The Weird Part 113

He manifestly wasn't convinced. 'It's not illusions I'm talking about. I'm talking more along the lines of ' he couldn't look at me now, so he compelled me not to look at him by pointing down at his map of the cemetery 'grislier facts. Most people don't find it pleasant to contemplate, ah, physical abnormality.'

Pleasant or no, I almost said, I contemplate it with every step. I could've gone on, mentioned my children's and grandchildren's congenital problems, too. I did say, 'I'm not squeamish, either.'

He gave me an okay-but-I-warned-you look. 'There's evidence of pretty high incidences of birth defects, of bone disorders. Many of them are kind of gruesome and unusual.'

If he was expecting me to flinch, he was disappointed. If I was supposed to react strongly in any way, I failed. The only reaction I noticed in myself was some kind of inward shrug, meaning, approximately. Sure, of course, so what? In a community like Gardner, with no medical facilities and not even a resident doctor since Dr. Sweeny, there had been no avoiding the raw proof that flesh is weak, treacherous stuff. The maimed, the hideously diseased, and the genetic misfires had at all times been at least semi-present and semi-visible.

I said, 'Unusual how?'

He exhaled a soft, exasperated sound and said to Latham, 'Gertie, would you please take Mister Riddle over to where Dan and Greg are working and...show him.'

She almost managed to conceal her distress at finding herself appointed tour-guide. Anger flashed in her blue eyes, but she answered, 'Sure, Bob.'

We walked past the rows. Up ahead, I could see two men kneeling beside an open grave.

'Doctor Taylor,' I said, 'seems to think I'm made of gla.s.s.'

'Please try to understand. Working in recent graveyards is about the least pleasant job there is in archeology. It's very sensitive and very stressful, actually.'

One of the archeologists kneeling by the grave was writing in a notebook. The other poked at the contents of a coffin, yellow bones, disintegrating remnants of a dress. They smiled when they saw Latham, went blank when they saw me. Introductions were made: the man with the notebook was Greg, the one doing the poking, Dan. They received the news that I was a relative without cheering.

Latham looked down at the bones and said, 'Is this one of the is this one?'

'Yep,' said Dan.

'Would you please show Mister Riddle what you've got here?'

Both of the men regarded me doubtfully for a second, and then Dan said, 'Okay. Well, sir. Know anything about human anatomy?'

'Not much more than the foot bone's connected to the ankle bone.' I hadn't intended to call anyone's attention to my mismatched shoes, but Dan was the least-stiff person I'd met so far. He just nodded and turned to the bones and began speaking very easily. It was refres.h.i.+ng.

'I won't make this technical,' he said, 'and I'll skip the small stuff. Um, the long bones in your hand, how long'd you say they are?'

I glanced at the back of my hand. 'Three, four inches.'

'Close enough.' He directed my attention to the remains inside the coffin and pointed out an array of bones as long as cigars. 'These are the same bones, and there're the fingers. As you can see, it's a pretty extraordinarily oversized hand.'

It was almost an understatement. Whoever the dead girl or woman was I looked for the name, but glare on the stone obscured it she must have looked as if she had an oar up her sleeve.

'Typically,' Dan went on, 'congenital problems left the door open for all sorts of other problems. She must've been in pain her whole life. She was about eighteen or twenty when she died. Most of the others've been much younger.'

'There're really a lot of skeletons like this one?'

'Yep.' He watched me carefully now. 'Awful lot of 'em.'

'Enough to make you wonder,' said the other man, Greg, 'if the local drinking water isn't spiked with uranium dust or thalidomide or something.'

Latham shot him a thoroughly dismayed look. Greg cleared his throat and examined a page in his notebook very, very carefully. 'Actually,' I said, 'my family's probably just dangerously inbred.'

Latham and the two men seemed not to know how to take that remark. I let them twist in the wind, stared down at the tormented bones, thought, Roy Rich, Betty...I had sometimes glimpsed them through the half-open doors of their back bedrooms when my grandmother visited their mother and hauled me along. My cousin Dorsey would nowadays be called 'learning-disabled.' Aunt Jean was 'movement-impaired.' Several of her lower vertebrae were fused together; walking, standing, even sitting, all were torture for her. Once, I eavesdropped fascinatedly on a morbid conversation about her back and hip and knee problems and strange calcium spurs the doctor didn't know what to make of. Once, I was appointed to help her down the aisle at a revival meeting, at a pace glacial and excruciating even for me. The valley resounded with preaching on hot summer nights, and every household brought forth its lame, afflicted, dying, and sent them forward to be healed by faith. Summer after summer, I saw the lines of pain deepen around my aunt's mouth. I saw the microcephalic and the acromegalic, saw the man whose body appeared to be collapsing telescope-fas.h.i.+on, the man with the tumor that sat on the side of his neck like a second head, the woman with calves like some pachyderm's, the girl who was one great angry strawberry mark, saw it all and became inured to it. Faith never healed anyone, but no one ever lost faith. DNA had let us down, but Jesus would yet lift us up.

I was jarred out of this reverie as Dr. Taylor strode up in a hurry. He had a frown on his face and appeared not to notice me. 'Gertie,' he said, 'Rita's got something we better take a look at.'

He turned without waiting to see if she followed. She hurried after him, and after a moment's hesitation I went lugging after her. Two men and a woman with her nose painted white stood over a warped coffin. One of the men held the lid like a surfboard. We looked down, and Latham said, 'My G.o.d,' mah Gott.

Lying in the coffin was the apparently preserved body of an elderly man in a dirty funeral suit. Lying in the gra.s.s by the edge of the driveway was Dr. Chester Sweeny's headstone. I heard a roaring in my head.

The white-nosed woman, Rita, couldn't contain herself. She said, 'It's not a cadaver!'

Latham asked, 'What do you mean?'

'I'm saying this isn't a dead, embalmed body here! It's not a body at all!'

Rita pointed to the side of the elderly man's face. I peered and saw some sort of crease or seam under the jawline. It had come loose beneath one ear, and a flap of skin, if it was skin, was turned down there, exposing smooth white bone, if it was bone.

'Check it out,' said Rita, and used her thumb to push up an eyelid and show us a startlingly realistic fake eye set in a grimy socket. Then she pinched the loose flap of skin between her thumb and forefinger and pulled. It came off easily, exposing a bony tri-lobed bulb with openings that couldn't have been for eyes or any other familiar organ. Where the jaw ought to have been was a complicated prosthetic jaw complete with upper and lower rows of teeth and a fake tongue.

n.o.body spoke for at least half a minute.

Latham looked at Rita and then at Taylor, whose frown deepened when he saw me. I said, 'What,' and then, 'Why did, why would someone bury this,' and couldn't think of a suitable noun.

I had to settle for gesturing.

'Prosthetics,' Rita said. 'The whole thing's G.o.dd.a.m.n prosthetics. Feel it,' and first Taylor, then Latham, and finally I knelt beside the coffin. I touched the right cheek. It felt gritty but...I pulled my hand away quickly.

Rita looked about wildly and said, 'Now what is that stuff?'

Latham said, 'It feels like,' and stopped and shook her head perplexedly.

'Fleshlike,' murmured Taylor, barely audibly.

Rita nodded vehemently. 'So what kind of stuff is it, Bob?'

'I don't know. Some plastic, I don't know.'

'This grave was dug and filled in nineteen hundred,' Rita said, 'and no one touched it until it was opened today. I know because Gil and I opened it ourselves, and we'd've known if it'd been disturbed. This thing was in the ground ever since it was put in the ground, back when n.o.body, n.o.body, could make plastic like this. '

'Rita,' Latham said, 'just calm down and'

'Calm down? Gertie, n.o.body can make G.o.dd.a.m.n plastic like this now!'

Everybody was quiet again for a time. I looked around a circle of red sweaty faces. Taylor said to Rita, in a strangled voice, 'What's under the clothes?'

Rita carefully opened the coat and the s.h.i.+rt, exposing a dirty but otherwise normal-looking human torso. It was an old man's torso, flabby, loose-skinned, fish-belly white. Wiry hair grew in tufts around the nipples and furred the skin. Rita touched the belly gingerly, pinched up a fold, and, wide-eyed, peeled it right off like skin off a hardboiled egg. The inner surface had many small fittings and trailed strands of wire as fine as spider web. Within the exposed cavity, where a ribcage ought to have been, was a structure like a curved piece of painted iron lawn furniture.

Someone muttered, 'What in the h.e.l.l' Maybe it was me, though I am not a swearing man.

Rita started to touch the structure, but her hand trembled, and she pulled it back. She looked around, gray-faced, and said, 'Too weird for me. Bob. Just too G.o.dd.a.m.n weird. I'm sorry.'

Taylor touched the bulb carefully, then the chest structure.

'Doctor,' I said, 'what're we looking at?'

'Well, obviously, some kind of articulated skeleton, but'

'Is it, is this more what, some birth defect, bone disease, what?' I was panting now, my heart was bursting out of my chest.

Taylor worried his lower lip with his teeth. 'No disease in the world twists ribs into latticework. Whatever this thing is, it looks like it was supposed to grow this way. I don't even think it's bone. It feels almost like...I don't know. Coral.'

'Coral?'

'Something.'

'Jesus, Jesus Christ,' and I pushed myself up. Latham looked after me and asked if I was all right; I barely heard her.

The roaring in my head was louder now, and I staggered away, ran as only lame men run, disjointedly, agonizedly, until I found myself standing shaking before my grandparents' common headstone. I sat down on the ground between their graves to let my breathing slow and my heart stop racing, stared at the stone, tried to draw some comfort, some something, from the inscription. Beloved in memory, Ralph Riddle, Mary Riddle. All I could think of, however, was furry pale plastic skin draped from Rita's fingers, the bony white bulb inside the headpiece, the false tongue in the false mouth.

'Are you all right. Mister Riddle?'

I started. Gertrude Latham had followed me and was hovering concernedly.

'Just an anxiety attack.' I punctuated the remark with a bark of mirthless laughter. 'I'll be back in a moment.' She choked on a reply to that, so I said it for her. 'You think I shouldn't go back?'

She all but wrung her hands.

'If you people are playing practical jokes'

'We would never, ever, play jokes!'

'Somebody's up to something here! If this is some kind of, of stunt, you, Taylor, the historical commission, none of you will ever see the end of trouble. I can promise you that.'

'What do you think we'd possibly gain from a stunt?' she demanded hotly.

'Money, publicity, I don't know.'

'There's no money in archeology, Mister Riddle,' she said, biting off the words. 'Certainly not in this kind of archeology! You think we do this to get rich, to be on television?'

I was about to snap back, but then I saw that she was really angry, too, as angry as I was, maybe angrier. I got a hold on myself and said, in as reasonable a voice as I could manage, 'What is that thing?'

'It's not a joke!'

'Well, it's something, and it doesn't belong. If it's not a joke and not a box full of junk and not human and it sure isn't human, or any animal, vegetable, mineral I've ever seen or heard about'

'I'm sure there's a logical explanation,' she said, obviously not convinced herself. 'We'll be able to find out more when we get the...remains to the lab.'

'Yeah? And how long will that take?'

'We'll have to get all kinds of permission. It's going to be very complicated. Anything you could tell us about this Doctor Sweeny could be very important.'

'Doc Sweeny,' I said, and had to pause to clear my throat loudly. My voice was lined with wet sand. 'Doc Sweeny was the only doctor here for thirty years. My great-grandmother was at his funeral. She told me once the whole valley showed up to pay last respects. I don't know any more than what she told me and what's on his stone. He came here after the War Between the States. He died at the turn of the century.'

She didn't say anything for several seconds. Then: 'Where did he come from?'

'How would I know? Who knows if he ever said?'

'All right,' she said, 'then why did he come here?'

'Everybody's got to go somewhere.'

'But why here? We're not talking about your standard-issue nineteenth-century country doctor. We're talking about...G.o.d, I don't know what we're talking about. A guy with plastic skin, latticework for ribs. A skull like, like'

She couldn't find the right word, if there was a right word, and the sentence hung unfinished in the air between us until I said, 'A skull like something. And a face like nothing. Those bones back there are the bones of a'

'A Martian, for all anybody knows.' She was embarra.s.sed to have said that, and I was embarra.s.sed to have heard her say it. I couldn't look at her again for several seconds, until I heard her suck in a breath like a sob and say, 'Whatever he was, n.o.body caught on to him in thirty years. Thirty years! What was he doing here all that time?'

'Driving around the countryside in his buggy. Dispensing solicitude, advice, and placebos.'

'No, what was he really doing? Gardner's small, isolated, even backward.'

I could only nod. The roads hadn't been paved until the 1920s. There hadn't been plumbing and electricity in all the homes until the 1950s.

'There's no money to be made here,' she went on, 'and never has been.'

I nodded again.

'So why,' she began, and hesitated.

'Maybe he was stranded. Maybe the place just suited him.'

She appeared to mull that over for a moment, then nodded. 'Who'd've bothered, who'd've been able, to check anybody's background in a place like this in eighteen seventy? Why else except that a doctor, someone claiming to be a doctor and willing to settle here, would've seemed like a G.o.dsend? He could've given them anything he wanted to give them and called it medicine.'

I heard the roaring in my head again. I thought of my grandmother, breaking snap beans and humming. Are you washed in the blood? I murmured, 'Or candy.'

'What?'

The roaring in my head rose in pitch and blended into the incessant twirring of the cicadae. I thought suddenly that I knew the words to that song it was a song of the need to obey the biological imperative; Keep your genetic material in circulation, the chorus went and I suddenly felt cold and feverish.

I said, 'What if,' and then on second thought knew I could never go on and say what if Doc Sweeny had come to small, isolated, manageable Gardner from G.o.d knew where and become one of its citizens in order to become one with its citizens and had been accepted by them though the flesh of their children ever after twisted itself into knots trying to reject the alien matter he somehow had bequeathed to them, and those children, those who survived, had gone out into the world to pa.s.s along that same alien stuff to their children in turn, and So I said no more, only lurched past Gertrude Latham, and if she called after me, I didn't hear her. I wanted to be away from her and away from here, in my car, speeding away homeward with the radio turned way up and wind roaring past the open window. The waters could not close over Gardner soon enough to suit me. I didn't stop moving until I was through the cemetery gate, and then only because I put my bad foot in a shallow hole hidden in the gra.s.s and went down on one knee. The stab of pain in my leg and hip was so intense that I believed for a moment I was going to black out. Gasping, I dug my fingers into the earth, gripped it desperately. Maybe I was going to be sick anyway.

Last Rites and Resurrections.

Martin Simpson.