Lovecraft Ezine Mega-Issue 4 Rev1 Read online

  At the sound of it, Dr. Hamilton moved as quickly as he could, but he was met halfway up the stairs by Duncan Meaney and Jim Robertson. These were two rough, poor young men he knew only vaguely. Duncan stood with one hand around Belinda's throat and another twisting her arm behind her back, and both were covered in blood that did not appear to be theirs.

  “You're coming with us, sir,” said Duncan. “I'm awful sorry, but you're coming with us. Bring your – bring anything you can think of, there's men hurt. There's all kinds of men hurt. Now. Now!”

  “By God, you ha'n't had to threaten that girl. Or me,” said Dr. Hamilton some minutes later, after Duncan had grabbed him by the arm and dragged him out the door. “What the hell do you think of me, boy? Have I ever not come when I'm called in the night?”

  To this, Duncan said only, “You'll see. Just come on, sir. Just come see.”

  Between them, Duncan and Jim led him to the town square; and Dr. Hamilton saw.

  When Frank Hamilton was young, his late father had instructed him on how to build a set of doors in his head. The elder Dr. Hamilton had not been a man of impractical or intangible advice, and his son took it to heart when he gave it.

  When you are called out to see things that seem too terrible to bear with, he had said, look at the first terrible thing, and then set it out into the hall behind you, and shut the door behind it. Then look at the next terrible thing; then set it out in the hall, and shut the door behind it. In this way, you will find yourself behind a set of strong doors, alone with the thing you have been called to do, and you will be alone to do it.

  Dr. Hamilton had a great deal of injuries to treat that night, and he set them all behind the doors. Later, he opened a few of the doors, out of interest.

  Most of the men who were not yet dead had lost fingers or hands. Some had been bitten off, and some had been pulled out of the joints, as if from a cooked fowl. None of those who had borne with the pulling-out lived through to the morning.

  Years later, Dr. Hamilton learned that many of the ones who had done this thing were under the impression that the men's bones would grow back, like the claws of crabs, as indeed their own fingers or hands would have done. Those from offshore did not at first seem to know or care what exactly men's flesh would bear with; then, later, it seemed to Dr. Hamilton that they did, in the sense that slaveholders knew what negroes would bear, and cared exactly as much as they had to.

  The doctor was therefore considerably alarmed when it came to his attention, some weeks later, that a number of alliances were to be made with the gentlemen and ladies from offshore. But what could he do? – he would be needed worse than ever. Who else would come out here? Who would know what to do, when he hardly knew himself?

  One damp, black spring day, he was called out to see Mrs. Dalton; so she called herself, but six months before she was simply Miss Ann Dalton, and Dr. Hamilton had known that all her life. This, too, was a new custom, and it had to go unremarked.

  When Mrs. Dalton's sullen maid came to his study, she would only say, “Her back hurts. Was all she said to tell you, was her back hurts.”

  This meant that Dr. Hamilton had to prepare for anything. When a lady said her back hurt, it meant that there was something wrong between her head and knees that embarrassed her – diarrhea, costiveness, vomiting, monthly pain, anything. It could also mean that her back hurt. Dr. Hamilton had no way of knowing till he saw her.

  His maid showed him into the parlor of her rooms, a downstairs floor on Leverett Street. It would have been a fine place for a young couple, but there was no one who lived there except Mrs. Dalton. She sat on a red chaise-longue in her unlit parlor, bent over, her hands clasped and folded, her blonde-brown curls hanging limply across her face.

  Dr. Hamilton strode forward with the sort of heartiness that was expected of him in this situation.

  “Good afternoon, madam. No, no – stay seated, do not move yourself too much until I know what the matter is. Now tell me,” he said, bending slightly towards her, “when exactly did your trouble begin?”

  Mrs. Dalton, her face flushed hot and red, opened her mouth and shut it, then began.

  “There's – my back was scraped hard and it bled and now it won't stop hurting me, I was careless, it was my fault, but now it hurts just to feel clothes move against it, and it's hot to touch, I hoped you could . . .”

  “I will have to see it,” said Dr. Hamilton, after Mrs. Dalton showed no inclination to finish her sentence. “Belinda will be right here. If you'll step over to the light, here, and uncover it, please. Would you like to call your maid to –”

  “No, sir. No, thank you – Belinda, please . . . ”

  Mrs. Dalton stood, her shoulders still hunched, and stepped awkwardly towards the light from the lace-curtained windows. Dr. Hamilton looked politely aside. Ladies did not undress for their doctors if they could possibly help it, and he did not like to make it more difficult than it needed to be. He heard the fumbling, rustling noises of Belinda assisting her with the laces at the back of her outfit, and then a sticky kind of peeling sound. Mrs. Dalton gave a gasp and a whimper.

  “Here, sir – here it is – ”

  Dr. Hamilton turned to look at Mrs. Dalton's back as Belinda took away her soft high-necked linen chemise, which was stained at the back with dried brownish and yellow fluids. Mrs. Dalton was still wearing her stays, but she hunched and crossed her chest with her forearms as if she were entirely naked in the world.

  “Ah,” he said. “I believe . . . I believe I see.”

  Dr. Hamilton had never paid attention to any fashions in women's clothing, or indeed in men's, but after this visit, he came to realize how many women he saw in town who never wore any outfit without a high-necked blouse and long sleeves. There was a spiderweb cloak of scratches, cuts, and bites across the shoulders and the back of Mrs. Dalton. Some cuts were healed, some were freshly raised. A set of scratches on the lady's left shoulder blade was visibly infected, and swollen with pus.

  Dr. Hamilton had seen and drained worse wounds than this. Nonetheless, for the first time in years, he turned his face from an injury, and snarled with disgust.

  “. . . doesn't mean any harm by it,” said Mrs. Dalton, so soft and small that Dr. Hamilton could barely hear it.

  “Doesn't he?” Dr. Hamilton said, before biting hard against his tongue. Mrs. Dalton made an odd sort of chuffing sound, and bit her lip. The doctor's jaw set. He tried not to hate her.

  Was it more revolting that the creature had done this, or that the woman would lie barefaced to him about it? Of course, married women always lied to him about certain kinds of bruises. Dr. Hamilton expected that, and indeed it was rather sweet, in its way. It was tender for a wife to defend a man from his own weakness, and he liked to see that a woman thought so much of her husband. But those had been different times, and different husbands, and different sorts of blows.

  Dr. Hamilton gritted his teeth, and spoke as coldly as he possibly could.

  “Belinda – lancet, towels, charcoal and dressing. Madam, I am going to drain and clean this, and then Belinda is going to set a charcoal poultice to it, and she will show you how to make your own. Change the dressing once a day, until it is no longer hot to the touch. You needn't trouble me again – not unless it's still hot to the touch in three days or so. Send for me then.”

  Dr. Hamilton did not really want to be unpleasant as he set about his work, and yet he strove to be just that. He dared not seem soft enough to make the poor thing start to weep; then he would have to commiserate, wouldn't he, and hear her side against his, and it might simply start with putting a kind hand on a lady's head, but then where would it end for him?

  “In the future,” he said, “take care of these things yourself, and they should not grow inflamed.”

  Once their business was done, Dr. Hamilton shut the door behind himself as he left. But in the night, his thoughts grew careless, and the doors opened.

  It was eleven p.m. in the black of his room w
hen Dr. Hamilton suddenly sat upright, pulled out his chamberpot, and retched dry into it for three solid minutes, bringing up nothing but a mouthful of spit and hot acid from his throat.

  He was not ill, not as such. It was simply that he had thought of the wounds again, and understood them. He had not understood them before. He had seen the trouble and treated it, but he had not understood the wounds. The crescents of cut-marks on the shoulders were the marks from rows of teeth, the clawed scratches were dug into the blades of the back; and she had said that he did not mean any harm.

  A good deal of weddings, such as they were, had taken place in the fall of 1846, according to the quiet customs of those from offshore. As that next year wore through, Dr. Hamilton expected that he would soon be called upon to see far worse than what Mrs. Dalton had shown him. What surprised him, in the event, was that he was not called for at all.

  Most middling women only ever resorted to the midwife, but Dr. Hamilton always came out if Mrs. Coster had trouble she could not manage, and Mrs. Coster was never called out to one of the great houses; only a doctor would do. He certainly heard that the daughters of those houses were expecting – young Mrs. Gilman, the youngest Mrs. Marsh – and, sometime later, he heard that their children had arrived; but he was not sent for.

  Were there attendants from offshore? Did the Esoteric Order of Dagon have some ghastly ritual to perform? Or was there some hybrid vigor in that blood that allowed the women to drop these children so easily? This last idea, the doctor entertained only once; it came on so suddenly that it made his fingernails bite into his own palms.

  Dr. Hamilton did attend on several newly married ladies with maiden names not long after they lay in childbed, but they had ordinary troubles, various inflammations – nothing that he might not have seen otherwise. Their infants looked healthy, red and sound in their limbs; no one spoke to him about their health. There was no chatter in the house about these children, about their names or their strong lungs or their hopes. When he had done speaking with the mother, he always asked kindly after the child, as he would have done in any case, and some aunt would show him the bundle with all the pride and joy he expected to meet with when he presented his bill.

  One half-snowed-over afternoon in late November of that year, Dr. Hamilton at last got a call that came to show him a good deal of what he wished to know about, although, as it happened, that call did not have to do with going to any woman's aid. It was simply that Jack Morton, a brawny young man of whom Dr. Hamilton knew very little and no good, came to the back door with his hat in his hand, white-faced and red-eyed.

  “My brother Ben,” said Jack, “Lord love him. Could you come and see, sir?”

  Dr. Hamilton knew that there were several Morton boys, and none amounted to much, but they took care of each other. Jack looked ill himself.

  “What's the trouble?”

  “Damned if I could say,” said Jack. “He's devil-sick and swelled up and he can't move off his bed hardly. A'n't been up in weeks, won't see us in his room, and he's lyin' there says he just wants to go and die.”

  “Well,” said Dr. Hamilton, “we can't have that, can we?”

  Dr. Hamilton's interest in this call was not great, considering how little he looked forward to billing the likes of Benjamin Morton, but nonetheless he reached for his coat and his hat. With his black bag in hand, Dr. Hamilton followed Jack through the ruts and tracks in the ill-cleared roads to Witham Street, to a railroad flat on the ground floor of a decaying wood-frame boardinghouse. Here the Mortons stayed when they were ashore, but there was no one in the place now except Ben, who lay alone in his back room.

  “Go on, Jack,” said Dr. Hamilton, as he stood in the doorway, and stared at the shadow of Ben. “Leave us be.”

  Morton lay on the bed in a great mound, turned on his side. Dr. Hamilton had a vague and fleeting memory of Ben Morton's frame from two years before, when Morton had smashed open his fingers on another man's teeth and had to have the cuts seen to. Morton had been a big man then, but not a fat one. He seemed now to weigh nearly three hundred pounds, mostly in his abdomen. It was beginning to sway and bow the thin mattress below him. His face and neck were swollen and edematous. Even his arms were puffed.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Morton.”

  “Doctor,” he said, thick and slurred.

  Dr. Hamilton set down his bag, and began to peel back the cheap, sweat-soaked blankets from Morton's half-dressed form.

  “How long has this trouble been going on?”

  Morton said something through a congested throat. Dr. Hamilton bent closer to hear him.

  “Bleed me out, Doc,” he said. “Do it now. I got to die.”

  Dr. Hamilton's hands faltered, but he responded simply, “Why would you say a thing like that?”

  “You can't help. There's no help.”

  “Be good enough to let me tell you that, Mr. Morton. Now I have to know: how long has this been going on?”

  Morton did not answer, and Dr. Hamilton did not wait for an answer; he continued to examine the man's body. For his part, he agreed with Morton, more or less, but a doctor could not take such orders as that from a patient.

  Morton's stomach bulged out of his unbuttoned trousers as if it had split them apart. Great pink stretch marks had appeared along the sides, and the pores of the stretched skin gaped open, gleaming, inflamed and moist. The skin was chill at the chest and arms, feverish at the abdomen.

  In the damp silence, Dr. Hamilton measured Morton's pulse, and wondered why the smell of the room was so offensively familiar. Particular smells often told a doctor a great deal in a sickroom, but this was one that Dr. Hamilton could not quite place. He removed his fingers from Morton's wrist, and the mark of his grip did not disappear.

  “The less you tell me, the less good I can do,” he said at last, “but it is clear that you have a severe dropsy and I believe it to be associated with one or several growths, from which it may be possible to – ”

  Morton took Dr. Hamilton's hand and placed it palm-down, almost tenderly, on the upper right quadrant of his abdomen. Hamilton shut his eyes.

  “Did you feel it?” said Morton at last.

  “Yes,” said Dr. Hamilton at last. What he had felt was not a sensation that a physician ever forgot, nor was it one that he might mistake for anything else. It was the kick of an infant against the side of its mother's womb.

  Now Dr. Hamilton realized that he could recognize the odor of Morton's room. He smelled like menstruous matter. The air was chokingly thick with the smell of a woman's unwashed monthly cloth.

  “Coming along down by here, now,” said Morton, and moved the doctor's hand to the nearly vertical side of his gut, where, indeed, another and fainter kick could be felt.

  “Think there's five of them,” said Morton. “Might be six.”

  Eventually, Dr. Hamilton said, “Well, I tell you again, Mr. Morton, you have got to let me know exactly what you know about this. Everything, you hear me? Start as far back as you can. It could still be I can save you, or save someone else from it.”

  “I doubt the hell out of that,” said Morton, and blew a spit-bubble from between his lips in a sort of laugh. Nonetheless, a moment later, he began to speak, and Dr. Hamilton listened.

  Benjamin Morton had been a jobbing fisherman till he came upon more interesting work, having joined the Order and finding his fortunes improved considerably thereby. As this had been the case, it was pressed upon him, together with a number of young men in his position in 1846, that he should oblige the ladies and gentlemen of the Order by taking a wife according to their particular arrangements.

  Morton resisted this request as long as he might; but at last he gave in, for fear, he said, of what they might do to one of his brothers at sea, simply for his own disobedience. A certain ceremony was performed, and he was given in hand a lady from offshore; and her name was Mialai-thy'temai.

  Morton took this creature to his quarters, but his temper turned, and he would do no more wit
h her. He cursed her, and he said he would not touch her, and she could go back to Hell where she came from, or sit and stare in that corner with her great idiot eyes all she wanted, but he had had enough of the arrangement at the moment he saw her, and would have no more of it.

  At that, Mialai-thy'temai stood to her great height and said: “Just as you like, sir, I do not touch you tonight or after that or after that; I have more to do than with this business; but I tell you, I have got to get a child before the moon turns twice, and if you wait me longer, you will not like it well.”

  With that, she left. She returned twice in the next two months, and said again what she had said; and twice, Morton refused her. Four months after their wedding, Mialai-thy'temai returned for the third time and the last. That had been this past April.

  So much Dr. Hamilton could piece together from Morton's storytelling, scattered and lowdown and vile as it was. What Morton said next was harder to understand; Dr. Hamilton supposed at first that he was raving.

  “Said it was a change of life she had. Said not every – not everyone had a change of life – said she would've stayed a she for longer if she'd got a child at the right time, but she didn't, and so that change come on her and she was he now. And it was none of, none of his fault if he a'n't done his duty by the arrangements, and he wouldn't have, no one could say that of him. So he did what he did. And here I am.”

  “What do you mean – what he did?” said Dr. Hamilton. Morton did not answer; Dr. Hamilton said again, “What do you mean what he did?”

  At that, Morton reached out, took Dr. Hamilton's tie in one hand, pulled his ear to the level of the bed, and told him.

  As Dr. Hamilton listened, he eased himself down to the floor, and at last sat cross-legged until Morton stopped speaking. There he stayed for some time, gray-faced, and wondered if he should, after all, bleed Morton to death – just gently, of course, without a word, as if he had drawn off too much by accident. What was Morton now? A man made a woman by force? Or only a poor host, as to so many worms?