The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck (2 page)

Vexation over my own cowardice made sleep impossible. I got out my diary and set down a shorthand account of what had happened. Presently I heard Mike say, “Where’s the paper, wit’ the words he wrote down, Biddy?”

“That nonsense?” she answered. “I burned it. Now go to sleep.”

“I could never get the memory of it anyhow. Oh, Biddy, I’m scared that he’ll come for me again.”

( I continued to record their conversation verbatim.)

“ ’Tis nonsense, I tell ye,” she shrieked, “whatever it was that ould divil put in yer head, Mike Connell. Ye niver was like this before he came here, last week.”

“ ’Twas longer than that,” he said, biting off the sentence as if he had spoken it inadvertently. Then he went on, “Out of a book he read it, Biddy, an old, holy-looin’ book, wit’ all the words to say at ’im, the black one. And he read some of it out of the Holy Bible.”

“Holy Bible. Ye know what Fayther Dunn said, about listenin’ to the Bible, except when the priest reads it. He’s an old atheist, that Dr. Wyck. How do ye know he read it true?”

“He showed me. I read it over meself. All about the different color of divils, it told, in the Bible.”[
2
]

She tried to change the subject. “Now, don’t ye even think about it any more, Mike, darlin’. ’Tis all nonsense. And we’ll git the insurance, and ye can spend all day fishin’ wit’ Charlie Michaud, and I’ll buy me an electric washtub, and we’ll live in style, like the Glennons.”

He did not answer. Exhaustion must have lured him to sleep. But for a long time I lay wakeful. Could people still be serious about the devils of our fathers? My diary shows that I was also pondering, even then, the meaning of Mike’s remark about giving his blood “to keep ye alive, ye old ghost.” Dr. Wyck had seemed startled by the accusation; yet I could not remember his being ill during my three years as a medic.

I resolved to look up the record of transfusions at the hospital, to see whether Dr. Wyck actually had received blood from Mike Connell. Hardly anything of interest occurred in the hospital that was not known to the medics within a few hours; but efforts were occasionally made to hush up certain cases. Wyck might have done this It was his boast that he had not been sick a single day in his life. “How can you expect to keep other people in health,” he would snap out, “if you don’t know how to stay healthy yourself? Doctors have no time to be sick, you idiot.”

1. The author has changed the name of whatever institution he may be actually referring to. There is of course no such institution in Maine.—Ed.
   
2. I cannot find such a passage either in the Bible or in any standard work on demonology. Watt’s
   Bibliotheca Britannica
   lists, under the date 1583, a book with the following title page: THE WORLDE POSSESSED WITH DEVILS,
   conteyning three dialogues; 1. Of the Devil let loose; 2. Of Blacke Devils; 3. Of White Devils, and of the comminge of Jesus Christ to Judgement; a verie necessary and confortable discourse for these miserable and daungerous dayes.
   Perhaps this is the “old holy-lookin’ book” referred to.—Ed.
   

When I mentioned, some pages back, that I could guess what might be prompting Mike’s ravings about devils, I was thinking of the coincidences that his physician happened to be an authority on the literature of demonology. Another of his colleagues, Dr. Kent, is one of the foremost authorities on the legal aspects of medicine, a subject in which he gives a regular course at the medical school. And Dr. Alling, the president of the local institution, is perhaps the world’s most learned investigator into the causes of deviation from normal structure in the growth of the mentality as well as the body in man. If you ask why such distinguished men should be sequestered in a small and comparatively out-of-the-way community, I can only ask in reply why the work of the Mayo brothers has been done in a relatively obscure city in Minnesota, rather than in the city of New York.

Altonville, as a matter of fact, is an ideal community in which to conduct researches in medicine. It contains the largest hospital but one in the whole state. The patients, drawn equally from the countryside, from villages, and from manufacturing towns, give perhaps a better cross section of mankind and its ailments than could be got in any of the better equipped hospitals of the world’s great cities.

The foregoing facts will make clear why several men of the highest rank in their profession are conducting an up-to-date medical school, and researches of a most advanced sort, in the midst of a largely decadent farming area; for it was only the coincidence of these apparently anomalous factors that made possible the events I am about to describe. Crime of an urban kind, with abstruse ramifications, has been committed in a setting provided with only the primitive police facilities of the back country. That, I suppose, is the reason why I am now writing of a still unsolved mystery.

Before going on with my story, I ought to explain how I was able to discover so much concerning a matter which I from time to time have really tried to avoid. The crucial fact was my residence at the Connells’, where everything started. Another entangling circumstance was my old habit of keeping a shorthand diary, which served to sustain interest in many little occurrences that would otherwise have been soon forgotten, but which proved, long after I wrote about them, to be mutually significant. The main factor, however, was my job as secretary to our “Prexy,” Dr. Manfred Alling. The fact that he sometimes needed me at odd moments had the effect of freeing me from most of the curricular restraints.

I had arranged to take dictation from Prexy every morning for two hours, until it was time for the eleven o’clock lecture. At half past eight, after a troubled sleep and a hasty breakfast, I was on my way to Dr. Alling’s house. My unpleasant reveries over the events that had occurred in the dark early hours of the morning were interrupted by the incisive noise of feminine heels behind me. It was Muriel Finch, walking stiffly, frowning. I waited for her to catch up, but she was not in a talkative mood.

“Regular morning grouch?” I asked.

“That’s the least you can expect, after an all-night shift.”

“Why aren’t you in the dorm, then, by now?”

“I wanted some air—fresh air. I hate that smelly place. Oh, how I hate it!”

We had taken the left-hand turn, southward, onto Packard Road, the last house on which was my destination. Prexy had located his home for solitude, when he wanted it. We walked for a little way without speaking. Then Muriel sobbed suddenly, crying, “I hate this whole damned town. I’ll go crazy if I stay here another day. I know I will.”

When I patted her shoulder, she shrank from the touch, and then apologized. “I just can’t help it. People are such muts. All of them. I don’t mean—any one person.” She looked up in a half-scared fashion and said, “You didn’t think I meant anybody in particular?”

I thought I knew what was wrong with her. She went by the name of “the blond floozy” among the medical students, who had a theory that a unique impediment of speech made it very difficult for her to pronounce the word “no,” especially when the moon was shining, with a jug of applejack near by. There was a general tendency to be lenient about the private lives of nurses and of medics, so long as their affairs were managed without impairment of their duties and studies. But Muriel had several times been slated for lateness on the night shift, and for a fit or two of hysterics while in attendance upon critical operations. It was hard to understand why these derelictions, in her case, were being overlooked. As I did no learn the reason till later, I shall save it for its proper place in the narrative.

“Dave,” she blurted suddenly, “do you think I could get a job somewhere else?”

I asked where she had worked last, and she said, “I came right here from the farm. Father died. There are four kids younger than me. They need what I can send, they and Mom. But I’ll go crazy if I have to stay any longer.”

“Want to tell me what’s the trouble?” I asked.

She looked quickly sidewise, as if in fear, and asked, “What are you thinking? What do you mean?”

“Nothing much. I’d just like to think that some of my friends are liars. Would it help any if I punched them on the snoot?”

She looked almost relieved, and then defiant. “Oh, that! Just ’cause I’m a farm kid, I suppose. All you read about—wicked cities, nice upright country folks. Oh yeah? If they knew what went on back of the barn on every farm I ever saw.”

She was talking shrilly, and hysterically.

“Don’t worry, Dave. They didn’t have anything to teach me here. Maybe I’m too—good-natured. What if I am? You can be a lot worse things than good-natured. People can act like you’d think they were—Dave! Do you—do you believe in—devils? On earth, I mean, getting inside of people—like in the Bible. Oh, never mind, I guess I am going crazy.”

Impressed, I took a flyer. “I can’t think of anybody who’s got a fiend inside him, around here—of course excepting old Wyck.”

She stopped short, staring with startled eyes.

“Then you know— What are you talking about?”

“Things you couldn’t possibly know about. Got anything to add to the horrible record?”

“She said, “No!” as if in great relief.

“Well, that reminds me. Biddy Connell claims you told her that the amputation wasn’t necessary. Maybe it wasn’t. But no good can possibly come of saying a thing like that.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she cut in.

“Oh, yes I do. I’m not thinking about Wyck. The hell with him. I’m thinking of the Connells. It’s bad enough to be crippled. But it’s harder to bear if somebody gives you the idea that it wasn’t necessary. Don’t you understand that?”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she repeated stubbornly. “Oh, but I’ve got to tell somebody—something—anything— Even if it’s just what happened last night.”

“What was that, Muriel?”

“No, never mind.”

“Suit yourself,” I said with a shrug.

“All right, then, I will!” she cried. “Other people saw that. They can at least make him stop practicing, even if that’s all they do. And there was somebody else saw that much, anyway, about half past one this morning.”

“Saw what?” I inquired, mystified.

“Saw the way he treated two poor old people at the hospital.”

I remembered Marjorie Wyck’s call to say that her father was wanted at the hospital, after he had stopped in to see Mike.

Finally she got out her incoherent story, in bursts of passionate bitterness. It seemed to me not to be worth all the fuss she was making about it, but I realized that her emotion was being caused by something worse which she dared not speak of. Here is the outline of the incident:

Peter Tompkins, aged fourteen years, had shot himself through the lung while hunting. Mike had told me “the histhory of the case” a month ago, it having been his blood that saved the boy’s life. Peter had progressed fairly well for three weeks or so. Then a lung abscess had developed, and Gideon Wyck had told the poverty-stricken parents that nothing could save their son. At their insistence, however, an oxygen tent had been rigged. At one o’clock the morning on which my story opens—April 3rd—after the costly cylinders of gas had been hissing for four days and five hours, Nurse Finch failed to distinguish a pulse, and put a call in for Dr. Wyck. “There they sat, near dead themselves,” she said, “when in comes Dr. Wyck. Four days they’d been watching, with hardly a break, he in his overalls and a patched old army coat. She had on something you couldn’t tell what it was, it was so old.

“ ‘Phew,’ says Dr. Wyck, coming in, ‘what makes this place stink so?’ I nodded toward them, a little bit. ‘Phew,’ he says again, ‘Why don’t you send ’em out for a bath?’ A nice thing, with their son dying in the room. I whispered there might not be any use in their coming back.

“ ‘Hey?’ he says, ‘The boy dead?’ just as loud as before. Oh, I could have—well, never mind. The old farmer says, ‘We ain’t afraid to learn, now, any more, Doctor,’ and he snaps, ‘Why should you be? I told you four days ago it was no use.’ He’s off his head, Dave, really. Oh, you’ve got to believe me.

“Well, the kid was dead. But even that wasn’t enough for the old devil. He starts right away saying that the hospital couldn’t pay for the oxygen, trying to make them pay forty dollars right away. Forty dollars! They won’t see that much actual cash in a year, on the kind of a farm they must have.