The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck (4 page)

I shook my head. My mind seemed to be seething with disconnected portents. Things had been happening too rapidly for comfort, in the ten hours since a little past midnight. What was the demonic understanding, or misunderstanding, between Wyck and Mike Connell? Had the former really received some of the latter’s blood, to strengthen him against an ailment which he refused to acknowledge to the world? And why had he demanded the return of a certain book, secretly looking at once to see whether it contained a slip of paper with cryptic notations? What was the horrible information about Dr. Wyck that had driven Muriel Finch to the verge of hysterics, the thing she did not even dare admit that she knew? Why, if his mind was so obviously deranged, did his associates permit him to continue as a practicing doctor and teacher? What had happened that Gideon Wyck, who notoriously was without mercy in cases of classroom delinquency, had failed to report a case of cribbing at once? Was it merely for the pleasure of hazing the culprit slowly, all year?

I resolved to look up Prendergast, who I knew well, and get his version of the affair as soon as possible.

1. A history, that is, of deviations from what is normal in the origin and growth of body and mind.—Ed.
   
2. Demoniality
   by Ludovice Maria Sinistrari, Friar Minor. Tr. By the Rev. Montague Summers. London: The Fortune Press, 1927. (Original edition, Paris, 1875, from Ms. Written
   c.
   1700.)
   
3. Etienne and his son Isidor Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. The father helped pave the way for Darwin’s theories.—Ed
   
4. The author of this narrative perhaps assumes in the general reader a knowledge of the medical significance of the word “monster”:
   “An animal or plant departing greatly from the usual type: a monstrosity.”
   The deliberate formation of monsters by external influence in the laboratory is most easily accomplished with certain insects, notably the
   Lepidoptera.
   The reference to a calf is significant in that (as every visitor to the side shows of a country fair must know) abnormal births of accidental origin seem to be commoner among cattle than among other domesticated mammals. Dr. Alling, as later events make clear, was preparing microphotographs of sections of tissue taken from various monsters to illustrate a lecture on the cause of such deviations.—Ed.
   
5. “The pelvis and lower extremities in the individuals of this group are imperfectly developed, and the two lower limbs are more or less fused. Sometimes this fusion is complete, and the feet are wholly lacking.”—
   New International Encyclopedia,
   2nd ed., vol. 16, p. 174.
   

We were just turning in at the hospital when someone behind us on Atlantic Street frantically screamed our names.

“Mr. David! Dr. Alling! You, for the love of Gof, you come.”

The car stopped, spraying gravel at the wheels. Biddy Connell ranged alongside, panting. “ ’Tis my Mike again,” she said, “ ’tis certain he’s dyin’.”

“Who’s—” Prexy looked at me. “Oh! She means Mike Connell.”

“Himself. And that old divil Dr. Wyck wasn’t up, he said, and wouldn’t come, says he, if he was up. God have mercy on his black sowl. So I was comin’ to drag a doctor meself. Quick, now.”

“What’s the matter with him?” asked Dr. Alling.

“Oh, the terrible, terrible pain in the arm—you know, where it ain’t there. I couldn’t stand his screechin’.”

“Get in,” Prexy said abruptly. As we drove the block or so to the Connells’, I got in a few words about the similar occurrence of some time after midnight.

We found Mike in a sleep of exhaustion, from which Biddy promptly awakened him to justify he anxiety. He looked wildly around, as if afraid of the unseen world.

“Are you still feeling pain?” Dr. Alling asked kindly.

“No. That is, not enough to spit at. But oh, Doctor, I felt the sowl dragged near out of me arm. He was tuggin’ at it, but I couldn’t see him.”

“Please tell me just what happened.”

“Wide awake, I was, this time. There’s always the little pains. But it started growin’, slow, getting’ worse and worse, right here.” He put his index finger to a point in the air, three or four inches below the stump of his left arm.

“What did it feel like?”

“Like—like he was tearin’ the muscles out o’ me. Like his claws was in me muscles, Doc. Oh, tuggin’—slow—harder and—”

“His
claws?
 Whose claws?”

“The black one. I couldn’t see him only shadow-like. And when I wouldn’t let go to him, he began bangin’ me heart, like wit’ a big club, right here. And all the while he was tuggin’ and tearin’. And then me heart began to burst, Doc. Everythin’ swimmin’, and the room whirling’, and me sowl near torn out. It was the black one, I know. I could just see him hazy.”[
1
]

He turned suddenly on the pillow and sobbed. Dr. Alling looked seriously at Biddy and me.

“Just when did you say this happened before?”

“Early this morning, about one or two o’clock. We called Dr. Wyck a few minutes after it began, but it took perhaps five minutes to locate him.”

“I see. Dr. Wyck left my laboratory about then, in response to your call. He’d been helping me with some slides. I didn’t note the exact time.”

“I saw him plain, that time,” Mike cried. “All black and grinnin’.”

“Dreamin’, he must have been, when it started,” Biddu hastily explained.

“No, Doc, it was real. And this time I could see him too. Yes, I did see him—the white eyes, wit’ black pinpoints in the middle. Doc, if he comes again? I can’t stand it again. Next time he’ll drag out me sowl. Oh, God, what shall I do?”

“We’ll be right back, Mike,” Dr. Alling promised. “Saunders, I want to talk to you a minute.” I followed out to the doorstep. “You said his heart was behaving strangely?”

I described the symptoms with care. He shook his head.

“Like nothing I’ve ever heard of. All mental in origin, perhaps, but such terrific physical effects take a physical remedy. Well, I’ll stop back with a hypodermic for the wife to give him, if he has another attack. Risky business, but she probably couldn’t get anything in at the mouth, if he was like that. I can’t understand why Wyck wasn’t interested enough to come in his pyjamas? He really must be ill.”

This gave me an opening to speak about what had been nagging my conscience all morning.

“I don’t know, of course,” I said, “but it may be explained by something else I didn’t tell you of. It came out last night that Dr. Wyck had been filling Mike’s head with stuff about demons. Well, you’ve seen the result of it. It may be unethical to say this, but I heard him myself, last night, giving him more nonsense to believe. I think it’s a damned outrage.”

Dr. Alling cocked his little birdlike head shrewdly. “Thanks for your frankness,” he said. “There have been many private matters in which I’ve had to place confidence in your discretion as my secretary, Saunders. Please say nothing. I’ll admit
sub rosa
 that arrangements are being made to have Dr. Wyck retired from actual practice. For years he’s handled only emergency and charity cases. He won’t have even those, in a short while.”

Perhaps it would have been better, in the long run, if I had not been given this early reassurance. In such a case, I might have spoken further, and my words might have altered the whole course of future events. I am positive now that Dr. Alling at this time could not have suspected that anything was seriously wrong. For years Wyck had acted like an old Tartar, but had had the justification of brilliance in the laboratory, in the classroom, and as a surgeon. Probably, at the time of which I am writing, the faculty had reached the decision that a temperament unfortunate from the first had merely become a little too much so, with advancing years. They had decided to retire him at sixty-six, rather than at sixty-eight. That was all. The step they were quietly preparing to take had not been occasioned by any inkling, on their part, of the gruesome facts which I myself was on the verge of discovering. Had they known, or even suspected, Wyck surely would have been under restraint within a few hours; but it so happened that a little more than half a day of extra freedom gave fate the opportunity to embroil us all in a mystery to which I myself do not as yet see any clear solution—and I think I know more about it than any other living person.

I must get back to my story. Dr. Alling and I stepped in again to caution Biddy to communicate at once with Dr. Alling direct if the symptoms should recur. As only ten minutes remained before my lecture, Prexy drove off without me to see the symmelus, and I walked back toward the school building. Prendergast corralled me as soon as I was inside the front door, eagerly waving a paper under my nose.

“Here, Dave, your John Hancock’s needed. Here’s where you sign.”

“Show it to me afterward, then,” I said, as the hour began striking.

“Oh, don’t be an old woman,” he urged. “It just says in effect that Wyck’s an old son-of-a-bitch, and we all know that.”

“Sorry, I probably agree with it, but I won’t sign anything without reading it first.”

“O.K., O.K.,” he said testily.

When the lecture was over I listened while the paper was read aloud by a disinterested third party. It proved to be a perfectly just catalogue of well known examples of Wyck’s arbitrary unfariness, and several malcontents willingly appended their signatures. I refused, because it was address to the state legislature. Had it been merely a petition to the faculty, I would have signed it at once; but I knew too much about Prexy’s troubles with the legislature to put my name on any document that might serve further to embarrass him, in that quarter. By the exercise of an adroit political instinct, he was able to keep a small working majority of the liberals on his side, to assure the yearly appropriation; but I well knew that a latter from the antivivisectionist societies, objecting to our use of live animals in the laboratory, was enough to send Prexy scooting down to the legislature.