The Color of Evil - The Dark Descent V1 (1991)

by David G. Hartwell (Ed. )

  and he moved more briskly.

  He put Willet on the examining table and cut the clothes

  off him with shears, storing the pieces in an evidence box.

  The overalls were soiled with agonal waste expulsions. The

  doctor stared a moment with unwilling pity at his naked subject.

  “ You won’t ride down to Fordham in any case,” he said

  to the corpse. “ Not unless I find something pretty damned

  obvious.” He pulled his gloves tighter and arranged his implements.

  Waddleton had said more to him than he had reported

  to the sheriff. The doctor was to find, and forcefully to record

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  that he had found, strong “ indications” absolutely requiring

  the decedents’ removal to Fordham for x-ray and an exhaustive second post-mortem. The doctor’s continued employment with the Coroner’s Office depended entirely on his compliance in this. He had received this stipulation with a

  silence Waddleton had not thought it necessary to break. His

  present resolution was all but made at that moment. Let the

  obvious be taken as such. If the others showed as plainly as

  Willet did the external signs of death by asphyxiation, they

  would receive no more than a thorough external exam. Willet

  he would examine internally as well, merely to establish in

  depth for this one what should appear obvious in all. Otherwise, only when the external exam revealed a clearly anomalous feature—and clear and suggestive it must be—would he look deeper.

  He rinsed the caked hair in a basin, poured the sediment

  into a flask and labeled it. Starting with the scalp, he began

  a minute scrutiny of the body’s surfaces, recording his observations as he went.

  The characteristic signs of asphyxial death were evident,

  despite the complicating effects of autolysis and putrefaction.

  The eyeballs’ bulge and the tongue’s protrusion were by now

  at least partly due to gas pressure as well as the mode of

  death, but the latter organ was clamped between locked teeth,

  leaving little doubt as to that mode. The coloration of degenerative change—a greenish-yellow tint, a darkening and mapping-out of superficial veins—was marked, but not sufficient to obscure the blue of cyanosis on the face and neck, or the pinpoint hemorrhages freckling neck, chest, and

  shoulders. From the mouth and nose the doctor scraped matter he was confident was the blood-tinged mucus typically ejected in the airless agony.

  He began to find a kind of comedy in his work. What a

  buffoon death made of a man! A blue, pop-eyed, three-lipped

  thing. And there was himself, this curious, solicitous intimacy with this clownish carrion. Excuse me, Mr. Willet, while I probe this laceration. How does it feel when I do

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  this? Nothing? Nothing at all? Fine, now what about these

  nails. Split them clawing at the earth, did you? Yes. A nice

  bloodblister under this thumbnail I see—got it on the job a

  few days before your accident no doubt? Remarkable calluses

  here, still quite tough. . . .

  The doctor looked for an unanalytic moment at the hands—

  puffed, dark paws, gestureless, having renounced all touch

  and grasp. He felt the wastage of the man concentrated in the

  hands. The painful futility of the body’s fine articulation when

  it is seen in death—this poignancy he had long learned not

  to acknowledge when he worked. But now he let it move him

  a little. This Roger Willet, plodding to his work one afternoon, had suddenly been scrapped, crushed to a nonfunctional heap of perishable materials. It simply happened that his life had chanced to move too close to the passage of a

  more powerful life, one of those inexorable and hungry lives

  that leave human wreckage—known or undiscovered—in their

  wakes. Bad luck, Mr. Willet. Naturally, we feel very sorry

  about this. But this Joe Allen, your co-worker. Apparently he

  was some sort of . . . cannibal. It’s complicated. We don’t

  understand it all. But the fact is we have to dismantle you

  now to a certain extent. There’s really no hope of your using

  these parts of yourself again, I ’m afraid. Ready now?

  The doctor proceeded to the internal exam with a vague

  eagerness for Willet’s fragmentation, for the disarticulation

  of that sadness in his natural form. He grasped Willet by the

  jaw and took up the post-mortem knife. He sank its point

  beneath the chin and began the long, gently sawing incision

  that opened Willet from throat to groin.

  In the painstaking separation of the body’s laminae Dr.

  Winters found absorption and pleasure. And yet throughout

  he felt, marginal but insistent, the movement of a stream of

  irrelevant images. These were of the building that contained

  him, and of the night containing it. As from outside, he saw

  the plant—bleached planks, iron roofing—and the trees

  crowding it, all in starlight, a ghost-town image. And he saw

  the refrigerator vault beyond the wall as from within, feeling

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  the stillness of murdered men in a cold, yellow light. And at

  length a question formed itself, darting in and out of the

  weave of his concentration as the images did: Why did he

  still feel, like some stir of the air, that sense of mute vigilance

  surrounding his action, furtively touching his nerves with its

  inquiry as he worked? He shrugged, overtly angry now. Who

  else was attending but Death? Wasn’t he Death’s hireling, and

  this Death’s place? Then let the master look on.

  Peeling back Willet’s cover of hemorrhage-stippled skin,

  Dr. Winters read the corpse with an increasing dispassion, a

  mortuary text. He confined his inspection to the lungs and

  mediastinum and found there unequivocal testimony to Willet’s asphyxial death. The pleurae of the lungs exhibited the expected ecchymoses—bruised spots in the glassy, enveloping membrane. Beneath, the polyhedral surface lobules of the lungs themselves were bubbled and blistered—the expected

  interstitial emphysema. The lungs, on section, were intensely

  and bloodily congested. The left half of the heart he found

  contracted and empty, while the right was over-distended and

  engorged with dark blood, as were the large veins of the

  upper mediastinum. It was a classic picture of death by suffocation, and at length the doctor, with needle and suture, closed up the text again.

  He returned the corpse to the gurney and draped one of

  his mortuary bags over it in the manner of a shroud. When

  he had help in the morning, he would weigh the bodies on a

  platform scale the office contained and afterwards bag them

  properly. He came to the refrigerator door, and hesitated. He

  stared at the door, not moving, not understanding why.

  Run. Get out, now.

  The thought was his own, but it came to him so urgently

  he turned around as if someone behind him had spoken.

  Across the room a thin man in smock and gloves, his eyes

  shadows, glared at the doctor from the black windows. Behind the man was a shrouded cart; behind that, a wide metal door.

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  Quietly, wonderingly, the doctor asked, “ Run from what?”

  The eyeless man in the glass was still half-cr
ouched, afraid.

  Then, a moment later, the man straightened, threw back

  his head, and laughed. The doctor walked to the desk and

  sat down shoulder to shoulder with him. He pulled out the

  bottle and they had a drink together, regarding each other

  with identical bemused smiles. Then the doctor said, “ Let

  me pour you another. You need it, old fellow. It makes a

  man himself again.”

  Nevertheless his re-entry of the vault was difficult, toilsome, each step seeming to require a new summoning of the will to move. In the freezing half-light all movement felt like

  defiance. His body lagged behind his craving to be quick, to

  be done with this molestation of the gathered dead. He returned Willet to his pallet and took his neighbor. The name on the tag wired to his boot was Ed Moses. Dr. Winters

  wheeled him back to the office and closed the big door behind

  him.

  With Moses his work gained momentum. He expected to

  perform no further internal necropsies. He thought of his

  employer, rejoicing now in his seeming-submission to Wad-

  dleton’s ultimatum. The impact would be dire. He pictured

  the coroner in shock, a sheaf of Pathologist’s Reports in one

  hand, and smiled.

  Waddleton could probably make a plausible case for incomplete examination. Still, a pathologist’s discretionary powers were not well-defined. Many good ones would approve the adequacy of the doctor’s method, given his working conditions. The inevitable litigation with a coalition of compensation claimants would be strenuous and protracted. Win or lose, Waddleton’s venal devotion to the insurance company’s interest would be abundantly displayed. Further, immediately on his dismissal the doctor tyould formally disclose its occult cause to the press. A libel action would ensue which

  he would have as little cause to fear as he had to fear his

  firing. Both his savings and the lawsuit would long outlast

  his life.

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  Externally, Ed Moses exhibited a condition as typically

  asphyxial as Willet’s had been, with no slightest mark of

  fragment entry. The doctor finished his report and returned

  Moses to the vault, his movements brisk and precise. His

  unease was all but gone. That queasy stirring of the air—had

  he really felt it? It had been, perhaps, some new reverberation of the death at work in him, a psychic shudder of response to the cancer’s stealthy probing for his life. He brought out the body next to Moses in the line.

  Walter Lou Jackson was big, 6' 2" from heel to crown,

  and would surely weigh out at more than two hundred pounds.

  He had writhed mightily against his million-ton coffin with

  an agonal strength that had tom his face and hands. Death

  had mauled him like a lion. The doctor set to work.

  His hands were fully themselves now—fleet, exact, intricately testing the corpse’s character as other fingers might explore a keyboard for its latent melodies. And the doctor

  watched them with an old pleasure, one of the few that had

  never failed him, his mind at one remove from their busy

  intelligence. All the hard deaths! A worldful of them, time

  without end. Lives wrenched kicking from their snug meat-

  frames. Walter Lou Jackson had died very hard. Joe Allen

  brought this on you, Mr. Jackson. We think it was part of his

  attempt to escape the law.

  But what a botched flight! The unreason of it—more than

  baffling—was eerie in its colossal futility. Beyond question,

  Allen had been cunning. A ghoul with a psychopath’s social

  finesse. A good old boy who could make a tavemful of men

  laugh with delight while he cut his victim from their midst,

  make them applaud his exit with the prey, who stepped jovially into the darkness with murder at his side clapping him on the shoulder. Intelligent, certainly, with a strange technical sophistication as well, suggested by the sphere. Then what of the lunacy yet more strongly suggested by the same object?

  In the sphere was concentrated all the lethal mystery of Bailey’s long nightmare.

  Why the explosion? Its location implied an ambush for

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  Allen’s pursuers, a purposeful detonation. Had he aimed at a

  limited cave-in from which he schemed some inconceivable

  escape? Folly enough in this—far more if, as seemed sure,

  Allen had made the bomb himself, for then he would have to

  know its power was grossly inordinate to the need.

  But if it was not a bomb, had a different function and only

  incidentally an explosive potential, Allen might underestimate the blast. It appeared the object was somehow remotely monitored by him, for the timing of events showed he had

  gone straight for it the instant he emerged from the s h a ft-

  shunned the bus waiting to take his shift back to town and

  made a beeline across the compound for a patrol car that was

  hidden from his view by the office building. This suggested

  something more complex than a mere explosive device,

  something, perhaps, whose destruction was itself more Allen’s aim than the explosion produced thereby.

  The fact that he risked the sphere’s retrieval at all pointed

  to this interpretation. For the moment he sensed its presence

  at the mine, he must have guessed that the murder investigation had led to its discovery and removal from his room.

  But then, knowing himself already liable to the extreme penalty, why should Allen go to such lengths to recapture evidence incriminatory of a lesser offense, possession of an explosive device?

  Then grant that the sphere was something more, something

  instrumental to his murders that could guarantee a conviction

  he might otherwise evade. Still, his gambit made no sense.

  Since the sphere—and thus the lawmen he could assume to

  have taken it—were already at the mine office, he must expect

  the compound to be sealed at any moment. Meanwhile, the

  gate was open, escape into the mountains a strong possibility

  for a man capable of stalking and destroying two experienced

  and well-armed woodsmen lying in ambush for him. Why

  had he all but insured his capture to weaken a case against

  himself that his escape would have rendered irrelevant? Dr.

  Winters saw his fingers, like a hunting pack round a covert,

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  converge on a small puncture wound below Walter Lou Jackson’s xiphoid process, between the eighth ribs.

  His left hand touched its borders, the fingers’ inquiry quick

  and tender. The right hand introduced a probe, and both

  together eased it into the wound. It inched unobstructed deep

  into the body, curving upwards through the diaphragm towards the heart. The doctor’s own heart accelerated. He watched his hands move to record the observation, watched

  them pause, watched them return to their survey of the corpse,

  leaving pen and page untouched.

  Inspection revealed no further anomaly. All else he observed the doctor recorded faithfully, wondering throughout at the distress he felt. When he had finished, he understood

  it. Its cause was not the discovery of an entry wound that

  might bolster Waddleton’s case. For the find had, within moments, revealed to him that, should he encounter anything he thought to be a mark of fragment penetration, he was going

  to ignore it. The damage Joe Allen had done was going to

  end here, with this
last grand slaughter, and would not extend

  to the impoverishment of his victims’ survivors. No more

  internals. The externals will-they nill-they, would from now

  on explicitly contraindicate the need for them.

  The problem was that he did not believe the puncture in

  Jackson’s thorax was a mark of fragment entry. Why?

  And, finding no answer to this question, why was he, once

  again, afraid? Slowly, he signed the report on Jackson, set

  it aside, and took up the post-mortem knife.

  First the long, sawing slice, unzippering the mortal overcoat. Next, two great, square flaps of flesh reflected, scrolled laterally to the armpits’ line, disrobing the chest: one hand

  grasping the flap’s skirt, the other sweeping beneath it with

  the knife, flensing through the glassy tissue that joined it to

  the chest-wall, and shaving all muscles from their anchorages

  to bone and cartilage beneath. Then the dismantling of the

  strong-box within. Rib-shears—so frank and forward a tool,

  like a gardener’s. The steel beak bit through each rib’s gristle

  anchor to the sternum’s centerplate. At the sternum’s crown-

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  piece the collarbones’ ends were knifed, pried, and sprung

  free from their sockets. The coffer unhasped, unhinged, a

  knife teased beneath the lid and levered it off.

  Some minutes later the doctor straightened up and stepped

  back from his subject. He moved almost drunkenly, and his

  age seemed scored more deeply in his face. With loathing

  haste he stripped his gloves off. He went to the desk, sat

  down, and poured another drink. If there was something like

  horror in his face, there was also a hardening in his mouth’s

  line, and the muscles of his jaw. He spoke to his glass: “ So

  be it, your Excellency. Something new for your humble servant. Testing my nerve?”

  Jackson’s pericardium, the shapely capsule containing his

  heart, should have been all but hidden between the big, blood-

  fat loaves of his lungs. The doctor had found it fully exposed,

  the lungs flanking it wrinkled lumps less than a third their