Digger - The Doctor Will See You Now by Clifford Beck - HTML preview

Chapter 19

By the end of the following week, Ryan found himself sifting through his collection of maps. Only a few days ago had he finished cleaning up the basement, wiping down the table, and soaking instruments in the bleach solution he had prepared. Now, he set his sights on a cemetery further out of town. He drew outlines and arrows, marking his entrance and escape. The shortest path was usually the best. This time, he hoped to find a less-than-healthy specimen -- cancer, heart disease, and trauma. The condition didn’t really matter, as long as it was obvious, and this time, before he left, Ryan emptied the trunk of his car of everything but the essentials. The more room there was, the faster he could get a body into it. Speed was of the essence, and if caught, Ryan’s future would become something very different, very quickly.

Late the next night, Ryan stepped out of the woods and into a modest cemetery. It was just past midnight, and the sky was a moonless field of inky black, strewn with a broad scattering of stars. Something in him would have rather sat and stared up at the clear night sky. But there was work to do, and it had to be done quickly. Again, Ryan did not bring his flashlight, and in the darkness, tripped over a gravestone. He lay on the ground clutching his shins, knowing that by tomorrow they would be badly bruised.

He found a gravestone whose date of death had been only three days past, and sinking the copper rod deep into the soft earth, he encountered the smooth sensation of a casket’s curved wooden lid and tapped it several times to be certain. By this time, Ryan had figured out that most, if not all, caskets were constructed with the lid divided in half. Knowing this, he tried to avoid digging up the entire grave. However, once he reached the casket, he would need something to stand on. Ryan needed to dig up most of the grave, and upon opening the lid, he found the body of a woman, perhaps in her mid- to late-thirties. Glancing up at the gravestone, he discovered her name. “So, Karen, is it?” he began.

He stared into her face, as though expecting an answer. “Well, Karen. You’re going to help me whether you want to or not.”

He had unknowingly spoken the words from his nightmare, where he woke to find himself in Evergreen Cemetery, falling into a black, endless grave -- a shovel buried in his chest. He was no longer having the nightmare but would soon begin living it.

He carried the body back to his car. Opening the trunk caused its small light to dimly illuminate its interior. Ryan placed the body into the trunk, but before closing it, he took a few extra seconds to look at the body. She seemed slightly heavy and wore short-cut Brown hair. At first glance, he saw no outward signs of disease -- at least, not in the face. He hoped that he’d recovered this body before the brain had a chance to liquefy, and as he drove the roads back to Sebago, he decided that keeping the headlights off might raise some suspicions. But he would not turn the high beams on unless he needed them.

Arriving at his cabin, he dragged the body down into the basement. It was wrapped and tied much like the last one and lifting it from the floor, Ryan placed it on the table. Leaving the tarp ropes as they were, he once again climbed the basement stairs and fell asleep on the couch. He tossed and turned a bit during the night but otherwise slept undisturbed. His drifting mind was oddly unpolluted by the visions of horror he had previously witnessed in his dreams. Rising late the next morning, Ryan made his first cup of coffee. Choosing not to have a TV, he turned on his laptop and logged into Portland’s news website. He discovered that since the day after he’d procured the first body, the Portland police had been investigating it as a grave robbery. But currently, they had no leads and were asking the public for assistance. Unless Ryan could find bodies further out of town, he would have to take a break for a few weeks, perhaps even months. But, driven by his fascination, he chose to take the risk and began searching for cemeteries further from town.

Upon finishing his morning coffee, Ryan descended the basement stairs, approached the body and unwrapped it. Her face reflected a peaceful sleep. At about twenty feet away, one’s mind might be tricked into seeing a flutter of the eyelids or the movement of a shallow breath. The mind always tries to fill in the gaps. But Ryan had work to do and cutting off the clothing, examined the body’s exterior, and finding no outward signs of disease or trauma. As previously, Ryan began with the head and, after making a clean incision around the back, peeled the scalp over the face. Smoke rose into the air as he cut deeply around the skull. Removing the skullcap let loose a slurry of heavy, decomposed brain matter. In as much as Ryan was not surprised, he was still upset by a second missed opportunity to acquire an intact brain, and in a fit of anger, he threw the skullcap across the basement, its viscous fluid spattered on the floor and ceiling before shattering against the wall. “Fuck!” he yelled.

He sat down against the wall near the body that hung from the ceiling. It had become bloated over the last few days, and the foul stench of decomposition had begun seeping through its plastic wrapping. Getting back to his feet, Ryan sprayed the body from top to bottom with diluted bleach, hoping it would keep the smell at bay.

Ryan stepped back to the table, and after opening the body, he immediately suctioned the fluids from both the chest and abdominal cavities. In the absence of embalming chemicals, the remaining blood broke down within hours after death, turning it from red to a brownish color. Suctioning it out not only allowed Ryan to see the organs more clearly, but also lessened the intensity of the smell rising from inside the body. When this was accomplished, he began dissecting out the organs. The liver was first. But as he lifted it out of the abdomen, he felt a lumpiness about it that was not consistent with what would be considered normal, and there was something else. It was the wrong color. Even accounting for its degree of decomposition, the organ was too pale. He took it aside and sliced it into thin layers. His knife started easily through the soft, decaying tissue, but at some point, the blade met a noticeable amount of resistance. There was nothing that would bring it to a stop, but it was definitely something with a comparatively denser consistency. The layers fell away as the blade slipped through the liver. At about a quarter of the way through, Ryan discovered a number of roundish growths strewn throughout the organ. Dissecting one out, he was fascinated by its appearance. Round and misshapen, they looked surprisingly like tightly curled shrimp. Extracting one with a pair of forceps, he held it up to the light. “Definitely some kind of cancer,” he whispered to himself. Even though he had learned nothing about cancer, he thought it interesting enough to preserve and dropped it into a small specimen jar. It floated for a moment to the surface of the alcohol, then sank to the bottom. Ryan became excited at the prospect of finding additional disease. Was this the primary cancer, or had it spread from a different organ?

After hours of dissection, Ryan thought everything to be, more or less, normal. There was, however, one glaring exception. Near the bottom of the neck, Ryan noticed an almost random pattern of small lumps. He dissected away the skin and underlying tissue to find an array of tiny lumps covering the neck, discovered more around the ears and both sides of the jaw. They were too close to the surface to be lymph nodes, leading Ryan to suspect that not only was this likely to be head and neck cancer, but with the liver growths, this person had probably been a very heavy drinker.

He placed the organs back into the body and closed the ‘Y’ incision with heavy braided silk suture. By this time, Ryan had enough practice that he could quickly tie a clean, tight suture. This he took great pride in, even if he was working on the dead. He also recovered the fragments of the skullcap he’d thrown against the wall. He intended to piece them back together, but upon collecting them concluded that there were simply too many to successfully reassemble. However, instead of just throwing them away, Ryan decided to put them back into the remaining half of the skull and pull the scalp back over. It was now just a matter of suturing the flesh back together.

It was near midnight when Ryan finished. He wrapped the body in clear plastic as he had with the first and hung it by its ankles through the rope that held its feet together. After spraying both bodies down with diluted bleach, Ryan walked up the basement stairs and turned in for the night. But just before drifting off, something forced Ryan back from the edge of sleep. It was just a feeling. But it was strong enough to get him back out of bed. After hours of dismantling another decomposing body, Ryan suddenly felt soiled. The only thing he had not done was empty the intestinal tract, and he had no plans or desire to do that. In fact, the mortuary technicians had done him a favor in that regard by inserting an orifice plug to prevent fluid leakage. The only thing Ryan needed to do was tie off the intestinal tract just below the stomach. Everything was then contained.