Authors: Thomas Cater
The memory of Elinore’s screams cut through the fabric
of my thoughts and started my heart beating too fast for comfort. Before I
could move into my haunted house, I needed to move many things out: but how.
Carry them out, of course. Remove the coffins. I’d
carried the skeleton of the creature out; the bones were now wrapped in a sheet
under the bed.
I pulled the sheet out and looked again. I concluded
that it wasn’t an arboreal primate, it was some kind of rock-dwelling,
land-roving ape that spent a lot of time on its front and hind legs. There were
differences among apes, but I wasn’t sure what they were. Apes didn’t have
tails, and this beauty had a large tailbone. The jaws and teeth looked as if
they belonged to a huge carnivorous cat.
To provide access to the brains and
eyes, the skull was incised.
Nothing so incredibly unusual about that, it
happened all the time.
The eye sockets, I noticed, were larger than those found
in human skulls. I fished the ring out of my pocket and turned it over in my
hand and mind. So how did it come to be on an animal’s finger? Elinore would
not have buried a ring bearing an inscription to someone she loved. Either it
was stolen, or she parted with it willingly. On the finger of someone whose
love was unconditional, it would be impossible to remove.
Would Samuel have demanded that kind of sacrifice from
a daughter, or from her husband? Even if her marriage was not pubic knowledge, some
of his actions seem to indicate he loved his daughter. He was trying to buy her
sight.
“Samuel must never know…I think he knows.”
I knew what was required. I had to return to the
cemetery and open Elinore’s grave. I had to know if her eyes were sewn shut,
and what a lobotomy did to a human brain, and if there were a similar gold band
on her finger.
I wondered if there might be some less confrontational
way. My old aches and pains were not healing, especially in my mind. I was also
concerned that I may be pushing my luck. I could still feel the painful
impression of a backbreaking jolt in the middle of my spine. I decided to
postpone further excavations for a day or two. I wanted to take the skeleton to
a university and find out exactly what kind of a ‘critter’ I was consorting
with.
I could also bone up on the history of eye surgery,
talk to someone in the medical school and see what they knew about Grier. Connie
said someone from the university had written a paper on the Alberichs. Even
Grier had found them interesting enough to devote a little time and study to
their fate. What had happened to the paper? Of course, it was in the back of
the folder
, a
slim document in relatively good shape. What had he
called their condition? ‘Geonlinger’s Disease; a Case Study of the Alberichs --
three male dwarfs of an undetermined age residing at the insane asylum,
Vandalia, W. Va. April 3, 192
3’
. Snappy title.
The first few pages were devoted to personal information:
weight, height and general health. There was no info regarding family, birth
dates, places of birth and other unknowns. The following six pages were devoted
to the hard science of diagnosis. Limb and skull dimensions, how many teeth, a
few rough drawings, and the results of various tests, physical and mental, none
of which I was able to clearly decipher and
understand
.
The remaining pages summed up the results of the
tests. From what I could gather, there was nothing different in the way the
Alberichs functioned, only that they were aging at a much slower rate.
It was not a very philosophical or theoretical tract.
In fact, it was intolerably dull compared with the subject matter he had to
work with. It was apparent that Grier was not interested in changing the course
of medical history. He only wanted to correct a condition he viewed as
unnatural, and with information that he could substantiate, which amounted to
no information at all. Even his conclusions were extraordinarily brief.
The Alberichs, he stated,
“Were aging at a rate
five to ten
times
slower than normal, and there is no way explain it,”
proving that it required a medical thoroughness and
attention to detail he and the current state of science were unable to achieve.
There were a few attempts to make age comparisons. At
one point, he discussed the tendency of one generation to mature faster than
the previous one. He examined the prevalence of young women in the 1800s to
start their menstrual cycles when they were 15-16 years of age. Years later,
they were menstruating at 13-14, and again it was common for 11 or 12 year-old girls
to menstruate. It also claimed that a poor diet, such as occur in Third World
countries, delay sexual maturity. Which translated into good health equals
rapid development into old age, while poor health equals slower development and
a longer life.
Despite its subject matter, it was a brief article and
not brilliant or perceptive. It was full of physical data but slim on theory. I
would have preferred to read something more speculative, something that may
have intimated the possibility was within all of us to slow this aging
mechanism down and live far beyond our normal life span. If the Alberichs could
do it, why couldn’t everyone?
Grier never really considered it as a possibility. He
looked upon it as a perversion, a disease, something to cure. It is possible he
considered the price too high. To spend one’s life as a dull-witted gnome was
not worth 10
0
more years of longevity, at least not to a
psychiatrist-surgeon.
I decided his Case Study would accompany me to
Morgantown with the skeleton. It may be something I could trade to get
information about Grier and anything he may have submitted to them.
I checked my watch. It was time to start making phone
calls to Harmons. I put several dollars worth of change near the public phone
and took up temporary residence. I was in luck. There were about two dollars
worth of Harmons living in Vandalia and Elanville area. I called the first
number and a woman answered.
I introduced myself and told her I was passing through
town and looking up distant relatives. I mentioned the name of Frank Harmon and
waited while she slogged through a memory of names, but none that seemed to
coincide with a Frank in the early 1900s. She was having difficulty breathing;
black lung, she said, from living close to mines and coal tipples. She wanted
to tell me about it and asked if I knew someone who could help, but I kept
asking about Frank.
“No, I don’t think so,” she finally said. “William’s
Daddy is gone and so’s his gran’pap. He had brothers, but I don’t think any were
named Frank.”
I was glad to hear it.
“You talk it over with the mister when he gets home
from work,” I said. “If he knows or remembers anything, you have him call this
number.”
I gave her Virgil’s home phone number. I didn’t want
his teenybopper secretary losing any potential leads. I knew he would think I’d
lost my mind.
It went on like that for fifteen minutes. Everyone had
grandparents who had brothers and sisters, but no one knew what their names
were or where they worked, or whom they had married. Most lived with his or her
wives for a few years before someone died of pneumonia, or measles, or whooping
cough, or some other disease seldom mentioned in modern medical practice.
It was still early, but my finger was getting tired of
punching numbers and my ear was getting tired of listening to the twangy nasal
sounds that seemed to issue from Harmons, or perhaps all the people in the
Elanville area. I decided to call Virgil and tell him what to expect.
I considered holing up in the van and reading Grier’s
journals until 5 pm, or going back to the house and start on Elinore’s grave.
The last idea was the least appealing of them all.
I decided instead on a trip to Morgantown to find out
what I could about the skeleton and Doctor Grier, and to see if the graduate
student who took an interest in the Alberichs was still around.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
I took my time on the interstate. I was only getting
ten miles to the gallon and the price of gasoline was increasing faster than
the speed of my van, especially since I wasn’t going anywhere, only back and
forth on a tiresome highway. If I could save on the van’s mileage, I wouldn’t
regret the loss of money as much as time.
Theoretically, I wasn’t making much progress at the
Ryder mansion, either. My credibility was at the breaking point. No matter what
I said about the house and its history, I would be nominating myself for a
closed and padded room at the state hospital. I made a mental note to be
discrete regarding things that had happened. Despite a penchant to ‘spill my
guts’ at the drop of a question mark, I would try to confine my revelations and
queries to facts surrounding Grier and the Alberichs.
I found a parking space on the street, which was a
good omen, since most spaces were reserved for properly stickered University cars.
It was close to the library.
Inside several co-eds in the reference section behaved
as if they had been awaiting my arrival. They stopped giggling long enough to
offer help. We discussed the possibilities of unearthing material on Dr. Grier
and his term as Vandalia’s chief medical officer. She wrote his name and the
dates down and asked questions, which I dismissed with “anything at all on him
or the hospital.”
She tossed her hair around and caught a lock between
her fingers.
“We have tons of material on the hospital,” she said,
“state and local reports, pictures, just tons of information. Maybe you would
like to see his published papers, or papers published on or about him, or
papers by other superintendents of the hospital. The author of ‘Sybil’ used to
be a superintendent there; In fact, one of her patients was the personality in
question. They say she’s still there, or at least some of her personalities
are,” she said giggling.
I wanted all I could get my hands on, but not tons.
“How about some medical books on lobotomies and eye
transplants, and color blindness,” I said, feeling incurably lazy and
bureaucratic for passing on the legwork.
She wrote that down, too, and wanted to know what else
I needed.
“Does the university have a paleontologist or a zoologist
on its staff?” After I thought about it, it seemed like a stupid question. Her
eyes thought so, too.
“That would be Dr. Richard Cavell. His office number
is…” and she gave it to me, along with directions on how to get there. “You
can’t miss it just follow the path across the front lawn.”
I said I’d be back for the books in thirty minutes. She
smiled and released a veritable blitz of scrupulously maintained enamel. I
walked jauntily out of the building, feeling the cerebral sweetness that blows
through the lofty towers of a university campus. It meant something to command
the services of one so young and attractive, especially in the service of
intellectual pursuits.
I followed the footpath across the lawn to Cavell’s office.
I was told Cavell wasn’t in; he was out, or rather in the basement working on
his fossils and shards. Shards? bones of a dog-shark? I thought, or perhaps a
shark-dog?
I made my way to the basement, making all the wrong
turns, until I accidentally stumbled into a gallery overflowing with broken
pots, bone fragments and fossils.
In a brightly lit office beyond the gallery, I saw
three figures moving around a table, laughing joyously as each piece of a small
puzzle came into perspective. I approached the office undetected until I stood
outside the door. One young man instinctively, as if I had triggered some
primitive signal, looked in my direction. I wondered what had given my presence
away.
“We have a guest,” he said.
He motioned me toward the door. I extended a hand as I
entered and mentioned Dr. Cavell’s name. He smiled to let me know my search had
ended. I introduced myself and gave my address as Vandalia.
“I’ve got something to show you,” I said. “Something I
‘dug up’ in my back yard.”
His ears perked up and his eyes sparkled.
“Pot shards, or Indian relics?”
I shook my head, dismissing the obvious.
“Nothing so redundant; it’s a skeleton.”
“Human?” He asked.
“I don’t think so.”
“Some kind of animal then: dog, cat, fox?”
I got the impression he enjoyed guessing games.
“Bigger,” I said, and his interest mounted.
“Bear?” he questioned.
Judging from the size of the rib cage, the teeth and
the length of the arms, I shook my head.
“It’s in my van,” I said. “Come and take a look.”
He was helpful and obliging.
“Bones aren’t my bailiwick. I’m more into fragments,
fossils, pieces of puzzles, than biology, but I may be able to help.”
He slipped out of his lab jacket and grabbed a
windbreaker from a hook on the back of a door. He carried it in one hand as we
walked up the stairs. Outside, he slipped his arms into the sleeves.