Page:Weird Tales Volume 3 Number 1 (1923-12).djvu/32

Rh and the autopsy theatre and returned twofold to the morgue proper. Side by side, bottom to top, the niches of the dead were embedded in the cement wall, four rows, five in a row, like pigeonholes in a gigantic desk. Sometimes, when covers closed the fronts of all of them, they reminded me more of boxes on the shelves of a shoe shop—all of one size, one-color, one shape—with black figuring and lettering for more convenient identification, only that in a shoe shop one pair of shoes occupies one box. Here—new born babies are huddled six and eight in a niche to save room, until a truck from the department of Charities comes to cart them off, and in times of stress, when undertakers are busy—

I let myself into the laboratory by a narrow, almost unknown door connecting the two buildings. Marguerite Judson was waiting for me. All the iciness of the morgue melted from me while I watched from a corner, how she adjusted and readjusted the cap on her shining bobbed hair, cut sharply across the forehead after the manner of little boys. I could see two of her from my hidingplace—one in the flesh, slim with suppressed energy: one in the long glass door she was using as a mirror.

"I'm on duty in Ward Six tonight," she would say when I "hemed or "boo"ed at her from the door, "I saw your light burning. Everybody's asleep—I thought I'd come down."

Silly play-acting, of course—as if she didn't know that apologies were unnecessary—but nevertheless a delightful opening for whatever we had to say to each other. Unfortunately, she had been on night duty for a month, and I on day.

I resolved to remain concealed for another few moments until the cap should conform to her idea of what would attract me most. It would be too cruel to her to appear before. Then, entirely without forethought, my gaze wandered off to the table where I had left the tubes with which I had been working.

"Marguerite Judson!" I bit out sternly. She shrank against the wall—covering her mouth with the back of her hand in fright.

I cleared the room in two strides. "You nurses could drive a corpse mad!" I cried. "You've disarranged my tubes. Thought they were gorgeous colors, I suppose, thought you'd like to play with them! In the operating room you're afraid to touch an instrument. You women! Ugh!"

Up went Marguerite Judson's head. Her sudden recuperation should have been a warning. Had I called her an incompetent individual, or a meddling female, she might have humbled herself sweetly, and later proved to me the injustice of my opinion. But when a man incriminates the whole of womankind for what a woman believes is some personal fault of her own—

On behalf of her sex and her profession, Marguerite Judson slammed the door.

In a fury I swept my disordered tubes back into the incubator. I pulled out my watch. Two o'clock! At that hour the omnipotence of micrococcus hematodes no longer seemed a thing of the immediate future. Work—work—and years of harder work! A cutting wind blew in from the morgue under a crack in the door. It cooled my puerile anger.

Marguerite Judson, I felt convinced at the time, would never talk to me again. Why had Mary Malloy resorted to suicide? Gleason would sing to another tune in the morning when the Local News appeared with a sob-encrusted account of the valiant young ambulance surgeon who had fought tirelessly to save the suicide's life!

I was tired, dead tired. To another in my state I could have given sound advice, but because I had goaded myself beyond the point where exhaustion ceases to be exhaustion and becomes nervous irascibility, I cast about persistently for some interest to keep me awake. The silence of the laboratory taunted me now. Still it said, "Here are treasures. Dig and find." But I knew that I could not dig and find unless I insured myself against interruption.

I walked through the laboratory closing up for the night, unwilling to leave, hoping against hope that something would detain me. A guinea-pig I had bled late in the afternoon squealed like a rubber toy at my approach. I fed him a few lettuce leaves and a handful of oats. Two white mice, who should have been torpid with pneumonia were chasing each other up and down the miniature stairs in their infirmary. From the confines of an alcohol jar, the lidless eyes of a two-headed infant monster followed me about uncannily.

LL at once the muteness of the morgue enticed me. I had no business to go up to my room, after all, for on the autopsy table the keeper had left for me the disemboweled body of a woman, the cause of whose death the coroner's physician had been unable to discover. I had a theory about that woman.

The morgue keeper would be down early next morning to sew up the coroner's cut, lest his infraction of the rules be discovered by some early-prowling undertaker. The woman's family would come for their dead. I only wanted her heart, anyway. The woman's family? As I returned to the morgue, locking the little door behind me. I recalled what the hospital historian had told me of the family. Likely as not, she would be in her niche another day or two until the matter could be settled amicably. Two men had come to the office, each within a short time after the woman's death, each with a marriage certificate and several pictures, each claiming to be her husband. Would the third man, under whose name she had entered the hospital, assert his rights in the morning? Had there really been a third man?

I switched on the white lights. Another gust whirled through the morgue, twisting and turning the tags on the covered pigeon-holes until their scrapings against the metal sounded like the gnawing of rats from within.

The odor of death, obstinate despite disinfection, more obstinate now because of the uniced cadaver exposed all day, seemed to saturate my clothes instantly as a single plunge into water will saturate them. From the center of the slate table a drain pipe dripped a mixture of clotted blood, body fluids, and water into a tin pail below. I found myself crossing the morgue to the steady rhythm. of it. One—two—three—four! Drip—drip—drip—drip!

Some facetious nurse, wearying of the endless one-inch bandage and square knot, had tied the woman's jaws with a three-inch bandage, securing the band by a flippant bow over the left ear. Instead of the usual impression of a corpse with a tooth-ache, the variation in method produced a corpse decked out for a party. In the recurring drafts that whistled through the door, the blood-stiffened ends of the bow fluttered and grazed each other. Contrary to rules, a pair of imitation jade ear-rings and a ring to match had been left on the body. The right arm dangled limply over the edge of the table. It interfered with my work, annoyed me, in fact, for it scraped against my trousers every time I bent over, like fingers trying to pick my pocket.

I lifted out the woman's heart. I examined it. In the gross, nothing was to be seen, I weighed it in my right hand. Normal to the touch, yet—inside—I suspected that Beaker at St. Sebastian's would be profuse in his thanks for that heart.

Quite suddenly, then, as a dog will bark at some unseen danger, or a cat arch her back, my hand remained sus-