff drained his cup.
“ Anyway, at last we got lucky. Don’t get me wrong now.
We didn’t go all hog-wild and actually prevent a crime or
anything. But we did find a body—except it wasn’t the body
of any of the seven people that had disappeared. We’d took
to combing the woods nearest town, with temporary deputies
from the miners to help. Well, one of those boys was out
there with us last week. It was hot—like it’s been for a while
now—and it was real quiet. He heard this buzzing noise and
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Michael Shea
looked around for it, and he saw a bee-swaim up in the crotch
of a tree. Except he was smart enough to know that that’s not
usual around here—bee hives. So it wasn’t bees. It was bluebottle flies, a god-damned big cloud of them, all over a bundle that was wrapped in a tarp.”
The sheriff studied his knuckles. He had, in his eventful
life, occasionally met men literate enough to understand his
last name and rash enough to be openly amused by it, and
the knuckles—scarred knobs—were eloquent of his reactions.
He looked back into his old fnend’s eyes.
‘ ‘We got that thing down and unwrapped it. Billy Lee Davis, one of my deputies, he was in Viet Nam, been near some bad, bad things and held on. Billy Lee blew his lunch all over
the ground when we unwrapped that thing. It was a man.
Some of a man. We knew he’d stood six-two because all the
bones were there, and he’d probably weighed between two
fifteen and two twenty-five, but he folded up no bigger than
a big-size laundry package. Still had his face, both shoulders,
and the left arm, but all the rest was clean. It wasn’t animal
work. It was knife work, all the edges neat as butcher cuts.
Except butchered meat, even when you drain it all you can,
will bleed a good deal afterwards, and there wasn’t one goddamned drop of blood on the tarp, nor in that meat. It was just as pale as fish meat.”
Deep in his body’s center, the doctor’s cancer touched him.
Not a ravening attack—it sank one fang of pain, question-
ingly, into new, untasted flesh, probing the scope for its appetite there. He disguised his tremor with a shake of the head.
‘‘A cache, then.”
The sheriff nodded. “ Like you might keep a potroast in
the icebox for making lunches. I took some pictures of his
face, then we put him back and erased our traces. Two of the
miners I ’d deputized did a lot of hunting, were woods-smart.
So I left them on the first watch. We worked out positions
and cover for them, and drove back.
‘ ‘We got right on tracing him, sent out descriptions to every
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271
town within a hundred miles. He was no one I ’d ever s
een in
Bailey, nor anyone else either, it began to look like, after
we’d combed the town all day with the photos. Then, out of
the blue, Billy Lee Davis smacks himself on the forehead and
says, ‘Sheriff, I seen this man somewhere in town, and not
long ago!’
“ He’d been shook all day since throwing up, and then all
of a sudden he just snapped to. Was dead sure. Except he
couldn’t remember where or when. We went over and over it
and he tried and tried. It got to where I wanted to grab him
by the ankles and hang him upside down and shake him till
it dropped out of him. But it was no damn use. Just after
dark we went back to that tree—we’d worked out a place to
hide the cars and a route to it through the woods. When we
were close we walkie-talkied the men we’d left for an all-
clear to come up. No answer at all. And when we got there,
all that was left of our trap was the tree. No body, no tarp,
no Special Assistant Deputies. Nothing.”
This time Dr. Winters poured the coffee and bourbon.
“ Too much coffee,” the sheriff muttered, but drank anyway.
“ Part of me wanted to chew nails and break necks. And part
of me was scared shitless. When we got back I got on the
radio station again and made an emergency broadcast and
then had the man at the station rebroadcast it every hour.
Told everyone to do everything in groups of three, to stay
together at night in threes at least, to go out little as possible,
keep armed and keep checking up on each other. It had such
a damn-fool sound to it, but just pairing-up was no protection
if half of one of those pairs was the killer. I deputized more
men and put them on the streets to beef up the night patrol.
“ It was next morning that things broke. The sheriff of
Rakehell called—he’s over in the next county. He said our
corpse sounded a lot like a man named Abel Dougherty, a
millhand with Con Wood over there. I left Billy Lee in charge
and drove right out.
“ This Dougherty had a cripple older sister he always
checked back to by phone whenever he left town for long, a
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habit no one knew about, probably embarrassed him. Sheriff
The Color of Evil - The Dark Descent V1 (1991) Page 33
